Giving you shall receive

Giving you shall receive

Blind, unwise, and of a narrow mind as I am, I was not foolish and unknowing enough to believe that Christ asks us to give from our surplus: that, even the pagans do.  I was however unskilled and lost in the darkness enough to think – what seems entirely in accord with Christian teaching – that we are asked to give from the little we have, if not even from the very little.  I even went as far as agreeing with the idea that from the parable of the two talants thrown by the widowed woman in the offering box (Mk 12:41-44, Lk 21:1-4) follows that we should give all we have, our entire possessions.

 

A Good Word

A Good Word by Monk Nicolae Steinhardt

„Christ is on the cross, naked; on His head, a crown of thorns; spikes, piercing his ankles and wrists, pin Him to the wood; His body is full of blood and bruises, it secretes only sweat and the silent groan of suffering flesh. He has been slapped, spit upon, pushed around, hit, mocked, He climbed Calvary and more than once fell beneath the burden of the tool of torment. Now He is waiting for agony and shameful death, slow, atrocious, beneath the double sign of mocking and of cursing. He is surrounded, on the foul wasteland of the hill at the edge of the city, only by hostile people and a certain number of the indifferent curious, the usual fans of capital executions and of public cruelties.

 

COMMUNISM – THE REFINED LABORATORY OF TERRORISM

COMMUNISM – THE REFINED LABORATORY OF TERRORISM

NICOLAE STEINHARDT – THE DIARY OF HAPPINESS

Motto: “Envy is a incomparably more active passion than selfishness, which is a benign sickness. And the virus of equality urges us to wish for each other’s harm with obstinacy. The hate for the others can be more powerful than the love for oneself” (N. Steinhardt, 98)

Although literature has a powerful fictional component, being part of the artistic genre, it brings to surface relevant episodes of a political or ideological system, even more convincingly than the mechanisms of historical analysis, which more often than not are cold and unconvincing. Literary confessions, though, lose a part of their fictionality, as they may become a true historical document. As Mircea Eliade put it: “A personal diary has for me a more universal human value than a novel with masses, with tens of thousands of people”1, and Eugen Ionescu gives the same trustful credit to this type of literatyre, considering the diary “preferable to the novel, the tragedy, the poem and the other literary genres, as it is more complete[…] and more true”2. Such is The Diary of Anna Frank, a testimony about the waiting room of the Nazi extermination camp, and The Diary of Happiness, by Nicolae Steinhardt, a testimony about the communist camps and prisons. The literature of confession mediates art with the historical document, and the truth of emotion is more persuasive than that of any scientific recording of the same facts.

 

Nicolae Steinhardt in english

Nicolae Steinhardt
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Nicolae Steinhardt (born Nicu-Aurelian Steinhardt; July 12, 1912-March 29, 1989) was a Romanian writer, Orthodox hermit and father confessor.

Biography

Early life

He was born in Pantelimon commune, near Bucharest, from a Jewish father and a Romanian mother. His father was an engineer, architect and decorated World War I participant (following the Battle of Mărăşti). Due to his lineage from his father side, he was to be subject to anti-semitic discrimination during the fascist governments of World War II Romania.

Between 1919 and 1929, he attended Spiru Haret primary school and college in Bucharest, where, despite his background, he was taught Religion by a Christian priest. His talent for writing was first noticed when he joined the Sburătorul literary circle.