Source: St. Elisabeth Convent
May 15, 2017
Christ is Risen! Pascha is ongoing, and we continue fighting for joy and hope, which we can hear in these words: “Christ is Risen!” We want to be sure in this truth about God and that He has defeated death. If we are with God then we can prevail over our sick, lame, deaf, blind and foolish nature, and live with God forever.
The Lord calls upon us to lead a spiritual way of life - "Let us lift up our hearts." However, we who were born on this earth have a hard time perceiving anything spiritual! In the Gospel, the Samaritan woman talks about the water, about the well and her thirst that she wants to quench, while the Lord talks about the water which resurrects a person and lets us enter eternal life. The disciples go for food; they want to feed their Teacher. But the Lord offers them a different kind of food. Which one? "This is My Body, and this is My Blood" (cf. Matthew 26:26-28). This is a different and eternal life. It is difficult for us to perceive this, for we need to estimate everything according to the measures of this world. The Lord wants us to be able to realize the spiritual meaning of what is happening to our life and to realize what is truly important in our life instead of caring for miniscule and irrelevant things…
We are already in the Church, we believe and we feel that there we can find the truth of life, to find something what we cannot find anywhere else in the world. But we need to be sure of this. We need to come out of the church and look at our life from a different point of view. We should not be guided by the earthly laws, but begin a new life. Then all questions will disappear. When we mix spiritual, soulful and corporal things together, then many questions arise and we can get confused. This is why we need to trust God and accept what He gives us today. We should look for a spiritual sense in everything, instead of a secular one. We should tear ourselves away from our “justice”, our talents and gifts, if they disrupt us from following Christ. A rich man shall hardly enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. It is hard not because of his money. Money is not the thing. The thing is, a man is simply afraid of losing what he has. A man feels that he is worth something, and because of this he loses peace.
The rich one – it is also a man who arrogates his talents to himself, and does not use them for the Glory of God. Father Sergius, our icon painter says that sometimes it happens like this: “A person is developing professionally, he is working better and better, but at the same time he is getting worse inside…” A person becomes self-confident. However, if a person knows he is guilty, if nothing works out, if he understands that he cannot do anything, then he looks at this world and his neighbors in a different way.
Read the rest at St. Elisabeth Convent
