The Winter Is Now Past.Saint Gregory of Nyssa.

"My beloved calls to me, “Arise, my darling. Come away with me, my beautiful one. For now the winter is past; the rain is over and gone. The flowers have appeared in the countryside; the season of singing has come, and the cooing of turtledoves is heard in our land"(Cant2: 10-12).…

And the flowers beamed

 in the countryside...

The Word has spoken to the bride, calling her my love because she is close to Him, and my dove because she is beautiful. He now goes on to say that the sadness of winter no longer dominates our souls. For the cold cannot resist the rays of the sun. Behold, He says, winter is now past, the rain is over and gone (Cant. 2.II).

Sin is given many different names in accordance with its different effects. It is called winter, rain, drops-each name suggesting a different sort of temptation. In wintertime everything that is lovely withers away. All the leaves, which are the natural crown of the beauty of the trees, fall from the branches and are mingled with earth. The song of the birds is silent, the nightingale flies away, the swallow sleeps, and the dove leaves its nest.

Everything imitates the oppression of death. The blossom perishes; the grass dies; the branches are stripped of their leaves like bones of their flesh, and what was once lovely flower and leaf is now an ugly spectacle.

“Marie, Mère de Dieu”.Bertrand Vergeley*.

         

Très Sainte Mère de Dieu
 sauve-nous

On se pose toujours la question de la place de la femme dans le Christianisme. C’est vrai qu’il y a beaucoup à faire. La société Chrétienne a été marquée par le patriarcat, la masculinité, et la femme a été souvent dominée surtout dans le monde méditerranéen et derrière le Christianisme on peut dire que la culture méditerranéenne a été plus forte que la culture Chrétienne alors que c’est l’inverse qui aurait dû avoir lieu. Surtout ce qui très ennuyeux c’est d’apercevoir qu’en ayant ce rapport dominateur sur la femme le Christianisme n’est pas à l’hauteur du Christianisme lui-même parce que ce qui apparaît dans le Christianisme c’est un message totalement libérateur à l’égard de la femme.

         Je vois trois éléments fondamentaux dans la signification de Marie.

Premièrement il y a quelque chose de totalement nouveau dans l’inconscient de l’humanité. Jusqu’à présent il était dit que la chute venait dans l’humanité de la femme. C’est Ève qui avait séduit Adam et qui était responsable de la chute de celui-ci et par la femme venait la chute de l’humanité. La femme a été dans quelque sorte maudite, elle était pécheresse et elle était responsable de la condition humaine. Ce qui est tout à fait nouveau à l’intérieur de l’humanité c’est l’idée que le salut vient dans le monde à partir de la femme. Je crois que c’est très important que ceci soit dit avant la naissance du Christ et avant Sa résurrection même!.

         Attention!. Marie est très importante!. Nous apercevons que le Christ prend toute Sa signification parce que Marie existe. Quelle est la signification de Marie?. C’est la sortie de la malédiction; Non seulement les femmes ne sont pas maudites mais toute l’humanité n’est pas maudite, et c’est le deuxième élément : Dieu peut venir de l’intérieur de l’humanité, le salut peut devenir de l’intérieur de l’humanité. Il est remarquable que dans la construction symbolique il y a une cohérence,. on pourrait dire que si Marie n’existait pas il faudrait l’inventer!.

         Dès la naissance du Christ, le salut est là. Le Sauveur ce n’est pas simplement le Christ qui vient et qui sauve, le salut c’est tout un ensemble. Toute l’humanité est concernée par le salut. Toute la féminité, toute la culture, est marquée de la malédiction, on n’arrête pas de vivre dans la malédiction. La preuve de la malédiction est le discours existentialiste, qui dit que si vous pensez qu’il y a un salut dans le monde vous ne pouvez jamais vous en tirer, dans la condition de l’humanité il n’y a pas de salut!. Pourquoi?. Parce que fondamentalement l’humanité est maudite et pourquoi l’humanité est maudite?. Si vous dites aux hommes qu’il y a un salut ils vont être paresseux, ils ne vont rien faire, ils font se laisser faire, et pour agir il faut qu’il n’y ait pas de salut!. Ce qui signifie que les hommes sont paresseux,  ils sont bêtes, ils ne font rien, et donc il ne faut pas dire qu’il y a de salut pour les hommes parce que c’est ça qui sauve. Qu’est ce que c’est que ce discours?. C’est un discours de malédiction. Fondamentalement les hommes sont paresseux et pour bousculer la paresse il faut absolument supprimer le salut.

         Or qu’est ce qui est dit au Christianisme?. C’est exactement l’inverse!.

      Premièrement, le salut est possible. Deuxièmement, si vous donnez le salut à l’humanité, les hommes ne vont pas du tout être paresseux, au contraire ils vont en faire un très bon usage. Troisièmement les femmes, ne sont plus les responsables du malheur de l’humanité.

