Upon Which Foundation?
“My poor children,” God says, “you want to live without me. What, then, do you depend upon? What is your essential foundation?
“My poor child,” He declares, “you think you can escape from me by plunging yourself into what you conceive to be the ‘natural world.’ But what you cling to is not at all the natural world in its very depths.
“You think you can lead a better life by distancing yourself from that Love which is beyond every limit, which loves beyond every visible thing. You strive to give yourself solely to what is visible. You talk of affirming your own person and realizing your own being. You speak of earthly nourishment, and you await from it both harmony and joy.
“Nonetheless, you will inevitably come into conflict with every aspect of creation. For the universe allows no peace to someone who believes they can separate a particular situation or another person from limitless Love.
“You try your best to find your support in reality itself. Yet you believe the natural world alone is what is truly real. You want to lean on a fragile reed, yet that reed will pierce your hand.
“In this world where all things are united by a Love without limits, every creature you want to seize individually, without basing your action on absolute Love, will withdraw from you, one after the other. You will be left alone, wounded, lying in the roadway. Everything will abandon you, the moment you abandon Me.
“My poor child, whom will you find to save you, if not Me? Whom will you find to love you, if not Me?”
~Adapted from the Very Rev. John Breck, Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), January 2007. Article #5, Love Without Limits, by Archimandrite Lev Gillet, “A Monk of the Eastern Church”
“You alone are uncreated, my Savior
you alone are without beginning….
Holy and all-venerable Trinity,
God of all that is:
you have shown to us the light
of your immaculate glory.
Grant it to me even now, and unceasingly, my Savior.
Through the light, let me ever contemplate you, Holy Word,
and begin to see your transcendent beauty.”
–Symeon the New Theologian
~From John Anthony McGuckin, The Book of Mystical Chapters: Meditations on the Soul’s Ascent, from the Desert Fathers and other Early Christian Contemplatives
