A Reminder of what you are as a Christian
Here is a wonderful passage by Saint Sophrony, one of the most recent saints of the Orthodox Church. He started a monastery in Essex, England, in the 1950s and lived out the rest of his life there, where he died in 1993. The passage quoted here is particularly pertinent to those of us who were born in an Orthodox home and were baptized as infants and perhaps do not appreciate or never learned the fullness of what it is to be an Orthodox Christian. The reason why many people leave the Orthodox Church is because they are never shown the depths of our Orthodox theology, and they only see mechanical repetition and ethnic and other attachments that they grow away from. May the words of Saint Sophrony be an inspiration to your own infancy-acquired faith and membership in the Body of Christ. And if you entered the Orthodox faith as an adult, may these paragraphs remind you of the excitement you felt when you first believed. God bless you for reading the words of Saint Sophrony:
God, who created Heaven and Earth, is our God from our mother’s womb. After our birth in the flesh and before we had learnt to distinguish our right hand from our left, we received a second birth, from on High, in the baptismal font, and a name – mighty and terrible even to the angelic powers – was pronounced over us: the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Next, we received another priceless gift, which our souls cannot contemplate without trepidation – Chrismation, when the sanctifying seal of the Holy Spirit was imprinted on all members of our body with the sacramental words: ‘The seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit.’ Thus we became the abode of the Most High, with our body the temple of the Holy Spirit.
Sophrony, Truth and Life, Stavropegic Monastery of St John the Baptist, Essex, 2014, pages 121-22.
Since our infancy we have been nourished in the Church with the Divine Body and Blood of Christ. We are his children – flesh of His Flesh and blood of His Blood. From our youth we have lived in the atmosphere of the word of God, which opens up for us boundless expanses in the cognition of God who is without beginning, our Father who permits us here on earth to foretaste the bliss of evermore abiding with Him and in Him. In the Church, we live each and every day in an ineffable abundance of spiritual wealth, and our grateful soul is imperiled to cry out: ‘Rich indeed is our God! He is in all places and filleth all things, constantly enfolding in His embrace each and every one of us.’
And yet, despite all this, we are ‘poor in spirit’. Within the confines of the earth we cannot satisfy our hunger of quench our thirst for knowledge of God, since we seek to attain the Unattainable, to behold the Invisible, to know the Unlimited. In every [Christian], this urge grows ever stronger when the Light of Divinity is pleased to shine on [us], albeit faintly, for it is then that the eyes of our mind are opened to the abyss of darkness in which we are living. This vision confounds the whole [person], and henceforth [the] soul knows no respite, and can have no peace, until [the soul] has fully escaped the clutches of this darkness [and] is sated with the Inexhaustible Food, until the Light increases within [us] and unites with [us] to the point that Light and the soul become one, transfiguring [our] indigence into divine glory.
(The square brackets in the last paragraph above are modifications of the text to remove some gender-specific references. The text is an English translation from a Russian original.)