Metropolitan Anthony Bloom on The Christian Life

Metropolitan Anthony Bloom on The Christian Life
Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate. 1971
Source: http://masarchive.org/Sites/texts/1971-00-00-1-E-E-C-EM02-036ChristianLife.html

CHRISTIAN LIFE

A talk

I

We are starting this year on a new series of talks, the subject of which will be the Christian Life, and I should like to begin with a few introductory remarks.

First of all, I should like to underline the fact that the Christian Life is not a life according to certain moral principles, which the Christian lives within the world. The Christian life does not consist in applying a certain number of 'precepts taken from the Gospel and in adapting them to the possibilities of a life, which, otherwise, remains worldly. There is an aspect of the Christian life which is moral, but this moral aspect is the result of something greater than itself, it is the expression of being a Christian, and so, although I will concentrate quite often on the concrete aspect of living as a Christian should, we must remember that the Christian life is something deeper and wider than a certain form of behaviour.

At this particular point I would like to underline something I have said at other times and in various contexts, concerning the commandments of the Gospel as contrasted with the commandments of the Old Testament. We find in the Old Testament a law which is the expression of God's will for the people He has chosen. To be faithful to this law is equivalent to being faithful to the Covenant that exists between God and His people; to be unfaithful means, in terms of the Bible, "adultery", a turning away from a relationship into unfaithfulness. To be faithful to the law of God and to be within the Covenant, with Him, is one and the same thing — and one who is faithful to this law is righteous in the eyes of God. Yet, this righteousness cannot give life to one, because life does not depend on righteousness, life depends on a relationship, a communion, a sharing, and it is not the mere fulfilment of the will of God that can achieve that. The commandments of the Old Testament could therefore make a man righteous, establish him within the Covenant, keep him within the terms of this Covenant, which meant a human contribution together with a divine contribution, and yet they could not introduce him into a life that was beyond the categories of behaviour or of dependence.

In the New Testament, we find also commandments: the ones have a positive content, the others are restrictive — "thou shalt" or "thou shalt not" — yet, when we compare the attitude of the Lawgiver to the commandments of the Old Testament with His attitude to the commandments of the New Testament, we discover that there is a very deep difference. The Lord Christ says to His disciples: "When you have fulfilled all that I have commanded you, avow that you are unprofitable servants", and the same Gospel teaches us that, if we do the will of God, if we keep His word, we shall find life in these commandments. This is practically the opposite of what we find in the Old Testament. The commandments of Christ are not an outer law and, therefore, compliance with it leads us nowhere, we do not enter into a Christian relationship with God by doing outwardly what He commanded, without becoming something we were not before, and, on the other hand, when we do the will of God in the way in which Christ wishes us to do it — and I will try to define it in a moment — although we do not achieve righteousness, we enter into the realm of Life, of Eternal Life. The commandments of the New Testament are not an outer law, they are expressed in instigations, in invitations, in orders given by God, they describe the outer form of an inner content; what they are aimed at is our inner self, not our behaviour only; what we see in the person of Christ, in what He commands us to do, is in reality a description of the true man as he must be; and the actions which are signified by the various commandments or the various counsels of the Gospel point not to a way of behaving but to a way of being: being the man who, naturally, in conformity with God and in harmony with the Lord, acts according to the Gospel, means to be alive: — never to be righteous because this category is alien to the New Testament as it is basically alien to the situation of the created being with regard to God.

The categories of the Old Testament, in the beginning of Genesis, are life and death; they are not even good and evil, and they are certainly not righteousness and unrighteousness; and we must remember, when we think of our Christian life, that we must at every moment outgrow our habits of thought, our attitude of mind, and no longer think in categories of good and evil — which are secondary — but of life and death: that is in being in God or outside of His realm, within a relationship with God or alien to this relationship. And the Christian life although it finds expression in personal moral attitudes, in the behaviour of the individual with regard to the individual, in collective ways of being — because the Church, apart from being a mystery, is also a society — still remains, in content, not behaviour but being.

And so, the first problem that is in front of us is not one which one can define in simple moral terms: what does the Gospel advise or command us to do within each possible or imaginable situation, but what is our situation with regard to God, and, in God, with regard to ourselves and others and with regard to God Himself? I would like, first of all, to say a word about the way in which we are related to Christ, and, secondly, of the way in which, individually and collectively we are related to the outer world. There are two parables in Scripture. That, I believe, may throw some light on the first point: the first parable I have in mind is the passage from the writings of St. Paul in which he tells the Romans, the Gentiles, that they are grafted on Israel like the wild olive twig can be grafted on a tree full of life and of sap. The second image is taken from the 15th chapter of the Gospel according to St. John: it is the parable of the vine and the branches. First of all, the grafting, our spiritual life, our life as Christians, begins with an act of God: God, as the wise, the experienced gardener, spies a branch, a twig that is capable of a life better than one it possesses — the branch, the little bush grew so far on the poor ground of this world, it possessed a precarious life, a life that was a fight for existence, it was ephemeral, it depended on the accidents of rain and weather, and the Lord chooses one of these twigs which are capable of a greater, a fuller amount of life, and tears it from its roots. This tearing is a painful process, it is an act of God which severs connections which, hitherto, were infinitely intimate and special, in human terms, infinitely dear: a man, a woman who have been reared within a certain milieu, in a certain surrounding, within sets of ideas, of thoughts, of convictions, within a certain culture, suddenly are torn away from all that was natural to them in order to be given another life; but it begins with losing the one that was possessed, it always means suffering and a certain degree of tragedy. And then, the grafting takes place. This grafting is not as simple as it appears, it does not consist in simply inserting in a comfortable situation the wild little twig in order to give it a better life; grafting means a contact wound to wound of the twig torn and wounded to the tree cut in two so as to provide a bleeding wound, a wound bleeding with sap, and the two are: bound together and they must live together. To begin with, they are in simple contact. The life of the one seems to have become more precarious than it was and the integrity of the other seems to have been damaged. What I have said so far corresponds very exactly to what we discover when the hand of God comes down on one of us, in order to tear him away from the secure (and precarious) ground on which he was reared, in order to introduce him into a new life; obviously, when it is human beings, there is also human acquiescence, human agreement, human participation in the event. God's voice calls and, one day, this voice is heard. God called Jacob in the night and he said: "Here am I". It is first of all a response, an answer that means "I have heard and I am prepared to listen", and then it is an answer that will require a commitment, an act of determination that is always costly. Human freedom is left allowed to act freely, and yet always at a cost, but nothing happens unless God acts another time and, tearing us off, grafts us onto the Life-giving Tree. This act of God is what we call Baptism, while all that proceeds is the preaching of the Word, the calling of God, the wavering response of man, his final conversion, his surrender to God, his readiness to be dealt with by God, of Whom St. Paul says, repeating Isaiah: "It is a dread thing to fall into the hand of the living God".

But what happens when the little twig has been grafted? Wound to wound, the life-giving tree and the grafting are in presence, and then a fight begins: the life-giving sap is finding its way into the minute capillaries of this twig, it gradually progresses in them, it finds them, their opening cut open, it gradually invades the little twig, it gradually surrounds every single cell, it gradually presses on them and displaces out of them the life of wildness to replace it by the new life of the total tree. What happens is that the twig remains itself, but that what was precarious is now replaced by something which will abide for ever; what could give only a relative, an ephemeral, an incomplete life, is replaced by a power of life that is great and that will never fail so that, as a result, because this greater life has entered into the little twig, this little twig can become truly and fully itself because, before that, it was less than it could be. Again, when we think in human terms, it reminds us of the words of St. Paul: "It is not I, it is Christ who lives in me", not in the sense that Christ yet, has taken abode, that we become nothing but an appearance while the life and the person and the presence in Christ displeases our person, that we become like an empty shell in which Christ but in the sense that this fullness of life, this life eternal which is His, He pours out into us, making it possible for us to be ourselves — not Him, and yet to have Him in us; and because we are grafted on his Life-giving trunk, to be in Him. Remember the already quoted passage from the Gospel according to St. John: "I am the vine, you are the branches; unless you abide in Me, you cannot bear fruit." It is His life and it is our person. It is Him fulfilling us, and this is the beginning of our Christian life, of our life in Christ and the life of Christ in us; again in human terms, all this process of gradual assimilation by us of the life of Christ and by Christ of our life, is the mystery of the Eucharist, of communion, which makes us consubstantial with the Lord Christ.

