In the name
of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
This is our
first installment in the new series “Contemporary Orthodox Elders.” I think
you’ll find it absolutely fascinating, and I want to make a few preliminary
comments before we jump into our first example of glorious recent elders, Elder
Epiphanios Theodoropoulos of Athens. The reason that I’ve chosen to do this
series, which is dedicated to surveying the lives of seven elders, is that
these elders have lived and reposed in the last fifty years. The reason they’re
so important is that they answer the question we have as we struggle in our
fallen world, which is, “Is it really possible to be faithful to God now?
Things are so bad and the temptations are so great and the world is so
pressing. I know it was done in the past—we have so many saints in the past who
lived and found their way to the Kingdom of God in this wilderness, but they
didn’t live with what we’re living with.” This is the thought. The reason the
contemporary elders and saints are so important is that they provide a
definitive “Yes.” They tell us that the resources that God has provided for His
people—the gift of the Holy Spirit, the Holy Mysteries of the Church, the power
of Christian fellowship—are sufficient to enable us, as they have enabled our
brothers and sisters in generations before us, to live a life that is holy and
come into the Kingdom of God. This is the great value of the contemporary
saints.
Transformation
is possible for us and Pentecost is relevant now, right here. I have maybe
fifteen contemporary men and women who mean a lot to me and upon whom I rely
for hope and an example, but I have chosen seven. These real personas are
affecting me still and I’m always learning. When I came home a few weeks ago
from the country of Georgia I had a strange postcard in my bag. I was in the
big cathedral, and a woman came up to me, and without saying a word she seemed
to realize I was a foreigner, and gave me this postcard of some monk and walked
away. I looked at him and he was so beautiful. I had no idea who it was, but I
brought it home and now it’s on my keyboard, looking at me for the past month.
This week I found out who it was. I sent the picture to some Georgian friends
and found out he’s an incredible recent elder who suffered terribly under the
communists and who was a Fool-for-Christ and recently glorified as a saint. His
name is Elder Gabriel. That’s just one example of how the contemporary saints
are not a static reality. New saints are constantly being made all the time.
Just this past year Elder Paisios was glorified as a saint, and more are
coming, which is incredible. We discover them and share them with each other
and people from other countries visit and tell us about them. I’m always
learning new things.
Perhaps some
of these elders you won’t know and I’ll have the happiness of sharing a very
rich fare with you and you’ll take from it and eat and decide you want to
continue eating from that plate the rest of your life and you’ll become friends
with some of these elders.
Tonight we’re
starting with my favorite of favorites, Epiphanios Theodoropoulos. He lived and
served most of his life in Athens, Greece. When I think of him I think of what
St. Gregory wrote about St. Basil in an encomium on his life, that he was a
professor of life and a teacher of dogmas. This is very much an apropos
description of Elder Epiphanios. He was a professor of life. He was a very fine
Patristic scholar and canonist and he wrote several books. A collection of his
teachings have been published in English called Counsels for Life, translated
and published by Fr. Nicholas Palis through his St. Nikodemos Publishing.
He was a
celibate priest, living his whole life in the world. He didn’t retreat to Mt.
Athos which he loved dearly, but lived in the city of Athens and became a
professor of life for believers and teacher of dogmas for us. He was born on
December 27, 1930 in Vornazion in the southern Peloponnese in Greece. He was
named Etioklis and he was the oldest of six kids. His parents John and Georgia were
pious, and he had an aunt who was crippled a little bit in her feet named
Alexandra to whom he was absolutely dedicated, and vice versa. She was a great
God-lover, and many times he said that whatever he was in life he owed to God
and Aunt Alexandra. He absolutely praised and loved his aunt, and also his
grandmother. He said the two of them taught him to love Paradise. When he was
young and squirmy Aunt Alexandra used to put him on a stool in the kitchen and
told him that if he learned to sit still then Jesus would give him Paradise.
Sometimes he would grow restless and start to squirm and he would ask her, “Do
you think I’ve lost Paradise?” and she would say “If you move a little more you
will.” Through those little interactions she taught him to evaluate everything
he did in relationship to Paradise. She expected a lot from him. This is
important for us to hear, in a time when we expect almost nothing from children
and we’re taught to spoil them.
He wanted to
be a priest from the age of two and became very faithful to the fasts and
services of the Church by the age of five. Sometimes his aunt would suggest
that he have a little milk, because he was so young to be fasting so strictly,
and he was so incensed for even suggesting drinking milk on a Sunday morning
before Liturgy, when he was five! He used to give her little sermons about she
needed to trust God and that it’s very important to listen to the Church
because it’s the voice of Christ in the world. When he was six or seven he
would beat the priests to the church and would be waiting for them by the
locked church in the shadows. Many times he even scared his priest, making him
think he was some burglar standing in the darkness by the locked doors. From
childhood he read Small Compline every night and he later encouraged his
spiritual children to read Compline. Sometimes he even read it by the light of
the moon during the Nazi Occupation, when many Greeks were without electricity.
