Facing “reality” in the experience of Metropolitan Anthony
There are two realities: 0ne, the material world that is perceived by our senses. the material world does not pass away, does not die, the mountains, the oceans etc…Inert, soulless things exit; those do not vanish by themselves, it is felt that the creation is eternal and material things are perpetual. Hence, the achievement of Civilization marking the passage of time, of great personalities, of their power, that changed the face of the Universe. Paradoxically, we feel that the planet earth is eternal and bare the witness to our power negative or positive!
On the other hand, part of the creation dies like plants and animals and among them Human beings. To a certain degree animals feel death but human beings, who are endowed with consciousness, long to an eternal life. Death-likewise is the absence- is the deprivation, from the sign of existence of the one we usually dealt with, with our senses. The visible sign is important to be subscribed in reality, but it vanishes and the essential stays in the memory tormenting. Thus we realize that the essential is invisible for the eyes and we repeat with Saint-Exupéry in his book the Little Prince :” one cannot see well except with the heart ;the essential is not visible to the eyes”. God always existed, but we see Him through our realities. When the time has come He sent his Son to make us aware of His love with whom he created the world and us! The world will never vanish because it is a sign of the eternal Love of the Creator. The reality of the matter is the visible reality the God has given men to survive materially, physically .The visible reality is a sign from God, but it does not reveal who He is.
Man is created to the image of God and it is imprinted in his soul, in his likeness having the potential of loving. Now, men have a soul, a memory, a consciousness, and freedom. In his image, means that man was created free and loving. And God tested his fidelity by commanding him to obey, not eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The couple used their freedom to turn away from God. After the sin, this likeness is not deleted, but it is there in the depth of our soul in our hearts. Nature of the human being remained godly but it is vulnerable. Death is the price of the sin .Men being free and weak, there is a need to reinforce that image of Christ all mighty loving. What is the commandment of Christ “Love one another as I have loved you“! Notice,it is not a negative commandment , it is as positive order. Christ came to resurrect this capacity of love that is our godly reality .. The reality of mankind is that the beauty of love will give them eternal life and trample death, chase away fear and save the world.
But what is the sin that Adam committed?
The rupture of the disobedience of the human couple:‘Love is to keep the commandment”. He believed in his own power, disobeying the commandment of God, thus breaking the harmony that love allowed men to dwell in the presence of God. The human couple turned away from God and God respecting their freedom chased them away from his presence. The presence of God is life and the absence of God giver of life is death , the human couple have known death: love is the relation that the human couple enjoyed in Heaven . The absence of love between the Human Couple and God in the sense that the deprivation of the reality of the presence of God almighty powerful and giver of Life, is death.
To restore this relation of the only truth of God , God sent His Son through Mary the mother of God who did not turn her back to God as the angel said : Luke 1:30 -38
And in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee, named Nazareth,
27 To a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary.
28 And the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.
29 And when she saw him, she was troubled at his saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be.
30 And the angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with God.
31 And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name JESUS.
32 He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David:
33 And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end.
34 Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?
35 And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.
36 And, behold, thy cousin Elisabeth, she hath also conceived a son in her old age: and this is the sixth month with her, who was called barren.
37 For with God nothing shall be impossible.
38 And Mary said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word. And the angel departed from her.
By the obedience of Mary entered the Saviour in our World.
This is the sign of the Incarnation for the reconstruction of the reality in our life, we needed a sign to be perceived through our senses ;here it comes in the Incarnation, the life and teaching of Christ , His passion and his death on the Cross and His resurrection!
A new reality arose from our ancient memory as we were in the presence of God. John in his Gospel was a visionary. He saw the invisible meaning of the Incarnation of the :Life of Christ and of the reconciliation of our humanity with the Goodhead:
He saw with their full meanings the events of all life of Christ:
That was the true Light, which lighted every man that cometh into the world.
10 He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.
11 He came unto his own, and his own received him not.
12 But as many as received him, to them gave the power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name:
13 Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.
14 And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truthJohn1;11-14
The reality of the Incarnation perceived in the senses ( reality ) and in the faith (vision).
Saint Paul says; in Hebrew Ch. 11, examples of Faith: v 1 “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
When our senses ceases, to see to perceive, we are dead physically, but a person appear in front of God and then is total absolute reality for the faithful. I don’t dwell on how we will be in front of God , but it says that in Paul all of us will be changed .
