Hello, my dear ones and may God bless you wherever you are! I'll turn the camera
in a second so we can see each other but just have a look at this sunset.
I really had no intention to record tonight, I usually record in the morning
but it is so beautiful and it fills my heart with so much peace I want to share it with you and
I hope it reminds you, the beauty of it, the peace of it, I hope it reminds you as it is reminding me
that God is the Creator of everything that is good, everything that is peaceful,
everything that is truly beautiful, and that the Creator never changes and that His intention His
plan for His creation does not change either. I'm sorry now we are turning to something much less
beautiful than the sunset. It's me, let me get up my rock I don't quite know what to
tell you because honestly I was not planning to record anything tonight I just came out for
a walk and I saw the sunset and I wanted to share it with you.
I had a beautiful and very helpful to me conversation
today with my monastic brother from Moldavia. We spoke for I think well over one hour and he told
me about this letter which he found written by Fr Sophrony from Essex, Saint Sophrony from Essex now
and it's written to a lady from Cyprus. Somewhere in this letter Saint Sophrony answers a question
which was put to him by this Cypriot lady about the reasons why God allows anything painful,
anything evil to unfold in the world, why do all these horrible things happen in the world?
And what struck my monastic brother and what he wanted to talk to me about was Saint Sophrony's
pure complete utter honesty in his response; he writes that 'I've been a monastic for 50-60 years
and in all my monastic life I've done my best to lead a good monastic life, I've done my best to
grow closer to God, to put an increasing distance between myself and my sins, to help my brother
and my sister; I have prayed for the world, I've done in one word everything that I could,
everything that was in my power to grow closer to God and to bring the world closer to Him as well,
and at the same time for every day of my life I've suffered and I've gone through temptations and
I've gone through pains of all sorts,' spiritual battles with the evil ones, spiritual battles with
his own fallenness, temptations from people around him, temptations from his body, his failing body,
he was suffering greatly and he was very ill in the last decades, not years, decades of his life,
'and I've always asked God why things must be like this'.
So he's done everything in his power to live a life well pleasing to God while at the same
time never stopping to ask God in prayer, Why? Despite all his attempts to please God,
all these temptations are still allowed to unfold in his life and he ends this letter
with a sentence which is amazing in its simplicity and in the proof of the depth
of the faith of this Saint: he says, 'In all these 50-60 years of struggles and inquiries in prayer,
God has kept His silence, and if God has kept His silence about these things, then so shall
I.' Why there is something almost beyond human in the peace with which he embraces this reality
and at the same time there is something painfully human in his constant never-ending attempts to
understand and to ask for an answer, not because he needs an answer personally necessarily but
also because he's aware, as a spiritual father, how helpful an answer, an understanding would be
to all the people who ask for his advice in order to deal with this question; and this conversation
with my monastic brother reminded me why I love Fr Sophrony so much, it reminded me why I've,
I've just fallen in love utterly with him from the first few lines I've read of his.
He says somewhere else to always identify the source of tension, the source of spiritual
tension in your life, and once you identify it, don't try to solve it, don't try to
resolve it by running away, by exiting that place of tension, by getting off that cross,
instead do your best to keep yourself on that cross, do your best to remain
in that place of spiritual tension, because that is where the treasure is, that is where
and how you are going to grow and ultimately find your salvation, by keeping yourself
in the midst of that fire, by keeping yourself on that cross, in that source of tension, if one
has absolute faith in God, if faith in God is a given, if the existence of God and
God being a loving, good Being that has created everything around us and us in order to save us,
in order to unite us with Himself, if this belief in this God is unshakable in you
at least as much as it is possible for a mortal human being to have anything unshakeable in us,
once that is a given then you not only can ask God all these difficult questions, but you should ask
them for a very simple reason: they exist in you. Anyway, it's not as if if you deny them,
if you lie to yourself, if you pretend that you don't have them they go away; the doubts
that we have exist, they are real, they don't just go away because we want them to go away,
the pain that we feel, the passions that fight us, the sins into which we fall, these are real
experiences in our lives, they are not just theatre, we don't pretend that they are there,
and the risk is that unless we acknowledge them and we are honest about them and we try to
understand where they come from and we ask for God's help to overcome them,
if we pretend to be the Saints that we are not, we are going to miss the opportunity to become
the Saints that we could become, if we are going to make ourselves into Saints of our own making,
of our own creation before we actually reach that state of being, we are going to miss becoming the
Saints whom God created us to become anyway, and who you would become, because God's will
is unshakeable for us and for the world. When Fr Sophrony says, 'All my life I've done the good
or I've tried at least to do the good that was up to me while at the same time not shying away
from asking God difficult, uncomfortable questions, trying to understand, difficult,
uncomfortable realities about myself, about the world, about my brothers and my sisters',
when he says that, when he teaches us not to run away from the places of tension in our lives
but to learn from them and to grow from them, he is basically telling us not to fake
anything. We grow between these two poles in our lives: on the one hand the given,
the reality, the unshakable pole of God's existence and God being love, Christ
God is love, He has created the world out of love in order to save the world through love so the
world becomes one with Him Who is Love, this is one pole, one unshakeable reality of our lives;
the other one is painfully shakeable, painfully unstable and it has to do with our fallen reality,
our fallen humanity while still alive here in this world. Do not seek to escape this tension
because the only ways out are one, to deny God's existence and in that case you would escape this
tension by finding relief into nothingness, by losing your eternal self, losing your salvation;
and the other possible escape is to deny who you are, to deny the reality of your being,
the reality of your doubts, of your passion, of your sin, of your struggle, and that is to
fake everything and to become something that has nothing to do with you, it is to build yourself,
to build a Saint out of a fallen human being, to build a Saint out of a sinner, to try to
build something eternal, an eternal being out of earth and soil which goes back into nothingness.
Struggle, my brother, struggle, my sister, with all the uncomfortable realities in your life. All
the Saints of the Church are teaching us the same thing: the way to the Resurrection is the Cross;
the way to Life is to die to the world and to ourselves here. Don't seek an easy escape
from this cross, don't seek an easy escape from this source of tension in your life, because this
source of tension, this fire will burn everything that is evil, everything that is fallen in you and
will only allow the gold, the spiritual gold, what is truly valuable, truly eternal in you
to shine through, once this spiritual fire, these flames of the Spirit have completely run through
you and finished burning everything that is fallen in you, then, and only then, the true you,
the eternal you, the you whom God created in His image to exist eternally with Him,
then and only then that true you will shine through. Don't build yourself into a Saint;
Adam has tried it and we see where that ended. Allow God the time and the space to work in
your life, and if God allows pain and suffering, if God does not answer to your questions: Why?
Why, O Lord? Why? If God keeps his silence, then we should learn to keep our silence as
well and to keep on going forward in virtue of our faith in Him and in the fact that He is Love
and He will forever unshakeably, unchangeably, if that is a word, be Love.
Oh, I don't know if this is going to amount to anything, I don't know if
this is going to benefit anyone, all I know is that I saw something beautiful and like
like a stupid child I wanted to pick it up and show it to his friends, and you are our friends
and this is, this is the gift that God has given me,
this beautiful sunset and this conversation with my monastic brother, and they are all yours.
Be blessed, my brother and my sister, be blessed wherever you are. Amen, amen, amen.
[singing] which doth abundantly pour forth the sweet wine of our salvation,
truly making glad the souls and the bodies of all mankind.
Wherefore as we call thee blest as the cause of our every good,
we ever cry to thee like the Angel: Rejoice, O Full of Grace.