Whom the Master seeks

For to despise the present age,
not to love transitory things,
unreservedly to stretch out the mind in humility
to God and our neighbor,
to preserve patience against offered insults
and, with patience guarded,
to repel the pain of malice from the heart,
to give one's property to the poor,
not to covet that of others,
to esteem the friend in God,
on God's account
to love even those who are hostile,
to mourn at the affliction of a neighbor,
not to exult in the death of one who is an enemy,

This is the new creature
whom the Master of the nations seeks
with watchful eye amid the other disciples, saying,
‘If, then, any be in Christ a new creature, 
the old things are passed away. 
Behold all things are made new.’

— Gregory the Great, Bishop of Rome

What can it mean to ‘despise the present age’
if only not to worship it and be hardened by its accomplishments?

What can it mean to ‘not love transitory things’
if only not to rely on any beauty other than the Divine Nature?

What can it mean to ‘unreservedly stretch out the mind in humility’
if only not to crush ourselves with the heavy weight of self-protecting walls built against saying ‘yes’ to God and our neighbor?

What can it mean to ‘preserve patience’
and to ‘repel the pain of malice’
if only not to abandon being hung on the Cross with Christ
who promises paradise even to thieves?

What can it mean to ‘give one’s property to the poor’
and ‘not to covet that of others’
if only not to hoard as our own
that which has been provided in abundance to us and to all?

What can it mean to ‘esteem the friend in God’
if only not to hate one's enemies, not to laugh at the pains of others, and not to rejoice at the death of anyone?

Yes, He knows who are His among those who profess to be His disciples, even those who are His without professing, and that is why He does not give Himself to all men, because He knows them, but secretly bestows Himself on those and only those who earnestly seek Him by obedience to His word.

If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.

John 14:23

Immediacy

The offense of Jesus and of the entire New Testament record consists of one thing—immediacy. The words and deeds of Christ and the holy Apostles are too immediate, too direct, too alarming, too disarming, for the natural man, the man that wants to bury himself in the finery of illusion.

We spend our lives laying on more and more layers of finery to hide ourselves from the One who created us Naked so that in time He could cover us with His very own self, and beyond time that we might appear before Him as His very own sons.

In which direction do we find ourselves moving? Whether we call ourselves Christians or not, are we burying ourselves, like those who cry out to the stones at the Lord’s coming, ‘Bury us! Hide us!’ Are we wrapping ourselves in the winding bands of our shrouds?

Or have we found out the truth, that we need to make peace with our Opponent on the way to the court, so that there need be no trial? That to divest ourselves of our finery, divulge voluntarily the secrets we have collected, is the only safe work we can undertake?

Expose yourself to the Word of God. Enter the world of the Kingdom immediately. Let the words He has spoken convict all that is false in you, that you may approach Him in spirit and truth. Turn around and hear the Voice, as did John the Revelator, loud as trumpet blasts.

The offense of Jesus and of the entire New Testament record consists of one thing—immediacy. Modern man (and woman) wants to be free, but on their own terms, wants no one to tell them what to do, how to do it, or especially when. They don’t like to be rushed.

But Jesus has a way of just showing up, saying the most unlikely things. Unlikely because we don’t want to hear them, because we know as soon as we hear them, that His words are true. Truth, if we must hear it at all, we want to hear as spectators, not as doers.

That’s why so many of us don’t mind ‘going to church’, because there we may be a captive audience, but more importantly, He’s a captive Lord, and whether our ears are itching for the latest news or gossip, we might hear the good news, only to let it ‘in one ear and…’

It seems to me that once all the labor-saving devices and self-improvement programs had done their work, freeing us from wasting our precious few years ‘sweating to make a living’, we might have remembered why we invented these things in the first place.

We were created to be gods, but sin has slain us root and branch and thrown us on the fire and, had it not been for the Firebrand snatched from the flames by the Only Spirit, who now burns in the shrub of humanity without consuming it, we could never have done a thing.

Closer than our jugular vein, more immediate and necessary than our next breath, more faithful than our beating hearts to keep life pumping in us, the words of Life lodged in our ears, meshed into our minds, yet we deny them and Him who speaks, whose immediacy offends us.

Tear us away from our deaf deadness, O Lord. Liberate us like newly molted serpents from our tight, scaly skins. Unstop our ears that we may hear Thy unsettling sayings and receive Thee, the living flame of Love, transforming our cold blood to internal, eternal Fire.

‘I am the Resurrection and the Life. Do you believe this?’ What more can be said than that which forever is spoken on every page of holy and divine scripture in innumerable ways? ‘Blessed is He who is not offended by Me.’ Let that person be the one reading this.

There alone, Christ is in our midst

How many Christians would say they’d do anything to have Jesus Christ come to their church, bodily, in person? I know this sounds far-fetched, and no one in their right mind would even think of such a thing, since it is an impossibility. Or is it?

I wonder how many times a stranger, maybe not even a total stranger but an ‘outsider,’ comes to your church. You see him or her in the congregation during the worship service. You may even feel obligated to exchange the peace, ‘Christ is in our midst,’ if they’re standing near you in the service.

If you’re the priest, you may beam them a clerical smile when they venerate your hand cross and your hand as they pass by at the end of liturgy with a ‘How are you?’ and receive their equally formal, ‘Fine, thanks!’ in polite response. Neither you nor your congregation recognize Christ in your midst.

Inviting everyone, especially any visitors, to join you in the parish hall for the coffee hour, is protocol: You have fulfilled the commandment to love your neighbor as yourself. Now you can, whether priest or member, go into the fellowship hall and socialize with a clear conscience. You made the first move. Or did you?

When I attended my family church, where I was known to everyone by name because I used to do some high profile volunteer work like publishing the parish monthly newsletter and running the book store, along with a handful of others, I kept watch for the stranger who might cross our threshold.

One of our older members, old enough to be my dad, always sat in the last pew on the right side of the aisle and kept an eagle’s eye out for the visitor and newcomer. He then would make sure they didn’t just leave without personally inviting them and accompanying them to the coffee hour if they accepted.

I tried my best to follow his example, though as a dad with boys in tow I sometimes couldn’t maneuver myself to catch the ‘outsider’ before they fled to their car or the bus stop. Each of us ‘watchers’ were quite different in age, background, and of course, of both sexes, and it usually came about that there were enough of us to match every kind of visitor.

Sometimes Christ would just show up in the coffee hour whom none of us noticed in the service. In that case, we didn’t let him sit alone at a table that everyone else avoided. When we did sit down, we asked, ‘May I join you?’ and then made our introductions, learning the stranger’s name and telling ours.

A friendly smile always broke the ice of no matter how shy a visitor or greeter, for yes, I for one am a shy person who has forced myself to ‘come out’ to others. We always felt—at least I did and still do—that the burden of opening the door of fellowship with a newcomer is on the home parishioner, not the other way round.

It rarely, almost never, happened that Christ caught in the coffee hour wanted to be left alone. He always showed up, hoping someone would notice him. If he had wanted to just slip into a pew for liturgy and then escape the same way he came in, he would have. So what are we going to do with him, now that he’s ‘in our midst’ for real, and not just a line we recite in church?

