Met. Georges Khodr on the Principles of the Orthodox Youth Movement (IV)

From 1950. Part I here. Part II here.Part III here. Arabic original here.





The Third Principle: "The Movement strives to create an Orthodox culture animated by the spirit of the Church."

The Church and Civilization

By culture, we mean everything that the human intellect has produced in history-- philosophies, sciences, arts, and social situations. Culture is a creative activity without any confusion regarding the truth. Like everything in existence, it is either with Christ or against Him. Believers cannot allow activity in the world to be stripped of its Christ, whether or not this activity is separated from the Church by law, because the position of worldly activity toward Him is not that which is officially accepted, but that which actually done. The Church cannot limit her concern to places of worship. She must go beyond this and enter into all manifestations of life, directing the movement of life. History should not go forward in isolation from her. Rather, it should set its course in accordance with her spirituality. She is the source of every good theory that explains humanity and existence and there is no mysticism like Christian mysticism which is based on love and is capable of building up a person with harmonious faculties and inclinations, sensing his complete unity with God, humankind, and creation. The soundness of human reason demands an end to this painful dualism that stands between the Church and civilization. This is possible if we understand that Christianity is the religion of the Incarnation and that the faithful are not performing their duty to God if they are satisfied to work for their own salvation apart from the salvation of culture. Christ is the Savior of the world and thus the Savior of civilization, which is part of the world. This does not mean that the Church should dominate culture from without, in the way that the Western Church dominated it during the Middle Ages. God must become in deed Master of civilization, but from within by means of the spirituality that we sew in our creative, cultural activity. Orthodoxy does not know external dominance over the world and it deplores clerical authoritarianism. It believes in the culture of its free spirit which liberates man from all the enslavements of history and submits him to truth. Culture grows through its free natural faculties, but our natural movements have no life if they are not transfigured by divine grace. This grace enlightens the human intellect from within and through its light the features of Christian culture are produced.

From a theoretical perspective, the question of Orthodox culture is a forgone conclusion. The complicated issue lies in actively applying it to current issues in thought, art, and social life. This application depends on the effort of Orthodox people who are active in all parts of the world, in social, legal, artistic, and other fields. Clergy and laity must participate in this because the spirit of the Orthodox Church commands it. It is especially the responsibility of laity to introduce the life of the Church into the world within their worldly activities. But clergy also must be proficient in worldly culture in addition to the religious sciences, so that they can win educated people for Christ. The culture of the priest must be no lower than the highest cultural level in the country, so that cultured people can feel that they are on the same level of thinking with him, in order to make it possible for them to rise from the culture of sense and reason to that which is outside the bounds of sense and reason.

Orthodoxy and National Heritage

If, by "Orthodox culture" we mean the embodiment of the spirit of the Church in civilization, a consequence of this is that Orthodox culture does not have a specific cultural face. The Orthodox Church is not bound to Greek heritage or to any eastern cultural form. The spirit of the Orthodox Church is shared by Russians, Greeks, Arabs, and others, but there is a great difference between Greek, Russian, and Arab cultures. There is no Orthodox culture that is added to the national cultures of the various Orthodox peoples. An Orthodox person adopts the culture of the country in which he lives and breathes into it his spirit and the spirituality of the Orthodox Church. This spirituality is distinguished by the fact that it is love, sympathy, and humility. Cultural differences between Orthodox people in all the world do not preclude them from embodying the Orthodox Christian life in the various environments in which they live. In other words, we must support the intellect in all the forms of civilization in which it appears. We must especially be present in our Arab Middle East as an Arab Christian movement, robust in thought, literature, and art so that Orthodoxy will be manifest in all nations and peoples.

Orthodox Education

Culture calls us to construct a particularly Orthodox education. The Christian West, in both its Latin and Protestant halves, differs from us in its understanding of the nature of man, his spirituality, and his relationship with God. For this reason, it poses its questions in ways different from how we pose our questions. The creation of Orthodox educational curricula will end the educational crises that we are stumbling through. Schools that are Orthodox in action and not just in name are ones that give instruction in a satisfactory manner and that direct their students in a profoundly spiritual manner in all fields of study. Such is a school that lives in a sound religious atmosphere for its teachers and students. 

