In
the name of the Father and the Son
and the Holy Spirit.
The reason I love
Father Sophrony, personally, and the very simple abrupt answer, is that he kept
me alive.
No one else except Father Sophrony and his writings,
(I differentiate between the two because I prayed to him personally and then
I've read his writings), they kept me alive for many years in my monastery.
Actually, from the very beginning, I still have the first copy of his writings
which I bought the very year I was tonsured and then ordained (2005).
If you begin your
experience of Father Sophrony through a book like “we shall see Him as He is”,
for instance, the first and most striking thing, to me at least, was the clear
and the wonderful ability this monk has, to perceive and to understand pain. He
is useful in a practical way for people, like myself, who are very easily drawn
towards depression or shying away from everything. And particularly if you
fight this wonderful but horrible gift, to have on your shoulders, this image
of death that becomes overwhelming at times.
I have met no one who writes so clearly, and
somehow from the inside, about these things. Absolutely no one. You find a lot
of literature in the patristic fathers about awareness of death, and there's a
whole theology about it and how it benefits you etc... However, in my opinion,
they all felt detached from the experience of it. Father Sophrony writes from
within it, as if he's living it there, on the page with you, and that gives his
writing a certain energy or vibe that is immensely helpful. If you've got this
temptation of falling into depression, or of an overwhelming, sometimes
crushing awareness of the uselessness and emptiness of everything, if death
sometimes crushes you, Father Sophrony is your best friend. If you haven't
discovered him, do, because he's there and he is a gift from God to you. That's
the first reason why I love Father Sophrony.
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| "A gift from God"... |
The second reason, is
because he is like a permanent teenager in his approach to love. There's a
sense of openness to everything, and anything, and everyone, which is very rare
to encounter in serious experienced monastic elders. He is always open to
embrace someone else's experiences. He doesn't come up with any type of recipe
for anything. Everything is personal and unique. He's got the ability to
respect who you are, and to respect your experience, even when that experience
doesn't fit or contradicts his own. That respect, and that openness to the
diverse gifts of the Spirit is very rare. Most people tend to hold on to their
own experience and then try to enforce that on the people whom they guide.
Father Sophrony is quite the contrary. It seems the people who approach him
benefit him a lot, because they enlarge his own experience of life, and of God…
and that is very rare. We find something similar in St. Seraphim of Sarov with his
famous greeting “Welcome, my Joy” …
Because, it is through
the others you grow.
Another characteristic Father
Sophrony has, which is becoming very difficult to argue in our days, is the
respect for the diversity, not only of the personal experience but also
tradition. For instance, when he speaks about monasticism, he never insists
that the only type of monasticism or monastic life is that of a community.
Never!. He talks positively about living in a community, as well as in a small
skete, or as a hermit… He even creates space for a new type of monasticism
known as “white monasticism”, or “monastics in the world”. Although he didn't
experience it himself, or perhaps he did in his years in Paris, he never shied
away from it.
He always had respect
for other people's experiences, unlike the orthodox today who are facing a
tragedy, if not extinction, because we decapitate and amputate our own
tradition for all sorts of minor selfish reasons. We have reached to a point today,
particularly in the “Orthodox countries”, that the only approved, supported,
encouraged, blessed etc... type of monastic life is that in a major monastery,
and hence we simply lose everything else. Imagine the monastic tradition of the
Orthodox Church as a body, and we've decided that only one arm is right, and let
everything else rots away because no one is allowed to follow their calling. You
don't find that in father Sophrony!. And if you feel cold for the type of monastic life that is not really encouraged by your local
jurisdiction, you will find a friend in Father Sophrony, and for me as a
monastic, that was hugely helpful, not to feel alone.
