I believe in God, I believe in man

I believe in man

http://masarchive.org/Sites/texts/1991-05-09-1-E-E-T-EM95-052IBelieveInMan.html

The subject which I want to speak about, “I believe in man”, is something which was born within my thinking from a variety of sources. On the one hand, the experience which I have both of the West, where I have lived since the age of seven, that is solid 70 years, and of Russia, which I have been visiting yearly for the last 40 and a few more years, has proved to me that speaking of God immediately to people may a be a divisive thing because immediately there is a polarisation, much less in the West, because everyone has more or less faith, but in Russia it’s either — or, white or black, while there is one point, which we all have in common, believers and unbelievers, is our common humanity. And to tell a person, yes, like you, whether you believe in God or not, I believe in man, is a point of encounter instead of a point of confrontation. And this is an extremely important thing because it is important to have a common ground if you want to discuss things and particularly to discuss things with people who are at the other extreme of your own convictions.

The second reason why I would like to touch on this subject, is a question which I was asked in Russia. I was taken up by someone who was an unbeliever and he asked me whether I really could believe in God Who didn’t exist. I said my piece, and then he looked at me and said, “Alright, you believe in God; what does God believe in?” And I said, “God? God believes in man.” He was taken aback and I must say as honestly as I can, so was I, because this answer came to me of a sudden. Of course, God believes in man. If we do believe that God of His own free will called into existence, and I should prefer even to say, loved into existence every human being that has ever existed, that He gave to each of us life, that to each of us He gave a longing for something which is beyond sheer animality, that to many He revealed himself, either clearly or much less clearly, of course He believes in us. Who would create beings that would ruin the world He has created, to whom could God reveal Himself if He believed that the person to whom He reveals Himself was simply not be able to grasp what it meant and reject Him offhand?

This is something that strikes me very much, the way in which God believes in us. What does it mean? It means that apart from creating us, He has created us with freedom which is a very dangerous gift, because freedom may, on the one hand, lead us into a relationship so deep, so splendid with the beloved one or the loving one, but it also may lead us into catastrophe. You know perfectly well that freedom may degenerate into licence, that very often when we speak of freedom we mean the right to do whatever I fancy, which is not the basic meaning of the word. You probably know that the word “liberty” comes from a Latin root which characterises the situation of the child born free in a family of free people as distinct from the little slave. But also conversely this kind of freedom, this kind of liberty does imply that if you want to preserve it, not to get enslaved by fears, by passions, by all the things that keep us enthralled, that we must learn to be masters of ourselves and our lives. So there is immediately the moment we speak of freedom in that sense, we mean on the one hand, a given possibility of being anything or doing anything but also a call to be worthy of what we are; and from the Christian point of view what we are, we are created in the image of God, in a way, we are His likes.

On the other hand, we have the word “freedom” in English, in German which comes from a Sanskrit root which means in its verbal form “to love” or “to be loved” and as a noun “my darling”, “my love”. So that apart from this basic notion of a freedom which is a gift of independence, of being self-contained and having a right to define all my destiny, there is a further point that freedom is a love relationship. Where there is no love relationship on both sides, freedom is not fulfilled. And then there is a Russian, a Slavonic root for the same notion, “свобода”, which in one of the possible interpretations means “to be truly oneself”. So, here we are confronted with various aspects of freedom but each of them presents both a possibility, and a wonderful one, and also a risk. I can take liberty and make of it licence, my independence from God, make it into opposition to Him, neglect of Him, contempt of Him, my relationship with my neighbour and make it also a relationship of master and slave or of brother and sister. We may forget that there is a relationship of mutual love (?) that must grow out of this situation of freedom and that only then does the person who was given this freedom of self-determination and called to outgrow self into more than self being truly him or herself. I don’t want to play on words but I may remind you at this point that there is a passage in the writings of Schopenhauer, in which he says that in marriage it’s a situation when two persons become one personality. This is a degree, a growth into another dimension of freedom, which is not my own, it’s not only I versus the world, it is I in unity of love and becoming all I can be thanks to the exchanged love.

So that when we speak of God’s faith in man, this element of freedom plays an extraordinary great role because it is because there is freedom that there can be love. That is an old notion that if there was no freedom of choice, there could be no love relationship. When we speak for instance of a stone falling on the earth, we speak of the law of gravity, we do not say, “How much this stone loves the mother earth that the moment it is free it rushes towards it.” And if there was no freedom that would allow us to say ‘no’, there would not be the possibility of a love-relationship. And here we have a God who gives us this freedom with the certainty that in the end in ways which we can not guess probably, we can hope for, we can dream of, we can long for that in the end the freedom will blossom out into a love-relationship and into fulfilment.

But faith as described by the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews in the XI chapter, is certainty of things unseen. And unseen they are to us indeed because how often we see a person and think, “It’s impossible. How can God have willed this person into existence, how can God expect anything from this person? This is a pure monster, there is nothing in this person that is redeemable, this person should be blotted out.” And yet God sees something in each of us, which we do not see even in ourselves.

I remember a friend of mine who said to me once, “When God looks at a human being, He does not pay attention to his achievements or his virtues that may be there or not. What He sees is His own image imprinted in him, which He tries to cleanse, to free, to call into existence not only as a fact but as dynamic power, (if you want as a DNA) that will shake the life of the person completely.” But that implies also that God trusts us in a way in which we don’t trust one another. This kind of faith of God, this certainty that there is in each of us the possibility of becoming a glorious being, a glorious image, what Irenaeus of Lyon means when he says, “The glory of God is a human being completely fulfilled.” There is more than just seeing that, God trusts us. He has not only faith, He has hope that we will not deceive His expectation. And this again is something which we hardly ever can boast of, either about ourselves with regard to the others or about ourselves with regard to our own selves. Do we really hope, do we really think that everything is possible to us in the power of Christ that sustains us? These are words of St. Paul. When we look at ourselves and see all the ugliness there is, and there is no doubt, in each of us there is distortion of the beauty which is our vocation, if we look at ourselves we see a frailty that doesn’t allow us seemingly to achieve anything. God sees something else. And there is a passage in St. Paul again, in which he tells us that he prays to God for strength, and Jesus Christ answers to him, “My grace suffices unto thee, My power deploys itself in weakness.” Now, what weakness? Of course, not cowardice, not sloth, not laziness, not all these things that make us, well, like slugs instead of being human beings, no, in another kind of weakness. I’ll give you a couple of examples. I must make a confession in passing, I have never been in a theological school so I can not speak on the level to which you may be prepared. I’ll give you examples the way in which I would give them to children in a Sunday school, and you will forgive me — it’s my level, not yours. Now, if you speak of this weakness, think of the way in which a small child, which is completely weak, totally dependent upon his or her parents, trustfully allows the mother or the father, or the nanny to take it into her arms, to wash it, to dress it, to feed it, there is a gift of self, a surrender, which is conditioned by two things: on the one hand by the actual frailty, weakness, defencelessness, but at the same time by the trust. This child has never been yet betrayed and therefore has no reason to defend himself or to lack of confidence.

There is another example which I could give. Think of a surgical glove. The glove so is thin that it can be burst by the touch of a nail. And yet it is because it is so frail, so thin that it can be used by the surgeon to do anything he wants. The wise hand of the surgeon within this frailty of the glove can work miracles, which an iron gauntlet could never achieve. Again it is the frailty that allows the hand to move freely, that makes it possible for the miracle of surgery to happen.

Or take another example again. If you think of a sailing ship, what is the frailest part of this ship? The sail of course, and yet, this sail turned and directed in the right way will engulf the wind and can carry the heavy structure of the ship to whatever place it is destined to. It is the frailty again but in each case, it is not simply frailty, it is surrender, it is gift of self.

