completeness. And when saints, for example, Gregory of Nyssa [22], tell us about the "darkness" of the Divine, they do not say that there is some kind of darkness in Him, but that if we look with human eyes not only at Him, but in the direction of God, we are blinded by the abundance of this light, we enter into darkness, because the light is too great for us.

This is one thing, and it already tells us that God is incomprehensibly great, that in Him there is a fullness that surpasses all our understanding and our very ability to fully partake of this essential Divine mystery.

In Western languages of Germanic origin, the word God—whether God in English or Gott in German—comes from an ancient Gothic word that does not describe Him, but which means: He before whom one prostrates oneself in worship in sacred terror. People who in early times strove to say something about God did not make an attempt to describe Him, to delineate Him, to say what He is like in Himself, but only to point out what happens to a person when he suddenly finds himself face to face with God, when suddenly Divine grace, Divine light, shines upon him. All that man can do then is to prostrate himself in sacred terror, worshipping the One Who is incomprehensible and at the same time has revealed Himself to Him in such intimacy and such wondrous radiance.

It seems to me that we also need to remember this, because too often, when we are asked the question of God, we immediately try to somehow give outlines and descriptions of Him in human language, and in the language of fallen humanity, and instead of God we get a caricature. St. Gregory the Theologian [23] says in one of his works that if we were to collect all the testimonies of the Holy Scriptures and all the experience of the Church, saints and sinners, and from all this we would create, as it were, a complete picture of what God is and what He is, we would create an idol, but we would not create God, because everything we know and everything we comprehend is infinitesimal in comparison with what is Who He is and what He is like. All our theological descriptions, everything that is said by saints and theologians about God, can be compared to the starry sky. Stars enable us to discern shapes in the deep darkness of space, but these stars, these constellations, these combinations of light, make sense only because they are separated by a vast space where there is nothing. And when we talk about God, we must remember that each of our words, the most significant, even if it be said by the greatest theologians or saints, is only one lit candle, one star, which gives us the opportunity to know more deeply the depths of heaven and to revere the mystery.

But God is not only a mystery and such a depth, a bottomless incomprehensibility; It is both incomprehensible to us and, at the same time, experiencedly cognizable to us. Those of you who know the secret prayers [24] of the Divine Liturgy remember that after the exclamation "Singing, crying, crying out, and saying," the priest says: ... Thou art holy and most holy, Thou and Thy Only-begotten Son, and Thy Holy Spirit... I don't know if you have paid attention – even to the celebrants, even to those celebrating the Liturgy (this hurt me after many years of service) – to this small, short word "You". Thou art without an adjective, Thou art without any descriptive words, as the almighty, the all-wise—only this word is Thou. And if we think about this word in the context of all those languages where we make a distinction between the word you, which is addressed to the closest ones, to relatives, to friends, and you, which we address to people standing a little further away from us, then we cannot help but catch two things. You're the second person. To tell a person "you" means to recognize his personal existence, outside himself. To tell a person you means to admit (both in relation to God and to man, this recognition should be extremely deep and reverent) that this person exists apart from me, outside of me, to admit that he exists not because I exist, not because I perceive him, but he is in himself. We rarely treat each other like that, it's true; Very often we treat each other, either as individuals or as collectives, as if the people around us exist only insofar as they have something to do with me; And the pastoral approach to a person is precisely to see him as an individual, as a person who exists, which is, and which does not depend on the fact that I exist, or on how I relate to him.

And this, of course, applies to God more than to anyone else. God exists in Himself, He existed when the world did not exist, He exists apart from His relationship to us; and therefore to say Thou art to God is to say: Thou IST, Thou art the Being, Thou art not dependent on my faith, not on me, not on us, Thou art royal in Thyself.

But, at the same time, to say to a person or to God You is to recognize a wondrous closeness. You say to your mother, father, brother, sister, bride, bridegroom, close friend, the person whom you want to caress, to accept, to whom you want to make it clear that he is your own, not some stranger, but your own. And thus the Apostle says of us in relation to God: "We are our own to God, our kinsmen" (Ephesians 2:19). And therefore, to say to God "You" or to understand with amazement that He addresses us with this word, means to understand that He recognizes in us our uniqueness, that we, each of us, are unique and infinitely close to Him. This means that God, before Whom we prostrate ourselves in worship, in love, in amazement, in holy horror, at the same time (this is the word of Nicholas Cabasilas [25]) is nearer to me than my life itself; that stream of life, that current of life, that power of life that lives in me, is less close to me, less permeates me, than the grace and presence of God, communion with Him.

And this leads me to the next concept. We say of God that He is our Creator; and often without thinking through what this means, we imagine that at some point the Lord commanded us to be, called out of non-existence everything that is. But is this creative act an act of power or an act of love? That's the difference... God calls us to life, created the whole world only in order to give Himself to us, so that we would partake of Him, so that we might become one with Him, so that we might become gods by communion, in the image of Christ, Who, being God, partook of our nature. And at the heart of God's creative act is not the sovereign, but the One Who loved us to the end, even before He called us into existence. In German or English, we can say that He loved us in life: He loved us into life; Er hat uns ins Leben geliebt. And this wondrous realization is that we were drawn to life, to existence, by the love of God, and not only by the creative power of God. What a deep relationship it creates between Him and us; how wondrous that when I was not yet there, the Lord said: Come, without you My creation is incomplete! Come into life, enter into the destinies of earth and heaven, because you are part of this wondrous icon, which is represented in history as the formation of the Church and in eternity as the city of God, the constituent stones of which we are all.

