Love to the End: Fr. Rafail Noica on the Life-Giving Cross
Will you believe me if I tell you that human beings seek the Cross of Christ and nothing else? May God enlighten us, and then we will be able to sing “Oh Life-Giving Cross!”
I think the days are coming when our life needs to be pure. Pure doesn’t mean we don’t have any sins. But at least our thinking needs to be pure, whole, complete. Because if not, we run the risk of being swallowed by the waves, the tsunamis of the postmodern world. The true life culminates with the cross, paradoxically. But doesn’t the Church say “Blessed life-giving Cross”? How is it life giving, when the Giver of Life died on it? The body is not all, the body was an object of sacrifice, and He gave it to us as Communion, and also His blood which was spilled. And we also, by eating the Body and Blood under the form of bread and wine, because He knows we are not cannibals, we eat the Body and Blood which knew the Resurrection, and so we eat everlasting Life, as Christ says.
Ever since I was allowed to hear confessions, I’ve heard many times from young people a confession of this type: “I tried to do carnal things”, or carnal things tempted them, and they say either: “But I didn’t go too far”, or “I didn’t go all the way”, or “I went all the way”, or, as some were saying “Oh, Father, when I had this experience for the first time, I thought: is this all?”. I want to say two more things:
1. Is this all? Yes, or course, this is all; you were looking for love, but your poor body was able to only offer you this much. Why? Because, in its essence, it is nothing but a biological function and the body can’t do more. It is a biological function which is veiled by lies into a whole mysticism of the body, and even of the soul. You look for fulfillment or things like that. The ones who have had this experience, expecting such things, were disappointed. All are deceived when these things attract them too much.
2. All the way. I want to focus on this expression “too far”, or “all the way”. Love needs to go all the way, and this allows the enemy to hinder us and darken us, and the human being goes “all the way” to the end of the carnal coming together, which in its law, in its limits, is very good, very beautiful, if only we had sufficient freedom from passions to see with pure eyes this work of conceiving the image of God, even after the Fall. All the way; love cannot help but give itself all the way. It’s not that it can’t, but it is in its nature, it is a consuming fire which consumes God Himself. He consumes Himself because He is love, and if we talk about history, a history where things culminate with death, then He allows Himself to be consumed by love unto death, consumed for the sake of His beloved. And when He says on the cross “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing”, He wasn’t lamenting His wounds, but our wounds, our darkness. Because these poor darkened beings don’t know that they are killing their only true Friend. “But I will die for them, and through this death I will find another way to save them, since I did not find an answer of obedience and love in them; through their hate and their criminality, I, God immortal, let Myself be killed, and through this sacrifice I will spoil the work of death and of Hell, and even so I will save them.” And, of course, we need to add “Give us, God, to want this, and to want it more fully”.
The great heresy is the way we understand the Cross and we say “Oh, I am carrying my cross”, which is to say I suffer much. We equate the cross with suffering. Heresy! The cross is love, love brought - to quote - “too far”, love brought “all the way”, true love, which doesn’t need carnal fulfillment, which is very good but can only be experienced within its own law and its own limits. But love needs to go beyond that. The Cross is that which human beings desire, and when they arrive at sin, at that end where there is disappointment, then they think it wasn’t sufficient, and they look for another experience, they seek another person. They try more and more and they run the risk of running aground in their sinful ways, in lies, in darkness, in going all the way.
Will you believe me if I tell you that human beings seek the Cross of Christ and nothing else? May God enlighten us, and then we will be able to sing “Oh Life-Giving Cross!”
Excerpt from:
Hieromonk Rafail Noica - Conference: “What is Man?”
Alba Iulia, November 23, 2006
Translated by Grig Gheorghiu