“I give you a new commandment...”

by John Kalomiros

    The fall of the nature of man into decay and death resulted in disunity
in creation. This is the bitter poison of the primordial serpent. The
Incarnation of God in the Person of Christ healed this discord with a
unifying power. Christ resurrected our nature by sowing upon it the power of
the Holy Spirit and His binding force that abolishes all divisions. Christ
Himself gave us an example of sacrifice, love, and unity of things formerly
estranged, without terms or boundaries. He gave us the example as the man who
had asked nothing for Himself.
    The new commandment of Christ is “love one another,” but this is not a
moral commandment. The Lord did not urge us merely to use our natural powers
to do our best in a world where strife and fragmented natures rule. He
endowed us with the living power of the Holy Spirit so we may tread upon
snakes and scorpions, i.e., the works of division, and build bridges of
unity.
    This capability of ours, in the language of the Church, is called
“person” and “image of God.” It refers the potential of human existence to
come face to face with the Other in a spirit of unity without the
afterthoughts of fallen nature. It is a renunciation of power for the sake of
relationship. It is what gives us the strength to cast aside our need to be
competitive, to conquer, to dominate another, and to be assertive at the
expense of another.
    This power enables us to cease looking with distrust at another's love
and searching for its ulterior motives. And through this power, we cease
holding back love for others and trying to determine if their reasons for
loving us are satisfactory. This is the mystery of relationships in which one
ceases to seek his own self-interests, for real love is offered without
reasons. (And this is the stumbling block that Christ poses for us if we have
not experienced the mystery of the human person.)
    Even in that condition, we are able to change our mind and our way of
living. And then we can abandon anything that offers us self-justification or
exalts our personal aggrandizement to the detriment of others. Gladly putting
ourselves in the other person’s position, we agree to look at things from his
vantage. We set aside our apprehensions that compel us to be suspicious and
skeptical about feelings of others.
    We need to show trust without reservations and to dismiss the cunning
attitude that yields only a little ground to the other person while we
secretly hope to bring him around to our way. Our way, however, is not better
than his. There is no “better” and no “worse.” There is only a deeper
condition where people suffer and clash with one another and have no way out
except to give one another a helping hand and to accept the weaknesses of
others, and not with skittishness but with love, exactly as Christ did for
us. Others do not need us to critique them, something we are usually inclined
to think and do. No one can be changed only by logical criticism and reasoned
arguments, for the problems do not arise from a faulty solution to an
equation. Rather, the problems are fissures deeply carved in a man’s soul. It
is these wounds that estrange us from one another and cause our hardness and
behavior, and our self-justification. This is how the lines of division
become etched in our souls and divide people,  leading  us to classify people
as either smart or stupid, handsome or ugly, educated or uneducated, correct
or wrong, possessing truth or falsehood. Such disparities, of course, are
based on individual cultivation or natural endowments. But what we need to do
is to remove from inside of us the moralistic frame of reference that
fortifies these differences that are usually external phenomena without
absolute impact on human value.
    Fallen men ascribe a certain validity to these characterizations, imbuing
them with power that sustains the hardened core of their individualism. In
other words, they use these characterizations to form a  hardened ego, the
individualistic “I,” instead of the interpersonal “I” who is always defined
by an ongoing dialogue with another who is equal but different.
    What transforms the human soul, then, is love and the receiving of love
from another, and the filling of the fissures of the soul with the knowledge
that another has looked beyond the fissures and disparities and has seen the
beauty of our soul, and has loved it. This is how the wounds of the soul are
healed and they cease to hurt. To do anything else is only to chafe one
another’s wounds. But what we do not always understand is that a wound or
fissure is neither entirely yours nor entirely mine. Half the fissure is mine
and the other half is yours. This is because the fissure is the line between
us, even if the line was drawn by the other. Whether I want it or not, half
of it is always mine. Then I always bear half the responsibility for its
healing. And when I poke at it, I make the wound deeper, not only for the
