The university professor challenged his students with this question,
“Did God create everything that exists?”
A student bravely replied,
“Yes, He did!”
“Did God create everything?” the professor asked.
“Yes sir”, the student replied.
The professor answered,
“If God created everything, then God created evil because evil exists,
and according to the principle that our works define who we are
then God is evil”.
The student became quiet at his assertion.
The professor was quite pleased with himself.
He boasted to the students that he had proven once more
that the Christian faith was a myth.
Another student raised his hand and said,
“Can I ask you a question, professor ?”
“Of course”, replied the professor.
The student stood up and asked,
“Professor, does cold exist?”
“What kind of question is this?
Of course, it exists.
Have you never been cold?”
The students sniggered at the young man’s question.
The young man replied,
“In fact sir, cold does not exist.
According to the laws of physics,
what we consider cold
is in reality the absence of heat.
Every body or object can only be studied
when it has or transmits energy.
Absolute zero (-460 degrees F) is the total absence of heat.
All matter becomes inert and incapable of reaction at that temperature.
Cold does not exist.
We have created this word to describe how we feel if we have no heat.”
The student continued,
“Professor, does darkness exist?”
The professor responded,
“Of course it does.”
The student replied,
“Once again you are wrong sir.
Darkness does not exist either.
Darkness is in reality the absence of light.
We can study light, but not darkness.
We can use Newton’s prism
to break white light into many colours
and study the various wavelengths of each colour.
You can`t measure darkness.
A simple ray of light can break into a world of darkness and illuminate it.
How can you know how dark a certain space is?
You measure the amount of light present.
Isn’t this correct?
Darkness is a term used by man to describe what happens in the absence of light.”
Finally, the young man asked the professor,
“Sir, does evil exist?”
Now uncertain, the professor responded,
“Of course, as I have already said.
We see it every day.
Violence between people, many crimes and violence around the world.
These manifestations are nothing else but evil.”
To this the student replied,
“Evil does not exist sir,
or at least it does not exist unto itself.
Evil is simply the absence of God.
It is just like darkness and cold, a word that man has created to describe the absence of God.
God did not create evil.
Evil is not like faith, or love which exists as light and heat.
Evil is the result of the absence of Divine love in the human heart.
It’s like the cold that comes when there is no heat
or the darkness that comes when there is no light.”
The professor sat down.
The young man’s name was Albert Einstein.
What can I say about God?
What can I say to an unbelieving person about God?
What can I say to myself?
I often have nothing to say.
At times I can say very little, other times I can say more, at greater depth.
But there’s never a situation where I can say it all.
This would be an absurdity.
God is not an entirely clear subject. God is God.
And He remains like that until the unknown, infinity is there.
When believers try to explain and prove all the points, they do not understand that they humiliate God.
The God Who cannot be fully contained.
There must always be a doubt in a true faith.
Self-doubt.
It’s noble, it must be like that.
The ability to contain begins with an inability to contain.
I know that I know nothing.
This happens when one stands still before the Great Extraordinary. That is exceeding his measure.
But this is already an engagement.
And this engagement is with Him.
With The One Who is. And this is the main thing that we can say about Him.
All the rest we can describe only partially, according to our spiritual age.
Therefore I’m whispering about Him very carefully, fearing to distort it or being misunderstood.
But I can’t keep silent either, because He wants me to talk.
The atheist:
I want to ask you a very simple question.
You believers, if you are truly believers,
why don’t I see a miracle in your life?
Why did it happen so often in the far past 2000 years ago?
So far that its objectivity is eroded, any trust is being lost.
This is a miracle of one of those who were in distant history and who cannot wake up and confirm anything.
And where is your own miracle? This day’s miracle?
The lame walk, the dumb talk; if they drink anything deadly, it shall not hurt them.
They speak different languages.
Jesus Christ said,
“If you have faith like a grain of mustard seed,
you can say to this mountain “move from here to there, and it will move”.
But I don’t see you have such faith.
Or maybe you yourselves are non-believers
Or Christ was not telling the truth?
You’re disappointing me.
Priest:
The most precious thing in a dialogue is sincerity.
It itself deserves respect.
Frankness encourages me to put those very same questions about faith to myself.
And it happens often.
It is vital that one does not pretend to have faith, but is looking for it with all one’s heart.
The verb “to look for” suggests an action.
Progressive movement forward from smaller to bigger.
My faith is little, paltry compared to the faith of the saints.
But it’s already within me, and faith urges me to move up, to search, to multiply it.
