Fr. Rafail Noica: “My search led me through several crises.

 Fr. Rafail Noica: “My search led me through several crises. Here is one of them: why must we go to church, why must we pray? Can we not pray at home as well? This question is asked by many, even today, but many in my own generation raised it too. And although I was not praying at home, I still thought it was enough to pray at home. So I was only searching. I was not praying, as we usually understand prayer, yet I was, nonetheless, in search. And I encountered a community of Baptists, led by a truly remarkable man. I took part in their religious life, unbound by external forms, thinking that in that Baptist expression—such as it was in that church—I had found a purer, more simplified form of glorifying God. I remained there for about a year, a year and a half, until, in the course of my spiritual search, I arrived in France, within a Romanian enclave. Thus, in France I found myself in a Romanian milieu, where I continued my search, especially through conversations with a man whom I greatly esteemed for his simplicity, his humility, and at the same time for the depth of his spiritual life. And not so much through conversation as through a difficult trial through which the Lord led me, little by little the Mother of God drew me back into the Church in which I had been born and baptized—this time with the revelation that the Orthodox Church is not one Church among others, but is, quite simply, the very nature in which God created man. The essence of Orthodoxy is the nature of man.”  from the (Romanian) book „The Other Noica”