What do you do with them, brothers and sisters? What do you do with them, reverend father? These strangers and outsiders whom you verbally welcome in the church service and invite to join you for coffee hour? Yes, you welcome them, you invite them, and then—what?

Don’t comfort yourself with bible stories about the disciples not recognizing the resurrected Christ until after He spoke to them. Yes, that is how it worked during the forty days till His ascension to the right hand of Divine Majesty, but that isn’t how it works now. So, after the forty days, that is, today, why don’t you recognize him?

‘Whatever you do to the least of my brothers, that you do unto me,’ is a gospel verse burned into my memory till it hurts, and I’m glad it does, because that is almost the only thing worth feeling guilty about it if you fail to do it, if I fail to do it. If we can’t see Christ in our neighbor and do for him what we say we want to do for Christ, we are lost. Yes, sorry, we are lost.

Brethren, in love I cry to you, really welcome the stranger as Christ Himself, especially when he comes to your church, or accepts your invitation to join you in the fellowship hall. He expects you to keep your word to him, just as you expect Him to keep His word to you.

And, brother or sister, stranger to the flock though you may be, if you come to a gathering of the brethren, and after they welcome you and invite you to join them in fellowship and friendship, and you go, and find yourself alone in a crowd, then I bid you, flee from that place!

For if you seek Christ, who is the life of all, then pursue Him until you find Him, for truly, Christ is in our midst, but just in whose midst, that is the question. ‘For God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son,’ and that love cannot be hidden, cannot be faked. Where you find that love, go, and stay, for there alone, Christ is in our midst.

Our God

Our God, the living God of Israel, whose Divine Word became a man for us and for the whole human race, out of pure love, to save and to deify all souls that do not resist Him, can never be circumscribed by our thoughts or our beliefs, nor can the words even of Jesus be used by us to deny salvation to anyone, but only to extend it, graciously.

Our hope for the salvation of unbelievers is nothing compared to the mercy and love of God which our imaginary lines cannot restrain, for His Son came not to condemn the world, but to save it, and to bestow eternal life. Not everyone who believes is aware of their own faith, nor does everyone believe who says or thinks they do.

God is incapable of making a mistake. No one whose soul seeks Him, whether they know Him or not, is condemned, and no one is saved by no matter how much religious devotion, if all along they were seeking only themselves. God, not man, knows the difference, and infallibly.

All who have faith, wait. As for the others, let them judge, saved or condemned, to no avail. Only God is God, and only God is love.

Only what is

It’s strange how often reality presents itself to us not in an either-or dualism, but in some kind of unforeseen manner that defies all our attempts to categorize and define—unless we are willing to, consciously or subconsciously, settle for mental compromises that allow us to work within an environment we have created, no matter how imaginary, or worse, foist them on others, excusing ourselves because we are ‘experts.’

We see this readily in the realm of natural science if we view it in historical perspective. Though the logical guesses of the ancients—the atomism of Democritus, for example—were initially proven nearly correct, with modern researches into subatomic nature a new structure of the universe is being uncovered. No serious atomic scientist would dream of clinging to earlier models, even though for ‘household’ applications they still work.

In politics, because we’re now moving into a social sphere, it’s more difficult to give up old models of political organization that simply don’t work and maybe never did, and it’s also easier to pretend to expertise—now called ‘legitimate authority’—to perpetuate social and political pathologies, often at immense cost, especially in human lives. The either-or predisposition of the human mind draws imaginary lines that cannot, or must not, be crossed.

In religion, or that which is, as Paul Tillich calls it, the ‘ultimate concern,’ we move to an even deeper, more personal level of reality-evaluation, in which our critical faculties, if we try to use them to bend reality to fit our rational or irrational prejudices, can cause the greatest historical, cultural, and social dysfunctions. This is also where the greatest compromises with truth—that which is—are easiest to make, and hardest to abandon.

History, though, is as merciless as Darwinian evolution is, in weeding out the unsurvivables of our world views in every category of experience. It works, however, just as slowly, and so mistakes stubbornly believed in, implemented, or imposed, can take generations to finally fail and be discarded. In the political sphere, not imperialism, not fascism, not communism, are really dead yet, but neither has true monarchy been eradicated forever.

In the religious sphere—and we must confine ourselves for brevity of example, to Christianity—eighteen centuries of spent experiments with theology and ecclesiology, and five or six with scriptural exegesis, have resulted at present in a faith community strategically crippled by attachment to and promotion of ideologies that are as far removed from reality as we can make them, and history’s winnowing fork is already at work as we, helpless, look on.

A case in point is the famous assertion of ‘sola scriptura’ that arose at the time of the Protestant reformation. The reality is that this cannot be an either-or proposition, no matter how much we argue for or against it. It simply doesn’t yield to our manipulations or our attempts to turn theology into a one-dimensional process. Real theology, as multi-dimensional as the ‘real world’ is, is open only to those who experience first and humbly articulate later.

Without institutions or ‘experts’ to certify it, truth, reality, only what is, is notoriously vital and, though susceptible to dichotomy and dissimulation, lives on, survives and propagates itself in freedom as wild and undetected as nature’s. As Archimandrite Vasileios writes, ‘Heresy, by contrast, has in it that which is self-destructive. Its self-assurance—its attachment to human reasoning and sanctity which are its idols—leads it to a state of internal crisis’ (Hymn of Entry, p. 100).

Heresy—yes, it need not mean ‘religious’ heresy, but any compromise we make with reality—as all other elements of the physical universe and all living creatures appearing at intervals and being perfected by evolution—God’s instantaneous creation being experienced as ‘time’ and all events that fill it by creatures such as us—yes, heresy, wanting to believe that which can never be, leads always, by the mercy of God, to crisis—κρίσις, judgment.

For Christian and non-Christian alike, to be faithful and not infidel, is to ‘seek first the Kingdom of God, and His righteousness’ (Matthew 6:33), and Reality, now not just what or even whom we rationalise, but the Uncreated in whom ‘we live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17:28), is available to everyone without exception, the ‘true Light that enlightens everyone who comes into the world’ (John 1:9), who has trampled death by death, and bestows life to those in the tombs.

Χριστός Ανέστη! Αληθώς Ανέστη!

I was in that room

A lot of things have gone through my head, both before and after I met Jesus son of Joseph. Sitting in the synagogue and hearing the Torah read, commented upon, for years, and then comparing what was said with what they did, those betters of mine, made me sense a cleavage in my mind, a breach impossible to mend, a wound that could not be stitched together and healed.

With the others, those of us who now understand what no rabbi or teacher of the Torah could ever know, I was attracted to this man whose words seemed to have an authority, a power and grasp of reality, that we had never encountered before. Not only that, but as we came to walk with him more often, we noticed it wasn’t just his words. What he did—sometimes incredible things—shook the very foundations we thought our faith was built on.

We were an odd bunch, those we began to call ‘the brothers’ as if we had the same mother. Before we met Jesus, our hearts hungered for something but we didn’t know what. Other tradesmen thought about their work all day, but we, even before we knew him and one another, were always preoccupied with thinking through questions that seemed to have no answers.