Met. Georges Khodr: The Existential Resurrection

From his column in today's an-Nahar. Arabic original here.


The Existential Resurrection




The Resurrection is an event and it is an idea. That is, it was an occurrence in the life of Jesus of Nazareth but it was also something with meaning. This is expressed in the Paschal troparion which says, "Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death." These words mean that when Christ entered death, it had no power over Him, as though there is something that goes beyond the impact of the event and expresses the Savior's triumph over the reality of death.

This death is an event that is explained in the four Gospels in numerous passages, just as it is also a focal point for Paul. In Luke's account, "A great multitude of the people followed Him, and women who also mourned and lamented Him" (Luke 23:27). After being lifted up on the wood of the Cross, He "gave up His spirit" (Luke 26:46). The expression "gave up His spirit" is repeated literally in the other Gospels, with mention of witnesses by name. The crucifixion was a physical event, since the Gospels used the current reports of those days, whether or not they believed in salvation. The consistent and true accounts of the death of Jesus of Nazareth are proof of the current text of the Gospels. The people of the first century testified and confirmed the event before the complete Gospels were written down.

Jesus of Nazareth was killed with the encouragement of the crowds of Jews and by a Roman court ruling. We also speak of another event, the Resurrection. This discloses the chief meaning of the death of the Nazarene for His followers. The remaining question is, did the Resurrection palpably occur for you? The beginning of an answer is that Jesus was buried in a cave. This means that a stone, rather than soil, was placed over Him and that this large tomb was witnessed to be empty on Sunday morning. According to Matthew's account, the angel said to Mary Magdalene and the other Mary who had come to the tomb, "Come, see the place where the Lord lay." Then he said, "He is risen." So it appears that palpable proof of the Resurrection is based on the absence of a body in the tomb. For Mark, the young man sitting on top of the tomb said to the women who came to the tomb to perfume the body, "He is risen. He is not here. Here is the place where they placed Him." Here again is assurance that it is empty.

Luke expresses the emptiness of the tomb by saying that Peter was there and "saw the linen cloths lying by themselves." That is, without a body. This testimony is the same with John.

The Gospels do not say that Jesus' body moved on the third day and went out. But they all do say that He appeared to His followers. The Resurrection is not a physical event in the same way as that crucifixion, in the sense that it can be physically described. But it is an event that we can deduce or identify from the Teacher's appearances to the diciples and to Mary Magdalene in the garden. Thus, it also has an eventedness or consequence-- another physical reality. It was a real liberation from a real death. We accept it from the testimony of witnesses, the Apostles and companions who said that they saw Him.

We understand the meaning of His crucifixion through the Resurrection. The crucifixion was an event, but you need someone to explain it to you, to bring you from the reality of the event to the reason that was the purpose of the crucifixion: that we may come to life through the Resurrection just as Christ came to life. In other words, the purpose of the Resurrection is us. But this could only occur if Jesus condemned sin in His flesh, as Basil says. For this reason the Feast of Pascha came, to say that after the new life that we have acquired in Christ, we do not await anything else, for "the fullness of time has come," as Paul says, and through the crucifixion we have become children of God, earth has become heaven, and we have been called to the throne of glory.

No one has expressed the meaning of the Resurrection and our acceptance of its implications as Paul did when he said, "Do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life" (Romans 6:3-4). If we do not want to live a new life, it is as though the Savior's Resurrection did not mean anything for us. It is as though we did not accept it and remained in our sins.

For this great Apostle, the Resurrection was not an event that occurred and can then be dispensed of. It became present in the life of the faithful, who come from its light, its warmth, its permanence. This is why the Russian Saint Seraphim of Sarov made his daily greeting, "My joy, Christ is risen." This brings to mind Saint Mardarius, who was a Roman nobleman. Once, as he was pacing about the upper floor of his palace, he heard songs rising up from the street. He looked down from above and saw a crowd singing. He asked his servants who they were and why they were singing. They said that they were people from the east, being led to their execution, singing their belief that in their death they will be united to their Savior, who is called Jesus. So Mardarius said in his heart, "People whose religion puts them in such a state of joy on their path to death must have the true religion." So he went down and joined them and was baptized in his blood. We celebrate him as a martyr.

