The following quote from Patriarch Daniel's Enthronement Address, from September 30, 2007, has a couple of poignant reminders for those of the Orthodox faith inside and outside of Romania:
Secondly, it is our constant duty to promote brotherly communion, coresponsibility and cooperation with all the hierarchs of the Holy Synod, in order to preserve and defend the Orthodox faith and the unity of our Church, as well as to find, together with Their Eminences and Their Graces, with the clergy and the Orthodox lay faithful, appropriate ways and means for the deepening and enrichment of the spiritual life and of the missionary activities in the parishes, monasteries, theological schools, cultural institutions and social-philantropic establishemnts of our Church. These are to be undertaken on the basis of the past experience and in consonance with the new challenges which come from the contemporary society, which is more and more a secularised one. This society – often more indiferent rather than faithless – needs the Church because it longs for healing and spiritual communion, precisely because it identifies personal freedom with egocentristic individualism and with the possesion of limitated and futile things. Or, the human life cannot be built firmly and constantly on the spiritual vacuum created by forgeting about God and about the heavenly or transcendental vocation of the human person.
One can notice very quickly that the deficit of transcendence in the life of individual human beings brings about a deficit of humanity (the quality of being human) in the social life. Without spiritual or metaphysical perspective human life is quickly reduced to “mathematics”: a number of human robotic humans and quantities of finite products, for well-defined purposes, but in a world closed in itself, a self-sufficient one.Source