And so, the frailty of which Christ spoke to Paul was probably this kind of frailty that is abandonment which is gift of self, which is surrender, which is flexibility, or if you prefer another image, transparency, or at least translucence that will allow the light to flow through. So that if we think of ourselves in those terms, I think, we share our vision of self with God’s vision of us. He sees our frailty, He has no illusions about us but He knows that in spite of all this frailty, if we only allow Him to act, things will work out. I think it’s a very important notion that frailty, weakness understood in that sense is not something that will ever prevent anyone from achieving great things. It is not by being strong and immovable, unbending that we can achieve our human vocation. And so God sees us in our frailty, and this frailty is compounded in the world in which we live by sin, that is by separation from Him, by inner conflict, by our separateness from one another, by all the tensions that exist, by the horror which we are creating and have created in this world. And in spite of it God trusts us. He trusts us that we can achieve whatever is our human vocation. And all this, His faith which is the primeval act by which He creates us, this trust which does not abandon us in spite of all the evidence there is, all this is summed up in the love which is at the root of the notion of freedom on God’s part Who gives Himself unreservedly, not only what He possesses but what He is. He calls us to become partakers of the divine nature. These are words of St. Peter in his Epistle. If we think of ourselves and of everyone around us in such terms, how different our attitude is to each other? And this comes out so clearly in extreme situations.

The first person who ever came to confession to me after my ordination, a week afterwards, was a murderer. And at that moment I made a discovery, which has become a continuous certainty in my life, that when a person is prepared to come and to expose himself or herself in all the ugliness or all the unseemliness of action and personality, what strikes me, as it strikes, I am sure, everyone who has had the privilege of hearing someone’s confidence, what strikes is not ugliness, it is the fact that a person can value integrity, truth and beauty in such a way that this person is prepared to expose himself or herself to shame, to rejection but for the sake of integrity and wholeness.

So that this may well be God’s attitude to each of us, God’s attitude to each of us to the extent to which we strive to be what we should be. We do not always know what we should be, but there is one thing which everyone of us tends towards is being truly human whatever meaning we put into it. It may be something very great. A Christian would say, to be truly human is to be the like of Christ, another person would say, to be truly human would mean to be compassionate, generous, ready to give his life or her life for others, and so on. But whatever ideal or image of perfection or of a goodness we have, this is what we strive for. I have never met in all my life, either as a prison chaplain or as a surgeon in the war and in the French Resistance or as a priest anyone about whom I could say: this one is evil, there is not in him a touch of truth, of beauty, of light. This is an empty saying to you perhaps in the sense that I can give you no evidence of it, except in certain situations. And I would like to give you a few examples not of evil people but of the way in which a person can grow into a greatness one never expected of him or her in ordinary life.

I taught one year in a Russian secondary school in Paris. It was during the Resistance, and I had to have a cover, and the school had to have a teacher. So the two needs met and I was hired to teach. There was a girl there, a girl who was then in one of the last forms of the school, who was a very nice girl and nothing in particular. She was well-mannered, well-spoken, she was a good pupil, there was nothing wrong about her and no one expected anything much except what happened. What happened was that during the bombing of Paris by the Germans a bomb fell on the house where she lived with her parents and a variety of other people. The house was set on fire, everyone ran out, they countered one another and they saw that a very old woman had not been able to come out. This girl did not make any discourse. She simply rushed into the fire to bring the old woman out and died in the fire. No-one would ever have said this was a budding hero or a budding saint, a most ordinary little creature, and she reached within a few moments a height, a saintliness, I would say, that others may not reach by great efforts because it was all there. What was there? There was love and simplicity, directness.

I’ll give you other examples. One of my older friends, he was about 25 years older than I, who had been a soldier in the first World War, about whom we had no particular feelings, whom we didn’t admire particularly, was taken by the Germans into a concentration camp for hiding Jews. He came back after 4 years. I met him in one of the streets of Paris and said, “What have you brought back from camp?” His reply was, “Agony of mind.” I said to him, “Do you mean to say that you lost your faith?” “No,” he said, “but as long as I was in camp, as long as I was subjected to violence, to cruelty, to hunger, as long as I were in danger of torture and murder, I could at every moment turn to God and say as Christ has said, ‘Father, forgive, they don’t know what they are doing.’ Now I am free, and I am in agony because I think of those people who tormented us with such cruelty. Have they understood what they were doing? Have they repented, have they turned away from their evil ways? I don’t know. But then, when I pray for them, what evidence can I give to God that my prayer is sincere? I am no longer a victim. He can very well say, ‘What does it cost you to pray for them? You are paying no cost’.” At this point I think, we must remember that a victim can pray for its tormentors, his tormentor, her tormentor in a way in which no-one else can. A victim acquires, if I may put it that way, divine power of forgiveness in the same terms as Christ said, “Father, forgive, they do not know what they are doing”, and a victim can do this. And this is something that has made a great many people great although they were inconspicuous. I’ve been in charge for a year and a half of people coming back from concentration camps. I have seen several hundreds of them and I have seen how extreme suffering can call out of a person a greatness no-one ever suspected in them.

And I’ll give you a last example. Together with this friend of mine a woman worked for the Jews and for anyone who was in danger of being arrested and taken to camp. She was a Russian nun who had been in her time before the revolution a Russian revolutionary but had proved far too humane and too refined to accept what was going on in Russia at the beginning of this century and was expelled out of Russia, because in those days Lenin expelled the dissenters instead of putting them, as it was done later, in concentration camps or disposing of them. She was taken to a concentration camp in the following way: the Germans came, she was not at home, they found her son, a boy of 14. They arrested him and left a note: if you come and surrender to us, we’ll free your son… She surrendered, and they both died in camp. The boy died of hunger but she died in a different way. I know the story from people who were in camp with her, so it is something which I know for sure. I have a letter from one of her companions. A group of women have been singled out, called out in order to go to gas chambers to die. Among them there was a young Jewish girl of 19 who was crying in terror. Mother Maria came up to her and said, “Don’t be afraid, the last word is not death, the last word is life.” And the girl said to her, “How can I believe you?” And Mother Maria said to her, “O, very simply, I’ll come with you and you will be able then to believe my words.” And one too many, she went into the gas-chamber and died there together with this girl. And this woman who wrote the letter to me said, “In all the 4 years we spent in concentration camp we had never seen a group of women doomed to die go to their death with radiant faces and singing as we saw this group because among them there was one person who believed in eternal life”, but also who believed, that is I am adding it, who believed in each of these persons, that these persons were not just animals taken to the slaughter, that these persons were persons, that had meaning, that had significance in the eyes of God, that were precious in the eyes of man and with whom it was worth dying for them to be sure that the last word is life and is not death.

And this faith which I believe God has in us, which He pours into the minds and hearts of people who have the daring of siding with Him, this is the faith which I believe should change our relationship to the secular world around us. We have, when we are people of the Church or people of any faith in fact, we have a tendency to think that there are, as it were, two camps: there are the believers and the unbelievers. There are the atheists and those who know that God exists. And we do not realise that all, all without exception are known to God as His own children, and that there is something in the Gospel which should make us reflect very deeply about not only the destiny but the substance of the unbeliever.

