A Homily delivered to the community at St. Vladimir's Orthodox Seminary
On Forgiveness Sunday of 1983
As once more we are about to enter the
Great Lent, I would like to remind us – myself first of all, and all
of you my fathers, brothers, and sisters – of the verse that we just
sang, one of the stichera, and that verse says: "Let us begin Lent,
the Fast, with joy."
Only yesterday we were commemorating Adam crying, lamenting at the gates
of Paradise, and now every second line of the Triodion and the liturgical
books of Great Lent will speak of repentance, acknowledging what
dark and helpless lives we live, in which we sometimes are immersed. And
yet, no one will prove to me that the general tonality of Great Lent is not
that of a tremendous joy! Not what we call "joy" in this world
– not just something entertaining, interesting, or amusing – but
the deepest definition of joy, that joy of which Christ says: "no one
will take away from you" (Jn. 16:22). Why joy? What is that joy?
So many people under various influences have come to think of Lent as a
kind of self–inflicted inconvenience. Very often in Lent we hear these
conversations: "What do you give up for Lent?" – it goes
from candy to, I don’t know what. There is the idea that if we suffer
enough, if we feel the hunger enough, if we try by all kinds of strong or
light ascetical tools, mainly to "suffer" and be
"tortured," so to speak, it would help us to "pay" for
our absolution. But this is not our Orthodox faith. Lent is not a
punishment. Lent is not a kind of painful medicine that helps only
inasmuch as it is painful.
LENT IS A GIFT! Lent is a gift from God to us, a gift which is
admirable, marvelous, one that we desire. Now a gift of what? I would say
that it is a gift of the essential – that which is essential
and yet which suffers most in our life because we are living lives of
confusion and fragmentation, lives which constantly conceal from us the
eternal, the glorious, the divine meaning of life and take away from us
that which should "push" and, thus, correct and fill our life
with joy. And this essential is thanksgiving: the acceptance from
God of that wonderful life, as St. Peter says, "...created out of
nothing...," created exclusively by the love of God, for there is no
other reason for us to exist; loved by Him even before we were born, we
were taken into His marvelous light. Now we live and we forget. When was
the last time I thought about it? But I do not forget so many little
things and affairs that transform my whole life into empty noise, into a
kind of traveling without knowing where.
Lent returns to me, gives back to me, this essential – the
essential layer of life. Essential because it is coming from God;
essential because it is revealing God. The essential time, because time
again is a great, great area of sin. Because time is the time of what? Of
priorities. And how often our priorities are not at all as they
should be. Yet in Lent, waiting, listening, singing ... you will see,
little by little that time – broken, deviated, taking us to
death and nowhere else, without any meaning. You will see that time again
becomes expectation, becomes something precious. You
wouldn’t take one minute of it away from its purpose of pleasing God,
of accepting from Him Hislife and returning that life to Him together with
our gratitude, our wisdom, our joy, our fulfillment.
After this essential time comes the essential relationship that we have
with everything in the world, a relationship which is expressed so well in
our liturgical texts by the word reverence. So often, everything
becomes for us an object of "utilizing," something which is
"for grabs," something which "belongs" to me and to
which I have a "right." Everything should be as Communion
in my hands. This is the reverence of which I speak. It is the discovery
that God, as Pasternak once said, was "...a great God of
details," and that nothing in this world is outside of that divine
reverence. God is reverent, but we so often are not.
So, we have the essential time, the essential relationship with matter
filled with reverence, and last, but not least, the rediscovery of the
essential link among ourselves: the rediscovery that we belong to
each other, the rediscovery, that no one has entered my life or your life
without the will of God. And with that rediscovery, there is everywhere an
appeal, an offering to do something for God: to help, to comfort, to
transform, to take with you, with each one of you, that brother and sister
of Christ. This is that essential relationship.
Essential time, essential matter, essential thought: all that is so
different from what the world offers us. In the world everything is
accidental. If you don’t know how to "kill" time, our
society is absolutely ingenious in helping you to do that. We kill time,
we kill reverence, we transform communications, relationships, words,
divine words into jokes and blasphemies, and sometimes just pure nonsense.
There is this thirst and hunger for nothing, but external success.
