Activity of study, meditation and intense spiritual life
During the winter I read extensively with Valeriu Gafencu, listened to Father Vasile Serghie, and studied dogmatics and apologetics, biblical archaeology, symbolism, mysticism, and asceticism. Anghel Papacioc combined the study programme with hours of prayer, meditation, and exegetical discussion.
I have never felt so fulfilled.
Father Vasile Serghie, a distinguished graduate of the Faculty of Theology in Chernivtsi, was also a living exponent of the truths of Christian life. He possessed a rare sobriety in all his manifestations. For him, life was “Christian time,” not a matter of chance or a mere succession of events from which one knows not what to choose. Together with Anghel Papacioc—whose zeal for virtuous, pure, and holy life was rare, and who was a fervent promoter of the Jesus Prayer—they were both light and exhortation, guiding us to integrate ourselves into Christ as holy members of His body.
Valeriu Gafencu, an inspired man of God, did not need what Father Serghie taught him, for it sprang naturally from his soul, as if rooted there. Yet he followed with total obedience the programme of study, exegesis, prayer, and moral discipline. He was like an elder brother: I tried to hold onto the hem of his mantle along the path of knowing and living in Christ.
From time to time—weekly or monthly—knowing from the Holy Fathers that true humility consists in revealing one’s thoughts so as not to be alone in what one thinks, we would meet at Mr Trifan’s or at our place, sometimes all of us, sometimes only a few. We would bring forth our perplexities and discuss the questions that had stirred our consciences, in the light of the writings of the Holy Fathers and the canonical decisions of the Church.
We lifted our minds to the heights of holy contemplation, striving to walk the same path of holiness that the “wise men of God, who served not the creature but only the Creator,” had walked in the light of grace. The Book of the Fathers helped us understand how to apply supernatural truths in practice, mobilising our inner powers toward the attainment of virtue.
Those who place other concerns of life before the struggle for moral, spiritual, and Christian perfection will never complete it. They lose awareness of their responsibility before God—for their deeds in the world and for their own souls.
In March, Anghel Papacioc moved into the cell with Mr Trifan, while Naidim came to us. Mr Trifan, a “spiritual digger,” felt the need to complete the act of affective and practical life—of acute sensitivity—and Anghel Papacioc complemented and fulfilled this sensitivity by adopting a method of spiritual investigation.
On the path of knowing and following Christ, each person acquires a new and whole personality; one must arrive at Christian knowledge and thought, while ensuring that sensibility does not burn itself out in the process of becoming in Christ.
Many theologians, “men of knowledge”—even some priests who “know but do not do”—do not truly live the truths they know. Their inner sensibility, “the feeling of the Spirit,” as the Fathers call it, remains dormant. They do not act upon what they know, and their will is unmoved. Those who are merely emotional may weep and prostrate before great spiritual acts, but they remain unintelligent of the Spirit and are robbed by sentimental gestures that are foreign to the truth.
“Pray in the Spirit, but pray also with understanding,” says the Apostle Paul.
“Sing to God with understanding,” says the Psalmist David.
The meeting of mind and heart—reason and feeling—the “descent of the mind into the heart,” is the great achievement for which the Desert Fathers, and indeed all monks and true Christians, strive.
It cannot occur on its own, within a life lived by chance. It is the fruit of conscious effort under the action of grace, through the blessing of the Holy Spirit, who “makes of the two”—the rational man and the sensitive man—a new being: the Christic man, the knower and doer of the Word of God.
He works within him the incarnation of the Godhead: the Father as the act of knowledge, the Son as the act of love, the Holy Spirit as the act of working power—holy manifestation itself.
I repeat, though I may weary some readers of these testimonies: the Christian life is not a life lived at random.
Those to whom the Apostle said, “You have not yet resisted sin to the point of blood,” were not monks, nor ascetics, nor hermits, but ordinary people—baptised Christians who lived as we do today, in communities of families, villages, and towns.
Christian life is not a mere sector of society—it is a permanent and living effort to look steadfastly upon the Beginner of Life, Christ. It means living a life of humble self-examination and inquiry, a life of humility and active love, of constant obedience to the gracious priestly hierarchy—accompanied by fasting and prayer, by tears of sorrow for the degraded spiritual state in which you have lived, which has mutilated your being in its spiritual depths and offended the Godhead in Christ Jesus.