At this point, I think, it is time to underline the fact which was underlined constantly in early centuries: that the beginning of our life in Christ are the sacraments, that is, such divine actions performed within the Church by the power of God Himself, that make us grow into a new dimension which is the dimension of our vocation. Life in the One in Whose image we are, participation in the humanity of the One, Who, alone, possesses humanity in the full sense, is the True Man, the Very Man both True because He is not below the mark of humanity as we, fallen creatures, and also because, in Him, we see that there is no such thing as simple natural humanity. That humanity consists in being in God: apart from this, there is an empty shell, there is a dying out. And this is the beginning of the Christian life because the Christian life consists, first of all, in becoming and in being living members of the Body of Christ. This Body of Christ is not an organisation, it is a living organism. If this is true, if the image given by Christ in the vine and the branches is true, if the words of St. Paul, concerning the Church as a body of which we are members and not adjusted parts, is true, then the life of the Christian is something almost frightening. St. Ignatius of Antioch at the end of the 4th century said that, together with Christ our Head, Head and limbs we are the total Christ, and St. Irenaeus of Lyons, in the second century, said that, if the relationship with Christ is true, if we really become what we are alleged to become, if His life and ours are one, if we are real members of a new humanity, or, rather, of a new total Man, then, with regard to the Father, we can, daringly but adequately in our oneness with Christ, be called the Only-begotten Son of God. Here then is another feature of the Christian life: the life of sonship, a relationship which is absolutely unique because it is not based on a covenant that defines ways, but on an existential, an ontological situation that defines being. We do not, as Christians, call God our Father because He behaves in a fatherly way, we do not call Him our Father because in Him, not substantially, but indirectly by the word of creation, we have our origin; we call Him Father because, in Christ, we enter with Him in that very relationship which is the relationship of the Incarnate Word of God to the Father Eternal. This is a very substantial and essential aspect of our Christian life because life consists in being alive and living, and not only in behaving.

This difference between living and behaving is brought out very clearly in the parable of the prodigal son. There are many features in it, but I would like to single out a few. You remember the story: a man has got two sons, the older one is dutiful, faithful, the younger one is not; he is impatient to be leading his own life, free, separate, and he cannot wait until his father is dead. He comes to him and says in substance: your life is too long for my patience, die to all intents and purposes, that is, give me all that I would receive when you die, your actual death matters little, once, practically, you are no more. And the father accepts because he loves him enough to be dead for his son, he accepts the condition of this murder: his son does not need him alive, he needs him dead. He does not want him alive, he wants him dead because what matters is not the father but what he can derive from him, and the father gives the son his part of his goods and lets him go. The boy has no father any more, he has murdered him; he has brought him to naught because, in a way, this father did never exist for him. The prodigal son goes and spends all his wealth in a far country. When he comes to his senses, his first thought is that he is dying of hunger in the strange country, while so many servants in his father's house are safe and he decides to go back to share their security. He prepares his words: "I have sinned against Heaven and against thee and I am no longer worthy to be called thy son; let me be as one of thy hirelings." For him, for years perhaps, the father was dead, but for the father the son was both dead and alive. He was alive in his love, he was alive in his concern and yet, as a moral personality, as a human destiny, he was dead; and, because he was alive for him, although dead, the father, more than once in the day, went out of his house to see whether the boy was not coming back; and, one day, he saw him coming back in a ragged trampish way and he ran to him, and the boy began to make the discourse he had prepared, and the father allowed him to say the first words: "I have sinned against Heaven and against thee, and I am no longer worthy to be called thy son," but at that point, he stops him, because what the boy was about to say is not possible: he can be the prodigal son, he cannot be the faithful hireling; whatever his behaviour, whatever his attitude to his father, whatever he does, he remains what he is; he cannot come back into the house as a respectable hireling, although he can come into the house as a heart-broken prodigal son. And the next step brings it out so clearly. The Revised Version says: "Bring him the best robe." The Greek uses a word that may be either "best" or "first", first in quality or first in time, and I think it is much more adequate to think that what the father says is not "Bring him the best we have and let him come into the house," but "bring him back the robe of sonship, the robe he dropped so contemptuously when he was leaving the house, because it was not good enough for his new life, and let him put it on." And when the boy put it on, it seemed that no time had passed, he was back on the same doorstep, he was wearing the same robe, the same old father was there with the same love, the same servants, the same surroundings; he was back, not adorned with a robe that would make him feel a stranger, but in the old tweed he dropped to put on something better.

And this is one of the important lessons of the parable: whatever we do, it is our being that counts and not simply our doing, and what Christ offers us in His Gospel is not a moral code, is not a teaching on how to behave to be respectable or how to behave to deserve God's reward. He gives us a picture as to what we should be in order that these actions, expressed in commandments, in parables and in His own life, should be natural to us. There is a passage in St. Paul in which he advises us to find ourselves in Christ and one can speak also, from other passages, of discovering Christ in us; both are essential, because it is again at this point of coincidence between the two lives, His and ours, that we begin to have a Christian life. It is not by using our life of wildness in the Christian way that we are Christians, it is by discovering in ourselves the life of Christ and letting it grow, letting it conquer all that is in us, that we begin to have a Christian life.

Concretely, this means something that I have already mentioned here, probably, more than once: when we read of the Gospel, we find, passages in which, with all our heart, with all our mind, with all our longing, with all our determination we adhere to the Image of Christ and to the will of Christ, passages which make us feel that this is both truth and beauty and life and meaning, that this is worth living for; these passages are waymarks in us, they show us that, on this particular way, in this particular point, it may be a very minute one, Christ and we are of one mind, of one heart, of one will, that all our longings are directed Christwards and if we discover, day after day, year after year, these various points of coincidence between the person of Christ and ourselves, these points which one could call cells into which the Life of Christ has already penetrated while others are still full of life of wildness or are still in the process of being changed: if we discover these spots, we can gradually allow Christ to conquer us, to conquer all the ground. The Christian life consists in a life of likeness unto Christ, not of aping Christ, but of being like Him and more than this, of being the place where His life is made manifest, in us and through us. We will have to search the way in which one can make it possible for Christ to conquer us and the way in which the Life of Christ finds expression in us. I will begin our next talk with the last image which I have given, and an investigation into it.

Answers to questions.

I think there are two stages in our spiritual life: the one consists in a choice "for" or "against" and the other consists in actually becoming what we have chosen. You remember the passage where we are told by St. Paul that he is dead to sin; yet he does not imply at all that he does not sin; what he means is that his attitude to sin is radically different from what it was before, consequently his attitude to God is radically different; yet it does not mean that he has achieved what, finally, he is called to achieve. Still, in himself, he finds two conflicting laws: he does the evil he hates and does not the good he loves; the flesh is fighting against the spirit and other difficulties are there.

— Well, a sin, for instance, loved and hugged, is a barrier between us and God. When I say: "I would rather cling to this than cling to God," I have made one choice; the moment I have understood and say: "I renounce this sin, I choose God," I am not free of the sin. It may happen that this act of determination does free me — I would say more often it does not — but the sin that before was a wall of partition between God and me, becomes now a task which I can fulfil for God and with God. And, although, speaking objectively, the same three things are there: God is there, I am there, the sin is there, the whole situation has become different.

