The Second Gospel Commandment
By Mother Maria of Paris
Undoubtedly Mother Maria's most important insight was the realization that our love of God cannot be separated from our love for the neighbor. While this reality might seem obvious, she reveals both traditional religiosity and the machinations of our consciousness subtly tend to divide these two loves. Mother Maria grounds her argument in Scripture, the spirit of liturgical prayer, the wisdom of the Church Fathers, the principles of orthodox philosophy, and the very "triune" nature of the human being: body, soul, and spirit. But ultimately, this piece reflects her own distinctive vision of the relationship between religious life and social action, a theme that winds its way through all of her writings.
There exists in the Christian world a constant tendency, in moments of various historical catastrophes, to preach with great intensity an immersion in oneself, a withdrawal from life, a standing of the solitary human soul before God.
It appears to me that now, too, this tendency is beginning to show itself very strongly, producing a strange picture of the world: on one side all the diverse forces of evil, united and affirming the power of the collective, of the masses, and the worthlessness and insignificance of each separate human soul; and on the other side -- dispersed and disunited Christian souls, affirming themselves in this dispersion and disunity, for whom the world becomes a sort of evil phantom, and the only reality is God and my solitary soul trembling before Him. It seems to me that this state of mind is definitely a temptation, is definitely as terrible for each person as it is for the destiny of the Church of Christ, and I would like to rise against it with all my strength and call people to each other, to stand together before God, to suffer sorrows together, to resist temptations gather. And I can find an enormous number of indisputable masons for this call, in all areas of Christian life.
I will begin with what is perceived as most personal and intimate, the area which everyone knows to be precisely the one where the soul stands alone before God-with Orthodox prayers and, to limit myself still further, not with the prayers of the Church, uttered during church services, where there non-personal character goes without saying, but precisely with the personal prayers, known to everyone, which are said at home behind closed doors. I am thinking of the usual order of morning and evening prayers, which can be found in any prayer book and which we have been accustomed to since childhood. The important thing for me is to establish that an absolute majority of them are addressed to God from us and not from me. I want to look at them from that point of view.
They begin like this: "Glory to Thee, our God, glory to Thee.” The prayer "O Heavenly King" ends with the words: "Come and abide in us, cleanse us from every impurity, and save our souls, O Good One." The Trisagion ends: "have mercy on us." Then: "Lord, cleanse us from our sins, Master, pardon our transgressions, Holy One, visit us and heal us of our infirmities for Thy name's sake." Further on comes the Lord's Prayer, beginning with the address: "Our Father....Give us this day our daily bread; and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one."
In the morning prayers, the plural is used as definitely and as clearly. "We fall down before Thee, we sing unto Thee... have mercy on us....O come, let us worship God, our King ... receive our prayer...cleanse us and heal us...that we may be found ready… for Thou hast borne the savior of our souls…”
Further on come prayers for the living and the departed, that is for others, not for oneself. Exactly the same thing is repeated in the evening prayers. Thus what is most personal, what is most intimate in an Orthodox person's life, is thoroughly pervaded by this sense of being united with everyone, the sense of the principle of sobornost, characteristic of the Orthodox Church. This is a fact of great significance; this forces us to reflect.
If this is so in a person's private prayer, there is no need to speak of prayer in the church. A priest cannot even celebrate the liturgy if he is alone; for that he must have at least one person who symbolizes the people. And the eucharistic mystery itself is precisely the common work of the Church, accomplished on behalf of all and for all.
It would be an unseemly protestantizing on the part of Orthodox people if they forgot these central and most characteristic particularities of their Orthodox truth. In the Orthodox Church man is not alone and his path to salvation is not solitary; he is a member of the Body of Christ, he shares the fate of his brothers in Christ, he is justified by the righteous and bears responsibility for the sins of the sinners. The Orthodox Church is not a solitary standing before God, but sobornost, which binds everyone with the bonds of Christ's love and the love for one another. And that is not something invented by theologians and philosophers, but a precise teaching of the Gospel, brought to life through the centuries of existence of the Church's body. Khomiakov, Dostoevsky, and Soloviev, who did much to explain these truths to broad segments of Russian educated society, were able to confirm it by references to the Word of God, to precise teachings from the Savior. The Orthodox man only fulfills the precepts of his faith when he takes them as a certain bi-une commandment of love for God and love for one's neighbor.