You remember the last week of the life of Christ on earth, what we show in Holy Week, Christ had stood for God unreservedly, uncompromisingly and therefore all the people, all those who were not prepared to accept the God He preached rejected Him to such an extent that there was no place for Him to die even within the city of men. He had to die like the scapegoat of the Old Testament, as the Anglican hymn has it, on the middle-hill (?) without the walls, outside of the city of men, in the desert, in the loneliness of total rejection. But at the same time He had not only stood in the total solidarity with God in the face of human rejection, He had stood and He was standing before the face of God the Father in total oneness and solidarity with man, He had chosen to be one of us, to be true man, not only perfect but as real as any man is, to take upon Himself all the consequences of createdness, all the consequences which human sin made of the world. Sinless Himself, He bore all the consequences of what man had been and done, and at no moment did He dissociate Himself from us. But the way, one thing He had to share with us, which was not hunger, or thirst, or rejection, or misunderstanding, or betrayal, or so many other things, there is one predicament of man which was in a way alien to Him because He was God incarnate, the fullness of the Godhead abided in the flesh, He was immortal by nature even in His humanity, and He chose of His own free will to share with us the ultimate horror: the loss of God that kills. And when on the cross He said, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?”, He plumbed the depth of the loss of God as not one atheist had ever known it, because no atheist knows or has ever known what it means to be with God, in God, at one with God, while He knew, and He lost in His human consciousness this awareness in order to die a human death. And when we speak of the atheist, when we look round, we must realise that there is not one atheist which is outside of the experience of Christ, as there is no believer who is outside of His experience. And we must look at every atheist or at the secular society or at different people with new eyes, realise that our Western world is built to a very great extend on the message of the Gospel. Before the Gospel there was no notion of the absolute value of the individual person, there was notion of what we call “human rights”, there was notion of the fact that rank makes no difference, that the lowest beggar is as precious, as significant to God as the richest or the most powerful ruler. So we must realise how much there is of the Gospel in the world and that God was not mistaken when He believed in man because the Gospel, which was preached by the Lord Jesus Christ, has found an echo in mankind in all those who have heard it, has found an echo, and men have responded without knowing about God, without tracing the message to its source and origin but pervaded by notions, which come from God, and which are bearing fruit in our secular, in our Godless society at times more really, more actively, more powerfully than they do within the small ghettos, which we create in our parishes and churches. We can believe in man in the way in which God believes in man, because we have this evidence of God’s faith to the point of death and of the result of the preaching of the Gospel throughout the world because it has spread invisibly, incognito and has shaped a great deal and is still shaping, and I would say, almost more and more powerfully both East and West.

Q

I think we have a simpler approach. The West has been really brought up on the philosophy of Greece and the great thinkers of the West. Russia in particular became Christian a thousand years ago when you had been Christian for another thousand years, and we inherited an extremely rich theological, liturgical, philosophical tradition from Byzantium but inherited it at the moment when we could not assimilate it as such. And so what was taken up by the Russians, received very deeply and made into our life was worship, not the philosophy of it, not the theological intricacies but the extraordinary sense, the overwhelming sense of the divine presence and of adoration and worship of the Living God. And from there we have moved on to the same attitude to a human being. Yes, of course, we admire intelligence, learning, of course we admire achievements of culture but never does a Russian Orthodox say that this person is superior to another because of culture but rather because of heart. This is a person of love, this is a person of worship, this is a person who has wholeness and integrity in herself or in himself, and the rest matters less.

It does not mean that we have no interest for culture — we have had great writers, we have had good theologians, good thinkers, but this is not the centre of gravity of our attitude to man. When we meet a human being, we look at it as a human being, and I remember an ascetic of our century saying that the grace of God reaches first the spirit of a man in prayer, then flows from the spirit into his psyche and then fills his physical being and the whole is one thing really. And there is a remarkable passage in an ancient writer, St. Simeon the New Theologian, who wrote in the XI century, he was an ascetic of Mount Athos and having received communion, he sits on the wooden bench that was the only thing that occupied his mud and wood hut, and an old man already, he looks at himself, at his hands, at his body and says, “How awesome that: because I have been baptised into Christ, died with Him and rose with Him, because I have now received communion to His Body and Blood, when I look at these old, decaying limbs of mine, it is Christ I see. And this little hut, so poor, is vaster than Heavens because Heavens can not contain the divine presence and this little hut through my bodily presence contains it.” So we have got this, perhaps, primitive attitude, perhaps less elaborate intellectually, but that gives us a sense of joy in every single person irrespective of who he or she is in wealth, in rank or in intellectual achievement, which doesn’t mean that we do not pay respect to the ones or the others in their own right but it does not dehumanise them, it does not make them less of a total human being because they are a learned person or because they are an illiterate one.

Q

What you do with the sail is not to make it strong but to turn it gradually so that the wind can flow into it. And if you remember that in ancient languages ‘wind’ and ‘spirit’ are the same word, you can see the analogy. The question is not to change the sail but to find a way in which that will allow the spirit to blow into it, and that can be done no longer with sails and sailing ships but with us through moral integrity first of all. Be worthy of one own self before trying to be anything better than what we are, not be bellow our own self, not be able to say after things spoken or things done, “That was unworthy of me.” That is the first step. The second one is, I am speaking now in terms of a Christian, by reading the Gospel and marking those passages, which make our heart burn within us, give a sense of light, a sense of joy, of elation, and give us courage because such passages tell us at this point, which may be a small point, “You and God are of one mind, one heart, you have discovered your likeness with God at this point.” And so if you are faithful to this vision, if you make a rule not to be unfaithful to being that, you will grow into a greater likeness of God and at the same time discover who God is and discover who you are in other terms. And /.../ the Gospel or something we hear or a situation, or a person to be, in the words of St. Maxim the Confessor in the VI century, to have a mind of ice and the heart of fire, to be able to be afire with understanding but at the same time understand with an objective mind, not allow ourselves to be carried away by the desire to understand one thing rather than the other. And then ultimately, praying, and praying in all the ways in which prayer is accessible to us, basically and ultimately, that is, to start with and to end, it should be to begin with, our response to God. Very often we find it difficult to pray because we think we must take the initiative. We place ourselves before God and we say, “What could I tell Him?” because at that particular moment I have nothing special to say, I am full of my own concerns. But if instead of this we turn to God and say, “Look, this has been my day. I am happy about these things, I am not happy about those, I am ashamed of this and I am so grateful for that,” we would already have something to say. If you have nothing to say, we can take a passage of the Gospel, read this passage and say, “Well, Christ has just spoken to me. What can I reply?” We may say, “O, my heart is filled with joy at these words. This is what I want to say to You.” We may on other occasions say, “Can’t understand a word of what You say. It seems to be so totally irrelevant to me.” And as a lady said me once after a talk on the Beatitudes, when I have mentioned “Blessed are you when the men shall revile you”, she said, “If you call that a Beatitude, keep it. I have had my fill of revilement!” But that is honest replies. If you are honest, the relationship will be straight and honest, but ultimately it should be a joy to be with God. There is in the life of curé d’Ars, a saint of the XIXcentury of France of the region of Lyon a story of his coming to his village church and seeing an old man whom he had seen time and again, time and again sitting there and he said, “Granddad, what are you doing in church? I don’t see your lips moving in prayer, I don’t see your fingers running along your rosary, what are you doing?” And the old man said, “I look at Him, He looks at me, and we are so happy together.” Well, that is the way in which we can gradually organise ourselves, condition ourselves so that the wind really will blow into the sail and lead us wherever God wishes us to go.

Q

... may remember, there is a passage in St. Mathew’s Gospel in 24-25^th chapter, which is the story of the sheep and the goats. Well, we usually take it to mean: some are the good people, some are bad, goats — to hell and sheep — to heaven. I think this is just a staging for the parable. What I see in the parable is that Christ says, “Who are the sheep? The sheep are those who have fed the hungry, clothed those who were naked, given a roof to those who were homeless, visited the sick without fear of being uneasy or of catching the disease, not being ashamed of visiting someone in prison for people not to say, hey, you are a friend of this bad person. That’s all He says, He doesn’t say a word about being Godly or being a believer or anything. And what I see there is that Christ says, “Unless you try to be truly human, you can not go beyond it and become partakers of the divine.” I think that is very important. So you can not say, “Well, I would be perfectly inhuman, perfectly beastly (because I don’t want to accuse animals and say, like an animal, no, like a beast) and then God must fulfil that into saintliness.” No, unless we are true to ourselves, true to our being human, there is no way ahead.

