Yesterday I spent a blissful day at my desk. After a two-month interruption, I came back to my book (Eucharist). I started by rereading a pile of drafts and could not understand what I am writing about; what is it that I cannot express? Little by little the thought started working. If only I could have one such day each week! The tragedy of my life is that I don’t have it; that I live in constant fear of a phone call, meetings, talks, etc.
Today, a deluge of confessions. Father P[aul] L[azor] was serving. I heard confessions until the Great Entrance. I sometimes think that the highly overdeveloped feeling of sinfulness has weakened the feeling, the understanding, the consciousness of sin. The Gospel saying, “I have sinned against heaven and before You” (Luke 15:21), has lost its clarity. Predominant are “my defects,” “my weaknesses,” all kinds of introspection.
Sin is first of all unfaithfulness to the “Other,” a betrayal. For a long time now, sin has become reduced to morals. And nothing leads away from God, from thirst for God, as precisely these morals. All morals consist first of all of bans and taboos. “I quarreled with my wife”—but in a quarrel with your wife whom you love the reason and content of the quarrel is almost always unimportant. What is important, painful, unbearable, is the rupture, the breach, as short as it might be. And you make peace with your wife not because you find who is right and who is wrong, but because you love each other, because each ones life is in the other. A Christianity reduced to morality, to norms, is impossible to practice because; not one of Christs commandments is fulfilled without love for Christ. “If you love Me, you will keep My commandments” (John 14:15).
There is a kind of moral person with a passion for cleanliness, who runs to confession because for him any little spot is unbearable, just as it is unbearable for any well-dressed man of the world. But this is not repentance; it is closer to a feeling of human decency. But one can’t say about a saint, “He was a thoroughly decent person.” A saint is thirsty not for “decency,” not for cleanliness, and not for absence of sin, but for unity with God. He does not live interested in himself (the introspection of a clean fellow), but in God.
Morality is directed toward one’s self. Concern for rubrics is the equivalent in the Church. But in morality, there is no treasure about which it is said that “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matthew 6:21). The Church: Its call is not to morality, but to the revelation and the gift of the Treasure.
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The Rev. Alexander Schmemann was a leading Russian Orthodox theologian influential in U.S. church life in the cause of religious freedom in the Soviet Union and in the world-wide ecumenical movement. He was an adjunct professor at Columbia and New York universities and at Union and General theological seminaries in New York City. He was also dean of St. Vladimir's Seminary in Crestwood N.Y.
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