There occur, of course, whole epochs of deviation from the right attitude toward this bi-unity. And it is especially characteristic of periods of catastrophe and general instability, when man in his pusillanimity tries to hide, to take cover, and not deal with anyone who belongs to this tottering world. It seems to him that if he remembers God alone, and stands before Him in his soul in order to save it, he will thereby be delivered from all calamities and remain clean in a time of universal defilement. Such a man should tirelessly repeat to himself the words of St. John the Theologian about hypocrites who say they love God without loving man [1 Jn 4:20]. How can they love God, whom they do not see, and hate their brother, who is near them? For the fulfillment of love for one's neighbor, Christ demanded that we lay down our soul for our friends. Here there is no sense in paraphrasing this demand and saying that it has to do not with the soul but with life, because when the apostle Paul says, about the fulfilling of Christ's demand, that he could wish he were separated from Christ, so long as he could see his brothers saved [Rom 9:3]-it is clear that he is speaking of the state of his soul, and not only his life.
Equally irrefutable is Christ's teaching about how we should deal with our neighbor, in His words about the Last Judgment Mr 25:31-45], when man will be asked not how he saved his soul by solitary endeavor but precisely how he dealt with neighbor, whether he visited him in prison, whether he fed when he was hungry, comforted him -in short, whether he loved his fellow man, whether this love stood before him as an mutable commandment of Christ. And here we cannot excuse ourselves from active love, from the selfless giving of our soul for our friends.
But even if we set aside the separate and particular Gospel teachings in this regard and turn to the whole activity of Christ on earth, it is here that we find the highest degree of the laying down of one's soul for others, the highest measure of sacrifice, love and self-giving that mankind has known. "For God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son" (Jn 3:16), calling us, too, to the same love. There is not and there cannot be any following in the steps of Christ without taking upon ourselves a certain share, small as it may be, of participation in this sacrificial deed of love. Anyone who loves the world, anyone who lays down his soul for others, anyone who is ready, at the price of being separated from Christ, to gain salvation for his brothers- is a disciple and follower of Christ. And inversely, anyone who abides in the temptation of self-salvation alone, anyone who does not take upon himself the responsibility for the pain and sin of the world, anyone who follows the path of “egoism” be it even “holy” egoism, simply does not hear what Christ says, and does not see what His sacrifice on Golgotha was offered for.
Here it is important to stress once more that quite often various exercises in external virtue- feeding vagabonds, sheltering beggars, and so on-are also accepted, as it were, by those who follow the path of self-salvation. But they are accepted as ascetic exercises useful for the soul. Of course, this is not the love that the Gospel teaches us, and it was not for this kind of love that Christ was crucified. His love, given to us in inheritance, is true sacrificial love, the giving of the soul not in order to receive it back with interest, so to speak, not as an act in its own name, but as an act in the name of a neighbor, and only in his name, our love for whom reveals to us the image of God in him. Here we cannot reason like this: Christ gave us the firm and true teaching that we meet Him in every poor and unhappy man. Let us take that into consideration and give this poor and unhappy man our love, because he only seems poor and unhappy to us, but in fact he is the King of Heaven, and with Him our gifts will not go for nothing, but will return to us a hundredfold. No, the poor and unhappy man is indeed poor and unhappy, and in him Christ is indeed present in a humiliated way, and we receive him in the name of the love of Christ, not because we will be rewarded, but because we are aflame with this sacrificial love of Christ and in it we are united with Him, with His suffering on the Cross, and we suffer not for the sake of our purification and salvation, but for the sake of this poor and unhappy man whose suffering is alleviated by ours. One cannot love sacrificially in one's own name, but only in the name of Christ, in the name of the image of God that is revealed to us in man.
All these Gospel teachings we have referred to may be taken as random or tendentious. We know that heretics and sectarians support their arguments with Gospel texts. It seems we need to support ourselves with something else, to show that such an interpretation existed throughout the centuries of the history of the Orthodox Church, for instance, in the Philokalia. That is right, of course, though it calls for certain reservations. The first thing we need to remember is that the Philokalia is not Holy Scripture, a divinely inspired revelation, but the writings of saints, who are people after all. The second thing is that in the Philokalia the writings of the authors are not printed in their entirety, but only as a selection, only, for the most part, in those fragments which concern instructions for the ascetic endeavor of an individual person. Therefore there is little mention of themes dealing with what presently concerns us.
