Today is the anniversary of the passing into eternal life of Father Alexander Schmemann (+December 13, 1983), pastor and theologian who kindled a desire for the kingdom of God in countless people. His writings, especially his books FOR THE LIFE OF THE WORLD and THE EUCHARIST: THE SACRAMENT OF THE KINGDOM, have become classics. I had the privilege of meeting him just once but will never forget the intensity of his presence.
In FOR THE LIFE OF THE WORLD, Schmemann defined the human being as homo adorans — the worshipping human being. We may decide later in life that religious belief is a delusion and suppress an instinct to pray, but we seem to have an innate sense that our existence is the work of a creator and are haunted by a search for connection, crying out in hope, need, grief and gratitude to an unseen maker. There seems to be no human society, however small, in which prayer and some form of collective worship is absent.
Schmemann wrote: “If secularism in theological terms is a heresy, it is primarily a heresy about man. It is the negation of man as a worshipping being, as homo adorans: the one for whom worship is the essential act which both ‘posits’ his humanity and fulfills it.”
Eternal memory! (drawing by Fr Ivan Reves)
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