When a person does not look at life superficially, when he does not glide over things, when he thinks about the miracle of the atom, the cell, the blossoming flower, the complexity of his own structure, the more he penetrates into it, the stronger is his endless amazement.

The universe is a giant organism. Any thing created by man requires effort, art, talent, and intelligence. But how great and immense must be the intelligence and the genius that stands behind the entire universe! Everything that we know about the universe leads us to it.

Of course, I will not dwell on the primitive arguments that were pulled out of dusty boxes thirty years ago, when I was just beginning to serve. I remember there was a poster with a picture of satellites. And there was an amusing inscription on behalf of the satellites that they had walked around the entire universe — they had not found God anywhere. Of course, the very assertion that they went around the entire universe was doubtful. You need to have some idea of what the universe is to understand how meaningless such a statement is.

In this regard, I recall a parable written by Soloukhin about how one crucian carp decided to find out what was happening "on the other side". Jumping out of the water a few centimeters, he plopped down back and said: "Well, there is no life there, of course, you can't live there at all." So, a person rises above his planet no more than this crucian carp rises above his.

But in space the Divine principle cannot be sought at all. God is neither here nor there. He's here or everywhere, He permeates everything. And when a person comprehends Him, he does not comprehend a thing that can be photographed or measured, but he reveals Him with his inner eye. At one time, it was customary to say that this faith, which we call religious, takes a person away from life. Meanwhile, it is the only thing that fills our life with meaning. It means that we were created for something, it means that the Earth was created for something, all nature was created for something, and the Higher Mind leads both man and life to some goal. And then He gives us inspiration, then we are not just bubbles that burst on the surface of a boiling liquid, but each of us is the image and likeness of the Creator.

The Creed speaks of God as the Father and Creator of heaven and earth. What does that mean? The concept of father emphasizes that it is not an impersonal element like the one depicted by Karel Čapek in the novel "The Factory of the Absolute". There, in this fantasy novel, the heroes isolated a certain supernatural element from matter. No, this is not an element, the Father is a personal principle. That is why man is a person, because he reflects in himself the highest personal principle of God, the Creator of heaven and earth.

What is heaven and earth? This is a very ancient designation for the Universe. Six thousand years before us, the ancient Sumerians called the Universe An-ki, which means "heaven and earth" – the two poles of existence. In the same way, the Bible begins its narrative with the words "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth," that is, all the basic parameters of the universe.

And two more parameters are indicated in the Symbol: Visible to all and invisible. He is the Creator of all things visible and invisible. These words lead us to the idea of the duality of the entire universe, the duality of our nature. And man, who is a microcosm, that is, a small universe, unites everything in himself. Minerals live in our tissues, in our bones. Each cell of our body has the same principles as the cell of any plant. Our physiology contains everything that is in the physiology of higher animals. But in addition to this, we also have an invisible principle, the very principle that we call spirit. Strictly speaking, the soul is the link between the spirit and the body.

The spirit is distinguished primarily by creativity. Only the spirit creates. There is no creativity in the animal world. Therefore, man is similar to God. The spirit cognizes moral values, chooses between good and evil. The spirit is free, potentially free, so man is responsible for his actions. Spirit is not material, it has no color, shape, weight, does not occupy space, and therefore it is indestructible. Why is matter destructible? Because it is made of something: molecules, atoms, elementary particles that move in space. What is movement? This is a change in location in space. Creativity, consciousness, and love are not in space, so material movement is inaccessible to them, and neither is destruction. The human soul is enriched internally, it can grow, but its growth is not material. A tree grows, an organism grows. The spirit also grows, but in a completely different way. All the properties of the spirit are dynamic magnitudes. I emphasize, dynamic values, that is, they can increase and decrease. You can bury talent in the ground, you can develop it; you can learn to love, or you can suppress this desire in yourself, etc. That is, we should not think that this gift is given to us in a ready-made form, that it appears like Athena from the head of Zeus, and there is no need to add anything else. No, all human life is the development of spiritual qualities. The Bible calls these properties the image and likeness of the Creator.

Man is the image and likeness of nature, I have already spoken about this. And as a creator, as one who knows good and evil, as a thinker who embraces the entire universe, he is a likeness of his Creator. In this respect, he infinitely rises above everything. Blaise Pascal, the famous physicist and philosopher, wrote that man is a blade of grass, a reed, that it costs nothing to destroy him, a small drop is enough to kill him. But if the whole universe falls on him, he will be higher than it, because it will fall on him senselessly, thoughtlessly. Only he will understand that he is dying.

Man appeared at the last moment of the history of the world. It remains a mystery to us whether it was created only on Earth or in other worlds. In practice, today we are talking only about our, earthly humanity. There can be two options: either God populated the Universe with other humanity, or our humanity is the epicenter, from where the intelligent settlement of the entire Universe will eventually begin. But what is important is that the world, according to the Bible, according to the Holy Scriptures, is not a ready-made thing, but a certain givenness, a person's calling. And when a person betrays his calling, he begins to destroy the world. Instead of transforming it, spiritualizing it, it pollutes it. Instead of developing the abilities of spiritual cognition, he becomes dull. Instead of deepening brotherhood and love, he becomes bestial. And this ultimately leads to grave consequences.

One should not think that Divine punishment is a criminal punishment. I am often asked why they say: "God punished" and so on. No, God is not a criminal authority. But He created a certain moral world order, and in this moral world order, the sown evil eventually turns against the one who sowed it. Man is responsible for what he has created, and this responsibility is linked to the deep solidarity of human beings. People are connected, and when we do evil, it's not our own business—it's always spreading around.

Thus, the first point of the Creed concerns the main point of any religion. What I have just talked about is a dogma of both Islam and Judaism. And even the pagans, who worship the Divinity in individual phenomena of nature, still know that behind the individual phenomena is hidden the Supreme Reality. Therefore, the first point of the Symbol of Faith introduces us only to the threshold of Christian teaching. For the time being, it is still a religion in the broadest sense of the word. Is it an abstract theory, metaphysics, theology, philosophy? No, both theology and philosophy only comprehend it.

In fact, for each person there is a possibility of the deepest mysterious personal encounter with the Higher Reality. A person can and should always look for a way to it. We will never have the fullness of life or what we call happiness if we are cut off from this reality. We will never be truly happy if we replace it with idols: sooner or later the idol will fall, and we will see that it is powerless and inglorious.