Aziz Matta

The great are few. One of them is the Orthodox Patriarch Ignatius IV. He left us and went to the Divine Compassion. As he was being buried, I felt that he was settling in the Kingdom of the Father. We longed for his stay among us. He left to “the infinitude”, to the dwelling in the quiet of his Lord and to “we missing him”.

His piety, as a priest, would draw people to it in such a way that you become indwelled with it and with what he has accomplished through that piety in the hearts of those he has pastored. That is what the Lord and those who love Him expect from the pastor. And as a pastor, he gave himself to all people, whether they were of his Church or other churches or people of this world.

He gave to the intellectual world what he has obtained through the intellect and he radiated with that; and I think that was his strong point. I have said what came above about a bishop who had a significant presence in this world. In that he reminds me of those great spiritual fathers who did not separate between what God inspires them with and that which their minds create; as such they gave the world what came down on them (from God). His Eminence Ignatius IV enjoyed both, divine and human wisdom; and humanity is a real pillar that holds the divine that comes down on us. I think the significance of this great late man dwells in that he was able to probe human knowledge in order to tell the skeptics that they do not have monopoly over free pure thinking but that people of the faith also have it.

Because of his life, as I read it, those who do not believe in God cannot claim that intellectual understanding and knowledge is something that belongs solely to them. In the realm of knowledge and understanding, the unbelievers are not more intelligent than those who believe. Patriarch Ignatius confirmed that through his intellectual exploits.

This great man was able to show that the pure intellect is not severed from simplicity. He had a simplicity, which was Jesus-like, that was fused with intelligence. In sharp words, he maintained the village-like humility with the sophistication of academia. At times his simplicity would be so amazing that those with him would wonder as to how that very intelligent man can combine between a bright enkindled mind and the child like expressions that he utters at times. Then one would also wonder about the nature of his faith or about its style because one would find him candid in his religious expression and yet very philosophical. And if one would classify the nature of his intellect you would say that he was brought up on a philosophical methodology without neglecting the simplicity of verbal expression.

He hides his simplicity with an expressive style behind which he remains obscure; I think he got that from a shyness inherited from the ways of asceticism. In that he used to hurt over those who do not have the fervor of faith, though he would be very patient with them. He learned patience from a long sufferance in our religious milieus and from seeing our weaknesses one of which is that the Church has not yet arrived at what She aspires for, to be the Bride of Christ. He used to see our lethargy; in spite of that, he was “a man of sorrows”, as Isaiah says, and at the same time, a man of great hopes.

Perhaps due to seeing what has not been realized (in the Church) and seeking what is aspired for, he became the “man of the institutions”. Did he think that the “institution” provides stability and makes one’s dream materializd? I think so. That was an expression of the pragmatic side of him. And that is what made him prefer what is practical over that which is theoretical.

That is noticed in his directorship of the Balamand and every educational institution and realm in our Church. And if I want to highlight his personality more, I would say that he was a pedagogue in all the different educational fields that he undertook both as an instructor and as a pastor in the Church. He was concerned that we would sink in what is purely theoretical and neglect to deal with the real problems of the Theological University and those of the Church. In both situations, he approached the matters concerned with more emphasis on the pastoral aspect than on the academic aspect. What was important was salvation and the practical outcomes of what we say or think of. For sure, and without any doubt pastoring meant suffering; and that showed in all what he endeavored. And shepherding starts in the heart and moves up to the mind; and so the late Patriarch used to oversee his heart through his mind. That makes the priest or the bishop in a tension between his theoretical convictions and the necessity of practical application or between the truth and dealing with people. How can you lead, using the religious texts, a group of people who are not acquainted with them? How can you maintain peace and truth, in your parish, at the same time? And in other words, how can you, as a teacher, instruct people in the faith yet, as a pastor, hammer it down in their minds in as much as they are able to receive it and make them ready to accept what the truth is? I think that he did not digress from the simplicity of living in all things. He did not see any conflict between simplicity and high culture. He used to amaze me how he blends both the simplicity of thinking and its complexity, in himself. You would find him that person who is strong in channeling paradoxes into one stream, as we say during Lent; he wanted to be rational and sensitive at the same time. In our worship, the mind and feelings blend; and that is something he had mastered. Perhaps his religiousity is founded on what it has of reasoning despite his Christ-like simplicity. And here I say that he did not care for positions and he did not accept them in order to raise himself above others. The Orthodox Church everywhere is fond of the image of the Deacon who is well read and yet does not seek positions. Those above you call you to hold positions for certain needs and you are expected to obey. You become a Patriarch who maintains in himself the spirit of the Deacon who prefers hymning and delighting in worship above all else. The Orthodox are “Liturgy” and all the rest is only added to them.

