For the Life of the World

by Alexander Schmemann

These issues are none other than secularism—the progressive and rapid alienation of our culture, of its very foundations,

The world is a fallen world because it has fallen away from the awareness that God is all in all.

Things treated merely as things in themselves destroy themselves because only in God have they any life.

The sin was not that man neglected his religious duties. The sin was that he thought of God in terms of religion, i.e., opposing Him to life.

The fall is not that he preferred world to God, distorted the balance between the spiritual and material, but that he made the world material, whereas he was to have transformed it into “life in God,” filled with meaning and spirit.

But it is the Christian gospel that God did not leave man in his exile, in the predic...

Christianity, however, is in a profound sense the end of all religion.

Religion is needed where there is a wall of separation between God and man. But Christ who is both God and man has broken down the wall between man and God. He has inaugurated a new life, not a new religion.

And in Him was the end of “religion,” because He himself was the Answer to all religion, to all human hunger for God, because in Him the life that was lost by man—and which could only be symbolized, signified, asked for in religion—was restored to man.

Christianity does not condemn the world. The world has condemned itself when on Calvary it condemned the One who was its true self.

It meant an action by which a group of people become something corporately which they had not been as a mere collection of individuals —a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Thus the Church itself is a leitourgia, a ministry, a calling to act in this world after the fashion of Christ, to bear testimony to Him and His kingdom.

The journey begins when Christians leave their homes and beds. They leave, indeed, their life in this present and concrete world, and whether they have to drive fifteen miles or walk a few blocks, a sacramental act is already taking place, an act which is the very condition of everything else that is to happen. For they are now on their way to constitute the Church, or to be more exact, to be transformed into the Church of God. They have been individuals, some white, some black, some poor, some rich, they have been the “natural” world and a natural community. And now they have been called to “come together in one place,” to bring their lives, their very “world” with them and to be more than what they were: a new community with a new life.

we never get anywhere because we never leave any place behind us.

For the Gospel is not only a “record” of Christ’s resurrection; the Word of God is the eternal coming to us of the Risen Lord, the very power and joy of the resurrection.

Man is a sacrificial being, because he finds his life in love, and love is sacrificial:

The Church is all those who have been accepted into the eucharistic life of Christ.

The Church in its separation from “this world,” on its journey to heaven, remembers the world, remembers all men, remembers the whole of creation, takes it in love to God.

What is “supernatural” here, in this world, is revealed as “natural” there. And it is always in order to lead us “there” and to make us what we are that the Church fulfills

Adam is again introduced into Paradise, taken out of nothingness and crowned king of creation. Everything is free, nothing is due and yet all is given. And, therefore, the greatest humility and obedience is to accept the gift, to say yes—in joy and gratitude.

The modern world has relegated joy to the category of “fun” and “relaxation.”

“Through the Cross joy came into the whole world”—and not just to some men as their personal and private joy.

Is not the whole life of the Church a constant remembrance of the death and resurrection of Christ?

Easter is not a commemoration of an event, but—every year—the fulfillment of time itself, of our real time.

our eyes have seen salvation and a light which will never fail. And because of this, the time of this world is now pregnant with new life.

But God revealed and offers us eternal Life and not eternal rest.

No wonder that such an understanding of baptism led to a similar narrowing of the baptismal liturgy. From an act of the whole Church, involving the whole cosmos, it became a private ceremony, performed in a corner of the church

in this world in which right now some ten million people are in concentration camps because they failed to understand the “only way to universal happiness,” in this world the “demonic” reality is not a myth.

How could we then speak of “fight” when the very set-up of our churches must, by definition, convey the idea of softness, comfort, peace?

the Christian knows, rather, that Christ is this reality. In its self-sufficiency the world and all that exists in it has no meaning. And as long as we live after the fashion of this world, as long, in other words, as we make our life an end in itself, no meaning and no goal can stand, for they are dissolved in death.

believe in Christ is to repent—to change radically the very “mind” of our life, to see it as sin and death.

And to believe in Him is to accept the joyful revelation that in Him forgiveness and reconciliation have been given.

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.

This is why the whole creation, the whole Church—and not only women—find the expression of their response and obedience to God in Mary the Woman, and rejoice in her.

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, the king will bring into his chambers, saying: “Thou art all fair, my love, there is no spot in thee”

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.

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.

by getting older and older in this world, we are growing younger and younger in the life which has no evening.

Our secular world “respects” clergy as it “respects” cemeteries: both are needed, both are sacred, both are out of life.

it abolished religion because it destroyed that wall of separation between the “natural” and the “supernatural,” the “profane” and the “sacred,” the “this-worldly” and the “other-worldly”—which was the only justification and raison d’etre of religion.

He revealed that all things, all nature have their end, their fulfillment in the Kingdom; that all things are to be made new by love.

The world does not want religion and religion does not want Christianity.

Secularism, in this sense, is a phenomenon within the Christian world,

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.

Christianity quarrels with religion and secularism not because they offer “insufficient help,” but precisely because they “suffice,” because they “satisfy” the needs of men.

The dead cannot glorify God.

health has a limit, and it is death.

The Church does not come to restore health in this man, simply to replace medicine when medicine has exhausted its own possibilities. The Church comes to take this man into the Love, the Light and the Life of Christ. It comes not merely to “comfort” him in his sufferings, not to “help” him, but to make him a martyr, a witness to Christ in his very sufferings.

The Church is the entrance into the risen life of Christ; it is communion in life eternal, “joy and peace in the Holy Spirit.”

Church is mission and that to be mission is its very essence, its very life.