I called a priest of the ROCOR recently to "check in" with him concerning his wife's health. Of course, men of God always turn the tables on pastoral visits: "How are you?" he asked. "How are the Sisters?" I told him that the Sisters, at nearly eighty-years-old, never complain. He shared that it was hard for him to watch the people he loves come apart at the threads. "Yes," I said, "this is the stuff that will not last. Thank Heavens we have given our lives to the stuff that does last." He rejoiced at my words saying, "Glory to God!"

As a hospital chaplain, I have seen many people shake their fists at Heaven saying, "How could God have let this happen?!" .... perhaps on the occasion of the death of a child or of a beloved mother or a family's provider. It is right to say, "I grieve with you. You have lost the one you love .... at least in your daily life." this day you will be with me in Paradise."

I have always wondered why people are drawn to "cotton candy" life — life that might look beautiful and sweet but which, at every bite, is empty, false, and sickening. You would think that after the last round with cotton candy, that would be enough. But for many people, it is not.

When I have a chance to speak with young people, I ask "What is your aspiration, your meaning, the thing that makes you 'tick', your belief?" Nearly all of them reply, "I want to be happy." When I press for more, they point to a state of emotion. I reply that emotions are fleeting and, anyway, emotions are not a destination. They are the side-effect of something deeper and more permanent. They arise from .... other things.

Certainly, the pursuit of feeling helps us to understand why drugs are so dominant and why so many people try to surf the waves of cultural excess, seeking more and more intense feeling.

By contrast, the elders of Holy Orthodoxy have counseled circumspection where emotions are concerned and have warned against impulsive flight toward "happiness." The advice of St. Theophan the Recluse, to name an elder near to our own time, is blunt:

St. Seraphim Rose, a precise contemporary, has written that

Let us now ascend above the elders and ask, "What is God's aspiration and direction? He is our exemplar. What is His pattern of life? It turns out that the God-man, Jesus Christ, seeks closeness with us. Remarkable.

Many years ago, I met a holy nun, perhaps the holiest person I have ever met. We discovered a certain mutuality a harmony of mind and soul (which God made possible taking pity on me, I am humbled to say). We found that in our love of God, our hearts beat as one. We became spiritual friends. Even our thoughts and words naturally arose in a kind of unison. We scarcely could talk without speaking the other's mind. We even discovered that we carried the same picture with us over the thousands of miles in our journeys over many years — the same miniature of Christ by a nineteenth-century English painter. But the uncanny is always part of life in the Spirit.

Have you heard the words of the great Italian tenor, Andrea Bocelli?

"There is no such thing as happenstance." And this holy sister and I could actually feel our highest aspiration to the Divine animating our friendship and guiding us forward. We alway looked forward to free time when could be together, and we always talked about the same things: God. Truly, a miracle had been given us — a perfect, pure, and chaste .... love to share. That is the only word for it. And we must never forget: pure and good love is the only Divine property commonly to be found on the Earth — a Divine property. It is our most important passage way into the Kingdom of Heaven. "God is love" (1 Jn 4:7-21). And you know what kind of love I mean.

She said to me once (I shall never forget it), "I wish I could climb inside of you. I want to have a share in your spirit." She meant that she had discovered a spiritual closeness so pure that she wanted no intrusions to mar that purity. As we are both physical and noetic, she wanted that perfect balance we see in Jesus, such that the body is not in the way of the soul.

I share this very private story to open a very sacred book, whose title might be, That We Might Dwell in Him and He in Us. For, you see, the Lord God not only "wished to climb inside us"; He wished even to become us .... without intruding in any way. The Russian Orthodox Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh said that

What God seeks is chaste intimacy with us deserving of the name indwelling that He might be present in every scintilla and cell of our bodies yet not intrude.

Tragically, a lack of mindfulness can lead people to miss, even dismiss, the most overwhelming fact of Life, which is the Presence of God .... even within them. But perhaps they have never seen someone die: at one moment so abundant, we might say, lifted up in animate life, then in the next moment, an empty sack of flesh and bones collapsed in on itself. The difference comes [CLAP] like that! To miss the God so Present within us is a heartbreaking irony. Almost unbelievable.

