“What I owe to Christ!”

There is a prayer in Jewish ritual that consists of a syllable of thanksgiving to God for all the blessings bestowed upon His people Israel. As a refrain, or as an interjection after each gift mentioned, there are the words dai lanu, which means: enough for us. If it were only that the Lord brought us out of the land of Egypt, it would be enough to bless Him and bring Him glory. If only He had turned the sea into dry land, it would be enough to praise and thank Him. If only He had fed us in the wilderness… And so on. Any act of divinity, any miracle, is enough to arouse the gratitude of the people and to provoke the exclamation: dai lanu!

In the same way, I think, every Jew who has received the Holy Sacrament of Baptism, to whom the Lord has revealed himself and who now counts himself among the “Jews who have believed in Him”, can also cry out: “You have done enough for me, O Christ my God!

I thank you with all my heart, with all my soul, with all my mind and with all my strength, because you have removed the scales from my eyes. Just as you would have done, having taken care of me, with dignity and justice, I cry out with tears: dai li!

For having given me the power to know my own sinfulness, wickedness and iniquity, I give you praise and thanks, and if it were limited to so many gifts given to me, it is still too much to repeat: dai li!

That I may pray to You, love You and worship You – enough to bless Your Holy Name. That I may have the hope of forgiveness and begin to glimpse the power of salvation – all praise to Thee o, O Lord!

For having given me the courage to conceive the establishment of an I-Thou relationship with You, my Lord and my God, I am amazed and, not being able to say anything else, I cry out: dai li!

And so it is, for I can now imagine myself among those to whom you said: ““If you abide in My word, you are My disciples indeed. And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.“. (John 8:31-32).

I am grateful to You, my Christ, beyond the possibility of expressing myself in our weak and banal human words, to have acquired the quality of being Your “friend”, in other words, to have been ennobled, enrobed by faith and the water of Baptism and the fire of the Holy Spirit.

To have come out of sadness, mourning, grief, sorrow, akedia (there is an akedia of the layman, of the unbeliever), disillusionment, and to have approached the state of happiness. And especially because You have judged me to be able to understand and to be fully convinced that You are the Truth, the Way and the Life.

If it is not given to me to keep myself, yet this absolute conviction is enough for me to know peace and to taste peace.

You have given me, O Lord, in Your inexpressible mercy, to know all the truth – the terrible truth – about myself; you have freed me from the bondage of sin, which I do not think a more enslaved servant than myself could have been.

More than that (for You never give little, sparingly, according to justice, but only fully, grace upon grace, you do not give tips, but covet the imperial dinner): thanks to Your kindness and mercy I was able to tell myself Dostoyevsky’s words: If, on my deathbed, it were proved to me in the most incontrovertible way that Christ is not the truth, that the truth is another – if the proof were incontrovertible and overwhelming, I would not doubt for a moment: I would choose to remain with Christ, not with the truth.

Dai li!

From a slave and a cripple you have made me a free and elderly man; from a coward and a wretch, a brave man; from a being of darkness, a lover of light; and free to try to feel that I am not forbidden to behave effectively according to Your teaching and will.

For it has not only revealed me to myself in all my wretchedness and vileness and nothingness, but it has also revealed to me the good and loving things laying dormant in me;

– It has shown me that I am not lost forever and irretrievably;

– It has brought me out of my cesspool, my narrowness and darkness;

– translated, existentially and at my own expense, the moving (and consoling) phrase Qui Mariam absolvisti mihi quoque spem dedisti;

– and He did not ask me to destroy myself, to die, but – on the contrary – to die to sin and vanity and to live strongly in Him – with love and joy – that is to say, in freedom, good will and serenity (because He – says Fr. Stăniloae – “in valuing man does not want to confuse him with Himself, but to maintain and raise him in an eternal dialogue of love”).

He also revealed to me another great (and for a long time totally unforeseen) mystery, namely the inescapable universal law of paradox, helping me to understand that innocence can only be achieved through this paradoxical path of recognising one’s own guilt.

