What storms, what
disturbances, what sins, what tears there are in every dwelling, every town and
every market place! And what good is there in the world? It is full of
deception, fear and sickness. Our birth is strange, our death is frightful, and
what is after death is inscrutable.
[St. Joseph of Volotsk, +1515]
† † †
The whirlwind of life, like
falling leaves, spins around the people of this age in a frenzied dance.
Vanity—this is the most accurate definition of all that occupies our minds and
hearts; it is what moves us to sorrow and to rejoice. So pass the years and
decades of our life. Sooner or later, however, there comes for each person the
hour of awakening, the hour of realization that he is mortal. And this seemingly
obvious truth strikes us in the depths of our souls, like a terrifying
revelation.
This awakening comes in
different ways, but most frequently it finds us when we are ill. Lying in bed,
we suddenly realize that we are not eternal, that we are, in fact, going to die,
possibly very soon. Then the sickness leaves us and again we become absorbed by
new concerns, and we forget about death. But sickness and adversities are those
messengers sent to us by the Lord, who call to our hearts: People, come to
your senses! Do not imagine that you are immortal gods. Take a good, hard look
at yourselves, and you will see that death and decay reign over your bodies.
See, your hair is getting gray, your skin is withering, and all this is
irreversible. Think well. Are you prepared for death? What awaits you there in
eternity, after the last clump of earth is thrown into your grave and a new life
begins for you?
Only a few blessed souls, even
before the coming of an illness or other dread messenger of death, come to
realize, with God’s help, all the vanity of this earthly life. Multitudes of
holy fathers and mothers who in every age filled the deserts and monasteries,
were motivated precisely by this soul-saving awareness. And we too are capable
of the same realization. We have but to listen carefully to the voice of our
conscience, when we are alone with ourselves, when we have no reason to be
hypocritical or double-faced.
Here
before us lies the path of the God-pleasers, who came to realize that however
beautiful, however marvelous this temporal world is, there will come a time when
it will no longer exist. The beauties of nature, which today delight our eyes,
will disappear; the mountains, the flowers, the sun, the stars—all will
disappear. The beauty of youth will wither, the canvasses of the old masters
will fade, the books of renowned authors will decay. All will pass away. God
will remain, but will we be with Him? According to our deeds, according to our
sins we must conclude that it is not our lot to enjoy His eternal presence. But
He alone is truly Existing, Who always is. And if our lot is not with Him, then
what good to us is eternity? For it will be for us an eternity without God.
Unbelievers are often
panic-stricken at the thought of leaving this temporal life. They want to live
forever, although they know that they are destined to die. These foolish people
do not understand that their awful tragedy lies precisely in the fact that after
death their souls (and, at the General Resurrection, their bodies also) will
receive that eternal existence without God, towards which they have been
striving. And can one compare even the most dreadful torments and illnesses of
this present life with those hellish torments that sinners will experience for
all eternity?
True Christians, by contrast,
do not fear the death of their mortal bodies. In the Symbol of Faith they
confess, I believe in the resurrection of the dead and the life of the age
to come. For them, the death of the flesh is a passage to that place
where there is neither sickness nor sorrow, nor sighing but life everlasting.
The only thing they fear is that they have not prepared themselves for eternal
life by sincere repentance and good deeds.
Let us ask ourselves: We who
call ourselves Christians today, what do we hope for? Do we keep in mind the
life of the age to come, at least when we recite the Creed? Or are we
captivated by the sparkle and the tawdry brilliance of Satan’s carnival whirling
around us with its mad fascination? That fallen angel has forever been trying to
divert people from the soul-saving inclination to prepare for the coming passage
into eternal life.