Translated by Riad Moufarrij

Original Text: “البطريرك إغناطيوس” – An Nahar – 15.12.2012

“One is holy, one is Lord, Jesus Christ”. We gather from that quotation that holiness whether there is much or little of it, when attributed to a human being is relative and cannot be perfect in any creature.

We have not found absolute righteousness in the Saints though one sees high degrees of that and much of divine radiance and gifts. In this world, they were close to God to a great extent; so when we, the believers in the traditional churches, address them in our prayers, it is because we feel that they participate with us in our journey to God and our return to Him. But if we call our great Saints “christs”, it is because we see them as close to Christ and seated with Him in as much as they had of grace and truth.

And when we call them “mediators”, we have to keep in mind that “the sole mediator between God and Man” (1Timothy 2: 5) is the blessed Lord who is both Man and God; and those we call “the Saints” can mediate for us only through the sole mediation of Jesus Christ. So there is no place at all for the wrong popular belief that says that we invoke the Saints because they as humans are closer to us than the Lord is; on the contrary, those who know Jesus Christ find in Him the humanity which is whole in its pureness.

Those who have knowledge see that the Saints, whom we invoke, manifested their weaknesses when they were on this earth. Only the martyrs are received in utter glory. They do not yet dwell in full bliss before the time of the Resurrection and Judgment though they radiate holiness; for that radiance is that of the Trinity. No creature has light in himself; even those who have gone before us to Heaven have no grace of their own. Every grace that falls on a human being, whether he is still in this body or has passed on to Heaven, has descended on him from Above; he has received it from his God whether the Lord has kept him on this earth or has called him to Himself.

That is why when some Christians disagreed among themselves over the Saints they love most as to who is better, namely St. Basil the Great, St. John Chrysostom and St. Gregory the Theologian, the Church established one feast day for those “Three Luminaries” to say that passing judgment on the holiness of the saints is a matter only the Lord can make judgment in and that will come out on the Last Day only.

What I said above does not stop some from getting to know the different virtues that the different Saints have; it does not also stop one from getting to know one Saint more than another; these are “spiritual tastes” which can be so among people. But to say that one Saint is specialized in one kind of love over another, or to say that we can resort to a certain saint for help in a certain special circumstance is a practice that has not been revealed by God to people.

It does not benefit us to compare among one saint and another. What is of benefit is to know them and imitate them. The drawback is that we know very little of them and that we do not seek to know. Yet I notice that many in our country show an emotional type of closeness to the prophet Elijah. They ask his intercessions frequently, and they build churches by his name, and invoke him for the healing of their sick children or kin. And I am confident that the only thing they know is that he intercedes for them before the Lord. But which among those believers know that he is of the Old Testament? How many among them know about his life and his clash with king Ahab and Queen Jezebel? Which among the people is sanctified with such knowledge of the Saints? I am shocked at this popular piety which is void of real substance.

I do not condemn anyone within the Orthodox realm but I get shocked that the attitude of many from the saints has nothing to do with Orthodoxy; as if there is a “popular” church based on people’s imagination and it has nothing to do with the real Church that Jesus Christ has founded.

Pastorally, it distresses me that some pastors know these diversions from the faith and they say: “Leave the people on their faith.” Such a statement is totally rejected because what was described as faith is not faith at all. It is myth itself; and we need to strike down myths in the same way our ancestors in the faith struck down the idols. Idols are often in the mind or in the soul and we have no right to keep idol worshippers in the Church.

