Years pass, and every year the Week of Prayer for the unity of Christianity and the churches is held; but what unity do we hope for?
The Patriarch of thrice-blessed memory, Ignatius Hazim, says: ”The unity of the Church is not that the Catholic become Orthodox; this is a figment of the imagination. We must reform our thinking. The Catholics will not become Orthodox, and the Orthodox will not become Catholics. People do not return to situations that have their justifications.” (1)
With these words the Patriarch summarizes many rounds of discussions and attempts that will not bear fruit, for we cannot pluck the stars with two hands. Therefore, in my opinion, the ancient understanding of unity has weighed heavily upon everyone’s shoulders: they are neither able to achieve complete unity, nor do they want to return to the years of enmity. So the Week of Prayer comes as an attempt expressing an inner longing for complete unity, but unfortunately it has become annual folklore that offers nothing toward the lost unity — a week of courtship between the churches, as though we were commemorating what was lost centuries ago, with no tangible changes on the ground. Is not the reality of schism a declaration of the Church’s failure to carry out the message of Christ? And paradoxically, atheism and the many ideologies gathered the hearts of thousands that the Church could not gather after two thousand years of teaching and evangelization, as the late Patriarch Ignatius Hazim expresses it (2).
Is not what Christians hate the work of their own hands? For division does not come from a vacuum, nor does it come from God. Therefore whoever prays for unity must not raise to God hands that are empty of it.
So do we stop? No, never — but we must reform our thinking, as Patriarch Ignatius Hazim expressed it.
First: we Christians believe in the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Resurrection, and we all recite one creed; we are united, whether we like it or not, in the name of Christ.
The second matter is that Christians in the East have one destiny, one reality, one set of problems, and one set of fears; for the problems do not distinguish an Orthodox from a Catholic, and this is what we have seen in the current crisis. This impels us to unite our work in reality, and the simplest expression of this desire is to celebrate Pascha together. Here I am not raising a desire for discussion or a question needing an answer, for we have passed beyond this question, and we await a practical application that unites the Christians who live in a fragmented East, waiting for a glimmer of hope in a new land where harmony and justice prevail.
For the unity of the feast expresses the unity of the reality of Christians and the unity of their destiny in the East. Before one church unites with another, the simple believers must unite. Metropolitan Georges Khodr says: ”It is now my conviction that the common people may be closer to the spiritual reality than the company of the learned, if they insist on the necessity of fixing a single day for the Resurrection.” (3)
We live in a region that wants to breathe life, that wants not to see itself divided; for the believers have grown weary, and the difference in the date of the feast has become a stumbling block — nay, a cause of despair and a cause of mockery, (“the name of the Lord is blasphemed because of you,” says the prophet). It has become a burden laid upon the shoulders of our families. For what expression of our bad condition is there except when the Orthodox father celebrates without his daughter who married a Catholic, or his sister who married a Maronite?
A Catholic parish celebrates Palm Sunday while the Orthodox parish celebrates Pascha. Has Christ been divided as the people have been divided, so that each group has its own Christ?
The third matter: we must realize that theology developed for each church separately throughout the past centuries, and each formed itself through it, saw Christ through it, and expressed Him through it. Therefore we cannot shatter what past centuries made in a few short years.
The truth of the work of the Week of Unity is that we set out from it to make every week a week of unity (I do not mean here the one chalice), and that we change the thinking that we need to work together for the advancement of justice in the East so that it is realized for all, not for each community to work for its own sons. And the important matter is that we understand that the unity the East needs now is not a single authority, but a unity characterized by harmony rather than division, by consonance rather than dissonance.
Is not schism the work of our hands? Then unity is the work of our hands, if we wish to see a new feast and a new Pascha.
References:
1. Nafahat Antakya (Breaths of Antioch), Ignatius IV, Patriarch of Antioch and All the East, p. 164.
2. Ignatius IV, Patriarch of Antioch and All the East, Positions and Sayings, Balamand Publications, p. 122.
3. Hadith al-Ahad (The Sunday Talk), Religion and Religions (2), Metropolitan Georges Khodr, p. 197.