Your Beatitude, our most worthy and most beloved Brother in Christ, Patriarch Teoktist of Romania,
Your Excellencies,
Most holy brother Hierarchs,
Much beloved members of the National Church Assembly,
Beloved brothers and sisters, sons and daughters in the Lord,

For us, who are gathered here today in the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ, Who, according to His promise,  is also here, with us and amongst us, these moments are indeed affecting and joyful to the utmost. We have gathered together to celebrate a multitude of happy anniversaries: the eightieth of the elevation of the Most Holy Autocephalous Church of Romania to Patriarchal rank; the hundred-twentieth of the recognition of her autocephaly by the Ecumenical Patriarchate; the ninetieth of the birthday of her Primate, our beloved brother and concelebrant, His Beatitude, Patriarch Teoktist; and the fifty-fifth of his consecration as Prelate.

It is love that causes the joy of this encounter, and vouchsafes this wondrous reality, in which no linguistic, or ethnic, or any other kind of difference, can do anything to prevent our sense of unity and spiritual communion with everybody. Such an experience of unity is the paramount achievement of human personality, which is why it is also the sign of our spiritual struggle that is the most attacked by the barbs of the evil one.

There are those that seem incapable of comprehending the spiritual unity in which we live within the Orthodox Church, those that hold the declaration of autocephaly of a Church to imply the fragmentation of the unity of the Orthodox Church. But it is not at all so. The unity of the Orthodox Church is neither administrative nor external: it is spiritual. We, Orthodox Christians, experience our unity with one another and – in a different fashion, of course – with all our fellow humans: yes, even with our departed brothers throughout the centuries. We experience the grand unity of God’s creation and imbibe every aspect of this unity as it emerges from the material and the spiritual world. We sense that, despite its variety of forms, the universe, and humanity as part of it, is imbued by one unifying principle and purpose: that there is one purpose and one temporal end, and, furthermore, one centre from which the world emerged and to which it yearningly tends.
For all those who believe in unity, the one, sole model thereof, to which we must all tend, with a view to achieving our ‘likeness’ with our archetypal image, is the unity between the three persons of the Holy Trinity, that perfect unity of will and action. That perfect unity of the faithful, ‘according to the likeness’ of the Trinitarian unity, constitutes the main request of our Lord’s Intercessory prayer, which we all know and which we must always keep within our sight. For our Lord ascribed such great importance to this unity that he caused the persuasiveness of any preaching of our Gospel to depend on whether we have unity amongst ourselves. His utterance “That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me” (John 17, 21) bears witness to the fact that if we, preachers of the Gospel, lack unity amongst ourselves, we will not achieve to convince our fellow humans that our Lord Jesus Christ was sent by God to save the world.

History has confirmed the truth of this utterance of the Lord, because from the moment that Christians, and especially those that preached the Gospel, were split, and divided, and sundered from one another, and set up Christian groups that disagreed with, and confronted one another, the peoples began to distance themselves from such preachers, and from Christ. The secularization, particularly of non-Orthodox Churches, is both evident and marked; both typical and widespread; and, like a virulent disease, it is also spreading over a portion of the Orthodox.

Perhaps it is not readily understood that the failure of our preaching is due to our lack of unity as preachers: quite possibly, the evil one seeks to persuade our preachers that there are other reasons rather than the lack of unity that render their preaching less than persuasive. Then perhaps there are some who remain content with the externalities of an organizational or racial or other such type of unity, who do not realize that the unity of the faithful, as demanded by our Lord, is utterly profound and spiritual, and hearkens to the model of unity offered by the Holy Trinity: “even as we are one”, in the Lord’s words.

Such spiritual unity does not do away with the particular personality of any one person. It does not cause any person, with his or her peculiar features, to disappear. It constitutes an outpouring and expression of love and freedom, and for that it occasions gladness. For it is well known that love and all superior sensibility can only grow in freedom. It can not be achieved by coercion, as a result of pressure from without, or from within. The movement towards unity with the other is the outpouring of love alone: of this attribute of God that is unifying and that causes the world and those that approach Him to cohere. This is the reason why unity amongst the faithful constitutes proof of their unity with Christ. If unity does not exist amongst human beings, it can be adduced that their unity with God is also wanting.

This means that all the actions that strike against the unity of humanity, constitute a departure from God and do not stem from Him. Of course there are those amongst our fellow humans who, in their error, preach hatred and the extermination of other humans, as if that were God’s commandment, and thus they seek to justify their terrorist acts – acts that are of satanic provenance – as acts that are pleasing to God. But they are in error, for God is love: He is filled with mercy and pity and seeks no one’s perdition. This is the faith and the living experience of us orthodox Christians. It is the actual living experience whose truth the Saints have known, as have many ordinary people amongst the faithful, and therefore they speak of it from their experience. Gladness and peace stem from love and from a sense of unity. Distress and sadness, disorderliness and war come from souls that are deficient in love, and are dominated by feelings of hatred, loathing, bitterness and division.

Of course we realize that, for us humans, the perfection of our unity as sought by Christ, and as may be achieved within Him, is no easy task. The advice of the Holy Fathers is to regard our fellow humans as at one with us and to feel their pain as if it were our own, and also their gladness as if it were our own, such being the ideal whose summit very few attain, though it is an ideal to whose summit all of us Orthodox Christians should aspire.

There is, however, one serious obstacle. This is each one’s will, which is usually put first, and seeks that the will of all others conform to it. Our own will is of course the unavoidable consequence of the independence of each one’s personality. That is why it is not possible, or, to say the least, it is not easy to coordinate human will into one composite resultant, that would be commonly acceptable. The only way to harmonize the wills of all human beings with one another is to harmonize them with one paramount will, revered by all. This sublime will cannot but be God’s will. If in its place we posit any human will whatsoever, conflict is most certainly bound to arise. Therefore, perfect unity for humanity can only be achieved within our God Jesus Christ, in Whom all is recapitulated.

Until this is achieved it is necessary to look towards such unity as towards a desirable goal and to climb the ladder leading to it step by step. In all areas of ecclesiastical life, and also of political, international, social and familiar life, we are lagging behind in achieving this objective. The germ of division is widespread and continually causes rifts and conflicts. Tolerance, conciliatoriness and forgiveness are not held in sufficiently high regard. Therefore there lies before us an extremely broad field for action in bringing about the inculcation of the notion of unity as a necessary prerequisite for peace and prosperity, and also for our profound and inalienable joy.
Such a joy we are enjoying today, as, in a spirit of unity with you, we jointly celebrate the anniversaries we have mentioned: and this joy is such that no one deprive it from us, for we know that the autocephaly and emancipation granted by the Mother Church to her daughter come-of-age, the Most Holy Church of Romania, has rather consolidated, and most assuredly has in no way detracted from the bonds of love and cooperation inspiring both of what have already become our sister Churches.

With such feelings of love and unity we congratulate you upon these anniversaries and wish and pray for all the blessings of the Lord to be showered upon you, and for your progress in all good works, and especially such as lie within Christ’s spirit of unity – which is the foundation of all spiritual ascent and of all inalienable joy – to be vouchsafed to all your Church, and Nation, and People, and to each several member thereof. May it be so.