The Church is not the people of a certain sect who call themselves Christians. She is the group of people whose faith is orthodox so they speak of God’s word as it came from Him and as it is interpreted by the fathers of the faith and theologians that we have. You believe only in what has been revealed, and when you believe you hope and love. You long for the holiness which is the perfect attribute of God, knowing that God has called you gods and has said: “Be holy as I am holy.” Though you are in the body on this earth, yet you are in the Heavelies when your mind becomes Heavenly. God registers you in the scroll of life as a deified man and as a seeker of Him. As such, Holiness is in seeking to be holy, perhaps.

You aim to be complete in your humanity like Christ is; you do not settle down for what is less than Christ, since what is less than Him is of this world. And you have transcended this world to dwell in the Heavens. It is He who has filled the chasm that sin has formed between this word and the one to come. That incites you to belong, in hope, to the world to come. Christ has come, and comes now, and will come again.

When you are His, you find yourself existing in every move He makes. Sin is that you contently accept to “put on” your weakness after the Apostle has said: “All those who are baptized in Christ have put on Christ.”

Holiness is in that nothing should separate between your being and your clothing which is Christ. Christ is happy to make you His clothing after you have accepted Him to be your clothing.

Holiness is in refusing to make a realm for yourself other than that of Christ. As you dwell in Him, He makes you His own. Then your face is His face, your body is His body, and your eyes are His eyes; and with those eyes you behold all that is around you.

Translated by Riad Moufarrij

Original Text: “قداسة أم قديسون” – An Nahar – 08.12.2012

You do not make people; and God has thrown you into their hands and as such He does not save you from “beasts” which by nature are ravenous; and you are in a jungle though your desire is to live with lambs. Had the Lord wanted you to live in constant bliss, He would have customized a special society for you according to your wishes; but he did not do so; and sin seeped into the crevices of your brains and your mind and the folds of your heart. And things will remain like this since people do not repent and those who do are few and they get benefits from the sins they commit since so many of us are lovers of money, power and killing and they do not have the faith that God sends into the human soul. They do not believe, and this world is their only horizon; and judgment day imposes a high cost on them and much effort and confrontations with those in positions who themselves never tire of confronting.

And you cannot leave the world though you might desire to. And the people of the world want to control you. They get drunk with power and they make your life difficult and they try to win you to their delusion feeling at ease in that because virtue makes them “choke”; yet virtue does draw people to itself like sin does and if one is drawn to it (virtue) he will have much of it.

Delving in sin means delving in thick darkness from which you would not want to get out; and you might not think of getting out since that means that you have to live in the light so that your soul would not be a nest of snakes; and when the snakes bite you, you consider that your healing has to be miraculous.

And the world is under the Evil One since all what is in the world is “the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh and the grandeur of life”. Those who delve into the world love its lusts and that has become their substance. They think their salvation is in finding pleasure in the world. They want to have new life; “what do I do to inherit eternal life?” they ask. You sometimes sense, in “big sinners “a longing for the new life that comes down from the Lord who is able to make every man new; as if no iniquity has nested in them. The human being cannot bring life out of himself. He is dead. He cannot enliven himself. Someone else has to give him life. Someone else has to raise him from the dead. And the greatest insinuation of the devil is to tell him: “Postpone that. Your life is in hating eternal life and in not longing for it. It costs you a great effort; and there is no pleasure in it like the pleasures you are swimming in.”

Rising from spiritual death to life is problematic after the dimming of God’s image in us. Who can do away with this darkness? That can happen when God comes to Man to destroy death. Christ has risen from the dead because He brought back His soul, that is His unending life, to His body that tasted death. That is a miracle. Man cannot live anew except through a miracle, and the miracle implies that which does not come from Man; but that which comes down on Man. And due to that, repentance is a rebirth. Man does not make repentance. It falls down on you as Grace. Man receives it and confesses that it is grace; if you think that you make it, you die in your pride.