— "The conquest of God" in the sense in which heat can pervade frozen limbs: the moment I bring my limbs to the fire, I have done something which is absolutely decisive, and yet, my limb is still cold; it will take a time for it to become warm and supple and soft, and yet all is contained in the first act of surrender, provided of course I do not go back.

II

Last time we dealt with basic presuppositions of the Christian life. I think that we came to the conclusion that the Christian life is a life in Christ, a life which is rooted in Him, not only in a relationship but in a deep interpenetration of His life by ours, and ours by His. The life of the Christian is the life of Christ and, short of this, there is no Christian life, and whatever could be described in terms of a Christian life is void of real content; the actions may be the same, the form and appearances may be the same, but the substance of the life is not the Christian life. The Christian life is rooted in the mystery of the Church as the Body of Christ, as the living organism both equally human and divine, in which the life of the Holy Trinity is given without measure by the Living God to His creatures and is received by His creatures in an act of freedom.

We must now turn to one or two more aspects of these presuppositions. Where does the Christian life begin and how does it develop? The Christian life begins in an act of worship. We understood, in its original basic meaning, a choice which establishes the worth of God beyond every and any worth, an act of choice and understanding that makes God the supreme and the only real value that exists. St. John the Ladder says in one of his writings: "What should I strive for in Heaven or on earth? There is nothing either on earth or in Heaven which is worth my striving, because I have set my desire to worship the Lord God and to be with Him incessantly". This is an extremely important point.

The life of the Christian is the life of one who owes allegiance to the Lord God, who has chosen Him to the exclusion of every other or any other Lord and Master. In the individual life, from the very beginning of Christianity, it leads to the estrangement of the Christian from the surrounding world. In terms of the Christian society it meant: on the part of God: election; on the part of the surrounding world: rejection, a rejection that could be either indifference or animosity or active and aggressive hatred. The position of the Christian society, that is, of the Body of Christ, is, through history, present in the world, yet remains, as Christ Himself, not of the world, as a challenge and a scandal. The Christian society, which one calls the Church, claims at the same time two impossible things: on the one hand, it declares that it recognises no other Lord than God Himself, that God is the only one to Whom a Christian owes allegiance, that the individual Christian, the Christian family, the Christian group and the total Church, belong to another Kingdom, the Kingdom of Heaven, that they are on this earth as a vanguard of this Kingdom — as Moffat says: "a colony of Heaven" — that is, a small settlement of people who represent another country, another kingdom, who have their own allegiances and their own rules and laws and aims; and yet, the same society claims a right to belong to the total humanity, claims a right to be recognised, to be accepted, not as a fifth column, not as people who are disloyal to the society within which they live, but as people who transcend this society, who, in all things in which this society is equal to its human vocation, belong to it, and who, in all things in which this society falls below the mark, remain alien, estranged from it.

From the very beginning, this created tension which resulted, so often, in open persecutions and always had the same result that, persecuted or not, the Church thought of Herself as being both an alien body and belonging to the surrounding world. And what I say of the Church at large applies to every single Christian. Those terms of election and rejection, which I have used, are the natural outcome of the situation: election, that is being chosen, picked up by God, and rejection, go together. The early Church defines itself very often as being Noah's Ark; it thought of the surrounding world as being the Flood; security was to be found only within the Ark; danger and death, indeed the wrath of God, was to be found outside it. This was so clearly the case of the people who assembled for worship in the early centuries: the room, the cave, the catacomb in which they met was not only the place worship but, also, a place of safety, as long as it had not been discovered and in this place, the people of God gathered together and worshipped. But around them, there was a world unfriendly, full of hatred and of suspicion; between the two, there was no bridge: one could only move out of the one into the other, one could not bridge the gap between the two and this moving, from the one into the other, was conditioned by this last final choice of the Living God of the Christians as the only supreme value in life. The election of God unavoidably carried with itself rejection. And the election of which we are speaking was not an election that gives privileges, or at least not the kind of privileges which we are accustomed to call by this name.

1 remember one of our meetings here when I spoke of the Beatitudes and when I had read them out, someone said: "Well, if that is beatitude, thank you, I do not want such bliss!" Well, this applies also, I think, to the election of God: we are called out of the crowd in order to become part of the Body of Christ, this very Body of Which Christ says that It is broken unto remission of sins, the members of Which are delivered unto death that others may live, and the vocation which is offered to this Body is that of the Divine Victim and not of anyone privileged on this earth or, if you prefer it, to someone privileged indeed, but privileged with the dread privilege of sharing, in history, the destiny of the Lord Christ. This is made so clear in the passage of the Gospel in which we see the mother of James and John approaching Christ Who has just spoken of the establishment of His Kingdom, and saying: "When Thou cometh in Thy Kingdom, may my sons sit on thy right and thy left-hand side" . And Christ turns to the young men and says: "Are you prepared to drink the cup which I am to drink, to be baptised with the baptism by which I am going to be baptised?"

In clearer terms perhaps, the cup was always understood as the destiny: "are you prepared to drink the cup" means: "are you prepared to have an identical destiny with Me and to drink it to the dregs as I am going to drink it?" You know that baptism means "merging". So the question was: "are you prepared to be merged into what is ahead of Me?" and the young men answered: "Yes, we are". And the answer of Christ is tragic, because He says: "My cup you will drink, with My baptism you will be baptised, but as to being seated on My right and My left side, it does not depend on Me".

If you want to follow, if you want to accept this election, you must accept as sufficient the privilege and the joy of being Christ's and of being with Christ, whatever the consequences; it is a privilege in itself, it is self-sufficient without any reward attached, almost without any future. The Cure d'Ars says that if there was no eternal life, the joy of knowing God on this earth and of serving Him would be sufficient in itself.

Well, this is where we begin: we begin a true Christian life when we recognise in the Lord Christ, in our God made Man, such value, such significance that it is enough for us to be with Him, to serve Him, to worship Him and to be united to Him by the mysterious ties which define the Church. It is essential for us, if we want to lead any kind of Christian life, to realise that a Christian life begins there and that the Christian life does not consist in trying to acquire, through Christ and in Christ, our own personal happiness, or even our bliss or anything else, but in becoming faithful servants of the Lord Christ.

Now, these two things have consequences: first of all, when I said that we are not to look for happiness and bliss, I do not mean that there will be no happiness or bliss as a result of following Christ. Remember the words of the Lord Himself: "No one, there is no one who will have abandoned father, mother, sister, brother, his house, his goods for the sake of searching for nothing but the Kingdom of God who will not receive a hundred times more"; but it still remains that we do not first receive and then abandon, that we do not first receive the gift of the Kingdom before we take the risk of abandoning the illusory and ephemeral possessions of earth; our first action must be a choice between God and everything else or anything else, and this at a cost; and this cost must involve everything, every single thing, beginning with our own selves: "Renounce yourself, take up your cross and follow Me."

There is no Christian life whatever, or rather, there is no Christian life in the full sense of these words, as long as we have not rebuilt our lives, restated our values according to a new scale. We are servants of God, we are to serve Him to the exclusion of everyone and to serve everyone in His Name, for Him and, once we have done this, we must remember the words of St. Paul: "that no one who undertakes to wage a war encumbers himself with wordily cares". We must be free, we must be ready to follow and to go anywhere we are called to go; otherwise, again, it is aimless to say that we have set our heart on following Christ. And, as I said last time, it is not even a matter of following, one can follow at a closer or a greater distance, but the relationship between Christ and us, within the Church, is the relation of life to body, is the relationship of interpenetration; ultimately, finally, it is defined in the words of St. Paul: "It is not I, it is Christ Who liveth in me". And in an incipient, in a germinal way, it is true for each of us visibly or invisibly, perceptibly or not.

