Saint Sophrony the Athonite.
Peace be with you!
How are you? Do you have enough strength to follow
events, or rather, to keep up with them? I remember, so very long ago, when I
was still a schoolboy, and I was at home reading Turgenev's novel 'Rudin'. I
was straight away absorbed by its content. Papa was sitting in the same room
reading the newspaper. I asked him naively, 'Papa, how can you find it
interesting to read newspapers? There are so many wonderful books.'
His answer: 'And what are you reading just now?'
'Turgenev. '
'Do you like to read books about history too?'
Remembering that such books were for me at that time
text-books, which I had to know so as to pass exams, I replied: 'Not much.'
'But I personally do like history' , answered Papa.
So then I said to him, 'But look, you are reading a newspaper, not history. It is different, after all.'
'No, I don't see any difference. Newspapers are real
history, only not of the past, but of the present, of the very same day.'
So when I remember you now, I was thinking that you
too like to follow the history of humanity,
and when you haven't any strength in your
eyes for reading the papers, or books, you listen to the radio.
For my part I have lived the whole of my life outside
the world. In the years of my youth my fascination with art cut me off from
everything around me. I was overmastered by one aspiration: to penetrate the
mystery of the beauty in everything I saw,
every manifestation of nature. The more I was absorbed in my quest, the more mysterious
became every sight, and I used to
swoon with rapture at this mystery. We see the world in quite a different way
than the intellectuals. Take the sky - what is it for an 'intellectual'? A
fiction, a diffusion of solar light, reflected in the earth's atmosphere, and
beyond this sky - the dark and endless space of the cosmos. I always considered
that the wonderfully deep heavens that we could see were not a 'wall' around
the earth; that beyond the limits of the visible lay reality that is boundless,
cosmic, and inaccessible like the visible sky Lying on the roof of my studio,
I used to gaze attentively at the sky, and in a strange way it seemed to Come
nearer to me, so close that it seemed to
encompass me too. But it did not communicate its Myster» to me.
Oh, how I looked at every Object, at every sight, with passion; and each
phenomenon, each object, became mysterious. How is it possible that a ray of
light, in itself something simple, divides into an infinite variety of hues,
but acting as a whole it creates a
picture which is forever alive, which changes unceasingly, and yet preserves
something of oneness?
To take the place of these youthful pursuits came a
new awareness, another quest for a different Absolute, hidden behind
all these visible manifestations.
Even now it seems to me, or rather, it is manifestly
clear to me, that until man resolves this last question, until he finds the
first and last meaning, he is naively and chaotically creating, and
afterwards destroying, what was created with arduous labour.
It is obvious to me that if people were aware
of, understood, what man is, every problem - family problems, political,
social, demographic, economic problems, and so on - would be solved automatically
and all humanity would become brothers, one great superb family. The division
into slaves and masters, into superiors and these the least I" would
be unthinkable. There would be no more of wars - that ultimate fall of
humanity. And what we see is that, if you forgive the expression, all the
history I learnt at school was for the most part filled up with chronicles of
fratricidal wars. As soon as any state becomes stronger than its neighbour, it
quickly begins to enslave 'by fire and by sword' those weaker than itself. And
so it goes on until our day ... the same 'law of the jungle' .
Living 'to one side' of this wild and brutal life,
with a dreadful pain in my heart I appeal to the Heavens, with their sublime
mysteriousness, to descend to the level of the earth, to embrace all who are by
nature suffering people, to reveal to them another sphere of Being, so that
every labour of man may become an attractive process of creativity, so that the
fruits of this creative upsurge remain without menace from destructive weapons.
I pray that the Light, invisible to us unless there are objects to
receive it, become visible to all people in the domain of their minds and their
loving hearts.
To many of our contemporaries such an idea seems like
an unrealistic dream, just naively keeping one's head in the blue-tinted clouds
... not to say rose-tinted clouds. But I know with all my being that they are
not correct; the ones who are right are those who see the blue heavens and love
their mystery.
Your loving
Sophrony.
Reference:
Letters
to his family. Archimandrite Sophrony (Sacharov). (2015)