The only thing in your capacity is to receive Grace. It is Grace that opens your heart so it can dwell in it. A new creation takes place in you. You become a new creation. That is what Paul said:”By grace you are saved”. You do nothing and are nothing in that and do not give life to yourself. The Holy Spirit alone is the giver of life.

If you fall in sin again, then you would ask yourself as to how you would be illumined again. Paul does not make it clear as to how to rise up again. He gets very disturbed due to that. He is very concerned that no means of salvation remains for us. The only thing he can do is to seek Grace, to call on the Holy Spirit to dwell anew in the human soul. We find an existential perplexity in Paul concerning the problem of rising after having fallen. He cannot understand how Man can have life outside Christ. How Christ remains dwelling in you through one Baptism. Where does Baptism go after one’s falling? How does one live again through the resurrection of the Savior? Do you have real existence if you do not abide in Christ? Those are questions one lives through with pain. If you obtain the miracle of Salvation, you do not have an explanation for that miracle. You only can receive and accept it.

In that we have a heritage from Pascal who said: “Kneel down and pray, whether you feel like it or not”. I have not found such talk in the ascetic tradition of the East, but that is very beneficial and reasonable pastorally. Ask him who has questions about the faith, or even the disbeliever, to accompany you to Church; he might hear a new voice or touch a grace that descends on him.

Some of those who disbelieve speak of a conversion that has happened to them but they did not turn to God. In fact it is God who turns towards you and He chooses the means that He sees fit. Train yourself to receive grace. Train yourself as much as you can but that does not mean that you can order God to pour His grace on you.

The Fathers said that you should understand the words of the prayers you pray. But that does not mean that you have to feel the words. But say the prayers; you might be “ordering” God to come to you. Cast yourself on Him. Throw yourself into His bosom. He would probably gather you to Himself and embrace you. He always feels that you are His son. The Lord always creates means for you to get closer to Him. And when He sees you from far and He knows that you are a prodigal, He would forget that, since He is certain that when you are in His embrace you will hear His heartbeat and understand that His heart beats for your sake. He longs for your heart to get back to Him.

He moves your heart in a miraculous way that He had not shown you before. He is always the one who performs wonders. We say God is “Wonderful in His Saints”. And I would say He is wonderful in His “sinners”. The sinners are His; and He “uttered” that when He accepted the sinners to nail His Christ to the Cross. And if they (the sinners) accept His blood as salvation for them, their adamancy (of sin) leaves them so that it will be replaced with His “adamancy”; that is His love.

Translated by Riad Moufarrij

Original Text: “عناد الله” – An Nahar – 01.12.2012

This world is a bunch of disappointments if you expect the love you give to be given back in return with “loves” (from others). God did not command in His Book that you seek to be loved by others. Your job is to love like His Son loved; till death. You are a sower who sows in hope, but the Lord does not say that you are sowing for yourself. He is the Harvest of the good that you give others. No one might pay your good work back, and you should not expect that. You are comforted with what you give and not with what you expect since your obedience (to God) might be returned with rejection (from others).

You give freely and you hope that the one given will return his thanks to God. You should not give others with the expectancy that they will give you back. You should give others for the sole reason that they would improve their relationship with God. You give others for their own salvation and that in turn increases your lot in salvation. As you give, you should hope for salvation for yourself and for the others you give to. And this comes to you from the gratuitousness of the Divine Gift that has descended on you and inspired you to love.

You know from what has been mentioned that you are in need of God alone since others can give you only from what they have; and what they have might only be the very little. When Jesus speaks of reciprocity in love, He means that your reward is in Heaven in the sense that it is He who takes what you think you have given to a human and as such the Lord sees Himself as the One who has taken.

If you are not always aware that what you need is God alone, you will drown in disappointment. The giving of those who give you is real only when they feel that when they give you, they are giving the Lord. You are not rich in yourself. You are rich in God and so you distribute His grace on others. He who gives you and does not reckon that in that he is giving God, or he does not consider that the money he gives you of is from God, he then enslaves you. No one has a thing to squander. One is entrusted with what God has given him. The human being seeks the bounty of the Lord, and when he obtains some of that, he shares it with other people. And he who offers others gifts should make them feel that he is God’s steward in distributing His gifts and when people thank him for what he gives, he has to bring them to offer thanks to God. What you spend of money or mind or love is only a bridge between God and those whom He visits. The only feeling we have the right to have is to bring to the Lord those on whom we pour our love; He is to be thanked for what we grant people and that is due to His love for them and also for us.