         Le féminin de l’humanité n’est pas responsable. Il est la réceptivité, qui n’est pas du tout la passivité, par contre elle est une chose extraordinaire!. C’est la même chose que l’expérience de l’invisible. L’expérience de l’invisible c’est le fait de dire qu’il y ait une vie dans l’invisible. Mais Ce qui se passe dans le ventre de la femme c’est exactement la même chose que la vie dans l’invisible!.

         Dans le ventre de la femme il se passe des choses énormes, c’est le laboratoire de l’humanité, vous ne le voyez pas mais c’est là que ça se passe!. L’invisible est le laboratoire de l’humanité. Ça permet de comprendre ici la virginité de Marie.

        À propos de la virginité de Marie on est complètement dans la myopie totale d’une manière assez grossière. On dit : “Oh non, ce n’est pas possible! une vierge ne peut pas devenir mère!.” Bien un jour, j’écoutais Annique de Souzenelle et tout d’un coup j’ai eu cette intuition : “il n’y as qu’une vierge qui peut devenir mère!”. Pour devenir mère, il faut être vierge!. Toutes les femmes qui sont devenus mères étaient vierges et ont vécu l’expérience de la virginité. Ce qui veut dire que pour être mère, il faut être dans la radicale nouveauté!.

        La virginité de Marie veut dire qu’Elle est radicalement neuve, il y a quelque chose en Elle qui est radicalement neuf, pour accueillir quelque chose de radicalement neuf.

      

Marie la Mère de l'humanité.

Au 4^ème siècle il y a eu une controverse extrêmement intéressante développée par Saint Cyril d’Alexandrie, et qui reposait sur la question : Comment faut-il appeler Marie?.  Est-ce qu’Elle est la mère de Jésus?. Ou la mère de Dieu?. Saint Cyril a décidé de l’appeler la mère de Dieu!. Ce qui est ahurissant!. Normalement une femme ne peut pas être la mère de Dieu, puisque c’est Dieu qui a créé Marie, et ce n’est pas Marie qui crée Dieu. Dons lorsqu’on dit Marie mère de Dieu, est ce qu’on ne provoque pas une inversion terrible qui ferait de Marie la créatrice de Dieu?!. Et on serait dans une espèce de folie!. Mais c’est exactement l’inverse qui se passe. Si on dit Marie est mère de Jésus et non pas mère de Dieu, tout le mystère du Christ s’écroule. Ce n’était pas la peine que le Christ vienne, étant donné que son mystère s’écroule. Marie mère de Jésus ça veut dire Marie est la mère d’un être humain, c’est une femme comme une autre. Marie n’est pas la mère d’un être humain, Marie est la Mère de l’humanité et en ce sens Elle est la Mère de Dieu, Elle est la Mère de tout, c’est d’Elle que tout vient. Pourquoi?. Parce qu’elle est porteuse d’un mystère qui dépasse l’humanité et qui est la sortie de la malédiction, la sortie de la chute, qui constitue le salut. Marie est l’incarnation du fait que le salut est possible dans le monde, le salut peut tellement rentrer dans le monde, il n’est pas parachuté de l’extérieur par les armées célestes, il vient de l’intérieur d’une femme à l’intérieur de l’humanité. Là on est devant une chose absolument prodigieuse!. Et ça permet de comprendre que Marie est la Mère de l’anthropologie, de tous les hommes. Se relier à Marie c’est se relier à la possibilité du salut pour l’humanité, et ça se traduit par le “Oui” que dit Marie à Dieu quand Il lui demande de porter en Elle le Christ.

         Qu’est ce qui est tout à fait extraordinaire à partir de Marie?. C’est qu’il se dit des choses dans l’histoire de l’humanité qui n’avaient jamais été dites, et qui permettent de libérer totalement l’humanité de la malédiction, les femmes de la malédiction, mais également la culture, l’esprit, la manière d’envisager les choses. Les hommes ne se rendent pas compte de ce dont ils sont porteurs. Ça permet de comprendre ici ce qui serait nécessaire pour vivre une libération de la femme dans notre monde.

         Quand une femme porte un enfant dans son ventre, elle ne porte pas seulement son enfant, elle porte l’enfance, la nouveauté de l’humanité, elle porte le salut humain, il y a ici une extension totale de la notion de naissance et de grossesse. Et cela va être mis en relation avec ces passages de l’Évangile où le Christ dit : “Attention, quand vous faites ça, vous faites quelque chose de très grand dans le Royaume des Cieux”, ce qui signifie qu’il y a toujours une extension ontologique de ce qu’on fait. Quand on agit sur un plan humain d’une manière ontologique, de tout son être, on agit en même temps sur le plan céleste, c’est cette relation entre les deux qui fait ce que l’on est!.

       

Bertrand Vergely.

* Bertrand Vergely, philosophe et théologien orthodoxe enseigne dans des cadres différents: classes préparatoires, Sciences-Po et institut Saint-Serge. Il a publié, des manuels dans la collection Essentiels philosophie et des ouvrages de réflexion grand public, notamment en 2018, “Obscures lumières - La révolution interdite”.

