What is the Kingdom of Heaven?
~+~
The Kingdom of Heaven encompasses the fullness of God’s uncreated personal energy—that is, grace—which, from the moment of our Baptism, dwells within our spiritual heart. Through His personal energy, God Himself dwells within our heart. Yet, that is not all.
The heart is also the center of our personhood. The essence of our mind, our self-awareness, and our personhood resides in our heart. But even that is not all.
Our spiritual heart is an organ, a place, and a home created by God for a personal meeting between us and Him. A gift from God—indeed, the greatest gift for us—is that only God (together with all other persons, in Him) can fill our heart; no one and nothing else can. In other words, our heart can be filled only by the Church of God; any other form of “fulfilment” would be eternal death.
The problem is that we are “outside of ourselves”—in a godless manner—existing in a state of total energetic disorder. The energy of our mind—driven by the senses, thoughts, fantasies, fears, worries, and the like, and fuelled by the passions that afflict us—has become trapped and scattered throughout the created world and time; in short, it is caught in the snare of death.
Our task is [to direct] the energy of our mind—through obedience to a spiritual father, that is… Through the proper directing of our energy—in fulfilling God’s commandments for the glory of God, as well as through the prayerful orientation of our being toward its essence within the heart (toward God), so that we may unite the energy of our mind with the Divine Energy in an inseparable, personal way; in other words, that we may personally appropriate God’s uncreated energy.
Our personal meeting with God within our heart—through our personal energies (His and ours)—as well as our personal meeting with our neighbours within the heart (in God), constitutes the Kingdom of Heaven realized within us, here and now. In it, there is nothing impersonal, nothing meaningless, and nothing mortal. On the contrary, everything is personal, everything is imbued with meaning, everything is immortal, everything is in enlightenment, everything is in joy, and everything is in knowledge.
The Kingdom of Heaven is within us, but we are not there. God Himself became Man and came to reveal to us the horizons of the Kingdom of Heaven, as well as to call us to repentance—to enter into it—even though He knew how much He would suffer. Do you think His sacrifice was not worth it?
Metropolitan of Strumica, Nahum
10 / 11 / 2026
++++++++++++
Divine Liturgy at the Skete of the “Nativity of the Most Holy Theotokos” near Câmpulung, Romania. Metropolitan Nahum of Strumica, and Metropolitan Calinic of Curtea de Argeș și Muscel.
