Conservation of Love -- a reflection and poem by Mother Natalia

As we finish up the Nativity Fast, we wanted to make sure we shared this beautiful reflection from Mother Natalia with you. She wrote it for our eparchial magazine, Horizons. Even though the fast is now coming to a close as we are now in the prefestive days, we hope it will bless you and give you some inspiration as we prepare for the Feast of the Nativity of Christ. 

When I was studying engineering physics, a basic concept that often came up in our courses is

that of the conservation of energy. Simply put, this law indicates that energy can be neither

created nor destroyed; it just is. And this energy that exists is merely converted from one form

into another. So if I need solar energy, I can’t just create it out of thin air; I have to harvest it

from the energy source that is the sun. Similarly, when I convert one kind of energy into another

–kinetic energy into thermal energy – it can go from kinetic into thermal energy, but it doesn’t

just disappear into nothing.

I was reminded of the principle when an engineer visited the monastery to go on poustinia.

During this personal retreat he shared this idea: In the universe there exists not only the law of

conservation of energy or the conservation of mass, but there is also the law of the conservation

of love.

This concept struck me and stayed with me, so much that I took it to prayer with me on my own

poustinia. This concept that brought together two of my great loves – physics and the spiritual

life – brought together for me two passages from the apostle John. At the beginning of his

gospel, he writes about God’s creation of the world: “All things came to be through Him and

without Him nothing came to be” (John 1:3). And then in his first epistle, he tells us that “God is

love” (1 John 4:8). Everything that was created exists in God, and it is good, and it was created

in love by Him who is Love.

As we enter into the Nativity fast we are given an opportunity to re-order our loves. But as we do

so we must not fall into the trap of thinking that rightly ordered love means to turn away from

food or drink or other material things because they are bad. These are good gifts given to us by

our good Father. But they lose their goodness when they become the object of our love as

opposed to a gift received in love. Nor does love of God in the Christian life mean turning away

from human love/love of neighbor. Quite the contrary! As we read throughout scripture,

especially in Matthew 25, the very act of loving our neighbor is loving God. C.S. Lewis reminds

us that our desires are “not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about

with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants

to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a

holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased” (The Weight of Glory).

God placed in us a desire for the infinite; this desire is like a magnet inside of us drawing us back

to Him, because only He – the infinite – will satisfy our deepest longings. When we turn our gaze

from God, we divide our love among other things, or worse, we place our infinite desire on finite

things, turning them into little gods. This not only gets the proper order of things wrong, flipping

it on its head, it also means that I’m not loving all of these things and these people with fullness.

We have to go back to the law of conservation of love: I can’t just create love out of thin air. I

have to harness it from a pre-existing energy source, and St. John tells us what – or who – that

source is: God. “In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that He loved us and sent His

Son as expiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also must love one another” (1

John 4:10-11). I must first go and receive from the Source, and having done so, I can and must

transfer that love to the world around me: to my neighbor and to my daily work.

The Nativity fast is, as all fasting periods are, an opportunity for us to refocus on where we are

directing our love and our desires. Are we willing to sacrifice passing or temporal pleasures for

the sake of conserving and appropriately directing love? In order to receive God’s love, we have

to remove all those little gods that distract us from him; temporarily removing them so that we

can return to them with a proper love, a love without idolatry.

Conservation of Love

Nothing brought into being

can just slip into non-existence.

And all that is,

ever has been,

or still is to come,

came into being through Love.

Thus love must be conserved,

even if it changes form.

It can move

from God to mammon

to sex, food, or sleep.

In each, love aches for the Good.

But the ache isn’t enough.

We must pursue love

in its purest form.

For when spread out,

we find a disintegration,

each separation feeding into destruction.

Yet herein lies the paradox

that when love is focused

singularly on Love,

we find it permeates

even sex, food, and sleep…

when in everything we seek You.

The forms can be deceptive,

for really, there are only two:

I can love You

or love myself.

And each day, hour, moment,

You offer me this choice.

Your Brother Will Rise -- a reflection by Mother Iliana

When the war broke out in Ukraine, my heart was torn to pieces. My own people were being slaughtered. I felt so helpless – what could I do to help them so far away, here in a little monastery in Ohio? My heart was filled with grief for all the broken families, and all those who have lost or been separated from fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, friends, and even their precious little children. As I sat in the chapel one day, I heard the Lord speak to my heart, “Your brother will rise,” and I wept. I did not understand what His words meant, but I was consoled to hear them, because in hearing His word, I understood that He was with me and with each of them. “God is with us, understand all you nations” we sing over and over at Great Compline, especially during the time of the Fast.

During Matins on Lazarus Saturday, as we sang the Praises, these words came off the page –though they were simply retelling the story directly from a very familiar Scripture, in that moment they became alive. “Martha and Mary said to the Savior: Lord, if You had been here, our brother would not have died.” Is this not the cry of every heart in the midst of tremendous human loss? “God, if You had been here, my brother, my sister, my child, my parents, my nation, my dream would not have died! If You had only done something, I would not have this grief in my heart day and night” (see Psalm 12). As we continued to sing the Praises, again a line jumped out to me: “Martha said to Mary: The Master is here!” While I think, “If He had only been here,” Martha reminds me that “the Master is here.” Here, in the midst of this sorrow and grief, He is here, and what does He say to me? “You brother will rise.” 