Some of us found ourselves thinking so much, we were bound to become insane, so we thought. All of us felt so close to the solution, yet infinitely unable to grasp it. When he appeared, as he was first pointed out by the baptizer John, a few of that righteous man’s followers began to follow him around, and then very soon they were telling us, ‘We have found the one Moses wrote about.’

‘A likely story,’ I thought to myself and laughed out loud. I always laugh when I don’t understand, and why not? It’s better than weeping. It seemed to me then, after all my thinking, I had never gotten any closer to the answer to my question. In fact, I hardly even knew what my question was, but my mind never ceased its revolutions, sifting, straining, funneling, and soaking up what I could.

But I started following him, Jesus son of Joseph, from Nazareth, with the others. He told us things we’d never heard before, opened our minds to fill them with what we never knew existed. In my bright moments, I believed him wholeheartedly, and with the others followed this peculiar rabbi, and went along with whatever he told us. His ideas at least made sense. I felt I was finally making progress.

In my dark moments, ah, well, what can I say? His teachings, even his doings, incredible and miraculous as they were, seemed somehow just talking and tricks. Maybe he was just a charlatan after all, a magician and smooth talker, all in one. As dark as I sometimes felt in those moments of doubt, though, even my doubt turned upon itself, and taunted me like the demon who says, ‘I never tell the truth.’

Towards the end, we all felt we were being dragged along behind him on a journey we’d hoped we’d never have to make, one which we couldn’t believe was happening. After all we had experienced with him, our hopes were held captive in the thought that everything would turn out victorious in the end. Instead, after ignoring his many warnings, we found ourselves driven with him at our head towards, not the kingdom of our people restored, but to the enactment of a hideous crime.

Impossible when it happened, and so quickly that we barely understood what was going on, he was arrested after our mystical passover together as we rested afterwards in an olive grove.

I was already descending from bright to dark in my mind and heart, one part of me believing, ‘He won’t let this happen,’ and the other part despairing, ‘It’s all over. It was never real. What a fool I’ve been.’ Neither my belief nor my doubt was right, as it turned out.

What happened that night launched all of us into isolation, fear and self-pity, even though it was Jesus that was captured, beaten, mocked, stripped, and nailed to a stake. We didn’t really give him a thought at all, though we wouldn’t admit it to ourselves. All we thought about was how our hopes and dreams had been dashed to pieces. We didn’t want to even be around each other at first and, except for the young one John, and his mother and a couple of the women, we didn’t want to watch him die either.

After his body was taken down from that scaffold, I didn’t want to live. I felt so ashamed, of myself, of him, of my dashed hopes, of my foolishness in loving him like I did. Yes, loving him, though when he was alive I didn’t let anyone know. I kept up my reputation of doubting and questioning, right up to my last moments with him and the others.

Later, when I heard that Judas had hanged himself, I couldn’t believe that either. Was that really Judas who led the guards to Jesus with a kiss? Or was it someone that just looked like him? It was so dark. In the even greater darkness that was my mind I thought, ‘It might as well have been me that led the guards to him. Did I ever really believe what he said or did?’

Still oppressed in a dark moment that I thought would never end, I hid myself from the brothers for days. Finally—I don’t know what possessed me—I got up the courage to look for them, going back to that room where we had all had our last supper with him. I almost couldn’t say his name. They told me some fool story about him being alive. I was overcome with doubt. I said words I now wish I’d never spoken.

I opposed Cephas and the others to their faces, my doubt flashing like sharp shards of broken glass to cut their hopes to slivers, as mine had been shredded. ‘You say he’s alive? How’s that? Can I see him too and poke my finger through the holes in his hands and feet and jab my hand into that spear cut slash?’ Little did I know that my scathing words, meant to hurt, would in the end heal.

They let me go, saying nothing, nor defending themselves. I hated them for that. I’d wanted them to oppose me, to counter my barbed accusations so I could feel justified in making them. ‘Hah! So they have faith, and I don’t!’ roared inside my head where no one but I could hear. Why did things always have to end this way? Why can’t anything good ever last? What is the point of it all?

Days passed. I hated the brothers because they seemed to have something that I would not permit myself to have. I hated myself more, I hated how I was, I hated my doubt, I hated my hateful words and the dark thoughts that produced them. That’s what drove me back to where they were hiding out. Hiding, yes, but at least, together. I was envious too of their company, where their first fears seemed to have yielded to a gentle, abiding love.

‘Why are they like that?’ I asked myself. ‘How can they still love one another and seem so peaceful and happy, when everything we lived and hoped for is finished, when it was crucified between thieves? Are they pretending? He can’t really be alive. We all saw his body, limp and dead, being moved somewhere by that rich man, what’s his name.’ Such were my thoughts as I approached the door and knocked.

Cephas let me in. He could tell, he said, that it was me by my knock. ‘What’s so special about it?’ I thought but didn’t ask. I barely had time to walk into the room as I heard the door slam behind me and the thud of the bolt falling. Then I heard my name pronounced from somewhere behind my back. I turned around quickly, almost running into Cephas who was right behind me.

We all turned to face the one who spoke my name. It was Jesus.

‘No! This can’t be happening!’ the words died on my lips as I felt every muscle in my body liquefy. I fell to my knees as though the weight of the world were crushing me down to the floor. Jesus looked at me and was softly asking me something, but my eyes and ears were both overwhelmed by what is beyond sight and hearing. I was blind and deaf for a moment.

‘My Lord and my God! My Lord and my God! My Lord and my God!’

I couldn’t stop babbling these words that didn’t even come close to what my spirit groaned inwardly. He came close to me, laying one arm across my shoulders and lifting me gently with the other. At His touch I felt weightless. I rose effortlessly and my mind was suddenly clear. I could see with my eyes, hear with my ears as He said to me, ‘You believe because you can see Me. Happy are those who have not seen and yet believe.’

Now, no matter what thoughts assail me inside or out, no matter what wars of words between men sunder the world’s peace for vainglory, I am no longer safe in what I know or merely believe or doubt, for beyond all this is the peace that only He can give, because I was in that room.

In our midst

Orthodox Christianity is not so much a religion as it is healing for the soul, the Church not so much a temple as it is a hospital for sinners. This is what has been handed over to us by the Fathers, to whom it was handed over by the Apostles, to whom Christ Himself handed it over. Religion, or rather what men have embraced as religion, is a sickness, and Christ is both the healer and the cure.

At the end of every orthros service we sing from Psalm 41:4, Ιασαι τήν ψυχήν μου ότι ήμαρτόν σοι, ‘Heal my soul, for I have sinned against You.’ Our approach to God is always to the Divine Nature as יְהוָה רָפָא Yahweh Repha (Exodus 15:26), ‘the LORD [our] Healer.’ Christ Himself is the physician of souls (Matthew 9:12). Even to this day, the pious among the Jews sing incessantly, ‘I want Mashíach,
I want Mashíach now!’ They too are sick; they too know that not religion, but only Christ, Mashíach, is the cure.

Yes, but Orthodoxy is still a religion. That is how it is experienced by most of its adherents. Indeed, Christianity in general is experienced as a religion. How and why is this possible?

