1990-00-00-1-E-R-I-EM05-133ChurchMustBeAsPowerlessAsGod THE CHURCH MUST BE AS POWERLESS AS GOD ...

The following interview was given to M. B. Meilakh in London and printed in the paper The Man of Letters (21 September 1990), published by a Leningrad writers' organisation.

Your Grace, maybe from a distance it is easier to see what is happening in the Russian Church in our homeland?
You know, maybe from a distance one can see certain things more clearly, but some things cannot be seen at all. Because the situation in Russia is so complicated, and there are so many varying currents in it, one can catch certain things and miss a great many others. It seems to me that the Russian Church has survived thanks to the love of the Russian people for Church worship and the beauty of the Liturgy, of which Nil Sorsky spoke. I am not speaking specifically about the Jesus Prayer, but of the personal contact between a living soul and the Living God which takes place during a divine service, but does not necessarily depend on understanding it but simply on standing before the Living God and on the fact that the Living God is amongst us. What is certainly missing in the Russian Church is the knowledge which an ordinary believer has concerning matters of faith. Already in the nineteenth century Leskov wrote that Russia had been baptised but was never enlightened. And indeed a Russian's knowledge of God is within himself, within his soul. As Leskov says, 'He has Christ in his bosom.' On the other hand, he has yet to acquire a great deal of knowledge: not any specific knowledge, but simply a deep understanding of the meaning, for instance, of the Creed, and the Lord's Prayer. And as a result it seems to me that we have in Russia a great many people who could not defend their faith should it be under attack or stand up for it in a dispute, but who could die for it, because they know it with their whole being, and with their inner selves know that what they believe is the Truth, the Way and the Life. Therefore the Church is now faced with the question as to how to educate its believers, how to teach their faith to them. First of all there is the Gospel. The Gospels were for many decades inaccessible. We have somehow to disseminate the book of the Gospels throughout the population so that more people can read it and live according to what is the living strength, the fire, the life-giving spirit of our faith: the words and the example of the Saviour Jesus Christ Himself. On the other hand, it is also essential that people should understand the divine service in which they are taking part, not because it is necessary to have some sort of intellectual understanding, but because the divine service is so constructed as to transmit the essence and content of our faith, and the more one understands it the further one can penetrate into the content of Orthodoxy. So now we have two tasks, which we shall probably have ever-increasing opportunities to tackle. One is to educate the laity: in groups, at open meetings, and in catechetical courses. The second task, which is now becoming more and more important, is to instruct the young clergy. New courses not seminaries are being started to prepare the

clergy, and that is very important. However, one must of course say that it is not only theological knowledge which makes a man capable of becoming a priest. To be a priest is an art. There are things which a theological school does not teach, because it is totally absorbed in theological education. I have met many young priests who were insufficiently prepared in many spheres, who had not yet entered into the life of the parish. They had not been taught, for instance, how to make their confessions and teach others to do so, how to hear confessions, and what sources to draw upon when preaching. Spiritual writers and the holy Fathers have written on various themes, but a sermon is spoken from the heart it is spoken first of all to oneself. If it does not touch you to the heartstrings, it will not touch anybody to the heartstrings. If it does not flow from your mind and experience, it will not transmit itself to others. A further problem is how to learn to pray oneself, not only with words, not only as prescribed, but from the depths, and how to lead others into the mystery of this prayer. And, finally, there is one more thing. Many people bishops, clergy and laity have come to me after services and spoken to me along the following lines. They were brought up in a totalitarian, authoritarian State, and they got used to the fact that they did what they were told to do, let alone the fact that many people wait similarly to be told what to think. But now they had a new problem: they had to learn how to make decisions and choices and they did not know how to do this. One well-educated and sophisticated man asked me, 'Tell me how to do this.' I replied, 'If I were to tell you how to do it, you would again be acting under direction. You must learn to think for yourself, to act according to your conscience, to take risks (and I am not speaking now of worldly risks) and learn that you might make mistakes: you must learn to think deeply in order to understand how well you are doing and in what you are mistaken.'

