From 1950. Part I here. Arabic original here.
The First Principle: "The Orthodox Youth Movement is a spiritual
movement that calls all the children of the Orthodox Church to religious,
moral, cultural, and social revival."
A Spiritual Movement
We say movement because we are not, nor shall we be, a
sectarian "association" in the familiar sense, with a specific
temporal concern. Nor do we constitute a frozen body, settled in its thought
and activity. Rather, we are the orientation of all the community toward
complete Christianity. The Movement is a spirit, and the current principles are
nothing but a verbal expression of this moving from ignorance to knowledge and
from sin to purity. Our zeal is a movement that is not divided and is not
limited. It includes all existence and embraces every goal that aims for the
unity of humanity to the God of love and makes all creation shine in the Church
of Christ. Our awakening is a movement because it is drawn from the Church that
is in motion, carrying our life and our heritage to all the world and bringing
into the bosom of the Church all that has been churned up by history, so that
it may be united in her and through her be raised up and made holy.
The Movement is a Comprehensive Organization
We are a youth movement that has been freed from the worship
of all the idols that the history of human thought has presented to us. By its
completely free will it has approached Christ because it has sensed that He
alone solves all its problems. It has abandoned worldly pleasures because it
has found its great pleasure in Christ. This awakening is an organization
because it has separated those who are awake from blind reactions and has
brought them to enlightened consciousness, indeed to true consciousness itself.
It is a popular organization, truly connected to all the Orthodox people, which
brings truth into the world. It is popular because it does not work in its
ivory tower and does not navel-gave for the sake of sheer disconnected
intellectual pleasure. Rather, its members meditate on religious truth and live
it in order to bear the fruits of their interior struggle to all humanity, by
means of organized teaching.
The movement permeates the Orthodox in order to renew them
and imprint upon them its image. The movement is not a program for sectarian
reform. Rather, all reform comes out of it and the children of the Church strive
in vain to put together a program of reform if it is not preceded by a creative
religious consciousness. The reforms that will treat the external state of the
Church in the Middle East must occur in a state of Christian renewal, not along
its margin, since within the work of renewal in the Church there is not one
spiritual program and another material program, but rather there is one
religious current that has spiritual and material manifestations.
The movement calls all the children of the Church to revival,
because every Orthodox person-- youths, men, women, laypeople, clergy-- are
responsible for it, because there is no reform except through common work among
all of them. All of us are responsible because all of us are sinners. Someone
who puts responsibility on another's neck is a haughty Pharisee. We must
remember that we are not here in a court of justice, but in a workshop. One who
judges another looks at the many wrongs in the near past, but the one who works
looks to the realization of the Kingdom of God in the future.
We are all workers, but the youth are activists. This is
because they are the pillars of the revival and because they are made to wake
the dead who, if they hear in the graves the voice of their children, they
arise to new life.
We are all workers, but women have special responsibilities,
because first of all Christian education in the family depends on them and
because they will play a special role in the new civilization and in awaking
religious feelings in that age.
The Interior Spiritual Crisis
We call for religious revival because the Church is only
served by people spiritually. The crisis that we are going through is spiritual
at its base. The attempts at reform that have for decades appeared within the
Antiochian Church have all failed because they did not realize this basic
truth. Those who are satisfied with external reform without asking for the
involvement of peoples' spirits do not know where to turn to. We have seen many
people in every place form associations for temporary purposes that end with
the end of their goals because they are not based on intellectual principles
and spiritual factors. How can can the community's crisis be solved by one who
does not think about the solution to his own crisis? How can one reform who
does not feel the enormousness of his responsibilities? And how can one feel
the necessity of any work if he has not been built up spiritually? So how can
one solve the crisis if he himself does not participate in its solution, but
rather remains content with contributing his money and influence? How can one
treat the illness if he thinks it is in someone else and is unable to humble
himself a little in order to see it in himself? Some have wanted activity and
they have used screaming, disorder, enmity, ungratefulness, and desperation.
The issue requires peace, faith, hope, and love.
They have only looked at Orthodoxy from two perspectives:
administration and finances, even though these two things are as far as can be
from the matter at hand. They say that the Church is in need of administration
and organization and we say that this is true but that will not be completed
except through one's participation inwardly. The time has come for people to
prepare the path that they have not followed, in an atmosphere of love and
holiness. We say to those who see material organization as a prerequisite for
spiritual work: follow the religious path so that your enlivened spirit will
work within the unorganized community and your radiant spirit, robed in the light
of the righteousness, covered with the holiness of truth, is what will change
destruction into construction and weakness into power. The Spirit cannot be the
product of organization. Organization is always the result of the Spirit which
announces Itself, whether or not the means abound, because the Spirit blows
where It wishes and creates what It wishes in whatever situation It wishes and
because a person filled with the Spirit cannot remain with his hands tied, far
from work. Rather, the Spirit in whom he lives and whom he contemplates is that
which presses him on and sets his mind in motion and leads him to useful work
and organization.
This Spirit creates the moral revival through which we face
the evil hidden within ourselves. We have no salvation if we first of all do
not realize that evil is within us apart from external circumstances and that
it leaks into the outside from within us. The revival that we desire begins
through combating sin within the children of the Church because the sin that
is within me and within every person prevents our awakening and our being
enlightened by the truth. The ignorance of hate and the materialism of many and
the laziness of all of us is nothing other than a result of the evil that is
well-established within us. Whatever our sinful hands have handled, whether
they have extended it to us from without or from within, we cannot allow it to
overcome us, as the evil that lives in our hearts has overcome us. The first
task that every person must undertake is to purify his being of its stains. The
sole enemy of the Church whose danger we must sense and which we must be
militant in uprooting. There's nothing truer than the words of the Apostle,
"Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against
the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the
spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms."
This new mentality will logically lead to a renewal of all
the forces coming out of humanity, whether they are cultural or social.
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