Two stories to inspire you this season of Nativity, which thematically remind us of the gravity and wonder of the Incarnation and the stature of Love. Let us pray for courage to live the Christian life. To live eucharistically, transformed daily in the depths of Christ's kenotic life, victorious death and glorious resurrection. Let us love one another and learn what it means to love...and offer thanksgiving for the life of the world, on behalf of all and for all.
Forgive me a sinner.
+++
++++++++++++
An Undying Love
http://morningoffering.blogspot.com/2013/12/why-christ-click-on-photo-to-enlarge.html
When I was in jail I fell very, very ill. I had tuberculosis of the whole surface of both lungs, and four vertebrae were attacked by tuberculosis. I also had intestinal tuberculosis, diabetes, heart failure, jaundice, and other sicknesses I can’t even remember. I was near to death.
At my right hand was a priest by the name of Iscu. He was abbot of a monastery. This man, perhaps in his forties, had been so tortured he was near to death. But his face was serene. He spoke about his hope of heaven, about his love of Christ, about his faith. He radiated joy.
On my left side was the Communist torturer who had tortured this priest almost to death. He had been arrested by his own comrades. Don’t believe the newspapers when they say that the Communists only hate Christians or Jews—it’s not true. They simply hate. They hate everybody. They hate Jews, they hate Christians, they hate anti-Semites, they hate anti-Christians, they hate everybody. One Communist hates the other Communist. They quarrel among themselves, and when they quarrel one Communist with the other, they put the other one in jail and torture him just like a Christian, and they beat him.
And so it happened that the Communist torturer who had tortured this priest nearly to death had been tortured nearly to death by his comrades. And he was dying near me. His soul was in agony.
During the night he would awaken me, saying, “Pastor, please pray for me. I can’t die, I have committed such terrible crimes.”
Then I saw a miracle. I saw the agonized priest calling two other prisoners. And leaning on their shoulders, slowly, slowly he walked past my bed, sat on the bedside of this murderer, and caressed his head—I will never forget this gesture. I watched a murdered man caressing his murderer! That is love—he found a caress for him.
The priest said to the man, “You are young; you did not know what you were doing. I love you with all my heart.” But he did not just say the words. You can say “love,” and it’s just a word of four letters. But he really loved. “I love you with all my heart.”
Then he went on, “If I who am a sinner can love you so much, imagine Christ, who is Love Incarnate, how much He loves you! And all the Christians whom you have tortured, know that they forgive you, they love you, and Christ loves you. He wishes you to be saved much more than you wish to be saved. You wonder if your sins can be forgiven. He wishes to forgive your sins more than you wish your sins to be forgiven. He desires for you to be with Him in heaven much more than you wish to be in heaven with Him. He is Love. You only need to turn to Him and repent.”
In this prison cell in which there was no possibility of privacy, I overheard the confession of the murderer to the murdered. Life is more thrilling than a novel—no novelist has ever written such a thing. The murdered—near to death—received the confession of the murderer. The murdered gave absolution to his murderer.
They prayed together, embraced each other, and the priest went back to his bed. Both men died that same night. It was a Christmas Eve. But it was not a Christmas Eve in which we simply remembered that two thousand years ago Jesus was born in Bethlehem. It was a Christmas Eve during which Jesus was born in the heart of a Communist murderer.
These are things which I have seen with my own eyes.
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Natalie's Story
"This God is the one who stands at the middle of history. The is the one who stands at the breaking point of the storm, and he calls us to stand where He stands, to be involved, to be committed, to be committed to life and death within the storm, and yet neither to accept this fallacy of a ghost in the storm instead of God, or to turn to God and say ‘If you can do nothing more, at least be together with us, in anguish and in despair’. He wants us to take a step, to be in the world at the point which I called ‘the eye of the hurricane’, but not of the world, because we are free from the uncertainty, from the fear, from the self-centredness of Peter, remembering himself at a moment when the whole sea was death and danger for the other disciples, for all the other boats around, and when God stood there as the key of harmony, but it was not the harmony that he expected.
I should like to give you one example of what it means both to make an act of intercession and to stand where our place is. It is the story of a woman of whom we know nothing except the name. She was called Natalie. The story was told me by the other people involved in it. In 1919 at a moment when the Civil War was raging like a storm over Russia, when our cities were falling prey to one army after the other, a woman with two young children was trapped in a city which had fallen into the hands of the Red Army, while her husband was an officer of the White Army. To save her life and their, she hid in a small cabin at the outskirts of the city. She wanted to wait until the first surges were over and try to escape afterwards. On the second day someone knocked at her door towards the evening. She opened it in fear and she was confronted with a young woman of her age. The woman said ‘You must flee at once because you have been discovered and betrayed; you will be shot tonight’. The other woman, showing her children that stood there, said, ‘How could we do that? We would be recognised at once, and they can’t walk far.’ The young woman who so far had been nothing but a neighbour, someone living next door, became that great thing which one calls a neighbour in the Gospel. She grew to the full stature of the Gospel of God, of the good news of the dignity and graciousness of man, and she said ‘They won’t look for you, I shall stay behind.’ And the mother said ‘But they will kill you.’ ‘Yes’, said the woman, ‘but I have no children, you must go.’ And the mother went.
