– May God grant that there never be hatred among us, may there never be violence in our souls and among us, and that we never see each other as enemies – said His Holiness Serbian Patriarch Porfirije this evening in the Church of Saint Sava in Vračar, where the canon of Saint Andrew of Crete was served on the second day of Great Lent.

Speaking about the essence and meaning of our faith, which is that with our faith and asceticism, prayer, through repentance, love and the grace of God, we move towards the Kingdom of Heaven, His Holiness the Patriarch emphasized: – The content of the Lenten fast itself is what both Saint John the Baptist and our Lord Jesus Christ himself call us to, and that is repentance. Of course, repentance is joy for us – through faith and trust in the Lord – because it is a spiritual washing, a spiritual bathing, a spiritual inner transformation. It is an encounter with ourselves before the face of God, where we have the best possible opportunity to recognize what we have done wrong and badly, and what we should have done but did not. Looking at ourselves in the Lord himself as in a mirror, recognizing our failures and what we did not do but could have done, by the grace of God we gain strength and understand essentially, deeply and spiritually where we should go, just as it is described in the story of the prodigal son. The son, lost and alienated from his father, alienated from his neighbors, alienated from himself, understanding that he had found himself on the wrong path, because he had preserved within himself the image of the father who is love, was able to return to his father’s home. So, through repentance, we want to be different than we are, i.e. we want to be in harmony with the will of God within us, we want to be better even though we know that we cannot do it with our own strength and power. Therefore, we ask the Lord to do it for us, to bring us back to Himself.

– This is especially important in these days of Lent, which should be an opening of hearts to our Lord, but also an opening of our hearts to one another, and we are faced with many contradictions, many misunderstandings, deep misunderstandings and divisions among us. Without true inner transformation and without repentance, it is difficult for us to overcome this, and this is not natural, it is not normal, it does not belong to God's will for us, His plan, for us. God wants us to understand each other, God wants us to have room in our hearts for our neighbor, no matter how different he may be. God wants us to commune with each other, to talk to each other, and that is what we are constantly talking about – emphasized Patriarch Porphyrios and concluded:

– May God grant that this fast be a fast towards peace, towards mutual understanding, towards love, towards fulfilling God’s commandment of love, which not only calls us to love one another, but even tells us to love even our enemies. And we, moving away from that word of God, may not only go down the wrong path, but may also begin to think that we should hate our neighbors, to fight against our neighbors, which God did not allow, because this is a perversion of the Gospel of Christ, a distortion of it, but also the introduction of complete schizophrenia into our lives, in fact the introduction of a deep unrest in our souls that makes us incapable of recognizing the love of God, and therefore His commandment of love. May God grant that there may never be hatred among us, that violence may not reign in our souls and among us, and that we may never see each other as enemies, but as members of one and the same body of Christ called the Church, in which we can come to an encounter with God, to the knowledge of God, to the knowledge of ourselves, to self-knowledge, but also the whole world as a gift from God and our neighbor as our own paradise. Along with repentance and transformation, it is a threefold and multiple gift of God and at the same time the realization of the meaning and purpose of our lives. May you be blessed and may this beginning of Lent truly be the path to victory over the devil, sin and death, the path as it were to the Risen Christ and His Kingdom. Amen.

Source: Serbian Orthodox Church