Each one among us who shines with spiritual glory is risen from sin, just as Christ is risen. If we look at the icon in our church and rejoice in it, we are coming from the Resurrection. We begin the week by remembering it, because each liturgy is a pascha.

The first Christians would dress in white when someone dear to them died, since at death he speaks with the Father, as Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, says.

However, God is not only concerned with individuals. He wants the Resurrection to encompass all existence and for this reason on the last day existence is radiance. It is our teaching that Jesus' Resurrection inaugurated new existence and that matter will shine with it on the last day. If our expression is true, matter does not remain material. It will shine with the light of Christ and every existential movement will become a part of the final Pascha.

In this way, we can understand the full meaning of our chanting, "Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death and to those in the tombs bestowing life." It is saying that the dead shall rise. This must be explained by our saying that existence itself will become the garment of Christ, and Christ only garbs himself in light.

Laughter... a Parable

So, I'm not sure how I didn't know about the blog Fara7 al-Kiameh until just now, but it's a wonderful resource for (Arabic-language) info about MJO activities and general Orthodox life in Lebanon. Lots of pictures! 


Arabic original, here.



One day, the monks Elias Morcos and Touma Bitar met, and it is a rare thing for two such spiritual peaks to meet. One of the young people wanted to take a picture of this distinguished meeting. He set the picture up with everyone smiling, but Father Elias was grumbling to himself. The photographer asked them not to move in order to get the picture right. He noticed that Father Elias was complaining, so he asked him what the reason was. Father Elias replied, "How can you frame the picture right when you're standing in front of two people with completely opposite heights? The first one is rising up and the second is going down." The two fathers laughed, and Father Touma bent down a little bit so that their heights would even out. Everyone was cracking up, and if the photo could talk, it would tell the story of a funny stance and two monks who are not bothered by shortness or height because they are great in the presence of God...  but through contrition and humility.

Fr. Georges Massouh: What is Orthodoxy?

While this essay is a couple years old-- it was published in Majallat al-Nour in February, 2009 (Arabic original here), it makes for interesting reading when read alongside his recent essay about primarily Islamic religious discourse in the Arab Spring, as it applies some of this same thinking to Orthodoxy.

What is Orthodoxy?

"Orthodoxy" is a quality that encompasses two things: correctness in belief and correctness in life. It is not possible to consider someone Orthodox if he is not correct in dogma and in all its ethical implications. Dogma is not theoretical teaching or sterile philosophy, without fruit in a person's life. Rather, it is the base upon which the faithful build their life, their behavior, and their everyday opinions. One who believes in the cross of the Lord Jesus and in His resurrection from the dead, for example, cannot refuse to bear the cross to which he is called, because in doing so he would contradict what he claims to believe or would render useless the effects of that in which he believes. The same goes for any other dogma.

There is no correctness of belief without correctness of life. Orthodoxy is not complete without this harmony that is supposed to exist between teaching and application. "The rule of faith is the rule of worship" and "the rule of worship is the rule of faith." The Orthodox life rests on the basis of these two expressions. Acts of worship are an essential part of the formation of a proper Orthodox personality, and love of one's neighbor is another part that is no less important than acts of worship. What applies to the saying about the relationship between dogma and acts of worship also applies to the relationship between dogma and one's way of life and between acts of worship and one's way of life. If one strand of this knot is dissolved, then the whole knot dissolves.

However, the way that Orthodoxy expresses the faith and worship occurs within what we have come to call culture and culture is variable and not fixed. This does not at all mean that the faith is variable, but that faith can adopt various forms in order express itself according to civilizational, cultural, linguistic, and ethnic environments. If Christianity had arisen in a world other than the Hellenistic world, then the expression of the faith-- but not the faith itself-- would be different from what has come down to us through the living tradition of the Church. If the Creed was a sufficient expression of faith, then there would have been no need to explain it and comment upon it, according to the knowledge of each successive generation, from when it was set down until the present day.

The expression of the one faith, as it exists in the civilizational, cultural, linguistic, and social environment of every people, can take various forms in one era and can change from one era to another. For Russians to eat fish during Lent, except on Wednesdays and Fridays, the first and fourth weeks, and Holy Week, does not mean that their fast is incomplete. Their climate does not provide them with things that make it possible to go without fish. That the Russians do not use the Byzantine tones in their prayers does not mean that their faith is in some way lacking. For married priests to shave their beards does not mean that they have departed from the Orthodox faith. For women on their period to start partaking of the holy gifts is something praiseworthy, and not an unacceptable defilement. It is the very core of our faith that there is no purity that a human being can acquire spontaneously and so consequently there is no involuntary impurity.