It is not easy, I would say it is almost sacrilegious, to try to imagine what happened in the heart and mind of this woman in the course of the hours that preceded her death. But we can look back to the Gospel and see what happened in the Gospel to those who were the prototype, the archetype of this great and holy woman.
Almost two thousand years before, a young man of her age was waiting for his death. His name was Jesus. He was in a garden wrapped in darkness of the coming night. There was no reason within him why he should die. He was young, healthy; he had done nothing wrong. He was waiting to die in a vicarious way other people’s death. He was waiting in the darkness of the night, and death was coming to kill life eternal itself. Three times he went towards his disciples, hoping for a word that would strengthen his heart, for companionship: not to be released, not to be saved from the oncoming death, but to feel that there was a human presence, compassion, love and awe. The disciples were asleep. He got no help.
Natalie in the coming night, in the gathering darkness, in the cold that was falling from the walls and the roof, had nowhere to turn; there was no-one to whom she could turn. She was alone, facing the coming of another woman’s death that would be enacted in her body, in her destiny. She could have walked out. The moment she passed the threshold, she was again Natalie, not the mother. Two thousand years before on that same cold night when Christ was betrayed into the hands of his murderer, the strongest, the most daring of his disciples was challenged three times, twice by a little maid in the courtyard, once by a group of standers-by; he was not asked ‘Are you Jesus?’ he was told ‘You were with him!’ and three times he said ‘No’, and walked out of the courtyard. Into what? Into security. He turned round and the eyes of Christ met his eyes, and he remembered and he wept. But he walked out. Natalie did not walk out, she stayed inside.
How often must she have thought ‘Is there any hope that at least my sacrifice will be useful?’ Again, two thousand years ago a man was waiting for death, John the Baptist, and before he died, he knew that death was inevitable, he sent two of his disciples to Christ to ask Him ‘Are you He for whom we waited, or shall we expect another one?’ That means ‘If you are Him, then my life of asceticism, my aloneness, my preaching, my imprisonment and death, all the tragedy and hardship of my life, make sense. But if you are not, then I have been betrayed by God and by man, by my own inspiration and by the weakness of the living God. Are you He?’ Christ did not give him a direct answer. He gave him the answer of the prophet ‘Go and tell him what you see – the blind see, the lame walk and the poor proclaim the good new – news about God – news about man.’ The humility of the one and the greatness of the other.
Natalie probably asked herself the same question – was it in vain that she was dying? There was no answer, only the hours passed, the cold of the early morning came and with it, death. The door was brutally opened and they did not even take the trouble of dragging her out. She was shot where she was.
This is the answer which the Christian can give to the tragedy of history. The place where we must stand. Natalie stood where Christ had stood, and where indeed Christ stands now, risen in Heaven with his hands and sides seared with nails and the spear. He stands at the very heart of human history, human suffering, human death, human anguish and tragedy. But He stands there like a rock. He stands there firm, having endured everything, every human suffering in thought and body, and he says to us Christians, ‘That is where you must stand, not in the dreamland of a faith that gives you the illusion that you are already in heaven while you have never been on earth. No, at the heart of human suffering and tragedy but with a faith unshaken, with a certainty that He was expected by Job, has come’. And if we stand there, we may undergo all that was promised by him. You remember the passage: ‘Are you prepared and capable of drinking the cup which I shall drink, of undergoing what I shall go?’ ‘Yes’, said his two disciples. This must be our answer, and when tragedy comes, we must answer again as Isaiah spoke: ‘ “Whom shall I send?” said the Lord. “Here I am, send me.”’ Like a sheep among the wolves; like the Son of God among men."
Forgive me a sinner.
+++
"Truly to love a person means to love them for themselves even when they no longer give us anything...For if we remain firm in our love towards others despite their incomprehensible hardness towards us, we make a true proof of love, of the love which we have for them."
