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.

And in this way He reveals to us something that I have already pointed out when I spoke about the nearness of God: He tells us how potentially great man is. If God could become man, it means that man is so great, his metaphysical capacity is such that he can contain the essential communion with the Living God, become a partaker of the Divine nature (2 Pet. 1:4), and become His kinsman in the strongest sense of the word. Man is not only a being who can contain spiritual mysteries, he is a being who can become one with his Creator.

About the Church[28]

As you will soon notice, I am not a learned theologian; I am a doctor by education; but throughout my conscious life I have tried to think over my faith and understand what we live by in the miracle that is the Orthodox Church, the Church of Christ. And I want to tell you about the Church.

We speak of the Church in the Symbol of Faith: I believe in One Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church... For us, it is an object of faith; but, on the other hand, we observe the Church in history as well. The Church of Faith is presented to us in a kind of amazing radiance of holiness, beauty, and grandeur. The Church on earth in its history, in its formation, sometimes seems to us dull, and sometimes tragic, and sometimes it causes bewilderment: what is the relationship between the Church, which we confess as holy, and the Church that we represent? I insist on this word "we" because we are not talking about some Church outside of us that we observe, but about the Church that we are, which suffers from our sins, which is weak because of our weakness. And so I would like to speak about these two aspects of the Church and, perhaps, add something more.

The Church is not only a community of believers gathered in the name of God. The definition of the catechism, however precise, does not exhaust the mysteries of the Church, just as no definition can exhaust the mysteries. All the definitions that we have in theology, in the experience of the Church, reveal to us the mystery, but not only do they not exhaust it, but they do not even strive to express it to the end. But what we know definitely about the Church is that it is a place where God and man meet, where they are together, where they form one mysterious family. And the Church in this sense is simultaneously and equally Divine and human society in two planes: we make up the Church – sinful people, struggling, falling, rising, weak; but humanity in the Church is also represented by one Man, the only One Who is fully human – our Lord Jesus Christ. He is a perfect man, and He is a man to the end. He is a man like us in everything, except sin, and He is a man in whom we can see in a realized form all that we are called to, all the perfection, all the beauty, all the greatness of human nature, and, at the same time, the mystery of the union of man with God, God-manhood. For us, He is the only fully realized vision of what man is – He and the Most Pure Virgin Mother of God. Thus, in the Church, the image of the true, authentic man is revealed to us in all his holiness and in all his greatness; and St. John Chrysostom in one of his sermons says: "If you want to know what man is, do not turn your eyes to the royal chambers, or to the chambers of earthly nobles, but lift up your gaze to the throne of God, and you will see Man seated in glory at the right hand of God and the Father... And thus, in the Church, humanity is revealed to us both in our weakness and in His perfection and holiness.

But it is not only humanity that is present, lives and acts in the Church by Christ. All the fullness of the Godhead dwelt in Him bodily (Col. 2:9), and in Him, through Him, all the fullness of the Godhead had already entered into the mystery of the Church as a human society. We read both in the Gospel of John, at the end of chapter 20, and at the beginning of the book of Acts, about the gift of the Holy Spirit to the Church and to its living, regenerated members. These two stories are not identical in all respects. It can be said that there were two gifts, two different moments of this gift of the Holy Spirit to the Church. You remember the story of how the Savior first appeared to His disciples after the Resurrection. In fear, in grief, depressed, perplexed, they hid after Christ's death on the cross in the house of John Mark. For them, Good Friday was like the last day. When we are present and participate in the services of Good Friday, no matter how deeply we experience them, we know, we know not only by knowledge, but by the experience of our lives, that in less than two days we will sing Christ is risen in this same church, embracing each other in the joy of God's victory over death, over strife, over everything. But for the disciples, before the first appearance of Christ after His Resurrection, there was only the death of Christ. There was nothing left but bewilderment at best, and despair at worst, that God had been overcome by human malice and hatred, that it was possible to continue to exist, but that it was no longer possible to live, because life itself had departed for them from the earth with the death of Christ.