Thus it is necessary to distinguish between that which is fixed and essential-- that which if it is absent, Orthodoxy is absent-- and that which springs from human culture and so by its own nature is variable. A question from a Muslim brother attracted my attention to this when he noticed that we depict the Virgin with a veil and that nuns wear a veil. The point for him being that the ideal Christian woman is veiled. So why, he asked me, are your women unveiled? I added to the examples he mentioned what the Apostle Paul said about women covering their head. Then I tried to explain to him that the Apostle Paul's point, and Christian teaching in general, is to encourage people to exercise virtue, piety, and modesty. His point was not to mandate veils forever. The veil is not the point in itself, but rather the acquisition and preservation of chastity and purity of spirit is the point. Wanting to wear a veil and wanting to not wear a veil are both acceptable.

And so we must pay attention to the distinction between that which is essential and that which is  cultural and we must be careful not to confuse that which distinguishes Orthodoxy in various times, circumstances, contexts and environments, and that which can change without effecting its essence. The religious fanaticism that afflicts us, just as it affects people of others religions and denominations, gets its start from a lack of distinction between what is essential and what is accidental. Orthodoxy is too good to be limited to habits and traditions that many times hide God from the faithful.

Fr. Georges Massouh on Religious Discourse in the Arab Spring

The Arabic original, published in an-Nahar, can be read here.




When will there be a Springtime of Religious Thought?


The name "Arab Spring" that is given to the changes occurring in the Arab world will not be true until there is a corresponding renewal of religious thought. Religion is an important and influential factor in Arab societies, as has been made manifestly clear in the results and the ballot boxes in more than one country, especially Egypt. Citizens, because of the repressive regimes that have ruled them for decades, have ceased to believe in secular ideologies like nationalism, socialism, and republicanism... So it was natural that they resort to the "religious" option when they gained the opportunity to freely express their opinions.

The current or the dominant religious discourse raises anxiety and frustration among many elements of society who hope for an effective change for more political rights, which had been forbidden to them for a long time. This anxiety and frustration is not limited to members of "religious minorities". It is also felt among those who belong to "religious majorities" who are not impressed with religious rule, religious domination of society, the constitution, and general freedoms. These people worry that they are being freed from  tyrannical despotism only to fall under a new despotism, no less tyrannical than the one that preceded it.  

We do not need to search hard for evidence and proof that confirms the backwardness of religious discourse in the Arab countries.  The media is daily replete with fatwas, opinions, and behaviors that in their bizarreness go beyond even the most active imaginations and are incomprehensible to rational people. This in no way means that reasonable voices are absent, but they have no influence on the masses and are disregarded by them. What we are witnessing is the tyranny of irrational religious discourse over everything else.

The great Islamic thinker Sheikh Muhammad Abuduh (d. 1905) said, "Ijtihad is not only permissible, it is also an essential necessity." For him, a true Muslim is one who uses his reason in the affairs of the world and of religion. Muhammad Abduh's concern was to show the possibility of agreement between Islam, modern thought and the contemporary world, and to show a means of realizing this. Abduh criticized "extremism in holding to the externals of Shari'a" and those who make no distinction between  that which is fixed and essential in religion and that which is unessential and can be changed in it. He also criticized "blind tradition" that leads to decline, according to his words, in Islamic society.

What Sheikh Muhammad Abduh was criticizing over a century ago predominates in our religious societies. Fatwas are copied literally from ancient sources without any effort at interpreting them. Blind tradition that looks at externals more than it searches for meaning, opinions fitting for people of long-past centuries that have absolutely no connection to our present age, confusing what is essential and what is accidental, all finally result in declaring those who do not imitate the tiniest details of religious rulings to be unbelievers.

We long for a civil state that makes a complete distinction between temporal and religious authority, even as we hope when the ballot boxes show a majority with a religious-political character, for a discourse from this majority that is in keeping with the spirit of the age. The majority is responsible for reassuring the minority, not the other way around. For this reason, the majority must strive to innovate for the sake of a discourse that takes into account humanistic thought, especially with regard to human rights, especially freedom and equality in citizenship and human dignity. Without this, we will continue to await the true springtime.