It is most likely that it all starts with finding meaning in life, with facing losses, disappointments, and instability for the first time, which then leads to a sharper sense of time.
All things will pass…
We’re constantly losing something, and in this regard, everything gets depreciated.
If I was born to die, then even if I lived a long life, a relatively long one, as in comparison with eternity, my life is a moment.
What’s the point of life?
Is it to give birth to children who will also die and ask the same question?
The wise Solomon asked these questions himself three thousand years ago in the book of Ecclesiastes,
perhaps in the final document of his eventful life: Vanity of vanities; .
All things will pass and all is vanity
This work could be described as deeply pessimistic, but the last lines were:
live like that and have fear of God.
In the New Testament transcription, the word “fear” can be safely replaced by the word “love”.
Thinking about the meaning of life is not yet faith, but it is well on the way towards it.
We’re peering at the world around us more closely, and curiously.
We’re still not seeing God, but we begin noticing His traces and traces of His creativity everywhere,
because wherever you look, you can see harmony and wisdom.
I often hear the response – this is just nature, and straight away I’m asking:
What or Who is nature?
Only “Who” can create the wise poetry of being.
There is no personal creativity in “what”.
You know, when something has already happened inside between man and God, often there’s no desire to prove anything at all.
Was asked and provided an answer, that’s it.
Hence in this topic of God’s being exploration
through His creativity around us and within ourselves, I’m satisfied with
the very first point…
The Big Bang, which is now being talked about a lot,
trying to explain where everything came from, everything has come from nothing.
Has anyone ever heard about an explosion that had great harmony in it instead of destruction?
You have to believe very strongly in a miracle
to claim that after the explosion instead of a cacophony of sounds the thunder spread around like Beethoven’s fifth Symphony and
instead of destruction – coherence and consistency.
Observing the harmony of the universe gives confidence that there’s a Creator,
with Whom you have not yet met as with an Individual Personality.
But everything around the whole universe speaks about Him.
This is already a faith and at the same time it is not yet faith, the faith that works miracles.
All this can be just a beginning in the seeking out for Him and to return to oneself as an image and likeness.
This is where the most difficult part begins, because that faith supposes a permanent, gradual movement towards Him.
This practice is called spiritual life,
which involves overcoming one’s self, one’s imperfections, limitations.
Limitations of vision and experience.
God is located precisely beyond these restraints.
And only those overcoming these join into a one -to -one communication with Him.
And this is no longer just a reflection on the meaning of life,
observation of the universe’s harmony,
not a belief in God’s existence, or a belief in Him, but a direct relationship with Him.
Not many people have achieved this.
But this particular state is called faith,
the faith that is capable of performing miracles.
Unfortunately, believers often live vicariously,
through the experience of saints, in whose lives this has taken place in an extreme, total way.
The Lord said about them the following, “they shall speak with new tongues; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them” and so on.
Yes, unfortunately, this is often not our personal experience, but rather trust towards those people.
But you have to trust someone in your life.
When you ask someone for directions, you often have to trust a complete stranger, and we do trust.
But I have much more confidence in a saint who deserves trust by his very righteous life.
He’s so decent that it’s impossible not to trust him.
If you are lucky enough to meet a saint in your life, believe me,
this meeting will not only inspire you with sympathy for his words,
but you will have an irresistible desire to experience his spiritual state.
You’ll just see a really happy person.
Made happy not by the external circumstances,
but by internal content that does not depend on the external one.
An atheist:
I`m sorry. May I interrupt you right now?
I don’t want to sound categorical, so I won’t use “ALL”.
I will use the word “many”.
Many members of the Church don’t correspond with what you’re talking about.
I’m not talking as much about holiness, but at least righteousness,
not in words, as you usually like to participate in, but in real actions.
Surely, you will say that it is not easy.
It is a massive task that shows you are actually moving ahead.
But from the outside, we’re seeing something completely different:
someone who is not moving anywhere,
because a very comfortable position is taken and all is jolly good.
So why would you strain yourself?
And some people have no intention of moving anywhere,
faith for them is a kind of fairy tale,
which does not oblige to do anything,
you can talk about it, discuss it, but nothing more.
You need God as far as He does not interrupt your life.
Why are you ready to talk so much about the saints and you really don’t want to do as they did and even get angry when you are told about Judas?
There’s plenty of those in church.
Priest:
-every twelfth.
Of course, this is an allegory, no one knows the exact number, and of course it does happen.
I see what you’re trying to say.
I often hear this fair question.
We understand that there may be wicked people in the Church, it is clear that we are all human.
