Lord, I and You, You and me

I am telling you what I am realizing to be increasingly essential, from my life experience, as much as it was, as it is. It must be emphasized, it must be emphasized very much, what we call the personal character of the relationship with God. Me with God, God and me. Me with God: I went to the icon, and I have the Face: “Behold, Lord, I am before You, You are before me. We are I and with You. You and me”. In this way, you help yourself a lot to realize the presence of God. The personal presence of God. Otherwise, we are most of the time empowered by an impersonal, abstract presence of God, and it does not help us. But when I know that You are before me… And a man, if he were, I have help only in the fact that I have the thought that I am not alone, but when I would have the feeling that the Lord is next to me! But the real feeling that there is Someone, that you are You, Lord, You, Lord…

And we, as a Church, must insistently recover the personal character of man’s relationship with God. Do you know what Abba Alonius said in the Pateric? “Until a man says in his heart: ‘Only I and God are in the world,’ he does not find rest.” This means putting everything aside and sitting face to face with God: “Lord, I and You, You and I.” And in this way, you delve into what is called the consciousness of God’s personal presence. And when you raise your eyes to the icon of the Lord, you bring to your mind the thought, the sensation, the feeling of a personal relationship – that there is Someone, it is not an abstraction.

But here is what the Fathers of today say: to deepen this awareness of the personal relationship, when you sit down to pray, before starting your rule, you have a dialogue with God: “You, Lord…”, this is how I began. “Who am I, that I am before You? Who am I? How am I?”. A little introspection, a little self-awareness. A little, otherwise we lose ourselves. And we lose the sense of our own person, and if we do not have the awareness of our own person, then how can we have the awareness of the personal presence of God, whom we do not see? We ourselves have the feeling that we are an abstraction. That is the great drama.

It is not at all easy to reach self-awareness, to the continuous feeling of self. Many of us have an “idea” about ourselves, as well as about God. And, when we pray, we put the two “ideas” in an artificial connection. The deepest and fullest sense of self is a condition of living on a personal level. Self-awareness is a continuous, felt recapitulation of the personal self.

Of course, this personal awareness is also extremely important in the fight against thought, because only in this way will you be able to say: “I am above thought, I am something other than thought. Thought may be mine, but I am more than thought, I can banish thought, I can not receive thought”. Me – who is this “me”? As someone said, “It is not the brain that thinks, I think!”. No? I fight, I receive or do not receive the thought, I receive or do not receive the temptation. This attitude must be cultivated a lot, especially in a time when we have suffered a lot because of leveling, depersonalizing ideologies, and we continue to suffer, because it is a world, it seems, more dangerous from this point of view, more depersonalizing than the one we have gone through.

I tell them: “The thought is not you!”. That is very important, the thought can be the enemy’s. And when you feel terrorized by a thought, you have to ask yourself: “Well, how can a thought overcome me?” I tell them: “The thought is a breath! Can a breath overcome you?!” “Well, I can’t escape, this thought is terrorizing me!” Well, you have to walk somewhere. And it wouldn’t be a big deal, you just have to run to God. But if someone doesn’t experience this running to God, all of this remains just empty talk, some abstractions.

Father Constantin Coman