In the prayer which we recite, or not, after meals, We say to God that we thank him for all his earthly gifts, and ask him to grant us also the gifts of the Kingdom. Doesn’t it mean that, at that moment, we realize that everything we have, our very being, our life, is of God, and yet that we treat it as part of a created material world, a world that, in our mind, in our imagination, in our illusion, we see as something God has made and then left adrift? And then we ask God: ‘Make it into thy Kingdom, all that is my life, all that is the world around me, make it, O Lord, into thy Kingdom.’
Is that not what we should do all the time, transform everything of this created and fallen world into God’s realm? But it isn’t what we do. We take what God makes, what God gives, and we take it away like the Prodigal Son, until one day we feel hungry. Why? Because these gifts, which we received, were stolen as it were from God when we snatched them from him by saying to him: ‘Die now, because I can’t Wait until you are dead to enjoy the fruits of your Work, of your sacrifice, of your love. Die now.’
We go away and we spend them. But what happens? As long as we are rich with what God gave us, we are surrounded with people who want to take from us what we possess, exactly on the same terms as we have behaved to God. As long as we are in possession of things, others are around us like parasites. The moment when We have nothing else to give, when we have spent What God has given us and are spent ourselves, deprived of everything, we are of no interest to people and they turn away from us. Is this the moment for which we must wait in order to realize what we have done? Alas, very often it is the
moment. It is a moment when we realize that we have condemned God to death, that he has actually died on the cross for us, and that we have accepted his sacrifice in order to be redeemed.
We are not, though, redeemed mechanically by the death of Christ. We are only redeemed if we integrate ourselves into his death and eternal life. We have rejected and lost what God gave us, perhaps not completely, because otherwise we could not even think of God and repent, but we have rejected so much, and, now, what can we do? We can remember that there was a time when we lived in the Father’s house, when there was love, when there was not this desperate loneliness of rejection. And we can start on our way back.
But we do not only sin against God in this direct way of renouncing him and taking his gifts. We sin against him also by discarding and despising his gifts, as when, from time to time, people say, ‘I wish I could die, because life is too heavy.' We also sin against God through the way in which we behave towards people and treat them. God has loved every one of us into existence, into life, and he has died so that every one of us can recapture the life We have discarded and lost. Every one is loved, and the measure of divine love is the death of Christ upon the cross, his descent into hell, to join for ever those who have been rejected. This is God’s measure of love of our neighbor. How do we treat our neighbor? Do we treat him as someone whom God has put in our charge? Do we treat him as someone for whom we care, who matters to us, who has been put in our path for us to do for him all, all we can
- or do we, on the contrary, treat him with cruelty, coldness and indifference?
Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom), from Coming Closer to Christ, Chapter 2, Confession as Encounter with God.
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