This also applies to the word, for not only does the bell ring and renew souls, but the human word resounds and renews souls or kills souls. If the word is dead, it kills; if it is alive, it can reach the depths of man and there awaken the possibility of eternal life. You probably remember that place in the Gospel of John, when what Christ said confused the people around Him, and people departed from Him. The Savior turns to His disciples and says: "Will ye also depart from me? And Peter answers for others: Where shall we go? With Thee are the words of eternal life (John 6:26-29). The point is not that He knows eternal life in such a way that He describes it in such a way that the disciples are eager to enter it. If we read the Gospel, we will see that Christ nowhere specifically speaks about eternal life, in the sense that He does not describe it, does not present before us a picture of eternity or hell or heaven. No, but the very words of Christ were such that when He spoke to people, His words reached the depths of man, where the possibility of eternal life rests, and, like a spark falling on a dry tree, eternal life lit up in man. I think it is very important to imagine this.

This applies not only to Christ, whose word certainly came more powerfully than any other, but also to those great teachers and preachers who transformed the lives of others by their words. Both sound is substantial, and light is substantial. Everything material and material (so great that we cannot even imagine its dimensions, and so small that we cannot even grasp it with an instrument) precisely because man was created from the earth, that is, belongs to matter in his flesh - everything is embraced by Christ, included in Christ. And therefore, when we are told that the calling of man is to go into the depths of God, to become related to Him in such a way as to be one with God and through this to transform his corporeality, and in the process to transform the whole world around him, these are not words, but reality, this is our specific calling, what is given to us as a task.

But why are we so unsuccessful? It seems to me that it is worth looking into the Holy Scriptures and asking yourself: what happened? (Of course, I will speak fragmentarily, because I cannot develop the topic now simply because of lack of time.)

When man was created, he was given the opportunity to enjoy all the fruits of paradise, but he did not depend on these fruits for his existence. As Christ said to the devil when He was tempted by him in the wilderness: "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God" (Luke 4:4). Man lived, of course, not by the words of God, but by the creative Word of God and his communion with God. At the moment of his falling away from God, this is what happened. Firstly, there was a division between man and man. When Eve was created from Adam, they looked at each other, and Adam said, "This is flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone" (Gen. 2:23). That is, he saw himself in her, but no longer closed in on himself, but as if in front of himself; he saw in it not his reflection, but its own reality. And so does Eve. And they were united. Sin not only separated them, but also shattered the integrity of man's relations with the entire surrounding world. And now, when man has broken away from God, has lost the ability to live only by God's word, God gives him the opportunity and the task: the opportunity to exist by the fact that he will receive a certain part of his life from the fruits of the earth, and the task of cultivating this land. Without it, he will die - he can no longer live by God alone. It is as if man is rooted both in God, Whom he has not completely lost, and in the earth, in which he has sunk with roots, which he should not have done, because his calling was to lead this land to God, to be, as it were, a leader. We read in the Bible that man was told to possess the earth, and we constantly interpret this word in the sense of having power over it, having dominion over it. To possess does not necessarily mean this. You probably remember again from the Gospel the passage where Christ says: the rulers of the earth rule over their subordinates; let it not be so with you: let the first of you be a servant of all (Mark 10:42-44). This was man's calling: to be a servant; not in some humiliating sense, but to be the one who serves all creation in its ascent to God and its gradual rooting in God and in eternal life.

And then another moment comes. If you read carefully the story of the generations from the fall of Adam to the Flood, you will notice that the number of years of life of the persons mentioned is decreasing. In another passage of Holy Scripture (I cannot quote it exactly) it is said that after the Fall, death gradually set in, that death gradually began to take possession of man, or rather humanity, more and more, because mankind moved further and further away from unity with God and plunged deeper and deeper into creation, which in itself cannot give eternal life or even prolonged earthly life. Two exceptions, however, are in this series. One is Methuselah, who lived longer than all his ancestors and descendants; it is said of him that he was a friend of God and lived for so many years. Another is Enoch, who, because he was a friend of God, died young, according to the biblical story: only three hundred and something years old... For us, of course, this is not youth, but compared to others, he was young. But the longevity of the one and the early death of the other were due to the fact that both were more united with God than anyone else. God needed one to live, and God needed another to come to Him.

And then the flood comes, and there is still a place in the text that you can think about. People moved further and further away from God until the moment when God, looking at them, said: "These people have become flesh" (Gen. 6:3). There was no spirituality left in them, and the flood came, death came upon them. And after the flood, the Lord says for the first time: now all living creatures are given to you for food. They will serve you as food, and you will be their terror (Gen. 9:2-3). It's very scary. It is frightening to imagine that man, who was called upon to lead every creature along the path to transfiguration, to the fullness of life, has reached the point where he can no longer soar to God and is forced to obtain his food by killing those whom he was supposed to lead to perfection. Here, as it were, the circle of tragedy closes. We are in this circle, we are still incapable of living only eternal life and the word of God, although the saints to a large extent returned to God's original plan for man. The saints point out to us that we must gradually free ourselves from the need to eat the flesh of animals through prayer and spiritual podvig, to switch only to vegetable food, and, going into God more and more, to need it less and less. There were saints who lived only by communing the Holy Mysteries once a week.

