Akathist by Mykhayl

< NOTE: Chapters available by CLICKING ON TITLES in left margin.

(STAND)

Mystic Pholosaphher… 1-10 (899)

MEDITATION varance 1

(CHANTER:)

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages”. (Wm. Shakespeare; As you Like It 
Act II
 Scene VII) * (“Cromwell,) I charge thee, fling away ambition (control) : By that sin fell the angels ; how can man, then, The image of his Maker, hope to win by ‘it”? (Wm. Shakespeare; Henry VIII Act III Scene II) * ” Let the anguish of the darkening night vanish, let the rising sun reinstate its radiance.  Sunshine begets joyous enlightenment, dispelling  nights inevitable drowning gloom“. (Skovoroda’s quote carved into the University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning’s Ukrainian Nationality Classroom’s “svolok” (crossbeam).

CHANT

(CLERGY)
Attention! A reading from Saint John:

(ALL:)
+ Glory be to You O Lord glory be to You
Alleluia, alleluia.

(CLERGY:)
“[My Lord said to my Lord;] Those You have given Me I have kept; and none of them is lost except the son of perdition (antichrist), that the Scripture might be fulfilled. * But now I come to You, and these things I speak in the world, that they may have My joy fulfilled in themselves.” (John 17:12-13)

(ALL:)
+ Glory be to You Our God glory be to You
Alleluia, alleluia!, alleluia!

(MAY SIT IF FATIGUED)

(ALL:)

1 Rejoice our back earth cultivates a mystic philosopher par excellence. * Herheryj Skovoroda the son of free kossacks lived through writing, composing and teaching not by publishing.

In the theater of life Skovoroda played his leading role as a supporting character * inter-playing equally with the influential and impoverished alike.

2 Rejoice for Hryhoryj embraces the role God intended with just accreditation, * as understudies play incompatibly with their neighbor’s inheritance for their own selfishness as a basic human downfall revealed in Christian truth.

Skovoroda gives us intellectual stimulation for moral enlightenment. * As we deal with earthly cares dreading death’s mortality we can embrace the fulfillment of immortality.

3 Rejoice Hryhoryj supported himself as a teacher not a professor, as a writer not a philosopher, as a musician not a composer. * These latter ambitions were achieved by the late Skovoroda through the publications of his works.

Skovoroda willingly balances unobtrusive puns with pithy aphorisms achieving a playful humor. * This softens for him the misery in the world compounded by those frustrated by searching for happiness in material treasurers.

4 Rejoice on Hryhoryj’s Socratic walk of faith communing from within himself. * Thirsting for happiness he drinks from the well of eternal truth while dialogging in the language of aesthetics.

Skovoroda muses as a music professor character in Shevchenko’s story TWINS, is the bases of reason in Gogol’s tales, * the philosophical anchor for Dostoyevsky and the oasis for the views of Tolstoy.

5 Rejoice as the quality of Hryhoryj’s thoughts far outweigh the quantity of his writings. * Both volumes of works are prolific in the rewritings of others as the philosopher’s simplicity is expanded.

Skovoroda uses the rationalism of Plato and of Descartes and of Spinoza * while traveling with his personal library of the Bible, and the Church Fathers and the Christian Mystics.

6 Rejoice as Hryhoyj sees the external as a symbol of the deeper internal reality, * a dualism of the obvious in a hidden magnification of the symbolic.

Skovoroda gives us concrete where others use illusions, a life of color and an afterlife of feeling. * Our dilemma is the tangible is multidimensional so it reveals different truths in different perspectives.

7 Rejoice as Hryhoryj’s students tacking ambiguity bring themselves into the creative process. * The abstract truth is challenged by one’s own experiences, interpretations, imagination making it personally your own.

Skovoroda reveals the hidden meanings of reality, the imagery of philosophy, the imagination of mankind transcending the flesh and blood into reflection. * Religion equates the eternal while philosophy the here and now all spanning the cosmos of the was, is now and to come.

8 Rejoice though Hryhoryj exists on a fault line of history where his contemporaries were critical negativity of this oracle. * The agendas of intellectuals often produces distorted interpretations.

Skovoroda easily stems from Orthodoxy to Freemasonry against the western European continuum rather than a backdrop of world commerce. From the Greek philosophers, to church fathers, to medieval scholars, to renascence interpreters we now come to an incarnation of thought.

9 Rejoice even though Hryhoryj’s Christian precepts are beyond some’s understanding producing their own distorted reality no matter how incompatible. * Current leftest, central or right do not correlate to these realities of history, whose problems are the eternal against the global humanistic chain.

Skovoroda according to the godless Soviet Revolutionaries you took on the illusion of a Haydamaka (native inquisition), utopia hiding reality instead of reality in eternal perspective. * God forbid we forget the communist project was ruled by power and economics rather than the preached human possibilities of monasticism.

10 Rejoice as Hryhoryj traveled the land with a sopilka (flute) from Prague to Saint Petersburgh * Returning back to his childhood home after three days of digging his own grave he left the epitaph: “The world tried to kidnap me, but alas did not succeed”.

Skovoroda like Saint Athonasis believed if God could become human, we could become godly. * Unlike Saint Augustine he did not believe man was predestined to evil for God only creates in the potential of good except for the sons of perdition.