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August 10 - November 2, 2019
that of chrismation (or confirmation)—has always been an integral part of the baptismal liturgy. For it is not so much another sacrament as the very fulfillment of baptism, its “confirmation” by the Holy Spirit.
Confirmation is thus the personal Pentecost of man, his entrance into the new life in the Holy Spirit, which is the true life of the Church. It is his ordination as truly and fully man, for to be fully man is precisely to belong to the Kingdom of God.
The whole man is now made the temple of God,21 and his whole life is from now on a liturgy. It is here, at this moment, that the pseudo-Christian opposition of the “spiritual” and the “material,” the “sacred” and the “profane,” the “religious” and the “secular” is denounced, abolished, and revealed as a monstrous lie about God and man and the world.
To be truly man means to be fully oneself. The confirmation is the confirmation of man in his own, unique “personality.” It is, to use again the same image, his ordination to be himself, to become what God wants him to be, what he has loved in me from all eternity.
Confirmation is the opening of man to the wholeness of divine creation, to the true catholicity of life.
It is only in the light of baptism that we can understand the sacramental character attached by the Orthodox Church to penance. In its juridical deviation, sacramental theology explained this sacrament in terms of sheer “juridical” power to absolve sins, a power “delegated” by Christ to the priest. But this explanation has nothing to do with the original meaning of penance in the Church, and with its sacramental nature.
The sin of all sins—the truly “original sin”—is not a transgression of rules, but, first of all, the deviation of man’s love and his alienation from God.
this is the only real sin, and in it all sins become natural, inevitable. This sin destroys the true life of man. It deviates life’s course from its only meaning and direction. And in Christ this sin is forgiven, not in the sense that God now has “forgotten” it and pays no attention to it, but because in Christ man has returned to God, and has returned to God because he has loved him and found in him the only true object of love and life. And God has accepted man and—in Christ—reconciled him with himself. Repentance is thus the return of our love, of our life, to God, and this return is
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And yet sin is still in us and we constantly fall away from the new life we have received. The fight of the new Adam against the old Adam is a long and painful one, and what a naive oversimplification it is to think, as some do, that the “salvation” they experience in revivals and “decisions for Christ,” and which result in moral righteousness, soberness, and warm philanthropy, is the whole of salvation, is what God meant when he gave his Son for the life of the world.
how often the “moral” Christians are precisely those who never feel, never experience this sadness, because their own “experience of salvation,” the feeling of “being saved” fills them with self-satisfaction; and whoever has been “satisfied” has received already his reward26 and cannot thirst and hunger27 for that total transformation and transfiguration of life which alone makes “saints.”
It is indeed after baptism and because of it, that the reality of sin can be recognized in all its sadness, and true repentance becomes possible.
The sacrament of penance is not, therefore, a sacred and juridical “power” given by God to men. It is the power of baptism as it lives in the Church. From baptism it receives its sacramental character. In Christ all sins are forgiven once and for all, for he is himself the forgiveness of sins, and there is no need for any “new” absolution. But there is indeed the need for us who constantly leave Christ and excommunicate ourselves from his life, to return to him, to receive again and again the gift which in him has been given once and for all. And the absolution is the sign that this return has
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the sacrament of penance is not a repetition of baptism, but our return to the “newness of life” which God gave to us once and for all.
Yet in a more precise way the Church calls sacraments those decisive acts of its life in which this transforming grace is confirmed as being given, in which the Church through a liturgical act identifies itself with and becomes the very form of that gift.
We do not even remember today that marriage is, as everything else in “this world,” a fallen and distorted marriage, and that it needs not to be blessed and “solemnized”—after a rehearsal and with the help of the photographer—but restored. This restoration, furthermore, is in Christ, and this means in his life, death, resurrection, and ascension to heaven, in the pentecostal inauguration of the “new aeon,” in the Church as the sacrament of all this.
As long as we visualize marriage as the concern of those alone who are being married, as something that happens to them and not to the whole Church, and, therefore, to the world itself, we shall never understand the truly sacramental meaning of marriage:
It is significant that whereas in the West Mary is primarily the Virgin, a being almost totally different from us in her absolute and celestial purity and freedom from all carnal pollution, in the East she is always referred to and glorified as Theotokos, the Mother of God, and virtually all icons depict her with the Child in her arms. There exist, in other words, two emphases in mariology, which, although they do not necessarily exclude one another, lead to two different visions of Mary’s place in the Church.
