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.."Come
and See"
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"The
next day John was standing with two of his disciples;
and he looked at Jesus as He walked, and he said, 'Behold the Lamb of God!' The two disciples heard John and they followed Jesus. Turning around, Jesus saw them following and asked, 'What do you seek?' They said, 'Rabbi, where are you staying?' He said, 'Come and see.' They came and saw . . . and stayed with Him" (John 1:38ff) |
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Christians love one another. They never fail to help widows; they save orphans from those who would hurt them. If a man has something, he gives freely to the man who has nothing. If they see a stranger, Christians take him home and are happy, as though he were a real brother. They
don’t consider themselves brothers in the usual sense, but brothers
instead through the Spirit of God. And if they hear that one of
them is in jail, or persecuted for professing the name of their
redeemer, they all give him what he needs. If it is possible, they
bail him out. If one of them is poor and there isn’t enough food
to go around, they fast several days This
is really a new kind of person. From
a report given by a pagan official, |
"In a world full of so much ugliness, liturgy should be a rest for the soul, a repose where the soul can breathe. Beauty is not aestheticism. It is not an aim in itself. It is a glimpse of God's glory. We shouldn't stay with a glimpse . . . because people are thirsting for beauty and for what they rigthly feel is behind beauty: the glory of God revealed to us. Heaven opens in liturgy. Beauty in liturgy costs time, love, care, commitment. We must take time for preparing the liturgy, looking for the beauty of the flowers, the songs, the space, the incense, the candles. All this has nothing to do with pure aestheticism, but it is an expression of love. The faithful can tell whether or not there is the love of God in a church. My experience is that wherever you have a beautiful liturgy, people come. People are attracted, and rightly. We should not say that this is only a superficial attraction. Beauty is one way to God. It should never be separated from goodness and truth. Beauty without goodness is not beauty; so love for the poor has to be cultivated together with love for beauty -- and, of course, with love for the truth." by
Archbishop Christoph Schonborn of Vienna
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The
Joy of the Kingdom We cannot answer the world's problems by adopting towards them an attitude either of surrender or of escape. We can answer the world's problems only by changing those problems, by understanding them in a different perspective. What is required is a return on our part to that source of energy, in the deepest sense of the word, which the Church possessed when it was conquering the world. What the Church brought into the world was not certain ideas applicable simply to human needs, but first of all the truth, the righteousness, the joy of the Kingdom of God.
The joy of the Kingdom: it always worries me that, in the multi-volume systems of dogmatic theology that we have inherited, almost every term is explained and discussed except the one word with which the Christian Gospel opens and closes. "For behold, I bring you tidings of great joy" (Luke 2:10) - so the Gospel begins, with the message of the angels. "And they worshiped Him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy" (Luke 24:52) - so the Gospel ends. There is in fact no theological definition of joy. For we cannot define that sense of joy which no one can take away from us, and at this point all definitions are silent. Yet only if this experience of the joy of the Kingdom in all its fullness is again placed at the centre of theology, does it become possible for theology to deal once more with creation in its true cosmic dimensions, with the historic reality of the fight between the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of the prince of this world, and finally with redemption as the plenitude, the victory and the presence of God, who becomes all in all things.
What is needed is not more liturgical piety. On the contrary, one of the greatest enemies of the Liturgy is liturgical piety. The Liturgy is not to be treated as an aesthetic experience or a therapeutic exercise. Its unique function is to reveal to us the Kingdom of God. This is what we commemorate eternally. The remembrance, that anamnesis of the Kingdom, is the source of everything else in the Church. It is this that theology strives to bring to the world. And it comes even to a "post-Christian" world as the gift of healing, of redemption and of joy. An
excerpt from Father Alexander Schmemann's
original images © by G. Murphy |