We can catch a lot about this both in the Gospel and in the Epistles of the Apostles, but I want to give you a different image. At the beginning of his "Life", written by himself, Archpriest Avvakum gives a short description of the Pre-eternal Council, which preceded the creation of the world. I do not remember the exact words, but the train of thought is this: And the Father said to the Son, Son, let us make the world and man. And the Son answered: Yes, Father. "And the Father said: Son, man will fall away from Us, and in order to save him, You will have to become a man and taste death, even the death of the cross. And the Son answered: So be it, Father. "And the world was created... At the root, in the core of our existence – yours, mine, ours, all – this Divine act of crucifying Himself, the cross in the core of the Divine mystery. And perhaps this is expressed especially vividly at the beginning of the Divine Liturgy, and at the beginning of the Vigil, when the priest, proclaiming the Blessed Kingdom..., makes the cross with the Holy Gospel, or when, proclaiming the Glory of the Holy, One-in-Essence, Life-Giving and Indivisible Trinity, the priest makes the cross with the censer, as if inscribing this cross in the very mystery of our confession of God. We are loved by God even before the creation of the world by the Divine love of the Cross.

And the Apostle speaks of the same thing when he speaks of the Lamb of God, slain before the foundation of the world. That is why our relationship to God and our relationship are so rich (I do not want to say complex; there is nothing complex, the complex consists of separate parts that do not connect well with each other), in such incomprehensibly wondrous simplicity and integrity, but in such a bottomless wealth of relationships, feelings, and mutual positions.

And this, it seems to me, explains what we proclaim as the first commandment on the mount, that is, as the first beatitude: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for to them is the kingdom of heaven" (Matt. 5:3). If at first we pronounce these words thoughtlessly: how is it possible to reconcile blessedness and beggary in our human experience, from within the suffering, the horror of the history of the world and, often, the life of the individual? It seems to me that in order to find the joy of this bliss, you need to understand that nothing in me is my own. I was created without my consent. God told me to come! or rather, the Lord called me and said: Come to Me with open arms. My body, my soul, everything that is in me is a gift of God, not mine, does not belong to me. We know from experience, from everyday experience, that it is enough for a small vessel to burst through the brain of the greatest man, and he becomes, like King Nebuchadnezzar, like a beast, without a mind, he loses his human image and human dignity (Dan. 4:30). We know everything from experience that in the face of grief even of the closest, dearest, beloved person, sometimes our heart remains stone, we cannot move it to compassion, to affection, to love; We know all this, and we know that there are no circumstances in life over which we have power. So, in fact, we are beggars. We depend on what? We can say: either from a handout, or from love, depending on how we look at things. We can say that we depend on accidental circumstances, which are either happy or sorrowful, but we can also say that everything is in God's hand, and that everything that is in me: myself, the content of my soul, the state of my body, everything, everything without a trace is a gift from God. And if I could tear out of this context whatever I had torn out, that is, that which would be mine and not God's, that which would be mine and not the gift of human love, solicitude and affection, I would remove from the realm of the mystery of Divine and human love. It would be mine, I would become somewhat self-reliant, and I would lose a whole area of love. Therefore, to truly realize that I am nothing, that I have nothing of my own, that everything, everything without reserve, is a gift of God's love and human love, is precisely the recognition, the discovery of the Kingdom of God, because the Kingdom of God is the Kingdom where above everything is Divine love, either directly poured out on us, or conveyed to us through people. And thus our notion that God is the Creator is not merely a bare fact which is opposed to certain theories about the origin of our existence, but speaks of such a profound relationship of love between Him and us that, again, we can only look and marvel with reverence and trembling; because this primary vocation of ours is at the same time the final one: we are called to become children of God, we are called to become the body of Christ, the place of dwelling, the temple of the Holy Spirit, in Christ and in the Spirit, according to the words of Irenaeus of Lyons [26] to become the only-begotten son of God, to partake of the Divine nature (2 Pet. 1:4). All this is incomprehensible, unattainable, no human power can do this, but it is given to us by God's grace through faith, through the sacraments, through God's direct influence on our souls and our lives. And this is revealed to us with some new, tremendous power in Christ.

I belong, according to the years of my life, to the emigration. I was born before the First World War, but until 1920 I was a child and I didn't perceive many things – well, I perceived them as a child. That is why I only later discovered some things that perhaps you recognized faster than I did, if you were born in a family where you received a religious upbringing, which I did not receive. The first time I met Christ in my life, I was struck by the revelation about God that will be given to us in Christ. If you think of God in the context of cathedrals, churches, majesty, God becomes great and to some extent distant; The Holy One of Israel [27] was incomprehensible. How many saints of the Old Testament have said: "Woe is me, I have seen God, I can only die..

In emigration, I met something else. We did not have churches; There were garages, there were rooms, there were basements, there were iconostases made of plywood, there were paper icons, everything was very poor. And in this poor there lived the Living God. And this is the first thing that struck me. And then, thinking and experiencing, I discovered that in Christ we were given a revelation about God that neither the Old Testament man nor the philosopher of the pagan world could have imagined. A philosopher of the ancient world could not have indulged in such a humiliation that his God was a man recognized as a criminal, condemned to death; And the Old Testament man perceived such an idea as blasphemy. In Christ we see God, Who gives Himself defenselessly to us; not a great, powerful God, but a defenseless God; God, Who gives Himself over to the mercy of man; God, Who humbles Himself not only to partake of our human nature, but to all conditions, perhaps the most terrible conditions of the fallen world; God, Who partakes not only of man's life, but of man's death; God, Whom everyone who believes only in power, in authority, and in power, will certainly despise; A God Who, as it seemed to His crucifiers, could be dismissed from history.

Such an idea of God proceeds precisely from what I said earlier about the creation of man by Divine love, and moreover by the love of the Cross: the Lamb of God, slain before the creation of the world, is really, bodily slain in the heart of world history.