And so one cannot even speak of coming to terms with the problem and following Christ from afar off, because we have not the zeal, or the courage, or the sense to follow close on His heels: the moment there is a rift between Him and us, the moment we accept a distance, we accept a falling away from Him. There is an element of apostasy in that. We can only be together; apart from this, there is no Christian way and this way is narrow because Christ is the Way itself. It is within these seemingly very narrow limits of what the Gospel offers that we must find it, and there is no strain right or left. Remember this passage in the Gospel according to St. Matthew: "Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn of Me; for I am meek and lowly of heart; and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light". What is this yoke and what are the consequences of this offer? Quite often we are told by spiritual writers that the yoke is the cross, but a yoke is a yoke and a cross is a cross. If you follow the image which Christ has chosen Himself, you will see how far it leads and how simply. A yoke yokes together, unites together in order to fulfil a task; two oxen under the same yoke, within the same task. What the Lord offers is not one more burden: what He offers is to be yoked together with Him, so that the task which is ours becomes the common task of the Incarnate Word of God together with us. The two oxen plod through the field cutting deep a furrow, but there is no strain right or left: it must go straight because, when we are yoked together with Christ and He treads relentlessly, firmly, mercilessly in a way, the right path, there is no strain, there is only one way to walk, side by side, under the yoke, on the narrow path which is defined by the straight line of Christ.

What in that case, you may ask, are we to expect? The Gospel gives promises: what kind of promises are these, what kind of refreshment, what kind of help? Why is this yoke easy, why is this burden light?

If I may leave the Gospel for a moment and turn to more familiar images, I think what happens is a little like what happens to a little child who walks with his mother, pushing a pram or a basket on wheels: the mother has a hand on the pram and the child pushes hard and, admirably enough, the pram moves fast and straight, and the child achieves infinitely more than he could expect to achieve, simply because the strong hand of the mother is on the pram, adding a great deal of strength to the push of the child and giving direction to the pram. This is what happens when we are together on a job with the Lord Christ: both are in the job, both, yoked together, drag the plough, and yet the one is weak and the other one is strong. The weak is doing all he can, but the success of the work is not measured by his strength but by the total strength of him together with the other. This explains a great many apostolic sayings. When St. Paul who was so aware of his weakness says: "All things are possible to me in the strength of Christ", did he not think of this? When he says that we are co-workers with Christ, did he not think of this? A great deal of help, a great deal of strength, but together with One Who will never waver, who will never go astray. And one can go astray only by unyoking oneself, by falling away from this oneness of purpose and this fidelity to the common task.

At the root of all this, apart from the act of worship, of choice, there is also an act of faith. Faith we will have to discuss in greater detail, but let us say for the moment that this act of faith is the first step; it consists in three things: first of all, in trusting God; secondly, in being faithful to Him; and thirdly, in remaining aware of what has been learnt and in acquiring, as a consequence, the certitude of things unseen (St. Paul).

We usually think of faith in terms of a disposition of the soul which trusts God and, therefore, possesses security and serenity. Faith begins at a simpler level, as a total risk in the name of the total truth; remember Abraham called in the night by the voice of God; he was commanded to set out and to go where he would be led; he was not told where, he was given no explanation. Abraham followed the command because he had recognised, in the night, that it was the voice of God; and then, God led him to the place He had chosen and declared unto him that it was the land He had promised to him and that, from his seeds, would be born a great nation; and, then, a son was born who was the fulfilment of this promise. And, apparently, seemingly contradicting Himself, the Lord commanded Abraham to bring Isaac as a sacrifice. Abraham might have said: "but what about Thy promises, how can they be if I sacrifice my son?” But he trusted God more than his knowledge of the will of God; he trusted God in an act of complete faith; he would not admit that God was wrong or mistaken, or unfaithful; he just did what he was told. And here we find a man who chooses to believe God more, even, than what he knows of God, and this is very important because, quite often, we stumble on this very point. What we know of God, the little we know of God, makes it difficult for us to learn more, because the more is not simply more added to the little, it is, every time, such a change of perspective, that what was known before becomes almost untrue in the light of what is known later. Then it is not only trust in God that makes faith. In the Old Testament, the great theme is the faithfulness of the people of God, or else, of its unfaithfulness. The trusting that becomes a chronic situation becomes faithfulness. To trust for a short moment is comparatively easy, although probably very few of us have any idea of what it means to trust God, even over a short moment completely, unreservedly, obediently. Yet to make this act of trust a permanent situation is another aspect of the same faith; it is faithfulness to the will of God as a permanent thing and although it is rooted in the first, it has got its own ways and its own difficulties. And when, through a series of acts of trust and through a prolonged act of faithfulness man becomes aware of God, of His will, of what He is and of His ways, then it becomes increasingly easy to be sure of the things unseen, to stop at the limit between the known and unknown and only to worship instead of asking questions. And this brings us to the serenity and the certitude of faith.

Questions and Answers

“You said to follow anywhere, but where is anywhere, and have we not to become instead of to follow?"

Yes, we have to become. It is so difficult to find one set of expressions to signify what we have got to say and the Scripture puts us in the same position: Christ is the Way, Christ is the Door, Christ is the Head of the Body, and it's Christ's Life which is in us. In a way, it is right to say that we must follow. Christ says: "I have given you an example that you should follow it” and He has gone ahead of us all the human way in order to cut a groove for us; but, at the same time, we can follow only if we are within Him, we cannot simply follow afar off, or from nearby, with curiosity or with interest, or even with concern, remaining outsiders to Him. We follow, because we belong so completely. The alternative is either to follow or to fall off. I know there is a discrepancy between the two things I said, and yet, when you are yoked together, the two things are brought out more clearly, perhaps: on the one hand, in your togetherness one cannot distinguish the one from the other, and yet each is different and has got his destiny; on the other hand, Christ is the Incarnate Son of God and we are mere creatures, and yet, together with Him, we are the total Christ; there is a difference between being the head or the body; yet, there can be no head without a body and vice versa.

"Our life is not built on what we perceive or do not perceive, but on the choice we make for Him, or against Him, and on the determination we have to do His will or not, to follow after Him or not, to be His or not, to be His servants or not, and so on; and the central moment in life is the fact that we have made this choice and He has become absolutely central: what will happen to us is His lookout. You cannot be related to Him without having a relationship, but that will come sooner or later, in one way or the other. There are people who are aware of what is going on in them, other people are practically unaware of what is going on in them; and yet others can see what they do not see.”

About Abraham's faith: Yes, Abraham knew that God could do anything, even raise the boy from the dead. But to believe in this resurrection in that sense is an act of faith which cannot be discredited, because I wonder how many mothers here would say: "I believe in the Resurrection, I accept the sacrifice of my little girl or my little boy, because I know that the Resurrection is there; and yet, we have evidences for the Resurrection now, which Abraham had not: we have Lazarus, we have Christ. I think that, however strong the certitude, the evidence is stronger and it takes a great deal of faith to believe against every evidence, and that is, really, the moment when faith becomes a reality, because in minor things, too, "life and experience" teach us a lot of things and Christ says the contrary: well, even on that very simple level, we usually, implicitly, say: "experience has taught me that and it is safer than what Christ says", and when it comes to major things, this faith of Abraham, which was not substantiated by any evidence of the past (there had not been a case to which he could refer himself), was a perfect act of faith in the fact that God is wise, God is faithful, God has power; to believe actively, not academically, is a great deal!

