To Always Desire to Know God

 Another ecclesial union, a gathering expressed in the icon is that of mankind and angels...

Every liturgy we celebrate is not just a gathering of humans but also of angels, we sinned against the good angels when we listened to the fallen angels and we therefore need to be reconciled to the good angels for not listening to them. .

According to St Maximus the Confessor, Christ reintroduced us to the good angels when ascending into heaven he passed through all nine ranks of angels and reintroduced us to the angels saying "I forgive them so you must forgive them" .

So one might ask why one needs all this complexity and richness? Is not the Christian life just between me and my God?

We need this communionality, not just of people, but of angels and all this stuff because we're made in God's image and God is a Trinity, God is a community. We are in God's image and likeness as a community rather than as isolated individuals. And this Trinitarian source of everything in this Icon is indicated at the very top of this icon where we see a single source of light seperating into three rays...as an aside but an imporant sort of aside, the heart of this partial hidden sphere at the top is of a dark blue and this symbolizes that God in His essence is entirely uknowable, even in the age to come we will never know God in His essence. He is always the Creator and we are always the creation. However in the outer edges we see white light and this symbolizes God's outgoing grace, His knowability.

I've been married to my wife for about twenty years and I know her but I also don't know her, the day I think I know her, I've lost her. I got to keep reminding myself here's a profound mystery and to get to know her through her energies, but at the heart of my wife made in God's image is a pround mystery.

The more we know this, we'll want to bow down and kiss each other's feet, because before us we have an awesome creature.

So we can say that Christians aren't pantheists, we don't say everything is god, rather we are panentheists, we say "God is in everything"

+ Iconographer Aidan Hart, 'From Genesis to Jerusalem' - Talk on a new icon of creation (talk & panel conversation), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ugxxxz2vAU&t=2094s , fromInstitute for Orthodox Christian Studies Cambridge Youtube ( https://www.youtube.com/@institutefororthodoxchrist517 )

Hope of the Resurrection

"...the very accomplishment of a liturgical celebration of the mystery of the resurrection floods the light of hope into our hearts, which produces generosity. It is the person who does not hope, and is tethered to temporality, who concludes he might as well eat, drink, and be merry if this really is all there is. If we are really only flickering bits of consciousness that will be snuffed out tomorrow, we might as well focus on the little pleasure we can squeeze out of today. (How simple life must be for a hedonist!) 

But hope in the resurrection allows us to take the proper measure of our brief time in this world, and this does not make us neglect our neighbor, it stirs up greater generosity. We have seen this in the lives of many mystics. The saint with a soul soaring upward into heaven does not forget the world; to the contrary, he or she is in the most radically free position to transform it. 

Chesterton said his first attractions to Christianity came when he realized that Christians were the only ones to preach the paradox that one must be “enough of a pagan to die for the world, and enough of a Christian to die to it.” 

Hope allows us to love the world radically, without practical calculation or cost analysis. Hope gives courage. Hope gives fortitude. Hope lets us love recklessly."

+ Dr David Fagerberg, "Liturgical Mysticism", Steubenville : Emmaus Academic, 2019. 122.