        

           Référence :

         Texte choisi de la conférence de Bertrand Vergeley “Marie, Mère de Dieu”, le 5 Novembre 2018, dans sa sixième série de conférences « L’éthique du salut ».

https://vimeo.com/300011573

Faith, Hope, and Love.Saint Tikhon Zadonsk.

Saint Tikhon Zadonsk.

Man is more beautiful than any other creature since he is in the image of God. Through the in­carnation he is justified and is no more under wrath. He has become a member of the body of which the heavenly head is Jesus Christ. He mysteriously par­takes of the life-giving Body and divine Blood. He is made worthy to become the habitation of God and the temple of the Holy Ghost. He is in communion with the Father and his Son Jesus Christ. Through faith in Jesus he becomes a son, an heir, a co-heir with Christ. Read the Acts of the Apostles and you will see that all these titles are ascribed to man by the Holy Ghost. ... And what will it be in the future life, according to the unfailing promise of God! What goodness, bliss, honor and glory! The unin­terrupted flow of eternal blessedness will be like a river, incomprehensible to the present mind and in­expressible by the tongue, the blessedness which "eye hath not seen" spoken of in (1 Cor. 2. 9). The children of God will shine like the sun in the kingdom of the heavenly Father; they will be as angels, like other gods. Glory be to the Trinity for having so honored and magnified our kind !

The soul cannot live without grace. Grace and faith are the necessary conditions for the soul which strives to restore its innate nobility. "Our own strivings are power­less",read Psalm 118.

Grace is the food and clothing of the saints. It wakens grief in a man's heart, making him dissatis­fied and moving him to seek the reason of this dis­satisfaction. Grace gives sorrow and grace comforts; showing us the poverty of all things, it engenders in us a repentant sorrow for having fallen short of the love of God. . . . One who is possessed by such sorrow will always grieve, for he thinks of God's offended love and not of the fear of hell. It is a grief of love.

This state, approaching what might be called perfect con­trition, is propitious to the growing longing after God; through grace, the love of God is increased in the heart, and the soul "desires nothing more than it desires God." Hu­mility, prayer, thanksgiving, assurance of divine mercy are gifts of grace."

Faith is a spiritual gift; it enters the heart. It comes down from heaven and the heart of man is caught up to things celestial.... Faith is the com­forting perception of the gospels produced in the heart by the Holy Ghost. It purifies the heart, endows it with joy and freedom, that gift of the Son.

Faith is intimately linked with hope, for "we hope in the One in whom we believe"; moreover, faith calls forth love for Christ, which leads to pity for all, love for all and-true fruit of true faith-acts of justice and sympathy.

Alone faith in the Son of God who died for us and rose again justifies us without regard to our works, nevertheless this faith cannot be idle but engenders love as its concomitant. Faith, this divine spark, is kindled in us and bursts into flame with the help of God through the reading of and listening to the word of God, through meditation on the acts of God in the past, through prayer, through the partaking of the holy mysteries and, like a good tree, it reveals itself externally by sweet fruit of love.

Faith is not an emotion divorced from the logical powers of the mind. The creed is a matter of thought and conviction as well as of deep re­ligious emotion produced by response to its historical and spiritual assertions. He never protested against the intellect, but only against the deadly theoretical knowledge of right dogma divorced from its expression in Christian life.

True faith is the keeping and confession of right dogma, that is to say, it consists in true faith in Jesus Christ the Son of God: for knowledge of beliefs is one thing and real faith in Christ is quite another. The first often makes one haughty, arrogant, and fruit­less. Hence, many who possess a right knowledge of dogma live lawless lives; many even preach on faith, and teach and exhort others, but themselves do not move forward, as though they were mere signposts on the road. True faith in Christ is humble, patient, merciful, and full of loving-kindness.

A traditional image best expresses it: faith is the root from which a Christian grows; good works of faith are its leaves and fruits and the more fruit there is, the lower do the branches bend, as true symbols of humility.

It is always good to enquire into one's faith, especially at the present time when there are so many phantasies. Believe, together with the whole Church, what has been revealed by the word of God.

Faith is inseparable from the other theological virtues. In the trinity of the acts of man's mind, heart and will, lies his total response to the perfection of divine love. And with the support of abundant references from the New Testament: "All Christianity and all Christian duty consists in faith, hope and love."

Lord Jesus, the tree of life.

The person of Christ should be everything for us, our estimation. The main obstacle to faith and spiritual growth is estrangement from the Christ of the Bible. It is our only enemy, the Devil who sows doubt, disbelief, and despair of the goodness of God" in people's minds particularly in the mind of a monk or of a man who is making spiritual progress. The Devil strives to tear the Church by schisms, by slan­derous reports on righteous persons and, above all, by blur­ring the image of Christ in people's memory. It is the Devil who turns our eyes away from the suffering of Christ in order to prevent, or at least to endanger, out salvation.