Now, asceticism does not consist in making oneself miserable by not eating, by not sleeping and so forth. Asceticism is like training in sport, it’s a way of training oneself in body, in mind, in soul, in all respects, so as to be masters of ourselves and be capable to respond to God or to the best promptings within us. You know, if you are so slack that you can not get yourself out of an armchair, don’t expect to be a hero afterwards. I remember I have spoken in a University in this country. I was supposed to speak on prayer, and about ten students came, organised themselves in very comfortable armchairs with their feet on little tables and said, “Well, Father, what about praying?” I gave a ten minutes talk, and then one of them said to me, “Well, where should I start?” And I said, “I’ll tell you where you start. You start by putting your feet down and sitting upright. After that when you are at home in the morning you put your alarm clock to get up, you give yourself five minutes to be out of bed, straight into a cold shower, ten minutes gym and then you learn to walk like a human being and not like a caravan of camels like this. Do that for six months and then come and ask me what to do about mystical prayer.” And I think that’s where asceticism comes into the picture. If I am not capable of commanding my body, why should I be able to command my wings which (mine have not yet grown) but ...

Q

Well, if you mean by ‘experiencing’ being aware of it, I would say no. We should simply grow into being what we are and what we should be in whatever natural way it happens in the same sense in which you speak consciously in foreign language but in a quite elemental way your own. You don’t need to go through the grammar of your own language in order to speak it fluently, which you should do if it’s a foreign language. And if we simply endeavour to be human in all the ways in which we are capable of it by being really thoughtful and severe about ourselves, never allowing ourselves to be below the mark. You know how it is, we know perfectly well that telling a lie is something that pollutes us, and yet it’s so easy to tell a lie and to escape trouble. And then we discover having done it once or twice that the root of it is cowardice. So it’s not only that I am a liar but I am also a coward. And if the lies go beyond a certain point, it becomes almost a murder because we create around us a non-existing world of lies, in which we think we can survive while others are caught like flies in a cob-web. You know, Satan is called the liar and the murderer and the two go together, because it is by creating a world of unreality that we kill. And so if we fight to accept our own reality however unpalatable it may be, however unattractive it is and say, well, I accept it and now what do I do with it? You know, in a way in which an artist has got to accept the material in hand. Say, you may wish to carve an ivory cross. To carve an ivory cross you must have a piece of ivory and you happen to have clay. Well, take the clay and make of it something which is natural to clay and expresses what you want to express. Eventually you may land on granite, on marble, on ivory, on something else, but that’s were you begin — you begin with what you have or what you are by accepting it and by making of it all or bringing out of it all the beauty it is capable of expressing. But if you try to do it the other way round, try first to achieve a certain form of perfection, then it becomes not imitating Christ but aping Christ or aping an ideal instead of growing into it, and that is lethal. I have experienced

God Believes in Man

http://masarchive.org/Sites/texts/1991-05-02-1-E-E-T-EM05-187QuietDayGodBelievesInManIntersession.html

Talk I

…as a first subject for my address something which is perhaps a little unusual: “I believe in man.” And I would like to preface what I have got to say by two quotations not of great writers or great thinkers but things, which I have heard and which have stayed with me. One is a phrase, which I have heard in Russia. Someone was speaking of his faith in God to someone else who was rather impatient of the discourse and who interrupted the outpourings of the believer by saying, “Alright, you believe in God but what God does believe in?” And the answer came in a very apt manner, “God? He believes in man.” And I think it’s something which we must remember because if we are called to proclaim God’s word or to be witnesses of God, we must do it from His point of view and not from the point of view of an outsider who speaks to a third person about an absentee.

The second thing is a quotation also. When I was in my late teens, which was a life-long time ago, I heard a conversation between what one might call a highly educated gentlemen and a very simple priest. The simple priest was in his middle forties, had been a village priest in Russia, was gradually dying of TB, was very frail and was certainly not an intellectual in the way in which one speaks of people: an intellectual, with a University background and intellectual interests, but he was a man who had a soul, who believed, who prayed. The other one was a man in his forties, very well educated, who had studied at University philosophy and language, who had read practically everything that was worth reading in Russian literature and in foreign literature, who had studied theology at a theological school and was explaining to this poor man that faith in God was good enough for the uneducated like him but not for the people like himself who was possessed of great knowledge, had studied philosophy, literature, even theology and other things, a little like Faust saying, “Alas, I’ve studied medicine and philosophy and alas, alas, also theology and I feel as ignorant as before,” but he did not feel as ignorant as before, as Faust did. And I remember this priest sitting there, looking at him with big-big eyes of a man was really going out of this world into the other and said, “Alexander, do you really think that it matters that you don’t believe in God? It can’t harm Him, what matters is that God believes in you.” And I remember the way in which this man sat up, and it started him thinking and his thinking led him eventually to becoming a priest.

But these two images, which I wanted to present you are not simply easy illustrations or time-filling quotations, they matter to me immensely. Because God created the world, as it were, in act of faith. He entrusted to all his creation including man existence, being, life, the knowledge of Himself and all the complexity of freedom, that is, all that freedom gives and all the risks it contains. And in that sense to have created man free, capable of being faced with Him and reject Him or accept Him, or damning himself, destroying the world, was an act of faith and of faith which is something very positive because it is not simply that God said, “Well, I believe it will work,” in the way in which we speak the word “believing” in the sense that it may not, but I’ll give it a chance; His act of faith is an assertion that it will work, that the victory in the end will be the victory of man and of God over all evil and all imperfection. In that sense when I say that God believes in man, He entrusts him with all the possibilities for good and evil with an inner certainty that in the end however much man may err, loose his way, he will find his way to what is right. And that also may be expressed in another manner by saying that God does not only believe in man, God also trusts man and has faith in him and has hope. He hopes all things from creatures like us, although I wouldn’t say that we give Him much evidence that He is right.

But I think it’s immensely important for us to realise that God has faith in us, that He hopes all things from us and, to use again St. Paul’s imagery, that His love never faults /us/, that His love remains stable, it is the stone on which we stand even when we imagine that we are tossed by the waves… …that very important thing in our own personal lives because there are moments when we can’t believe in ourselves, there are moments when we loose hope, there are moments we can’t love ourselves; and here are three things, which we must learn from God: He does love us. Loving doesn’t mean being sentimental about us, it means that He is prepared to give all of Himself and all that He has to us at any cost. …in Christ, Christ has so loved us that He lived and died for us and that when He was confronted with the betrayal of Judas, He said to him, “Friend, why hast thou come here?” And when He was being crucified, He said to the Father, “Father, forgive, they do not know what they are doing.”…had said to His disciples that no-one has greater love than he who is prepared to give his life for his friends, and his friends are those whom he loves, not those who love him because he has chosen us… not the other way round. We have responded, yes, but the initiative was His. So at the root of it there is this divine love which is sacrificial love, which is the love of the cross, or if you prefer, using the words of St. Paul, the folly of the Cross. God, confronted with the betrayal of man, with our proclivity towards evil, with our weakness, our frailty, our sloppiness, has been foolish enough to choose His own death upon the cross to save us. …The thing is that to do that one must have hope because one does not die aimlessly, one does not give one’s life for nothing, one gives it when one believes it will make sense. …what sense can that make in terms of hope? What strikes me is that it is only a victim that can give forgiveness. As long as we are safe in life, are offended by no-one and by nothing, we can easily forgive those to do evil to our neighbours and preferably to those neighbours who are as far from us as possible, but at the moment when you are the victim, then you acquire divine power to forgive…

