Father Rafail Noica: „Why do Orthodox Christians show such reverence to their priests, even kissing their hand?”

 Father Rafail Noica: „Why do Orthodox Christians show such reverence to their priests, even kissing their hand?”

“I wandered into other confessions because I did not have the awareness of what the Church truly is, nor did I understand why there are many ‘churches.’ Yet the particular thing I could not grasp was the Eucharist—the Holy Communion in the Orthodox Church. I thought it was merely a symbol...

But the Lord led me through Protestantism, and as a good Protestant I began to read the Bible. And in the Scriptures I stumbled especially upon chapter six of the Gospel according to Saint John, where the Lord Jesus speaks so clearly and openly about Holy Communion—not as a symbol. He speaks there of His Body, saying that unless one eats the Flesh of the Son of Man and drinks His Blood, he has no life in himself.

And I struggled to understand what this meant: why does He speak so concretely? Yet I found some consolation seeing that even the Apostles were troubled by this hard saying, and some even left Him, saying: ‘This is a hard saying; who can accept it?’ Then the Lord turned to the Twelve and asked: ‘Will you also go away?’ And the Apostle Peter answered Him: ‘Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.’

And I clung with all my being to the words of the Apostle Peter and remained, so to speak, unshaken—waiting until the Lord would show me the way.

Through a rather long story, with crises which now I look back upon with much interest (though at the time they were full of pain and heaviness, with anxiety—deep unrest and turmoil through which I passed), the Lord eventually showed me what the Eucharist truly is. And this is how:

While I was still a Protestant, I challenged an Orthodox Christian to explain why Orthodox believers show such reverence to their priests, even kissing their hand. And he, very humbly and gently, said to me: ‘Well, I do not know. But I, personally, kiss the hand that can give me what I cannot have without the priest.’ And I asked him: ‘What is that? What can a man give you that you, being a man like him, cannot have yourself?’ And he answered, just as gently and humbly: ‘The Most Precious Body and Blood of our Lord and Savior.’

And then, all at once, I realized that it was about what we in the Church call a “Mystery” (Sacrament), and for the first time I understood more concretely, more consciously, what a Mystery means...

So, returning to what I was saying before, I asked that same man—through whom the Lord had, as it were, struck me like a blow to the head—to arrange for me to confess and receive Holy Communion. And from that moment, I have once again been in the Orthodox Church.”

—from the Romanian book “The Other Noica”