To begin with, every people has a religion, and all religions begin as myths, that is, stories and traditions that convey truths without themselves being the Truth, providing some relief to the human condition, but never able to cure us. Even the people to whom the Divine Nature revealed Himself, taking up their myths and fulfilling them by signs and wonders, instituting the only divinely revealed religion, even the Law given to them as an incapable covenant, even that could not heal them. ‘If a law had been given that could impart life, then righteousness would certainly have come by the law’ (Galatians 3:21). Of course, this people is Israel, which now fills the world as Jews and as Christians.

Christianity is a religion because it is the co-heir with Judaism of that ‘only divinely revealed’ worship of ‘the Being’, in Greek ο Ων, ho Ón, in Hebrew יְהוָה, Yahweh. Into this religious heritage Jesus of Nazareth was born and raised, of this people He has been acclaimed Lord and Christ, proven by His resurrection from the dead and all that follows from it, and nothing that He did while He walked the earth as a Son of Israel ever refuted or denied this religion. Instead, everything He did fulfilled and perfected it.

Worship of the Father is no longer ceremonies alone, and it never was. The Only-Begotten Son of the Father had to come, in person, to settle once and for all every dispute among the children of Israel on this and all other points. Those who worship the Father must worship in spirit and in truth. And He is the Truth.

There is only One Israel, and yet there is the Church and the Synagogue. In the first, Christ is revealed, in the second, He is hidden. ‘Truly, God is hidden with you, the God of Israel, the Saviour’ (Isaiah 45:15). What tender and pitiful love the Messiah, the Christ of God, Jesus of Nazareth, must have for His people, to have suffered through the centuries hidden within them, as they have maintained their faithful watch over the holy things of God! How faithfully He has stood by them through their every persecution and suffering, even to the gates of She’ol, to near annihilation. He who prays, ‘Father, forgive them,’ has made good His prayer, becoming the Father’s answer, having emptied She’ol for all humanity, for all time, till the last human creature passes into the brightness of His mercy.

And what of the Church, the Bride of Christ, even His Body on earth, visible sign of His presence, home to fugitives and exiles of earth? This is the Israel of God, religion her mainstay, hemmed in by walls the world builds to protect itself from her, though she is its place of healing, and her food and drink its best medicine, no less than the Bread of heaven, and the Blood by which the whole universe was restored before it ever began. He has come and lives in her midst, who says, ‘It is not the healthy who need a physician, but the sick.
I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners’ (Mark 2:17).

Knowing Him as He is, for who He is, and why He has come, the Church has more than mere opportunity, more than promises only, but possibility. Faith is fulfilled in obedience, sickness cured in love, slavery dissolved in faithfulness, and death, finally, overcome in mercy. ‘And there will be princes dancing there. All find their home in you’ (Psalm 87:7).

The only fire worth having

Jesus left the temple and was walking away when his disciples came up to Him to call his attention to its buildings. ‘Do you see all these things?’ He asked. ‘I tell you the truth, not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down…
Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold…’
Matthew 24:1-2, 12 NIV

The love of most will grow cold.
This verse comes from Christ’s discourse on the end times, and there are many seemingly more startling predictions than this one in the passage—impersonators of Christ, wars and revolutions, famines and earthquakes, persecution, apostasy, and false prophets—and then this, the love of most will grow cold. It seems almost anti-climactic. Yet Christ included it. It must be an important sign, and a sign it is.

This is my experience practically every day.
This is our experience, though because its presence is so pervasive, we’ve all become used to it and don’t notice it. If we did, it might drive us to despair. What am I talking about? ‘The world’s not all that bad!’ Sorry, brothers, sorry, but it is. Even close to home.

At first I wanted to say of this love growing cold, that unwillingness to affirm the other person is its hidden root, but no, even that root doesn’t go deep enough. Jesus plainly calls its cause—wickedness—in Greek anomía, lawlessness. Ironic, that lawlessness causes lovelessness? I should have stopped here, but forgive me, brethren, for this worthless ramble.

We love because we feel we are loved. Loved by whom? Well, for starters, think of a child, one who knows that his parents love him, especially that his mother does. That makes it possible for him to love, and love he does. But what if his mother doesn’t love him, and he knows it? Right from the beginning, the inner emptiness caused by that lack of love can turn his love inwards, to self-love. ‘Well, if mommy doesn’t love me, I’m looking out for number one,’ or, as we read in C.S. Lewis’ The Last Battle, ‘The dwarfs are for the dwarfs!’ A lot of loveless people start out this way, crushed children grow up into crushing adults.

In a general sort of way, the love of most grows cold because they don’t really believe that God loves them, personally. Why don’t they? Well, it’s probably because they don’t believe that God exists at all. Imagine this—living in a universe without God. If you don’t open your eyes in the morning and look at the universe, it may not even exist! When you die, for sure the universe is gone. But if there is a God, could that be why the universe continues, whether any one of us is alive to experience it, or whether we are dead? This God, like the character of Christ in the film Jesus of Nazareth, doesn’t even blink. If He did, what would become of us?

This is my experience practically every day.

People protect themselves from the imposition of others. They see that something they know and could say or do would lighten someone’s burden, help them in some way, but they withhold it. ‘Why should I lend a hand? I’m busy,’ or worse yet, ‘Serves him right, he’s old enough to know how to do that. Too bad, you dope!’

Parents turning away their children, eager to push them out of the nest. Children abandoning their parents, ignoring them until they want something. Employees making a co-worker’s job difficult because they can’t be bothered to share what they know. Drivers cutting people off, making other unsafe manoeuvres, honking their horns at anyone who gets in their way. Customer service people who respond only to your exact question, unwilling to help you ask the right question to solve your dilemma. Why? What would it cost them?

How can anyone have such hatred towards another creature? They see someone crushed, they crush him lower. They see someone in distress, they say, ‘It’s none of my business.’

And when do these people attend? When do they extend themselves for others? When there is profit to be had, plain and simple. Calling ourselves Christians, we try our best to live in love according to our ability, because we know that ‘he who lives in love lives in God’ (1 John 4:16) and ‘whoever loves his brother lives in the light… but whoever hates his brother is in the darkness’ (1 John 2:10-11), and yet we somehow are able to provide ourselves with reasons why we should withhold our love from this or that person. ‘Why should I help him after all he’s done to me?’ or ‘Let her learn for herself what I had to go through!’

Christ help us!

Why doesn’t our own past suffering soften our hearts towards those suffering now? Do we think by handing over a five-dollar-bill we can satisfy the justice of God? Does making a party for our friends and being generous to those from whom we expect benefits or praise make up for our callous hearts?

At any moment we can draw near to Christ’s resurrection, or rather it draws us near, the Father draws us near to His Son, if we will let Him. We confess, ‘All is forgiven in the resurrection,’ echoing the teachings of the fathers. We shout at the end of the midnight service of Pascha, ‘Epikranthi! It was vexed!’ speaking of Hades’ state when it discovered it had tried to hold the uncontainable God, and ‘Anesti Christos! Christ is risen!’ speaking of the single event in the universe that has annihilated annihilation.

