Quotes from Alexander Schmemann

Principles are what people have instead of God.

Centuries of secularism have failed to transform eating into something strictly utilitarian. Food is still treated with reverence...To eat is still something more than to maintain bodily functions. People may not understand what that 'something more' is, but they nonetheless desire to celebrate it. They are still hungry and thirsty for sacramental life.

The only real fall of man is his noneucharistic life in a noneucharistic world.

For one who thinks food in itself is the source of life, eating is the communion with the dying world, it is communion with death. Food itself is dead, it is life that has died and it must be kept in refrigerators like a corpse.

There has been a rediscovery of the meaning of baptism as entrance and integration into the Church, of "ecclesiological" significance. But ecclesiology, unless it is given its true cosmic perspective ("for the life of the world"), unless it is understood as the christian form of "cosmology," is always ecclesiolatry, the Church considered as a "being in itself" and not the new relation of god, man and the world.

In the radiance of His light the world is not commonplace. The very floor we stand on is a miracle of atoms whizzing about in space. The darkness of sin is clarified, and its burden shouldered. Death is robbed of its finality, trampled down by Christ's death. In a world where everything that seems to be present is immediately past, everything in Christ is able to participate in the eternal present of God.

To be more precise... death is [contrary to] God, and if death is natural, if it is the ultimate truth about life and about the world, if it is the highest and immutable law about all of creation, then there is no God, then this whole story about creation, about joy, and about the light of life is a total lie.

The "modern man" has "come of age" as a deadly serious adult, conscious of his sufferings and alienations but not of joy, of sex but not of love, of science but not of "mystery.

As we make the first step into the "bright sadness" of Lent, we see—far, far away—the destination. It is the joy of Easter, it is the entrance into the glory of the Kingdom. And it is this vision, the foretaste of Easter, that makes Lent's sadness bright and our lenten effort a "spiritual spring." The night may be dark and long, but all along the way a mysterious and radiant dawn seems to shine on the horizon.

The Purpose of the Eucharist lies not in the change of the bread and wine, but in the partaking of Christ, who has become our food, our life, the manifestation of the Church as the body of Christ. This is why the gifts themselves never became in the Orthodox East an object of special reverence, contemplation, and adoration, and likewise an object of special theological 'problematics': how, when, in what manner their change is accomplished.

We are approaching again the Great Lent—the time of repentance, the time of our reconciliation with God. Repentance is the beginning and also the condition of a truly Christian life.

It is indeed one of th e grave errors of religious anti-secularism that it does not see that secularism is made up of verites chretiennes devenues folies, of Christian truths that "went mad," and that in simply rejecting secularism , it in fact rejects with it certain fundamentally Christian aspirations and hopes.

The Church, if it is to be the Church, must be the revelation of that divine Love which God "poured out into our hearts." Without this love nothing is "valid" in the Church because nothing is possible. The content of Christ's Eucharist is Love, and only through love can we enter into it and be made its partakers.

Love is the essence of the holiness of the Church.

The natural dependence of man upon the world was intended to be transformed constantly into communion with God in whom is all life.

How shall I begin to deplore the deeds of my miserable life? What beginning shall I make, O Christ, to this lament? But since Thou art compassionate, grant me remission of my trespasses." "Like as the potter gives life to his clay, Thou hast bestowed upon me Flesh and bones, breath and life; Today, O my Creator, my Redeemer and My Judge, Receive me a penitent..." "I have lost my first made beauty and dignity, And now I lie naked and covered with shame...

It is significant that whereas in the West Mary is primarily the Virgin, a being almost totally different from us in her absolute and celestial purity and freedom from all carnal pollution, in the East she is always referred to and glorified as Theotokos, the Mother of God, and virtually all icons depict her with the Child in her arms.

Christian mission is not to preach Christ, but to be Christians in life. There

Religion is needed where there is a wall of separation between God and man. But Christ who is both God and man has broken down the wall between man and God. He has inaugurated a new life, not a new religion.

In the Bible the food that man eats, the world of which he must partake in order to live, is given to him by God, and it is given as communion with God.

Simone W eil has said that though a person may run as fast as he can away from Christ, if it is toward what he considers true, he runs in fact straight into the arms of Christ. Much

Theology is] the attempt to express Truth itself, to find words adequate to the mind and experience of the Church, then it must of necessity have its source where the faith ,the mind, and the experience of the Church have their living focus and expression, where faith in both essential meanings of that word, as Truth revealed and given, and as Truth accepted and "lived," has its epiphany, and that is precisely the function of "leitourgia.

The light God sent was his Son: the same light that had been shining unextinguished in the world's darkness all along, seen now in full brightness.

For the basic question is: of what are we witnesses? What have we seen and touched with our hands? Of what have we partaken and been made communicants? Where do we call men? What can we offer them?