God’s place in a humanist society (10) [Locul lui Dumnezeu într-o societate umanistă]

Contemporary God-less societies in this secular EU stubbornly reject what was obvious to their forefathers maybe less than 100-130 years ago – that our ‘civilisation’ is inherently tied to the birth of Christianity.

We open the mobile phone (I wanted to say the morning paper :-), and read the year we’re in: 2010. That is 2,010 years after the birth of Jesus Christ, Whose Transfiguration (one of the clearest certifications of His being the Son of God) is celebrated tomorrow.

At the dawn of the 20th century, even in the UK – albeit in a rather diluted form, because of so many Protestant beliefs stepping astray from the Truth – I think that most people acknowledged that Christ was somehow fundamental for their world.

Maybe even some 20-30 years ago, He may have been already the Ignored One – invoked when one is astonished, shocked or suffering a little physical pain – yet He was there.

No laws, traditions, customs, formal or informal regulations, aspirations, moral values, likes and dislikes wouldn’t have made sense without Him. Although the British society was no longer Christocentric, people couldn’t just scrap Him.

Sadly, I feel that these days they just want to take Him out of everything. Out of everything His, as the world itself is kept alive by His interceding with the Father.

Over the past centuries, He was gradualy banished from the British culture. Today, countless pop culture characters are better known than Him, and atheists foolishly rejoice seeing this as His defeat.

On the contrary, I’d say; it’s the defeat of the very society which imagines it is better off without Him. In the absence of the Ignored One, divorces, adulteries, promiscuity, abortions, binge drinking and other ills of civilisation are sky-rocketing.

Any ‘big culture’ developing itself independently, supposedly ‘liberated’ from Him, remains nothing else but a nauseating flea market – a meaningless concoction of humanist values, of satanic ‘I-do-what-I-want’-s guised as forms of cultural diversity.

Blasphemous ‘manifests’ like the one painted above a shop in Brighton are not worse than what He was given ever since He came in this world: suspicion, mockery, rejection, disdain, spits in the face…

Like the Jews 2,000 years ago, these people don’t know Whose face they are slapping. For the past decades, poking fun at the Son of Lord and anything Christian has become ‘trendy’ in today’s civilised UK and EU.

Unlike making fun of Islam’s Prophet, it’s thousand of times ‘safer’ to laugh at Jesus these days. Nevertheless, the more comfortable without Him contemporary societies become, the less safer they will be when the Day of Reckoning will strike.

“That’s only a superstition,” would say the same people who consider that the unborn child having a soul is a ‘superstition’ as well. They are the same who say that marriage should not be ‘restricted’ to a man and woman.

They are the ones who desperately need to see Chirst taken out of all His, so that they could proclaim their ‘I-do-what-I-want’-s as values. They are wolves dressed in wolves’ clothing (also known as democracy, liberty, prosperity) who despise the Good Shepherd.

But there is an afterlife (true life, actually), and there will come a Judgement day, I say. Time will tell if those claiming this truth (or absurdity in this hedonist world’s eyes) were right or them – today’s fashionable thinkers.

Those who say that life is just ‘here and now’ have no other evidence than holding on to their ‘I-do-what-I-want’-s. For those of us who trust in Christ, we have His Transfiguration as one of many facts proving that life is more than the ‘here and now’ our egoism would want it to be.

[For all the episodes of this series, and all the posts on this blog go to/Pentru toate episoadele din această serie şi toate postările de pe acest blog mergi la: Contents/Cuprins]

A crossroads of the Orthodox World (4) [O răscruce a Lumii Ortodoxe]

As another summer is steadily coming to its end, and we are awaiting the Dormition of the Theotokos, today’s Great Feast – the Transfiguration of our Lord Jesus Christ – gives me the chance to send my good thoughts to dear people around the world by offering them another picture of an icon that remained in my heart.

