“Unity in the General field of eternal life, finally delivered from sin, corruption, hardships, information, endless accounts of mutual hostility and dislike” – on the eve Dimitry Saturday ponders the priest Sergei Kruglov.
Photo: tatmitropolia.ru
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Priest Sergei Kruglov
On the eve Dimitry Saturday I wrote one of my friend gave a little list of a few names to remember the dead. And attributed to him: “Anna is my aunt’s father, was baptized yourself in our Russian Orthodox Church, we in the Urals, back in the eighties, attended services and took communion. In subsequent years, when the children transferred to Germany, went to the Greek Church, the other was not around. As I understand it, between them and us is now split, but I asked the priest, he said that it is possible to remember, dead these our sad squabbles will not hurt…”
“Our sad squabbles”… the Desire to avoid the manifold squabbles, to escape from “unbearable lightness of being”, from the yoke of afflictions, passions, diseases, toil, injustice and strife, a dream of a better existence, though not here, not in the earthly period, but in some “beautiful far”, has always accompanied the life of fallen humanity. I struggled to peer into the dense impenetrable fog, hiding from living human afterlife, to catch out the sounds, images, hints and variously to interpret them, trying to see something terrible, or, conversely, can expect a man beyond the grave. Anyway, changed, these ideas penetrated into the life and aspirations of Christians.
As noted by Church scholars, among the Jews of the time of the Exodus, the time of judges and kings, the time of David and Solomon’s interest in a personal afterlife almost was not, Judaism had to say about the earthly life and how God says to live in the here and now. Powerful impetus to the development in Judaism, ideas about life after death was given by the meeting of Israel with the Hellenistic world, especially in times of war; in the Second book of Maccabees we read the flaming words of the mother-Jewess to his son before his face death at the hands of enemies:
“I beg you, child: you look to heaven and earth and seeing everything in them, know that nothing created God, and what happened and the human race. Don’t be afraid of this executioner, but by becoming worthy of thy brethren, receive death, but for the grace of God will receive you again with your brothers” (2 Mac. 7, 28-29).
Almighty God created us and the world out of nothing – but really do we disappear into nothing? Irreversibly whether mortal man, the greatest creation and a child of God, or there is something indestructible? The tumultuous events of history, challenges the so-called “lizavetoj era” that befell Israel in the time of his confrontation of the Hellenic invaders and later the Romans as well as the spread of the Jewish Diaspora in the lands that belonged to the Gentiles, and engagement in Jewish thought with the thought of the Greek philosophers is shaped and strengthened the submission and the personal survival of man, and the resurrection of the dead, and about the “soul” in the Platonic sense of the word (different from ordinary use of this word in the Tanakh in which “soul” often simply means “life”, “life force”).
And in the gospel we have already encountered ideas about the individual soul of man and his post-mortem existence as something for the Jews is well known. Testimony of the evangelists tell us about the Sadducees not believing in resurrection, transmit the questions of the scribes to Christ about whose wife in the resurrection will be mnogomernaya the widow, and the parable of Christ about the rich man and Lazarus.
The event of Christ’s Resurrection has shaken conventional ideas about life and death, subsequently otlichish for the Church in the stamped line of the creed about the hope of resurrection of the dead and the life of the age.
Now and forever death has ceased to be a Christian in the impersonal void, the nothingness, obessmyslivaet and absorbing all living things, time itself has ceased to be the inexorable slow killer – it was the path leading from birth to eternal life.
However, the death even defeated by Christ, not disappeared altogether. The years went by, generations of Christians, realizing that the second coming of Christ may be soon that we need to somehow get to live yet in this world, returned to the personal understanding of death and afterlife the man in your life, in the circle of the major worries of today…
About the beliefs of the Christians of the East and West to the posthumous fate of the person about what nuances have acquired these beliefs in different times under the influence of certain events, can say a lot. However, undoubtedly and clearly for all of us in these lives views one important aspiration – aspiration of peace. “In blissful repose eternal rest on me, o Lord…” – sings the Church, asking God’s of the assumption not as nothingness, but as being filled with the fruits of rest, that rest which enjoys rural workers, completing harvest harvest. And asks for peace – not of insensibility and inactivity, but a rest from the torment of sinful passions that afflict mortal man, peace from pain and loneliness, hostility, anxiety and fears, peace, reconciled, joyful, sober, living.
Based on the belief in the mercy of God is an aspiration that, in spite of all our infirmities, hell in the face of His Almighty love is not eternal, colors our attitude to the commemoration of the dead special tones.
His prayer for them, we don’t just ask God to watch over them, to put them in eternal memory in contrast to our weak and short-lived memory we affirm our unity with them, unity in, finally, and their reconciliation with God and with us, and our God too.
The unity in the General field of eternal life, finally delivered from sin, corruption, hardships, information, endless accounts of mutual hostility and dislike. Life that is not separate from us at some infinitely distant Aeon, but we have sown in Christ grows and grows in us and among us, albeit not very visibly, a life that is ALREADY there and dwells.
So the rights of the author of the letter, I mentioned our vain and sinful life walls that we build between themselves a lot, not that the sky do not reach – and reach, after all, a child of God, we have a lot of talents, this, Oh, what – what, and in the construction of the towers of Babel we, sinners, pretty naturaly, and not about the rightness or wrongness of certain builders are now discussed. But there is no doubt that these partitions are doomed sooner or later to collapse. In particular, that we are going to the temple Saturday – ask for our deceased eternal memory and affirm his faith in the eternal war and eternal life.