Communion
- Michael Haldas
- 8 hours ago
- 4 min read
“Man is a being created for communion with God. Therefore, the question of whether it is possible or impossible is probably moot. If we look at the first chapters of the Book of Genesis, we see that God continually appeared to the first-created man, communed with him, taught him and raised him; that is, this communion was entirely direct. But man was something different then, and capable of this direct comprehension of God. Only later did man and the entire visible world change, and this caused an extreme complication in man’s relationship with God.” (Igumen Nektary Morozov)
“At its heart, sin is “death working in us.” We did not create this process of death – it is the outcome of our broken communion with God. The things that we do wrong (often referred to as “sins”) are symptoms of the death-working-in-us. The work of healing is the life of prayer, forgiveness, participation in the sacraments, and our transformation in and through the love of God.” (Father Stephen Freeman)
“All of these observations have deep theological parallels. We can talk generally, of course about the nature of humanity after the Fall, which is surely the ultimate cause of any mental suffering. However, whilst the Fall may be the first cause of suffering, it is not the immediate cause of the mental suffering we are witnessing. I am put in mind of the prophets of Ba’al on Mount Carmel, who, desperate to invoke the power of their false god who would not save them, cried aloud and cut themselves after their manner with knives. (1 Kings 18:28) It is not inappropriate to think of our post-Christian social priorities as false gods, and the way in which we have come to torture ourselves as a desperate way to express our inner recognition of its failure. What we are seeing is a complete breakdown of the communion for which we were created. It could even be said that modern society encourages us to be anti-Trinitarian in our relationships with others.” (Priest Alban Illingworth)
“We call the elevation of the individual and selfish will to this paramount status “democracy,” but more and more it will come to resemble a berserk state, a self-deification through the collapse of concern for anything other than the self…Today our common political and social program is the self–a paradox that either will open a window to the Church or will be seen as the suicide pact of the human race. I mean, the fact that it is necessarily a common project can lead us to see that we exist in and through each other, in communion, or we can choose merely to make a temporary alliance with others in order to expedite each soul’s flight into gnostic aloneness and thus the abyss.” (Timothy G. Patitsas)
“Love is the ground of our being. To have true, hypostatic (personal) existence, is to exist in communion – with God, with other human beings, with all things. Communion itself is the existence in and through love. Adam’s exclamation, “This is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh!” is far more than a material proclamation. It is a declaration of love (and its definition) – that this “life of the other” is “my life” as well. St. Paul describes this life-in-the-Other when he says: “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.”(Gal. 2:20)…Communion with God is the greatest good we seek, for Christ is the source of all good.” (Father Stephen Freeman, Dynamis 7/26/2021)
“A false Eden represents a significant theme in the Scriptures—the attempt by human beings to make for themselves that which God had already given them or was going to give them. This theme is not about humans growing up and striking out on their own, but it is rather about breaking away from communion with God to try to take something on independently, which we saw with the taking of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.” (Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick)
“The most fundamental relationship in our human existence is that of communion. What we label as the Fall is nothing other than the rupture of communion between God and human beings. It is no accident that the Genesis account mentions shame as our first emotion in that rupture. How could it have been otherwise? Shame is what broken communion feels like…For Adam and Eve are not just the first human beings in the story; they are all human beings throughout all time. The Fall is repeated, relived, in numberless ways through the ages, and even numberless times within each single life. The rupture of communion with God is also a rupture of communion with ourselves and all creation around us. It is particularly a rupture of communion with other human beings…” (Father Stephen Freeman)
“Man was not created immortal, but by having his personhood he was made capable of communion with the immortal God. Death came to him not as a punishment in a juridical sense but as an existential consequence of the break of this communion; it came at the moment that man became introverted, and limited the ekstatic movement of his personhood to the created world. Sin, therefore, entered as idolatry, that is, as an ekstasis of communion with the created world alone. In this way, what sin did was of deep ontological significance: it made the limitation of creaturehood show itself in the existential contrast between being and nothingness.” (Metropolitan John Zizioulas)
“…the problem with sin is not primarily rule-breaking but disordered affections. When our desires are reordered toward the Creator, then our enjoyment of created things is purified from the passions and becomes a means for deeper communion with Him.” (Robin Phillips)
“To be in communion with God, you have first to be in communion with other people. The Lord behaves towards Judas in the same way as He does towards the other disciples, even though He knows he will betray Him. All the actions of His presence on earth combine to reconcile human nature and morals and to show them the real human image as made by God, as made to love.” (Petros Panayiotopoulos)
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