I have said that sobornost will be yours when you realize what it means to walk 'naked' on a pilgrimage, through a poustinia (a Russian-style hermitage), up to the mountain of the Lord. From now on, you will hear the inner voice that calls you onto the mountain again and again an inner voice, yet not yours. Always it will repeat the same sentence, "Friend, come up higher."
This is the time when you will have to realize why sobornost took root in you; why you went through that pilgrimage; why you went through that poustinia; why you are ascending the mountain of the Lord.
The answer is very simple. It is now your time to bring sobornost to your brethren. Yes, now is the time to cement unity between them and yourself, remembering that God died for all people, the baptized and the unbaptized.
You see, there was a day in the history of mankind when there was sobornost between God and human beings. But man lost that beautiful sobornost when he fell, and original sin entered the world.
The coming of Jesus Christ, his death and resurrection, has brought healing to our souls. By taking up our sins and introducing the sacraments, God healed this original sin. So we came forth from our Baptism into a beautiful union with God again, as it once was before the fall.
Again, a sobornost between God and man was renewed. This time, however, it was on a grand scale. For the Lord not only instituted the sacrament of Baptism, he made us understand also that we are part of his Mystical Body that he is our head, that our sobornost lies within this mystery. For if I am the hand of the Mystical Body, then I must be united to the Body. Am I? Am I really united to it?
If you really are united to the Mystical Body, you will — with great love and compassion — direct your whole life, your apostleship, your ambassadorship, to promoting brotherhood. You have been made an integral part of one another by the death of Jesus Christ and his resurrection.
Now your task is before you: to make that brotherhood live, to incarnate it, to bring the law of love (which is brotherhood) into the open so that people, looking at you who are baptized, will say: "Behold, how these Christians love one another!"
This is the task of sobornost. For this you go on 'laying down your life' as Christ asked you to do. For this you continue to undergo martyrdom, even as Our Lady underwent it. Maybe it is not a bloody martyrdom; but it is a martyrdom nevertheless… an inner one. For this you are constantly crying to God for faith. And it will continue to be that way until you die!
Faith alone can carry out this task of unity, which the Russians call 'sobornost.' Nothing else will. Do you understand the type of unity I am talking about? It's a unity total and complete — of mind, of heart, of soul. It is an inner unity which, once established, cannot be broken. It is a unity from which all the rest will follow, but it has to be first a spiritual unity.
So, then, sobornost is a strange 'love affair' between you and other human beings. But it cannot exist unless there is first a sobornost, a sobrania, a unity between your inner soul and God. Yes, the beginning of sobornost is for you to be 'one' with God.
In such a sobornost, you cannot be 'against' any other person. You have become one with God … and God is not against anyone. When you have this oneness, the devil cannot divide you from others.
Oneness of mind and body, soul and heart, comes when your heart is lifted up into the heart of God. It is when you enter into God that — suddenly! you understand what unity is, what sobornost is: Three in One, and One in Three. The Trinity!
Then it spreads out$#133; for you and you and you and you — all of us! — are already one' with each other!
We come from the heart of God. We are one with him who has said, "I have come to serve." The one who washed the feet of his apostles, which signified service in those days. (John 13:3-17)
He incarnated himself — that tremendous feat of God becoming man so that man can become God! That is what he came for: to make us divine!
But we can become divine only when we enter the mind of God — the mind of Abba, the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. We become one in the Trinity. And that means one with everyone.
Yes, sobornost has to be a spiritual unity. And here we begin to understand what that word really means because now it becomes palpable, visible, touchable as it grows among us who believe in Jesus Christ. Now the mysteries of his Gospel are open to us.
Christ became obedient even to death on the cross. (Phil. 2:5–8) Such obedience now becomes very simple to us, for if we are of one mind with the Trinity, what else could we do but obey as he did? The Father asks him; the Son immediately agrees; and the Holy Spirit hovers over both.
It is the same with us. God asks us to surrender to him totally, unreservedly, without any hiding place (if we are foolish enough to think that there is any place where we can really hide from God).