other soul but for myself also.
    We often say that the Holy Spirit heals the soul. Indeed, it is the Holy
Spirit Who imparts the cohesive energy that closes these wounds and fissures.
This is why we call Him the Comforter and Spirit of Truth. What we usually
forget to say, however, is that the Holy Spirit does not work in a magical
way in our souls. We need to call upon Him, but it needs to be with an inner
energy from our heart and mind; we cannot expect  mechanistic recitations of
words to be magically effectual. The magical perception of special, effectual
words is the work of the self-seeking individual, who invokes the operation
of special powers either for himself or for someone else. The powers that act
within us then bring only division. We need to change our manner of
supplication from a self-serving prayer to an inner energy of the synaxis,
the gathering of souls in the same place. Someone must take the first step by
acting in a unifying way to break the vacuum and open paths of communication
and to offer his outstretched friendly hand to the other. There is no room
here for prerequisites and grudges but only for self-denial and the end of
intransigence and of minds that are closed. Whatever contributes to the
bonding of souls is meaningful, and whatever impedes it must be cast aside.
In this the kind of effort, the Holy Spirit is indeed present and working.
This kind of effort is the only truly Christian prayer and invocation of the
Holy Spirit and not some self-serving vanities. The only reason the Holy
Spirit does not visit us is that we do not invoke Him in that manner.
    How do we differ from pagans when we pray to God only with our lips in
order to support our selfish purposes, our own reasoning, or our own opinion
of what is good and what is evil? Are there certain special words that
enchant God and automatically activate divine compliance for us? This is the
reason why Apostle Paul insists so much on the criterion of love. Love is not
simply an emotional posture that inflates our souls with nice feelings for
the other person. It might be this also, but, at the same time, love
presupposes the whole internal journey to self-denial that emerges from the
self. Then a man ceases to focus on protecting his own feelings from injury,
and he freely embraces the other person, not because the other person is
attractive or smart or educated but because this is what his soul wills. This
is the freedom of man: to act in this free manner against the bondage of our
passions. Moreover, this is why it is said that Christ loved us. It does not
mean that we deserved His love but that He loved us freely, taking on Himself
the wounds of each one of us. When it is said that He healed our nature, it
means that He gave man the energy of the Holy Spirit and the capacity for
love and sacrifice, which He was first to manifest for us. This is what is
called the renewal of creation, and it became a reality in His divine
Incarnation and Resurrection. It is we who fail to exploit this potential
because we resort to nurturing our ego and shielding it in thick armor. And
then we fail to become “all things to all men,” even to the few people who
are close to us. We always keep grudges. We always look at others critically.
We excuse ourselves by saying that our harshness springs from love while it
is nothing but a hardness full of criticism and faultfinding. So, it is not
the Holy Spirit that is present in our relations with others but a spirit of
division even if we invoke the help of God.
    When we hear that God is love and that He teaches us a loving way of
life, it refers to a theological image that each of us needs to lower to our
own levels and capabilities and to regard its realization as an obligation.
This is our first obligation as Christians and the first witness we must
convey before people: to love one another, to love with genuine love and
without doubts, without fears, without always worrying about the consequences
for us. Once we begin our journey from this point, the Holy Spirit will come,
and we will not have to declare our witness for Christ, for He will witness
for Himself.
    What is a saint? A saint is not simply a man who has a good, private
relationship with God. A relationship with God works only in the context as
described above. The saint is the one who intercedes in the bringing down the
Holy Spirit and gathers souls together without calling attention to his own
presence but yields the room for Christ to be present. The saint manages to
be invisible, transparent, and he retires into the background. His presence
spreads the rays of the Spirit everywhere, and people feel the listing of the
Spirit, but he remains unseen. The only people who clash with such a person
are those who place obstacles before others in order to bolster their own
tyrannical ego.

(“Epignosis”, issue 87/2003)

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