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.

And then the Lord appeared before them, and His first word to them, in their storm of hesitation, despair, doubt, bewilderment, was: Peace be unto you! How did they need it.. If what I have just said so briefly and so clumsily has reached you, you must understand that it was precisely they who did not have peace; and Christ gives it to them: the peace that the earth cannot give, the peace that the earth cannot take away, the peace of God, which only He, Christ, can give us... And then he blew on the disciples and said, "Receive the Holy Spirit... At that moment, this little flock, these ten disciples, who were then gathered together (because Thomas was not with them, and Judas died), became like a vessel containing the presence of the Holy Spirit; just as the Holy Spirit descended upon Jesus Christ when He ascended from the waters of the Jordan after His baptism, and remained upon Him, so now the Holy Spirit descended upon the body of Christ, upon His apostles, and dwelt in them, but on none of them separately from the others. The Spirit was given to them as to the body of Christ in its entirety, in its wholeness; He did not belong to any of them personally, but He lived in this new body of Christ. A week later, Thomas was again among his brethren when Christ came—and he did not need to receive the gift of the Holy Ghost separately, because that gift was given to the Church, and he was a member of the Church, whether he was there or not at the time of the gift.

The Holy Spirit dwells in the Church by this general gift and this personal gift; and each of us, at baptism and chrismation, enters the Church and, together with the others, because he is a member of the body of Christ, partakes of this mystery of spirit-bearing and receives the gift of the Holy Spirit personally.

And so the Church is also the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit; each of us individually and all of us collectively are the temple of the Holy Spirit. But even the word "temple" is not enough to express this mystery of our communion. The temple is a vessel, the temple is a frame; our relationship with the Holy Spirit is deeper: we not only contain Him, remaining as if alien to Him, but He permeates us, He becomes our life. He is present in the Church of Christ and in each of us. Of course, His presence is different; of course, we do not bear the same fruits, because our relationship with God is not mechanical. God does not do for us what we are called to do in His name and for Him; and therefore we have the task of acquiring the Holy Spirit; By ascetic podvig, purity of heart, purification of the mind, renewal of the flesh, the direction of all our will in accordance with the will of God, we must become capable of giving freedom to the Holy Spirit to act in us, to burn in us with a full flame. It can be said that each of us is like a tree that has not yet dried up, which has caught fire, partly smokes, partly burns, and partly dries up and is engulfed by this fire, until at last we are so embraced that each of us individually and all of us together will become like a burning bush, which burned with the fire of the Divinity and did not burn in it.

And so the Church, even in our person, through this gift of the Holy Spirit, is filled with Divinity, and our humanity in her and in Him is gradually changing, gradually being processed in some sometimes invisible, and sometimes tangible way.

I want to give you an example of how this can be felt. A few years ago, a non-believer came to our London church, not of his own free will, but simply to meet a believing Orthodox woman he knew. He hoped to come to the end of the service, but by the mercy and providence of God he came earlier and stood behind. He stood silently, not expecting anything, not praying, because he did not believe in God, and suddenly (as he later told me) he felt that there was some incomprehensible presence in this church, which he had never experienced, that there was something in this church that he had never met outside of it. He attributed this to the influence of singing, the beauty of the church, the icons, the prayers of all those gathered — in a word, he attributed it to the influence on his soul of purely earthly and human actions and states. But this puzzled him so much that he decided to come and see if it was so, or if there was something in this place that he had never seen before. After a while, he came to the service, when there was no one, nothing happened; stood for a long time, watched, watched himself, and came to the conclusion that something—or Someone—was present in the temple, that it was probably what people called God. But even this was not enough for him; as he said to me, "What does it matter to me whether there is a God or not, if He cannot have any influence on me, if I feel Him only as an external presence or an external force?" And he decided to go to church and observe not his own condition, but people: what happens to them. To observe not in the sense of how they behave, how they behave, how they pray, what they do, but whether anything happens to them... And he finally came to me and said: "I have been coming to you for three years, I have been observing people and I have come to the conclusion that God, Who lives in this temple, not only lives in it, but acts. I don't know if the people that you have here are getting better, but I see that something is happening to them, some kind of transformation, transformation; they are changed by the power of God, who is present here; and I need to be changed, and therefore I have come to you: I want baptism, I want God to change me"... This is what a person – a stranger, not connected with us in any way, not a Russian, a person who could not be carried away by Russianness or the feeling that he had returned to some kind of his homeland, felt it humanly. This is how the Holy Spirit is present and even in us, in our weakness, it acts, and shines, and reaches.

And it must be added that in Christ and in the Spirit we are so united with the Father that no one, anywhere, can be united in any way. You remember the words of the Saviour: "No one cometh unto the Father except by me" (John 14:6), no one knoweth the Son but the Father, no one knoweth the Father except the Son, and him to whom the Son deigneth to reveal Him (Matt. 11:27)—because the relationship between the Divine Son and the Father is so incomprehensible to us, Their unity, Their incomprehensible difference, that only by partaking of it, that Christ is, we can begin to come closer to understanding who and what our Heavenly Father is. And when we speak of Fatherhood in this respect, we are not saying that God is good, merciful, that He is the source of our being, and that therefore in some moral relation, in an existential relation, we are, as it were, His sons, daughters, children; no, our relationship with the Father in Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit is something completely incomprehensible except by experience, but inexpressible in words. This is incomprehensible to us, but this is our calling, and this is the very content of the Church, this is her very life. After this, can we not say that the Church is a mystery, that the Church is holy by all the holiness of the Triune God Who lives in her, by all the rudimentary and gradually growing holiness of saints and sinners, who are gradually transformed into a new creation by God? This is the Church of which we speak, I believe, because, according to the words of the Epistle to the Hebrews (11:1), faith is confidence in things that are not seen. Yes, it is invisible to the outside eye; The external man sees only human society: in some respects attractive, in others repulsive. In each of us, both sinfulness and striving for good are fighting; Did not Paul, the great Paul, say that in him two laws are at war, the law of life and the law of death, the law of the Spirit and the law of the flesh (Rom. 7:15-25)? — so it is in us. But we know all this, we know it by experience, by our union with Christ, by the action of the Holy Spirit, Who ineffably teaches us to pray and clearly and terribly teaches us to call God our Father (Gal. 4:6), because we are so one, at least embryonicly, with Christ the Holy Spirit. This is what we believe, this is what we know, this is why it is possible to live in the Church and why it is not necessary to be afraid of death. The Apostles hid themselves on Good Friday for fear of death and suffering, because then they knew the only temporary life on earth; but when Christ was resurrected, when they became the living body of Christ (in the words of one of our Orthodox theologians: by expanding, spreading the incarnation of Christ through the centuries), then they were not afraid to die, because all that could be taken away from them was temporary, transitory life, and they knew eternal life in themselves, which no one, nothing can take away.

And this experience of communion with God is sometimes so vividly expressed in the Fathers of the Church. I am reminded of one of the hymns of St. Symeon the New Theologian. After communion, he returned to his cell, a small, insignificant cell, where stood a wooden bench, which served him as both a bench and a bed. He was already an old man; and he says: I look with horror at these old hands, at this aging, decaying body, because through communion of the Holy Mysteries this is the body of Christ; I look with trepidation and horror at this insignificant, small cell — it is larger than heaven, because it contains the presence of God, Whom the heavens cannot embrace... This is the Church in which we believe, this is the Church that we preach, this is our victory, which has overcome the world (1 John 5:4).