March 22, 2026
Sunday of St. John Climacus, author of the Ladder of Divine Ascent

Blessed and Holy Great Lent to all on this 4th week of the Great Fast in the Orthodox Church. I neglected to post my usual reflections at the start of Lent, but there is no better time than the present. What comes to your mind when I say the word salvation? I grew up thinking of it in two categories that I was told were diametrically opposed: On the one side, faith in God, deep and sincere, was all that I needed to achieve perfection; that God would accomplish this work in me without any effort on my part. On the other side was something we called “works righteousness” which meant a belief that we could somehow obligate God’s salvation by performing the right deeds in the right sort of way. To be clear, St. Paul condemns this kind of works for salvation exchange, but St. James in his epistle also condemns the former position; he calls faith without works as something dead. So what is missing in this relationship between faith and works?

The Sundays of Great Lent prepare us for a more engaged approach to salvation, what the fathers call ascetic labor, denying oneself for the sake of the Kingdom. This Sunday which commemorates St. John and his Ladder of Divine Ascent opens up a rich catalog of virtues for which to strive and vices to overcome with the assistance of divine grace. In this passage from The Ladder, St. John distinguishes between sham ascetic labor and the kind done with divine grace:

It is worth investigating why those who live in the world and spend their life in vigils, fasts, labours and hardships, when they withdraw from the world and begin the monastic life, as if at some trial or on the practising ground, no longer continue the discipline of their former spurious and sham asceticism. I have seen how in the world they planted many different plants of the virtues, which were watered by vainglory as by an underground sewage pipe, and were hoed by ostentation, and for manure were heaped with praise. But when transplanted to a desert soil, in accessible to people of the world and so not manured with the foul-smelling water of vanity, they withered at once. For water- loving plants are not such as to produce fruit in hard and arid training fields. (Ladder of Divine Ascent- Step 2: 6)

What a beautiful image of God’s grace that can come from our poor human efforts to unite with him! May He draw us ever closer to Him to be saved on the ladder of His virtues and not on the pretend virtue that we make up for ourselves.