Are we willing, at last, to rekindle in us the only fire worth having, the only flame that never goes out? ‘Come, receive the light from the unwaning Light!’ Though in this world of darkness that Light still shines, without being put out, yet also without being grasped, can we walk in that Light? Can we live in love? Or is our love going to grow colder? ‘Upon those who walked in darkness, a Light has shone’ (Isaiah 9:2).

Φωτιζου, φωτιζου, η νεα Ιερουσαλημ, η γαρ δοξα Κυριου επι σε ανετειλε. Χορευε νυν και αγαλλου Σιων…

A Christian asks himself

How can I be living my life as though the resurrection didn’t really happen?
I say, “Christos anesti” with my lips, but what do I say with my heart?
What do I say with my life?

What is belief?
Is it just the mental agreement that a statement is true without experiencing the truth it expresses?

Can I live my life in the resurrection of Jesus while living it as though He did not die on the cross, and die on the cross for me?
I can humbly bow and cross myself with my body and kiss His image, but what worship does my spirit offer?

But the hour will come—in fact it is here already—when true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; that is the kind of worshipper the Father wants.
John 4:23 JB

Can I believe in the resurrection without believing in the Lord’s death?
How can I believe in the Lord’s death without experiencing it?
Can I believe in it by attending the services, or reading the bible, or is there more to believing than being a “good Christian”?
And what is a good Christian?

Then Jesus said to his disciples, ‘If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross and follow me. For anyone who wants to save his life will lose it; but anyone who loses his life for my sake will find it.
Matthew 16:24-25 JB

“He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”
—Jim Elliot, Martyr of Ecuador

Can’t I be a follower of Jesus without dying?
Isn’t all the talk about being buried with Christ in my baptism just a metaphor?
But if it is, what is there to do?

Back to my original question, why am I living as though the resurrection didn’t really happen?
Is it really because I don’t believe in the death of Christ and in the power of His life-giving cross?
What is this “power” of the cross?

All I want is to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and to share his sufferings by reproducing the pattern of his death.
Philippians 3:10 JB

Living as though the death of the Lord did happen will give you the power to live your life as though the resurrection did happen.
There is not one without the other.

You cannot live as though Jesus Christ died on the cross,
and still lie, steal and kill.
You cannot live as though He died for you,
and still treat others with disrespect.
You cannot live as though He endured temptation,
and still fornicate, alone or with another.
You cannot live as though He said from the cross,
‘Father, forgive them,’
and still hold grudges, envy the good fortune of others,
and judge your neighbor.
You cannot live as though He endured being stripped naked
and beaten,
and still look the other way and wink at wickedness,
and let the innocent be slaughtered.

You must give up your old way of life; you must put aside your old self, which gets corrupted by following illusory desires. Your mind must be renewed by a spiritual revolution, so that you can put on the new self that has been created in God’s way, in the goodness and holiness of the truth.
Ephesians 4:22-24 JB

“Christ says ‘Give me All. I don’t want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half measures are any good. I don't want to cut off a branch here and a branch there, I want to have the whole tree down. I don’t want to drill the tooth, or crown it, or stop it, but to have it out. Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked—the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: My own will shall become yours.’…”
—C. S. Lewis

So, this is the way to live a resurrected life, to live as though the resurrection of Christ really happened, to know that it happened, not just to say I believe in it:
To live a dying life, to let Christ nail not only my sins, but also my very self, what I think is me, what I think I want, to the cross.

…the thing that is sown is perishable but what is raised is imperishable; the thing that is sown is contemptible but what is raised is glorious; the thing that is sown is weak but what is raised is powerful; when it is sown it embodies the soul, when it is raised, it embodies the spirit.
1 Corinthians 15:42-44 JB

If we have died with him, then we shall live with him.
2 Timothy 2:11 JB

Lord, let me live as though You really rose from the dead, by living as though You really died for me.

By faith and not by sight

What this strange, ‘tremblesome’ quality of my life means—I am beginning to understand. I am living forward, one day at a time, like a blind man who cannot see what's ahead, but can only feel his way, taking short, deliberate steps, groping into the next moment, listening to a barely audible voice that's calling me. By faith, not sight. And faith comes by hearing. And hearing by the Word of God.

This quality has been growing, and I, sensing it growing, am surprised that the initial fear has lessened somehow. But the meaning of ‘living one day at a time,’ that I once glibly repeated along with others, has truly become the nature of my life.

There's no wonder, then, nor merit, in the fact that every morning I am surprised, yet usually happy, to wake up, and find myself still alive. No wonder, then, that when I see the sun rising as I drive to work, I am happy and thankful beyond measure. One more day. I remembered my first elder, Philip the cabinetmaker, who taught me when I was in my young twenties, how to saw up boards and make furniture. I remembered how he would confess to me, on a bright sunny morning, how he wept as he drove to work. I couldn't understand it then, but I'm beginning to understand it now. I too have wept on the way to work. Sometimes for sadness, sometimes out of gratitude inexpressible any other way. God is good.

I think to myself, Has it always been like this, only I didn't notice?

When you're ‘young’ the thought of death (as the end) never crosses your mind. Life extends limitlessly before you. You can plan things far in advance and expect to do them when you get there. When you're ‘older’ the thought of death starts intruding on this scene of self-confidence, and you begin to understand what ‘pride of life’ means. Is this when some people have their mid-life crisis?

You'd probably expect that life will always go on in the same seamlessly perfect way, though, like it did when the world was new. Perfect in that it's in your control. But thank God, for at any chronological age, He is always there and willing to let us give our lives to Him, a little at first maybe, and then more later, and at some point, maybe all of it. As we approach that point of no return, the giving up of all, time begins to ‘stretch out.’ Limited time, chrónos, becomes limitless time, kairós, which also means acceptable time.

Every day means more, every hour, minute, second. Every particle of being, of life, takes on the quality of being in the center, of being important beyond measure. The beetle that crossed my path as I fumbled for the key to unlock my door, God's handiwork, down to the least barbed leggy. The coolness of the empty warehouse I walked through on the way to my office, God's gift, at the beginning of a day that promises to be very hot.

When it comes to lunch, there's no question of ‘saying grace’ wherever I am or with whom, He feeds me and I thank Him. Every mouthful of ten-cent-a-bag ramen tastes as luscious as my favorite food. It's all manna. And if I'm with a friend, it doesn't matter if I eat at all, because the warmth of a friendly smile feeds more than any food. All from God's hands.

To know with every fibre of my being, He is here, He provides, in His hands are life and (what we call) death, as in the old spiritual ‘He's got the whole world in His hands,’ did this knowledge come first? Or was it the willingness to follow Him blindly, and to accept each next moment as His free gift, that ushers in the leading edge of His parousía?

"Let us go where He is waiting and worship at His footstool."
Psalm 132:7 Jerusalem Bible

Faith

Faith is faith. Nobody can have faith for us, not even God. If we want Christ to do something for us, we must have faith.

What a powerful thing faith is, real faith, not hypothetical faith.