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| Father Sophrony with young monastics. |
Father
Sophrony, gave me a principle in life, which has guided me, and I can see it being
applicable and guiding me years from now, as long as God still wants me alive
here. Father Sophrony was the first, and so far for me, the best writer, to
come up with a principle, I can use in any context, or situation, or danger, facing
my spiritual growth. I don't know how to formulate it, it is something along
the lines of “keep going and keep open”. He wrote the following: “there is only
one way for me: always forward”, which sounds very simplistic. However, the way
he explains it and how he wants you to apply it, is not at all. What he means
by this quote is that: You must live your life in full awareness that you own
nothing. And ownership here doesn’t refer to the typical monastic meaning, which
is not having a family, or a wife and children… it implies that you don't own
yourself, nor own your own experience, or your own knowledge of God. Tomorrow
you are going to be someone else. Tomorrow God for you will be someone else.
Tomorrow your experience will be something else. Don't ever hold on to anything.
Never stop. Always move forward and remain open. Ultimately what we do in our
spiritual life is that we live a mystery. I am a mystery to myself; I am not
properly myself yet. We become who we are called to become, only as a gift,
after we depart this life. So really I am a mystery to myself. God is a mystery
to me and will remain a mystery until I stand in front of Him face to face.
The
minute you hold on to an idea or a point of view, for instance, your own understanding
of God, that is the moment you've actually died in your growth, because that is
the moment you've replaced the mystery of the Living God with a created concept
that your mind can deal with. The minute you point and say: “This is God.”, be
sure that you have missed the point right there, and you are in fact worshiping
an idol and living idolatry not Christianity.
This
is a very important idea, owning absolutely nothing; not yourself, nor your
experience, nor your knowledge, nor your God… and being constantly open to a
mystery. I know nothing even when I feel I know everything. This doesn't mean
knowledge is restricted to me or unattainable. It simply means I still didn't
get there yet. I tell you this from my own personal experience and as somebody
who hears the confession of other people, that it is extremely difficult not to fall into this type of
idolatry.
I'm
not venturing figures, but frankly, I have never met anyone who truly lives
that way. We end up deforming the real God, in a way or another, the true God,
in order to fit the Idol we've decided we are going to worship, because that idol
corresponds to our values. So rather than allowing the mystery of the Living
God to inform my values, to inform my life, and to allow that mysterious God to
shape the mystery that I am, most people, work the other way around. And it is
this life, and the values of this life, and the things they hold dear in this life,
that inform their knowledge of God. Eventually, they build a God according to
their values rather than developing their values according to God.
It
may sound theoretical, but it's not. It's painfully true, and it is a real and
extremely common disease. Father Sophrony has helped me personally to become
aware that I've got this disease, which I imagine is the first step towards,
God willing one day, getting healed.
This
is the first idea which I hold on to from Father Sophrony, and there is another
idea which somehow reflects and mirrors the first one, in a slightly different
manner.
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| It is through the others that you grow. |
As a
monk, and I assume it should apply for lay people as well, prayer is absolutely
fundamental. I can't imagine salvation without prayer. What we call prayer can
be extremely different, and again there's a diversity in the types of prayer. But
someone who doesn't pray, I am not sure how he can be saved, because that simply
means there's no relationship between him and Christ. The method in which prayer
is manifested can be extremely diverse; it can be reading prayers written by
the Saints, as almost 90% of the Orthodox are doing, or trying to improvise
words, or meditate. I strongly believe there are people who pray in painting
rather than using words, or who pray in writing poetry. Not everyone is driven
by mere intellect. We live in a society where we have built this idolatry
towards the brains, and even prayer has to fit our grammatical rules and it has
to make sense. Words have to add up into some sort of a logical statement and only
that is prayer. I don't believe that is correct!. Prayer is beyond reading
logical statements about faith.
Father
Sophrony, at the very beginning of his book “On Prayer” says something along the lines of prayer
being creation, the process of creation, when you pray, you create yourself or
rather you allow God to continue the process of creating you and creating who you
really are through prayer. This opened a whole new world for me, when I started
to understand it, because truthfully prayer is impossible!. If you define
prayer as meeting God in a relationship face to face, being a person in front
of a person and interacting, then prayer would be impossible. Because what does
it mean being face to face with God? It means nothing… that is the reality of
it, beyond metaphors and nice theological writings, it really means nothing.
