Reflections on the preliminaries of eternity

- love, toil and humility -

“He who loves others chooses toil and humility, foreign to the pleasure of comfort and vain glory, foreign to bodily pleasures and lover of sacrifice for another accompanied by pain – Fr. Stăniloae says commenting on St. Maximus the Confessor. For so did the Son of God, incarnate as a man, to give us power over them, uniting us with Himself and preparing us for the perfect union with Himself, in eternal life (...).”[1]

Fr. Stăniloae, inspired by the patristic synthetic thought of St. Maximus the Confessor, reminds us the example or the paradigm of the Christian life in all its dimensions, which is that of the Son of God incarnated. The Word of God became incarnated for us and for our salvation. He did not need it. He considered more important to enter our lives, to make of Himself the life of our lives, to give us our inner breath and the strength to the resurrected and transfigured life of ours that makes us resemble to Him. The Word of God chose the toil of being among us, though He did not need it. He did it only to see man and His creation restored to the beauty and orderliness of the first creation. He chose rather the union with the tired and tiring human nature, assuming it from within freely and without sin, in order to render it as a mold capable of renewing our existence.

If we believe that we are built in the image and likeness of God, it means that we must follow the path opened by the One according to whose model we are made. So, following our model Christ, the reason for our choices does not lie in ourselves but in our neighbor. It is the example that the Creator gives us through the incarnation of His Son. Love in the Christian sense of the word means toil, humility, and sacrifice. It means undressing of oneself and dressing in another as Christ did. This is in total contradiction with the secular proposals of today's society that teaches us indecent self-promotion, the overly selfish care to keep sparingly what we think we have or have acquired. The example of today's pandemic highlights the fragility of our existence and the precariousness of plans made without bearing in mind the benevolence and steadfastness in the vocation and gifts that God has planted in each of us.

Toil is the courage to engage in a spiritual effort that opens the way. Its teachers are the saints because they have already stepped on this path before. It is the fearlessness to untie the ship or boat from the port in which it was built or sheltered to try the joy of the accomplishments and the practical science of the art of sailing and meeting serene or gloomier days, those without wind or on the stormy ones, which harden you and force you to grow up spiritually, to find sometimes good solutions, sometimes less good ones, to suffer temporary defeats of your own selfishness due to the routes you followed and which did not always take you where you imagined or planned. This toil is the toil of preserving the faith against the ‘secular evidences’ that do not seem to be favorable to it.

Humility is the awareness that Christ God was the first to make the new path you have begun, and He is the One who is by your side every moment for counsel, help, and encouragement. He does all this because He is the divine Architect who laid the foundation of our world and life. Humility is the awareness that one's own origin and vocation do not lie in oneself but in the will and the acting grace of God that inspires everything.

Love is the way that has the courage and audacity of stepping forward creating paths and bridges between oneself, God and neighbor but also the goodness and docility / gentleness / patience of hearing or feeling the inspired word of the Spirit who cares for and guides all. This love no longer takes into account the exhortations of worldly pleasures nor the fears of the pains it may encounter in going through this path because above all lies the feeling of selfless sacrifice and generosity whose incarnation is Christ. Love places the reason for being or doing in the need of the other/neighbor. The raison d'être of the incarnate Word of God was man's need for salvation. The incarnation was not made out of any need of God. It was made of man's need for restauration, transfiguration, and salvation. The Word of God chose bodily toil against man's suffering and death and for his salvation. In fact, the meaning of man’s eternity is sown by Christ in time. “In order to break the chain of transition from pleasures to pain and vice versa, in which the time given to man on earth and the history given to humanity move and which, in fact, lacks the time of man and the history of humanity of any meaning, the Son of God became man in history, as such, has shown its use as a place where eternity is prepared, without human affections or passions. He showed that man can advance through the effort of overcoming this chain to spiritual rest beyond time. So that the whole of humanity can advance towards it. Through this, time and history take on meaning.”[2] The coming in time of the Son of God through the incarnation gives time and history, human life, a meaning beyond the intermundane dialectic of pleasure - pain. The union with the human nature of the divinity in the divine Person of the Word of God prepares the fullest union of them in the kingdom of heaven. The Son and the Word of God through the incarnation became the seedling or the seed for the full fulfillment of man in the spiritual rest of the eternity of the kingdom of God. There is a progress from the mysterious but real experience of the kingdom of God in the Church in the Divine Liturgy to the experience of the full presence of the kingdom of God in eternity. There is an analogous consistency between our world and man here and the eternal world of God and man's condition in the kingdom of heaven.

†Ioan Casian

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[1] Dumitru Stăniloae. Studies of Orthodox Dogmatic Theology. Craiova: Ed. Metropolia of Oltenia 1991, p 43

[2] Idem p 41

Photo: Ziarul Lumina