Yet MA now and here on this earth dwelling among was a special presence , charismatic, a pedagogical way to spread the word which we can honestly present to God saying, “Lord, I can’t, give me strength,” and then if we have been truly honest we will hear the Lord saying to us as He said to Paul on a similar occasion, “My grace suffices unto thee, My strength deploys itself in weakness,” not in slackness, not in timidity, not in cowardice but in that weakness which is surrender, the awareness that we cannot do it but that God can do it within us, through us.”
When you entered the Ennismore gardens Cathedral, you could feel that something serious was taking place. Something holy took hold of you and you became silent, listening to the silence in you. You were facing yourself like no introspection, like no judgment; you were surrounded by mercy and the reality of a God of fire, of love, such a burning bush. MA. says: Most of the time we are beside ourselves. We don’t act from within, we don’t act from the depths, we don’t act really by our choice; most of the time we don’t act, we react. We act because something has happened and we respond to it. This is not the sovereign freedom of a free act, it is conditioned. It is nothing to do with us except that we passively receive an impact and in an half active way, respond to it. We must learn to have such inwardness as to be able to act freely of our own choice to wield it.
This experience one could never forget, because it is the utmost reality of the presence of God, the God of the Ancient testament where fear prevailed, and anger mesmerized you, His power had no end. In the mouth of the prophet Isaiah God of the Ancient covenant says; hear you who are far off, what I have done; and you who are near acknowledge my might. The sinners in Zion are afraid trembling has seized the godless:”who among us can dwell with the devouring fire? Who among us can dwell with everlasting burning? Who stops his eyes from hearing of bloodshed? In the chapter 40 Isaiah says in versus10 “behold your God! Behold, the Lord God comes with might, and his arm rules for him; behold, his reward is with him and his recompense before him. In Ch. 46 Isaiah “Was is not I, the Lord? And there is no god besides me, a righteous God and a Saviour; there is no one besides me. By myself I have sworn, from my mouth has gone forth in righteousness a word that shall not return.
The Cathedral was inhabited by the promise ; and the prophet was MA. Read what he wrote about the living reality of the Presence of God. I had remembered however that there are four Gospels of which I deduced with remarkable intelligence that one of them must be shorter than others, and so I turned to the Gospel of St. Mark without suspecting that this was an act of Providence because that particular Gospel had been written by St. Mark for the rough boys, street boys of Rome of his time and I was very much that kind of boy. What happened I cannot describe and I am not going to make a discourse about myself, what happened is that between the beginning of the first and the beginning of the third chapter of St. Mark’s Gospel I suddenly became aware of a Presence, the other side of the desk the Lord Jesus Christ was present. I did not see anything, I did not hear anything, I did not have any sensorial feelings but I had a certainty that he was there, and I sat back and thought, “If he is there, alive, after His crucifixion then what is said about Him must be true.”
In the Daniel prophecy the king Nebuchadnez’zar set the furnace and asked for everyone at the hearing of the horns and all instruments of Music to worship the golden image. The three servants Shedrach , Meshach , and Abed’nego refused to worship and the king ordered the furnace to be fiery; the king noticed that three men became four men and were loose, walking in the middle of the fire and they are not hurt; and the appearance of the fourth is like the appearance of the son of gods. Then the king said blessed the God of the three who has sent them an angel and delivered his servants.
One must read the ancient promise of the Lord to acknowledge that he is the True God , the Saviour who came to the sinners of whom I am the first. Metropolitan Anthony before inviting the crowd to the communion liked to say in His word and by his mouth “OH Lord I believe and I confess that you are the true God and Saviour that comes to save the sinners among whom I am the first”, who is slain for you in front of everybody, and you were seized by the mystery of love, of quietness, of the presence of God of joy of salvation and you were transformed in reality.
Metropolitan Anthony was not a legendary man, he was an anointed person. He has no fear in facing reality, because he was a man of courage, disciplined and pragmatic. In this way , unique way, of an eastern monk of the orthodox church, God make use of his talents to witness to Him. He knew the human body as a medical doctor, the weaknesses as a sinner; but he had surrendered in Faith his entire person for the answer of Love to He, who has given him His life. He was serious and standing in owe in the Cathedral: you acquired something from this attitude that one ought to be transparent to the God alive who is in front of you; the stream passed like lightening and the community became one.
