Girding our Loins
This is not the way
in which we should await the Kingdom and the Judgment. We must recapture an
attitude of mind which, usually, we cannot conjure even out of our depth,
something which has become strangely alien to us-the joyful expectation of the
Day of the Lord-in spite of the fact that we know that this day will be a Day
of Judgment. It is striking to hear in church that we are proclaiming the
Gospel, the gladdening news, of Judgment, but we are proclaiming that the
Day of the Lord is not fear but hope and, together with the Holy Spirit,
the Church can say: “Come, Lord Jesus, come quickly!” As long as we are
incapable of speaking in those terms we are missing something very important in
our Christian consciousness. We are still, whatever we may say, pagans dressed
up in evangelic garments. We are still people for whom God is a God outside,
for whom His coming is darkness and dread, whose judgment is not our redemption
but our condemnation, for whom a meeting face to face is a fearful event and
not the hour we long and live for.
Unless we realize
this, spiritual endeavor cannot be a joy, for it is strenuous and confronts us
with judgment and responsibility-because we must judge ourselves in order to
change and become able to meet the Day of the Lord, the glorious Resurrection,
with an open heart, without hiding our face, ready to rejoice that he has come.
And every coming of the Lord is judgment. The Fathers of the Church draw a
parallel between Christ and Noah and they say that the presence of Noah among
his generation was at the same time condemnation and salvation. It was
condemnation because the presence of one man who had remained faithful, just
one man, who could be a saint of God, was evidence that that was possible, and
that those who were sinners, those who had rejected God and turned away from
him, could have done likewise. So the presence of the righteous one was
judgment and condemnation upon his time. Yet it was also the salvation of his
time, because he was the only one thanks to whom God looked with mercy upon
man. And the same is true of the coming of Christ.
There is another joy
in judgment. It is not something which descends upon us from outside. The day
will come when we shall stand before God and be judged, but as long as our
pilgrimage continues, as long as we live in the process of becoming, as long as
there is ahead of us this road that leads to the full measure of the stature of
Christ which is our vocation, judgment must be pronounced by ourselves. There
is a continuing dialogue within us throughout our life.
We very often walk
in darkness, and this darkness is the result of our darkened mind, of our
darkened heart, of our darkened eye, and it is only if the Lord Himself sheds
his light into our soul, upon our life, that we can begin to see what is wrong
and what is right in it. There is a remarkable passage in the writings of
Father John of Kronstadt, a Russian priest of the turn of the nineteenth
century, in which he says that God does not reveal to us the ugliness of our
souls unless he can espy in us sufficient faith and sufficient hope for us not
to be broken by the vision of our own sins. In other words, whenever we see
ourselves with our dark side, as this knowledge increases, as we can understand
ourselves more in the light of God, that is, in the light of the Divine
Judgment, it means two things: it means, indeed, that we sadly discover our own
ugliness,but also that we can rejoice at the same time, because God has granted us his trust.
He has entrusted to us a new knowledge of ourselves as we are, as he always saw us and as, at times, he did not allow us to see ourselves because we could not bear the sight of truth. And here again judgment becomes joy, because although we discover what is wrong, yet this discovery is conditioned by the knowledge that God has seen enough faith, enough hope and enough fortitude in us to allow us to see, because he knows that now we can act. All that is important if we want to understand that joy, and spiritual endeavor, go together. Otherwise the continued, the insistent, effort of the Church, of the Word of God, to make us aware of what is wrong in us can lead to despair and darkening of the mind and soul. Then when we have become too depressed and low in spirit, we are incapable of meeting the Resurrection of Christ with joy, because then we realize, or imagine we realize, that this has nothing to do with us. We are in darkness, He is light. Nothing appears to us but our judgment and our condemnation, at the very moment when we should emerge out of darkness into the saving act of God which is both our judgment and our salvation.