Yet the essential freedom of man remains-that freedom so much in connection with the spiritual combat. It is on account of this freedom that man can respond to divine love, to the sacrifice of Christ, and to the whole problem of the future life and salvation. The atonement has achieved the organic regeneration of man's fallen nature. But salvation has both its divine and its human side: God's love requires man's free response. "Are then all saved?. Salvation is offered to all," but those who reject Christ, or false Christians, deliberately cut themselves away from saving grace, from the fruit of the incarnation-for Christ wishes to save all (1 Tim. 2. 4).

Salvation is both the content of Christian belief and the appropriation by man of Christ's saving life and death and resurrection; it is at once a belief and a mystical experience which has its beginnings here on earth and is to be lived and fully revealed in the life to come: "The beginning of salvation is to learn our own wretchedness”. It is here that we must seek it not after death .... But whilst we neglect it, Satan steals away our immeasurable treasure, the eternal salvation bought by the blood of Christ." Whilst he is alive a Christian must strive after that "which is his dearest hope."

We were created and, having fallen, we have been redeemed for eternal life. We are renewed in baptism and through the word of God, and called to eternal life; to this end has holy scripture been given to us, to this end did Christ the Son of God, come into the world to live as a man, to suffer and die, that we should receive this everlasting life. The first duty of a Christian is eternal salvation.

The token of salvation here on earth is true faith practiced and expressed in acts of love, triumphant in its hope over all temporal tribulations and firm in its fidelity to Christ. Salvation in the future life can be apprehended through cer­tain images and mystically experienced.

You see the rising of the sun and yet when it goes down it seems as if it had never been there­ and then again it appears. This reminds us of the death and resurrection of Christ, and of the resurrection of the dead. Victorious soldiers inspire us to contrast earthly triumphs with the so much greater triumph of the saints whose souls are at peace and who contemplate the beauty of the Heavenly Jerusalem. What rapture overtakes those who put on the garment of salvation! ... If here on earth people listen to sweet singing, and still desire to hear it, and are comforted by it beyond words, how much more so in that mansion where “the voice of praise is ceaseless”. There is peace, harmony and love, and his will, and the fellowship of the saints and angels, complete serenity and perfect wisdom.

Beauty is a reminder to man of his innate dignity; in nature it is a memory of paradise and an image of future harmony.

Reference:

Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk. Nadejda Gorodetzky.(1976)

The Body as the temple of the Holy Spirit.Metropolitan Anthony Bloom.

Metropolitan Anthony Bloom.

We hear from the first lines of Genesis that God created the world (Gen. 1:1-31). We hear also, from St John's Gospel, that in the beginning was the Word and that from Him all things proceeded (Jn. 1:1-3). When we try to understand how things came into being we are faced with a strange analogy. Today in scientific circles people speak about the big bang. In the Gospel we read about the Word that brought everything into being (Jn. 1:3). Modern science thinks of the big bang because we always think that important events must be tremendous, noisy, shaking, and we forget that in the story of Elijah, when the prophet finds himself in the desert, there was a thunderstorm, there was lightning, and God was neither in the one nor in the other; and then came the quiet voice of the evening breeze, and God was in it. And I think that none of us imagines the creation by the Word of God as a tremendous bang sounding in the universe and bringing into being all things that were to become. We read in the Bible that in the beginning there was what the English translations call the chaos. And very often we understand the chaos as an extremely disorderly state of being. No, chaos does not necessarily mean that. When we speak of chaos we visualize the chaos of the world, the chaos that results from the falling of bombs, the tragedies that occur in our human lives, the destruction of harmony, the annihilation at times of the existing order. But chaos has also another meaning: chaos is being that has not yet unfolded itself, like a bud that has not yet opened. The chaos created by God in the beginning is exactly that. He creates a whole mass of potentialities. And the thing that strikes me is this quiet voice of Christ, 'Come', which is a call of love, 'Come', because you are called to be my companion of eternity, 'Come' because there will be the day when all things will be in God. Over this chaos of potentialities the Spirit of God is brooding. He is not simply breathing like a wind over the sea. He is brooding, if I may put it in Biblical terms, like a hen, over this chaos (Mt 23:37), warming it, and calling out of it all that it can become: not by forcing it, as its maker, but by calling it to unfold itself, to open itself up, to become all that it can be. In the Bible we can see several stages of this process (Gen. 1:1-31). At every single stage something appears that was not there before. There was nothing artificial about this process of becoming. Everything grows out as a possibility that unfolds itself and declares its presence. And at the end of every day God looks at what has unfolded and says ‘That is good'. And yet, the next day starts, and something else comes, which is also good, because the unfolding continues unceasingly.