If we do not remain grounded in our need for God, we cannot receive anything from Him. That is why our relationship with others is one version of our relationship with God. Yet our relationship with God can be tested in its authenticity and trueness only through our relationship with other people. They are God’s face (presence) to us. If we accept them we would have accepted Him and if we reject them we would have rejected them. That is why people who attend Church-services are not necessarily people of God. Of course every love, be it divine or human, requires to be expressed; and our love for God is expressed through our love for people. We encounter Him in people. They are the true altar of our worship for Him. That altar, as John Chrysostom says, is more significant than the altar on which we present the offerings (sacrifice). Love is the offering.

The love of people for each other may reflect God’s love for Man. If you ascend on the path of your love for the Lord, you would be able to love people with a serenity that descends on you from above with a freedom from any sense of gain from the others. If your love for them becomes a reflection of God’s love for His creatures, your love then would be unadulterated and free from any sense of utility or self-pleasure.

The love of people for one another, when it is from God, may be fused with emotions. It is not bad if you purify yourself. And the love you grant to others without expecting anything in return, is often inflamed with what is human; that is not wrong. When we love in a Godly way, our Godly love mixes with what is human; and that is not harmful. Godly love in us is not due to mere human motivation. The meeting of Divinity and humanity in us is one of the mysteries of this existence. We have to make it in the image of the meeting between the Divinity and humanity in Christ. The fusion between us and what is of the Deity in us, remains a mystery that we accept and receive but do not explain. I am certain that I can use the word “fusion” which denotes a meeting of what is human with what is human. That is how the Deity that is “humanized” in us meets with our humanity in its ascension to the Divine that dwells in us.

That is the Saints’ experience which, though I see it from far, I try to interpret to myself and the reader in human language. I wish the Lord would grant all of us to receive that experience in our lives as much as the Lord’s Grace wishes for us. The Lord gives a taste of that to those who truly try.

What came above is sufficient for us to understand the experience of the Saints. The Saints use the language of the mind only after they have gained the Vision (of God). The mind cannot fully understand and interpret the life of the Saints except in the areas that are in its scope.

In those who obtain the above Vision, sin does not necessarily obscure it unless they give themselves to it; then they return to being merely dust, and dust has no vision of anything. And such Vision (the above mentioned) is poured on those who seek and strive on-goingly so that no trace of anything except God remains in their soul.

Such seeking as the above does not find its strength in alienation from others. You do not “see” God unless you “see” the brethren and come with them to the embrace of Christ so they can lean their head on His chest and listen to His heartbeat and listen to words that cannot be uttered. And when people are in His embrace, they bring their brethren with them to Him so that the Kingdom sets in, and thus we all rejoice in Him together. This is so because the Kingdom is not a meadow, it is the King who has come to give us the good news that God is love and we are called to recognize His love for us and appropriate it; as such others recognize the Lord when He comes towards them and gives them to taste His love; for in this, His bounty and love towards us are shown.

Translated by Riad Moufarrij

Original Text: “محبّة الله ومحبّتنا” – An Nahar – 24.11.2012

“They hated me without a cause.” (Psalms 29: 15). And in a more recent translation, “They hate me fervently”. Was the one who translated that into Arabic aware of what it entails to consider hatred as the antonym of love? Is not it much worse than that? There are degrees in love. But hatred is enmity itself in such a way that not one iota of love remains in the one who hates.

