The Church Must Be as Powerless as God

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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 manyothers. 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, butdoes 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 inhis 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 agreat 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 theLife.

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 formany 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 essenceand 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 totackle. 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


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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 andteach 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 touchyou 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 tothink. 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 manasked 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 wellyou 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 ratenow, 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 organicfreedoms 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 theRevolution 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 notwithout 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


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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 uswith 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 remainsthe 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 ofthe 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 toChristianity, 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 notonly 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 shouldenfold 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 thatis 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 notgive 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 tocoerce 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


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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 ofthe 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 andbe 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 whatfrightens 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 cantake 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 thatpossibility 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 interlocutorreplies, '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 believerthrough 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, inHoly 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? Tome 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 notwish 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 thecontrary, 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, aswater 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


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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 ityourself, 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 Ihave 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 thathis 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 toreach 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.

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The Church Must Be as Powerless as God