Archimandrite Placide (Deseille) (+2018)
On this Sunday, which marks the
middle of Great Lent, the midpoint of our journey toward Pascha, the Church
invites us to venerate the Precious Cross.
The Cross thus appears within the
period of fasting as a foretaste, we may say, of Pascha. For the Cross does not
signify only suffering and death, but on the contrary: above all, victory over
suffering and death.
A few days ago, I received a
letter from someone who informed me that he had moved away from Christianity,
because, as he wrote, Christianity constantly speaks about trials, death, and
tears, whereas he was seeking something more joyful, more peaceful.
No, it is not Christianity that
brought suffering and death into the world; sin did that. Pain and death are consequences
of sin, of man’s separation from God, Who is the Source of Life. What Christ
brought us is the opposite: the victory over pain and death. Certainly, He did
not abolish them immediately; Christ came to conquer them by reversing their
meaning. From being signs of man’s separation from God and of men from one
another, from a source of opposition and hatred, He made them signs of love
toward the Father and toward His brethren.
At that moment, He introduced
into suffering and death the seed of the Resurrection, that seed which would
destroy them and would cause Eternal Life to triumph definitively.
In this light of the Resurrection,
we must contemplate the Mystery of the Cross. The Cross of Christ is no longer
merely an instrument of torture, and the great iconographers always tried to
make visible—within the very suffering of Christ upon the Cross—the Light of
the Resurrection and the Peace, which are already present on the Cross.
Those crosses that we see at the intersections
of our roads, which we find in certain regions at the corner of every farm,
this Cross is the emblem of Christ’s victory over suffering and death.
But also in our own life, our own
painful hardships, our own trials—if we are able to live them within the Light
of Christ, then they too become instruments of victory. When we read in the Lives
of the Saints the torments they endured, we see how their spirit was not at all
gloomy, but on the contrary how they already lived, through their very trial
itself, the victory of Christ over death, that triumph which we celebrate on
the day of Pascha.
And if, while reading the Lives
of certain ascetics, we are astonished and perhaps even frightened by the
hardships they imposed upon themselves, we should know that it was not some
morbid attraction to suffering that led them, but rather the opposite; through
their suffering they perceived precisely the presence of the victorious love of
Christ, the love that was destined to triumph over suffering and death. They
understood that suffering would allow them to uproot their egoism, that egoism
which always focuses on ourselves and whispers to us that we are the center of
the world. Suffering would allow them to turn themselves entirely toward God
and toward their brethren.
Thus, we must live through our inevitable
trials, which we shall certainly encounter in our earthly life. But we must
have a living faith in the victory of Christ. We must rely upon this faith,
knowing how to transform all our sufferings and trials into instruments of
victory, already transfiguring them by this love of Christ, by the victorious
power of the Resurrection.
Then we shall truly be Christians,
with all the power that the word contains. Then we shall truly be children of
the heavenly Father, bearing the image of His Christ, through the power of the Holy
Spirit.
To these three divine Persons,
the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, be all glory unto the ages of ages.
Amen.
Greek source: https://www.imoph.org/pdfs/2026/03/15/20260315aKyr-Stayr.pdf
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