From a retreat
7 March 1981
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The moment we offer our allegiance to the Lord, we immediately expect
that He will allow us to stay by Him, to follow Him, to accompany Him.
We expect as the reward and as the response for our choosing Him, that
He will choose us as companions from whom He will not be parted. Well,
we must be prepared for something else, because we do not join Christ
in order to stand about around Him or around His place, but to serve
Him where and in the way in which it is more expedient for Him and for
His purpose.
More than once we can read in the Gospel that someone healed by
Christ, whose life was transformed by his meeting with Him, wanted to
follow Him, to accompany Him, to cling to Him. And Christ said to him,
'No, go back to your own people. Go away into the world from which you
have come, because it is there that your presence is needed.' It is
enough for us to know God, to know Christ, to know within ourselves
the crushing and transfiguring work of the Holy Spirit. We do not need
more. If we receive more we can be grateful for it and marvel at the
privilege, but our function and our essential privilege is to be sent
by Christ wherever He needs us, into darkness to bring some light,
where there is hatred to bring some love, when there is strife, to
bring some reconciliation, where there is pain, to bring some
consolation, and so forth. Our place is where things are wrong. And we
must go there, we must be there so that there is someone in each
situation who will say 'Come, Lord, stand in our midst. Give us Thy
peace.'
I want you to give thought to this, because all of us all the time
fall into a natural but ugly temptation to treat God as the One who
gives and who must give. We forget that He is a consuming fire and we
want to sit round a fire and warm our hands. It is not right. If we
have chosen Him, if He has been wonderful, so wonderful as to reveal
himself to us, we can leave it to Him to give us whatever He will
choose, but to live for His sake and for the sake of those for whose
sake He has become man, lived and died. Ask yourself questions about
the way in which you approach Him in prayer. Is it in His Name or in
yours? Is it for His sake, that He may win His victory over you and
within you, or is it that sweetness and peace and joy may come? Ask
yourself whether to be Christ's has anything to do within you, in your
life, but in your deeper self, in turning away from self-centeredness,
saying to yourself whenever thought of self comes, 'Oh, out of my way,
because you are in my way to God and in God's way to me.' Ask
yourselves whether you relate to people in God's Name and in their
name or in your own, whether you can imagine one person in your
surroundings about whom you can says 'This person, his existence I
contemplate and serve without a thought of the way in which it may
affect me; or whether all the people who are dear to you, who are your
friends, who are your acquaintances, who are your chance meetings in
life, are seen and judged only from your point of view: 'What shall he
do to me? What is this person to me?'
----
* All texts are copyright: Estate of Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh
Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh Library
http://www.mitras.ru/eng/
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