This is, of course, the most important part, but there is another, closely related question. It is easy to understand what took place during the long years of the Church's persecution. It is not known if this period has ended; but at any rate now, in the course of Perestroika, the Church has acquired a somewhat different status. But does that not hold in itself new dangers? Are not these more organic freedoms fraught with the possibility of unfavourable developments in connection with co-operation with the State ?
Political conformity this has for long been the cause of ill-health for the Russian Church. Even before the Revolution the Church and the State existed in a sort of unified harmony, which was, incidentally, not always pleasing to the Church. After the Revolution the Church fell silent. During the time of repression and extreme persecution nobody expressed political views. And to start to think politically, and to speak of politics from within the Church will require a long and more specifically a deep period of learning. The Church cannot belong to one party or another, and at the same time it is not without or above party politics. It must be the voice of conscience, permeated with the light of God. In an ideal state the Church must be in a position to speak for every party, for every point of view, to say, This is worthy of Man and God, and this is not worthy of Man and God. Of course this can be done from two positions: either from a position of strength or from a position of total helplessness. It seems to me and I am firmly convinced of this that the Church must never speak from a position of strength. It should not be one of the

powers that be acting for the State. It should be, let us say, as helpless as God, as helpless as Him who does not force His will on us, who only calls us and reveals the beauty and truth of things, but who does not force them upon us and, like our conscience, prompts us with the truth but leaves us free either to listen to the truth and the beauty or to deny them. It seems to me that the Church must be just like that. If the Church represents some organisation which has power, which can coerce and control events, there always remains the risk that it will want to exert power, and as soon as a Church begins to exert power it loses its deepest essence God's love, and the ability to understand those whom it must save, rather than break or reconstruct them.

And finally, Your Grace, this is a very general question, but we know both from your books and your sermons that you have considered very deeply the question of what happens in life and what happens in the world. Tell us how you rate the position of a Christian in the world today, in view of all that takes place in it.
This is a difficult question, because what I want to say will probably offend a lot of people. I think that today the whole Christian world, including the world of Orthodoxy, has become cut off from the simplicity, the all-inclusiveness and the triumphant beauty of the Gospels. Christ with his group of disciples founded a Church which was so deep, so all-embracing, so complete, that it contained within itself the whole universe. Over the centuries we have made the Church one of mankind's societies. We are smaller than the world in which we live, and when we speak of the conversion of this world to Christianity, we are saying in fact that we should convert as many people as possible into being members of a limited society. This, I consider, is our sin. We should understand that the Christian Church, the believers, should be believers not only on account of their view of the world but also in their lives, through their inner experience, and that our part consists in bringing light into this world where it is so dark and at times so frightening. The prophet Isaiah says: 'Comfort ye, comfort ye my people' (Isa. 40:1). Those were God's words to him and, of course, also to us: 'Comfort ye'. That means: understand in what sorrow the whole world exists, both materially and in its confusion, and spiritually, through its lack of God's grace. It means that we should bring comfort to this world: God's tenderness, God's love, and God's concern, which should enfold every person. There is no point in speaking to a man about spiritual things when he is starving feed him. There is no point in saying that a man errs in his view of the world when we fail to provide him with the living experience of the Living God. And that is our position in the world today it is the position of people awaiting trial. The world, in turning away from God and from the Church is saying to us: 'You Christians cannot give us anything that we need. You do not give us God: you give us a view of the world. It is very doubtful whether at its heart there is any living experience of God. You do not give us instructions how to live yours are as arbitrary as those which we get from other people.' We need to become Christians Christians in the manner of Christ and his disciples, and only then will the Church acquire not power that is the ability to coerce people but authority that is the ability to speak such words that once any soul hears them it will shudder and will open itself to the eternal depths. Perhaps my view of our condition is a pessimistic one, but after all we are not Christians. We profess to believe in Christ, but we have turned everything into symbols. I am always

