Love is Divine life, and in it, there is no pride (the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life). The Father is always the Father, but gives everything to the Son, the Son “does not claim” the “right” to be the Father and is eternally the Son, and the Holy Spirit is the very Life, the very Freedom (“breathes where He wills”) and the very Love of the Father for the Son, and the Son for the Father, the very Divine self-giving and obedience. This love is given, it is communed by God to man, and this communion is the Church. Therefore, there are no “rights” in the Church and no leveling associated with them. There is no leveling, and therefore no “comparison”, this main source of pride. The call to perfection addressed to man is a call to find oneself, but to find not “in comparison” and not through “self-analysis” (what is my potential – hidden possibilities), but in God. Hence the paradox: you can find yourself only by losing yourself, and this means – to identify yourself with the “calling”, with God’s plan for yourself, but which is revealed not “in oneself”, but in God…
To understand what it means to Love with God’s Love both oneself and others, it is necessary – in our time of almost complete misunderstanding of love – to grasp the radical “peculiarity” of God’s Love. Perhaps one of the first peculiarities is its harshness. This means – the absence in it of that “sentimentality” with which the world has long identified it (and therefore “Christianity” itself). In God’s Love, there is no promise of “earthly happiness”, no concern for it. Or rather, it is completely subordinated to the promise and care for the Kingdom of God, that is, for that absolute Happiness for which God created and called man. Hence the first and main conflict between God’s Love and fallen human love. To cut off a hand, pluck out an eye, leave wife and children, go the narrow way, etc. – all this is so obviously incompatible with “earthly happiness”. It is from all this that “this world” recoiled, did not want it, hated it…
The rite of the Church’s Worship is not arbitrary fantasies of pictorial symbolism (we talked about this above), but it is a form of transmission in which the Church expresses and transmits in history its liturgical (Eucharistic) experience of God-knowing, knowing the Kingdom of God. And the language of the rite of the Church’s Worship is eschatological symbolism. The word “eschatological” is used very ambiguously in our days, especially when the number of heretics, false prophets has multiplied without count, so it is necessary to clarify what the Church speaks of when it testifies about the last days, about the “eighth day” (eschaton). First of all, it points to the foundational and boundless faith, starting from the early Christian community-parish and to this day (and forever), in the fact that the coming of Christ, His life, death and resurrection from the dead, His ascension to Heaven and the descent of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost mean the arrival of the Day of the Lord. The Day of the Lord, prophesied, announced by the prophets, opened a new eon of the Kingdom of God. Believers in Christ, although still in the old eon, which the New Testament calls “this world”, already belong to the new eon: being united with Christ and anointed by the Holy Spirit, they bear in themselves the new eternal life (the seed of the Holy Spirit) and the power to overcome sin and death. The image of the presence in this world of the “world to come”, the Kingdom of God, is the Church – the community of those united with Christ (by Marital bonds), and in Him – with one another. The action by which the Church embodies this presence, actualizing itself as the new people of God and the Body of Christ, is “the breaking of bread”, the Eucharist, through which the Church is lifted to Christ’s table in His Kingdom. This confidence (in the invisible and the fulfillment of the expected – faith-knowing-faithfulness), which is the core of the early Christian (and at all times the faithful to Christ of Christ) experience-knowing and faith-faithfulness-trust, implies tension – tension-opposition between this world and the world to come, between being in this world and at the same time already being not of this world. It is this tension that lies at the foundation of the formative principle of early Christian (when the rites of Worship were formed) Worship and especially its most important actions – Baptism and the Eucharist. They express and fulfill the Church as Pascha, the transition from the old to the new, from this world to the “unending day” of the Kingdom of God. In this world, the Church is in diaspora, in exile, in pilgrimage (to the Homeland, to the Promised Land (Heaven)) and expectation, and its task is to preach the Gospel of the Kingdom, the “Good News” of the salvation accomplished by Christ. And the Church can fulfill this task only because it already has access to the Kingdom, the joy and arrival of which it will testify to the end of the age. Only in the light of this eschatology (the light of the Eighth Day, which is already shining!) can we understand all the forms of the Church’s Tradition!