The Repetition of Love

An excerpt from Hieromonk (now Metropolitan) Amfilohije's eulogy in memory of Archimandrite Justin:

Somebody might say that Father Justin repeats himself when talking about Christ in his works. Yet, his repetition is the talk of a baby to its beloved mother. His repetition is the repetition of love: as much as we love someone, we repeat more often the words of our love, and it will never bore us to repeat at every moment and continuously the same words. Thus, for Father Justin it did not become boring to repeat the name of the Lord God and his and our salvation, to pour forth before Him his own sorrow and his joy, to offer his love as a fragrant sacrifice, and through it, his entire being.

Why did Father Justin emphasize so often the personality of the God-Man Christ? Because more than anybody else in our time, except for his teacher Bishop Nikolai [Velimorovic], he felt that all of European culture is rushing into a horrible blind alley; that it is returning to ancient polytheism and idolatry simply by overlooking, forgetting and banning from this universe and from the human heart, human culture and history, from the life of human society, the only true God and true man, the only true Lord and Savior, the only eternal Word of God. He felt and attested, as nobody before him among us, that the Word of God, through His creative act and His incarnation, united in Himself the divine and human; that He is the true God and true man; that He united within Himself all worlds; that He is the First and the Last; that everything leads and rushes toward Him, and that everything grows toward Him until it grows to the heights of Christ—until everything that exists reaches its fullness, until everything achieves its fullness in Christ the God-Man. Sensing that frightening danger which overshadows all of European civilization because of the fight against Christ's Spirit, he continuously put forward and underscored the importance of Christ's image for the history of man, for the past, for the present, for the future.

Read the entire eulogy here. Photograph, L to R: Fr (now Metropolitan) Amfilohije, Fr Justin, Fr Nikolaj.