"The Creation".Russian icon 

Having touched on this aspect of the creation I would like now to say something about the light. We are told that in the beginning God creates light; not the luminaries, but light itself. Light is seen both in the Old and in the New Testament as something which makes things visible, perceptible. There is an interesting passage in a novel by Charles Williams in which a painting is described. The person who looks at the painting says that the light was not streaming from one point or another; it seemed that the light filled the entire canvas, that the light became color, that this color became matter and that this matter was a beam of wood. I think we could imagine the unfolding of things in creation in these terms. The Spirit of God calls out of the potentialities that were created one thing after the other, and each thing comes into existence according to its response. The light becomes matter, matter takes shape, one thing after the other emerges, and each of them is good and right. So this is the first way in which matter, apart from man, relates to God. The wonderful thing is that matter has its own way of relating to God. Matter and God are correlative in that sense, leaving aside the fact that God is eternal and uncreated whereas matter is created. But at that particular moment, the presence of man is not needed in any way.

And then man is created. What strikes me in the story of the creation of man is that he is not created as a more perfect ape or animal or other being. His appearance does not represent the culminating point of the creation. A moment comes when God creates a being whom he will put in charge of the world he has created. In order to make this being capable of relating to all the things he has made, he takes the dust which is the basic material out of which everything else evolves. He cannot go lower. He takes the basic element, and therefore man, having been created on that level, is akin to everything that has emerged out of the chaos. He is at the root of the chaos, at the lowest level of the chaos. He is akin to the greatest and the smallest things. He is not simply more perfect. Man is made different from the other beings in that God breathes into him His own Spirit. So, there are two levels on which man relates to God: on the one hand as matter, and on the other hand as a living soul. These two levels are not absolutely identical, because matter remains pure even when man falls. I remember a spiritual writer saying that what we call 'the sins of the flesh' are the sins that the spirit commits against the flesh, i.e. matter. (In this case the word 'spirit' is used in the sense of psyche, a man's soul.) Matter is not sinful in itself. In a human body hunger belongs to matter; the choice of food and greed belongs to our imagination. And this could be extended to everything else. So we are confronted with a world in which God relates to matter directly. In that sense Christianity can be considered as a sacred materialism.

However, with the Fall a dramatic change occurs; but it is man who is instrumental in the catastrophe that transforms the original chaos — this infinite possibility and potentiality — into chaos as we know it. Something that could be beauty, perfection, harmony and structure, as a consequence of the Fall collapses in ruins. It is man who causes this chaos and that is something that we must remember. Man was created to be a guide to all things created from fullness to fullness. We cannot know what this fullness was meant to be because we do not know what was the condition either of matter or of  the human being, in paradise. We cannot imagine how man was to grow from a state of total perfection which was incipient, let us say from a state of innocence, into a state of holiness. But what we know is that it was avocation, both of the material world, and the human and the animal world, and that it collapsed because man fell away from God.

Instead of wanting to understand and to know the world from within his communion with God, he was tempted to try to know all the created world, including himself, by his own means. The tree of knowledge is not simply an apple tree, it is no apple tree at all in the Bible (Gen. 2:16-17 and 3:3). It is not a tree from which one eats, it is an attitude: 'I will know' instead of 'I will commune with God and in Him and through Him all things will be transparent and understandable to me'. And then the catastrophe comes. In the Bible we are told that man was called to have, as we read it in English, dominion over all things (Gen. 1:26). We understand dominion in a very narrow sense. The word 'dominion' comes from the same root as dominus, the master. But the master may be one who rules with a rod of iron, or one who has mastery in himself and conveys it to others. I believe that man was created to be the guide and teacher, listening and understanding within rules of harmony; and not to overpower the rest of creation.

Adam and Eve in paradise.

At this point I would like to make a short digression. The law of God is the law of freedom. But what does freedom mean? When we think of freedom we think more often than not of the possibility, or indeed the right, of being and doing what we want. When we speak of civil liberties that is what we mean. We have got rights and we will use them. We can claim them. Liberty, however, comes from the Latin word liber, which is the word used concerning a child born free, in a family of free men and women and not of slaves. That implies that a human being is born free, but he will not remain free unless he acquires mastery over himself. The way in which his parents will make him into a free human being is by teaching himself mastery, discipline and self possession. This is what man was to learn, in which case he could indeed lead the whole creation from glory to glory.

I am using these words because I have no other words to use; because we do not know what the paradisiac condition of man, of matter and of animals was. There was, however, a moment when we can glimpse the way in which man related not to matter as such, but to the created world. In the second chapter of Genesis (Gen. 2:19-20) we are told that God brings all animals to man, and man gives to each of the animals its name. In biblical terms, the name and the being are coincidental; it is not simply a way of describing one being to contrast it to another. It expresses the very substance of the being, and at that moment, because man is still in full communion with God, however incipiently, however immature he maybe in himself, he is in God and relating directly to Him; and for this reason he can see each animal as God sees it, and gives it a name.

We are told in the Book of Revelation that a day will come when all things will be fulfilled, when each of us will receive a name (Rev. 2:17): a name which unlike Peter, Paul, John or Mary, no one knows but God and he who receives it, a name which contains the whole of the creature whom it expresses. And so, freedom, which was offered to man, and which he was to convey to others, was of that quality: a communion with God that would allow man to see every being, animals, plants, stones, the sky and the earth, as God sees them, and possess the key to their being by knowing their name. And man has destroyed this harmony.