Indeed faith is the creed of the invisible realities that someone who had loved us unto death on the Cross, to save us from the fear of death. The invisible reality of Eternal Life is the Creation and this Creation culminated when God created man in his image. In his image, means that man was created free and loving. And God tested his fidelity by commanding him to obey, not eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The couple used their freedom to turn away from God. After the sin, this image is not deleted, but it is there in the depth of our soul in our hearts. Nature of the human being remained godly but it is vulnerable. Men being free and weak, there is a need to reinforce that image of Christ all mighty loving. What is the commandment of Christ “Love one another as I have loved you“! Christ came to resurrect this capacity of love that is our godly reality .That is why we baptize the children as they are born to restore the image of Christ in whose name they were created. The reality of mankind is that the beauty of love will give them eternal life and trample death, chase away fear.
What is ETENAL Life, our reality as Christians? Christ praying before his the surrender to death, talking to His Father “Father, the hour has come glorify thy Son ;since thou hast given Him over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom thou hast given him. And this is Eternal Life, that they know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.”John1:1-3.M.A. was inhabited by this reality. You could see it, in the gaze of his eyes.
He looked you straight in the eyes , fixed you , focused on you ! Who knows … perhaps he was praying for you as you talked your problems away. He used to receive individual person for teaching, for answering their quests. How did He teach and answer their quests? He was eloquent and his eloquence came from the clarity of the thought .He was a disciple of Christ, the thirteenth, that ‘s what a Bishop is supposed to be. He was not afraid to warn the person in front of him about the wrong and the truth about matters of faith. Hid spirituality develops in listening to the weakness of the person; compassionate as his Master-he does not make of the Christian Orthodox way an impossible way to follow. But he was intransigent, once he warns someone he expects from him to try and be committed …. In his weakness, the person in front of M A felt human not humiliated. He was merciful and used of sense of humour to release tension.
I remember giving once a talk on the Beatitudes and there was in my audience a lady who had really had an extremely hard life during the revolution, the early years of emigration and so on, and when she heard that, “Blessed are ye when men shall revile you and persecute you,” and so forth, she said, “O, no, father, if that’s a Beatitude, keep it to yourself, I have suffered enough.” We must be honest enough to say that, we aren’t. That is the trouble with us, we do not turn to God and say, “Lord, these words are hard words, I cannot accept them not only because I am immature, because I am not ready for them but I say, ‘No, I am terrified by this.’” And if you think of the lovely sayings of the Gospel, about love and if you take them seriously, you will see that they are very frightening indeed. And I can imagine that many people thought, “If only Christ could die on the cross, not descent from the cross and if this nightmare of love could go, a love that means that I must be prepared to give my life for my neighbour, to renounce myself completely, to forget everything except God’s and man’s need.” When we live a comfortable life these words don’t frighten us because we are not put to any kind of test but there are situations in which we are put to the test — in situations of war, if someone is attacked on the street, if a real tragedy comes into the life of a friend. Are we prepared to stand by? Are we prepared to enter into the frame? Are you prepared, are we prepared to lay down our life for our neighbour? And I am not speaking of the physical life, I am speaking of all this complex which is our life. How often I have seen in the days when I was a doctor people saying to me, “O, I can’t visit my mother or my wife, or my friend in hospital too often, it distresses me. I can stay minutes.” And I always said, “Yes, you can stay minutes facing the suffering of this person and this person must stay 24 hours a day and 30 days a month facing that very thing of which you are afraid so that you can not even face it.” So there are things in the Gospel, this call to love, to love wholeheartedly with all one’s life and if necessary with all one’s death which we can honestly present to God saying, “Lord, I can’t, give me strength,” and then if we have been truly honest we will hear the Lord saying to us as He said to Paul on a similar occasion, “My grace suffices unto thee, My strength deploys itself in weakness,” not in slackness, not in timidity, not in cowardice but in that weakness which is surrender, the awareness that we can not do it but that God can do it within us, through us.”
Now Christ was man, and the Son of God; and he gave us the possibility to see another reality and to reconcile the reality of this flesh , this world , the sinful world and by the grace acquire His strength. He gave us the prayer and taught us how to pray. The prayer, MA wrote about the prayer a lot ,that is an encounter with God , the friendly loving God.