Don’t we understand, don’t we understand, brothers and sisters
what power is given to us in the form of Lent. Lenten Spring! Lenten
beginning! Lenten resurrection! And all this is given to us free.
Come, listen to that prayer. Make it yours! Don’t even try to
think on your own; just join, just enter and rejoice! And that joy will
start killing those old and painful and boring sins... And with that you
will have that great joy which the angels heard, which the disciples
experienced when they returned to Jerusalem after Christ’s Ascension.
It is that joy which was left with them that we nobly adopted. It is first
of all the joy of knowing, the joy of having something in me which, whether
I want it or not, will start transforming life in me and around me.
This last essential is the essential return to each other: this
is where we begin tonight. This is what we are doing right now. For if we
would think of the real sins we have committed, we would say that one of
the most important is exactly the style and tonality which we maintain with
each other: our complaining and criticizing. I don’t think that there
are cases of great and destructive hatred or assassination, or something
similar. It is just that we exist as if we are completely out of each
other’s life, out of each other’s interests, out of each
other’s love. Without having repaired this relationship, there is no
possibility of entering into Lent. Sin – whether we call it
"original" sin or "primordial" sin – has broken
the unity of life in this world, it has broken time, and time has
become that fragmented current which takes us into old age and death. It
has broken our social relations, it has broken families. Everything is
diabolos – divided and destroyed. But Christ has come into the
world and said: "... and I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will
draw all men to Myself" (Jn. 12:32).
It is impossible to go to Christ without taking with me the
essential. It is not the abandonment of everything as we go to
Christ; it is finding in Him the power of that resurrection: of unity, of
love, of trust, of joy, of all that which, even if it occupies some place
in our life, is at the same time so minuscule. It is tragic to think that
from churches, from seminaries, what comes to heaven are complaints ...
being tired, always something not going right... You know, sitting in my
office from time to time, I am admiring people for inventing new
"tragedies" every half hour.
But we are Christ’s and Christ is God’s. And if we had –
because we know – just a little bit of that which would bring us
together, we would replace all my little offenses with even a little amount
of that joy. That is the forgiveness we want and ask God to give us.
Because if there is a strict commandment in the Gospel, it is that
commandment: "if you forgive ... your heavenly Father also will
forgive you; but if you do not forgive ... neither will your Father forgive
... " (Mt. 6:14-15). So, of course it is a necessity. But the NOW of
that, I repeat it once more, is to be horrified by the fragmentation of our
own existence, by the pettiness in our relationships, by the destruction of
words, and by the abandoning of this reverence.
Now we have to forgive each other whether or not we have any explicit
sins or crimes against each other. That reconciliation is another
epiphany of the Church as the Kingdom of God. We are saved because
we are in the Body of Christ. We are saved because we accept from Christ
the world and the essential order. And finally, we accept Christ when we
accept each other. Everything else is a lie and
hypocrisy.
So, fathers, brothers, sisters: let us forgive one another. Let us not
think about why. There is enough to think about. Let us do it. Right
now, in a kind of deep breath, say: "Lord, help us to forgive. Lord,
renew all these relationships." What a chance is given here for
love to triumph! – for unity to reflect the Divine unity, and
for everything essential to return as life itself. What a chance! Is the
answer we give today yes or no? Are we going to that
forgiveness? Are we gladly accepting it? Or is it something which we do
just because it is on the calendar – today, you follow, forgiveness;
tomorrow, let’s do...? No! this is the crucial moment.
This is the beginning of Lent. This is our spring "repair"
because reconciliation is the powerful renewal of the ruin.
So, please, for the sake of Christ: let us forgive each other. The
first thing I am asking all of you, my spiritual family, is to forgive me.
Imagine how many temptations of laziness, of avoiding too much, and so on
and so forth. What a constant defense of my own interests, health, or this
or that... I know that I don’t even have an ounce of this
self-giving, self-sacrifice which is truly a true repentance, the true
renewal of love.
Please forgive me and pray for me, so that what I am preaching I could
first of all somehow, be it only a little bit, integrate and incarnate in
my life.
Father Alexander Schmemann
Delivered on Forgiveness Sunday, March 20, 1983, at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary Chapel, before the Rite of Forgiveness. Transcribed from tape recording and edited. Published with the approval of Juliana Schmemann in the St. Vladimir’s Theological Foundation Newsletter.
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