SO GOOD QUOTES

The question in every life: How to truthfully discern what is from God what is obedience to Him (Lord, what do You want from me?) and what is from “this world” (and from the one behind it)? Questions about one’s calling. My own life is that of a churchman. But every year I feel more and more burdened-from weakness. Or is my real calling something different? I truly suffer from constantly asking myself this question. I live a double life-one consuming the other. Does God want this? Is this the condition of my salvation? When I ask this question, I have no answer. And I am 55!

What else is needed? Look—all of you who rush about in vain. Do not think that something else is needed. See the fight of light with darkness, the descent into death. It is at the same time the revelation of the power of evil and its destruction. That is where one would find the answer which everyone is seeking and often finding in pitiful idols. Lazarus and Palms: “Rejoice, and again I say rejoice…” at the very beginning of Holy Week and at the same time, the onslaught of darkness. (“I am deeply grieved, even to death…” and

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”) and of light (“Now the Son of Man has been glorified and God has been glorified in Him…”) up to the bright silence of Holy Saturday. Where else should one search for the solution to problems? Where else can one see, feel the only ray of light which illumines and solves everything?

What God reveals to people is unheard, impossible, and the tragedy consists of this deafness. And this revelation can no longer penetrate Western life without ripping it apart. What is revealed surpasses and therefore tears apart life-the gift of joy “which nobody will take away from you.” Genuine Christianity is bound to disturb the heart with this tearing-that is the force of eschatology. But one does not feel it in these smooth ceremonies where everything is neat, right, but without eschatological “other worldliness.” This is, maybe, the basic spiritual quality of any bourgeois state of mind. It is closed to the sense of tragedy to which the very existence of God condemns us.

I don’t know. It’s so difficult to express it, but I clearly feel that here is a different perception of life, and the bourgeois state (religious, theological, spiritual, pious, cultured, etc.) is blind to something essential in Christianity.

—Alexander Schmemann
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