Thus, for instance, we may note that in the first volume of the Philokalia, material about the attitude toward one's neighbor takes up only two pages out of six hundred, and in the second volume, only three out of seven hundred and fifty. The proportion is quite different from that in the Gospels or the Epistles. And we cannot say that it all refers to the direct question of fulfilling the commandment of the love of God -three-quarters of the remaining material in the Philokalia speak mainly about fighting against gluttony, lasciviousness, and other passions.... But there are texts of different sorts, which follow wholly from Christ's teaching about laying down one's soul for one's neighbor. Considering the generally small number of texts about one's neighbor, these are still less numerous than the previous kind.
Macarius the Great (ca. 300-390) says:
Those to whom it has been granted to become children of God and to be born from on high of the Holy Spirit...sometimes weep and lament, as it were, over the human race and, praying for the whole of Adam, shed tears and cry, burning with spiritual love for mankind. Sometimes their spirit flares up with such joy and love that, if it were possible, they would take every man into their heart, wicked or good, without distinction. Sometimes, in the humility of their spirit, they so abase themselves before each man that they consider themselves the least and smallest of all.
In St. John Cassian [ca. 350-435] there is the following statement:
When someone has no compassion for another's transgressions, but pronounces a severe judgment on them, it is an obvious sign of a soul not yet purified of evil passions.
Particularly remarkable are the thoughts of St. Nilus of Sinai [fifth century:
It is righteous to pray not only for your own purification, but for the purification of every man, in imitation of the angelic orders. Blessed is the monk who considers every man as God after God. Blessed is the monk who looks upon the accomplishment of the salvation and furtherance of everyone as upon his own. Blessed is the monk who considers himself the refuse of all. A monk is he who, while withdrawing from all, is united with all. A monk is he who considers himself as being with everyone and who sees himself in everyone. Prefer nothing to the love of your neighbor, except in those cases when because of it the love of God is neglected.
The same spirit breathes in the words of St Ephrem the Syrian:
This is what "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven" means: when we are united with each other in unenviousness, simplicity, love, peace, and joy, considering the furtherance of our neighbor as our own gain, and regarding his ailments, or failures, or sorrows as our own deficiency, as it is said: “Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others” (Phil 2:4). Being thus compassionate to each other, especially the strong for the weak and the firm for the ailing, we should be able to fulfill the law of Christ.
The sign of humility is to satisfy the needs of your brother with both hands, in the same way as you would receive assistance for yourself.Let us take care to acquire the eternal blessings promised us. Let us be zealous about it, before it turns dark, before the market closes. Let us make friends of the poor and destitute for our life there. Let us buy oil from them and send them there ahead of us. For it is here that the widows, the orphans, the sick, the lame, the halt, the blind and all the beggars sitting by the church door sell oil for your lamps there.
And, finally, I would like to add to this some texts from St. Isaac the Syrian (seventh century):
The sign of those who have reached perfection is this: if ten times a day they are given over to be burned for the love of their neighbor, they will not be satisfied with that, as Moses, and the ardent Paul, and the other disciples showed. God gave His Son over to death on the Cross out of love for His creature. And if He had had something more precious, he would have given it to us, in order thereby to gain human kind. Imitating this, all the saints, in striving for perfection, long to be like God in perfect love for their neighbor.
No man dares to say of his love for his neighbor that he succeeds in it in his soul, if he abandons the part that he fulfills bodily, as well as he can, and in conformity with time and place. For only this fulfillment certifies that a man has perfect love in him. And when we are faithful and true in it as far as possible, then the soul is given power, in simple and incomparable notions, to attain to the great region lofty and divine contemplation.
These words thoroughly justify not only active Christianity, but the possibility of attaining to "lofty and divine contemplation" through the love of one's neighbor- not merely an abstract, but necessarily the most concrete, practical love. Here is the whole key to the mystery of human communion as a religious path.
And two more texts:
If a merciful man is not higher than his truth, then he is not merciful-that is, a truly merciful man not only gives alms of what is his own, but also joyfully suffers wrongs from others and is merciful to them. He who lays down his soul for his brother is merciful, and not he who shows mercy by giving alms.
