2013 Pastoral Encyclical for Christmas (Metr. Hierotheos of Nafpaktos)

Pastoral Encyclical

Sacred Metropolis of Nafpaktos and Agiou Vlasiou

Christmas 2012

The Love of Christ

The day of Christmas is a warm and blessed day, because we feel the love of Christ, who became man in order to meet us after our apostasy and our departure from Paradise. We were wounded by sin, and He came as a physician to heal us; we were in exile, and He came as a friend to our land; we were in despair, and He brought us hope; we had deep pain of soul and body, and He gave us joy. How can a person not love such a God — who loves, who is born as a man in a cave, who passes through the malice of men, who is forced to live as a refugee in Egypt, who experiences all the tragic conditions of life that humanity endured, and who finally sacrifices Himself to save us?

The Saints of the Church feel within themselves the great, tender, ecstatic, sacrificial, and genuine love of Christ, and this frees them from every form of bondage, sorrow, despair, and difficulty. When one knows that someone truly loves him, he cannot feel the external troubles and problems. We see this in the hymns of the Church that we chant in these days, and we read it in all the texts of the saints. Recently, the Ecumenical Patriarchate decided on the canonization of a blessed hieromonk, Father Porphyrios, who at the beginning of his life was for a short time a monk on Mount Athos and who eventually fell asleep in the Lord on Mount Athos in the year 1991. In the intervening period he lived mostly in Athens and Attica, served as a priest at the Athens Polyclinic near Omonia Square, and came to know human suffering; yet he faced all these things with deep love for Christ, while at the same time he felt the love of Christ. On this blessed day I would like to present to you some of his words about the love of Christ, which is the deepest meaning of the feast of Christmas. Saint Porphyrios said:

“Christ is joy, the true light, happiness. Christ is our hope. The relationship with Christ is love, it is eros, it is enthusiasm, it is longing for the divine. Christ is everything. He is our love, He is our eros. The eros of Christ is inalienable. From there joy springs forth. Joy is Christ Himself. It is a joy that makes you another person. It is a kind of spiritual madness, but in Christ. It intoxicates you like pure wine, that spiritual wine. As David says: ‘You have anointed my head with oil, and Your cup intoxicates me as the best wine.’ The spiritual wine is unmixed, pure, very strong, and when you drink it, it intoxicates you. This divine intoxication is a gift of God, given to the ‘pure in heart’…

Christ is the ultimate object of desire, the supreme good; there is nothing higher. All sensible things lead to satiety, but God has no satiety. He is everything. God is the ultimate object of desire. No other joy, no other beauty, nothing can compare with Him. What is higher than the Highest? Love for Christ is a different kind of love. It has no end, it has no satiety. It gives life, it gives strength, it gives health — it gives, gives, gives… And the more it gives, the more a person wants to love. Human love, by contrast, can wear a person down, even drive him mad. When we love Christ, all other loves recede. Other loves reach satiety; the love of Christ has no satiety. Carnal love reaches satiety; afterward jealousy and complaining may begin, even murder. It can turn into hatred. Love in Christ does not change. Worldly love lasts only a little while and gradually fades, whereas divine love continually grows and deepens. Every other love can bring a person to despair; divine love, however, raises us to the sphere of God and grants us peace, joy, and fullness. Other pleasures tire us, but this one is never exhausted. It is an insatiable delight that one never grows weary of. It is the supreme good.

Satiety ceases at only one point: when a person is united with Christ. He loves and loves and loves, and the more he loves, the more he sees that he still wants to love. He realizes that he has not yet been united, that he has not yet fully given himself to the love of God. He continually has the desire, the longing, the joy, in order to reach the ultimate object of desire — Christ. He fasts continually, makes prostrations continually, prays continually, and yet he is never satisfied. He does not realize that he has already reached this love. What he desires, he does not feel as having filled him, as having been received, as being sensed and lived. This divine eros, this divine love, is what all ascetics long for and desire. They are intoxicated with the divine intoxication. With this divine intoxication the body may grow old and pass away, but the spirit remains young and blossoms…

We should feel Christ as our friend. He is our friend. He Himself assures us when He says, ‘You are My friends…’. We should look upon Him and approach Him as a friend. Do we fall? Do we sin? With familiarity, love, and trust we should run to Him — not with fear that He will punish us, but with boldness given by the sense of friendship. Let us say to Him: ‘Lord, I did it, I fell — forgive me.’ At the same time we should feel that He loves us, that He receives us tenderly, with love, and forgives us. Let sin not separate us from Christ. When we believe that He loves us and we love Him, we do not feel like strangers or separated from Him, not even when we sin. We have secured His love, and however we behave, we know that He loves us.

If we truly love Christ, there is no danger that we will lose our reverence for Him.”

What Saint Porphyrios the Kavsokalyvite said is the content of the heart of a healthy and authentic person; it is the longing of a Saint. Through this, all problems are overcome. It is the true meaning of the feast of Christmas.

My beloved brethren,

Let us love Christ with all our heart; let us feel His love; let us pray to Him; let us respond, even in the smallest measure, to His love — and then we will celebrate Christmas eternally in our hearts.

With warm wishes and blessings,

† Hierotheos
Metropolitan of Nafpaktos and Agiou Vlasiou

Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.