But why is the Church so laid-back in the struggle for self-purification, for decency within it?
I hear these questions and try to answer them.
In your worry about the presence of hypocrisy within the Church.
I can hear anger in your worrying and I am worried too, but for me it’s rather painful.
Our attitude to the same thing is of a different nature.
And everything is consistent.
You can’t have it in any other way.
As the Church is something external to you, a completely alien institution,
for me, it is my own mother, so it hurts.
Because it hurts, trust me, I care a great deal about that.
Instead of “laid-back”, I would use the expression “careful”.
For you to understand and accept the nature of this caution, I must explain to you one important thing.
The Church is far from being liberal, rather, it’s conservative in its traditions.
We have our own judicial and justice system.
And here is the most important point:
Is it the same sinners who are in charge of the punitive measures, the one’s whose morality is reviewed by the Church tribunal?
Sinners are judged by sinners.
Not by deliberately hardened sinners,
but by sinners who repent.
Who see in everyone’s sin their own propensity to any sin, as well as this particular one.
Do you know how difficult it can be to make drastic decisions when you are constantly judged by your own conscience?
And really wish there was an amnesty granted, another chance given, because you yourself are given it by God,
through all your life from confession to confession.
Do not judge, so that you will not be judged.
You can say that the clergy have high tolerance only for their own people.
Priests absolve thousands of people from millions of sins every day.
“I forgive and absolve” – these are the words that were blessed by Jesus Christ to the apostles to say as we know from the Gospel, followed by the blessing to clergy of the Church.
He had this authority from the Father and He had it as He was entitled to it.
At every judgment before God, there are always two defendants:
the one who is judged and the one who judges.
The defendant must demonstrate himself in repentance,
the judge in mercy and objectivity, and this is a heavy responsibility.
Historically, in both ancient and modern times, the people of the Church have accumulated a lot of illustrations of an amendment of life.
This experience encourages us to long-suffering, leniency,
and to wisdom that takes its time.
By and large, God is rarely in a hurry, more often He shows longsuffering.
And one more important thought:
in an aggressively acidic environment, the appearance of a small, delicate flower causes delight and awe.
This is regarded as a miracle, a treasure.
So, in our imperfect world, full of guile and sin, the birth of one saint is a great treasure,
precisely because he had to define himself and express himself in an aggressive environment.
And it’s worth a lot.
This is the price of the soul of each of us.
Whether we move closer to God or not
An atheist:
You talk a lot about a man, that every man can be treated with compassion because we’re all sinners, even saints.
But often I don’t get God, especially the One from the Old Testament Who gave his blessing to attacking whole nations.
And He punished people cruelly and mercilessly.
This is the same God, of which
the Gospel says that God is Love.
Is this love?
Priest:
– I want to tell you an important thing.
There is a difference between the intellect and the mind.
Intellect is the ability to reason, and this is present to a greater or lesser extent in each of us.
And the mind (in Greek patristic theology it is called “nous” – cognition) is a knowledge of the essence of things.
The first is from the nature of our mind, and it is good, but not perfect.
And the second is more of a charismatic nature.
It’s like a revelation, and it’s from God.
As you, an unbeliever, would say from Nature.
Adam had this state of mind in Paradise when he named animals according to their essence.
He didn’t analyze anything, he just knew and had an intuition.
Why am I talking about this?
Because I will not be able to answer all your questions to satisfy you.
Not because there is no answer, but because there’s a need for the ability to listen, and that comes from intuition.
Different people reading the Bible in fact don’t read the same book because of their non-identical abilities to follow the same content.
It turns the entire consciousness of some people upside down and radically changes their lives, while others remain completely indifferent to the same book;
the same content and such distinctive actions.
Spiritual topics need a spiritual approach, not with pure cold intellect, but more with instinct.
It’s like in music, it is not composed logically, other mechanisms of our psyche must be activated.
And only then everything happens.
The questions you ask are also of my concern.
When I’m trying to resolve those questions, I dive into that area of my psychic existence where there’s a possibility to find the answers.
Complicated questions are not solved by intellect, it is rather a field of prayer, and you do not try to make it out, but ask God and get an answer,
an answer that we are able to hear and accept, otherwise there’s only silence.
The question of the cruel Old Testament God was also before me, and I queried that and was not happy with the answers.
That’s why I stopped asking the questions and stopped pondering.
I began to pray and got an answer that satisfied me.
But this is my answer, the response to me, to my spiritual state, if you will.
For you, it may not sound right in this case, I apologize I’ve got limited abilities.
