MOSCOW, March 31 (Itar-Tass) – Patriarch of Moscow and all Russia Kirill I marked the second Sunday of the Great Lent by attending a divine liturgy in the wooden Church of Transfiguration that was built in the 1880’s in the district of Bogorodskoye.
In his traditional pastoral address to the congregation, which he made after the liturgy, Kirill linked the laws of materialist physics to the teaching on the Light of Tabor that was promulgated by a great medieval Eastern Orthodox theologian, St. Gregory Palamas.
Eastern Orthodox world traditionally venerates St. Gregory Palamas on the second Sunday of the Lent as the father of the Church who formulated the concept of the light shed on the people by the Savior on Mount Tabor.
Kirill I drew an allegoric analogy between the development of humankind and the second law of thermodynamics that includes entropy – a measure expressing order, disorder and/or chaos in a thermodynamic system.
Humankind has gone to really great lengths in destroying the design of God, thus bringing about wars, technogene disasters, and illnesses, and now only God’s Grace can abate this civilizational entropy, the Patriarch said.
He recalled the experience gained by holy fathers of the Christian Church, which proves that a simple short prayer saying ‘Jesus Christ Son of God have mercy on me’ can help when it aims to reach the heart.
“It establish a practical communication with God and finds reflection in the condition of the soul, which is made manifest in a man’s brightened look.
“The imprint of the Divine Light, of the Heavenly Grace, is reflected on us mundane people,” Kirill I said. “Each of us has certainly met someone who we would say about ‘What a bright person, how great it feels to be side by side with him!’.”
“The Lent aims to help people acquire the Heavenly Grace, which is a crucial factor for getting over the Illness – and I capitalize the first letter – not only the physical illness but also the spiritual one, the illness plaguing ourselves, our society, and our country, the illness of the entire human race,” the Patriarch said.
“No system can overpower the entropy if it relies on its internal resources only,” he said. “Heavenly power and energy from the outside is the sole force capable of curbing the entropy, dilapidation and demise of mankind,” Kirill I said.