"Was it not easier, for the people of the Old Testament to hear the voice of God, Who seems to have been speaking so clearly, in so many words?" I think that the trouble with us is that God has spoken so much that we are accustomed to His speaking and not paying attention, that is why we do not see the will of God. In eight out of ten of our situations, we could give a quotation already from the Old Testament or the New Testament which absolutely clearly shows us what the will of God is, but we are very careful not to look into it. What we expect is a new revelation on every single occasion, because it is much safer: we are practically sure that, as deaf as we are, we will never hear. I think that to know the will of God is not such a complicated thing, to do it is another one. Before you get this kind of concrete, intuitive and direct sense of the will of God which the Apostles had, even in their travelling, you must start by doing those things which you already know; why should God give you a special revelation when you have a whole Bible as thick as that? And if you are not prepared to do one thing, why should you be expected to do another one? And there are two examples about it: The first one is that of the rich man who, being in hell, saw a beggar he knew during his life in Abraham's bosom; and the rich man asks Abraham to let the beggar go back to earth and warn his five brothers of the fate which they are to expect if they go on living in sin as he did, but Abraham says: "They have Moses and the Prophets". Then the rich man asks again, saying that if they saw the beggar risen from the dead, they would believe; and Abraham says "no, if they hear not Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead". And that is so obviously the case with Christ. And the other example is that of Naaman who came to Elisha to be cured of his leprosy. Naaman came with horses and chariots and expected Elisha to meet him, to stand and to call on the name of the Lord, and instead of that Elisha only sent a messenger to him, saying: "Go, and wash in the Jordan seven; times, and thy flesh shall come again to thee, and thou shalt be clean". The reaction of Naaman was to be wroth, but he listened to one of his servants who told him: "If the prophet had bid thee do some great thing, wouldst thou not have done it? How much rather, then, when he says to thee: wash and be clean?" So he washed in the Jordan and he was clean. And this is again the same about the will of God. If God appeared to us and said: "Now you must do something which is quite out of the ordinary", we would be thrilled and I would probably do it, provided it was not too difficult. But as God tells us: "Do the same thing I said 2000 years ago", we say "Goodness, I have read it so often, heard it so often, is it worth while to try?" and then we find it difficult to know the will of God. There's plenty of it: you just start! St. Augustin says that the will of God is manifest quite often, simply by the circumstances in which we are. We are within a situation, we do not like it and we think "how can I escape it?" instead of saying: "the concrete will of God is that I should be in the situation" and that solves the problem. We are like a pupil who has been given a problem by the teacher, and he thinks the teacher quite silly to have invented such complicated things when he could have given the answer, but there are rules by which one can solve the problem. You are given the problem plus so many rules you have learnt in the past, and you can solve it.

III

Speaking of the Christian life, we have, so far, considered it from the point of view of our life in Christ, our life as part of the Body of Christ! But this is only one side of our Christian life: because it is true that, on the one hand, we are in Christ and Christ is in us, that He is at work in us, that we live only in so far as He is nearer, more intimate to our soul than life itself, and on the other hand it is also true that Christ and we are two different persons. On the one hand, because we are members of His Body, there is the deepest relatedness between Him and us and, on the other hand, we are the sheep of His fold, we are called to follow Him, to learn from Him. There is a duality in this relationship: we are not identical with Him. On the one hand, we are already virtually saved because He had fulfilled all that is necessary for our salvation and, on the other hand, we are not actually saved, but in the process of salvation. And this explains why, both at the outset of our spiritual life, even within the Church, and also in the course of our spiritual life, there is a relationship of "I" and "Thou" with Christ, of "Him" and "us" as distinct from one another, and this finds expression in two ways, in the Gospel and in the course of all our life: two ways which I would like to treat together, but which I would like to separate as two different points at the outset.

The one can be defined in the words addressed by Christ to His two disciples, Andrew and John: "Come and see", the same words which, on another occasion, were addressed to Christ by people in distress "Come and see".

Then there is the other group of relationships which is defined by the commandment of Christ to follow Him, addressed to us throughout the ages, but in a particular way, to different people whom He met in the Gospel.

When we read the Gospel, one of the facts that is strikingly there, which we cannot avoid, is the sense that the Lord Christ was constantly, at every moment of His life, followed by crowds of people during the day; followed by His disciples when, having dismissed the crowd, He remained in a smaller circle of friends; followed, pursued indeed, at certain moments when He sought isolation and lonely prayer, as in the case when, having dismissed the crowd which He had fed in the wilderness, He retired for a nightly prayer and was sought out by Peter because others were seeking Him to follow Him. This element of following, this element of Christ being surrounded, at every moment and everywhere, is extremely clear in the Gospel.

And now, let us look into the Gospel and ask ourselves what happens to these crowds, to these people, why they followed, what they found. First of all the crowd: we see the crowd around the Lord; it is a complex crowd wherever we find it; there is a small circle of Apostles and of disciples; there is a group, greater or smaller, of people who have their own problems, whether physical suffering and illness, or moral problems and needs, who are hoping that they will receive an answer or the help they need; there are also those who travel along the same path to Jericho, to Jerusalem, towards Galilee and who, as it always was done and continues to be done in countries where people travel in comparative danger, tried to travel together, and, therefore, met Christ, not so much because they had an intention of meeting Him in particular, but because He was one of their fellow travellers. There were also people who had been sent by the Pharisees and the scribes, by the High Priest, people who had come to inquire and to find out; as I said, the crowd was always complex, and what do we find in the relationship between the Lord Christ and this crowd?

At certain moments, the Lord Christ speaks, He speaks with authority to all those round Him, giving, teaching. One of the clearest examples of that kind of relationship is the Sermon on the Mount: The Lord Christ retires a few paces away from the people and speaks; the same is true when He spoke from Peter's boat on the lake. But much more often, we have an impression of stations and movements: at certain moments, the crowd stops and there seems to be a discussion that involves a great many people, at other moments, Christ seems to be going on along His road and a few people continue the conversation or enter into another conversation.

In all these conversations, at all these moments, concrete individual situations are faced; Christ speaks to one person, directly and personally; what happens to the others?

This is important to us because, so often, we get muddled with the Gospel because of this. So often people say: "I read the Gospel, I cannot fulfil all it says and I do not know what to choose." To choose the easiest seems rather mean, to choose the hardest seems rather proud, and even the distinction between what is easy and what is difficult may be an insufferable problem, because the easiest thing may prove infinitely difficult, while at moments, things difficult may be achieved with ease. In this crowd that surrounded the Lord, He spoke to one man who had asked a question, and this question was answered directly, and the answer was destined for this particular man; in the crowd were other people who had the same problem or a similar one; they probably came alive and caught something of the answer; they continued to brood over it, to try to understand; they might have found their answer in the words of Christ; they may have found the answer in the process of recollection; they may also, after a certain time, have come up to Christ with another question as concrete but more limited perhaps, or wider; or turned another way because they had not understood in the words pronounced before, the answer that was given to them. But innumerable people heard these conversations and knew they were completely irrelevant to them: it was not their problem, it was not their interest, they had nothing to do with these questions, and they were quite legitimately hearing and not partaking in the process.

This happens to us constantly. There are passages of the Gospel that speak to us directly: either those passages which move us deeply, which, in the words of the pilgrims to Emmaus "make our heart burn within us" or, on the contrary, those passages which are offensive to us: those passages which we would reject if we had the courage and the intellectual integrity to do so. These two kinds of passages are a challenge, they point to the fact that we are not what we should be. Those passages are addressed to us, I would say, to the exclusion, for the moment, of those which appear to us as being an irrelevant conversation between the Lord and someone else. These crowds surrounded the Lord, the some accidentally, the others hopefully. On certain occasions, people in these crowds pressed hard on the Lord: they pressed hard not because it was a crowd, but because they longed to come close. Remember the woman with an issue of blood: she touched the hem of Christ's garment and the Lord asked: "Who has touched Me?" and the disciples could not understand the question, they said: "You are pressed on every side, how can you say that someone has touched You?"; obviously, on every side people touched Him, but they touched Him mechanically, they were objects pressed against Him. This woman was not an object pressed by the crowd against the Lord; it was a woman who had stretched out a hand, hoping for something, there was a relationship between Christ and her that was established in this act of hope and faith, this act of daring (because she did not dare, should not have acted as she did according to Jewish law). Among the people who surrounded Christ, there were also a certain number of men and women who had been the object of His miracles or else were longing for help.