Primarily it is the severance of the other from yourself and it is the in-harboring of his death in you even though you do not mean to kill him physically out of fear of the consequences it might incur on you legally; or that you do not have enough courage in you to destroy the other. But the desire of killing is there in you at any rate. There is no ‘half hatred’ or‘quarter hatred’. There is a sense of murder in you that you are afraid of accomplishing. The ‘self’ in you, and here I mean your inner core, dislikes the one you hate; and you do not get together even in the imagination because for you, even in that, he does not exist. Deep in yourself you think of destroying the other. As such there are those who hate. The love that is poured down on them makes no effect in them. There are those who are closed in with hatred and those who are open to love. This is what Paul says is the mystery of evil and we do not get to know how people get closed in their darkness and why they welcome such darkness to start with. We notice that this happens because people get hurt from others treat them harshly or offend them with words; they cannot tolerate that and so they see the other as killing them and destroying them and as a result they read the existence of those who offend them negatively as if they (the offenders) want to annihilate them.

There is a reason for the above offenses happen, but the cause is a major one that is not considered as a psychological defect but is understood to be the inner passions that unleashed themselves wantonly between the offender and the one offended. In that case, there is a digression from what is normally rational or familiar, as such getting into a whirlpool of passions that cannot be understood by logic since we cannot find a link between the offense that took place and the reaction to that offense. When the link between what the offender does and the response of the one offended is absent, then that means that we have digressed from the normal and reasonable and entered into the world of madness.

Here we have departed from the realm of rational judgment, of reason and gotten into the realm of utter emotion and whims. That is why the Bible says “they hated me without a cause”. And the cause became over dramatized to the point that we can say that “they hated me without a cause”. What is the path that brings one to hatred? Here St. Dorotheos of Gaza comes to my help; he says: “Rancor is one thing and hatred is another” And then he speaks also of disaffection and annoyance. Our ascetics knew what sin is down to its minute details. And from their knowledge of sin they got to what is like the science of psychology.

In the Old Testament, anger and hatred are associated together as if anger is an outward expression of hatred. Anger is likened to fire. It burns the one who harbors it and the one on whom it is poured. There also is talk about the anger of God, but this is only a simile. There also is hope in that Book. No doubt that, for those who are righteous, it is possible to get free from the passions; and the way I see it, hatred is a great passion that only a storm of love that comes down from the Lord can hit it; this is so because the heart is by nature susceptible to be bombarded by hatred, and strongly so.

The rancor of those who hate has often fallen on us due to envy. There are those who do not want to see you as gifted or successful or beautiful or eloquent or pure or saintly. So they haul on you all the drawbacks which they invent in order to destroy you in a “nice” way. And often they gossip against you so that they can spoil your reputation making you a robber, and thief, and a liar, and do not be surprised at that even though none of what they say applies to you. There are those who have the desire to destroy others though what they say wrongly of them might not spread much. Few turn away a lie; most people are naïve and simple so the false accusation against you might remain for tens of years; no one turns it away.

Many of those who are honest are not believed for what they say; it is easier to believe those who lie. Quite often you are a victim forever, and God alone “sees” you (know you in that) and He alone justifies you. And that might never get known by the others in this life. And you have to be content with the justification of the Lord so that you do not fall into sorrow and as such you weep alone, and only the Lord wipes away every tear from your eyes.

You hold the one who hates you with the only power you have. Forgiveness. Though nothing ascertains that forgiveness would heal the enemy, but you have no other way; it was said: “Love your enemies, bless those who curse you and do good to those who persecute you …… for if you love those who love you, what reward do you get?” (Matth. 5: 44-46).

Our hope is that healing would come to those who hate so that the world will become righteous. “The whole world lies in the power of the evil one.” But that does not bring us to despair, but would lead us to great suffering because we desire that people be saved.

The salvation of the world is a strife and non-ceasing prayer on the part of those who sanctify themselves. Love has the victory in the end though we might not behold that during our lifetime. Hope is also a strife and we are saved on Hope.

We cannot antagonize the evildoers. We do not hate them. We hate the evil they do. We do not hate those who hate. We do not despair of their repentance; and when they return to the Lord, nothing gives us joy as much as that does because only their repentance saves their souls from their sins. O for the day when those who hate get into the Resurrection!

Translated by Riad Moufarrij

Original Text: “البغض” – An Nahar – 17.11.2012