Metropolitan Anthony Bloom on Love, Suffering and Death

'Whenever we move from this concern about men onto concerns about things, we make things – it may be ideals, ideologies, world outlooks – into an idol, and there is no idol that doesn't claim blood, and blood is always human blood. It will always be men, and women, and children, who will have to pay the cost of it.'
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"Death is really, with its sharpness, and its finality, the test of your readiness to love. I feel the great mistake which a Christian can make,,,is to love himself, to think,and consequently to feel, that with the best of a person things have come to an end. If we really believe what is our Christian faith, that God is a God of the living, that for him and in him everyone is alive, that there is a future which is eternity, then the death of the person is a moment--tragic, painful--of separation...

If a person is truly alive in God and so are you, there is a present and a future and not only a past, and instead of rehearsing the past to make the present more dark, one should face the present, which is a transitory separation, in the expectation of a future meeting, and not simply as wishful thinking, but as an active preparation for it, because in terms of love...if you have loved truly a person, if this life has been meaningful to you, the rest of your life can be marked by the life of the person who is now in God's keeping.

You may be on earth a continuation of all that was good and praiseworthy in the life of this person. You may be the undoing of all the wrong that was in the life of this person, so that this person can in a way continue to have a destiny on earth, because a day will come, thanks to you, what had been begun by this person will have been fulfilled and what had been done amiss might have been put right. And that is an active participation in the eternal destiny. And on the other hand, where our treasure is, there our heart is, and if we truly and earnestly believe that this person is alive, that we will meet, the death of a beloved person makes us already now citizen of the age to come. Not again, only in wishful thinking, but really."

https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1863518503

SCBD commented:

Alas, too many people today forget that capitalism and consumerism are ideologies, too.