You remember probably those lepers that followed Christ from afar off? Because between Him and them, there was all the law of purity and impurity, they had no right to come close and yet they were in the same position as this woman with an issue of blood. It was not physical distance that made them distant, it was not their coming nearer that made them close to Christ, it was their faith and their longing. They followed from afar off, appealing to Christ's mercy, and Christ turned to them and healed them. These might have followed or gone, and so often, we are told that, after a miracle of healing, of spiritual help, the one who received it followed Christ. Yet some were not allowed to — and this is also something which is important in this relationship between Christ and us, in this “I" and "Thou" relationship; some were simply allowed to follow, others were ordered or invited to, some were told: "Go home and tell everyone" preparing the ground for faith, being witnesses of what had happened to them personally; still, others, on the contrary, were commanded to go home and remain silent.

Here, again, is something which is of importance to us: So often, the Lord comes near us, and does something to us. He makes our soul alive, our heart warm, our intention clear, our body whole, and, then, He says: "Now, follow Me, I need you near Me for service or for witness"; in other cases He says: "go home". And so often, when the Lord Christ says: "Go", we answer: "No, I long to be with You, I do not want to be parted" and yet it is the only way in which we can do this service to Christ because, if He does not need us with Him for the sake of others, we should be prepared to go. There is a beautiful passage in the rule of St. Vincent de Paul, in which he says to his nuns: "Learn to abandon God for God", which means two things: "learn to abandon God for God's sake", it may also mean, as some other passages make us think, that anyone of these little ones, who are in need, are to be treated as Christ Himself. There is an old saying of the Desert: "if you have seen your brother, you have seen your God", and these are two ways in which we may be called to go away from the warmth, the deep spiritual prayerful experience in which we would delight, because it is not our delight that matters, it is God's service. It is not that God rejects us, but we can, in response for what He has done for us, serve Him by an act of sacrifice, of renunciation, not because renunciation, in itself, is a virtue or is good, but because He needs it. He needs it elsewhere and He has no use for us here, where someone else can do it. On other occasions, the Lord Christ commands us to go home and say nothing: this is also an important thing, I believe, to remember: so often, what God does to us benefits only our vanity and benefits nothing of God's or anyone else's; so often, it happens that God has come close to our soul, that we have perceived, known, discovered something, and then, we go round, telling of what God has done to us. The result more often than not is, at best, that people, knowing what we are, do not believe it; I say "at best", because then, at least, the honour of God and our vanity are protected; but, from time to time, if we are convincing enough, if we are on the borderline of those cases to whom anything may happen, people begin to give us glory: "Oh, how marvellous he must be... I never suspected it... God has spoken to him... God has healed... God has acted..." and the more, in the sort of deceitful humility which is ours, we say: "But of course, it has nothing to do with us, it is the Lord God", the more people continue to say: "You see, he has even acquired humility", and the result is that the centre of gravity is completely displaced from the Lord God to us. We become the miracle, we move about as a life-miracle. And God? Well, God is there, of course. He worked it. That is all right now, the miracle has become autonomous, it is there to be seen, to be admired, and, after a certain time, we grow quite easily into the habit of being a walking-miracle and we accept the reverence, the veneration or the good-will of people as something quite natural. More often, if we had kept quiet, it would have worked better; quite often, the moment we are about to say something, a voice says in us: "Keep quiet" and we do not: if we had kept quiet, something much more important might have happened; we might, in an act of awareness and of gratitude to God for what He has done for us, have begun to change and to be, to become, the kind of person for whom God legitimately, if I may put it that way, should work miracles; in an act of gratitude, we could improve and then, perhaps, there might have happened what the Gospel tells us about in the beginning of St. Matthew, after the Sermon on the Mount: people might have seen our good deeds and given glory to our Father which is in Heaven. And I think it is extremely important, when anything happens to us, inwardly or outwardly, to try and find out from the Lord Christ Himself, in prayer, in silence, and in becoming actively grateful (that is, more like the man described in the Gospel), what we need to be and through this discover whether we should speak or keep quiet only one never regrets having kept quiet; and one very often regrets having spoken.

IV

Now I would like to come back to the lepers that followed Christ from afar off; they are not the only men who followed Christ from afar off: apart from the other sick people who did not dare to approach Christ because of the Jewish law. There are three instances I can remember of this following from afar off: when Christ was taken, betrayed by Judas, in the garden, two of His disciples followed, both from afar off. John went first, John followed, apparently, quite close, Peter followed at a much greater distance: neither of them followed Christ to what was His destiny, they both dissociated themselves from Him. John followed, sure of impunity because he was known to the High Priest, and he came into the court of the High Priest's house, not as a disciple of Christ, but as a friend of the house. Peter knew no one, and he followed from afar off so as not to be in danger, for security's sake; he was seen by John around the gates of the place and, as John was a familiar of the house, he also was let in. You know how he fought for his security, three times he denied the Lord Christ "I do not know the Man." John did not deny. Peter did, but both were estranged from Christ up to a point; we cannot either measure or weigh up this estrangement, but we know that the relationship was re-established when, after the third denial, Peter turned towards the place where Christ was, and he met Christ's eyes, wept bitterly and walked out. Another occasion of following from afar off, we find in the case of the same John, in a quite new situation; after the Resurrection, Christ met His disciples on the Lake of Tiberias. He restored Peter to the old relationship and He commanded him to follow Him; and Peter cast a glance over his shoulder and saw that, probably with a certain uncertainty, John was coming along, not knowing whether he should come or not; and he asked the Lord: "What about him?" John, then, was prepared to follow, he did not know where to or how, but this time, he was not called; the call was addressed to Peter personally for reasons which are known to the Lord Christ, and here again, we meet the same problem as before or perhaps, the same answer: when Christ calls one man to follow, He calls him personally and everyone else can and must wait, wait to be called himself; we have no right to draw conclusions from the fact that Christ has said to Peter: "Follow Me." And, when Peter points out to John and says: "What about him?", Christ answers: "What is this to you? You — follow Me."

This brings me to the problem of the call of the disciples in general, and of those people who heard the call and accepted it, as well as those who heard and rejected the call. After their first meeting with the Lord Jesus the disciples went back to Galilee; there, John and Andrew and Peter and James and the others settled again in their usual occupation; and, after a certain time, a couple of months, if you reckon that the Lord Christ was 40 days in the wilderness, Christ passed them, walking along the shore, and this time, without ambiguity, sharply and clearly, He commanded them to leave all things and to follow. In the first place, the Lord Christ, when they had met Him, and discovered Him, each in his own way, but all with a great upheaval in the discovery... in the first place Christ had not commanded them to follow. The result of the meeting of John and Andrew with Him had consisted in their accepting Him as their Lord: otherwise, they would not have called Peter and James to meet Him as the Messiah, Nathanael would not have called Him "My Lord and my God" (Jn. 1. 49). One would have expected, in terms of human leadership, of action and efficiency, that Christ would take advantage of the clear conviction in which they were and the enthusiasm which it resulted in, but Christ sent them, home, not to speak or to do anything, simply to return to their usual occupation. And it is only when they have come back to, shall we say, normality, gone back to ordinary life, when emotion had subsided and conviction had remained, that the Lord Christ comes near and, this time, commands them to follow. We find the same in St. Matthew's report of the call of Levi (also called Matthew): he abandoned his tax gathering and followed.

All are called in the same way: a first meeting, and then a command; this command, addressed to all of us, implies several things: "Deny yourself, take up your cross and follow Me." And here is, perhaps, the most acute point that can help us understand the case of the rich young man and the case of the man who said: "Let me bury my father." These two cases, which I can remember, exemplify human refusal to follow Christ. The young man wanted to be perfect and he had fulfilled all that was duty, all that was of obligation, all that one could fulfil without the last act of sacrifice; when Christ says: "Now that you have fulfilled all these things, give away all your riches and follow Me." he could not do it. We may think that, if he had been poor, it would have been easier: no, because poverty does not depend on what you possess, but on the attachment which is yours, with regard to your possession; it is not the amount of wealth that makes a man rich or poor: St. John Chrysostom says that a man is rich when he is satisfied with what he has, and he is poor when he longs for what he has not. Whatever your wealth, if there is something you covet more than you enjoy what you possess, you are poor, because all that you have means nothing compared with what you have not. And it is this spirit of possession which is so important: whether wealth is great or not, it can stand between us and God; and this wealth is not, of necessity, material wealth: one can be separated from God by any kind of sense of being rich — intellectually, emotionally, religiously or secularly.