He replied, "Because you have so little faith. I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there' and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you."
Matthew 17:20

Jesus replied, "I tell you the truth, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only can you do what was done to the fig tree, but also you can say to this mountain, 'Go, throw yourself into the sea,' and it will be done."
Matthew 21:21

"I tell you the truth, if anyone says to this mountain, 'Go, throw yourself into the sea,' and does not doubt in his heart but believes that what he says will happen, it will be done for him. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours."
Mark 11:23-24

A man with leprosy came to him and begged him on his knees, "If you are willing, you can make me clean." Filled with compassion, Jesus reached out His hand and touched the man. "I am willing," He said. "Be clean!" Immediately the leprosy left him and he was cured.
Mark 1:40-42

Every English translation of these verses about the healing of the leper that I have consulted uses the word ‘willing,’ both in the leper's request and in the response of Jesus, linking the idea of what is going on here with ‘the will of God.’ But this is how I memorized this passage:

A leper came to Him and pleaded on his knees, ‘If you want to’ he said ‘you can cure me’. Feeling sorry for him, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him. ‘Of course I want to!’ He said. ‘Be cured!’ And the leprosy left him at once and he was cured.

This translation is from the Jerusalem Bible (1966 version, as the Book has been ‘corrected’ since then by the ‘authorities’), and this may be why I have kept this bible with me constantly from the first day I found it. “Of course I want to” may not be literally what is meant by the Greek θέλω, but is there any sense in translating the Word of God if not to evoke faith in us, the kind of faith that “moves mountains”?

Faith is faith. Nobody can have faith for us, not even God. If we want Christ to do something for us, we must have faith.

The leper came to Jesus, with faith. His faith moved a mountain.
What was that mountain? Was it his leprosy?
Or was it ‘the will of God’?

God knows us. He knows everything about us.

But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask Him.
Matthew 6:6-8

Though He knows everything about us, and His will is a mystery, His will is not fixed, it is not static. The might of the Almighty proves His power in that He is willing to undo His will for the sake of His creature who asks. He is the Living God, in Whose Image we are made and into Whose loving Heart we have been drawn, sitting at table with Him, given leave to speak to Him face to face, and yet live. His will for us is His will with us. The Holy Triad welcomes us into His company, invites us to approach boldly in the company of Jesus, through Whom we have become partakers of the Divine Nature.

“Of course I want to” is the will of God to those who ask, coming with faith. But faith is faith. Nobody can have faith for us, not even God. If we want Christ to do something for us, we must have faith.

During his conversation with Abba Serapion, Abba Mark the Anchorite inquired how things stood in the world. He asked about the Church of Christ, and whether persecutions against Christians still continued. Hearing that idol worship had ceased long ago, the saint rejoiced and asked, "Are there now in the world saints working miracles, as the Lord spoke of in His Gospel, 'If ye have faith even as a grain of mustard seed, ye will say to this mountain, move from that place, and it will move, and nothing shall be impossible for you'?" As the saint spoke these words, the mountain moved from its place 5,000 cubits (about 2 miles) and went toward the sea. When he saw that the mountain had moved, Abba Mark said, "I did not order you to move from your place, but was just conversing with a brother. Go back to your place!" After this, the mountain actually returned to its place. Abba Serapion fell down in fright. Abba Mark took him by the hand and asked, "Have you never seen such miracles in your lifetime?" "No, Father," Abba Serapion replied. Then Abba Mark wept bitterly and said, "Alas, today there are Christians in name only, but not in deeds."

Faith is faith. Nobody can have faith for us, not even God. If we want Christ to do something for us, we must have faith.

Bright Monday News

This post is very, very long, but forgive me, I couldn't help myself. It is just too good to tantalise you with fragments. The following is a talk given by Archimandrite Elias Morcos in 1964, which I discovered posted here in English translation of the original Arabic.

The Revival as a Return to God

The Church in her human reality is always something less than her perfect true reality. We must always surpass our human weakness within her in order to arrive at her perfect true reality. This is the revival: this constant effort, this continuous movement from the way we are to the way we should be.

The Church is the salt of the earth and completes the work of Christ in the world. The Church works, she is present, for the sake of the salvation of the world. We can say that she is the center of being, in her its destiny is achieved. The world corrupts and ages, but the Church is continuously renewed for the sake of the salvation of the world. But if the salt is corrupted, then how can it be salty?

The Church is the group of those who believe in the Lord Jesus and who have united around him to live the life of the Gospel, the life of God. They have no concern except to follow the Lord’s teaching and to follow in his footsteps. The group is in the world and for the world, but at the same time it is not of the world. From the beginning, from the ascension of the Lord to heaven, it is oriented toward the age to come, awaiting the return of the heavenly bridegroom and hastening him on. From now on, it lives in the last days, in the fullness of time, “it uses this world as though it doesn’t use it, and buys as though it doesn’t own.”

However, the coarseness and weakness of human nature weigh upon the Church, since she is made up of humans. Sins and failings and imperfections remain, and doubles will continue to remain as long as human beings are human. But the Lord has born all things and taken them all upon himself, and as a result there is no barrier.

The Lord Jesus has passed over our life and has cleansed us and taken us from weakness to strength and from corruption to life. In order for the Church to continue to be the Church, she must follow the Lord and cleave to a continuous Pascha, surpassing the self and constantly passing from the weight of the world and its many varied temptations to the victory of the Lord and the purity of the divine life.

Everything that exists is in a state of motion and progress. Vegetable, biological, and social life, the sciences… everything grows and is perfected. And how much more so the spiritual life. It is progress and growth, an infinite reaching toward God’s life. For that reason it is said that, “one who looks back is not suitable for the Kingdom of Heaven.”

The temptations of this world are many and varied. They take an evil appearance just as they take a good appearance. All of them are clear in their result, in that they are a stopping in the world, a stopping along the way, a stopping in the exodus, the passing over, Pascha. They are an obstruction to God’s eternal Pascha. The journey to God is a journey without end. Every stopping along it leads us to the corruption of the world.

We acquire upright faith. We build churches. We hold services and prayers. We celebrate the feasts. We have all the richness of Orthodoxy, its liturgical and spiritual and ascetic treasures… But naturally, if all this remains external it is not enough. There is no doubt that the journey towards God is at its base an inner striving of the heart, in God’s being a God to us, living, personal, inner. It is said, “If you want to kill God, then kill man’s inner life.”

No, the Church is not in the externals, it is in the heart. As the Bible says, “One who does not meditate in his heart has no knowledge and no understanding” (Isaiah 44:19). We know this, but in our habitual action we very often forget it. We know that the Church is not in the stone and not in the chants and not in the institutions and what is visible, but all its beauty is from within. If we are satisfied with the externals and we do not understand them and do not enter into their deep, living meaning, then the externals become something dead and superficial that comes between us and God rather than leading us to Him. It turns into an absolute value or an obsession or a reason to be distracted from God. Then we confuse the externals and the true, unseen glory, forgetting the words of the Bible, “On that day the glory of Jacob will grow lean” (Isaiah 17:4).

But if we transcend appearances and desire to live and enter into the essence, there is a Gospel that we must follow. There are teachings and divine commandments that we have abandoned for the sake of the commandments of men. Unfortunately, not only have we abandoned them, but often we have mocked them and we have mocked those who keep them. The logic of the world here is the logic of wealth and lust and it glorifies a lifestyle that dominates our entire life.

