Catholic Radio Dramas

The Lord Gives Life

From a Homily by Saint Basil the Great, Bishop (329-379)

The Lord Gives Life to His Body in the Spirit

A spiritual man is one who no longer lives by the flesh but is led by the Spirit of God, one called a son of God, remade in the likeness of God’s Son. As the power of sight is active in a healthy eye, so the Holy Spirit is active in a purified soul.

We may form a word either as a thought in the heart or as a sound on the lips. So the Holy Spirit, bearing witness to our spirit, cries out in our hearts, saying: Abba, Father, or speaks in our place, as Scripture says: It is not you who speak; it is the Spirit of the Father who speaks in you.

In the gifts that he distributes we can see the Spirit as a whole in relation to its parts. We are all members of one another, but with different gifts according to the grace God gives us. So the eye cannot say to the hand, I do not need you, nor can the head say to the feet, I have no need of you. All the members together make up the body of Christ in the unity of the Spirit, and render each other a necessary service through their gifts. God has arranged the various parts of the body according to his own will, which makes it natural for them to share one another’s feelings and to be concerned for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together. Moreover, as parts are present in a single whole, so each of us is in the Spirit since all who make up the one body have been baptized into the one Spirit.

As the Father is seen in the Son, so the Son is seen in the Spirit. To worship in the Spirit, then, is to have our minds open to the light, as we may learn from our Lord’s words to the Samaritan woman. Misled by the tradition of her country, she imagined that it was necessary to worship in a certain place, but our Lord gave her a different teaching. He told her that one must worship in Spirit and in truth, and clearly by the truth he meant himself.

As we speak of worship in the Son because the Son is the image of God the Father, so we speak of worship in the Spirit because the Spirit is the manifestation of the divinity of the Lord. Through the light of the Spirit we behold the Son, the splendor of God’s glory, and through the Son, the very stamp of the Father, we are led to him who is the source both of his stamp, who is the Son, and of its seal, who is the Holy Spirit.

Source: The Liturgy of the Hours – Office of Readings

Saint Basil the Great (329-379) was one of ten children of St. Basil the Elder and St. Emmelia and was born in Caesarea in Asia Minor in 329. He was educated by his father and his grandmother, St. Macrina the Elder. He took advanced studies at Constantinople and Athens, where Gregory Nazianzen and the future Emperor Julian the Apostate were classmates. Basil was well advanced in rhetoric, grammar, philosophy, astronomy, geometry, and medicine. He taught rhetoric at Caesarea, and then turned his attention to the spiritual life. Basil himself tells us how, like a man roused from deep sleep, he turned his eyes to the marvelous truth of the Gospel. He wept many tears over his miserable life, and prayed for guidance from God: “Then I read the Gospel, and saw there that a great means of reaching perfection was the selling of one’s goods, the sharing of them with the poor, the giving up of all care for this life, and the refusal to allow the soul to be turned by any sympathy towards things of earth” (Ep. ccxxiii). To learn the ways of perfection, Basil visited the monasteries of Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Mesopotamia. He was baptized and entered the religious life. In 358 he became a hermit by the Iris River in Pontus, attracted numerous followers and organized the first monastery in Asia Minor.

Saint Basil was ordained a priest in 363 at Caesarea and joined Saint Gregory Nazianzen, his lifelongfriend and companion, in combating Arianism. After the death of Eusebius, the Archbishop of Caesarea in 370, Basil was elected archbishop in his place despite objections of the Arian Emperor Valens. Caesarea was then a powerful and wealthy city. Its bishop was Metropolitan of Cappadocia an Exarch of Pontus which embraced more than half of Asia Minor and comprised eleven provinces. Basil was active in helping the sick and the poor and built a hospice and a huge complex to minister to them. He attracted huge crowds by the eloquence of his preaching. He became the leader of the Orthodox Christians in the East in the continuing struggle against the Arian heresy which threatened to destroy the Church in the East. Basil played a major role in the victory of denouncing Arianism at the Council of Constantinople in 381-82. He fought simony, aided the victims of drought and famine, strove for a better clergy and insisted on rigid clerical discipline. He fearlessly denounced evil wherever he detected it and excommunicated those involved in the widespread prostitution traffic in Cappadocia. He was both a statesman and a man of great personal holiness and one of the great orators of Christianity. Basil became known as the father of Oriental monasticism, the forerunner of St. Benedict. His four doctrinal writings which include “On the Holy Spirit”, and four hundred other letters earned him the title Doctor of the Church and patriarch of Eastern monks. He died on January 1, 379 at age 50.