from this very minute

.... Once the Elder was invited aboard a frigate which came from St. Petersburg. The Captain of the frigate was a highly educated man, who had been sent to America by order of the Emperor to make an inspection of all the colonies. There were more than twenty-five officers with the Captain, and they also were educated men. In the company of this group sat a monk of a hermitage, small in stature and wearing very old clothes. All these educated conversationalists were placed in such a position by his wise talks that they did not know how to answer him. The Captain himself used to say, 'We are lost for an answer before him.'"

"Father Herman gave them all one general question, 'Gentlemen, what do you love above all, and what will each of you wish for your happiness?' Various answers were offered.... Some desired wealth, others glory, some a beautiful wife, still others a beautiful ship he would captain; and so forth in the same vein. 'Is it not true,' Father Herman said to them concerning this, 'that all your various wishes can bring us to one conclusion -- that each of you desires that which in his own understanding he considers the best, and which is most worthy of his love?' They all answered, 'Yes, that is so!'"

"He then continued, 'Would you not all say, is not that which is best, above all, and surpassing all, and that which by preference is most worthy of love, the Very Lord, our Jesus Christ, who created us, adorned us with such ideals, gave life to all, sustains everything, nurtures and loves all, who is Himself Love and most beautiful of all men? Should we not then love God above every thing, desire Him more than anything, and search Him out?'"

"All said, 'Why, yes! That's self-evident!' Then the Elder asked, 'But do you love God?' They all answered, "Certainly we love God. How can we not love God?' 'And I a sinner have been trying for more than forty years to love God, but I cannot say that I love Him completely,' Father Herman protested to them. He then began to demonstrate to them the way in which we should love God. 'If we love someone,' he said, 'we always remember them; we try to please them. Day and night our heart is concerned with the subject. Is that the way you gentlemen love God? Do you turn to Him often? Do you always remember Him? Do you always pray to Him and fulfil His holy commandments?' They had to admit that they had not! 'For our own good, and for our own fortune,' concluded the Elder, 'let us at least promise ourselves that, from this very minute, we will try to love God more than anything and to fulfil His holy will!' Without any doubt this conversation was imprinted in the hearts of the listeners for the rest of their lives...

- from The Life of St. Herman, American Missionary (Originally published in 1894 by the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church. Translated into English by Archpriest Vladimir S. Borichevsky
and republished by the Orthodox Church in America)

a peculiar moral urgency

While reading an article recently I came across a remark by Lionel Trilling, noting "the moral urgency, the sense of crisis and the concern with personal salvation that mark the existence of American intellectuals" and I thought: bingo! Only not so much intellectuals or simply intellectuals as much as American Christians informed by the ambient
religious culture.. It may be hard for some Americans to understand, but that moral urgency and sense of crisis and absolute priority for personal salvation are not the only ways in which Christians can and have lived out their faith. These particular American themes are the roots of the religious and spiritual intrusiveness, of evangelical boosterism, of denominationalism as team sport, of the perverse commodification of faith and its transmogrification through advertising and marketing and the application of sales techniques into the tchotchke of this religious market-place.

All Saints

We have come to the end of a very long liturgical cycle, stretching back to the beginning of the pre-Lenten period, even to the Sunday of Zacchaeus in early February. The Sunday of All Saints is the fulfilment and fruition of the story of our salvation. If we look back from the perspective of All Saints to Pentecost, the Ascension, the Paschal season, Pascha and Bright Week, Holy Week, Great Lent and the preparation for Great Lent - it is a good third of the year! - we can see that everything that leads up to today's celebration of sanctity and the saints generally has had as its goal the creation of circumstances and persons capable of holiness, of our renewal and the renewal of the world we live in. The incarnate life, ministry, passion, death, resurrection, ascension and glorification the Lord are the step by step reconnaissance mission whereby our fallen, humiliated and enslaved humanity is liberated and renewed. The outpouring of the Holy Spirit is the power of this new life in Christ in the lives of believers and through believers passes actively into the community and world around us. We can say that the Son of God became incarnate in order to die, and He died in order to rise again, and He rose again in order to ascend back to the Father, and He ascended to the Father in order that the Holy Spirit would be sent, and the Holy Spirit was sent so that we might be filled with this new, glorious and grace-filled life in Christ.

The short-hand for the story of our salvation, expanding the famous phrase of St Athanasius, is that the Son of God became man so that man could share by grace in the communion of the divine persons of the Holy Trinity. Or we could say that all that has taken place for us - what the theologians call the economy of salvation - has taken place so that saints might walk among us and so that we may be numbered among them. The point of everything is holiness.

never fully comprehensible...

.... I see trees, the wood, as the best analogue of prose fiction. All novels are also, in some way, exercises in attaining freedom - even when, at an extreme, they deny the possibility of its existence. Some such process of retreat from the normal world - however much the theme and surface is to be of the normal world - is inherent in any act of artistic creation, let alone that specific kind of writing that deals in imaginary situations and characters. And a part of that retreat must always be into a 'wild', or ordinarily repressed and socially hidden self: into a place always a complexity beyond daily (or artistic) reality, never fully comprehensible, mappable, explicable, eternally more potential than realized, yet where no one will ever penetrate as far as we have. It is our passage, our mystery alone, however miserable the account that is brought out for the world to see or hear or read second-hand.

- John Fowles, The Trees

the warmth of the heart

The meaning of life is frighteningly simple: to strive always and in every circumstance to preserve the warmth of the heart, knowing that it will be yet needed by someone, that we are always yet needed by someone.

- Sergei Fudel