But this gentle lowliness (we might say) is God's way. We see it evinced in the presence of the angels He has given charge over us. How could so much power, a glory that overwhelms, be so .... "wrapped in silence," we say of the Queen of Heaven? Yet, this is our God. These are His ways.

Let us take the next step. Let us imagine this from the Divine perspective. What is it like to be so near and yet not intrude, to serve yet never be acknowledged (much less, thanked), to be fully present but never seen or heard .... at least by those who do not have eyes to see or ears to hear (Jesus says)? Truly, this is the love which elevates devotion and faithfulness to highest Heaven, ironically, in its expression of lowliest humility.

Jesus counsels us to seek this kind of love and to practice it. To be first, He says, you must be the servant of all. For He is first .... the man who nearly lies on the filthy ground to wash the filthy feet of his unworthy disciples .... He is first. He is the firstborn of Heaven. And, writes St. Paul,

Yet, without question He is the servant of all, even a "ransom for many."

Let us consider this love in practice. Does He not hear our prayers? Do we not marvel at His never-failing solicitude recalling His promise to be with us until the end of the age? I can tell you that the miracles that have rained down on my life and on this Hermitage are so many, they can scarcely be numbered .... startling miracles. This is self-sacrifice that has no end.

Do you recall what the Gospel tells us when Jesus touches the woman of the twelve-year hemorrhage? Jesus says, "Dunamis has gone out of Me." Energy, power, strength as gone out of Him. A self-sacrifice that has no end.

The saints evince these same qualities. The Most Holy Theotokos intercedes for us and protects us. The saints receive us into their cares and pray for us. The Heavenly Hosts are given charge over us — surrounding us with their guiding and protecting powers. All of this pouring out of Divine energy!

What is the sum of all of this? What can we say as we survey this entire scene? What sort of happiness do we find in Heaven, anyway? It is ..... the happiness of faithful love, even suffering love. And we begin to understand why the elders tell us that suffering is seamlessly part of closeness to God. For to love faithfully is always to suffer. Ask any mother or father.

In the words of the Apostle Peter,

In Chapter Four, he continues:

In a like vein, St. John Chrysostom writes,

God is proving His closeness to him.

This word prove bids us go slow. After all, we are the ones being proved. Proving closeness to God, St. John Chrysostom says, overwhelms us with the prospect of such a thing! Closeness with God is a thing of incommensurable purity .... like unto incorruptible gold, St. Peter says. Are you ready?

Let us think of it in terms St. Peter has set out: of "proving ore." And St. John Chrysostom's other word, trial, is related: as in "trying ore." That is to say, what is the truth about us? Who are we at our core and essence? What will the Assayer's Office say about the content of our souls? Do we ring true?

In the process of offering ourselves to others in love (which we call relationship), purity is everything .... if our love be not a sham or a fraud. What do we call a love that is not pure. It is called exploitation. It is called using others, playing people. This is why a single act of adultery can end a marriage of decades .... because the truth, being tried and proved, is plainly to be seen.

The great question God asks is this: Who are we? The facile answer that "Oh, God knows who I am" will not do. It only begs the question, "Which one?" For humans are famously changeable, sometimes virtuous, sometimes not; sometimes charitable, sometimes not; sometimes faithful, sometimes not. And the unexamined life is a boiling sea of many creatures, which surface, are seen in glimpses, then dive back down into the unfathomable darkness. What ones are the creatures that define our state of soul? Which ones populate our beliefs, our commitments, even our identities and what we are willing to die for?

As a college professor many years ago, I would hear my students claim that they "got it" concerning this text or that one. They knew their minds, they told me. Yet, when I actually assigned them an essay (a word which also means "to try" or "to prove"), and they were forced to work out what they believed. It almost always turned out that they "did not get it" at all when they had claimed to. The challenging and protracted work of knowing our own minds is no easy thing, not to be underestimated, and by no means to be "left till the last minute" in this life.