But what is this joy about? Why, in her own words, shall “all generations call me blessed”?3 Because in her love and obedience, in her faith and humility, she accepted to be what from all eternity all creation was meant and created to be: the temple of the Holy Spirit, the humanity of God. She accepted to give her body and blood—that is, her whole life—to be the body and blood of the Son of God, to be mother in the fullest and deepest sense of this word, giving her life to the Other and fulfilling her life in him. She accepted the only true nature of each creature and all creation: to place
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In fact, however, all our attempts to find the “place of woman” in society (or in the Church) instead of exalting her, belittle woman, for they imply too often a denial of her specific vocation as woman.
the relation between God and the world, between God and Israel, his chosen people, and finally between God and the cosmos restored in the Church, is expressed in the Bible in terms of marital union and love? This is a double analogy. On the one hand we understand God’s love for the world and Christ’s love for the Church because we have the experience of marital love, but on the other hand marital love has its roots, its depth and real fulfillment in the great mystery of Christ and his Church: “But I speak concerning Christ and the Church.”
True obedience is thus true love for God, the true response of Creation to its Creator. Humanity is fully humanity when it is this response to God, when it becomes the movement of total self-giving and obedience to him.
The man proposes, the woman accepts. This acceptance is not passivity, blind submission, because it is love, and love is always active. It gives life to the proposal of man, fulfills it as life, yet it becomes fully love and fully life only when it is fully acceptance and response.
For man can be truly man—that is, the king of creation, the priest and minister of God’s creativity and initiative—only when he does not posit himself as the “owner” of creation, and submits himself—in obedience and love—to its nature as the bride of God, in response and acceptance. And woman ceases to be just a “female” when, totally and unconditionally accepting the life of the Other as her own life, giving herself totally to the Other, she becomes the very expression, the very fruit, the very joy, the very beauty, the very gift of our response to God, the one whom, in the words of the Song,
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Tradition calls Mary the new Eve.9 She did what the first Eve failed to do. Eve failed to be a woman. She took the initiative. She “proposed,” and she became “female”—the instrument of procreation, “ruled over” by man.10 She made herself, and also the man whose “eve” she was, the slaves of her “femininity” and the whole of life a dark war of sexes in which “possession” is in fact the violent and desperate desire to kill the shameful lust that never dies. But Mary “took no initiative.” In love and obedience she expected the initiative of the Other. And when it came, she accepted it, not
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recognition of the Virgin Mary as the goal and the fulfillment of the whole history of salvation, of that history of love and obedience, of response and expectation. She is the true daughter of the Old Testament, its last and most beautiful flower. The Orthodox Church rejects the dogma of the Immaculate Conception precisely because it makes Mary a miraculous “break” in this long and patient growth of love and expectation, of this “hunger for the living God” which fills the Old Testament.
Motherhood is the fulfillment of womanhood because it is the fulfillment of love as obedience and response. It is by giving herself that love gives life, becomes the source of life. One does not love in order to have children. Love needs no justification; it is not because it gives life that love is good: it is because it is good that it gives life.
She is not mother “in spite” of her virginity. She reveals the fullness of motherhood because her virginity is the fullness of love.
She is the fullness of love accepting the coming of God to us—giving life to him, who is the Life of the world. And the whole creation rejoices in her, because it recognizes through her that the end and fulfillment of all life, of all love is to accept Christ, to give him life in ourselves. And there should be no fear that this joy about Mary takes anything from Christ, diminishes in any way the glory due to him and him alone. For what we find in her and what constitutes the joy of the Church is precisely the fullness of our adoration of Christ, of acceptance and love for him.
the sacrament of matrimony gives marriage a new meaning; it transforms, in fact, not only marriage as such but all human love.
the early Church apparently did not know of any separate marriage service. The “fulfillment” of marriage by two Christians was their partaking together of the Eucharist.
Each family is indeed a kingdom, a little church, and therefore a sacrament of and a way to the Kingdom.
even when it has been lost, and lost again a thousand times, still if two people stay together, they are in a real sense king and queen to each other. And after forty odd years, Adam can still turn and see Eve standing beside him, in a unity with himself which in some small way at least proclaims the love of God’s Kingdom.
Then secondly, the glory and the honor is that of the martyr’s crown. For the way to the Kingdom is the martyria—bearing witness to Christ.19 And this means crucifixion and suffering. A marriage which does not constantly crucify its own selfishness and self‑sufficiency, which does not “die to itself” that it may point beyond itself, is not a Christian marriage. The real sin of marriage today is not adultery or lack of “adjustment” or “mental cruelty.” It is the idolization of the family itself, the refusal to understand marriage as directed toward the Kingdom of God.
