17. Delight

It was customary to believe that delight was something wrong, immoral, shameful. That if we speak of spirituality, of love, of holiness, and of God, it must surely be about suffering and great torment.

God is, first and foremost, Delight. Christ left us 10 commandments. And this is not about “thou shalt not kill and thou shalt not steal” — those are the commandments of Moses, the Commandments of the Old Testament. Christ, however, left 10 commandments of the New Testament. Of them, 1 commandment is about Love, and 9 are the Beatitudes — the commandments of Blessedness. And what is Blessedness? Blessedness is the highest degree of delight.

Christ simply shows us a specific path to Delight. Not the one we are accustomed to. He says — delight differs from delight, and that delight with which You indulged Your body through external sources: gluttony, lust, fornication, alcohol, drugs, entertainment, power over others — destroyed You, literally devouring Your energy (which, let me remind You, was granted to You for 120 years, yet You sought to spend it — all of it — in a weekend)). Nor could it truly be called delight; external pleasures always left an undertone of dissatisfaction, it was never enough for You, You always expected more from them — in anticipation, yet in the end — You were disappointed. And each time such delight

became less and less delightful, ever more dim, fading away to nothing. The very capacity for delight was lost. In essence, it was bitterness in a sweet wrapper.

Yet there is such a Delight, says Christ, the Supreme Delight, inherent to Your nature — which depends on nothing external, and which is not only more powerful than all the external pleasures You have known, — such that it is truly delight-Delight, delight to the degree of Blessedness, and it not only brings a sense of perfect fulfillment and fullness, but with each time becomes ever more powerful and diverse. This is the Delight of true — absolute, unconditional, eternal — Love, the feeling of Divine Power, the shared experiencing of Truth Itself — the Delight of merging with Your Divine nature, with God, with the very Source of Delight within You.

It is precisely this state of Blessedness that Christ calls the Kingdom of God, and He specifically adds, so that we would have no doubt that this is about an inner state, and not some external mythical, paradisiacal realm:

“For behold, the Kingdom of God is within you.”

Yes, this Delight requires a certain effort on our part, an exertion of will; that is why the holy fathers say of it that it is sweetness wrapped in a bitter wrapper. But ponder this: will, self-mastery, in and of itself, is a thing

delightful. In the end, we arrive at the perfect formula: delight that magnifies Delight. Will is delight; not without reason in the Russian language is the word “volya” also synonymous with freedom. Will is delight, for it is so pleasing to feel that no external temptations have mastery over You, that You Yourself command Your attention, Your bodily urges, and know how to direct them toward what You need, and not what Your microbiome and hormones (read: demons) want. It is so blissful to be truly free, to feel this freedom, to delight in this freedom! Real Freedom instead of the illusion provided by money and external power. For in essence, money and external power are merely a means to satisfy slavish lusts. For Real Freedom and true Delight, neither is needed — neither money nor power — for Real Freedom and true Delight, only self-mastery is required.

And it was for the sake of this Delight that the saints renounced the world, entered into asceticism, fasted, performed feats of unceasing prayer, stylitism, and vigils — for the sake of Delight, the Supreme Delight of union with God within oneself. And thanks to their ministry, which acquired this Grace, this Blessedness in all its Divine fullness, filling through a chain of generations the Treasury of the Spirit for this very time in which You and I are blessed to live, a time that the holy fathers and Christ Himself called the “age to come,” — thanks to the cumulative

feat of the saints, to us — today — this Delight is given almost freely.

All that is required of You is to declare Your will by partaking in Christ's Communion of Love, and, having united with God within Yourself, to cleanse Your body and soul — through external fasting, external abstinence, yet within — through a true feast of Truth and Spirit, the Living Word of the Divine Presence within You, the Living Word of Inner Dialogue with God, the Delight of Love that knows no equal in the richness of its lived depth, power, and variety of shades — from soulful awe to Ecstatic Blessedness and the Divine Grace of Truth, which in the moment of the One Now, in the act of Union with all That Is, reveals to You the entire multidimensional and multi-world picture of Being. The Being of God, the Being of Spirit, the Being of the entire Universe, which — at this moment You clearly see and experience with Your entire being — is all, entirely, contained within You. For We Are One.

God is Delight. And God as Our Cumulative Highest Potential bestows this Delight upon You not according to Your individual merits, but by the Grace of God, redeeming Your soul, and body, and mind from all suffering, fears, and pain, from all this bondage of sin and dependencies on the external, from the dungeon of beliefs and convictions imposed upon You and unconsciously adopted, — liberating You through the simple act of Communion with His Divine Consciousness, and through the awareness and acceptance — on

Your part — of this Redemptive Sacrifice of Christ, the Collective Christ, who died for the sins of all Humanity, for all experiences of humanity's departure from its true nature, who died as the old man and was resurrected as the New Man, Deified and Holy — resurrected for Eternal Life and Eternal Delight in the Divine qualities of Love, Power, Truth, and Eternal co-creation with the Father in the inexhaustible Abundance of the Mother — resurrected in You, My beloved friend.