struck to the soul by our service on Great Friday. Instead of the Cross on which a living young Man is dying, we have a beautiful service. We can be touched by it, but it stands between us and the brutal, horrifying tragedy. We have replaced the Cross with an icon of the Cross, the Crucifixion with an image, the story of the horror of what was happening with a poetical and musical version of the event. This of course reaches us, but at the same time it is so easy to take pleasure in this horror, or even to experience it deeply and be shaken by it but then to calm down; whereas to witness the killing of a living man is something quite different. That remains like a wound in the soul, that one does not forget: once having seen that, one can never return to one's previous condition. And this is what frightens me in some sense the beauty and the depth of our service should be opened up; we should tear a hole through it and take every believer through that hole to the terror and majesty of what is taking place.
Yes, this is a very profound thought. After all our contemporary world is so established, so well ordered, that in principle it can exist without God, and without spirituality. It rolls on in an established manner, and in it one can safely sleep one's whole life through and then die.

But what strikes me as even more frightening is that one can call oneself a Christian and live one's whole life studying the depths of theology and never meet God. One can take part in the beauty of Church services, be a member of the choir or of the congregation, and never break through to the reality of being. That is frightening. An unbeliever has still the possibility of coming to believe, but for a pseudo-believer that possibility is very far removed because he has everything: he can explain every detail of the service, and of the Creed, and of dogma, and then it suddenly becomes obvious that he has not met God. He is at peace with himself. In Leskov there is a passage in which he speaks of such a person: 'Think of it! He has read his way to Christ!' And his interlocutor replies, 'Well then, there is no hope of changing him.' Such a person imagines that through Church services, through the Gospels, and through everything that we have one could indeed 'read one's way to Christ' and not be left behind I became a believer through the Gospels and through a meeting with the living Christ. Everything else came later, and everything else remains transparent to me: I do not shut myself off from what I once experienced, nor do I react to it with sharp pain. Yet how can one, for example, in Holy Week sing lightly of certain things which are so tragic? How can one, for example, when celebrating the Divine Mysteries [the Eucharist], listen to the music of 'We hymn Thee .. .' and not allow oneself to be carried by this music into the frightening depths of the Divine, where the blessed bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ? To me for I am an unmusical man it is totally inexplicable how one can sing at such moments: it seems to me that everyone should be numbed into a state of contemplative terror. And when they hear the words: 'And make this bread ...' - I do not even want to repeat the words of the Holy Offering. But that, of course, is my own reaction. I do not wish to say that it is the right one because I know people who are a thousand times more spiritually conscious and gifted than I am who are not troubled by this, who are, on the contrary, carried into the depths; but I also know many others who are brought to a halt at this point. One has to have enormous experience of prayer within services in order that the service should cease to exist as a thing apart, should become simply imperceptible, as water is imperceptible to the fish that swims in it. I remember an old deacon in Paris, Father Evfimy, who used to read and chant with me in the choir. And he read and chanted

so quickly, that I could not catch the words. And after the service I was then twelve years old and was both cheeky and self-assured I said: 'Father Evfimy, you stole the whole service from me today and, what is worse, you could not have experienced it yourself, reading and chanting in such a way!' And then he burst into tears and said to me, 'Forgive me, I did not think of you, but I was born into a very needy family in a very poor village. When I was seven years old, I was sent away to a monastery, and now I have been hearing and chanting these words for sixty years. And you know,' he said, 'at the moment I see a word, before even pronouncing it it seems to me that some hand has touched the heart-strings, and all my soul begins to sing.' And I understood then that his soul had become a musical instrument, and that at the lightest touch it sang with all its being like the Aeolian harp which sings at the touch of the slightest breeze, that it reacted to these words without their having to pass through the mind, the heart, or even consciousness. These words had become a song, a religious experience. But in order to reach that point one has to become like the Elder, Father Evfimy, whom people laughed at because he had lost his voice and drank a lot, and did not stand out in any way, but before God his whole soul sang may God grant this to everybody! Well, if what I have said should prove useful to anybody - that would be splendid! Transl. by Tania Wolff.