Our Father is Younger Than We Are

The Orthodox, it is typically said, do things in threes. We repeat over and over, or as the title of this blog suggests, again and again. Repetitiveness is something we see during these days of Pascha when Christ is Risen is heard not only once but over and over again.  There is, I think, some wisdom in this. In the Old Testament we read how God, whenever He wanted Abraham to do something, He said, “Abraham, Abraham.” Similarly, He repeated Samuel’s name as well as Jacob’s and so on. In the Book of Acts (9:4) we read how when our Lord encountered Saul He said to him, “Saul, Saul”,  while to the disciple Simon our Lord, predicting that he will deny Him three times, begins His warning, “Simon, Simon…” (Luke 22:31). This is not even to mention how our Lord, upon pronouncing a truth, vital to our salvation, says not only that it is true but, in order to put emphasis on it, He repeats it: “Verily, verily, I say to you…”

There is something childlike in this repetitiveness. It was, in fact, a post on Fr. Joseph Honeycutt’s blog which got me thinking of this.  More specifically, it was a quote he used from Chesterton, in which he states:

“A child kicks its legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough… It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again,” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again,” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike: it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”

The photo above is from yesterday’s Slava celebration service as the girls look on during the Litiya. After all, they live for this sort of thing: going around the church, blessing the Badnjak on Christmas Eve, making wreaths from the grass on Pentecost,etc.  It has always amazed me how, when we’re sitting at home, relaxing, these things seem to pop in their mind, they remember them and ask, “Remember when we….”.

It is as if they are asking me, or making me promise them that we will, indeed, do it again. There would perhaps be no greater tragedy for them than for me to tell them that, unfortunately, that was the last time we did such and such a thing.  No, children, as it seems, simply can’t get enough. It is precisely this faith which God calls us to have, the faith of a child which never grows old of hearing Christ is Risen, is not satisfied with going around the church only once.  For, it is unlike us Orthodox to accept the doctrine of simply confessing faith in Jesus and expecting instant salvation. It is not that we are skeptical. Instead, I think we’re a little too realistic. We are human after all and prone to make mistakes, to sin and confess our errors.  If we are realistic, it doesn’t make us hopeless. We fall but we get back up. We pray and then we pray “again and again” and once more and even again and so on.

For, in the end, we’re bound to get it right.