It is only those who are poor in spirit who are free and who cannot be prevented from being of the Kingdom and rejoicing in the Kingdom. Poverty of spirit, too, has got two sides — on the one hand, it is the awareness that we are utterly poor, that we possess nothing and that this "possessing nothing" is so radical and so complete that nothing can ever be possessed. Being is a gift of God, life is a gift of God, our body, and mind, and soul, our friends and surroundings, anything that is ours is a gift of God, which we can neither acquire from our own free will, apart from God, nor retain; and in that respect, we are completely destitute and always shall be,— and this could be a ground for utter despair: yet, it can also be a ground for freedom and joy, for, if it is true that none of these things which I am possessed of are mine, then it means that whatever I am in possession of is a gift of God which shows His concern, His love, His thoughtfulness for me at every moment. We lose all the world, but what we acquire is the certitude, the knowledge and direct and concrete experience of the love of God: if anything that I possess is mine, then it is not a sign of God's love; if nothing I possess is mine, then everything speaks and testifies to God's love and thoughtful attentive concern. And here is both freedom from all things which we possess, and joy — because what matters is not the gift, but the Giver; and we are free from the gift so that we can meet, face to face, the Giver ... and rejoice in this relationship.

The young man, called by the Lord Christ to abandon all things and follow Him, clung to these things, and these things stood between him and God, between him and Life, because he involved himself in a delusion. The relationship to things which we possess is given to us by so many parables of the Kingdom, but particularly by that of the pearl of great price: a man sells all that he possesses in order to buy the pearl of great price — it is a madness, how can this merchant do this, while all the aim of his activity is possession? This is just the change of mind, the radical change of mind which the Gospel calls "conversion" which gives new value to all the values of life. The Kingdom is the only thing which is worth possessing and it is worth losing everything for: yet the Kingdom itself is dispossession, complete freedom, possessing nothing but the Love of God, being, in this love and living by it.

The example of this call refused is the man who wanted to be allowed to bury his father. We usually think, and I have thought all my life I came to my senses a few days ago, that what it was just a question of going home and being present at the burial. Well, nothing in the Gospel allows us to think this. The father might have been dead, or he might be comparatively young; but what we constantly do is to postpone things because we want to bury our father, marry our daughter or do something else of the same kind: it may last twenty or thirty years to achieve it, but we have no time to follow Christ today, because our father may die in half a century. How can I abandon my home, my parents, my job, how can I abandon something useful which I am doing for God? I must first finish with this job, fulfil this vocation of mine, have done all that I am in charge of, and then, I will be free: never, because there will, always, be the father who sticks to life and who does not want to die until you are incapable of following Christ at all. And this is another aspect of the problem: the same attitude, no longer to richness or poverty, but to function in life, to activity, to vocation, to our meaning in life. There is no meaning to our life, unless we accept that the meaning of our life is this relationship with God, which is called following, which is called being with Christ and so on; all the rest, all these activities for Him may be activities beside Him. They may be a concern which bears a label which is religion, love of our neighbour, this or that, and yet have no other value except that they fetter us down and prevent us from the only real thing: a relationship. So we come again to what I mentioned a few minutes before, the words of Christ addressed to us: "Deny yourself, take up your cross and follow Me." Follow Me, deny yourself, reject all that there is in your life which is your connection with your enslavement to action or to possession, make yourself free, take up your cross and follow Me. We must remember that the cross of Christ was nothing of the romantic thing which we find in paintings, it was not, first of all, a form of torment, devised for Christ alone, it was something devised to punish an outstanding offence, it was the normal punishment of major criminals and the cross of Christ is a punishment for crime. The crowd that saw the procession of the three crosses from Jerusalem to Calvary did not think of heroes dying for their convictions, they thought simply of three more criminals that were being led to their punishment, and when Christ says to us that we should take up our cross we must realise that it has this penal sort of significance. This cross is not always the physical, actual crucifixion. It may be rejection, it may be social ostracism, it may be a great many things and, perhaps, we would see more meaning in it if we look at the three men who were crucified on Calvary: two of these men were, according to social terminology, criminals: robbers, thieves, murderers. One was the Lord Christ Himself, free from sin, the Incarnate Word of God. Look at the two thieves: both were condemned by human justice, and yet, how different their attitude is; the one, being confronted with Christ, perceived something that made him aware of the fact that he deserved his punishment while this Man was dying free from sin; the other one, confronted with the death of the Sinless, saw perhaps one more instance of human injustice. Speaking in terms of real justice, both could have said that no one had a right to condemn them. Remember the case of the women, taken in adultery: "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone." That might have been applied in the same way to these crucified with Christ: who had a right to condemn them? Who was without sin? It was the iniquity of human justice that had brought them there, because human justice has acted apart from the moral standards of men who had condemned. The one saw nothing but this iniquity, the other saw that the illegitimate, the unjust justice of men was fulfilling the Justice of God. The one turned to himself, stood self-condemned and could accept punishment from people who had no right to inflict it; the other did not stand self-condemned and therefore he saw only the injustice. And all the problem of our spiritual life and our life of relationship lies just in that: if we come to ourselves, if we see what we are, then we can accept whatever unjust iniquities are applied to us by other men who are no better than we are, because we all see the working of God's justice in the injustice of men. If we forget ourselves in that respect, then we will find nothing but human injustice and we will reject what comes our way.

This happens not only in major terms, but in minor terms at every moment: how often you will hear yourself and others say: "I would give anything to undo what I have done, to be forgiven, or to have this or that forgotten." What we expect is almost an angel, appearing to us and saying: "Do this, do such and such a thing" and it must, of course, be something grand and difficult. We are always in the spirit of Naaman, who was told by Elisha to go and bathe in the Jordan, and said: "Never, there are in Syria so many better rivers, why should I go into that dirty brook?" And then, his servant came up to him and said: "Do not be cross with us, but if he had asked you to do something difficult, would you have done it?—Of course — Well, then, why not do the easy thing?" And Naaman, who had common sense, bathed in the Jordan and was healed of his leprosy.

Well, what we expect so often is that something grand should be offered us, a sacrifice which would be worth the trouble, because we could, at least, admire ourselves for doing it; and instead of this, God asks someone to do something quite trivial to us, simply to be rude, unpleasant, disgraceful in his behaviour to us; and when it comes our way, we say: "Oh, no, that cannot be God; if it were an angel, yes; if it was something grand, yes; but he, her, they — and what do they do! We cannot possibly accept that as a just punishment, that cannot be from God!" And we miss our chance to accept what is our healing and to be true to our own words: "Anything, O Lord!” – instead of which we say: “Except what You send!"

Now, if we become aware of that, then the problem of justice and injustice become quite different in our life — because, then, we become aware, as the thief on the right hand of Christ, that God does work His justice through human injustice — provided we take it in the way in which St. Paul puts it: "For one who has faith, all things work unto salvation," and if they do not, it simply means that we have no faith, not the other way round.

After we have accepted all this comes the following — the following which may be the shy and tentative following of the crowd who listens, who may listen for a long time without hearing and, one day, hears the word that transforms a life; or the close pressing of the woman with an issue of blood; or the shy following from afar off; or the determined following of the disciples; and in all these cases, it is important to remember that this following is not simply a physical movement; it is not because we belong to a crowd that presses hard on Him that we are near Christ! The distance is bridged by our being at one with the Lord Christ, by acquiring the mind of Christ, by becoming what He wants us to be, by undergoing this transformation which hallows us on the way and, ultimately, makes us the life-members of His Body, which, on the one hand, bridges the gap between Him and us, making us part of the Body of Christ and, on the other hand, continues to keep alive this dialogue of "I" and "Thou"— so that we can go further and further, moving eternally, together with Christ, into the depth of all our relationships, through Him and in the Spirit, with the Father.

