Home > Work > Of Water and the Spirit: A Liturgical Study of Baptism
1 " Our modern theology, which in many ways has ceased to be personal, i.e. centered on the Christian experience of "person," nevertheless - and maybe as a result of this - has become utterly individualistic. It views everything in the Church - sacraments, rites, and even the Church herself - as primarily, if not exclusively, individual "means of grace," aimed at the individual, at his individual sanctification. It has lost the very categories by which to express the Church and her life as that new reality which precisely overcomes and transcends all "individualism," transforms individuals into persons, and in which me are persons only because and inasmuch as they are united to God, and, in Him, to one another and to the whole of life. "
― Alexander Schmemann , Of Water and the Spirit: A Liturgical Study of Baptism
2 " It is not a gathering of 'escapees' from the world, bitterly enjoying their escape, feeding their hate for the world. Listen to their psalms and hymns; contemplate the transparent beauty of their icons, their movements, of the entire *celebration. It is truly cosmical joy that permeates all this; it is the entire creation - its matter and its time, its sounds and colors, its words and silence - that praises and worships God and in this praise becomes again itself: the Eucharist, the sacrament of unity, the sacrament of the new creation. "
3 " Thus the whole death is not the biological phenomenon of death but the spiritual reality whose "sting... is sin" (1 Cor. 15:56) - the rejection by man of the only true life given to him by God. "Sin entered the world and death by sin " (Rom. 5:12): there is no other life but God's life; the one who rejects it dies because life without God is death. This is the spiritual death, the one that fill the entire life with "dying" and, being separation from God, makes man's life solitude and suffering, fear and illusion, enslavement to sin and enmity, meaninglessness, lust and emptiness. It is this spiritual death that makes man's physical death truly death... "
