In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I am recording this in Atlanta. I have been in the United States for over a month now. By the grace of God, for the last four or five years, at the invitation of local priests, I have offered retreats and conferences, various events, in American parishes, in an attempt to bring awareness of the monastery and awareness of the Celtic saints and to educate people about their lives and their significance to the Orthodox world, and particularly so to you, those among you who are converts to Orthodoxy. It is very important, particularly for you, but also for us who come from an ethnic patriarchate, such as the Orthodox Church in Greece or in Russia or in Romania or in Serbia. It is very important to understand that Orthodoxy has nothing to do with ethnicity or nationality and that there was a time when Orthodoxy was fully present and represented in western Europe. So for the last few years, whenever I have been invited, I have offered this talk and have tried to teach people as much as I could of what I know about the Celtic saints.

This time I arrived into Denver, and I spent a week at the beginning of this brief tour—I spent a week at the Monastery of the Protection of the Mother of God in Lake George in Colorado, where our wonderful friend, Mother Cassiana, lives. I try to go there every time I fly to the US, because she has been so wonderfully helpful to me personally and to the monastery. So I like to offer something in return, and all I can offer really is my presence and celebrating the Divine Liturgy with the sisterhood there.

However, this time when I got to her, she asked me to write a small answer, a brief answer to a question she had received from one of the readers of their newspaper. They have this journal or newsletter called The Veil which they send out to people who support them. It is a wonderful newsletter and very well-written. She has been publishing it for over 20 years now, which is an immense accomplishment for a small community.

The question she had received, the question for which I wrote the answer, to be included in one of the future issues of The Veil, that question travelled with me, and I think it is an important question. So I decided to record an answer to that question here as well, because I do believe it is important. I don’t remember the exact wording of the question, but the person was struggling to understand what is the correct attitude, the correct way in which we Orthodox Christians view our own death. The person asking the question was obviously a convert, and they had experienced several attitudes towards death in their journey toward Orthodoxy. In some traditions, people are absolutely petrified at the thought of death; in others they seem to be completely open to it and look upon it as a moment of joy and meeting with Christ. They wanted to know—they wrote to ask Mother Cassiana—what is the Orthodox understanding of death, and how one should prepare for it.

Once it got me thinking, I was struck how varied our attitudes towards death actually are, how human attitude, our attitude towards death has always varied from one age to another, from one culture to another, one place to another, and how, throughout our history as humans, we seem to have projected upon our understanding of death all our fears and hopes and everything that is both beautiful and ugly in our nature. Death has been seen as punishment in some cultures, for trespassing the law, but it could also come, in other cultures, with the promise of a reward for acts of courage and self-sacrifice. Death reflected our worship of wealth and social status by welcoming the rich, welcoming the famous, but it also betrayed our racism, our xenophobia, by rejecting access to this wonderful afterlife to those among us who were of different races and different cultures or simply foreigners to us.

To this day, one’s perception of death is in fact is a reflection of the deeper principles that guide one’s very life. Even within Christianity, the attitude toward death of the various Christian traditions is so obviously different, and it varies depending on how those traditions, in fact, understand life and salvation itself. There are those who make an absolute of Christ’s sacrifice for humanity and downplay to the point of annihilation the importance of our human free will. These people, these traditions, will of course look at death exclusively as a moment of joyful celebration, because it can only mark the end of a pointless existence, which was always due to lead to salvation. But then there are also those who fall in the opposite temptation, and they abandon all hope of salvation because of the overwhelming strength of our human sinfulness. These usually reduce Christ’s words to just dead sets of rules, and they end up following in the footpath of ancient Israel, and just like ancient Israel they no longer see any hope of resurrection. Of course, death becomes for them an all-devouring destroyer.

All these opposing meanings of death, all of them, they only reflect the results of what human wisdom is able to make of Christ’s revelation. All these contrasting images of death, all of them are just the idols of our brains, built based upon our fears and our hopes, our social and cultural values. Somewhere in the midst of this collection of diverse idols, somewhere there, hidden for two millennia and known only to those who choose not to follow their own understanding of life and death, somewhere there, there still is Christ’s own revealed teaching about death, and, like all things that belong to the kingdom and are not fabricated in this fallen world of ours, his teaching on death is paradoxical and profoundly challenging, because it does not fit nor does it function according to the rules of our logic. Instead, it keeps a perfect balance between despair and hope, and it teaches us to hold on tight to this path to salvation, the path revealed to us by Christ, and it teaches us to stay away from anything we have built ourselves.

The thing is that we cannot understand death if you take it entirely by itself, because death does not exist on its own. We always see it in relation to what awaits for us beyond death. Even for the non-believer, death is interconnected with the idea of disappearance, dissolution, the ceasing of being. For us, those who believe and we struggle to follow Christ, trust death comes with the perspective of judgment; of course, the outcome of that judgment, our salvation or our damnation. One cannot simply have a definite attitude to death. One cannot simply decide that death is a moment of pure joy or a moment of utter dread, because one cannot have a definite attitude to what is to follow that death. If we could claim with certainty that we are to be saved, death would of course be a gate to a life of eternal blessing, an event to be welcomed and eagerly anticipated. Similarly, if we were certain of our damnation, given our sinfulness and our awareness of our sinful state, death could only be the moment of ultimate fear and horror, the beginning of an end.