St. John Chrysostom says: “We do indeed die, but we do not continue in it; which is not to die at all. For the tyranny of death, and death indeed, is when he who dies is nevermore allowed to return to life. But when after dying is living, and that a better life, this is not death but sleep” (Christ Our Pascha, pg. 79). Jesus, when He raises Jairus’ daughter, says, “the girl is not dead but sleeping” (Mt 9:24), and before raising Lazarus He says, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I go to awake him out of sleep” (Jn 11:12). “Today, Lazarus rejoices in Your word, O Word of God, as he begins his life again” (Lazarus Saturday, Hymn of Light). And the word he hears, this brother who will rise, is the Incarnate God calling him by his name. “Through Lazarus, O Christ, You have already despoiled Death; where is you victory, where is your sting? Now You bear the grief of Bethany! Carrying branches in our hands, let us all praise the victory of Christ” (Lazarus Saturday, Hymn of Light).

The Weight of War: A Mother's Lament - A Reflection from Mother Petra

The war sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been a poignant, throbbing backdrop for my experience of the Great Fast this year.  On the second day of Lent, I read these words of St. Sophrony of Essex: 

“I have been in continuous and terrible pain as a witness to the nightmare of men—who are all brothers—killing one another.  At times, this pain causes me to howl like a wild animal, to yelp like a poor dog whose paws have been crushed by a car.  And just like a dog, shaking from pain, to crawl away from the paths of men.  But when the pain in the heart reaches the limits of our physical endurance, then the invocation of the Name of Jesus Christ brings PEACE which alone keeps us alive.” 

My prayer, around which all of my life revolves, has taken on a deeper urgency, and I glimpse the global (even cosmic) dimensions of the prayer of the Church.  I understand that when I pray, the whole Church prays in me, and this prayer is for the whole world.  The pain in my heart is but a taste of the great ocean thundering across the globe.

During the Fast, we once again start reading Scripture at the beginning, with the book of Genesis.  Woven throughout our Lenten prayers is the theme of the Fall, the suffering of Man who has exiled himself from Eden by his sin.  Recently, Genesis 4:8-15, which recounts Cain’s slaying of his brother Abel, was given me to read aloud during Vespers.  My heart grieved as I chanted the dialogue between Cain and God:

[Cain] “[A]m I my brother’s keeper?”

[God] “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to Me from the ground…. [Y]ou shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth…”

[Cain] “My punishment is greater than I can bear…from Your face I shall be hidden…”

Then Cain went away from the presence of the Lord…

Once again, Man is exiling himself by the spilling of his brother’s blood.  We taste anew the bitter cost of sin.

The next day, we read the conclusion of this same chapter in Genesis:  “And Adam knew his wife again, and she bore a son and called his name Seth, for she said, ‘God has appointed for me another child instead of Abel, for Cain slew him’” (v. 25).  Often I have meditated on Cain’s killing of Abel, but never from the perspective of their mother.  Eve, who apparently had never yet known human death, experiences the death of her son Abel, and she clearly understands he was murdered by her other son Cain.  In effect, she loses two sons, the slain and the exiled.  Surely, her agony is compounded by the awareness that she had in some way contributed to this fracture, this rending of her family, by heeding the serpent and grasping after the knowledge of good and evil.

I’ve been praying in recent months about the nature of motherhood as I experience the reality of my own spiritual motherhood:  both the sobering weight to which I consent when I accept a spiritual son, and the mysterious, hidden ways in which I am a mother to souls across the world.  From this vantage point, I looked at Eve’s grief and recognized my own lament over this war in Slavic lands and the choices of my children closer to home as an echo of her lament.  Crying out to the Crucified One as I live these dark days, I have prayed for God’s people, both those with whom I have personal relationships and those suffering in Ukraine and Russia.  Yet I am haunted by the conviction that my own sin has made me in some manner complicit; I am not an innocent bystander.  I also am one who seeks self, objectifies my brother, desires domination, and have harbored hatred in my heart.  As we sing in the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete, “I have followed in the footsteps of Cain, I have chosen to become a murderer; for I have led my poor soul to death by living according to the flesh in the wickedness of my deeds” (Ode 1).  This conviction fuels my repentance. 

Repenting in my prayer, I suddenly saw Eve’s suffering mirrored, not in my poor heart, but in the pure heart of the New Eve:  The Theotokos looks down from heaven and weeps because one of her sons slays the other.  Each day this blood cries out from the ground!  But Mary stands at the foot of the Cross, ready to receive as her sons both the apostle and the criminal because she knows her first Son died in order to open the way back to Eden for all Mankind.  The flaming sword has been quenched by the blood and water gushing forth from His side.  As disciples of Jesus Christ, she pleads with us to embody His love by living His Gospel of peace in the power of the Holy Spirit given us in baptism. 

So as we journey deeper into this desert, of the Great Fast and of human wars, let us offer the Father our repentance as a worthy sacrifice.  Let us assume our great dignity as disciples of Christ by being our brother’s keeper.  Let us vigorously fight evil, not by the world’s violent means, but by the spiritual weapons of the children of Light—prayer, penance, fasting, and self-sacrifice.  And let us keep our heart’s eye fixed on the promise of the Resurrection.