By Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos and Agiou Vlasiou
Tomorrow (July 11, 2020) the memory of Saint Sophrony the Hagiorite is celebrated for the first time. I had taken all the steps to find myself on this great day for my life and the lives of many others in the Sacred Monastery of Essex in England to celebrate his first feast as a Saint of our Church.
Many times from 1976 to 1993 I liturgized with him and felt the inner life of a hermit Hieromonk, I heard from his mouth words of eternal life, I lived blessed days with him all these years of our communication. He loved me and I loved him.
Unfortunately, however, the conditions of the pandemic did not allow me to attend this great day in the place where he lived the last years of his life and reposed.
My sadness is somewhat mitigated by the thought that the whole Church will celebrate the memory of the Saint in every place, but also by the publication of an interview I was asked to participate in for the Romanian magazine Familia Ortodoxă.
I quote below this interview, in which a small part of the legacy of Saint Sophrony is presented, as a small part of me, as a small candle in his memory, on this great day.
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1. Question: Your Eminence, the long-awaited time has come for the first celebration of Elder Sophrony of Essex as a saint of our Church. We know that you made the proposal for his canonization, as you also proposed the canonization of other great contemporary saints of our Church, Saint Paisios the Athonite and Saint Porphyrios of Kavsokalyva. Please tell us how you met Elder Sophrony and how did you understand that he is a saint?
Answer: It is true that I wrote to the Ecumenical Patriarchate about the canonization of Elder Sophrony in 2004. Of course, many Clergy, Monks and Christians requested it from the Ecumenical Patriarch. Among others, I can mention the Monks of the Sacred Monastery of Saint Paul on the Holy Mountain, where Saint Sophrony was a spiritual father.
However, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew himself wanted the canonization of Elder Sophrony, because he understood the influence that his life, conduct and teaching had on the Christians of Europe, but also on the whole world.
It is a special blessing that I wrote to the Ecumenical Patriarch for Saint Sophrony, and for Saint Porphyrios and for Saint Paisios.
I met Saint Sophrony, first from the book he wrote about Saint Silouan the Athonite, and later from my own personal searches.
At the beginning I understood, or I can say I felt internally, that in his heart flowed the hesychastic and theoptic stream of the Church, from the Prophets, to the Apostles, to the Fathers. Therefore, it expressed the genuine Orthodox life.
2. Question: Why is Saint Sophrony of Essex considered one of the great Church Fathers of the 20th century? What is the legacy that Saint Sophrony left to modern man?
Answer: Precisely, as I said before, that he himself was in the stream of the Prophets, the Apostles and the Fathers of the Church, he was one of their exponents, he was truly deified. This was shown by the atmosphere he created with his presence, his speech, his silence, his prayer, the Divine Liturgy he celebrated.
Much can be said about the legacy he left to everyone, especially to those who knew him more closely. I think a key aspect of this legacy is that Christ is the true God. He revealed the Father to us and sent us the Holy Spirit, and through Christ we know the Father, through Him we are led to eternity.
Saint Sophrony said that Christ is "the criterion of everything" and "we must bring to consciousness that we must also adopt and assimilate the mind and life of Christ Himself. To behave towards Him truly as children to a father and students to a teacher, that is, able to live the life of God Himself. And when we enter fully into His life, then this state will surely be 'theosis'."
3. Question: Saint Sophrony was an Elder of freedom. We ask you to talk to us about the teaching of Saint Sophrony about freedom. What is freedom and how does one acquire it?
Answer: Saint Sophrony, as he himself writes in his book We Shall See Him As He Is, attained the vision of Divine Light, which is a great and rare experience. He saw the Light of God after Divine Communion and this Light remained with him for three days. He saw the Light during the time of noetic hesychasm and pure prayer. He strongly reminds us of Saint Symeon the New Theologian.
Thus he acquired a spiritual freedom and through this freedom he faced all the issues of his life and in this freedom of spirit he also led the people with whom he had a spiritual relationship.
