Restore to me the joy of your salvation, sings the psalmist in the great penitential Psalm 51.

This Psalm, which is probably exilic, in origin, begins with a confession of sins and a plea for healing and forgiveness.

Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love, according to your abundant

mercy blot out my transgressions.

It ends with the expression of hope for a rebuild Jerusalem in which sacrifices will again

be offered to the Lord with praiseful and contrite hearts.

O Lord, open my lips and my mouth will declare your praise.

For you have no delight in sacrifice.

If I were to give a burnt offering, you would not be pleased.

The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart.

Oh, God, you will not despise. In my reflections with you today

on the topic of salvation from the point of view of the Byzantine liturgy, I'll refer back to

this Psalm, which I consider to be a touchstone for the Eastern Christian conception of salvation. But to begin with, I want

to invite you to reflect on this specific petition of the Psalmist, restore to me the joy of

your salvation. This petition should provoke each of us to ask, what is the joy of salvation?

Is this joy something that I actually experience, that we experience in the church today?

Well, perhaps this very question seems inappropriate to us,

precisely because it seems to put too much weight on conscious experience and on feeling good.

Especially from a Catholic perspective,

and we can just as well say from an Eastern Orthodox perspective,

it might seem that this emphasis on the experience of salvation

smacks too much of a charismatic or Pentecostal sensibility, or even of these new groups

...