The Heart of Holy Life

Three generations have passed since the Supreme Court banned school prayer in 1962. In that same year, one of the Hermitage Sisters entered the convent as a seventeen-year-old girl. In a milieu in which every child understood relationship with God to be basic to human life, most people understood this aspiration to holy life. For each day in school began with luminous words, which warmed the soul, and which never grew old or stale:

In those tender years, one might easily have looked around the classroom and pictured a classmate who would later follow God into those mysterious pastures. These were everyday thoughts in those years.

In seminary I participated in a weekly group led by a retired priest whose holy character and pastoral gifts were well-known. One evening he asked us to close our eyes. He wanted to take us somewhere, he said. You are seated in a green meadow. Feel the soft blades of grass under your hand. The air is full of its fragrance. There is a familiar sound in the near distance — a deep stream running through the pasture. See! A figure is seated on its banks facing the stream. It is the Lord Jesus. Go ahead. Approach Him. He has been waiting for you.

Well, this experience opened floodgates inside me. I was overwhelmed, choking back silent tears. For all my life I had been formed to cherish and to expect this very scene.

It is difficult to convey this powerful experience in the year 2022, difficult to describe the inner sense that God is the most real reality, that encountering Him around any corner, at any time, in any place, is to be expected.

I say this is is difficult in the year 2022 as I see that the government-funded NPR has now attacked our Church. And why have they attacked it? Because young men all over the world have sought a Church where God is honored, yes, and sacrificed for. This is not to be tolerated! What will happen next if God is to take center stage again? It will be back to the "bad, old days" of morality.

Reading how C.S. Lewis, that "vigorous debunker of Christianity," was overtaken forcefully by the Lord Jesus, was no surprise to me:

To me Lewis was one of those classmates who hated morning prayer (along with the pledge of allegiance). Yes, they would drag their feet, but I knew God's goodness, and I knew that God would leave no child behind. You might try to forget Him, but He will not forget you:

As I matured, I understood very well this disjunction between Heaven and earth. I saw that blaming God for the ills of the world was a common occurrence (though the blame usually traces back to God's human creatures). I understood that the Beatitudes recounted by St. Matthew and St. Luke are the "proverbs of Heaven," impossible to live on earth, which would destroy anyone who actually sets out to live them. For this world is fatally out of joint with the Kingdom of Heaven, and those caught between these two colossal forces are crushed .... an everyday experience.

Those who hate the idea of school prayer, who see life as a cruel joke perpetrated by God (if there is a God), who scoff at the life of faith, cannot understand godly life. They are apt to see the living saints of the fourth world in terms of hardship, of self-denial, of choosing to live in the midst of poverty and degradation and are apt to question their emotional stability .... or their sanity. But I suppose the same thing could be said about valor, self-sacrifice, and heroic life in general. There must be something wrong with those men who were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. "Who would risk their lives?" the sensible man asks. It runs against the grain of self-survival and self-promotion, those most basic attributes of life. Did not many of us grow up hearing that we must love ourselves first?

And they would not comprehend the living saints, who are shining people, radiant, smiling, sincere, caring, cheerful. For an inner light radiates from their faces. I have seen this smiling cheerfulness in sisters caring for the lost cases, the most extreme cases, "the poorest of the poor" as the Missionaries of Charity describe their ministry. Yes, young women who have given their lives — every hour of every day and on into their eighties and nineties — attend to the people and things that no one can fix. Whoever believes that their first duty is to themselves will never grasp holy life. To them it is a riddle, an enigma, a mystery.

The answer to this puzzle, though, all humans understand very well. The great mathematician Blaise Pascal wrote it down in his diary, which he called Pensees ("my ponderings"):

The heart has its reasons .... which all people everywhere do know. Have you ever been in love? Has love come into your life so powerfully that all is changed and in an instant? Old friends will say, he's not the same. The old jokes are no longer funny. The old pastimes do not satisfy. The former life holds no attraction. Truly, "the old man" has died.

How common this is! Yet it is undeniably extraordinary, miraculous, transfiguring. Our grandmothers and great-grandmothers told us: when it comes, you'll know it. It will shake you to your timbers. You would burn down your whole world for it. You would give every cent not to lose it. It is a treasure discovered in a field. And when it is discovered, a man sells everything he has in order to possess it (Mt 13:44).

This fact — that the treasure in the field or the pearl of great price is universal, awaiting each and every one of us — tells us that these things must be of God. For only God can work that magic in which each of us is singular, of greatest importance, yet without subtracting from any other one. This is the treasure that can be possessed by every man and woman on earth.

Once our souls are dazzled by this treasure, could we now go back to our old life of ego and self-gain and pleasure-seeking? For now the former life is no longer worth living. Indeed, we are ashamed of what we once had been.