…give you an example. ..a friend of mine that was older than I by something like 25-30 years was taken to concentration camp by the Germans during the occupation of France. He spent four years in concentration camp, he came back. I met him on a street in Paris and said to him, “… brought back from camp?” And he said to me, “Agony of mind.” You know, it struck me because he was a man of indomitable faith, he had gone through the hell of the First War, of the Russia revolution, of the emigration, of hunger, of dereliction, of mutilation, and here he was saying that the only thing he had brought back from concentration camp was agony of mind? I said, “But have you lost your faith then?” “No,” he said, “my faith is whole. But you see, when I was in camp, continuously the object of violence, of cruelty, continuously knowing that I may be taken to a torture chamber to be experimented upon, to be killed, at any moment I could stand before God and say, “Lord, forgive, they do not know what they are doing,” and I was sure that because I cried out of the deep, because I was in the throes of the horror, which was that of the concentration camp, God could not turn away from my prayer. At a moment when a warder was violent, cruel, beastly to me, I could say, ‘Forgive.’ “But now,” he said, “I am free, I am suffering no longer and I think of all these people who were so atrociously cruel to us and so blind. Have they changed their mind? Have they understood, have they repented? And when I turn to God and say, ‘Lord, save them, they did not know what they were doing,’ can the Lord hear me? Doesn’t He say, ‘It’s easy for you now to forgive, you are not suffering.’ And that leaves me in no peace, I pray continuously for their salvation but I have nothing to offer to God as a proof of my sincerity, of the truth of my words.”

This is what I mean when I say that only a victim can forgive but to do that one must have faith in the one who is the evil-doer, that he has within himself something that can blossom out into beauty and into the dimensions of saintliness and eternity. One must have hope that this creature can make the move, can by the power of forgiveness be redeemed… gives a dimension of wonder and almost of happiness to the martyr.

Now, there is at the root of it what I started with – faith. If we have not faith in our neighbour, faith in man, there is no point in hoping, no point in loving because it is all totally wasted. We are just going to be kind and nice to someone who is doomed to damnation, to destruction, to self-destruction and to divine condemnation. God has faith in us, and this is a wonderful thing because, as one of my friends said, when God looks at one of us, He is not interested in our achievements or in our virtues, whether they are there or are not, what He sees in us is His own image imprinted in us, which can at any moment become the whole of us and make us Christ-like, make us God-like, make us, in the words of Peter, partakers of the Divine nature. He believes in us because He has made us such that we can be what we are called to become.

Now, this is an important point from the point of view of our attitude to ourselves and our attitude to others. You remember this passage in the Gospel in which we are told by Christ that we should love our neighbour as ourselves. We cannot love our neighbour unless we love ourselves, and by loving ourselves I do not mean standing before the mirror of our imagination and thinking: how wonderful I am!... That is not loving myself. It consists in believing that within myself there is a God-likeness, that I am the like of my Creator and I can love, reverence, worship this likeness of God in me and for the sake of this likeness, which I love because I love God, I will fight and struggle to free this likeness from everything that makes it ugly or distorts it. We should treat ourselves like a restorer would treat a holy icon, an image of Christ, of the Mother of God, of the saints, or like a restorer would treat an ancient painting, damaged by time or by the carelessness or even by the hatred of men. He will look at it and see how much of it is destroyed, polluted but he will look in this, within this destruction for what is left of the primeval beauty of the original painting, and he will try to look at it long enough to be filled with it to such an extent as to be able gradually to take away all that disfigures this painting or this icon and restore it to its original beauty or holiness.

That is the way in which faith in man should act within ourselves and in our activity with regard to other people. We should be able to look at ourselves with the love of the beauty, which we know by faith if not by an experience to be within ourselves, and try to cleanse it and make it ever more the total of what we are. But it is the same way in which we should look at our neighbour. He may be in our eyes nothing but a provocation, a monster and yet, God has loved him into the world, God has allowed him to exist, God who knows all things has called him to enter this tragic world of ours in order for him to become what He expects him to be… when we meet a person it is not sentimental love, which we are to offer, which very often is more destructive because our tendency is to say, “Well, don’t worry about what you are, I love you all the same.” No, do worry about what you are but in a creative way. God believes in you, all things are possible for you in the power of Christ who sustains you. But I am frail, I feel I can do nothing. Don’t worry about it, didn’t the Lord say to St. Paul, “My grace suffices unto thee, My power deploys itself in weakness.” And by weakness obviously he did not mean laziness, slackness, cowardice and all this kind of things, but frailty. What kind of frailty? I think, I have time to say a word about that. The frailty, say, of a child who is so frail that he depends completely on the love, on the care of those who are strong around him – father, mother, other people or the frailty of the sail on a sailing ship. It is the frailest part of it, and yet directed, turned in the right way, it will allow the wind to engulf itself into it and carry the heavy structure into the haven towards its aims. A frailty which means surrender, which means suppleness, which means translucence or transparency, that kind of frailty. And we can tell people, “Yes, you are frail, use your frailty to respond to God’s faith in you, use this frailty with a sense of safety because God loves you, He is not spying on you trying to find out your mistakes, noticing every error, but rejoicing in everything, which is good, because he has hope that you will have the courage to be frail enough, to help you grow into the fullness of the statute of Christ. I think it’s terribly important for us to have this faith in us, this love for ourselves, this hope that all things are possible for us but also to have this attitude to everyone around us.

I have done a certain amount of prison work. I know that the first impression you have of a man who is a murderer, who is a thief, who is a rapist is revulsion. God hasn’t got this revulsion, God has died for him. Can’t we treat him accordingly as the person, the only one at that particular moment for whom Christ has given and is still giving His life.. …by revealing to a person that one can revere him, revere him, not just put up with his existence, that one can have this kind of the constructive love that will not say anything consoling when it is not consolation that is needed, when it is wine that is to be poured on the wound and not yet oil — I am thinking obviously of the Samaritan, — that he must be confronted with his own evil but not hopelessly, confronted with evil as a task, which God in His trust has given him to fulfil. Yes, He has given him a task and said, “I believe that you are strong enough to face that evil within you and I, an unworthy priest, or just a most human human believe that God was right and I also believe that there is that in you, which will allow you to overcome all evil in your, conquer and be worthy of your human calling.”

This is what I wanted to say about believing. Of course I have spoken about loving and hoping because it goes together. One can not believe in the void, one cannot believe in a sort of theoretical manner, it must be connected with that kind of attitude and actions with regard to a person that will allow him to receive your faith in him not as a general theoretical statement but as a power of light, which is communicated. And what I find more and more, and I have found that for years now, is that people who come to me in the hope that I will help them find God or teach them to pray or any such thing, need first of all that I should assert that I believe in them and therefore they can believe in themselves. The moment they can believe in themselves, they can start acting, living, searching, fighting evil. As long as they do not believe in themselves they can do nothing because otherwise if they don’t believe in themselves but believe only in a God that claims their allegiance or society, that will punish their evil-doings, then they will act as slaves from terror, from fear and resented with all their being, they will indirectly be brought to clinging to evil, because they hate those to want to inflict, impose good upon themselves. It is only through faith and through the knowledge, the certainty that God and others believe in them that they can begin.