It is not the lack of respect for the family, it is the idolization of the family that breaks the modern family so easily, making divorce its almost natural shadow. It is the identification of marriage with happiness and the refusal to accept the cross in it.
it is the presence of God which is the death of the marriage as something only “natural.” It is the cross of Christ that brings the self-sufficiency of nature to its end.
Christ is to be the very essence of life together. He is the wine of the new life of the children of God, and communion in it will proclaim how, by getting older and older in this world, we are growing younger and younger in the life which has no evening.
what both clericalism and secularism—the former being, in fact, the natural father of the latter—have made us forget is that to be priest is from a profound point of view the most natural thing in the world. Man was created priest of the world, the one who offers the world to God in a sacrifice of love and praise and who, through this eternal eucharist, bestows the divine love upon the world.
Christ is the one true Priest because he is the one true and perfect man. He is the new Adam, the restoration of that which Adam failed to be. Adam failed to be the priest of the world, and because of this failure the world ceased to be the sacrament of the divine love and presence, and became “nature.”
Christ revealed the essence of priesthood to be love and therefore priesthood to be the essence of life. He died the last victim of the priestly religion, and in his death the priestly religion died and the priestly life was inaugurated. He was killed by the priests, by the “clergy,” but his sacrifice abolished them as it abolished “religion.” And it abolished religion because it destroyed that wall of separation22 between the “natural” and the “supernatural,”
Therefore, no vocation in this world can fulfill itself as priesthood. And thus there must be the one whose specific vocation is to have no vocation, to be all things to all men,24 and to reveal that the end and the meaning of all things are in Christ.
The meaning, the essence and the end of all vocation is the mystery of Christ and the Church. It is through the Church that each one of us finds that the vocation of all vocations is to follow Christ in the fullness of his priesthood: in his love for man and the world, his love for their ultimate fulfillment in the abundant life25 of the Kingdom.
Christianity proclaims that Christ died for the life of the world, and not for an “eternal rest” from it.
Christianity, with its message offering fullness of life, has contributed more than anything else to the liberation of man from the fears and the pessimism of religion. Secularism, in this sense, is a phenomenon within the Christian world, a phenomenon impossible without Christianity. Secularism rejects Christianity insofar as Christianity has identified itself with the “old religion” and is forcing upon the world those “explanations” and “doctrines” of death and life which Christianity has itself destroyed.
the religious success of secularism is so great that it leads some Christian theologians to “give up” the very category of “transcendence,” or in much simpler words, the very idea of “God.” This is the price we must pay if we want to be “understood” and “accepted” by modern man, proclaim the Gnostics of the twentieth century.
The purpose of Christianity is not to help people by reconciling them with death, but to reveal the Truth about life and death in order that people may be saved by this Truth. Salvation, however, is not only not identical with help, but is, in fact, opposed to it. Christianity quarrels with religion and secularism not because they offer “insufficient help,” but precisely because they “suffice,” because they “satisfy” the needs of men. If the purpose of Christianity were to take away from man the fear of death, to reconcile him with death, there would be no need for Christianity, for other
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Christianity is not reconciliation with death. It is the revelation of death, and it reveals death because it is the revelation of Life. Christ is this Life. And only if Christ is Life is death what Christianity proclaims it to be, namely the enemy to be destroyed,3 and not a “mystery” to be explained. Religion and secularism, by explaining death, give it a “status,” a rationale, make it “normal.” Only Christianity proclaims it to be abnormal and, therefore, truly horrible.
It is not the immorality or the crimes of man that reveal him as a fallen being; it is his “positive ideal”—religious or secular—and his satisfaction with this ideal. This fall, however, can be truly revealed only by Christ, because only in Christ is the fullness of life revealed to us, and death, therefore, becomes “awful,” the very fall from life, the enemy. It is this world (and not any “other world”), it is this life (and not some “other life”) that were given to man to be a sacrament of the divine presence, given as communion with God, and it is only through this world, this life, by
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It is when Life weeps at the grave of the friend, when it contemplates the horror of death, that the victory over death begins.
The modern minister tends to become not only an “assistant” to the medical doctor, but a “therapist” in his own right. All kinds of techniques of pastoral therapy, hospital visiting, care of the sick—which fill the catalogues of theological seminaries—are a good indication of this.
We must discover the unchanging, yet always contemporary, sacramental vision of man’s life, and therefore of his suffering and disease—the vision that has been the Church’s, even if we Christians have forgotten or misunderstood it.