No, the Church is not in hearing the Gospel but in applying it. If we do not maintain our chastity, our poverty, our humility, our mercy, then where is the Church? If we do not desire righteousness and purify our hearts and we do not do good works, but rather tear each other apart, then where is the Church? Is it something difficult and ineffective? But have we tried? Have we experienced the Lord’s commandments to the very end in order to taste their sweetness and effectiveness? Or have we preferred the bitterness and emptiness of the pleasures of the world to the very end?

The Lord put a great deal of emphasis on keeping his commandments and he strongly urged this in his final sermon since he knew that “the prince of this world” will prevail over hearts. But if we are of the Lord and not of the prince of this world, should our faith not start from this? Does our Lord not deserve that we trust in his word and try to act according to his commandments so that we will be blessed? “If one loves me, he will keep my word. If you keep my commandments, then you shall be established in my love.”

But the Church herself is not commandments and ordinances so much as Love of the Lord and striving for his face. For this reason we do not understand the commandments if we see them as dry ideas, devoid of their marrow and their taste. Virtue is not in actions but in the movement of the heart within the actions. It is through actions oriented toward the Lord, cleaving to him and longing for him.

How can the Church be commandments when the Lord said through the mouth of the Prophet Isaiah “Precept upon precept, precept upon precept. Line upon line, line upon line. Here a little, there a little. For with stammering lips and another tongue He will speak to this people, to whom He said, ‘This is the rest with which you may cause the weary to rest,’ and, ‘This is the refreshing’; yet they would not hear. But the word of the Lord was to them, ‘Precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little, there a little,’ that they might go and fall backward, and be broken and snared and caught” (Isaiah 28:10-13).

And to the youth who had kept the commandments from his infancy, the Lord said, “You lack one thing.” That one thing remaining is love: to long for the Lord in our heart and to desire him alone.

This is not for some people and not for others. It is a call, it is an invitation, to all. All of us are called to love the Lord with the love of life. All the life of the Church is the life of invitation: “‘I have redeemed you and I have called you by your name. You are mine,’ says the Lord to his people” (Isaiah 43:1). Likewise the Apostle Paul says, “We also pray always for you that our God would count you worthy of this calling, and fulfill all the good pleasure of His goodness and the work of faith with power” (2 Thessalonians 1:11).

The people without a calling and love is “a people ravaged and plundered,” the Bible says. The Church does not exist without the visible Church, the Christian people. Our religion is a religion of incarnation. If we do not embody it, if we do not follow the Lord, then where is the Church?

“Our gospel did not come to you in word only, but also in power” (1 Thessalonians 1:5), says the Apostle, but out of habit and the passing of time, we often take the words without their true meanings, the shadow instead of the person and thus we mock the Lord. We might hear the call and do something. We might go for a part of the way. We might be given the grace of prayer if we ask for it, the fathers say. But if we do not do all the Lord’s will, there will come a day when we discover that we have no faith and no forgiveness.

“Woe to the person whose reputation surpasses his reality,” says Fr. Silouan. But the Lord says, “I know your works, that you have a name that you are alive, but you are dead. Be watchful, and strengthen the things which remain, that are ready to die, for I have not found your works perfect before God” (Revelation 3:1-3).

In order for us to truly follow the Lord, we must have force and self-emptying. Jesus came to be crucified, not to talk. If talking was enough, then Jesus would not have been crucified. He said, “He who wants to follow me, let him take up his cross and follow me.” This total commitment, the commitment of the cross is doubtless painful and scandalous. But it is the only way in the Church.

Pain here is a birth pang, and a birth pang is the beginning of any existence. We have no existence in the Church and the Church has no existence in us without the cross of commitment and its pains. But those who abide will be wiped out: “They slept a heavy sleep,” says the Psalmist, “and they found their hands empty” (Psalm 72:18). The issue is the issue of true commitment that we plunge ourselves into. We do not love our life to the point of death, a commitment in which we break the barriers of our freedom like breaking the sound barrier: in our freedom, we empty ourselves of our freedom in order to follow the Lord, and only then does he open before us the way into space.

This ultimate commitment is what makes the Church the Church. Everyone can contribute in this commitment to the Church of Antioch, each one in his field and surroundings and profession, fathers and sons according to the gift of the Lord. It is within the ability of fathers to offer the best and most precious gift, if the Lord wills.

I would like to repeat to you what a Coptic monk, a friend of mine, wrote, “O people of Antioch, the voice of the Lord to you, as from the voice of the great prophet Samuel: offer, offer the good vessels that you have, which through all these years have become empty. Offer them so that they can be filled with God’s oil. Do not be stingy with your sons and daughters, so that they can become your vessels of salvation on your day of hardship and so that they can become oil of joy and gladness in the time of war. The Lord will be pleased with you and your times of relief will come from him. Do not say enough, enough. The world looks upon you. Yes, enlighten once more, O Lord, Antioch so that the world will be enlightened by its light as in the first days.”

As for those who have truly committed to the Lord and have gone into the great depths—and among you are many of them—they do not stop along the way. If we have done something, we are not satisfied with it, as every stopping is a fall. No one is better than another.

“All the Church is a Church of penitents. All the Church is a Church of mortals,” says Ephrem the Syrian. We have not yet begun to repent. We have not struggled against sin to the point of blood. If we stop and we haven’t bled, then we have not brought it to the end and commitment, the revival, and the Church become mere expressions and empty clichés that we repeat in order to quiet our conscience. Our giving must increase in order to remain. May the spirit’s be to vigorously move forward and not stop short like Lot who remained alive while his wife looked back and died. We must renew our will like the stroke of a hammer in the soul so that it arrives at the profundities of existence.

“So the craftsman encouraged the goldsmith; He who smooths with the hammer inspired him who strikes the anvil, saying, “It is ready for the soldering”; then he fastened it with pegs, that it might not totter” (Isaiah 41:7). The danger of lethargy confronts us at every moment, “Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall, but those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles” (Isaiah 40:30-31).

Brothers, if we understand the revival on this basis, and we walk in it with faith, steadfastness, and alertness, by His grace, He, for the sake of His glory, for the sake of His love and the Love of His holy Church which is above all and for all, He will allow the revival to be. At that point the revival will be at its true extent, proceeding after the Lord risen from the dead. Then each one of us will rise from his death. In an eternal exodus we shall follow him in his Pascha, he whose life has no end, amen.

Day without night

I saw that there was no temple in the City since the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb were themselves the Temple, and the City did not need the sun or the moon for light, since it was lit by the radiant glory of God and the Lamb was a lighted torch for it. The pagan nations will live by its light and the kings of the earth will bring it their treasures. The gates of it will never be shut by day, and there will be no night there…
Revelation 21:22-25 Jerusalem Bible

The whole of the message of Christ is contained and taught in two yearly feasts: Christmas, the nativity of Christ, at the time of the winter solstice, and Easter, Pascha, the resurrection of Christ, at the time of the spring equinox. This isn’t the Church taking over two pagan religious festivals and converting them into Christian ones. This is Nature itself pointing to the truths of faith and existence given a place within the New Creation, demonstrating that there is only Christ, who is in all, and in whom all ‘live and move and have their being’ (cf. Acts 17:28).

