No man hath seen God at any time (Jn. 1:18). How can we see Paradise then? Indeed, our problem is that spiritually we are like blind and deaf people, who suffer from two severe disabilities at the same time. But no one has taken away from us the ability to feel. A blind person cannot see someone else, and a deaf person cannot hear the words he utters. But both will clearly feel the touch of their neighbor. Likewise, without seeing or hearing God in the literal sense, we can clearly feel His touch. At Pascha He stands so close to us that it is impossible not to notice His presence.
When we feel good, or, on the contrary, not very good in someone's company, we are used to comparing our feelings with the atmosphere: whether it is pleasant or oppressive. It seems no one touches us physically, but our spiritual essence seems to have been stroked or bothered. The Paschal atmosphere is a feeling of grace flowing in the air. The grace that came after the law of Moses, about which St. John the Theologian writes. The season of Great Lent, in a sense, was for us the time of the fulfillment of the law and certain prescriptions. And on Paschal night—or even earlier, already on Holy Saturday—we felt an incredible surge of a whole palette of feelings that we can’t even find proper words to describe them right away, but they are so vividly experienced by the soul that it’s impossible to doubt them.
We are unable to see or hear the other spiritual realm in which God dwells and which we are accustomed to calling the Kingdom of Heaven. But we can feel the breath of the wind of eternity, expressed in the grace-filled spirit of the Paschal days. Do you know the joy of the feast, which suddenly seems to cover all the problems that disturbed your heart? At Pascha God gives us an amazing opportunity to experience the atmosphere of the Heavenly Kingdom. After all, by and large, we seek happiness in life as a state, and not the possession of some external objects. Being self-deluded, we seek to acquire these only for the sake of obtaining some satisfaction, which we mistakenly take for happiness. And on Bright Week we receive from the Lord a clear description of the atmosphere in which we will be in the place that mankind calls Paradise. True, sometimes we understand this word as something diametrically opposite.
We should use these holy days to reassess our personal priorities. This is the Kingdom in which Christians are called to live. After all, we want to live with this Paschal joy in our hearts so that it would not go anywhere and would not be overshadowed by anything, don’t we? Well, this is why faith was given to us, so that through it we would draw near to God, to true happiness—not for a short period, as happens here on earth—but forever. It is not without reason that many say that Bright Week is a week which is like one day. Because this day belongs to eternity. The Day of the Lord, which opens the door to the Heavenly Kingdom for us, a light breeze of light, joy, peace, hope and love which each one of us can clearly feel in our hearts. This is what you really want to live for.
