In memory of Petko Hinov (1972-2022)

 

Petko Hinov

 

Translated from Bulgarian
VID

THOUGHTS ON THE EDGE OF ETERNITY

24.02.2019 PETKO HINOV

We all walk on the edge of eternity - no one ever returns from there, just as the infant does not return to the mother's womb. This world is like the womb in which the infant matures. The goal of this world is the fruit, the human fruit – [namely] the soul saved for eternity, just as the goal of the womb is not the womb itself, but its offspring.

Only a moment separates us from eternity. But how many realize this? Just a pushing, a stabbing, a hitting, a falling… And we are already there: naked, unprepared, with minds still wandering in the madness and mysteries of this world. Imagine infants who are in love with their mother's womb, who prefer its full-blooded darkness to the azure, fragrant [wide] spaces of eternity which we have been created for. Imagine the insult of a mother whose child does not want to be born, to see her, to learn to talk to her, [and] to love her. Imagine the insult of the Doctor who wants a new person to be born into the world. Imagine the futility of searching for eternity where time – doomed to death – conceals its miserable temporary power in the rags of earthly arrogance. What a sad humanity!

The Church - The Orthodox Church of Christ has been founded in order to give birth to us for eternity, for us to evolve from children of animals (yes, by flesh and blood!) into Children of God (born of His Spirit). Mankind, this new animal kingdom that parasitizes on God's gifts and the mercy of God's Spirit, is especially pitiful today, when ugly sin imposes its power everywhere. Prior to our baptism, prior to our deification in Christ [theosis], we are indeed animals with reason and children of animals with reason. Our thought gravitates toward the animal [side], and were it not for God's grace and mercy, we would have been living to prove our kinship with the animal world, if not our origin from it. Man begins with God. Man without God ends up with the animal. In this sense, many monkey phenomena in modern times (one of them being the complete sexual shamelessness) have human origins. Carnal wisdom is the first fruit of forgetting the eternity that makes this world, this womb, to exist. How very close to us eternity is every [single] moment! Only God's mercy protects the infant in the mother's womb so that he would not be born dead. Glory to Your long-suffering, O Lord!

(P. Hinov, November 15, 2007)