Yes, this is the Kingdom of Heaven, but we knew all these things already through the prism of our hearts. We might ask any crowd, what is the most important thing in the world? What are all our songs about, our poems, our movies, most of our books .... what are they about? And everyone instantly knows the answer: they are about love. And anyone who has been in love will hear these little masterpieces of song or experience these inspiring films and marvel. Surely whoever created these, we would say, must have been in love. For every detail is right.

In this we see that love is more than a fleeting emotion. It is something objective, experienced by everyone in precisely the same way. That is, it is a gift from God, an experience of Heaven on earth. And the saints will tell you that this is the Kingdom of Heaven — all-encompassing, good, and pure.

And the saints will say that the round of daily prayer in community and the silent prayers of the heart are natural overflowings of this love.

Prayer is not a hardship, not a toil or a labor, but rather a refuge and a refreshment. I recall praying vespers with a group of nuns in Haiti each evening. We would find a small, quiet room off to one side of the daily cocktail party thrown each evening for our visiting volunteers. In the distance we could hear jollity, booming voices, and the clink of glasses and ice. The Indian nun who led prayer one evening in her cell said simply, "They have their happy hour, and we have ours." And I thought of the psalm verse,

Is it a toil to write a love letter? Is it a duty to chisel out a jewel-like sonnet expressing each little facet of love? Is it an obligation to hold the hand of the beloved, to share every little thought, to give her your life and all that is in it? Certainly, if true love be not the cause for all of this, then religious life turns out to be a drudgery. Do you see how finely drawn the line is between Heaven and Hell? It is a line drawn by love. Which side are you on?

Love opens the gate to Heaven. And it is a fact that love is the only Divine property to be found on the earth.

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In this season when we reflect on the saints, let us not dwell upon their sufferings, their privations, their tortures, and their earthly deaths, for they would tell you, these are nothing as compared to Divine love. Hasn't this been Jesus' message all along? "The King of Love my Shepherd is," declares a nineteenth-century hymn. And this is why we follow Him. For only love, deathless love, could compel so many billions of people to follow Him .... and go on following Him, come what may.

I do not like the word religion. It suggests a "major" in college, the section of a bookstore, something people take up as a hobby to occupy themselves on Sundays. "Practicing religion" is not like practicing law or medicine because it is far more than an occupation. It is transcendent and the very element of Heaven.

Many over the ages have noticed that the beauty of love inspires us, transports us, elevates us closer to Heaven. Is not the loving soul kinder, gentler, more reflective, more humble, and is not the loving heart more tender, able to offer those sincere prayers rising before God in an instant .... no sooner than they are said?

This tender love lies at the heart of the Russian Church in particular. I cannot tell you how many feast days in the Russian Orthodox calendar are devoted to even the icons of the Mother of God. We at the Hermitage have lived on this calendar for only four years. And it seems a week does not go by without veneration of the Most Holy Theotokos either directly or indirectly. Of the Twelve Great Feasts of Orthodoxy, more than half are devoted, directly or indirectly, to the Holy Mother. Half of the Four Great Fasts of Orthodoxy are to prepare us before we come into her presence — preceding the Nativity and the Dormition. She grounds us. She protects us. She calls us back to what is good and right. Above all she is the face of love.

During the twentieth-century, 20 million Christians were martyred by the Soviet Union. 20 million. That is fifty times the number of all U.S. war dead in World War II. The United States would have to fight fifty instances of World War II, piling up its war dead fifty times over, in order to equal the number of Christians killed by the Soviet Union. 40,000 churches and cathedrals were defiled and destroyed, very often by laughing, drunken atheists, including the irreplaceable Cathedral of Christ our Saviour in Moscow. More than 100,000 clergy were murdered. That we might grasp the scale of this faithfulness, let us consider that during "great age of martyrdom" — from the death of Christ until the Edict of Milan in 313 when the Christian faith was decriminalized — roughly two million Christians were martyred. I do not depreciate them .... two million as compared to 20 million.

Small wonder that podvig, the Russian word for holy suffering, deeply embues the Russian character, coloring its literature, its art, and certainly its spiritual life. And this is just as well, for as we recently heard on National Public Radio, the more devoted you are to God, the more devoted you are to God's changeless faith and values, handed to the Apostles and then passed down to us, the more you will suffer .... and at the hands of government-funded agencies.

I do not say that suffering and death are a way to Heaven. I say that love is the royal road to God and that once you are in this love, nothing else matters. You have received your holy vaccination against suffering. Because the life without God is not worth living. Our hearts would suffocate, for the life-giving oxygen from Heaven would have attenuated and then disappeared.

No wonder every heart, sooner of later, seeks the purest air of Heaven and why Christians gladly accept the martyr's crown. For a world that is empty, and worse, holds no attraction. is not worthy of our hearts, our precious time, and is a waste of our spiritual lives.

Let us remember today the ones whose hearts were pure, whose eyes were clear, whose cause was right, and who had given their lives joyfully to and in love.

This life is not so far from each of us. It is as near as our souls are to our minds, and it is measured out with every beat of our hearts, whose good reasons are known only to itself.

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