It means tears of joy and gratitude for victories over personal weaknesses, passions, and temptations; tears of joy at the feet of Jesus crucified on the Cross—for without Him you would not have known the love of moral beauty, of your neighbour, and of all creation wonderfully and holily made.
If the Creator Himself had not revealed this love to your eyes and your heart, coming to teach you to love perfectly—to lay down your life for others, praying even for their blindness:
“Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do!”
Christian life is all this—and, as its crowning glory, the desire to enter into communion with Him, to be integrated in Him and with Him:
“Take, eat, this is My Body…
Drink of it, all of you, this is My Blood…
Unless you eat My Body and drink My Blood, you have no life in you.”
People, you have heard these words many times. Do not think they are symbolic or sectarian! Spiritual communion through the spoken Word of God is not the same as communion with the incarnate Word of God—with the very Being of the Godhead made flesh and blood for us in Jesus Christ, whom we receive from the Holy Cup in the form of bread and wine.
If Christ is not in us with His energies, what is our life?
Christ Himself answers: “You have no life in you.”
Life is Christ. Those who are not in Christ are in death—in the denial of life.
Before Christ came, God spoke to the Jewish people through Moses, the prophets, and the angels, giving them the law of life proper to man.
He told them to keep the law, and they would live by it. The law was summed up in two commandments, contained in one another: love of God and love of neighbour.
But no one could fulfil the law. No one could live by it. Knowing it only deepened guilt and led each soul further into condemnation.
Then came the law of divine love:
“Eat My Being, materialised for you in this sinless Body of My Christ; believe, and eating, you shall conquer sin—all carnal weakness and the consequences of sin—and you shall become bodily immortal, returning to the state of creation, and even beyond it. For not only shall you not die, but you shall be like Me—gods—each consciously integrated into My Divinity.”
“As You, Father, are in Me and I in You, may they also be one in Us.
Father, I will that they also, whom You have given Me, be with Me where I am; that they may behold My glory, which I had with You before the world was.”
(John 17:21–24)
Holy, glorious state—words fail to express this divinity to which we are called. Let us adore it through our actions toward one another, and live within it, body and soul, deified by Him who loved us and became like us, taking our humanity into Himself, in Christ, the God-Man.
Oh, that we could penetrate this mystery with our minds!
We would tremble before the working power of God’s grace poured out upon us.
But it is not given to us to know it through natural reason, but through faith—through the renunciation of the merely natural.
He who revealed these things to us through His Son did not give a laboratory method.
He said:
“Believe that the Father is in Me and I in the Father.
He who has seen Me has seen the Father.
Even if you do not believe Me, believe the works that I do.
The Son does nothing but what He sees the Father doing.
If you do not believe that I am the Christ, you will die in your sin.
If you do not believe, I do not judge you—for I have not come to judge the world, but to save it.
The word that you have heard will judge you on the last day.”
(Gospel of John)
Let it be known to all: whoever has heard the word of Christ also carries within himself the condemnation of not fulfilling it.
“He who believes in Me will also do the works that I do, and greater works than these.” (John 14:12)
Here, too, lies the laboratory for experiencing the truths of His divinity and of our own participation in it.
If we can so readily obey human commandments or counsels that often cause us pain, loss, and even death, why should we not more readily obey this commandment—to have joy in this life and to gain the consciousness of eternal life in the Divine Being of Christ Himself?
Because we do not truly believe.
And when we say we believe, we do not.
“If you had faith as small as a mustard seed,” says the Saviour, “you would say to this mountain, ‘Move,’ and it would move.” (Matthew 17:20)
How little faith is needed!—just enough to believe that in the consecrated bread and wine there is the divine and human nature of Jesus Christ.
Not even as much as a grain of mustard seed—for with such faith, we would move mountains.
The miracle of miracles that God has done you see with your mind’s eye, through faith: the incarnation, death, and resurrection of His Son.
How?
“Fool that you are,” the Apostle Paul would say, “can the comprehensible comprehend the incomprehensible?”
Not with the worldly mind, limited to reason; not with bodily senses, bound to matter—but with the spiritual mind and feeling transfigured by faith.
The transfiguration of matter within you—the ascent to the deification of your spiritual being—flows naturally from this faith and confession, through eating the “bread that came down from heaven,” making you food for eternal life.
“For with the heart one believes unto justification before God, and with the mouth one confesses unto salvation before men and angels, both good and evil,” says St Paul.
Virgil Maxim – Hymn for the Cross Carried