{"id":8639,"date":"2020-08-02T12:00:28","date_gmt":"2020-08-02T16:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/orthodoxinsight.com\/?p=8639"},"modified":"2020-08-01T08:03:23","modified_gmt":"2020-08-01T12:03:23","slug":"sergei-komarov-on-christians-and-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/orthodoxinsight.com\/?p=8639","title":{"rendered":"Sergei Komarov on Christians and Love\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cIn the first centuries of Christianity, entering the Church meant a fundamental change in someone\u2019s life. Rare exceptions apart, no one was accepted into a Christian community immediately. A catechumen was expected to witness the faith by his spiritual and moral transformation and prove his faithfulness to Christ even before his Baptism.<\/p>\n

The sacrament of Baptism bestowed a \u201cseal\u201d of the grace of the Holy Spirit on the transformation of the heart that ideally had already happened to a believer! \u2026This is something we don\u2019t have in our days.<\/p>\n

We try to implement a different idea which is noble as such: to make someone a good Christian from childhood (to have him baptized, take him to Communion, instruct him in faith, and so on). But this idea works very badly due to a wide range of factors\u2014for example, weak integration of parents and godparents into Church life, lack of catechization in parishes, the indifference of clergy to these matters\u2026 As a result we have what we have: there are far more Christians than good and kind people! It\u2019s a paradox!<\/p>\n

True, a Christian is molded by fasts, prayers, abstinence, bows, and other ascetic exercises, along with the participation in Church sacraments. But all of these are instruments to attain our aim. And our only aim is love.\u201d<\/p>\n

– Article in orthochristian.com<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

***Now and then we include a particularly thought provoking or inspiring excerpt not from one of our regular \u2018Elders\u2019***<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cIn the first centuries of Christianity, entering the Church meant a fundamental change in someone\u2019s life. Rare exceptions apart, no one was accepted into a Christian community immediately. A catechumen […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8639","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-modern-orthodox-elders","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/orthodoxinsight.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8639","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/orthodoxinsight.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/orthodoxinsight.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orthodoxinsight.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orthodoxinsight.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8639"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/orthodoxinsight.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8639\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8641,"href":"https:\/\/orthodoxinsight.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8639\/revisions\/8641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/orthodoxinsight.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orthodoxinsight.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orthodoxinsight.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}