"God brings all animals to man, 

and man gives to each of the animals its name".

(Gen. 2:19-20)

There is a remarkable story in the novel L'âne culotte by the French writer Henri Bosco. It is the story of a man called Monsieur Cyprian. Monsieur Cyprian is a man who spent many years in the islands of the Pacific, alone, in primitive conditions, and had learned to commune with nature, and to love it deeply. In this communion of love nature had conveyed something to him, but he is also able to do something about nature. He comes back to France, buys a piece of land which is all stone, rocks and not even weeds, and sings songs of love to this earth which has become barren and dead because man is alienated from God. And this earth begins to come back to life, a new paradise is formed there. To this paradise all animals flock, because it is a place of harmony which in God's own name has become an earthly paradise, however limited. Everything is good but for one terrible thing: there is one animal that refuses to come and live in paradise. It is a fox. The fox cannot be beguiled. No song attracts him, no food, nothing. He runs around this newly created paradise. He yaps. He tries to beguile the other animals to come out. In the end Monsieur Cyprian thinks that if there were no fox paradise would be fulfilled, and he goes out of paradise and kills the fox. And when he comes back the earth has become arid again, the plants have died and all the animals have run away. This is what we have done to the earth and this is what we have done to matter, or rather not to matter in its substance, because matter remains what it was, but to the way it relates to man and to all things. We have created chaos. God, however, continues to relate to matter. He remains the God of this material world. In Him the created world is still full of potentialities and we can see this in several ways. First of all, in the Incarnation God becomes man in the same way that the first Adam was created out of the dust of the earth. In that sense, the incarnate Son of God, through His materiality, through His material humanity, is akin to every single thing that exists: every atom, every galaxy, every star, every plant, every animal can look at Him and recognize itself mysteriously in Him. Every being can recognize itself as it is called to be, in glory, in the glory to which it is called ultimately to become when again, in the words of the Apostle, God shall be all in all (Eph. 1:23).

I know that various interpretations have proposed a limited reading of these words: God will be all in the saints, in those who are good, and so on, but this is not what the Apostle means. The calling transmitted in the words of the epistle to the Ephesians is that the whole of the created world will commune with God, that He will pervade all things and they will be pervaded by Him and be deified. In the Incarnation this has already happened to one human being who can now be the guide, the dominus, the master, the one who leads all creation (not only mankind, but the whole creation) into its fullness, which in Him can see itself in eternal glory. However, before this happens man must change because it is we, human beings, who create a problem. As long as we are not in communion with God we cannot be leaders of the rest of the creation, we cannot be guides. And even if the whole world could be in God it would still not be paradise because we would be the little foxes outside the garden of Monsieur Cyprian.

"Take, eat; this is my body".(Mt26: 26).

In order to provide this communion God has therefore introduced sacraments into the world to teach us something about matter and about ourselves. When we celebrate the liturgy or any other sacrament, it is Christ who is the celebrant. In one of the secret prayers in the liturgy we say, ‘Thou art he who offers and is offered.' He is the celebrant. And the power that transmutes this bread and this wine into the body and the blood of Christ, is the Holy Spirit. It is not the priest; the priest is instrumental, in the name of the whole congregation of the believers, but he is not one who has power. No ordination, no consecration can give a human power to make this bread into the body of Christ, or this wine into the blood of Christ or, if you prefer to look at it conversely, to force Christ into bread or to force Christ into wine. There is something greater than this: it is Christ who takes this bread and this wine and integrates it into Himself. It is by the hands of the priest that it is distributed, but the miracle has occurred by the power of Christ.

This applies to all the sacraments. I do not have time to go into it, but there is not one sacrament in which one could say that it is the priest who has the power to do this or that. He prays, but he prays in the name of the whole Church, the body of Christ, and indeed, of the whole created world. And the miracle happens. It goes very far indeed if we consider, for instance, that in the blessing of a bell we are told that this bell is blessed and its sound will resound in the souls of people and awaken them to eternal life. It is remarkable that even in this instance God is active, reaching out through matter to human beings who have fallen away from communion with Him. I think that when we look around us we should be aware that we are surrounded not by a world of objects, but by matter which is free to commune with God in a reciprocal relationship. God is free to commune with matter because it is sinless, it is not fallen, it has become a victim of the Fall of man. St Theodore of Studion in one of his Admonitions (Catecheseis) says that the created world, as we know it now, so anarchical, so wild, so brutal, so frightening, is like a good horse ridden by a drunken rider. We are the drunken rider. The world in which we live is like a perfectly good horse. We drive it mad and the result is chaos as we know it and not the original chaos of potentialities as God created it.

Christ the Healer.

