At the Last Judgment, I will not be asked whether I satisfactorily practiced asceticism, or how many genuflections I have made before the divine altar. I will be asked whether I fed the hungry, clothed the naked, visited the sick and the prisoner in his jail. That is all that will be asked.
If, however, this sacrificial and self-giving love stands at the center of the Church's life, what then are its boundaries, where are the peripherals of this center?
In this sense one can speak of the whole of Christianity as of an eternal offering of an extra-Templar Liturgy. What does this mean?
It means that we must offer the Bloodless sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-offering love not only in a specific place, upon the one altar of only one Temple, but that the whole world, in this sense, becomes the one altar of the one Temple, and that we must offer our hearts, under the species of bread and wine, in order that our hearts may be transformed into Christ's love.
We offer them so that He may abide in them, that they may become hearts of Godmanhood, and that He would give these hearts of ours as food for the world, that He would commune the whole world with these sacrificed hearts of ours, in order that we would be one with Him, in order that not we would live but Christ would live in us, becoming incarnate in our flesh, offering our flesh upon Golgotha's Cross, resurrecting it, offering it as the sacrifice of love for the sins of the world, receiving it from us as a sacrifice of love to Himself.
Here indeed Christ is present in every way and in all things. Here is the measureless love of Christ, here is the only way towards Christmanhood which is revealed to us in the Gospel.
Mother Maria Skobtsova,
martyr of Ravensbrük