He also allowed me to partake of His most pure Body and His most precious Blood, and to realise that every evil deed is only a source of bitterness and trouble, and that the acts of chastity, courage and detachment – the “good and beautiful deeds” of the much-hated practical morality – are the only creators of peace and contentment.

Are you calling Christ on the phone? Andre Gide joked. There is no need to call Him, He is always present, ready to enter through the (open) door of the heart, capable only of those characteristic acts of interior nobility which He also proposes to us, proclaiming that they are always accessible to us: Discretion, forgiveness, forgetfulness, detachment from pettiness, banishment of the remembrance of evil from the mind, thirst for revenge, hatred, susceptibility, irritability, mockery, and many other stupidities whose pitiful inferiority and acute harmfulness have been revealed to us once and for all, and revealed to us more painfully each time.

Finally, I was able to convince myself that freedom can only be won by killing sin, and I found myself able to decipher the formula “I do what I want”: it does not mean that I give unconditional obedience to my guts and tropisms, my stupid urges and instincts, making myself a prisoner of my egoism, my turpitudes and the plagues of my nature, but submitting them to my will, my reason and my conscience, the good (clean) part of my ego, my super-ego. I do what I want to do, the faithful and humble disciple of Jesus Christ, and what the devil does not want to do, lurking inside me or creeping around me in the name of so-called instinctive freedom, by which he tempts me to surrender to him and his evil spirits.

Not having been baptised as a child, but as an adult, I was able to experience baptism as a holy mystery and sacrament, as death and resurrection, as an inexhaustible source of living water and sensational happiness. The overwhelming majority of Christians have no way of knowing what the baptised person feels and what this lightning act really is; but those in my situation know as clearly as possible that baptism is not a form, a ritual, a ceremony, a symbol; it is a direct action of the living God.

I also owe to the Lord the priceless, inexhaustible strength to endure and suffer, to obey, patiently and following Him, the parable that He has given us, knowing that “He shares with us the suffering of afflictions, and in the same way He humbles Himself with us, burying Himself in a kenosis, in a night that He repeats in the life of each one of us”. (Fr. Dumitru Stăniloae). Or as Simone Weil, also a Jew blessed by the grace of faith in Christ, said: Christianity does not offer us a miraculous means of escaping suffering, but it puts within our reach the miraculous means of enduring it.

This does not mean that Christianity is identified with suffering. It is through suffering that one can reach truth and self-denial, but Albert Camus shows that detachment from the world can also be found in happiness. It is through happiness that we can ascend to the highest rungs of the ladder. Grief, in fact, is “the less noble face of straddling”. The goal remains happiness, which we must pursue beyond misfortune, trouble and trial. The essence of Christian teaching is this learning, this discovery of happiness.

“As in the baptism of the Lord, in the baptism of every Christian the heavens open, the field of spiritual understanding of the meaning of existence is opened”. (Fr. Constantin Galeriu: Sacrifice and Salvation).

Therefore, I owe to Christ above all the liberating, exhilarating, exhilarating, transforming, boundless sense of happiness – sharp as a double-edged sword – and the realisation that “He can make you a new creation” is not a mere theological statement or a pious affirmation, but an objective constant, a brute reality.

That is why, of all the verses of the Psalter, I like to repeat these (from Psalms 65 and 72), because they are closer to me, because they are more gratifying of the joy in which I have rejoiced unceasingly since that blessed day when I received the euphoric gift of Holy Baptism:

“We went through fire and through water; But You brought us out to rich fulfillment.“.

“Come and listen, all you who fear God, and I will tell you what He has done to my soul.”

“For this God has heard me; he has listened to the voice of my prayer.”

“Blessed is God, who has not turned away my prayer and His mercy from me.”

“For I was without understanding, and knew not: as a fool was I before Thee.”

“Take hold of my right hand. Thou hast taught me with thy counsel, and thou hast received me with thy glory”.

It is not far from these inspiring words to the sense of universal reconciliation that I feel. With God, with people and with the world, with those who want to harm me, with those who have wronged me, and – something quite extraordinary – with those whom I have wronged, and finally even with myself.

(Fr. Nicolae Steinhardt – Giving you will gain)