And often I have said to people who came, really not particularly attractive as persons, I have said, “Look, if I can believe in you, don’t you realise that God, who is not a fool, Who has created you, Who has loved into being believes in you otherwise he would not have taken the risk of bringing you into the world for you to be nothing but a destructive power.” And I have met that time and again. The first person who ever came to confession to me after I have been ordained was a murderer. I have been seeing for a year and a half as a physician people who were freed from concentration camps after the War, I have during the War and the Resistance struggle seen German prisoners and Germans who had fought us with all the violence they could, and I have never met a man or a woman in whom one can not see, if one gives him a chance, see a flicker of beauty, a flicker of truth, a flicker that can become a beacon, a fire and a light.

I will end this talk and I have spared you 1 minute 27 seconds.

Talk II

… of this second address of mine is intercession. … exercise which is common for us… we are used to it … we don’t always take intercession to it … very often when I go to churches and hear the long-long intercessions … place in certain services … What do these intercessions mean? … mean very often is .. sound to me — and forgive me for presenting things in this way, — and sound to me as though we were reminding God of His sins of omission … such and such need here and there I can see that, I do understand that. Don’tYou? And if You do being the Almighty why don’t You do anything about it? I don’t mean to say that any of you or some of you treat intercession that way but I have a feeling that more often than not it happens … the person or another. .. intellectually we grasp a need, we are aware that something is not as it should be and we turn to God and say, “Do something about it, Lord.” … I suspect that the Lord may say to us or whispering because he knows that we do not want to hear .. at times very loudly, and then we shrink away from the words, “Do it… have sent you into the world with My love in your heart… frailty … you to follow Me … way to the Cross… sent you to relieve agony of mind and pain and all manner of suffering … only in human society but in all this created world we … have damaged and are damaging continuously … we must I think goes back to a basic notion of intercession.

The word is a Latin one and it indicates that someone takes a step to stand between two conflicting parties, this is intercession. It begins with the daring of a person who will stand … between the offended and the offender … point where the violence of the conflict is at its high… probably in the Book of Job. I think it’s the end of the IX chapter, Job exclaims, “Where is the man who will take his stand between me and my judge?” And in one in the old manuscripts it says, “who will put his hand on my shoulder and my judge’s shoulder.” The image is so powerful… one stands condemned, the other one who has a right to condemn and there is one who will stand and plead … this is which is beyond the justice of Scribes and Pharisees… to say it is not justice, it is mercy that will answer, one who will dare hold together by their shoulders the two who either were about to enter into violent conflict or in desperation to turn away from one another and go their separate ways. And you know what happens when two persons turn on their heals and go there separate ways? They stand at times … to back, they can feel the other one’s shoulder blades and yet at that moment because they have turned away irremediably, rejected the other, they are infinitely far from each other because they are looking into opposite directions and shall never meet unless they turn round. … image of the one that took his stand before the two in conflict, holding them by the shoulders, doesn’t it remind us of the Lord Jesus Christ stretching out His arms in Crucifixion? … means keeping to the imagery which is familiar to us in the Gospel, it means that we must intercede the way in which Christ did — take a step to find ourselves at the heart of the conflict … where the violence reaches its greatest intensity, … stand there in a very tragic situation. Why was Christ crucified without the walls of the great city … chosen to be God’s own witness uncompromising, truth itself about God and man, and therefore those who were not prepared to accept this truth, to accept life on God’s own terms, had no choice but to reject Him ultimately. 

He could not die even within the city of men because the city of men had closed its door in him, he had to die as an Anglican hymn has it “on the little hill without the walls,” as a scapegoat was cast into the wilderness to die of the sin of men. But on the other hand He had chosen in the very mystery of his Incarnation … ultimately, finally solid with fallen men, at no moment to reject man even in his fall although He Himself remained free of sin but carrying upon His shoulders all the heaviness of the sinful world. He had to share with mankind the only thing, which is the ultimate tragedy, – the loss of God .. at one with man to the last He had to be crucified and at a certain moment die as everyone of us dies of the loss of God, and here are, here is the most tragic cry of history, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” He, the Only-Begotten Son of God, who had chosen to become the Son of man in His humanity had to experience the loss of God, and the loss of God in a way in which not one atheist has ever experienced it because He was totally, perfectly, gloriously aware of His oneness of God and at that moment He knew what it meant to be God-less, without God, and He dies of it. This is the image of the perfect intercession, and if you remember what I said about the power of the victim to forgive, here He acquires ultimately the power to forgive… nothing that could be added to His solidarity with God, His solidarity with men and the tragedy of intercession, … image of what it meant to be in this hellfire of a fallen world. We don’t feel it as a hellfire because we belong to it through sin too much, but He in His purity and perfection had to perceive it. But we have an image of it in the Book of Daniel – three young men cast into the furnace because they refused to forsake their God, and the king coming to see them perish in it exclaiming, “Have I not cast into the fire three men bound with chains? How is it that I see four men walking freely and One of them is the Son of God?” Again this is the image, which tells us where, on what terms we should be when we speak of intercession… where all violence meet at the point of ultimate tragedy remaining in total solidarity with God who in Christ had chosen this way. … in every situation that we can experience this with this ultimate violence, but there is in every situation the possibility for us to take our stand at the right point… pray for the hungry, we pray for those in prisons, we pray for the persecuted, we pray for all manner of men, women, child and suffering but what do we do about it, what do we do? ..

I remember something, which I will never forget so deeply it hurt me. About 30 years ago I went to the 1^st World Council of Churches meeting at which the Russian Church took part, as a representative of it. I travelled in India afterwards, I saw the hunger, the desperate need of people and when I came I spoke to a local Council of Churches in the suburbs of London. I spoke with all the passion I can put into things, with all the horror and the pain I felt because in my own small measure I knew in my own body what it meant to be hungry to the point of not being able to walk more than 50 paces. I have experienced that when I was a student and had no food. … it was nothing to what I have seen. I had experienced violence, brutality, but it was nothing to what I have seen… my address there were long intercessions about all the needs of India and then I was asked by the vicar to stand at the West door and shake hands with people who had come to pray and to listen. And a little lady came up to me, shook my hand and said, “Thank you, Father, for a most entertaining evening.” That was all she had received from my message, she was going home enriched with all these anecdotes of suffering, all this imagery. She will have high tea with her family and share with them abundance of food and abundance of excitement … happen or does it happen to no-one but this old lady, does it not happen within limits to each of us when we indulge in what we do not need… we have more than we (have?) when we find it natural to possess what others are dispossessed. I remember a Russian monk who told me — and his fare was very poor — that when he eats, he cries over his food saying to God, “Lord, forgive me, I am like a brute animal who needs devouring food, which others need, because I cannot live by every word that comes from Your mouth… remember an example of what true intercession is. A woman whom I knew, a woman who is revered not only in France where she lived but in Russia because her fame has reached there. She had been a young revolutionary before the revolution, when the revolution came, she was thrown out of the country because her revolution was not that of Lenin… humane revolution, a change of life for love’s sake… writer … educated woman. And then she became a nun renouncing everything except one – the care of people. There were at that time tens and tens of Russian émigrés who had no work, no home, no food, who went down the drain becoming drunkards, living in hovels. She sought them out in places where the police would not have gone, brought them to a little house, which she shared with two or three men and women of the same spirit, washed them, clothed them, fed them, gave them a little courage, and then many of them after a while could not resist the temptation of the fall and left her and went back, to use the words of St. Peter, to their vomit, and she went back again, found them again, brought them again, mocked, thrown out of these places hiding them. 

