A PASCHAL GREETING

Blessed be the day when, again, we hear these long-awaited and sacred words, that sound to us like [refrains of] heavenly music.  They fall upon our soul as the rain doth fall upon parch’d earth.  There is, in these words, the very living essence of our faith – all our hope, all our strength, and our invincible victory.

Mankind is exhausted by the tense and vain struggle for existence; by constant alarms and the awaiting of impending calamities; by constant disappointments; by bright hopes, which are repeatedly betrayed; by contact with aggressive world evil, which surrounds us everywhere; and by the reproach of its own conscience, gravely ill, from the innumerable wounds inflicted upon it by sin.

All men long intensely for tranquility and undisturbed peace.  They do not seek fleeting, deceptive, earthly security, but, rather, such complete and perfect happiness as could in no wise be taken away from them.  They desire to contemplate true, divine, heavenly beauty; to hear the happy harmony of worlds; to carry, within their hearts, a pure and sacred love toward all men; and to be delighted profusely with their lives, as with the most sacred gift of God, without any apprehension or fear that it could be snatched away from them at any moment by the lethal hand of death, merciless and implacable.

And so, the radiant Queen of time, the Passover (Pascha) [of Christ], which we await with impatience every year, announces to us, just like the rising of the sun in the springtime, that all these gifts, so very precious to us, have been obtained for us through the Cross and the Resurrection of Christ the Saviour, and have been bestowed upon us for an eternal inheritance; that, henceforth, nothing will be able to take all this away from us.

By the unlimited munificence of His Grace, He [God] gave us more than we are able to contain, or could even wish for.

The Saviour of the world, Who hath arisen from the dead, not only opened the closed gates of Paradise for us, but also, by His Resurrection, manifested the radiance of His Father's eternal glory, upon Whom not even the angels are able to gaze.


In the overabundance of spiritual joy, before which all our mutual offenses and vain dissentions should be silenced, let us forgive everything to one another in the spirit of the Resurrection, embracing one another like brothers, and with one tongue and but a single heart, let us exclaim together with theChurch:








Translated into English by G. Spruksts, from the original Russian text of Metropolitan Anastasii’s 1959 Paschal Message.  English-language translation © 1989 by The St. Stefan Of Perm’ Guild, The Russian Cultural Heritage Society, and the Translator.  All rights reserved.