It is instructive in this
regard to recall the story of Saint Ioasaph of India. His father, the prince
Abenner, desiring to guard his son from any exposure to Christianity, had a
palace specially constructed for him, where he was constantly entertained by
courtiers; he was deliberately kept from hearing anything about illness, old age
or death. No sick or elderly people were allowed to visit him. When, however, he
chanced to see two sick people and one old man, he came to understand the
transitory nature of this temporal life, and he fell into despair. He was
delivered from this state when the Lord sent to him His servant, the monk
Barlaam, who revealed to Ioasaph the truth of Christianity. (Saints Barlaam,
Ioasaph and Abenner are all commemorated on the same day, November 19th.)
Nowadays, the devil is setting
new snares. We are surrounded by a sea of diversions, by unheard-of discoveries
in science and technology, by ultra-modern medicine, and all this is designed to
divert us from the one thing needful. And we, unfortunate and deceived
little people, puffing ourselves up as though we were gods, try to catch
eternity in our toy nets. We try to stay the passage of time, dinging onto it
with cameras and video cameras, and then we look greedily at these shiny little
squares of paper, which have captured irretrievably lost moments of life.
Meanwhile, our God Jesus Christ stands invisibly over this frenzied world of
ours, and waits: When will we repent, when will we come to our senses? He is
merciful and long-suffering, suffering for us, even unto death, and
today He again suffers, gazing into the soul of each of us. Have we no shame
before His all-pure gaze?
We who call ourselves
Christian have reason to be ashamed. A spiritual self-examination inevitably
reveals that even if we maintain an outward semblance of piety, inwardly we are,
alas, far from Christ. Where, for example, is the joy of the anticipation of
meeting the Lord and His saints beyond the grave, a joy which was common to all
the early Christians? Nowadays this joy is known only to a few chosen righteous
ones; to the majority it is unknown. We must admit that many of us, contemporary
Christians, fear death and cling to this temporal life almost like the
unbelievers. The holy fathers say that to be a Christian means to be daily
crucified with Christ, to mortify our fallen nature. Daily! But we do not want
to die with Christ even once in our life. Self-conceit, intellectual pride,
vainglory—these are the “blind guides” of our souls. They whisper to each of us,
“You are such a good Christian, so decent; you are doing such important work.
You can’t possibly die now.” And we believe this lie, forgetting about death.
If tonight any one of us
should be unexpectedly hauled off to our deaths by execution (as this often
happened in the years of persecution in Russia or the days of early
Christianity), many would doubtless murmur to themselves: “Why me? I am still
young, I can still serve the Church.” The primordial fear of death, which
possesses our whole being, would not allow us to recall that martyrdom and
confession is the highest and most noble form of service to God and the Church.
We have only to realize this or, better yet, to believe in this, and the
murmuring will cease, and a divine consolation will settle in our souls, a joy
shared by the inhabitants of the world above.
Let us bring to mind the Holy
Royal Martyrs of Russia, especially the young and brutally murdered crown-prince
and grand duchesses. Life held out to them such wonderful promises. And what did
they get? Golgotha and the cross of martyrdom. And with what humility and
meekness they drank this bitter cup. Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ was
Himself crucified when He was only thirty-three years old.
What a striking contrast His
path in life makes with the lot of so many false-prophets of Eastern religions.
There we see venerable gurus surrounded by crowds of disciples, or, in extreme
cases, a “prophet” who, at the end of his life, simply flies into the sky on a
horse. In Christianity, the God-man Jesus spent three years tirelessly preaching
the word of Truth, and in the end was abandoned by almost all His disciples and
was crucified on the Cross. Truly, this was a stumbling block for the Jews and
foolishness to the Greeks. (But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a
stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness—1 Cor 1:23).
But let us—all of us who are
called by the Saviour to renounce the pharisaism of the Jews and the paganism of
the Greeks—take off from our souls’ hardness and despondency, and follow after
Christ and the saints, so that we too might confess, not only with our lips but
with our hearts, the Christian faith that makes no sense to the people “of this
world”; I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the age to
come. Amen.
Source-By Inok Vsevolod (Filipiev) “Orthodox America,” Vol. 140, May-June 1996
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