The Germans discovered that, they came to arrest her, she was not there. They arrested her son and left a message that if she comes, the son will be set free. He was a boy in his teens … to the Gestapo, they arrested her but they did not free the boy. He died in concentration camp. And she was taken to camp, and I have met people who was in camp with her. I was told that she shared her meager pittance, the little, little they were given to survive in turns with those who were fading, waning away, dying. And that lasted two years. And then one day a group of women was called … die in the gas chamber and among them was a young Jewish girl of 19 who cried in terror of death, and Mother Maria came out to her and said, “Child, do not be afraid – the last word is not death, it is life.” And the girl said, “But how can I believe you?” And she said, “You can because I will come with you and share the dying and enter into life with you.” And one too many she went with her into the gas camber and she died there. But I was told by a woman who wrote me about it that never had they seen a party of women condemned to death going to their death with radiant faces … to die but to conquer death because in their midst there was one woman who believed in life. She did not speak of God, she did not speak of anything, she was the presence of certainty … is our vocation. We are not likely to find ourselves into that kind of situation but don’t we find ourselves in so many parts of the world, of London (?) among people who are cornered by life, who have no hope, people for whom there is no future, people who know that the only thing they can do is to survive as long as it lasts and them die out, perish, whither away and not (?) selves only but all those whom they love. .. we can do something for them if we choose to share with them their destiny not to come as outsiders with a word of consolation, while they know that we come from the comfort of our lives and we will return to it while they will remain in the tragedy of theirs. No, come and share, come and live … then they may become more than we are, more than we shall ever be able to be - intercessors in the midst of people because people will see the despair in which they were and the despair is conquered, the hopelessness that was theirs and the hopelessness overcome, the hatred and bitterness and resentment that were theirs washed away with the certainty that they are the victors with God or simply if they don’t believe in God in the concrete way in which we do, simply as human beings who will not be conquered by evil, who can stand face to face with evil and ?fight (defeat?) and conquer.

I remember a letter which appeared in a German newspaper of South Germany, of Bavaria soon after the War in which a letter was quoted that was found in one of the concentration camps, written by a Jew who died there. It was written on a scrap of wrapping paper. It said something like, “Lord … come to judge the world, do not… against our tormentors, our suffering, their cruelty, their murders, the tortures we endured … last hopes our terror, look only at the fruits, which all these sufferings have born in us, our solidarity, our care for one another, our mutual compassion, our understanding of our tormentors, our readiness to forgive them, and make these fruits, which we are bearing of their cruelty, be accounted for their salvation.” This was also an intercessor, not a Christian, perhaps not even a believer before he reached the horrors of the camp… that the examples I give are far beyond us but they point out the way, they indicate to us that intercession is dead, is aimless, is almost blasphemy when we turn to God and say to Him, “Do it because I won’t, do it, although I don’t care doing it.”

And then there is another dimension to it, which is personal to us (and I am afraid I will speak a few more minutes than I promised)… I read it in the letter of a monk of Athos who has been canonised by the Russian Church two years ago, a man called the Staretz Siluan about whom some may have read in the writings of Fr. Sophrony, who wrote his biography and published notes he had written in textbooks in a child-like hand with a pencil because he had never learnt to use a pen. He wrote in his letter to a friend of mine that once he was asked by other elders of the monastery of Mount Athos, how it was that the young men who had come to Athos to work for a meagre pittance, for a small salary because their families were so poor in their villages, how it was that they worked faithfully while they did not work well they were supervising them continuously. “You never were in their midst while they work, you never supervise them. 

How is it that they work in spite of it?” And his answer was: “I can’t tell you why. I can only tell you what do I do. I get up several hours before they come to work and I pray for each of them before God for this day to be a blessed day for them, for them to have courage, to have integrity …overcome the sense of desperate misery at being separated from the beloved one in their distant villages of Russia. And then I come and I look at them, and my heart is filled with love, and I smile at them, and they smile back, and then to each I give a task, which is apportioned to his capabilities, nothing more than he can do so that he can work with joy, and then I retire to my cell, and all the hours they will be working I pray for them. And I will tell what I say. I am an illiterate man so I pray as I can. I say to God, “Lord, here is Nicholas who comes from a small village in Central Russia, he has left there his old parents with their little-little croft, his young wife with a new-born baby. He had to leave them because they was so poor that they could not survive, and he has come to earn a little money, which he sends back to them, and for two years he will know nothing about them because he is illiterate and they are. Look at him, be merciful to him, remember his village, their crumbling hut, their cow who is their only hope for food, each of them, give them courage.” And he says: “I pray like this about each of them in their own terms and to begin with my heart is filled with compassion for them, with love for them, with tenderness, my heart is broken at the thought of their misery because I also have come from a small village that was as poor as theirs. And the more I pray, the more I sense God’s overwhelming presence. And gradually this presence becomes so overwhelming that the earth begins to fade and I forget Nicholas and his village, and his need, and Mount Athos, and the people who work under my responsibility, and I am drawn into the depth of God as so I was a little shaving of wood on a torrent, and then I reach the depth of God as far as I can reach it and there in the depth of God I find love divine and within divine love Nicholas and his parents and their hut, and their village, and their cow, and the child; and then it is on the divine love rushing back to earth that I am carried to pray again and intercede for each of them. But it’s no longer my intercession, it is no longer my poor human love, it is God’s own love that carries my intercession, and it is God’s love that makes this young man work with joy, live with hope and … integrity …

…end here this talk of mine, think of what I have said and make of it in your lives more than ever I was able to make.

Talk III

… to Christ … and are sent into the world… Christ has brought… of our modern Russian theologians … said that the Church in each one of its members and in the totality of them is an extension through time and space of the Incarnate presence of God …incipiently … of Peter must be true in all … our vocation is to become partakers of the divine nature …words of Christ that He will be in us and we in Him … our mission is first of all a matter of presence .. we speak or are silent … those who have been, who have died with Christ in baptism and have risen with Him … who have become partakers of His Body and Blood in communion .. who are in communion with Him through prayer and through … the endeavour to live … already fulfilling their missionary … present in the world. But Christ present in the world as then so also now is the Lamb of God slain for the salvation of the world … patriarch Alexis who was a bishop of Leningrad in the course of the three years siege of it saying to me, “The Church is the body of Christ crucified for the salvation of its persecutors, .. persecutors all those who do not know Christ… presence, the presence of one individual, the presence of a group of believers is already part of our mission … Lewis in a broadcast made during the War, I think in 1941, said something to the effect that when an unbeliever or any person meets a believer … exclaim, ‘Look, here is a statue that has come to life…’” that … before we are alive with the life of God, we are like statues, like Lot’s wife, salt indeed …that it is the life of God is (?) to us that we come to life, …the kind of life, which is our vocation and the vocation of every human being and which through us should extend to all the creation world. .. try through prayer, through communion with God in all the ways, which are offered …with him his life …anyone meeting us would… look at us… something had never seen, … St. Irenaeus of Lyon describes when he says, “The glory of God on earth is a man, a human being truly fulfilled.” … understood as a shining, the resplendence of God, … meeting such a person … force those who meet him or her to ask themselves, what is the difference between me who exists, who is possessed of a biological life and this… who also exists, who also is biologically alive, who may well be even frailer than I, and who has got within himself an intensity of life, a quality of life, which is beyond my knowledge because it is not a quantity, it is a quality, it is not that he has got my life to a greater extent, it means that he has got a life within him of which I know nothing. … for people to ask themselves questions both about themselves and about us and then … us … essential part of our missionary work not to give premature answers but to create questions. One of the things, which we do so often, is to give answers to questions that don’t exist yet in the mind or in the experience of a person. … we prevent the question from finding a formulation and the person from being forced into asking. .. the question from himself and around him… this is … which I believe is immensely important… memory, our intellect works much, much quicker than our experience … imagination… giving an answer before we possess a question, the question will begin to bud and the answer will kill it... of answer not a life-giving power, not the words of life eternal but just words … passage in … a writing by a German mystic of the XVIII century Angelus Silesius … and of his book, he says, “And if you want to know more about the subjects I have treated become yourselves being… and I think this is each of us must aim at if he wishes to be a missionary in the world in which we live … role does not consist in defeating intellectually the various ideologies or opposing good arguments to the tenets of other religions, our role is to disclose a dimension, which … found only in Christ… will say, “In that case none of us has a right or indeed is capable of playing this role … be already at the goal before one can turn round and say, “Come.”

