PASTORAL LETTER
ON THE FEAST OF THE NATIVITY OF OUR LORD, 2025

† IOAN CASIAN
by the grace of God
Bishop of the Romanian Orthodox Diocese of Canada

To the beloved Clergy and the righteous Christian faithful,
peace and joy from Christ the Lord,
and from us, archpastoral blessings!

“And because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son

 into your hearts, crying out, “Abba, Father!”

Therefore, you are no longer a slave but a son, and if a son,

then an heir of God through Christ.
(Galatians 4, 6-7)

Reverend Fathers,
Beloved faithful,

The Feast of the Nativity of the Lord is a moment of joy and blessing. Every believer awaits it with great longing, preparing for it spiritually. The believer feels that the Nativity of the Lord is a moment that brings him closer to God, for God Himself takes the first step toward him. If for centuries man felt solitude, sadness, and estrangement from God because of sin, the birth of the Lord brings him hope, joy, and trust.

The cry of the prophet David from the Old Testament: “Lord, I have cried unto Thee, hear me; attend to the voice of my prayer when I cry unto Thee. Let my prayer be set forth before Thee as incense; and the lifting of my hands as an evening sacrifice”[1] is still heard today in our souls and hearts. The Church expresses this cry in the service of Vespers. Its order precisely expresses this search of man for God. Fallen man feels the distance from God and the estrangement from his original state. We see this situation expressed in Adam’s words: “I was naked, and I hid myself.”[2] This is the experience which accompanies man across his entire history, full of pains, conflicts, and death. Even though God accompanies him by His providence throughout, the awareness of the abyss created by sin and the concrete awareness of its consequences stand before man at every moment.

Why has man come to the state of sin?

“Because He who brought all things into existence by His word alone, - says St. Gregory Palamas, - when He shaped our nature with His own hand from the earth and breathed into it life from Himself, left it - being rational and master of its own will - to guide itself through its own thoughts and to move according to its own movement; but it, left to itself and deceived by the counsel of the evil one and unable to stand against his plotting, did not guard that which was according to nature, but slipped into what was against nature.”[3]

The great Athonite hierarch shows us that God is the creator of man with all the laws of his nature. He gives him true life, with reason and will. He gives him the freedom to organize and direct himself according to his own conscience. However, tempted by the devil, man lets himself be deceived by the illusion of becoming God by himself and immediately discovers with bitterness that this means nothing but darkness, loneliness, and death. Man distances himself from the order of his own nature placed by God at the foundation of his life and growth. Over time he realizes that by himself he cannot rebuild his nature but needs God.

Why did the birth of our Savior Jesus Christ have to take place directly through the acting of the Holy Spirit?

St. Gregory Palamas again answers: “For if He had been born from seed, He would no longer have been a new man, and being according to the old imprint and heir of that fall, He could not have received within Himself the fullness of the pure divinity and become an inexhaustible fountain of sanctification; and thus not only would He not have had the full power to wash away the impurity of those ancestors - an impurity coming from sin - but He would not even have been sufficient for the sanctification of those who followed.”[4]

The first man was created by God directly. Through the fall in Paradise, man distanced himself from God and from this pure state of his nature. Passions, sin, and death entered man’s life, becoming the daily leaven of his way of being. In his nature were imprinted all these consequences of sin, transmitted from generation to generation.

For God to be able to fully restore the life of the beginning, He needed to act as He did at the beginning - directly, through His action by the Son and the Holy Spirit - taking into account these consequences. Therefore, the conception takes place directly through the intervention of the Holy Spirit so that man may be fully restored by receiving the perfect divinity within him. At the same time, the humanity assumed by Christ is concrete, taken from the Virgin Mary, because this is the purpose of His incarnation - to restore the communion of man with God and the health of human nature from the beginning in His own Person - so that it may become a spring of holiness and perfection for all of us.

Here is how St. Gregory Palamas understands what happens in the mystery of the Incarnation: “Therefore, now He not only forms it anew with His hand in an incomprehensible way, but He also holds it with Himself; He not only takes it in His hands and lifts it from its fall, but He also clothes Himself in it in an ineffable manner and unites Himself with it inseparably, being born God and man alike from a virgin - so that He might take the nature He fashioned in the first human persons - from this Virgin - so as to make man new.”[5]

In His great love for mankind, seeing man’s suffering caused by sin, God not only heals the sickness of sin and death which had become part of his life, but lifts him in an indescribable way, holds him with Himself, and introduces him into divine life through the human nature He takes from the Virgin Mary. Without this intervention of God, the nature of man could not have been renewed according to the model of the first, sinless one.