Fr. Touma (Bitar) : There's Doubt, and then there's Doubt

Arabic original here.


There's Doubt, and then there's Doubt

They say that the Apostle Thomas is the doubting disciple. He was not with the rest of the disciples when the Lord Jesus, to Him be glory, came to them after His resurrection in the flesh. So when they met Thomas and told him that they had seen the Lord, he immediately said, "Unless I see in His hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and put my hand into His side, I will not believe" (John 20:25).

The fath that Thomas is talking about here, and to which John the Beloved Disciple is referring in his gospel, is not like the faith that we know. Faith here means believing. You believe or you don't believe, this is a human action. There's nothing blessed about it. This is why Jesus said to Thomas after eight days, when He came to the disciples while Thomas was with them, "Because you have seen Me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed" (John 20:29). This makes Thomas' doubt, if it is not held against him, an act of not believing what the disciples told him about their seeing Jesus.

In any case, whether we talk about Thomas' faith or his doubt, his faith is not like faith as we understand it today, and neither is his doubt. Faith in the Lord Jesus is not based on using the senses, nor is doubt based on the inability to use them.

Faith, as it occurs to us today, has a human aspect, there is no doubt about this. But it also has a divine aspect. The human aspect is related to receiving on the one hand and on the other hand it is related to response. Initiative in faith belongs to God. We are unable to attain it on our own. Only in Him are we able to attain it. In this way, the initiative towards Mary belonged to the angel Gabriel, "Peace be upon you... the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women" (Luke 1:28). Mary was, at the beginning, in a state of receiving. Then, after dialogue with the angel, she had her response: "Here I am, the handmaiden of the Lord. May it be to me as you say" (Luke 1:38). It is clear that the Lord God did not impose His will. He leaves the way open for us to respond or to not respond. He does not alter what we are inclined towards or what we desire. Naturally, He knows what is to come in advance. He does not act except at precisely the right time, when we are ready to accept what He offers us and thus are ready to accept His demand and fulfill His will. "My word does not return to Me empty," says the Lord!

This presupposes that if we are to accept what is of God, that our internal state must be prepared for it. "Blessed is the man who has resolved in his heart to go up, in the Valley of Baka, to the place that he intends. There the judge will permit him blessings" (Psalm 83:5-6 LXX).

The purity of heart and the soundness of intent that come from humans imply human virtues that are found within a person. Similar virtues are believing, compassion, bearing witness to the truth, faithfulness, helpfulness, being forgiving, generosity, and hospitality. When these virtues and natural, human virtues like them abound in a person, it gives him the capability of acquiring divine blessing. On this basis, they make him ready  to respond to God in the way that Mary responded, with an "amen," "may it be to me as you say." That is, in practice, with faith!

In the above context, when doubt occurs it comes as a "lack of believing." It is, in reality, a human event, part and parcel of the state in which Adam and Eve found themselves after the fall. This is not harmful to a person in his cooperation with God. As long as the heart is prepared, even if a person is beset by doubt, there is nothing to fear. It does not constitute a barrier between him and God. The Lord God will spread certainty of faith into his being at the appropriate time. This certainty is blessed!

The kind of doubt that is harmful to a person, the kind that prevents him from accepting that which is God's and thus from responding to Him, comes from an impure heart. Whenever a person is compromised by self-love and disregards love of the truth, whenever his being is enveloped by selfishness and pride, whenever he is tarnished by jealousies and taking joy in sin, whenever he disregards mercy and and compassion for others, then his doubt comes as a rejection of God. Here, the faculties of perception suggest alienation from God, they suggest being filled up with the self. So the person finds himself in a state of enmity with God, in an existential clash with Him, and likewise in a state of treating the self as a god!