Therefore, according to Saint Sophrony, freedom is not man's autonomy or life according to his passions, but it is life according to Christ, absolute trust in God's Providence and, above all, communion with Him in the Light.
He himself said that when "we cling strongly, like children, to Him we receive even what He has, a divine character," then in this state of fear of God "we will come to experience divine freedom from time to time."
Thus, for Saint Sophrony, freedom is a "gift of God", "it is in essence inseparable from the knowledge of the Eternal", it is our entrance through the action of the Grace of God "into the sphere of the freedom of God's children." And we can experience this in the Church, which is the Body of Christ, with the help of a deified spiritual father.
4. Question: How is spiritual freedom manifested in the communication between spiritual father and disciple?
Answer: The spiritual father, according to Saint Sophrony, is the one who passed from the Egypt of the passions to the desert of dispassion and from there reached the land of promise, of theoptia (vision of God). He is the one who experienced the first great arrival of divine Grace, the lifting of Grace and its subsequent arrival and has experience of the spiritual life. He is the one who met God and subsequently loves all people and with this love he wants to "bring people out of the hades they created with their own contradictory passions."
The work of the spiritual father is to create gods according to Grace "for eternity in the uncreated Light." It is a great work, he is not a simple guide for everyday problems.
This means that the spiritual father works with those entrusted to him by God, as God Himself does, that is, he works with love, with tenderness, without violence and excessive emotion. More as an empirical guide than as a legislator. He sees their situation and knows where and how he will guide them. Therefore, between the spiritual father and the spiritual child there must be "a breeze of spiritual freedom" and a search for God in eternity, so that the spiritual child will keep God's covenant eternally.
The Saint did his work more as a spiritual brother. He himself used to say to his monks: "You know how I never dare to say that I am a father or an elder. This does not suit me. I am among you as a brother. Nothing more."
And because towards the end of his life he was walking supported by two monks, he told them jokingly: "I feel as if I am with two brothers: they are the ones who have power over me!"
This is very important, because it shows a sense of spiritual fatherhood and brotherhood, but also recognition of what someone who was connected to him wanted, that he wanted to lead him to Christ, but also shows a great sensitivity. This is how I met him, as a big, experienced brother, full of self-sacrificing love.
5. Question: In marriage, how does one grant freedom to the other? What does freedom mean to a couple?
Answer: Saint Sophrony knew very well how to guide monks towards theosis, in the search for God. He knew what it would mean to give up everything and dedicate one's whole life to God in order to live in eternity with Him. In fact, he defined theosis as that state in which we act according to the will of God, according to the mind of Christ, according to the words of the Apostle Paul: "Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus" (Phil. 2:5).
However, when he was in Europe, first in Paris and then in England, he also needed to guide married people, with many family problems, regarding the relationships of the spouses with each other and regarding their relationships with their children.
First of all, influenced by the spirit and the teaching of the Holy Fathers, he knew that the monastic life is the pre-fallen state of man, that is, before the fall of Adam, and that marriage, as we know it today, is a post-fallen phenomenon, which was blessed from God. Also, he knew what it meant that man is in the image and likeness of God and therefore he guided all people, monastics and married people, in this direction.
He writes somewhere that humanity, due to the fall that they existed in before the incarnation of Christ, "did not know monogamy", because "polygamy is natural for the corrupt man", because they live with their passions. Christ blessed monogamy, therefore, as he said, "Christian monogamy is supernatural, it is a call to our responsibility for the deepest possible awareness of our personal origin."
That is, he said that the love between spouses should not be simply of the "soul or body", it should not remain within the limits of nature, and even as it was created after the fall, "so as not to be connected to the anatomy or at best, with the soul", but it must be the effort of the spouses to become "a temple for the worship of the Father who is without beginning. Then marriage becomes a way to salvation."