+ Fr. Dumitru Staniloae
"To Love means to look at a person and see in this person a treasure, something infinitely precious, something that's worth giving one's own life. Not giving it grudgingly but rejoicing in the fact that we can give, all our heart, all our intention, all our strength in the service of this person. And also conquer in us everything that is contrary to love which can hurt, which can diminish life of the person we want to love...Let us therefore think of the people who are around us..and ask ourselves...what can we offer them that will enhance their life, make it deep, make it great, bring joy into it...and then we will have fulfilled the law of love. The Lord says to us 'forget yourself, love the other, may your life be his joy, his strength, his inspiration.' Amen."
+ Metropolitan Anthony Bloom of Sourozh
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
+ John 3:16
"Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross. Therefore God also has highly exalted Him and given Him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those in heaven, and of those on earth, and of those under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father."
+ Philippians 2:5-11
+ Romans 13:8-10
"Owe no one anything except to love one another, for he who loves another has fulfilled the law. For the commandments, “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not bear false witness,” “You shall not covet,” and if there is any other commandment, are all summed up in this saying, namely, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no harm to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfillment of the law."
++++++++++++
An Undying Love
http://morningoffering.blogspot.com/2013/12/why-christ-click-on-photo-to-enlarge.html
When I was in jail I fell very, very ill. I had tuberculosis of the whole surface of both lungs, and four vertebrae were attacked by tuberculosis. I also had intestinal tuberculosis, diabetes, heart failure, jaundice, and other sicknesses I can’t even remember. I was near to death.
At my right hand was a priest by the name of Iscu. He was abbot of a monastery. This man, perhaps in his forties, had been so tortured he was near to death. But his face was serene. He spoke about his hope of heaven, about his love of Christ, about his faith. He radiated joy.
On my left side was the Communist torturer who had tortured this priest almost to death. He had been arrested by his own comrades. Don’t believe the newspapers when they say that the Communists only hate Christians or Jews—it’s not true. They simply hate. They hate everybody. They hate Jews, they hate Christians, they hate anti-Semites, they hate anti-Christians, they hate everybody. One Communist hates the other Communist. They quarrel among themselves, and when they quarrel one Communist with the other, they put the other one in jail and torture him just like a Christian, and they beat him.
And so it happened that the Communist torturer who had tortured this priest nearly to death had been tortured nearly to death by his comrades. And he was dying near me. His soul was in agony.
During the night he would awaken me, saying, “Pastor, please pray for me. I can’t die, I have committed such terrible crimes.”
Then I saw a miracle. I saw the agonized priest calling two other prisoners. And leaning on their shoulders, slowly, slowly he walked past my bed, sat on the bedside of this murderer, and caressed his head—I will never forget this gesture. I watched a murdered man caressing his murderer! That is love—he found a caress for him.
The priest said to the man, “You are young; you did not know what you were doing. I love you with all my heart.” But he did not just say the words. You can say “love,” and it’s just a word of four letters. But he really loved. “I love you with all my heart.”
Then he went on, “If I who am a sinner can love you so much, imagine Christ, who is Love Incarnate, how much He loves you! And all the Christians whom you have tortured, know that they forgive you, they love you, and Christ loves you. He wishes you to be saved much more than you wish to be saved. You wonder if your sins can be forgiven. He wishes to forgive your sins more than you wish your sins to be forgiven. He desires for you to be with Him in heaven much more than you wish to be in heaven with Him. He is Love. You only need to turn to Him and repent.”
In this prison cell in which there was no possibility of privacy, I overheard the confession of the murderer to the murdered. Life is more thrilling than a novel—no novelist has ever written such a thing. The murdered—near to death—received the confession of the murderer. The murdered gave absolution to his murderer.
They prayed together, embraced each other, and the priest went back to his bed. Both men died that same night. It was a Christmas Eve. But it was not a Christmas Eve in which we simply remembered that two thousand years ago Jesus was born in Bethlehem. It was a Christmas Eve during which Jesus was born in the heart of a Communist murderer.
These are things which I have seen with my own eyes.
++++++++++++
Natalie's Story
"This God is the one who stands at the middle of history. The is the one who stands at the breaking point of the storm, and he calls us to stand where He stands, to be involved, to be committed, to be committed to life and death within the storm, and yet neither to accept this fallacy of a ghost in the storm instead of God, or to turn to God and say ‘If you can do nothing more, at least be together with us, in anguish and in despair’. He wants us to take a step, to be in the world at the point which I called ‘the eye of the hurricane’, but not of the world, because we are free from the uncertainty, from the fear, from the self-centredness of Peter, remembering himself at a moment when the whole sea was death and danger for the other disciples, for all the other boats around, and when God stood there as the key of harmony, but it was not the harmony that he expected.