Face
according to Father Sophrony as for the whole tradition before him is another
word for hypothesis or “Prosopon” a Greek word, which simply means face. However,
there's a whole meaning beyond that hypothesis or person. Eventually, as father
Sophrony repeatedly said, we are not as yet “hypothestatical” beings in this life, we are not yet persons, we
are in the process of becoming who we are supposed to be, but we are not yet. He
says, we do not have an “I am” of our own” … I cannot say I am made the way in
which God is, because God is a personal being. I shall become a personal being
by the grace of God after my death but not now. Right now, I'm a deformed
version of myself. So, instead of having the face of God in front of the face
of man, in prayer, meaning a personal God in front of a person, you have the
person of God in front of an individual. What I mean by “a person” is a human
being who fully appropriates, activates, and actualizes his or her nature;
whereas an individual is someone who hasn't really reached that state. We are
all individuals, and we shall die individuals. We can experience personhood,
and therefore we can experience prayer, for extremely brief moments as gifts. Those
moments are like peaks, or glimpses into the kingdom which are given to guide
us. They are not a state that we can take ownership of, they are given and then
taken away.
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| "Thy Face Lord will I seek..." (psalm 27:8) |
Saint
Paul mentions such a state when he talks about out-of-body experience and so does
Saint Silouan when he says he could not support prayer and the Presence” at all
for more than a few seconds because that “could have killed him”. God allows
for a few fractions in a second in our lives to be in this state of filled with
who we really are, and what a painful state we must be in. If this experience
of who I really am can kill me, then what kills me is my own humanity if
revealed to me in its fullness and in its wholeness. So, just as I'm supposed
to hold on to the awareness that I remain a mystery to myself, in this earthly
life, and God remains a mystery to me, in the same way prayer is an experience
which is impossible. We are all aiming for the impossible.
The way
you've seen Me, Christ, pray separated from you. But when you pray say “Our
Father”. The point of revelation is me, the entry of Christ into the world is each
one of us personally.
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| "All being one..." |
There
is this personal relationship. The content of that revelation is all being one,
and this is perfectly represented in the prayer of the “Our Father”. The “how”
of the prayer, the method of the prayer is being alone in a personal manner. The
“what”, which is the content of the prayer, is for everyone, for the “we” and
the “our” and the “us”. This is what you find in father “Sophrony”, this
perfectly balanced importance of understanding that you are a person, but that
you become a person, by gathering within your own being every single human
being, who has been created, those who were created before us and those who will
be born after us. As father Sophrony and Saint Silouan say “the whole adam from
the first born to the last”. This balance between personal prayer and communal
prayer is something that must remain with us if we want to pray as Christians.
if you only pray in the church and you don't have a personal experience, then
your vision of the Trinity, of God, is wrong. If you don't allow space for multiplicity
within your own being then you don't have a Christian vision of the Trinity in
one.
Knowing
this theology you must reflect it on your practical life, and if you look at
humanity the way father “Sophrony” looks at humanity, all the critical contemporary
issues are instantly solved, such as questions concerning immigration or war,
question concerning the use of guns and the right to kill other people in any
context… all these extremely controversial issues are suddenly boring because
everything becomes so clear… once you adopt his theology all these issues are
perfectly clear. You cannot be a Christian and allow for war or use of guns
against other human beings at the same time… that can only mean two things, either you have
wrong theology and that is reflected in your practical life, or you have a
correct theology of God but you don't allow the theology to inform your
practical life. An extreme example of that would be the devil, what better
theologian than a devil, but he doesn't do anything of the things he knows.
So, it's
not only about our minds and our prayer and our spiritual lives, although
that's the main thing, it's also about the way we behave. Father Sophrony used
to say that somebody who has correct theology, but that correct theology is not
reflected in his life, is like a bird with one wing forever looking up and
thinking it will get there, not knowing that it's already
condemned to forever be on earth. If you don't allow your theology to inform
your life, your values, your choices then you've missed the point and you will
never fly…
Reference:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=6&v=aJEq9MHTFKE