You understand at what spiritual height he saw the mystery of marriage. Within this perspective he guided the spouses and emphasized humility as a condition of real life. To a young man who came into conflict with his wife, with whom he had two children, he said: "Humble yourself, and then we will avoid the tragic dissolution of the family. And the little children will be saved from the tragic form of life that exists for children whose parents are separated."
It seems, therefore, clearly that the Elder guided the people with spiritual wisdom, discernment, each time exercising exactitude and sometimes economia, but always from the perspective of man's life in eternity with Christ.
6. Question: Also, as parents, how can we find the golden measure between freedom and restriction in our relationship with their children?
Answer: I think that when husbands and wives find the golden rule in their relationships, which connects true love with true freedom, then they will also find the golden rule between freedom and restriction in their relationships with their children.
After all, the education of children is not done according to what the parents say with words, but what the parents themselves are in their inner life, in their hearts. Children will assimilate what they felt from the inner world of their parents and not what they see externally at home.
Saint Sophrony said that it is very important for the education of children what the atmosphere of the family is in which the children grow up. Just as the fetus lives and grows in the amniotic fluid in its mother's womb, so, in a way, the spiritual amniotic fluid of the home must be such that the child feels the love of God and the freedom of the spirit.
In other words, the atmosphere of the house in which the child grows up must be an atmosphere of prayer, of trust in God. This inspires the children and they feel the spiritual life not as commandments, nor as rules, but as a feeling of love and freedom in the life of Christ. In such an atmosphere children understand what God is and how He works with people, otherwise they will get a distorted image not only of their parents, but also of God Himself.
7. Question: We are going through a difficult period due to the coronavirus pandemic. What advice do you think Saint Sophrony would give to today's people for the current crisis?
Answer: The period we are going through is indeed difficult, but it is not only this period that is difficult, we always and everywhere encounter difficulties. Our whole life is not as God originally planned it, but as it was shaped after the advice of the devil and our own consent with the entry into our lives of corruption and mortality, the so-called garments of skin.
Thus, from the beginning of our conception we suffer from corruption and mortality. Death is constantly lurking in our lives, we have it within us, with the genes of aging. Before the body parts are formed in the embryo, but even before the embryonic stem cells are differentiated, within us there are the aging genes, that is, the death genes, which manifest themselves in various diseases immediately after the birth of a person.
Saint Sophrony went through many tests in his life, in terms of health. Thus, he used the discoveries of medical science, but in the end he had absolute trust in the providence and love of God, and he considered the time of death, as paradoxical as it may seem, as "a celebratory event".
He wrote to his sister Maria that the day of the soul's departure from the body is man's liberation "from the teeth of death", since death is a beast that devours everything. And he wrote to her that then "we will laugh at the end", and that "our last laugh will be the best". This moment of the exit of the soul from the body is "triumphant", because the spirit of man moves through all the ages.
I don't know what advice he would give to people for what we are going through, but what I told you he taught in general. We must take care of the prolongation of biological life in order to obtain real repentance, but we must also overcome the fear of death with the faith in our encounter with God.
8. Question: What is the most important and characteristic teaching of Saint Sophrony?
Answer: Everything he said was important, because he had experienced it first in his own life as tragic and redemptive events.
I noticed, however, that he considered his meeting with each person individually as a "prophetic event", as was the meeting between Elizabeth, the mother of the Honorable Forerunner, and the Panagia, the Mother of Christ.
In every meeting he left himself free to God's illumination, he asked God for a reason to speak to that particular person. This is what the Prophets did. They prayed to God: "Speak, Lord, because your servant is listening" (1 Kings 3:9-10), and then they said: "Thus says the Lord" (cf. Is. 1:24).
Apart from the prayer he made, I understood very well that what he said to the people was the fruit of his own experience and not the fruit of intellectual thoughts or the result of ideas he read in some books. He himself said: "I also work like many 'teachers' in the world: They record their knowledge and through this means they also teach others."