And the last:
Though you be persecuted, do not persecute. Though you be offended, do not offend. Though you be slandered, do not slander.... Be glad with those who are glad and weep with those who weep, for that is the sign of purity. Be sick with the sick. Shed tears with the sinners. Rejoice with the repentant. Be friends with all men, but in your thought abide alone.
For me these are truly fiery words, and it is not so important they take up so few pages in the many volumes of the Philokalia. The most important thing is that they exist, and by the fact of their existence create a patristic tradition that justifies our search for a path precisely in this direction. Thus we may say boldly that such a tradition exists. Unfortunately, in the area of applying these principles to life, in the area of practical and ascetic behavior toward man, we have much less material than in the area of man's relation to God and to himself. Yet the need to find some precise and correct ways, and not to wander about, guided only by our own sentiments, the need to know the limits of this area of human communion - all this makes itself very strongly felt. In the end, since we have certain basic teachings, perhaps it will not be so difficult to apply them to various areas of human communion, at first only as a sort of schema, an approximate listing of what is involved.
Let us try to find the main landmarks for this schema in the triune makeup of the human being-body, soul, and spirit. In the area of our serving each of these main principles, ascetic demands and teachings emerge of themselves, the fulfillment of which, on the one hand, is unavoidable in order to reach the goal, and, on the other hand, is beyond our strength. It seems right to me to draw a line here between one's attitude toward oneself and one’s attitude toward others. The rule of not doing to others what you do not want done to yourself is hardly applicable in asceticism. Asceticism goes much further and sets much stricter demands on oneself than on one's neighbors.
In the area of the relation to one's physical world, asceticism demands two things of us: work and abstinence. Work is not only an unavoidable evil, the curse of Adam; it is also a participation in the work of divine economy; it can be transfigured and sanctified. It is also wrong to reduce work only to working with one's hands, a menial task; it calls for responsibility, inspiration, and love. It should always be work in the fields of the Lord. Work stands at the center of modern ascetic endeavor in the area of man's relation to his physical existence. Abstinence is as unavoidable as work. But its significance is to some degree secondary, because it is needed mainly in order to free one's attention to more valuable things than those from which one abstains. One can introduce a certain unsuitable passion into abstinence-and that is wrong. A person should abstain and at the same time not notice his abstinence.
A person should have a more attentive attitude toward his brother's flesh than toward his own. Christian love teaches us to give your brother not only material but also spiritual gifts. We must give him our last shirt and our last crust of bread. Here personal charity is as necessary and justified as the broadest social work. In this sense there is no doubt that the Christian is called to social work. He is called to organize a better life for the workers, to provide for the old, to build hospitals, care for children, fight against exploitation, injustice, want, lawlessness. In principle the value is completely the same, whether he acts on an individual or a social level; what matters is that his social work be based on love for his neighbor and not have any latent career or material purposes. For the rest it is always justified- from personal aid to working on a national scale, from concrete attention to an individual person to an understanding of abstract systems for the correct organization of social life. The love of man demands one thing from us in this area: ascetic ministry to his material needs, attentive and responsible work, a sober and unsentimental awareness of our strength and of its true usefulness.
The ascetic rules here are simple and perhaps do not leave any particular room for mystical inspiration, often being limited merely to everyday work and responsibility. But there is great strength and great truth in them, based on the words of the Gospel about the Last Judgment, when Christ says to those who stand on His right hand that they visited Him in prison, and in the hospital, fed Him when He was hungry, clothed Him when He was naked. He will say this to those who did it either on an individual or on a social level. Thus, in the dull, laborious, often humdrum ascetic rules concerning our attitude toward the material needs of our neighbor, there already lies the pledge of a possible relation to God, their spirit-bearing nature.
Then comes man's inner world. What should our attitude be toward his inner world? Very often people not only deny it any value, but experience it as something that should be fought against until it is all but totally destroyed. And we see how man, through strenuous efforts, achieves strange results - dryness, indifference, coldness, lovelessness, dispiritedness. These results themselves speak for the fact that something is not right here. For, in the end, man is so made that he cannot destroy his inwardness. He can only pervert, deaden, freeze, ossify it. A right attitude toward his inwardness has all the same criteria.