In such a state, one who believes that  making human affairs easier through the intellect is the ideal solution for human cares, is cut off from a sound understanding of the actual state of existence. It is as though an upright state of existence is out of the picture. It is as if a person ignores a blurring of the heart's intentions-- of the entirety of the heart-- and so becomes foolish. Such a person has not only exploited the power of the intellect in his desire to follow his sick passions. He has even reached, existentially, the furthest limit of being aware of his passions. This means that deep down he has adopted an image of himself as an instrument, as an object and no longer as a living being. In his opinion, being an instrument comes to be the mark of precision and thus the supposed virtue par excellence! The person who in his own eyes is no longer a heart and someone who can be loved, but is rather an intellect, turns himself into an object because the intellect does not transcend being an instrument and a biological laboratory. If the heart does not govern this instrument that is capable of being extremely stubborn, if it does not use it for the service of humans and to the glory of God, then at that point the person has completely given himself over to utter darkness. At this point, the intellect proceeds with a dark and brutal force springing forth from a will to disobedience that neither brings one near to human nature nor to the God who created this nature. What is the identity of this dark power and of this state? This is precisely Satan's power that rebels against God, after he completely departed from God and from the soundness of his nature in order to create for himself an existence perverted by falsehood in the image of his total lust for self and his regarding himself as a god.  Through his will and his deepest feeling, he denied the divinity of God the Creator! One who has intentionally sought to kill God has overthrown God within his deepest feeling. Within his consciousness he has turned God into a dead idea, without any value and without any place for expression in him. He has turned Him into an absolute non-entity! This is the peak of foolishness! "The fool said in his heart, there is no God"! In this context, doubt is rejecting and killing God and there is no recovery from this. In such a case, a person's rationality toward his world becomes an indication of spiritual suicide, not just of error. A person commits this within his deepest self and he turns his guidance over to Satan, and through Satan to eternal perdition! As long as a feeling  of what belongs to God and to humans remains alive, even if a person is devoid of God's blessings, then the opportunity remains available for life-giving repentance, through means that God alone knows. If feeling dies, academically, through a complete and willing surrender to darkness and to following the power of the intellect with a blind heart, then a person has given himself over to eternal death, living here in the body and then after that dead! It would be better for such a person to have never been born, says the Bible! It is the will's eternal movement toward a nihilistic existence! This is the outer darkness!

And so, "Keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it spring the issues of life" (Proverbs 4:23)! 

Archimandrite Touma Bitar
Abbot of the Monastery of Saint Silouan the Athonite-- Douma
April 22, 2012

Met. Ephrem's Easter Sermon, 2012

Arabic original here, given at the Church of St. George, Zahriyeh.


Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death and upon those in the tombs bestowing life.

Beloved, on this great day that returns to us every year, in the hope that it will return to us every day and every moment, what must we do and what must we be, we Christians who bear the name of the risen Christ, in order for this resurrection, the resurrection of Christ within us, to remain continually? Is it merely a celebration at a given time, once a year? Is it an external celebration that we once again enjoy with tasty foods and drinks? This is blessed by God, but we must read the Gospel, ponder it, and imitate it-- imitate Christ first of all and second His disciples. We are also disciples of Christ, since we have been baptized in His name and have clothed ourselves in Him.

The Gospel that you heard at matins-- the service of the procession-- talks about those women who came very early-- as you also have come very early-- to anoint Jesus. On their way, they wondered, "who will move the stone for us?" because it was very large. This stone is applicable to our hearts. Who can move this stone? What stone? It is the stone of this laziness, this weakness in faith-- the faith of Christians today-- and the stone of these hardships, the stone of this widespread evil. Who will move this stone for us? Who will take this fear out of our heart, this anxiety? This is the great question that they were asking each other, just as we ask ourselves very often today.

They came and saw that the stone had been miraculously moved aside! How was this stone moved aside? The angel of the Lord came down from heaven--  power from heaven and not from humans came to remove this stone from us. Thinking and intellect are not enough. Faith in God perfects all things and even more. What was in the heart of these women? Who is the one who gave them this courage, while the disciples had fled scared? The myrrh-bearing women came very early because their heart was filled with the love of God that we lack. It was filled with their faith and their longing, which compelled God's power to come down and remove this stone.

And so what next? The angel got up and said to them, "Go and tell the good news to the disciples." This is why, beloved, one who has this love, one who still has this longing for the Lord and not for this passing world or for worldly politics, one who has this divine love, this kind of longing in the heart, is able today-- just like the women-- to go and spread the good news of the Resurrection, to give hope to this despairing world and to say to all, "Christ is risen! Indeed He is risen!"