This same process, like the essay, of trying and proving, is the point of Aerial Tollhouses. Through these gates, our emotions and desires and souls are thoroughly probed and exercised and tempted. What will be revealed? It is only in this "deep revealing" that we will be truly known. That's the Judgment.

The greatest proving and trying in human history took place on a hill outside Jerusalem. Was this not the point of Jesus' passion and death? Surely, the point was not not "to secure our salvation" (though many prayers of our tradition single out His death and resurrection as the moment our salvation is plainly seen). He had secured our salvation by touching our lifeworld with His immeasurable and incalculable life force, His dunamis. as St. Athanasius has written. He redeemed the world with his life, not his death, as the Fathers have written. Was He not the Lord of Life, the Creator of the World, before His Resurrection?

.... did not know the Lord of Life, did not detect the Presence of God.

And what do we say about His Passion? His Passion began at His Conception, when He set aside His Divine glory and emptied Himself (κε'νοσις, ke'nosis) to enter the horrible straits of our narrow humanity.

His death was not a trying or proving for Him but for us. As He asked repeatedly in myriad ways,

.... even revealing His Identity in the question: "I AM."

The thought of offering His limp, dead body to a wrathful Father God, who demands payment for our sins, is sickening .... and cowardly. For this has nothing to do with us. As we say today, "Where is our skin in this game?" The whole premise of atonement-through-blood-sacrifice is impersonal. It proposes that we secure the most valuable asset but pushing across the negotiating table a sacrifice which asks nothing of us. Certain "Christians" say, "I believe Jesus is Lord!" "Well done!" replies the Apostle James. "The demons believe that much!" (Jas 2:19).

No, this is not, nor ever could be, the path of salvation. And by the way, did He teach that we should offer up His body again and again to secure blessing for ourselves?! What He did teach was this:

Deny yourself. Remember the suffering poor. Take up your cross. Follow Me. This is what Jesus taught. He, the Servant Who suffered, is the Exemplar for all. Do we seek to be with Him in His Kingdom? Then we must follow Him and be like Him, yes, and suffer.

Look around you. The world suffers. I have shared many times that roughly a billion people suffer in hunger. I have seen these little, malnourished children. The Sisters have ceaselessly ministered to them, fed them, clothed them, healed them, and tried to educate them. So many receive a grain of salt at night to quiet their stomachs, so they can sleep. "If I could capture what Americans spend each year on grooming their dogs, I could solve every problem in Haiti," wrote the medical doctor-humanitarian, Paul Farmer.

Our Gospel lesson sets before us this morning a woman who slowly shuffles torward us, bent over and hobbled, for nearly two decades. She is ambassador from the suffering world. Jesus reminds us of her clay, her earthbound life, saying that Satan binds her. For, surely, this is Satan's hold over us, our bodies. Yet, in her suffering she discovers friendship, even pure intimacy. For the Suffering Servant, the one Who has made Himself last, touches her. Can you imagine being touched by Jesus? And we do not imagine wrongly to see an indwelling in this. She is filled with that force of life, which created the Universe, which only the Lord of Life can impart.

The religious sacrificers in our Gospel object. They have rules concerning atonement with God. In this, two religions are set before us: the religion of sacrifice, on one side, and the religion of intimacy with God, on the other, yes, expressed in suffering and through that indwelling love.

"Sir, we would have this water alway!" we cry out with St. Photini, the Woman at the Well, who also experienced this same touch.

St. Ambrose of Optina admonishes us,

As a priest of the Russian Orthodox Church, I say, thanks be to God that Holy Rus' (not a geography but a state of soul and mind) might be lived through this dark time as a saving and corrective way,

Now, there's a prophetic statement if ever I heard one!.

For our beloved Church will never bow to the gods of false happiness. She knows how to suffer in holiness. And she can teach us.

In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.