The spiritual life calls for total commitment. Once we sincerely enter into the discipleship of Christ, we have to reorient not only part, but the whole of our activities and relationships. This explains why our liturgical texts touch all sectors of life. Our Eastern Christian worship aims at penetrating all the facets of our daily life, consecrating them, transforming them, and rendering them divinely meaningful. Let us take as an example the hymn texts used during the Great Fast. Here the specific virtue we are called to pursue is charity, the “queen of all virtues”. Acquiring this spiritual treasure is the only way to combat selfishness, the obstacle to spiritual health. Without charity, the human heart suffers to asphyxiation. Love creates the appropriate spiritual climate for progressive sanctification. By love we are liberated from the bondage of our passions and are reconciled to the Lord.

Arising from charity are good deeds such as almsgiving, identification with our fellowman, and the sheltering of the homeless. Charity is universal, extending to all human beings and knowing no racial discrimination, for all are sisters and brothers, created in the image of God Such openness and unconditional love constitutes the only way to subdue the extreme individualism which not threatens human existence. In one of the hymns of our Church we pray:

Knowing the commandments of our Lord, let us feed those in hunger; let us give the thirsty to drink; let us dress the naked; let us help the strangers; let us visit the sick and those in prison, so that the Judge who one day will judge the whole universe might say also to us: Come, you blessed of my Father and inherit the Kingdom of Heaven which has been prepared for you.

Such prayers are not meant to be just pious words that we repeat from the Gospels. They are meant to be the words that emanate from the very depths of our souls. By saying them we declare our willingness to embrace the Jesus WAY of living – a way of living that truly loves our neighbors as ourselves.