From the Rector
The Week of July 13, 2025
Dear friends,
A parishioner and I were chatting last week about hell and the nature of evil (as one does!), and it turned out that we had both remembered — separately, that very morning — a passage from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. A Russian monk, Father Zossima, is asked about hell, and he replies, “What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”
For Zossima, hell is the incapacity to open one’s heart to another, and the one who refuses to love is exiled in a prison of projection and fear. Without love, our hearts turn to stone, and we shut out God and grow deaf to our neighbors.
The many ways in thought, word, and deed that we diminish the lives of others become the hell of our loneliness and isolation. Scripture reminds us, though, that God “made of one blood all the peoples of the earth” (Acts 17:26), and that “there is therefore now no condemnation” (Romans 8:1). Which is to say, heaven is our true home, where love prevails, casts out fear, and gives to willing hearts the courage to risk pain and love even more. In Jesus, we have a moral obligation to hold one another in life.
Sunday’s Gospel from Saint Luke is glorious in this light — the Parable of the Good Samaritan, and the question posed by a lawyer to Jesus: “Who is my neighbor?” (See Luke 10:25-37) It’s a question that echoes Father Zossima: “Hell is the suffering of being unable to love.”
“Who is my neighbor?” is, at its core, another way of asking how wide we are obliged to open our hearts to others? Surely, we are not expected to give and give without end, to forgive the unforgivable, to show mercy even to those who have done us wrong.
“There is no law against love,” Saint Paul says (Galatians 5:22-23)—for love is the very summary and fulfillment of the law. Which calls to mind the beautiful collect we prayed last Sunday:
“O God, who hast taught us to keep all thy commandments by loving thee and our neighbor: Grant us the grace of thy Holy Spirit, that we may be devoted to thee with our whole heart, and united to one another with pure affection; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the same Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.” (BCP 179, Collect for Proper 9)
Will we survive the onslaught of hate and violence in our days with hearts still tuned to love and cherish one another with pure affection—or will our hatred and violence and resentment be the inheritance of our children, and their children after them?
Yours in Christ~
Fr. Peter