The same applies also to miracles. Miracles are not moments when God uses His power to enforce harmony upon the world that surrounds Him or us. A miracle is an act of God by which things are freed from the enslavement which we have imposed upon them and can breathe. When it applies to nature, it is a direct and simple act of God by which he restores harmony. Remember the event in which Christ commanded the seas and the wind to abate, to calm down, to come back to peace. They came back to the peace of God, they came back to His peace. This was not the case with the Apostles. Peter wanted to come to Christ who was standing at the very eye of the cyclone. He wanted to come, and yet he thought of himself: he was afraid, he did not believe, he was not free of himself; and he began to drown. So, nature is open to miracles, open to the act of God, to the extent that we do not hamper it. When it comes to human beings, there must be consent, there must be a harmony of intent between God and man. How often do we see in the Gospels Christ speaking to a sick person, or to a possessed man, or whomever, and asking him: 'Dost thou wish to be made whole?' Healing is not imposed. Healing is not forced upon him; he must open himself: ‘Yes, I want it.' And then the miracle occurs. The words used are not simply, 'Dost thou want to be healed?', as if a person were to be healed of a temporary illness. The words 'Dost thou want to be made whole?' refer to the restoration of wholeness, to the extent that this is possible in a fallen world, a wholeness which is ours by vocation. Something that we often disregard when we pray for the healing of ourselves or of others is the fact that this wholeness implies that we must die and be made new. We must renounce all the things that have made us sick unto death, and accept newness of life in Christ. When Christ says, ‘You are now whole, go and sin no more,' he gives an absolute command. It is not simply conditional — ‘Try to be better than you were' — because the life of wholeness that I have now given you cannot coincide with your previous sinful life. Of course, all those who were healed were not made perfect. They were not yet back into the paradise of creation or that of eternity; but they were on the brink of it. I remember Father George Florovsky saying to me that the Church is a mysterious eschatological body which is both at home and on its way home; it is already fulfilled and in process. It is fulfilled because the fullness of God abides in it. Christ is the first born in this Church. He is the first member of this Church. He is one of us through His humanity. The Holy Spirit has come into it. And we are already in a position, if we are in Christ and in the Spirit, to call God our Father, as Christ called Him His Father. It is only to the extent that we are in Christ that God is also our Father. At the same time we are in the process of change and of becoming: the power of the Spirit is working in us, the power of Christ is working in us through His teaching, His example and His sacraments. Two things are instrumental in this process: on the one hand our will, and on the other hand the matter which conveys this change to us. Our will is essential because all things are done by God together with us, in synergy with us. God does not act upon us as an overlord who can do with us whatever He wants. He always says, 'Dost thou wish...?', 'Are you prepared to...?', 'Dost thou want it?' There was only one event, wonderful but tragic because of the circumstances, in which God acted one-sidedly and had to pay the cost of it. It was the creation of the world. God did not ask us whether we wanted to be created, because there was nobody to ask. So, knowing that in the end it would come right, He created a world and us in it. He took, however, full responsibility: for the Fall of this world that was caused by the Fall within the human person, and for the resulting tragedy of the world. In order to save the world he becomes one of us, He takes upon Himself, and shares with us, all the tragedy, circumstances and limitations of this world. We know from the Gospels that He was surrounded by misunderstanding, hatred and betrayal. He accepts all that and something more; something which man had brought into the world: death.

Τhe Incarnation,a result 

of the total mutual agreement 

between God and man 

represented by the Virgin.

By becoming man, although remaining immortal, He accepts to share with us our mortality and our death. When He says on the cross, 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' (Mt. 27:46), it is a moment when subjectively in His humanity He feels separated from God and therefore can only die, because separated from God one dies. The creation was the only occasion when God acted one-sidedly, at a cost to him that we can see and respond to. There is in one of the Russian spiritual writers a passage in which the eternal council of the Holy Trinity before the creation is imagined. The Father says, 'My Son, let us create the world and man'; and the Son says, 'Yes, Father.' The Father continues: 'But man will fall away from us, and to bring him back you will have to become man and die'; and the Son says, 'Let it be so, Father.' Only then does the world come into being. The response of this world to the Incarnation was voiced through the lips of the Virgin Mary in the Annunciation. The Mother of God did not receive simply the joy, and the miracle and the glory of the Incarnation but also the terror and the awe of the encounter with the archangel. As St Gregory Palamas puts it, the Incarnation would have been as impossible without the assent of the Virgin as it would have been without the positive will of God. Here, synergy, i.e. working together, is restored and salvation has come into the world. The salvation that resulted from the Incarnation, the union of the human and the divine nature in the person of Christ, was not one-sided: it came as a result of the total mutual agreement between God and man represented by the Virgin.

In this sense we may say that matter is indeed something miraculous. On the one hand, it is a martyr and a victim of our Fall, and it suffers throughout the ages of our Godlessness. On the other hand, in Christ matter is restored potentially to the fullness of its glory; and in Christ and in the Spirit it becomes capable of conveying to us what we have lost, communion with God. It is precisely this communion that we may cry for in prayer and in desperate longing and which is given to us by an act that involves matter and which is accessible to each of us. We may not be able to pray as the saints do, but a babe can open its lips and receive the Holy Body and the Holy Blood of Christ. Each of us can approach and say, 'Here am I, I am open to the gift although I am unworthy of it.' At times that is indeed how it happens.