An inwardness that fences man off from the outside world and limits him to the sphere of his own feelings, that concentrates him on following attentively the slightest impulses of his own soul - is the wrong kind of inwardness. An inwardness that allows man to approach the other more closely and with greater attentiveness, that opens to him the inner causes and motives of behavior of another soul, that creates a bridge between man and his neighbor, teaches him to love his neighbor - is the right kind of inwardness. Inwardness is threatened by two opposite dangers: on the one hand, it is a broad road for passions; on the other hand, through it death comes into the human soul. In order not to give power to passions, man, in the area of his inner life, should not allow himself any cult of "his own," of the exclusive, event what is supposedly most important. To avoid the second danger he should not destroy his inwardness, but transform it entirely into an instrument of love for the other.
And here we pass over to what our attitude should be toward another person's inner world. An absence of mercenary interest, of a certain curiosity and relishing of another person's experiences, should be combined in the first place with a strenuous goodwill, with a sort of genuine tirelessness with regard to another soul. One should be able literally "to put oneself in the place of the other person, try to evaluate and experience what he feels in himself, to be everyone for everyone. Even another man's passions should be judged, not from outside, but by entering the inner atmosphere of the one who experiences them. We must have the strength not to define generally what a given man should or should not do, but to define him from within his own inner state, to seek to free him from his passions and emotions not by cutting them off maximally, but by a conscious and profound overcoming, shifting, transfiguring of them. Here, again there are two opposite dangers. On the one hand, it is dangerous to approach a man with the yardstick of all-measuring doctrine and begin to dissect his living and sick soul; on the other hand, it is no less dangerous to accept sentimentally the whole of a man as he is, his soul along with all its sores and growths. The measure is given by attention, sobriety, and love.
Finally, the area of the spirit demands the greatest effort in one's attitude toward the other and toward oneself. Of course there are a great many spiritual paths, and they cannot all be unified and reduced to some one set of rules and regulations. But we have already distinguished a certain form of spiritual endeavor that emphasizes an authentically religious attitude toward man.
Here certain general presuppositions are possible. Spiritual asceticism here consists in the most open, unequivocal, and conscious renunciation of oneself, in a readiness always to follow the will of God, in a desire to become the fulfiller of God's design in the world, a tool in His hands, a means and not an end. The principle of service, of a certain spiritual mobilization, must be realized here to the end, must embrace all of man's spiritual possibilities and forces.
In turning to the other, to the one whom he is called to serve, man cannot replace everything in the spiritual area by choosing only the highest spiritual qualities. Here begins what is most difficult and demands the maximum ascetic effort and attention. In turning his spiritual world toward the spiritual world of another, a man encounters the terrible, inspiring mystery of the authentic knowledge of God, because what he encounters is not flesh and blood, not feelings and moods, but the authentic image of God in man, the very incarnate icon of God in the world, a glimmer of the mystery of the Incarnation and Godmanhood. And man must unconditionally and unreservedly accept this terrible Revelation of God, must bow down before the image of God in his brother. And only when he feels it, sees it, and understands it, will yet another mystery be revealed to him, which demands of him his most strenuous struggle, his greatest ascetic ascent.
He will see how this image of God is obscured, distorted by an evil power. He will see the human heart, where the devil wages a ceaseless struggle with God. And in the name of the image of God, darkened by the devil, in the name of the love for this image of God that pierces his heart, he will want to begin a struggle with the devil, to become an instrument of God in this terrible and scorching work. He will be able to do it if all his hope is in God and not in himself; he will be able to do it if he has not a single subtle or mercenary desire; if he lays down his armor like David and with nothing but the name of God rushes to do battle with Goliath.
These briefly are the landmarks that the human soul wants to go by if it longs for ascetic endeavor in the area of its relation to people. It can all be expressed in one eternal image of the crucified Christ: He gave His flesh to be crucified, He suffered in His human soul, He gave His spirit into the hands of the Father - and He calls us to do the same. And He offered His sacrifice for the whole man, in his whole spiritual-inner-bodily composition. There is another image that is particularly close to Orthodox consciousness - the image of the Mother who stood by the Cross of her crucified Son, the image of her to whom it was said: "Yea, a sword shall pierce thy own soul also" (Lk 2:35). This image is the great symbol of any genuine relation to man: in the Crucified she saw both God and her son, and by that she teaches us to see God-that is the image of God- in every brother in the flesh of the Son of Man, who is also a son we adopt through our love, our compassion, our participation in his suffering, our bearing of his sins and lapses. To this day the Mother of God is pierced by the Cross of her Son, which becomes for her a two-edged sword, and by the swords of our crosses, the crosses of all Godmanhood. And, contemplating her super-worldly intercession for all human sins and weaknesses, we find in her a sure and true path that tells us to receive in our hearts the crosses of our brothers, to be pierced by them as by a weapon that pierces the soul.