V (?)

At the end of my last talk, I said that we should begin with ourselves, taking into account what we are, who we are, and building up from this level — on the level which is really ours — to grow into the fullness of the stature of Christ. This first step into our spiritual life, to discover ourselves, or, at least, to accept what we are even before we have discovered it, is one of the most painful and difficult things, and it requires both sobriety and courage because, usually, we tend to divide our own personality into two very unequal halves: all that we find good, attractive and right, we call our real self; all that is unseemly, un-likable, all that we find ugly in our personality, we consider as blots, as something that has happened to us but which is not really us.

This is a point which St. Serafim of Sarov makes in one of his very few writings: "If you wish to use the material which is your own personality, you must accept all this material, in all its complexity, and accept any part of it as being really your own self - whether you judge it one way or another — the ugly and unpleasant features as well as those which appear pleasant to you."

This assumption of our total personality is not an easy thing; first of all, it requires insight and sobriety: we must be able to look at ourselves if not dispassionately (of which we are seldom capable), at least with all the honesty we are capable of; and we must do so with sobriety, that is appraising our various qualities, positive and negative, without passing any particular judgement of value about them, but just listing them, taking into account that that is the material of which we are made.

When I say that we should not pass any judgement at first, I have made a point which, I think, is important: there are qualities in us, both positive and negative, which we are not in a position to appraise rightly before they have brought fruit. You remember this passage in the Gospel, the parable in which the Lord Jesus tells us that a man had a field and had sown good seeds on it and, when it began to grow small blades the servants discovered that some of the blades looked terribly like tares, and they suggested weeding the field; the Lord forbade them, "lest," he said, "when weeding out the tares, you tear up also good blades.' There is a moment when the good and the evil in us can be confused: something may appear to be good which, later on, will develop obviously into something evil and there are also things which, at first, seem to be weeds, tares, which eventually will either prove good or serve their purpose and fade away.

It is very important to remember that we are incapable, in the state which we are at first, to pass a right judgement because we have no ground for right judgement: our experience is much too small and our ability to discern good from evil is blurred by our passions, by our lack of sobriety, by our lack of insight.

But also, there is something else which, I believe, is important: so often, we mistake for virtues things which are weaknesses in us and we take for vices strong sides of our character which appear to be evil simply because they are set up against situations which make them appear as such. If you take the Beatitudes, you will find that the meek are blessed, the humble are blessed, the peace-makers are blessed — but how far all this is from the kind of meekness which we find in cowardly people, in people who are incapable of standing firm on the ground of their convictions. How often we find that a person, whom we thought to be humble, is not humble at all but is only sheepish and afraid; how often we find that the people who appear to be peacemakers would make peace at any cost: at the cost of Truth, of Integrity; and one could take one by one all the virtues which are described in the Gospel and show that each of them has its counterpart in a caricature which is more evil than the opposite vice.

On the other hand, there are characteristics of ours which seem to be evil, which, if they remain such, if they remain unchanged, would possibly develop into ugliness in our personality (but) which, as a passing stage of our development, may be necessary. I have already quoted more than once a passage from Gandhi which I would like to quote again because it expresses in a few words more than I could express in many: having been accused of inconsistency because, in the early years of his activities, he had fostered strikes and violence in the South of India, he answered: "It was not inconsistency; these men were cowards, I taught them violence that they might overcome their cowardice and, when they had overcome cowardice, I taught them love that they should overcome violence." And, in many cases, both in education and in the development of our spiritual life, if we remember this principle, we would avoid important mistakes: we would not unnerve either ourselves or others because we confuse the nerves people have with potentialities of evil.

And so, that is the beginning: to look at ourselves — not to judge ourselves any more than we judge others, or, rather, not any more than we should judge others, which is quite different, and start with ourselves as if we were raw material. This is the attitude which, say, a sculptor would take to the material which offers itself to him. If he wanted to make a statue at low cost of effort, to use a material which would be perfectly obedient to his hands, he would choose clay: then he can fashion anything, there is no effort implied, there is no risk either because it will neither break nor resist — and yet the result, however adequate to his intention, will be nothing but a little piece of fashioned clay; on the contrary, if an artist wishes to work in marble, in hard wood, in granite, in all the varieties of materials which the world offers him, he will take into account not only his vision of the final result but, also, the concrete possibilities of this material: one does not carve in wood what one could make out of granite or out of marble and vice versa, because each material has got potentialities of beauty which exclude certain other possibilities, and it would be quite foolish if one tried to achieve in one material what it is possible to achieve only in another. This makes reproduction in one material, when a piece of work was made out of another, impossible; but it also means a fight, a tension in the mind of the maker between his intention and the concrete possibilities which are offered. Yet this very tension, this very struggle is essential and, if he wishes to achieve something which will be great and abiding, he will choose a material which imposes rules on him, but which, as a result, also brings out with strength, with power, the meanings he wishes to express.

This is true also of ourselves: we possess a body, we possess a mind, a heart, we possess a will, we possess all sorts of more concrete qualities and each of them must be taken into account when we wish to achieve a complete personality in the image of the Lord Christ.

There are things which we cannot achieve at a certain stage, which will be achieved later; there are things which will never be achieved by one person, but will be achieved by others; and this is both meaningful and irrelevant; irrelevant in the sense that it does not matter whether I cannot achieve what I am not meant to be: yet it does matter greatly that I should achieve what I am supposed to be.

Now, having taken into account the fact that we are given a certain kind of material, we must take into account a few more things: one is, that God knew what He was doing when He granted us this material, He gave a small piece of His created world for us to possess completely; He delivered it into our own hands; we can make it the Kingdom of God; we can bring it to God Himself as a more or less perfect offering (but as an offering which God always accepts), or else, we can refuse it. This small territory of the total cosmos, of the whole created world, over which we have all power, which we can take out of God's purpose, is this personality of ours — soul, body and spirit — and therefore, whatever work we undertake, whatever our achievements or whatever our failures, it is always meaningful, it is always working for or against the final Kingdom of God — either that it should be achieved or that it should be destroyed, at least in our own self.

Another thing we must remember is that, however humble the possibilities which are ours, however inconspicuous we may be, God has created us by an act of choice and of will; each of us was called by the creative Word of God and God did not call out of non-being an anonymous "someone" to discover later who he was and what he was; each of us was already known before God pronounced the creative word; each of us was willed into being by God in the concreteness of our existence. Parents may wish to have a child, they are ready to receive whoever Providence will send. They may hope it will be a boy or a girl, but this is all. The Lord God, on the other hand, commanded us, each of us, to be what we are; He called each of us into existence, in our complete, concrete reality and, therefore, at the root of all our existence, there is the will of God Who willed us, each of us, personally, and the love of God was there before we were, waiting for us, meeting us, greeting us in the world. Again, at the root of our being, there is a unique relationship between Him and us, and we can each, within the capabilities which are ours, within the qualities of soul and body which are ours, achieve the full stature of Christ in us.

Now, once we have accepted this, we must begin to act. Where are we to begin to act, according to the Gospel? It seems to me that the Lord Christ takes us in the very depth of our unworthiness and offers to us, at our lowest possible ebb, possibilities of growth and, already, of life which is movement and not only stagnation. Whatever complex of qualities we are possessed of, basically we are selfish, self-centred, "I" is the word that sums up the centre of the world for me. It may be wrong, it is certainly wrong, but it is the fact, even if we try to disguise it; and, very often, when we love someone else with all our strength and power and passion, it is again another expression of the same reality of "I".