St. Gregory Palamas further presents this connection between the Person of our Savior Jesus Christ, as the foundation of the Church, and the Church as the communion of those who believe and belong to it: “The Lord Himself came and saved us, becoming man like us for our sake and remaining unchanged God. For building now the new Jerusalem[6] and raising His temple from living stones and gathering us as His holy and universal Church, He places at its foundation - which is Christ - the eternally flowing source of grace. For the life that is full, sovereign, and eternal, the nature that is all-wise and all-powerful, unites with that which was deceived by evil counsel and enslaved to the evil one through weakness and which lay in the unfathomable depths of Hades due to the lack of divine life, so that He may bring to it wisdom, power, freedom, and life that does not fall.”[7]

Christ is the foundation of the Church. His sinless humanity becomes the foundation of the Church as a community of believers. From Christ, the divine and ever-flowing spring, flow the grace and gifts that transform and transfigure the Church and the lives of the believers. The union between the divine and perfect nature and the enslaved human nature causes the latter to be permeated and illumined by the divine light of which it was deprived because of sin. This new communion given by Christ, which rebuilds human nature, grants it divine graces and virtues such as divine wisdom, life-giving power, full freedom, and perfect life. Through participation in these divine virtues, every believer becomes the image and likeness of Christ. In this way the Church reflects divine life and becomes the image of Trinitarian communion here on earth.

How do the Church and its members live this new life?

Holy Father and Confessor Dumitru Stăniloae tells us: “The Church lives from another life than that of natural humanity, although this is not abolished but imprinted by the Spirit of the deified body of Christ - better said, opened to the divine infinity of this body and sharing in it.”[8] The Church is a mystery. Its mystical life, the life of every believer, is a participation in the divine life of the body of Christ. The Church - the life of the believers who form it - is a life in and through Christ.

The same St. Dumitru Stăniloae continues: “The glory with which the Church is filled coincides with the full attainment of the quality of sons of God by its members, a quality that means the most intimate communion with the Father. It consists not only in the vision but also in the sharing of the glory of the Son which the Word of God incarnate and the head of the Church has as man. ... But the state of sonship is obtained through a transcending beyond the natural and limited life, into the light of God’s infinite life, into the intimacy of the filial relationship with Him.”[9]

Each member of the Church, sharing in the glory of the Son and entering into intimate communion with God, receives the quality of son or daughter of God - the vocation for which the human person was created. Through this way of being, one surpasses natural and limited life, bound by sin and death, and opens oneself toward God’s infinity and eternity.

This is why St. Gregory Palamas expresses the joy of the union of heaven and earth in the event of the Lord’s Nativity: “For today I see heaven and earth of equal honor, and the ascent of all things below toward what is above equal to the descent of those above. … For nothing among the works accomplished by God from eternity is more universally beneficial or more divine than the Feast of the Nativity of the Lord which we celebrate today.”[10]

The Incarnation of the Lord lays the firm foundation of this path whose end is righteousness, deification, and eternal life.

Beloved brothers and sisters in the Lord,

The year 2025 is the Centennial Year of the Romanian Patriarchate and the Commemorative Year of Romanian Orthodox Spiritual Fathers and Confessors of the 20th century. This year also marks 1700 years since the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea (325 A.D.).

The Holy Fathers of the conciliar period, as well as the Romanian Orthodox Spiritual Fathers and Confessors of the 20th century, stand as examples of God’s children who bore witness to their faith in different times, even to the point of giving their lives for Christ.

The saints are our guides and protectors; they are intercessors before God and living examples who form the living and confessing Church. In times of turmoil and trial, they fought for the dignity of the human person and bore witness to faith in God, knowing that only through this could they continue the apostolic mission entrusted by Christ first to the Holy Apostles and, through them, to us all until the end of the ages.

Their witness calls us today as well - in an increasingly secular and fragmented society, full of contradictions, injustice, and conflict - to bear witness to the dignity of the human person as the image and likeness of God; to the need for uprightness of faith; to the necessity of practicing the love of God and of neighbor; and to unceasing prayer for the reception of deifying grace leading to the transformation and transfiguration of our lives.

Let us live this time of the Nativity of the Lord with joy and hope, with trust in God, and with renewed zeal in our witness, as persons fully responsible for our mission as Christians in our generation.

On the Feasts of the Nativity of the Lord, the New Year, and Theophany, I extend to you the greeting of St. Paul the Apostle: “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit! Amen” (Philemon 1, 25).

A peaceful and joyful Feast of the Nativity of the Lord!

A blessed New Year!

Your brother in communion of prayer to Christ the Lord,
† IOAN CASIAN

Saint-Hubert/Montreal 2025

_______________________

[1] Psalm 140, 1-2

[2] Genesis 3, 10

[3] Saint Gregory Palamas. Homilies (vol. 3). Iași: Doxologia Publishing House, 2012, pp. 186–187.

[4] Ibidem, pp. 186-187                       

[5] Ibidem, pp. 187

[6] The Church (n.a.)

[7] Ibidem, pp. 187

[8] Rev. Prof. Dumitru Stăniloae. Orthodox Dogmatic Theology (vol. 2 / 3rd ed.). Bucharest: EIBMBOR Publishing House, 2003, pp. 224.

[9] Ibidem, pp. 225

[10] St. Gregory Palamas. Homilies, p. 181-182