Metropolitan Naum: Cross of Christ is a personal relationship – Part 3
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Part 3
RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD IS NOT A ONE WAY RELATIONSHIP
Accepting and being grateful to God for what happens to us, does not mean accepting some kind of “destiny”, we cannot say – that’s how it is given (prearranged) to us from God and there is nothing we can change in the struggle that we are experiencing.
Acceptance and gratitude to God for our suffering is not a passive, one-sided relationship, but the basic beginning of a new relationship with God, which in itself essentially changes things for the better – not only in regards to ourselves, but also in actual life.
It looks contradictory, but it is not, as is everything else in the relationship with God and in the life with (in) Him – At the same time we experience Cross and Resurrection, joy and sorrow, giving ourselves to God and receiving Him, God’s abandonment and an extraordinary grace etc.
Accepting such a struggle is most important at the first stage of spiritual development – purification of the heart from the passions. There is no acceptance if our mind is not put into a healing process through obedience to the spiritual father. There is no acceptance if our life is not in accord with the level of spiritual development that we are at, and the place we have in the Church. If there is not acceptance with gratitude, our relationship with God is erroneous and we do not have a permanent life of joy. The worst thing in all of this is that the misplaced relationship cannot develop in the right direction.
However, in the second stage of spiritual development – enlightenment of the mind, we gain some freedom before God. Then not only will our main plans often coincide with God’s plan, though not necessarily in the time that we expect (we have previously spoken on this point), but now already we receive the gift of God ourselves, in our hearts – in the region of the Kingdom of Heaven, to prepare what we want to happen to us.
Here I talk of the graceful struggle of the ascetic-hasyhastic prayer of the mind in the heart. At the level of enlightenment we are already seeing the fruits of a properly established relationship with God – Which we correctly have set while we were on the level of purification of the heart from the passions.
In the third stage of spiritual growth – deification (or to be “God like”), children of God are gaining great personal freedom before God, so sometimes it happens, they change even God’s plans; as we have read in the biographies of our saints.
Our relationship with God is a living relationship, some things we accept with gratitude, with other things we invariably agree, against some other things we rebel, with love, and we want to change them – everything depends on how well-built our relationship with Him is ; and vice versa.
There is not God’s image and God-like behaviour in man,
nor there is a true freedom and love in the relationship between man and God,
nor there is a real relationship between man and God, if man is not even able to change God’s will.
There is no man and there is no God – there is no God-Man.
That is all.
Metropolitan of Strumica; Naum
(20.03.2015)