He has entrusted to us a new knowledge of ourselves as we are, as he always saw us and as, at times, he did not allow us to see ourselves because we could not bear the sight of truth. And here again judgment becomes joy, because although we discover what is wrong, yet this discovery is conditioned by the knowledge that God has seen enough faith, enough hope and enough fortitude in us to allow us to see, because he knows that now we can act. All that is important if we want to understand that joy, and spiritual endeavor, go together. Otherwise the continued, the insistent, effort of the Church, of the Word of God, to make us aware of what is wrong in us can lead to despair and darkening of the mind and soul. Then when we have become too depressed and low in spirit, we are incapable of meeting the Resurrection of Christ with joy, because then we realize, or imagine we realize, that this has nothing to do with us. We are in darkness, He is light. Nothing appears to us but our judgment and our condemnation, at the very moment when we should emerge out of darkness into the saving act of God which is both our judgment and our salvation.
How often have I
heard people say “Here are my sins”, then stop a moment to take a breath and
begin a long discourse to the effect that had not God afflicted them with such
a hard life, they would not sin so much. “Of course”, they would say, “I am in
the wrong, but what can I do with such a son-in-law, my rheumatism or the
Russian revolution?” And more than once I suggested, before reading a prayer of
absolution, that peace between God and man was a two-way traffic, and I asked
whether the penitent was prepared to forgive God all his misdeeds, all the
wrong he had done, all the circumstances which prevented this good Christian
from being a saint. People do not like this, and yet, unless we take full
responsibility for the way we face our heredity, our situation, our God and
ourselves, we shall never be able to face more than a small section of our life
and self. If we want to pass a true and balanced judgment on ourselves we must
consider ourselves as a whole, in our entirety.
Certain things in us
belong already, however incipiently, to the Kingdom of God. Others are still a
chaos, a desert, a wilderness. And it is for us by hard toil and inspired faith
to make them into the Garden of Eden; as “Nietzsche” says, “One must possess a
chaos within to give birth to a star.” And we must have faith in the chaos,
pregnant with beauty and harmony. We must look at ourselves as an artist looks,
with vision and sobriety, at the raw material which God has put into his hands
and out or which he will make a work of art, an integral part of the harmony,
the beauty, the truth and the life of the Kingdom. An artist must learn to
discern the peculiar potentialities of the given material and call out of it
all the beauty hidden in its depth. So must every one of us discern in himself
under God's guidance and with the help of his wiser friends, his particular
capabilities and characteristics, both good and bad, and make use of them to
achieve in the end that work of art which is his true self. To use a phrase of
St Irenaeus of Lyon, “the splendor of God is a man fully realized”.
Note, about the
author:
His
Eminence Metropolitan Anthony Bloom (June 6, 1914 - August 4, 2003)
was bishop of
the Diocese of Sourozh, the Russian
Orthodox Church in Great Britain and Ireland.During the Bolshevik
Revolution his family had to leave Russia, and in 1923 they settled in Paris
where the future metropolitan was educated, graduating in physics, chemistry
and biology, and taking his doctorate in medicine, at the University of Paris. In
1939, before leaving for the front as a surgeon in the French army, he secretly
professed monastic vows in the Russian
Orthodox Church. He was tonsured and received the name of Anthony in 1943.
During the occupation of France by the Germans he worked as a doctor and took
part in the French Resistance. After the war he continued practising as a
physician until 1948, when he was ordained to the priesthood and
sent to England to serve as Orthodox Chaplain of
the Fellowship of St. Alban and St.
Sergius. In 1966 he was raised to the rank of Metropolitan.
At his own request he was released in 1974 from the function of Exarch, in
order to devote himself more fully to the pastoral needs of the growing flock
of his diocese and all who come to him seeking advice and help. His first books
on prayer and the spiritual life (Living Prayer, Meditations on a Theme,
and God and Man) were published in England, and his texts are now widely
published in Russia, both as books and in periodicals.
Reference:
Meditations, Metropolitan Antony Bloom,(1972)
https://orthodoxwiki.org/Anthony_(Bloom)_of_Sourozh