But Christ made no definite statement about our eternal fate. He opened the gates of paradise for us, and he made salvation possible for all of us. What was impossible before Christ is now within our reach. It is within our reach, but, however, not yet in our possession. In some way, salvation is like love. It involves two persons, both entirely free to accept or to decline the other’s love. Yes, Christ died on the cross to open the gates of heaven for us, but you and I, we still have to willingly and sacrificially walk through those gates ourselves.

The Church followed Christ’s teaching and carefully guarded itself against making any definite statements about our salvation, and tradition has always taught that there are two deadly sins: despair and carelessness. Despair is a deadly sin because it affirms the impossibility of salvation. In a way, it affirms the victory of our sinfulness over God’s unspeakable love and mercy. Carelessness, on the other hand, the idea that we shall be saved no matter what, is at the other end of the spectrum. It is also deadly because it takes away our humanity by taking away our free will, our participation in our salvation. It is deadly because it reduces our salvation to a mechanical automatism, something that happens, with or without our free will, with or without our desire.

Now, if we look a bit closer at these two deadly sins, we shall see that, ultimately, they are both denials of Christ’s incarnation, of his crucifixion and his resurrection, because they both make a mockery of Christ’s sacrifice for us, and this is the underlying reason why they are held as deadly sins. For—think about it—what is the use of Christ’s sacrifice if our sins overwhelm his willing sacrifice on the cross? To despair, to lose hope, is to claim precisely this, that Christ’s sacrifice is useless. On the other hand, why would Christ become incarnate, why would God expose himself to the humility of death of the cross, if he knew that we would be saved anyway? If our salvation is entirely up to his will, why the need for his incarnation, why the need for everything that followed the Incarnation? Why not just save the world and just get it done with?

Christ’s Church has always maintained the balance between fear on account of our sinfulness and hope on account of Christ’s mercy and his sacrifice. The 2,000 years of experience of Christ’s true and only Church is filled with examples of holy men and holy women who lose their salvation at the very end of their lives, but it is also filled with countless sinners, men and women, who find their salvation just as death takes over them. It is not at all an accident that the gospels place before our eyes those two examples of Judas, an apostle who loses his soul, and the thief on the cross, a criminal who finds salvation as he is dying. Christ had the same love and the same will for both of them. He died for both of them. His divine sacrifice opened large the path of salvation for both of them. Yet his love, his will, his self-sacrifice could not and did not obliterate the free will of the human being. Judas willingly and freely positioned himself outside Christ’s will for himself, because Christ’s will for any of us is always to save. Because of this, death became a moment of horror for Judas. The thief’s heart, by comparison, heard the voice of its Savior and recognized him and welcomed him, and his death came as a blessing, a moment of transfiguration that washed all his sinfulness and covered him in the light of Christ.

This tension, this existential tension all of us feel regarding our death, has been guarded by the Church as a great treasure. Instead of trying to find a solution to it, instead of trying to find a way out of it, it has actually been valued and guarded by the Church as a treasure. Look only at the first monastics, those great saints of the Egyptian desert. Look how they lived in the most extreme lives in forms of asceticism that we cannot even imagine today. Look how, as they were dying, some of them were welcomed into life eternal by the Mother of God, by the saints, by Christ himself even. Their monastic brothers saw them surrounded by light, and they could hear the angels singing—and yet those holy monastics died asking for nothing but forgiveness. They gave their souls still crying over their sins. They entered death still begging for more time to repent, despite everything that everyone else witnessed as happening around them.

Why did they do that? Why did they have that attitude to death? Because they knew something that we try very hard to forget: Repentance does not end until after Christ’s judgment. As their souls were being carried to the heavens by the angels, they could hear the demons cry that they had escaped their traps, they had escaped their temptations. And yet they refused to listen even then, and they kept repenting until they heard their eternal fate from the mouth of Christ himself, because they knew that the last word belongs to him.

So if we can make no claim about our eternal fate after our death, how we can be at peace regarding death itself? We oscillate between horror and hope as we turn to face either our sinfulness or the endless mercy of Christ, our Savior. This balancing act is the narrow path. This struggle with the thought of hell’s torments while nevertheless hoping against hope in Christ’s love: this paradox is precisely what holy Fathers like St. Isaac the Syrian, for instance, are teaching us. Even closer, much closer to our times, St. Silouan from the Holy Mountain: he was taught by Christ himself that one walks the path to salvation with one’s mind in hell, yet without falling into despair. Death is our last enemy, and what lies beyond it is a mystery. Like all mysteries of the Church, we should draw near it with both fear and love. Fear and love, not letting go of either until Christ himself has spoken.

This is what I had to share with the person who had sent the question to Mother Cassiana’s moanstery. I wanted to share this with you as well, particularly now as we enter Lent and we are approaching the resurrection, because of course prior to the resurrection there is Christ’s crucifixion. And that moment will, one way or another, make us question our own mortality and our own fate after death.

Please pray for me as I continue to travel through the United States. I wish God keeps me safe and healthy, and that he gives me a good word for every single person I meet. Please pray for me, and may God bless you as well. Amen.