I should like to give you one example of what it means both to make an act of intercession and to stand where our place is. It is the story of a woman of whom we know nothing except the name. She was called Natalie. The story was told me by the other people involved in it. In 1919 at a moment when the Civil War was raging like a storm over Russia, when our cities were falling prey to one army after the other, a woman with two young children was trapped in a city which had fallen into the hands of the Red Army, while her husband was an officer of the White Army. To save her life and their, she hid in a small cabin at the outskirts of the city. She wanted to wait until the first surges were over and try to escape afterwards. On the second day someone knocked at her door towards the evening. She opened it in fear and she was confronted with a young woman of her age. The woman said ‘You must flee at once because you have been discovered and betrayed; you will be shot tonight’. The other woman, showing her children that stood there, said, ‘How could we do that? We would be recognised at once, and they can’t walk far.’ The young woman who so far had been nothing but a neighbour, someone living next door, became that great thing which one calls a neighbour in the Gospel. She grew to the full stature of the Gospel of God, of the good news of the dignity and graciousness of man, and she said ‘They won’t look for you, I shall stay behind.’ And the mother said ‘But they will kill you.’ ‘Yes’, said the woman, ‘but I have no children, you must go.’ And the mother went.
It is not easy, I would say it is almost sacrilegious, to try to imagine what happened in the heart and mind of this woman in the course of the hours that preceded her death. But we can look back to the Gospel and see what happened in the Gospel to those who were the prototype, the archetype of this great and holy woman.
Almost two thousand years before, a young man of her age was waiting for his death. His name was Jesus. He was in a garden wrapped in darkness of the coming night. There was no reason within him why he should die. He was young, healthy; he had done nothing wrong. He was waiting to die in a vicarious way other people’s death. He was waiting in the darkness of the night, and death was coming to kill life eternal itself. Three times he went towards his disciples, hoping for a word that would strengthen his heart, for companionship: not to be released, not to be saved from the oncoming death, but to feel that there was a human presence, compassion, love and awe. The disciples were asleep. He got no help.
Natalie in the coming night, in the gathering darkness, in the cold that was falling from the walls and the roof, had nowhere to turn; there was no-one to whom she could turn. She was alone, facing the coming of another woman’s death that would be enacted in her body, in her destiny. She could have walked out. The moment she passed the threshold, she was again Natalie, not the mother. Two thousand years before on that same cold night when Christ was betrayed into the hands of his murderer, the strongest, the most daring of his disciples was challenged three times, twice by a little maid in the courtyard, once by a group of standers-by; he was not asked ‘Are you Jesus?’ he was told ‘You were with him!’ and three times he said ‘No’, and walked out of the courtyard. Into what? Into security. He turned round and the eyes of Christ met his eyes, and he remembered and he wept. But he walked out. Natalie did not walk out, she stayed inside.
How often must she have thought ‘Is there any hope that at least my sacrifice will be useful?’ Again, two thousand years ago a man was waiting for death, John the Baptist, and before he died, he knew that death was inevitable, he sent two of his disciples to Christ to ask Him ‘Are you He for whom we waited, or shall we expect another one?’ That means ‘If you are Him, then my life of asceticism, my aloneness, my preaching, my imprisonment and death, all the tragedy and hardship of my life, make sense. But if you are not, then I have been betrayed by God and by man, by my own inspiration and by the weakness of the living God. Are you He?’ Christ did not give him a direct answer. He gave him the answer of the prophet ‘Go and tell him what you see – the blind see, the lame walk and the poor proclaim the good new – news about God – news about man.’ The humility of the one and the greatness of the other.
Natalie probably asked herself the same question – was it in vain that she was dying? There was no answer, only the hours passed, the cold of the early morning came and with it, death. The door was brutally opened and they did not even take the trouble of dragging her out. She was shot where she was.
This is the answer which the Christian can give to the tragedy of history. The place where we must stand. Natalie stood where Christ had stood, and where indeed Christ stands now, risen in Heaven with his hands and sides seared with nails and the spear. He stands at the very heart of human history, human suffering, human death, human anguish and tragedy. But He stands there like a rock. He stands there firm, having endured everything, every human suffering in thought and body, and he says to us Christians, ‘That is where you must stand, not in the dreamland of a faith that gives you the illusion that you are already in heaven while you have never been on earth. No, at the heart of human suffering and tragedy but with a faith unshaken, with a certainty that He was expected by Job, has come’. And if we stand there, we may undergo all that was promised by him. You remember the passage: ‘Are you prepared and capable of drinking the cup which I shall drink, of undergoing what I shall go?’ ‘Yes’, said his two disciples. This must be our answer, and when tragedy comes, we must answer again as Isaiah spoke: ‘ “Whom shall I send?” said the Lord. “Here I am, send me.”’ Like a sheep among the wolves; like the Son of God among men."
+ From Chapter 2 of “God and Man” by Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, New York, 1983, p31-47. ISBN 0-088141-024-1
