On Departure.Saint Sophrony the Athonite.

 

Saint Sophrony the Athonite.

        I think I have lived long enough, that there is no sense in prolonging this particular life, that I must 'depart'. Naturally, you have all grown old and like me are subject to illnesses; you too are getting ready for the in­evitable. But prepare with a sense of occasion, as if for the greatest moment of our earthly existence, and not with a feel­ing of despair and ingratitude.

 All of us must bear suffering in such a way that we live it not just as our own personal suf­fering, but as that of the human world. Through the experience of our sufferings we come to know cosmic life, we live the tragedy of all humanity, we widen our knowledge to the point where it reaches the limits of this world, where it surpasses these limits, where it attains to Infinity.

Suffering can be our new birth, greater than the first, if we live it not as our own individual suffering, but as a REVELATION of what is hap­pening in the world, in the universe. Then everything becomes a genuine and great EVENT, and our spirit contemplates the depths of the universe; it becomes capable of contact with the First Being, that is, God, our Father. For us, who have ac­cepted Christ as the revelation of God in history, it should be clear that we are all unjust in relation to God. Our unwilling­ness to accept the joys and the good fortune in life as a gift of God, and out of gratitude to love Him and strive towards Him, may be considered one of our gravest sins. Usually people turn to Him in misfortune. This makes suffering inescapable, inevitable. Otherwise it would be completely unjustifiable.

We all need a decisive effort if we are to awaken our feeling of Eternity, to arouse in ourselves the capacity to apprehend immortality. We must stand for some moments at the ultimate boundary, the boundary between life and death, so as to be 'existentially' aware of our dreadful limitedness, to know how much like animals we are within the limits of this earthly life. To stand on the border between life and death is incomparably more precious than the experience of the astronauts. If these latter, leaving the power of earthly gravity, enter into another world, where physical laws are at work which are already not of this earth, but celestial, where the idea of the ABSOLUTE must naturally arise, where a feeling of infinity becomes more real, then how much more should we, in our intense striving towards all-encompassing knowledge, receive the capacity for this great and godlike Act of Love, embracing all the cre­ation, while going beyond the limits of everything created, to­wards our Creator and Unoriginate Father.

I do not know which of you will accept such a train of thought, who will agree to make his way to this experience, but I fervently pray to God that all of you, especially now, at the end of your lives, will depart having overcome the world, that you become sons of the Kingdom which cannot be moved, and delight in the Day without evening. That Day starts from here, in the knowledge that Christ is the Only-Be­gotten Son of the Father, that through Him we too receive the gift of adoption and deification.

 

 

 

 

Reference:

Letters to his family.Archimandrite Sophrony Sakharov. 2015.