.What we really mean by prayer
I had a friend with one of my contemporaries and I said to a priest whom I admired very much, who was my spiritual guide, I said to him, “What shall I do? I hate him. When I come to ‘forgive as I, forgive me, Lord, as I forgive,’ I can’t say that, I don’t want to forgive him,’ ” So my spiritual father who was shrewd and realistic said, “What’s the problem? When you come to that point, say, ‘Don’t forgive me, o Lord, because I don’t forgive so and so.’ ” I felt it was too much and I said so. So he said, “Well, you have no alternative. You cope as you can.” So I tried but my tongue did not move the right way and I kept silent but that wasn’t good enough. So I asked for more advice and he said, “Well, have you tried to jump over that petition?” I said, “Yes, I did jump over the petition but it leaves me without forgiveness and there is so much I need to be forgiven for.” “Well,” he said, “would you like to be forgiven?” I said, “Well, I would like to, of course,” and in brackets I put “on condition that I don’t forgive Kirill.” Fr. Afanasiy said to me, “Alright, then say to God, ‘Forgive me because I hope I will one day wish to forgive him.” I thought that was adequate and so I trotted up my phrase and then I felt, “That’s really too mean, that’s really too bad. I can’t get forgiveness on the cheat like that.” And so one thing after the other I was cornered, I was cornered between either saying, “I don’t forgive and therefore You won’t,” or saying, “Yes, I do.” And this is what I did in the end. You may be, O, so much better than I, that this story may only fill you with horror and indignation, but that’s how I am.
In couselling MA:
I remember giving once a talk on the Beatitudes and there was in my audience a lady who had really had an extremely hard life during the revolution, the early years of emigration and so on, and when she heard that, “Blessed are ye when men shall revile you and persecute you,” and so forth, she said, “O, no, father, if that’s a Beatitude, keep it to yourself, I have suffered enough.” We must be honest enough to say that, we aren’t. That is the trouble with us, we do not turn to God and say, “Lord, these words are hard words, I cannot accept them not only because I am immature, because I am not ready for them but I say, ‘No, I am terrified by this.’” And if you think of the lovely sayings of the Gospel, about love and if you take them seriously, you will see that they are very frightening indeed. And I can imagine that many people thought, “If only Christ could die on the cross, not descent from the cross and if this nightmare of love could go, a love that means that I must be prepared to give my life for my neighbour, to renounce myself completely, to forget everything except God’s and man’s need.” When we live a comfortable life these words don’t frighten us because we are not put to any kind of test but there are situations in which we are put to the test — in situations of war, if someone is attacked on the street, if a real tragedy comes into the life of a friend. Are we prepared to stand by? Are we prepared to enter into the frame? Are you prepared, are we prepared to lay down our life for our neighbour? And I am not speaking of the physical life, I am speaking of all this complex which is our life. How often I have seen in the days when I was a doctor people saying to me, “O, I can’t visit my mother or my wife, or my friend in hospital too often, it distresses me. I can stay minutes.” And I always said, “Yes, you can stay minutes facing the suffering of this person and this person must stay 24 hours a day and 30 days a month facing that very thing of which you are afraid so that you can not even face it.” So there are things in the Gospel, this call to love, to love wholeheartedly with all one’s life and if necessary with all one’s death which we can honestly present to God saying, “Lord, I can’t, give me strength,” and then if we have been truly honest we will hear the Lord saying to us as He said to Paul on a similar occasion, “My grace suffices unto thee, My strength deploys itself in weakness,” not in slackness, not in timidity, not in cowardice but in that weakness which is surrender, the awareness that we cannot do it but that God can do it within us, through us.
