The Sunflower ─ Conforming the Will of Man to the Will of God

"May our love for the Sun, the will of God, be as strong as the sunflower’s, so that even in days of hardship and sorrow we will continue to sail unerringly along the sea of life, following the directions of the barometer and compass of God’s will that leads us to the safe haven of eternity." This is a thoroughly practical manual of the spiritual life focusing on the central goal of every Christian: learning the will of God and struggling to mold our life to it, just as Christ “humbled Himself and became obedient.” (Phil. 2:8) Even more fundamentally, St John addresses the question of why we should care about God’s will. Finally, the reader will find eternal wisdom running through these writings on questions of theodicy, free will, and Divine Providence. This work is reminiscent of the classic text Unseen Warfare in its historical genesis as an Orthodox redaction of an originally Roman Catholic text. First published in 1627 as The Heliotropium it was the work of a German Jesuit writer Jeremias Drexelius. The future St John adapted this text for an Orthodox audience as a student and then teacher at the Kiev Academy in the 1670’s but it was not published until 1714, just a year before the author’s death. This is the first English edition of St John’s text, further edited and abbreviated for the contemporary reader.

Nicholas Kotar is a translator as well as an author of fantasy novels inspired by traditional Russian folk tales. He is also a founding member of Conquering Time, an ensemble of performance, visual, and literary artists inspired by the Inklings that stages original works of storytelling and traditional music and publishes new poetry and prose. He holds a degree in Russian Literature from UC Berkeley and a B.Th. from Holy Trinity Orthodox Seminary in Jordanville, NY. St John Maximovitch (1651-1715) was Metropolitan of Tobolsk and all Siberia. His veneration among the people grew after his repose to the point that he was canonized by the Russian Church in 1916, becoming the last canonized saint of the pre-Revolutionary period. He is best known today as the namesake and ancestor of the great 20th-century saint of the Russian diaspora, St John of Shanghai and San Francisco.