Yes, God asks us to surrender, for sobornost is first of all an obedience of everybody to the will of God. We are united to the Trinity, filled with its life and its fire and movement; and we too become creative. We co-create sobornost in our hearts through the grace of the Trinity.
Now we are alert — alert to the voice that says, "Friend, come higher" — because that voice means very simply, "Deepen your sobornost– deepen it! "
The time is now.
Let the baptized be one, as one as the Trinity is one. Deepen it. Look, the world is fragmented People relate to one another as if they were enemies, even the baptized! Terror reigns in the hearts of men, and fear in the hearts of children. This cannot be!
In apostolic times, it was said, "See how the Christians love one another." Today, it can only be said, "Look how these Christians hate one another."
This is no time for rugged individualism. I mean the kind of individualism where I am so wrapped up in myself and my own ideas that I fail to become one with my brothers and sisters.
Sobornost doesn't eliminate individualism when it is used in the service of God. Artists are individualists. Writers are too. All kinds of good works are produced by individuals, but the spirit behind them must be one with God. Always it pertains to God, you understand. It pertains to our relationship with God.
We must ask ourselves: What is my relation with God? Is it sobornost? The sobornost of total unity, obedience, joy, incarnation? Is it the understanding that we constantly pass through Golgotha, that we 'die' with him and are resurrected with him? This is not something that just happened to us once in Baptism. It happens all the time.
Each year, as we realize that we are brothers and sisters of one another, as we grow in our realization of these verities … Slowly … slowly … our pilgrimage to Golgotha advances. The voice in our hearts says, "Come higher, friend," until it ceases to speak in us because we have reached the height of the mountain.
Now we understand! For we can see the whole panorama: the tragic life of the world and especially of the Church. All that is left to us now is to pray, because we are already at the periphery of the resurrection.
But we must 'pass it on' to others. That's our life — to make people understand. That must happen if we are to survive … survive as human beings instead of beasts or bionic people. We are freed by Christ to live a life of supernature. We don't have to wallow in the evil of our nature, especially in its animal aspects. We don't have to.
We can move in freedom in the supernatural. It's our true habitat, even though we remain here on the natural. And even the natural is beautiful too, once we accept it as coming from God's hands.
God, by his grace, gives us such great supernatural help. Yes! Listen … listen to the wind … we are not alone. Constantly with us, right by our side, is the Dove. See! It's the Dove that is making the wind. It's the wind of his gifts. With them, we can enter the heart of another.
With the gifts of love and tenderness and of the compassion of God, of Jesus Christ, we can 'seal' the heart of another to ours, as ours is sealed to God. And so begins a chain of hearts which are sealed to God and to one another. Now there is sobomost! That is the unity which must exist.
This unity transcends our emotions, our individualism, all things … because, you see, it is rooted in God, whereas all the other things are rooted in people, in this world. But we can gather these things and lift them up to God, as in a finely wrought chalice.
Yes, this is the task of the baptized, the goal of the baptized. It is to find oneness in the Trinity, and oneness in the way that leads to the Trinity, oneness with Jesus Christ who said I am the way. It is to discover oneness in the Holy Spirit, abundantly using his gifts for the 'binding' of one another (and all things) to God.
As a constant reminder, we have Our Lady. She is the perfection of sobornost. This perfection is in the unity of her heart with the heart of God the Father… and with ours.
Sobornost will happen when I become a community with the most Holy Trinity; when I understand that Jesus Christ is the way to the Father; when I understand that the Father is a Father, that he is the symbol of unity. The Father teaches me how to be one with myself, and with him, and with the world.
Ah, I've tried to 'explain' sobornost without really explaining it, because it is something that one's heart catches from another heart — a sort of fire.
God has sent his Fire, the Holy Spirit, as an Advocate, that we might draw near to the Father… but also so that — in total faith, trust and love — we might turn to one another.
One might say that — not by holding hands but by 'holding hearts' and entering that fire of the Holy Spirit — a chain of hearts will be forged. And they will blend with the heart of Christ. That is restoration. That is healing. That is sobornost.