However, I could say that what I saw in Saint Sophrony, which was an expression of his whole life, was the inspiration he had and which he conveyed to those who approached him. He acted as a spiritual artist who had inspiration and wanted to paint Christ in the heart of his interlocutor and make him also a spiritually inspired artist.
When I speak of inspiration, I mean that he was trying to inspire others to reject evil thoughts, to pray, to love God, to keep the covenant they made with God and to live continuously with the eternal and for the eternal.
For example, he advised his listeners: "We cannot live a Christian life without inspiration. If an artist, a true artist, lives day and night with the images of his art, then we Christians must be even more careful. We must go beyond the efforts of the artist, to live according to the spirit of the gospel."
He also said: "The most important thing now is for God to inspire your struggle for salvation. When inspiration is given, then life is filled with light and joy. We don't notice the details anymore."
And he further said: "In order not to lose the blessing that God gave you, strive to assimilate every thought that inspires you and to banish every thought that kills you."
One understood this inspiration when approaching Saint Sophrony, as it happened to me.
9. Question: You were a disciple of Saint Sophrony and you got to know him intimately, although you only went to Essex for one month each year. Can there be spiritual communication at a distance? How is such communication maintained?
Answer: This is a personal question and I don't know how to answer it. I think it depends on how one means distance. Is it geographical and temporal distance, is it heart distance, is it spiritual distance? I, however, despite the geographical distance I had with Saint Sophrony, tried to reduce the distance of our hearts. I cannot explain this to you more, but you can understand it if you read the second part of my book I Knew A Man In Christ.
However, there is a general rule, that what is true, even when it is divided it is united, while what is false, when it is united, it is actually divided. This rule applied to me in relation to Saint Sophrony. I was trying for my relationship with him to be true.
However, I would like to tell you that I was his disciple in the most general sense of the term, that is, I was studying the mysteries of the Kingdom of God where he lived. Before I met him, I had studied almost all the primary Fathers of the Church, I had a spiritual father par excellence, the Metropolitan of Edessa, Pelli and Almopia Kallinikos, who was already canonized by the Ecumenical Patriarchate, and with his blessing I went to Saint Sophrony. I was in the middle between a holy Bishop and a holy Hieromonk ascetic.
Thus, with the meeting with Saint Sophrony I found what I said at the beginning, the combination between Prophets, Apostles and Fathers. I found a great hesychast and theologian, I found what I was reading in the Holy Scriptures and in the Patristic texts, I landed in the stream of the hesychast tradition and swam freely in it.
Therefore, in this way I removed the local and temporal distance and experienced the meeting with him, as far as I could understand it. And this means that when one is hungry and thirsty and asks to be united with Christ and to live eternally with Him, then all distances are abolished.
10. Question: How is it possible for us to become disciples "at a distance" of Saint Sophrony?
Answer: I think I answered with my previous answer. We must become disciples of the Kingdom of God, love Christ and obey His commandments, and this must be done within the space of the Church. Then Christ will reveal to us His own people. And our whole life will be a constant surprise.
Saint Sophrony himself recommended that we constantly think of Christ: "Let our thoughts be where Christ is. Then our prayer will be with Him and there will not be much room left for the passions. We will get used to living in this way, and with this peaceful life we will build our whole being."
It is also important that our consciousness expands and embraces the whole world. He said: "Before everyone, we must be ready to fulfill their will rather than ours. This is how our consciousness expands. Little by little, in a completely unexpected way, the lament for 'the race of Adam' is born in us."
I would like to end this interview with some words of his that has always made a great impression on me and always made me think deeply. He used to say: "Life is so short and the goal so high, but also so far away."
Indeed, short is our biological life, high is our purpose from our creation and we see that we are far from our goal. And after all this, I think: How can we deal with so many details in our lives, without having inspiration, without being spiritual artists? And how can we play with eternity?
Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.
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