There is something else … French writer called George Bernanos in a book that was translated into English …The Diary of a Country Priest presents us at a certain moment with the following scene: a young officer offers to the young priest who is … of the story … is dying of cancer without knowing it and who struggles, struggles desperately for communion with God, for life while life is waning within him … officer invites him to ride with him on a motorbike, and they ride and they talk, and the young officer says to the priest, “What strikes us in you is … of prayer.” And the young priest says with a sense of despair, “But this is what I haven’t got, I struggle for it day in and day out and it escapes me.” And the young officer says, “Well then, that is what we perceive … desperate struggle, your wholehearted, passionate longing and it matters to us more than your possible achievement.”

I think this is something, which each of us can do. We can not speak of achievement, we cannot say that we are at the goal, we cannot say, “I know and I will teach you”, but we can say, “Without that I cannot live, this is the only thing that matters for me. To attain to that I am prepared to do anything.” Is more convincing than what might have appear as an easy success… This of course is a matter of our being but it is not only our being that plays a role in our missionary work. …things more formal, more tangible. People may well judge us … God indeed by the way we live … we live unworthily,… a way in which give the lie both to the Gospel and to our words, people will never believe our words. They will believe our words if they see us fall, stand, repent, continue on our way, struggle because they will realise that the way from the earth to Heaven is a long and difficult endeavour. But they can respect us in spite of lack of success from time to time but not if we choose to lead a life which is easy while we proclaim a Gospel which is arduous. One of our saints in the XVIIIcentury said, “One does not reach the Kingdom of Heaven from victory to victory, more often – from defeat to defeat, but those reach the Kingdom of God who after each defeat instead of sitting by the wayside to bewail their misery, stand up and move on, crying indeed, but moving Godwards without ever stopping .. way.” And this we can do. We can be frail, we can fall, we can be, technically speaking, unworthy of the Gospel, which we preach, provided we never accept defeat or unworthiness as a condition with which we can make our peace. There is the proclamation of the word… called to proclaim the Gospel… can we proclaim it … said that his proclamation was not in the sagacity, in the intricacies of philosophy but in the revelation, the manifestation of the power of God… do something of the same kind. I think we can… I think that we can speak of Christ sincerely, truthfully and with power, if what we say is not addressed to an audience but to ourselves.. live that if we have got to preach on a passage of the Gospel, we must not ask ourselves what have other people in their wisdom and saintliness said about this passage, although it is good for us to be aware of it, to have read it, to have lived with it, to have assimilated it so that it has become for our blood and our flesh, but when we have got to preach, we must listen ourselves to a given passage of the Gospel and ask ourselves, “What has Christ said to me now? …How do I respond?” And then turn to the people and say, “Christ has spoken, this is what I have heard and this is the way in which I respond.”

And I will give you an example to the contrary which is one of the shameful events of my life. Celebrating the Eucharist in our church once, I read the Gospel, and the Gospel, the passage of the Gospel, which I had read, did not reach me, I was like a stone on which the seed had fallen, there was no response in me… had to preach and I thought, “Woe onto me if I lyingly tell people what others have thought or felt, or experienced, or done because Christ has spoken to them while I … not even respond to something addressed to me personally. And I came out to preach and I said, “This is what has happened. Christ has spoken… I was of stone and my only response to Christ was … for me You can speak or not… nothing today.” …I challenged the people who were in church to ask themselves, had it ever happened to them … ever Christ spoken to them and they had turned away insensitive, indifferent … Christ’s words were irrelevant … many of the congregation said to me that they were grateful for my having been truthful because it is the truth that reaches out to people and not the art with which we represent a truth known, experienced by others and yet alien to us … saying that unless … of the Gospel pierces our heart, it will not pierce anyone else’s heart. This is what we should always remember. It does not mean that we must not prepare ourselves intellectually or in all possible ways but it means that when we speak to one person or to a group of persons, we must speak the truth and a truth which is alive, which is a burning pain or an exulting joy within us, not an intellectual truth divorced from life. .. missionary means to one sent by Christ but also we must remember that we are sent by Christ on His own terms. My Father has sent Me, so do I send you… If they hated Me, they will hate you… always like this, but it may happen …

…is another aspect again to the question… saw seeds is one thing, to assess the earth on which they fall is another one; and we, Christians… unfortunately a tendency to think that the world, the secular world in which we live is so far away from the Church. I daresay, yes, may well be away from the Church because so often the Church as people see it formally is so far away from the Gospel and from Christ, looking at people and not at … social gatherings. We will realise if we compare … as its … us with other societies of antiquity that even the most Godless societies have been somehow inseminated by the Gospel… of all people said, “He who does not work let him not eat.” He did not know he was repeating Christ’s words or perhaps, did he know .. of the structures of society, of the longing for justice, for human rights …the notion of the absolute value of the person .. human relationships, so many things are rooted in nothing but the Gospel and so when we are confronted with the secular world, we are not confronted with an alien world or with a world of adversaries, we are confronted with the world that has received the message of Christ centuries ago, which has forgotten where it stems from, but which lives to a very great extent and indeed increasingly so in spite of what we may think by the categories of the Gospel. And so at times it is enough to put a key of harmony as in music for the whole line to be understandable. I will give you an example which is not quite about the world as it surrounds us.

During the German occupation the Germans moved to France children from the Ukraine and from the occupied parts of Russia to work on fortifications in Normandy and in Brittany. Among them there was a little boy of 11 who spoke in a way that showed an extraordinary harmony between him and the Gospel, in phrases from the Gospel and from the Scriptures, he thought in terms of the Gospel. And a friend of mine who had find his way into the camp where these children were held said to him, “How is it that being born and brought up in Soviet Russia under such pressures of atheism you know the Gospel so well?” And the child looked in amazement and said, “What is that word? I have never heard it.” “But the Gospel is the book in which the life and the teaching of Jesus Christ is described. Don’t you know that?” “No, and who is this Man of whom you speak?” … it was discovered that this child was born in a family of believers who could not impart to him a concrete knowledge of the Scriptures and of his faith because one of the things, which teachers did at school, was to ask the children, “Who knows what God is? Who knows what Christ is?” And if a child said, “I know,” the family was arrested and deported, and the child was sent to an orphanage. So his parents had made a rule never to speak in his presence in any way that would contradict the Gospel and to use as many phrases from the Gospel they could without the child making extensive quotations that would give him away. And when he was given the book of the Gospel and read it, he said, “But that is what I believe, that is what I was told, that is the truth of life.”

This is what we could do more often than we imagine with the secular world, with people who imagine, think that they are alien to the Gospel and yet who … knew so much of it. And when we have occasion to discuss things with them is not against them that we should speak. … if you speak against a person this persons hardens and defends himself or herself, but what you can do is to speak higher than your adversary, to start on the level on which he is and show him that what he says, what he believes in, what he is, is smaller than the full stature to which he is called to the full greatness of his own vision…

…to thank you for having listened passionately to my three address. I hope they will be useful to you, perhaps, make you think in categories that have not been habitual to you .. ways in which a Russian thinks.