Death is life without God

Death is life without God. Death is a reality of the soul when the soul is not glued, nourished, infused by God, by the life of God, by the grace, by the uncreated energy of God. He is dead, dying, or sleepwalking. It is true that we believers are baptized, we commune, we confess, we receive grace, and we are not dead, but still, we often behave like dead or dying people, because we do not activate the grace received through the Holy Sacraments. Grace enters us through the Holy Sacraments, but it is activated and becomes active in us through our works. That is, by activating Grace, my word will be with my energy and with the energy of grace, my gestures will be with my energy and with the energy of grace. No movement of the soul and body will be just my gestures, my thoughts.

How do we activate grace? How do we metabolize it and manifest it in our lives, in our acts, in our words? By fulfilling the commandments and prayer. Prayer, itself a commandment of the Lord, is what does this work in us.

When we pray and activate grace, we enter and experience another dimension of death: the death of death. Our life without God is death, a gradual death, until burial. However, by activating grace in us, this death dies in us. By dying to this lifestyle that is life towards death, we kill death. As a result, we come to experience death as the separation of the soul from the body as a birth to the afterlife, as the day of our birth in Heaven. Then we will be definitively freed from the death that killed us, which threatens us, and we will experience death as a birth into true life. But for this we need to strive, to pass through the narrow gate and to always have the courage to kill the death within us by dying to passionate pleasures, killing the passions that kill us.

How do we prepare for death? Choosing moment by moment to die to our desires, to die to our attractions, these are vain and wasteful. Let us crucify our deadly desires.

But be careful, it is not enough for us to die like this in order to rise in Christ. We need to desire His life, to desire Him, to nourish ourselves with the food that He gives us, and to transform any kind of food into a place of encounter with Him, with His mercy, with His goodness. It is not enough not to eat something that I crave, but it is necessary to desire Him with the desire that is oriented towards the desired. To ask Him to nourish me also with the will of the heavenly Father. To choose to be hungry for His will! And to choose to eat what I have to eat with Christ, in thought and in mouth. To unite what I have in my mouth with His name, with His call.

This is how we overcome death, metabolizing the Life that is our Lord Jesus Christ. His grace, His uncreated energy, which He gives us and which He teaches us how to use.

Schemonarch Siluana Vlad