Father Alexander Schmemann was the dean of Saint Vladimir’s Seminary in Crestwood, New York, and the spiritual father, teacher, pastor, and friend of countless people not only in America but around the world. He died on December 13, 1983, the same day of the year as Saint Herman of Alaska.
Father Alexander learned that he had cancer in the fall of 1982. He greeted the disease as the opportunity for Christian witness. As a person who spoke so much about Christ, he said, it was fitting that he be put to the test to confirm in action, by God’s grace and power, all that he had proclaimed in words. The disease was God’s gift to him of the possibility to practice what he himself had preached so forcefully and so enthusiastically for so long.
Father Alexander underwent his personal “Winter Pascha” in December of 1983 as he “passed over from death into life,” in what Mrs. Schmemann, in her letter to the seminary community, called, the “feast of Father’s dying.”
Truly, truly I say to you, he who hears My word, and believes in Him who sent Me, has eternal life; he does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life. (In 5: 24)
Father Alexander received Holy Communion for the last time on Sunday, December 11, the Sunday of the Holy Forefathers. After partaking of the Holy Mysteries, now at home, Father listened to his family and friends sing the prefeast hymns of Christmas which he especially loved. When the praying and singing was over, he said simply, “Thank you.”
The day of Father’s funeral was sunny and cloudless. Everyone remarked that it was like the Lord’s Pascha in the spring. And everyone experienced, in hearing Father Alexander’s own words which were read at the Divine Liturgy, what Pascha always means for those who believe:
The purpose of Christianity is not to help people by reconciling them with death, but to reveal the Truth about life and death in order that people may be saved by this Truth ….If the purpose of Christianity were to take away from man the fear of death, to reconcile him with death, there would be no need for Christianity, for other religions have done this, indeed, better than Christianity.1
The Church is the entrance into the risen life of Christ; it is communion in life eternal, “joy and peace in the Holy Spirit.” And it is the expectation of the “day without evening” of the Kingdom; not of any “other world,” but of the fulfillment of all things and all life in Christ. In Him death itself has become an act of life, for He has filled it with Himself, with His love and light. In Him “all things are yours; whether … the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come; all are yours; and ye are Christ’s; and Christ is God’s (1 Cor 3:21-23). And if I make this new life mine, mine this hunger and thirst for the Kingdom, mine this expectation of Christ, mine the certitude that Christ is Life, then my very death will be an act of communion with Life. For neither life nor death can separate us from the love of Christ.
I do not know when and how the fulfillment will come. I do not know when all things will be consummated in Christ. I know nothing about the “whens” and “hows.” But I know that in Christ this great Passage, the Pascha of the world has begun, that the light of the “world to come” comes to us in the joy and peace of the Holy Spirit, for Christ is risen and Life reigneth. Finally I know that it is this faith and this certitude that fill with a joyful meaning the· words of St Paul which we read each time we celebrate the “passage” of a brother, his falling asleep in Christ: For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord (I Thess. 4:16-17).
~Adapted from Thomas Hopko, The Winter Pascha: Readings for the Christmas-Epiphany Season
1 Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973) p. 99.