Last Sunday's of forgiveness 

for Metropolitan Anthony Bloom.

17 March 2002.

I have mentioned in the past the case of a woman who came to see me, almost fifty years ago, and said to me, 'I have a problem. Lent is coming, then Easter. I am forced by my family, who are all believers, to receive communion. And yet, I believe neither in God, nor in communion. What shall I do?' I told her that her problem was already solved because even if she came to receive communion I would not give it to her. I proposed, however, to talk about it. We talked throughout Lent, once per week, but I could convey nothing to this woman; not even the sparks of knowledge I possessed. There was no hope.

Then, on Good Friday, she came to church, and I said to her, ‘The Church has let you down. We priests have betrayed our vocation. Your family has not given you what it should. Let us go and ask it from God Himself.' When I knelt before the epitaphios, she stood next to me for a while and then she knelt too — because, as she told me later, she felt uneasy towering over me. And I stayed there saying to God, 'You only can save her. You only can do something. Do it, or tell me what I should do!' Then a thought came to me, and this was not a thought that had simply evolved in me. I turned to her and said, 'Does it matter enough to you to have an answer to this question that you are prepared to do anything to acquire it?' She said, 'Yes. If there is no God there is no meaning in life. I must have an answer because I will not live if there is no God. What shall I do?' I said, 'I do not know.' And then I turned to God and said, 'She is prepared to receive an answer. What is the answer?' The answer came in a way that I would not have dreamt about because I found it terrifying: ‘Tell her to come to communion on Saturday before Easter and claim an answer from me.' When I told her what she had to do she said, 'If God exists, that is blasphemy. It is impossible.' I said that that was all I had to offer. I remember that she came to communion saying to God, 'Your Church has betrayed You; your priests and my family have betrayed me. Now I am challenging You. If You do not give me an answer in communion, I renounce You for ever and my blood is on Your head!' And then she received communion, and she left, and I also left for France. Two days later I got a short note from this woman in which she said, 'I do not know yet whether God exists or not, but what I know for sure is that I did not receive bread and wine. It was something else.' And that was the answer, after which the process continued and she discovered God and grew into a great fullness of life in Christ.

So, if I may put it in such a way, matter really matters. It is not only instrumental as an object, which we use as a tool. Matter in the example I gave you was filled with God and conveyed to this woman what I could not convey in anyway. The words of the Epistle to the Ephesians that I quoted above, that God shall be all in all, give us an idea about the vocation of the world. It gives, however, an image rather than a concrete description of the vocation of the world. There will be a communion with God far greater than that of the lost paradise. That paradise was the paradise of the innocent who were to grow into holiness. In the world in which we now live innocence is rare, sinfulness is in abundance and yet, in the soul of every person, in the soul of the Church as a whole, there is a longing, there is a cry: 'O come, Lord Jesus, and come soon!' The day will come when it will happen, and it will not be the paradise of the innocent, it will be the paradise of those who are in total, full, perfect communion with God. On this day, God and creation will be one, although God will always remain beyond His creation; and yet, the creation will be communing ever increasingly with God as it unfolds itself wider and wider, through His presence and action. At this point I want to close this talk in which I have expressed my thoughts about the way in which God relates not to man, but to matter, and about the role which matter plays in our becoming and in the becoming of the world.

Reference:

PUBLICATION,Russian Orthodox Diocese of Sourozh, Diocesan Conference. Headington, Oxford

23-26 May 1997

When God is Silent.

Dr.Daniel and Dr.Jane Hinshaw.*

"Do not lament me, O Mother".
20th century.

Dr. Daniel: Many people who are very sick, suffering, who are near the end of life, feel an increasing sense of isolation. If they are believers, sometimes they experience this as a sense of being abandoned by God; and we can even see this recorded in the Gospel, when our Lord on the cross cried out: “My God, My God why hast thou forsaken me.” That psalm, however, ends up with hope. I think some scholars believe that Christ probably recited the entire psalm. 

There are many different ways of thinking about silence, especially when one considers silence in the relationship between creature and creator. There is a thread within the early fathers, in the writings of Saint Ignatius of Antioch, that speaks about the Holy Trinity in a very interesting way. It says that the incarnation of Christ, God the Father spoke the Word from silence.  God in some very deep way, in the Apophatic tradition of the church, is beyond our understanding, and beyond our comprehension, therefore we encounter God in Silence. For example, in the Anaphora prayers where we speak of Christ, or God, being incomprehensible, inconceivable, beyond our knowing and that God is so utterly other from us, hence we are unable to know directly, the Father the very essence of the Divinity. But God breaks His silence, and speaks His Word, the incarnate Son of God Jesus Christ, a bridge to bring us back to God.