How Christianity can make life meaningless

Life must not be a preparation for death, but victory over death, so that, in Christ, death becomes the triumph of life…. When it considers life only as a preparation for death, Christianity makes life meaningless, and reduces death to “the other world,” which does not exist, because God has created only one world, one life.

Fr. Alexander Schmemann, Journals, Entry for September 16, 1974

“All of theology is here.”

Pascha. Holy Week. Essentially bright days such as are needed. And truly that is all that is needed. I am convinced that if people would really hear Holy Week, Pascha, the Resurrection, Pentecost, the Dormition, there would be no need for theology. All of theology is here. All that is needed for one’s spirit, heart, mind and soul. How could people spend centuries discussing justification and redemption? It is all in these services. Not only is it revealed, it simply flows in one’s heart and mind.

The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann, 1973-1983, Entry dated May 1, 1973

I’m resolved to do my best to “receive” for the first time the services of Holy Week of our Church, and I hope that you all are able to do the same from your respective traditions. I’m absolutely convinced of Fr. Schmemann’s words: All theology is here.

Schmemann on the heresy of religious nationalism

No one, I think, will deny that one of the fruits of Byzantine theocracy, which for a long time obscured the life of the Orthodox East, was the growth of those religious nationalisms which little by little identified the Church, her structure and organization, with the nation, making her the religious expression of national existence. This national existence, however natural and therefore legitimate it may be, is by its very essence a “partial” existence—the existence as a “part” of humanity which, though not necessarily inimical to its other “parts,” is nonethless opposed to them as “one’s own” to the “alien”. The early church knew herself to be the tertium genus, in which there is neither Greek nor Jew. This means that it proclaimed and conveyed a Life which, without rejecting the “partial” and natural life, could transform it into “wholeness” or catholicity. Hence it must be clear that religious nationalism is essentially a heresy about the Church, for it reduces grace and the new life to “nature” and makes the latter a formal principle of the Church’s structure. This does not mean that there can be no Christian people or any Christian vocation of a nation; it means only that a Christian nation (i.e. a nation which has acknowledged its Christian vocation) does not become the Church. Because the nature of the Church is the Body of Christ, she belongs to the Kingdom of the age to come and cannot identify herself with anything in “this world…”

Fr. Alexander Schmemann, “The Idea of Primacy in Orthodox Ecclesiology,” in The Primacy of Peter: Essays in Ecclesiology and the Early Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1992), 169.

This is no doubt the most beautiful formulation of the problem I’ve yet to come across—and for this same reason, the one that strikes in me the greatest sadness. May the Lord have mercy on us all.

“Boredom is the kingdom of the Devil”

“The curse of labor.” But many people, if not the majority, are wallowing in furious activity because they are afraid of remaining face-to-face with life, with themselves, with death. They are bored, and boredom is the kingdom of the Devil. Bored and afraid, they deafen themselves with action, with ideas and ideologies. The key to our culture is an optimistic activity with traces of fear and boredom. Without God, all is possible, but this “all” is endlessly frightening and boring. It seems to me that the first duty of the Church is to refuse any part in the logic and the keys of this world. One cannot enlighten the world without first wholly rejecting it. What is needed in contemporary Christianity is courage and spiritual freedom….

The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann, 1973-1983, Entry for October 19, 1973.

Repentance: “The shock of man”

The culture in which we live and which shapes our world view excludes in fact the concept of sin. For if sin is, first of all, man’s fall from an incredibly high altitude, the rejection by man of his “high calling,” what can all this mean within a culture which ignores and denies that “high altitude” and that “calling,” and defines man not from “above” but from “below”—a culture which even when it does not openly deny God is in fact materialistic from the top to the bottom, which thinks of man’s life only in terms of material goods and ignores his transcendental vocation? Sin here is thought of primarily as a natural “weakness” due usually to a “maladjustment” which has in turn social roots and therefore, can be eliminated by a better social and economic organization. For this reason even when he confesses his sins, the “modern” man no longer repents; depending upon his understanding of religion, he either formally enumerates transgressions of formal rules, or shares his “problems” with the confessor—expecting from religion some therapeutic treatment which will make him happy again and well-adjusted. In neither case do we have repentance as the shock of man who, seeing in himself the “image of ineffable glory,” realizes that he has defiled, betrayed, and rejected it in his life; repentance as regret coming from the ultimate depth of man’s consciousness; as the desire to return; as surrender to God’s love and mercy. This is why it is not enough to say: “I have sinned.” This confession becomes meaningful and efficient only if sin is understood and experienced in all its depth and sadness.

Alexander Schmemann, Great Lent: Journey to Pascha (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1969), 65.