Thus, the covenant of the Son of God, given to mankind repeated many times in the Gospel, sealed by the whole endeavor of His earthly life, coincides with the covenant of the Mother of God, revealed to us since the day of the Annunciation, since the time of her terrible standing by the Cross, and through all the centuries of the Church's existence. Here there is no doubt; here the path is clear and open.
If Orthodoxy, owing to historical circumstances, occasionally adopted certain tendencies that are foreign to it, a somewhat excessive emphasis on the path of self-salvation more characteristic of the religions of the East, even through them we always see that the fundamental covenant of Christ was never forgotten or set aside. The commandment of love for one's neighbor, the second and equal in value to the first, calls mankind in the same way today as when it was first given.
For us Russian Orthodox people it may be easier to understand than for anyone else, because it was precisely this commandment that captivated and interested Russian religious thought. Without it, Khomiakov would have been unable to speak of the sobornost of the Orthodox Church, which rests entirely on love, on lofty human communion. His theology shows clearly that the universal Church itself is, first of all, the incarnation not only of the commandment of the love of God, but also of love for one's neighbor, and is as unthinkable without the second as without the first.
Without the second commandment there would be no sense in Soloviev teaching about Godmanhood, because it becomes one and organic, the genuine Body of Christ, only when united and brought to life by the flow of fraternal love that unites everyone at one Cup and brings everyone to partake of one Divine Love. Only this commandment makes clear Dostoevsky's words about each of us being guilty for all, and each of us being answerable for each other's sins.
It can be said that for more than a century now Russian thought has been repeating with all its voices and in all possible ways that it has understood what it means to give one's soul for one's neighbors, that it wants to follow the path of love, the path of authentic mystical human communion, which is thereby also true communion with God. It has often happened in the history of thought that theoretical, philosophical, and theological presuppositions emerge first, but after that a certain idea strives to embody itself in life. All Russian spiritual works of the nineteenth century were filled with theoretical suppositions, the whole world heard them, they proved to be humanly brilliant, they determined the highest point of tension of the Russian spirit, its main characteristic. No wars or revolutions can destroy what has been done by Russian religious and philosophical genius over the course of the previous period in the history of Russian thought. Dostoevsky remains forever, and not only he. We can draw from these works, we can get from them an inestimable amount of data, answers to the most terrible questions, the posing of the most insoluble problems. One may boldly say that the main theme of nineteenth-century Russian thought had to do with the second commandment, with its dogmatic, moral, philosophical, social, and other aspects.
For us, for Orthodox people who are in the Church, and who were brought up on this Orthodox philosophy of the Russian people, our duty reveals itself with the utmost clarity: we must turn these theoretical presuppositions, these philosophical systems, these theological theories, these words sobornost' and Godmanhood, which have recently become sacred, into so many practical landmarks both for our personal spiritual paths, the most cherished, most inward ones, and for any of our external endeavors.
We are called to embody in life the principles of sobornost and Godmanhood, which are at the foundation of our Orthodox Church; we are called to oppose the mystery of authentic human communion to all false relations among people. This is the only path on which Christ's love can live; moreover, this is the only path of life - outside it is death. Death in the fire and ashes of various hatreds that corrode modern mankind, class, national, and race hatreds, the godless and giftless death of cool, uncreative, imitative, essentially secular democracy. To all forms of mystical totalitarianism we oppose only one thing: the person, the image of God in man. And to all forms of passively collectivist mentality in democracy we oppose sobornost.
But we do not even oppose. We simply want to live as we are taught by the second commandment of Christ, which determines everything in man's relation to this earthly life, and we want to live this life in such a way that all those who are outside it can see and feel the unique, saving, unsurpassable beauty, the indisputable truth of precisely this Christian path.
We do not know whether we will be able to realize our hopes. It is basically a matter of God's will. But apart from God's will, God's help and grace, each of us is faced with the demand to strain all our forces, not fearing the most difficult endeavor, in ascetic self-restraint, giving our souls for others sacrificially and lovingly, to follow in Christ's footsteps to our appointed Golgotha.
