Daily Reading for December 27 • Saint John, Apostle and Evangelist
God is light, and to those who have entered into union with him he imparts of his own brightness to the extent that they have been purified. When the lamp of the soul, that is, the mind, has been kindled, then it knows that a divine fire has taken hold of it and inflamed it. How great a marvel! Man is united to God spiritually and physically, since the soul is not separated from the mind, neither the body from the soul. By being united in essence man also has three hypostases by grace. He is a single god by adoption with body and soul and the divine Spirit, of whom he has become a partaker. . . . We become the divine offspring of the Divine Spirit [John 3:8], to whom the Lord rightly said and continues to say, “Abide in Me, that you may bring forth much fruit” [John 15:4, 8]. . . .
It is evident that just as the Father abides in his own Son [John 14:10] and the Son in his Father’s bosom [John 1:18] by nature, so those who have been born anew through the divine Spirit [John 3:3, 5] and by his gift have become the brothers of Christ our God and sons of God and gods by adoption, by grace abide in God and God in them [1 John 4:12 ff.].
From Symeon the New Theologian: The Discourses, translated by C. J. de Catanzaro (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1980).