Texts chosen from the writings and teachings of the Father Theodossios Maria of the Cross
The Church
Christ, according to his own teaching, founded his Church with a view to the Kingdom. He gave it a structure profoundly free and thus profoundly royal, a structure in the image of the holy, eternal prototype which He Himself is.
Christ endowed the Church with a structure which must remain immutable in its essence, because it is inaccessible to the relative, fluctuating forces of the terrestrial city. The influence of the changing image of the terrestrial city on the men of the Church must never condition the perennity of its structural essence as Kingdom. The Kingdom of the Church is made in the image of its Founder who said to Pilate, "My Kingdom is not of this world" (John 18: 36). And the same Jesus, before his Passion, responded to questions regarding the Kingdom of God, "The Kingdom of God is within you" (Luke 17: 21).
That is why we must never lose sight of the fact, when meditating or when teaching adults or little children, that even through the worst historical calamities, through the greatest trials and humiliations of the Church, the essential structure of the Church, made in the image of the Kingdom, in its profound intimity, structure inaccessible to the profane gaze, will remain immutable until the end.
The Church of Christ is not an assembly of chosen people; it is not an agglomerate in the midst of the world. The Church is not a juridical norm of the relatións between man and God, and of men among themselves; it is a universal, fertile earth, it crosses all the spaces and milieus of the created; it is irrigated on all of its immeasurable expanse by water from an infinite and eternal source.
On that earth, in that earth, a multitude of seeds and grains grow, each according to its nature, each according to the depth and expanse of its love. Besides the living water, a continual shower of graces falls upon that sweet and profoundly peaceful earth.
There are times in which the Church appears to be depopulated or populated only by brambles or roots and dead leaves. This impression is based on an image far too material of the Church. People say: the rain is coming, the good, dark earth receives it, but the seeds cannot take root and everything is dying.
The Church receives the sacred water from its sources and from the shower of graces, and there are always new seeds which grow and reach towards the Infinite, which embrace the whole universe and penetrate the intimity of everything on this side of and beyond death. The brambles and dead leaves are residues which will also be taken and absorbed by the holy earth, except for what in God's mysterious wisdom is destined to fire. But man does not have the right to pass definitive judgements. The order and the ultimate outcome of things are hidden in God.
These ever new seeds are not always visible to all eyes. According to the degree of fidelity of hope, what is called the "interior eye" of man, his interior vital intelligence, can perceive, in the midst of the peaceful, indifferent or extremely harsh events of human history, the life of eternal love rising from that boundless earth of the Church, towards the initial center of life, towards the invisible, omnipresent Creator.
That is why a great part of all that is said and done in the Church and in the world, in the name of and in view of the good of the Church, is often accomplished far from the universal, true, fertile earth of the Church.
Therefore, very dear Brothers and Sisters, do not allow yourselves to be captivated by external manels, or to be disheartened by the dryness and emptiness of terrestrial hours, for not only beyond those hours, but within the invisible and impalpable intimity of those hours, man can communicate, from the depths of his being, with the live mystery of eternal Love.
Do not allow yourselves to be disheartened either by sickness or by the death of dear ones, or by the profanation of holy things, or by the word and coarse and heavy verbiage which sometimes penetrate even to the interior of the sanctuary; do not let yourselves be disheartened by the inadequacy of human language and of material or intellectual human constructions.
There is a human measure which is infinite; it is a measure of life which draws man himself towards the serene and motionless rapture of Love of Truth.
It is this measure which allows man to go beyond the limits of his language and his intellect. It is the measure of the ontologic communication with the truth and with the most profound essence of beings. Thus the little human creature can, by humility and loving patience, gather fruits and flowers from the eternal earth of the Church and itself become a flower and benediction of that same blessed earth, the Church.
Beneath the interminable firmament, on the small planet where we were created and born, the soul can discover, even amidst the perpetual mutation of things and of its history, the secret and anointed permanence of the Church, and can live, with its most profound essence, the mystery of eternal Love.
The Church is a mystery of love. It is neither a society of men nor an ensemble of conditions of life or abstractions. The Church is like life, mysterious, simple, misunderstood, wounded, full of a sovereign love and of darkness of pride, of hatred, of conventions of temporal society.
The solitary soul who desires the good of all, and who lives the profound nostalgia, poignant but serene, of communion with God and communion of eternal friendship in God, lives the mystery of the Church, because it lives by love and for eternal love, because it lives the quintessence of the message of the Saviour: To love.
The soul who is very busy with works and actions in the name of the Church may be a stranger to the life and to the mystery of the Church, because works and action often serve as a substitute for love and communion.
According to the word of Saint John of the Cross, in the evening of our life we shall be judged according to love. It can be said that in the evening of our life, in so far as members of the Church, we shall be judged according to our love towards the Body and Blood of the Lord, towards the Body and Blood in the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist; on the worship and honor rendered to this Body and this Blood, upon the fidelity of faith to the great and sweet mystery, revealed and confirmed by the Lord, the Apostles and all the Saints, mystery of the transsubstantiation and renewal of the Sacrifice, which has transcended the Creation beyond all evolution in the universe.
If one is an agent of peace and union, he is blessed by God; but to be an agent of peace and union means to be bathed in the mystery of Gethsemane, that is, in the mystery of infinite love. The fundamental mystery of the Church can neither be represented nor expressed by the empty reflections of artificious ecclesiology but rather by courageous reflections and acts of offering and of eternal, spontaneous harmony with the sacred fire of the "new man" of whom Saint Paul speaks; and it is thus that man is an agent of peace and not of iniquity, according to the word of Christ.
If in the exterior life of the Church the great poetry of eternal love is wanting, that does not mean that the eternal Church of Christ, the intimate, ever-living Church, does not contain all the seeds and all the sacred norms of the poetry, full of love and nostalgia, of the kingdom of joy; and it is through this nostalgia, to the degree of this nostalgia, that the Cross is accepted with peace and without effort of substitution; without an effort to replace the Cross of Christ by our pains and personal desires.
Peace between nations, as peace in the depths of the soul, depends upon the glorious humility with which man loves his friends, God, His passion and His resurrection.
The Body of Christ was wounded in its healthy and holy tissues, without itself having lost its holiness. The members of the Church are wounded by their own sins and by the sins of others. The Body of the Church is wounded, without any alteration of the holiness of the Head, the Heart and all of the healthy cells. The wounds of the Body of the Church do not alter the identity of the holy mystical Body, the Church itself: the identity of Jesus Christ, His holy Mother and all men who, wounded or not, are bound by Faith and Charity to Christ.
If this sacred likeness of the Church is not well assimilated - not always, certainly, by concepts and notions, but by loving and sacrificial participation in the Body of the Church - no method, no technique and no tactic can transmit the truth of the Church and thus the teaching of Christ.
Notions, exterior images, precepts which are rigid or lax, may be transmitted, but within a short time are effaced. All that remains is the wound and dullness.
But when the participation is loving, to the point of sacrifice through love of eternal Truth, then the mystery of the Church is unveiled in the depths of the heart and is transmitted as blood which vivifies the mystical Body of Christ.
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