Again, the image I’m sharing with the world is that of a paper icon taken from the Patriarchal Stavropegic Monastery of St John The Baptist in Essex. I’ve already given this icon (carried many miles throughout Europe before it got from Tolleshunt Knights to Romania) to someone dear to me, but not before taking some pictures of it.

Of all the riches of meanings that the Orthodox faith brings into our life – especially in a world so full of deceptive choices, elusive opportunities, omnipresent illusions – today is one of the most fascinating for me.

I assume I’m not wrong to call the Transfiguration one of the least understood moments in Christ’s life, while actually being one of the most important. Even many Orthodox believers couldn’t tell what that moment really meant.

For the unbeliever, this may be nothing more than one of the weirdest biblical tales. But for those of us who, in spite of our unworthiness, have been blessed to know WHO is the TRUTH, and MEANING of everything, today’s Feast brings one of the most categorical evidence about the divinity of our Saviour.

It’s amazing how St Peter, and the other two Apostles were so irresistibly attracted to the glory of Christ. All of us would, if we ever got so close understanding His true nature of God-Man. In order to ever do that, it is us the ones who need to be transfigured, so that we’d be able to percieve Him in His Glory.

If everything that happened to the Apostles after the Ressurection offered a proof that Christ is the only One worth dying for, in my humble view, St Peter’s reaction facing the Transfiguration proves that He is also the only One worth living with.

People around us couldn’t ever be truly loved unless we knew Him, and unless He (often throught His Saints) weren’t showing us what love is. Without Him, absolutely nothing would make sense, and we'd be completely purposeless without Him.

Without knowing Him, all the ‘inertial motivations’ of being alive (things done just because others of my ‘species’ did them every day) drove me crazy… Why sleep, eat, learn, work, dream, yearn, speak & listen, like & dislike, love & hate, and then… just die… WHY???

Living like most of the religiously indifferent people around me, and like the absolute majority of Brits do, I was thinking of suicide at least 20 times a day. Nothing – neither joy, nor suffering – made any sense to me.

So many things got on my nerves without Him, and it seemed that life was but a neverneding bad dream, with no beginning and no end. What was it to me if it lasted a day, a century or forever?

The bad dream stopped only when I was blessed with discovering the true purpose of human life, which is Theosis, that is personal communion with God ‘face to face’.

With Him, I’ve got the certitude that everything happens for a reason. If I were to remember how I was on the Day of Transfiguration ten years ago, all I can say now is that I am a completely different person.

I am not shouting that I am sinless, nor could I claim that spared of suffering, and – to my utmost disappontment – I can’t say I am a better person. But I am definitely – albeit in an unseen way – transfigured. Instead of being trapped in a meaningless existence, I have a destination, and Christ’s presence in my life is as crystal clear as gravitation to me.

I’m not sure whether the Earth circles around the Sun and not viceversa, I’m not sure whether the Americans really set foot on the Moon… Actually, I’m not sure of anything deemed right, correct or desirable ever since secularism took hold of history, as I mistrust the logic, reason and moral intuition that secular ethics is based upon.

I’m not sure of countless other prefabricated truths forced down our throat by the humanist society we’re living in, while I’m 100% certain that some of these truths are satanic deceits like global warming hysteria, overpopulation, inborn homosexuality etc.

Nevertheless, what I am surest of in this world is that everything about or Lord Jesus Christ is just as He told us, and His only One Church keeps telling us. How I wish that more and more of the certainly unhappy people around me wouldn’t refuse refuse their curiosity about Christ, the only One worth being curious about!

There’s no doubt for me that, one day, we shall all see the One Who the Apostles saw on Mount Tabor almost 2,000 years ago. May we, for the prayers of the Most Holy Theotokos, share the enchantment of St Peter, therefore have the proper wedding garment on us, and not be clad in the darkness brought upon us by having led a meanigless life away from Him!

[For all the episodes of this series, and all the posts on this blog go to/Pentru toate episoadele din această serie şi toate postările de pe acest blog mergi la: Contents/Cuprins]