The reality of God is that we acknowledge his love for us, and restore the likeness to his image, reconstruct by the Grace of the Lord the relation of Love and harmony with the Eternal Trinity. In us, a sign of this reality stays: the need to be loved. Not in a selfish way, not in mundane way , not in materialistic way. In the early 30’s a French scientist working in the U.S.A. wrote a book called ‘Man the Unknown.’ The name of the scientist is Alexis Carrel (he also wrote later a book on prayer). He said somewhere that we are under a delusion most of the time that we are self contained, that our personality is limited, as it were, to where our skin covers our body. It is not true, he said. Don’t you know, he says, that the whole digestive system of a greedy person, instead of being located within his body, is spread throughout the world? His tentacles cling to all the edibles of the world. Don’t you realize that all the senses of a curious person are like tentacles clinging to everything that may be an object of curiosity, so that in the end we can describe a man very much like an octopus? He is a cavity in an expectant emptiness related to the outer world by tentacles that hold solidly what they have caught. Now there are two things that have happened in the process. The moment you catch something with your tentacles you imagine that you have laid hold of it. In reality you haven’t, because it is you who are caught, not the thing that you have taken. Suppose I take this watch and clench my fist on it. What happens? I have got the security of a watch, but I have lost the use of this hand and arm and the use of a shoulder. I can do nothing else but hold the watch with quite a lot of bone and muscle that could be used for much more than that. There is a story in the old Persian legends about a young man who goes out for a journey. He comes back stripped to the bone. “But couldn’t you defend yourself? What did you do about the robbers?” “Well,” he said in indignation, “I had a dagger in one hand and a pistol in the other.” Look that sounds a joke but isn’t it exactly what we do in life? We cling to things, we hold them, and if we have closed our heart solidly on one unique thing, it’s no use for anything else. If we close our brain in the same way on a few things it is no use any more, not to speak of our hands in all forms of activity. When you have made the object of your pursuit, say status values, what is left of you? There is no space for anything else.
Before Christ, Love is the possession, to possess something dear and someone dear, Christ reality will say set him free, serve him and give your life. God’s Grace that we receive in the baptismal font is enough. The reality of Christ, of his life in us, must shine courageously, in honesty, in loving equally all mankind. Because the true reality in God is Universal; his Love is Universal.
The flock in Ennismore garden’s were universal like the love of Christ , all nationalities confined in this shrine . MA Says to this effect; Modern man, as all human beings throughout the ages, does pray and he can pray. On the one hand he does; this was brought very clearly to my understanding by a pamphlet I read, providentially or by chances in the United States. A quite small pamphlet written by Theodore and Cynthia Weddell, in which the first paragraph impressed me very much. What it says is that unless you define prayer as a pious exercise performed under certain definite conditions, men pray, all men pray, and they pray all the time; but they do not always pray to God. They may pray to the adversary. This hit me very hard and I hope it will hit you also. Indeed, if instead of defining prayer as a pious exercise, we define prayer as the cry which rises from all our being: ”Let it happen, I want it, may it happen, I long for it,” then we pray all the time, because there isn’t one moment when, either in soul or in body, we do not long for something to happen, or not to happen. The only difference is indeed, as the authors point out, that not all these prayers can be addressed to God. Some, many, most are addressed to the adversary”. The reality of the human being is the image of Christ Ressurected , if we focus on that likeness with the help of Divine grace, we will be saviours and spread the Word of God without any texts . We are by the baptism the potential Christians incarnate loving the world , making peace, spreading the truth working for justice, to help the universe receive the second coming of Christ.
I read in the father that God the Father, looks upon Humanity and sees the face of His Son and that is why the reality of us whom are delivered from the sin of disobedience by the Sacrifice of Christ are loved by the The TRINITY .In reality, all of us who witnessed to the era of MA keep the silence of Ennismore Garden’s in every soul, as mirror of the Love of the Trinity and the Eternal presence though invisible. Now that M.A. is near the Lord , we can pray in Union with Him because the Church is a community of Living ,in faith we are the real: eternal presence invisible.
As Saint Paul says:in, IICorinthians 3;15-18 15 Even to this day when Moses is read, a veil covers their hearts. 16 But whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. 17 Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. 18 And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate[a] the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit..
And the final exhortation ;we are responsible because our eyes have seen the glory of God and received his grace and has taken communion in His blood and Body and His Word written by the finger of God .
Paul sees in that a responsibility “: I charged you to keep this commandment unstained and free from reproach until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ ; and this will be manifest at the proper time by the blessed and only sovereign the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, who alone has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no man has ever seen or can see.(I Timothy, 6:14-16)”. For then we shall see face to face God like a friend talks with His friend.
In conclusion; The death entered our world by the disobedience of the human couple, Mary the Mother of God and Jesus Christ have obeyed unto death. We have the liberty to choose and the responsibility to act in awareness:” For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known “(1 cor, 13 -12)
And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory,(2 cor, 3 -18)
Beirut,20 August 2015 Moscow.