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).

I would like to say something about the other side of the Church, about us. The Apostle Paul once said: "Because of you the name of God is blasphemed" (Romans 2:24). If only we were the Christians we are supposed to become, and that some of the saints have been with such glory! I am now thinking of Simeon, of whom I spoke, of Maximus the Confessor, of Sergius of Radonezh, of Seraphim of Sarov, who shone like light in the darkness. But what kind of society are we? We are a sick society, we are sick with mortality, we are sick with sin, we are sick with the oscillation between good and evil; and at the same time we are a miraculous society, thanks to which, in its weakness, in its insignificance, let us say, all the glory of which I have spoken is present. We ourselves sometimes perish and drown, like Peter when he walked on the waves and instead of thinking about Christ, thought about the possibility of his death in the raging waves. And at the same time, through this society, through our feeble presence, all this fullness is made available to the world in which we live. And this is wonderful...

What can we do so that this sick, weak, sinful society nevertheless grows in the person of each of us and in our totality into the Church of which we speak, into the Holy Church?.. You remember how the Apostle Paul grieved over his own weakness and how he prayed to God that it would be taken away from him, and how the Savior answered him: "My grace is sufficient for you: my strength is made perfect in weakness" (2 Corinthians 12:9). In what weakness, however? It would be self-deception to think that no matter how lazy, cowardly, cowardly I am, no matter how little impulse there is in me, God will still act on me, and everything will end well. It's not true, it doesn't happen! God will seek out any sinner, God holds each of us, as it were, above the abyss; but we can grow to the full measure of our calling only by becoming, in the words of the Apostle, God's co-workers, harnessing ourselves together with Him under the same yoke...

What kind of weakness does Paul speak of? I will try to explain to you what seems to me true about this weakness. There is that sinful weakness of which I have just briefly spoken; but there is another weakness, a weakness that gives away, a weakness that allows the power to act in itself. You probably remember when you were little, your mother, or father, or someone else, suddenly decided to teach you to write. You sat down, not knowing what would happen, put a pencil in your hand, which you did not know how to use, and did not know what to expect; and then your mother took your hand and began to move your hand; And while you had no idea what was going to happen, as long as your hand moved freely in the movement of your mother's hand, the lines were so beautiful, straight and rounded, and everything was in harmony. At some point, the child suddenly thinks: now I understand, I will help, and begins to pull the pencil: look, I want to help; I see that the movement is going upwards – I will bring it to the top, it is deviating somewhere to the side – I will lead it to the side... And you get scribbles. This is how a person writes history on earth. If only we would give ourselves into God's hand and allow God to move our hand, to write His mysterious tablet with our hand, but by His movement, there would not be the ugliness that we create on earth...

And another example. I told you at the beginning that I was once a doctor, during the war I was a surgeon. The surgeon wears gloves during the operation, so thin, so fragile that you can break through with a fingernail; And at the same time, precisely because they are so thin, so fragile, a clever hand in a glove can perform a miracle. If instead of this glove you wear a strong, thick glove, nothing can be done, because freedom of movement depends on this flexibility, on this weakness.

And the third example: what is weaker than a sail on a ship? "And at the same time, a sail, skillfully directed, can embrace the breath of the wind and carry a heavy ship to its goal. Replace the thin, fragile sail with a strong iron board - nothing will happen, except that the ship will probably sink. The fragility and weakness of this sail makes it possible for it to embrace this breath of wind and carry the ship. Now think about it: the wind, the stormy breath, the breath of the gentle evening wind in the vision of Elijah the prophet, the breath of the Holy Spirit — this is what we should be filled with. We must be as fragile, as given, as free as a child's hand in a mother's hand, as a light glove on a surgeon's hand, as a sail capable of encompassing the breath of the spirit and carrying the ship where it belongs. This is where weakness can become a help and not a defeat, this is the kind of weakness we must learn: this surrender or, if you prefer, this transparency, according to the words of St. Gregory Palamas, who says of us that we are all thick and opaque, and that the calling of man is gradually to be so purified as to become, like crystal, pure, so that the Divine light pours through man unhindered and, thanks to his faceting, shines in all directions and pours out on all the creatures around him.

 On the Sacraments [29]