All that we see around us and in the endless darkness of space is light.
Everything that is not light remains dark.
Light emanates from a source of light and also can be reflected from the surfaces of objects.
The first light can be called a pure light, virgin light, because it carries information only about itself.
The nature of the second one, the one being reflected, gets modified.
it includes the information of the reflected object, so, in fact,
we can see it with our eyes.
It is no longer a pure virgin light,
but rather a synthesis of it and its reflected object.
The Bible often speaks of God as the Light.
It is convenient for me to use this concept now.
God, as a pure virgin Light, floats in the existence of this world,
which He created within the boundaries of time and space.
This world reflects Him,
it reflects Him and fills it with the information about itself, as it is at this current moment in history.
God’s pure, virgin idea of the world includes the present state of this world,
the state of a free man who chooses between good or evil by his will.
The harsh God of the Old Testament and the God of Love of the New are the same.
There are no contradictions in Him,
it’s all about man,
who is not light, but only a reflecting object endowed with free will.
There is a concept that God permeates even hell, but hell remains hell.
Thus, a holy person in a state of Godlikeness partially refracts the virgin light of the Divine,
sharing His nature,
while a fallen sinner fills the virgin nature with information about himself.
And this happens both in individuals and in entire populations of a certain historical era.
An atheist:
That is always the case.
I suspect that when you have nothing to say, you talk in a difficult way to confuse and mess someone up.
I’m not satisfied.
Priest:
Please don’t be angry with me.
I’m not being sly, I am being honest with you.
There are just things that are very tough to explain, and you can only experience them.
How can I explain to someone who has never loved in his life what love is?
I’ll just have to sigh with shrugging my shoulders and
trying to choose the right concepts, admitting eventually that that’s not possible.
You have to live it out.
Without personal experience, we will always come to a dead end.
Christianity is not a theory, it is a practice, it is life itself.
That’s probably the place to start.
All in all this does not matter that much, I would not only like to share the information with you, but to share love itself, as the energy of the Divine.
This is the main miracle and acquisition of my faith.
If there is love in me,
not delicacy, good breeding, good emotionality,
but love itself, in its highest manifestation-
to the point of love for enemies,
God will be in me, and here the word stops, just a slight smile and a kind look in your direction.
It’s just that we are different, we can say we’re “parallel”.
You live in your world, which is real for you.
I see and feel differently.
But I’m very happy.
A philosopher once said,
“If there were no God, it would be worth it to invent Him, because without Him everything collapses.
He is like a bracket that holds the whole meaning of being.”
I don’t need to invent Him, He is in my life.
And I’m so happy that I don’t want to argue, just a slight smile and a kind look in your direction.
When I proposed the theory of relativity, very few people understood me.
And what I tell you now to transmit to mankind will also meet the misunderstanding and prejudice in the world.
I ask you to keep this letter for as long as necessary.
Years, decades,
until society is sufficiently developed to accept what I will explain below.
There is a very powerful force
that science has not yet found an official explanation for.
This force includes and controls all other phenomena that work in the universe.
This universal power is love.
When scientists were looking for a unified theory of the universe,
they forgot the most powerful invisible force.
Love is the light that enlightens those who give and receive it.
Love is an attraction
because it makes some people feel attracted to others.
Love is power,
because it multiplies the best
that is in us, that we are.
And it allows humanity not to be immersed in blind selfishness.
For love we live and die.
Love is God, and God is Love.
This power explains everything and gives meaning to life.
This is a variable that we have ignored for too long.
Maybe it’s because we’re afraid of love.
To understand love, I made a simple substitution in my most famous equation.
If instead of E=mc2,
we acknowledge that the energy for healing the world can be obtained through love
multiplied by the speed of light squared,
we conclude that love is the most powerful force,
because it has no limits.
Only through love we can find meaning in life and
Save the world
And every sensible or sentient creature.
To help our civilization to survive.
Perhaps we’re not ready to make a bomb of love yet.
A device powerful enough
to completely destroy the hate,
selfishness and greed,
all the things that devastate the planet.
However, each individual carries a small
but a powerful generator of love whose energy is waiting for its release.
When we learn to give and get this universe’s energy,
dear Lieserl,
We endorse that love conquers all and it is capable of overcoming anything.
Because love is the quintessence of life.
I deeply regret
that I could not express what is in my heart,
which has quietly beaten for you all my life.
Maybe it’s too late to apologize.
But as time is relative.
I have to tell you
that I love you very much
and thanks to you I have reached the final answer.
Amen.