Who art in the heavens Where our Father is, there, too is our Fatherland. Pagans who see their parent only in this material world, either as man, or as a river ("Mother Ganges, as the Hindus say), or as the sun (as the ancient Egyptians), or the moon (Assyrians, Arabians), or fire (Persians), cannot believe in any Fatherland other than the worldly one. But we Christians have learned from Christ the Lord about our true Father who is in the heavens, and consequently, about our our Fatherland which, too, is in the heavens. The Fatherland is a great treasure and the Lord has said: "For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." If our treasure is in the heavens, then our heart must be there, as well. From this we deduce that we can organize our earthly life in this manner only if we do not deem it to be our primary life, but only a preparatory one. Our social relationships can easily be brought into harmony, if we think very attentively about our soon-to-be transition into our heavenly fatherland. Those who have not embraced the world with their hearts have been the most successful organizers of earthly societies. In the common life of the monasteries, in which the brotherhood at times numbered more than 10.000, the social structure was as simple as it was perfect. Thy all asked first of all for the heavenly kingdom and thus their small earthly kingdoms were kept in order and harmony without any trouble, a thing rarely found even amongst the closest of relatives. In our times, many lose sleep over organizing the whole world as one big family, while on the other hand, they divorce their wives and take their children to court. Not even two can function together, but they aim at organizing millions into one big community! Christians must understand, in all seriousness, that their true Father and their true Fatherland are in the heavens; as long as they insist on perceiving their treasure as an earthly one and as long as they embrace with their hearts this miserable treasure, the louder Christian peoples and nations will cry about a social structure and the deeper they will stumble from chaos to chaos.
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