The world wants to localize these holidays, wants to contain them within calendar dates, wants to milk us for money as ants stroke and milk their aphids for nectar, giving us short respites between ‘holidays’, between milkings, so we can sufficiently recover. It doesn’t matter to the world whether the holidays are real or not. We tend to blame commercialism for spoiling the holidays, especially Christmas but to a lesser extent Easter, but it’s not their fault. ‘It’s not against human enemies that we struggle, but against fallen spiritual powers’ (cf. Ephesians 6:12).

So, they make Christmas end with a splash of presents and crumpled, glittering wrapping paper on the afternoon of December 25th, and they’d just as soon like to see Easter disappear under mountains of discarded candy boxes and deflowered Easter lilies: all very valuable and costly in the days leading up to the holiday, and suddenly transformed by studied consumption into garbage before sundown of the Lord’s Passover. Just as there is no mention of the birth of the God-Man during official Christmas, there is no mention of His resurrection during official Easter.

For the disciples of Jesus Christ whom He has ‘set free like birds from the fowler’s net’ (cf. Psalm 124), the great and holy Pascha does not disappear after the day of Resurrection, nor does the God-Man’s taking birth from the Theotokos retreat into mere myth and folklore after the day of Incarnation: These holidays are not days that inhabit one number on the world calendar. They are not days at all, as we experience them, but entrances into the Divine Nature, into the life eternal, the life of the Holy Triad, which begins in time but proves to contain even time itself.

In Christ’s birth, God becomes Man, not once, but forever, taking human nature up into the Divine Nature, divinizing the whole Tree that Man is, Himself one of us, by hanging on that Tree as its first fruit.

In Christ’s resurrection, Man becomes God, not once, but forever, reopening to us the gates of Paradise, a Serpent raised on a stake, inviting us to partake of the Fruit of the tree of life, renewing all creation.

In Christ’s birth, the two greatest commandments, ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself’ (Luke 10:27) become One commandment: to love your neighbor is to love God, thus brotherly love is theological.

In Christ’s resurrection, His entire life as Man becomes the pattern of our life, and only by following Him, by doing what we see Him doing, ‘Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill’ (Matthew 5:17), can we fulfill the One commandment, becoming by grace what He is by nature.

Tradition mandates twelve days to celebrate the birth of Christ, and after the day of His resurrection an entire week is gathered up into a single liturgical day, and a total of forty calendar days will hear the greeting ‘Christ is risen! He is truly risen!’ But after celebration, life must go on. We still must live our day to day lives. Tomorrow, I must return to the office and deal with what I find there, pretending to be ‘only human’ when I know by the testimony of His rising from the dead, that Christ is with me, even as He stands in the Presence of His Father, for He says ‘where I am, there will My servant be also’
(John 12:26).

In your minds you must be the same as Christ Jesus: His state was divine, yet He did not cling to His equality with God but emptied Himself to assume the conditions of a slave, and became as all men are; and being as all men are, He was humbler yet, even to accepting death, death on a cross. But God raised Him high and gave Him the name which is above all other names so that all beings in the heavens, on earth and in the underworld, should bend the knee at the name of Jesus and that every tongue should acclaim Jesus Christ as Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
Philippians 2:5-11 Jerusalem Bible

This, beloved brethren, is the Day of Resurrection,

the Day without night,

the Life without death,

and the Love without end.

If not now, when?

If I am not for myself, who is for me?
And if I am only for myself, what am I?
And if not now, when?

Pirkei Avot (Talmud, Ethics of the Fathers) 1:14

Resurrection, or reincarnation? The modern world—no, just the world, even from ancient times—has a hard time believing in what we confess in the Symbol of Nicæa, προσδοκουμεν ανάστασιν νεκρων, και ζωην του μέλλοντος αιωνος, ‘we expect the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.’

The two major views of human mortality and immortality—there is a third, but it can be a variation of these two—are the concepts of resurrection, and of reincarnation. In the first, the human soul and body are halves of an indivisible whole. In the second, the soul transmigrates from one bodily form to another.

It’s difficult to say which belief has historical priority. We find prehistoric graves, often well-stocked with goods for use presumably in an afterlife. This probably is evidence for the third major view mentioned above: The human person, with accessories, continues living in another world, perhaps in the sky.

Resurrection seems to be the native belief of Semitic peoples and their proselytes, specifically, Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Reincarnation seems to be the native belief of Indo-European peoples and their proselytes, specifically, pre-Christian Europeans, Hindus, and Buddhists. There is also some cross-over.

Judaism seems to believe in transmigration of the soul, at least in its literature, yet resurrection of the dead is still a major tenet of this religion. Some Christian and Muslim mystics believe in it as individuals. There is also a growing body of post-Christians who believe in reincarnation from reading about it.

Resurrection, or reincarnation? The adherents of both views point to nature to prove their beliefs, speaking for nature, which cannot speak for itself—except to humans who can hear beyond language. That exceptional group—I hope I am one of them—appears in China in books like 道德经 Dao De Jing.

The ‘resurrectionist’ looks at nature and notices that the cycle of earthly seasons gives example of dying and resurrecting in the annual cycle of plants. The ‘death’ is not really a mortality, only a ‘sleep’ of sorts. In winter, trees lose their leaves and sleep, and spring come alive again with flowers and leaves. The tree is still the same tree year after year. Its visible and invisible parts inseparable like the human body and soul.

The ‘reincarnationist’ looks at nature and notices how living things not only cycle, as trees through the seasons, but actually die and are utterly dissolved and then reappear through reproductive cycles. They experience or only imagine personalities in living things, and make personality the surviving entity which lives on from one body to the next. The body itself only appears to be alive because inhabited by the soul.

Understanding this broad dichotomy, we can see why burial of the whole body after death is mandated in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and why cremation of bodily remains is the logical way to dispose of the body in Indo-European religions, especially Hinduism and Buddhism. In each group, the treatment of the body after death is appropriate to the belief system. Cremation in the West is more expedient than respectful.

Resurrection, or reincarnation? The age old question has no logical answer any more than the other perennial question, ‘Is there a God?’ at least not in a form that can be accepted without ‘strings attached.’ For until you make one of two encounters, you can believe whatever you like.

Which of these will you encounter first, your own physical death, or the Lord Jesus Christ, ‘who was dead and is alive forever’? What kind of invitation is that? Whether you believe in the resurrection of the dead or in reincarnation, you must meet death: there is no choice.

Unexpectedly, the same is true of meeting Jesus Christ. I am not now speaking of religious beliefs about Him that you may have been handed by your parents or teachers. Whatever you believe about death or about life, you must meet Jesus Christ: but there is a choice. When will it be?

Now, when He says, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die’ (John 11:25), or after your body and soul have been separated, of which He says, ‘Night is coming, when no one can work’ (John 9:4)?

Christ is risen · Χριστος ανεστη · المسيح قام

Christ is risen from the dead,
Trampling down death by death,
And on those in the tombs
Bestowing life!

Χριστος ανεστη εκ νεκρων,
θανατω θανατον πατησας,
και τοις εν τοις μνημασι,
ζωην χαρισαμενος!

المسيح قام من بين الأموات
و وطئ الموت بالموت
و وهب الحياة
للذين في القبور