This is the kind of world we live in, this is what we are called to, this was the given. This is our Orthodox idea of what the world is like and how God is connected with this world: not only as the Creator, Who simply creates and remains a stranger to His creation. Even the artist does not remain a stranger to what he creates; Anyone can recognize the hand of the artist or his seal on his work. Here we are talking about something else. God does not simply create and let the creature live, He remains connected with it and calls it to Himself so that it may grow to the full measure of the given possibilities: from innocence to holiness, from purity to transfiguration. This is the idea that we have in the Orthodox Church about the created world, about the relationship of God with man and with all creation without exception, and about the role of man. Then, from the point of view of the Orthodox Church, the question of our role in what we are doing with the land now becomes clear. The question is not "what we do to the earth will destroy us"; But: "What we do to the earth is a violation of our human calling." We destroy ourselves and we close the way for other creatures to a transfigured life.

A Vocation to Growth and Holiness. 

 We are increasingly aware of the need to protect nature and prevent the destruction of the animal and plant world, which has now acquired very terrible proportions. In this regard, the word crisis is used. Crisis is a Greek word that ultimately means judgment. The critical moment is the one when everything before is called into question. The concept of crisis as judgment is very important: it can be God's judgment on us; It can be the judgment of nature on us, the moment when nature indignantly refuses to cooperate with us. This can also be a moment when we must judge ourselves and condemn ourselves in many ways. The question of what we have done to our land over the past half century is posed by our conscience; its essence is not that it is beneficial for us that the earth be fertile and that everything would happen on it as well as possible, but what is our moral responsibility before the world, created by God out of love and with love, the world that He called to communion with Himself. Of course, each creature communicates with God in a different way, but there is no creature that cannot have some kind of communion with God; otherwise the concept of a miracle would be impossible. When Christ commands the waves to die down and the wind to calm down, this does not mean that He has any magical power over nature, but that the living word of God is somehow perceived by His every creature.

In addition to the concept of judgment, which is contained in the word crisis, there is another concept in it, which I have recently heard. The same word that we pronounce as crisis, self-judgment, in Chinese means: opening opportunity. And this is very important. The concept of judgment speaks of the past; But when you've evaluated yourself, when you've evaluated the position you're in, when you've judged yourself, the next step is to go forward, not just look back. Indeed, at the moment of judgment, man looks deep into his conscience, peers into what he has done, both personally and collectively as humanity; And then he thinks where to go. And the moment we start thinking about the future, we talk about the possible. We have not yet reached a point where there is no return, no way forward. When there is no path either to the past or to the future, the end of the world will come; We haven't gotten to that yet. But we are all responsible for something in this nature in which we live; we all poison the earth, poison the air, we all have some part in the destruction of what God has created. And therefore it would be good for us to think about what is the connection between God, the world created by Him, and man. This is what I want to focus your attention on.

The first thing that is clear from the Holy Scriptures is that God created everything that exists. This means that by His sovereign word He brought into existence something that had not existed before. And He called it into existence in order to give everything bliss, to bring everything to a state of holiness and perfection. If I may say so, at the moment when God created man and other creatures, He created them out of love, created them in order to share with them the riches that belong to Him. Moreover, not only by the wealth that belongs to Him, but even by Himself, as it were. We know from the Epistle of the Apostle Peter that our human vocation (how it is reflected in the rest of creation - we will think later) is not only to know God, not only to worship Him, not only to serve Him, not only to tremble before Him, not only to love Him, but ultimately to become partakers of the Divine nature (2 Peter 1:4), that is, to partake of God in such a way that that the divine nature is instilled in us and we become like Christ in this respect. St. Irenaeus of Lyons in one of his writings used a remarkable and perhaps even terrible, at least majestic expression. He says that at the end of time, when all creation will have reached the fullness of its existence, when man has reached his fullness, all mankind in union with the Only-begotten Son of God by the power of the Holy Spirit will become the only-begotten son of God. This is our calling, in the end. But this does not mean that man is called to this, and the rest of creation is not. And I want to draw your attention to a few points in the biblical account of creation.

We read a story about how God pronounces a word - and something begins that has never happened before, something that has never been is conceived, something comes into being. And the light appears first. There is a (not biblical, but Eastern) legend that light is born of the word. And this is a wonderful picture: God pronounces a creative word - and suddenly there is light, which is already the beginning of the existence of reality. Further, we see how other creatures are formed by the command of God, as if perfecting themselves step by step, and we come to the moment when man is created. It would seem that man is (and this is true according to the Holy Scriptures, and even according to the simplest, earthly experience) the pinnacle of creation. But the story of the creation of man is very interesting. We are not told that God, having created the highest, most advanced animals, takes the next step to create an even more perfect living being. We are told that when all creatures are created, God takes the clay of the earth and creates man from this clay. I do not want to say that this is a description of what has happened, but it indicates that man was created from the basic matter of the entire universe. Of course, other beings are created from the same matter, but it is emphasized here that man is not separated from other creatures, that he is, as it were, at the root of the existence of all creatures, that he is created from that elementary, basic from which all other creatures came. And this, as it were, makes us native not only - as a non-believer would say - "to the highest forms of the animal world"; This makes us native and the lowest creatures on earth. We are made of the same material. And this is very important, because, being native to all created things, we have a direct relationship with it. And when St. Maximus the Confessor, speaking of man's calling, writes that man is created from the elements of the material world and from the elements of the spiritual world, that he belongs to both the spiritual world and the material world, he emphasizes that thanks to this, containing both the material and the spiritual, man can lead all created creatures to spirituality and lead them to God. This is the main vocation of a person.