He also had to become very wise in order to offset his aunt’s condescension to
him. In humility she didn’t want to push him too hard. When she would get up
early to go to some church or chapel for a feast day, she would leave him
sleeping and sometimes he would wake up, and she’d be gone, and for him that
was horrible. From the time he couldn’t stand it anymore, he would steal her
shoes before he went to bed and hide them in bed with him so that she had to
wake him up and not leave without him.
When he was
in elementary school he served as the altar boy in the school chapel and would
take home prosphora from the liturgies and took a little bit every day to stay
connected with the previous Liturgy and to prepare for the next Liturgy. He
lived Liturgy to Liturgy. He used to reenact the entire Liturgy once or twice a
week with his family in the living room. That’s a very common type—St.
Athanasius the Great reenacted the Baptism service over his friend as a young
boy. The patriarch of Alexandria saw it and said it was perfect and accepted
it. This is how Elder Epiphanios lived. For him, even as a small child, the
Liturgy was his greatest happiness.
He was very
manly in his courage. His aunt recalls that when he was young, after he made a
mistake he would immediately take credit for it. He wanted everyone to know it
was his mistake because he couldn’t bear the thought that someone else would be
blamed for his mistake.
He went to
school in Kalamata. He was very academic, although he hated math. He was
especially dedicated to reading Holy Scripture. He developed the practice for
the rest of his life of reading the Old and New Testaments in the ancient
languages three times each year. He wanted to regularly hear the voice of his
beloved, which is the why people are so serious about reading the Scriptures
every day. This is a common theme for holy people—think of St. Seraphim who
read the New Testament every week. Once his aunt caught him reading some very
secular material and was very offended. She didn’t understand why this pious
young man would read such things, and he chastised her saying, “I am going to
become a worker of the Gospel and I have to read all the things the other
people have read. I have to know these things and be able to converse with them
and be able to answer them.”
He used to
say the university does not make the scholar, but rather the chair makes the
scholar, referring to enduring the discomfort on your gluteus maximus and back
and eyes from sitting in your chair, reading and studying. The willingness to
endure is what produces scholarship and knowledge, which he applied to his
spiritual life as well. In high school he stopped eating meat for the rest of
his life. He honored the Lord’s Day very seriously and never studied on
Sundays. He visited monasteries a lot as young man. He called the monks and
nuns the “aristocracy of the Church,” meaning they had the wealth of prayer and
the wealth of piety—real treasures, and he wanted to be with them.
He loved the
poor and he would often turn his friends’ views of the poor upside down. His
dad owned several fields and thieves were often caught stealing the harvest. As
a young man he became responsible for the fields, and once a thief was caught.
When Fr. Epiphanios heard the thief’s story, not only did he not punish the
thief, but he told those holding him that this man had endured far more than
his family, and decided that from then on they would set aside a portion of
their fields for the thief every harvest, to take care of himself and his
family. He didn’t want the man to have to look for other fields to steal from.
He now had his own land to work, harvest, and sell.
In 1949 he
moved to Athens at about twenty-two years of age and enrolled in the spiritual
school and studied both sacred and secular literature very broadly, on the
model of the Cappadocian Fathers. St. Gregory and St. Basil had studied the
great secular works of the Greek Empire as well as the Holy Fathers and
Scriptures in Athens. He often visited the monastery of Logovardo on the island
of Paros, the home of the very famous Elder Philotheos Zervakos, who served as
his spiritual father until his own death in 1980. He said if he wasn’t a priest
he would have studied either medicine or law, because medicine is the most
philanthropic of the sciences, and law enables one to champion the cause of the
good and the just and to protect the innocent.
He was
ordained a deacon at twenty-five, the canonical minimum age and published his
first book entitled Holy Scripture and Evil Spirits. He published twenty-two
books in all, and many articles. Unfortunately there is a small amount of his
material translated into English. There is Counsels for Life, which I already
mentioned, which is a thematic collection of his teachings, and there is also
the wonderful book Precious Vessels of the Holy Spirit which collects the lives
of contemporary elders from Greece, including Elder Epiphanios. Hopefully more
will be translated into English.
He was a
great zealot for the canons, including the local canons and those of the holy
fathers which were ratified by Ecumenical Councils. Many contemporary Churchmen
accused him of having a pharisaical attachment to the canons, but he said that
to reject the canons and not listen to them was to reject the gifts of the Holy
Spirit. Someone said to him: “Father, with your attachment to the sacred canons
you will end up a legalist,” and he answered “No, my child. In an age, though,
when many invent various excuses to throw these fruits of the Holy Spirit in
the wastebasket, I insist on standing with absolute respect before these canons
and the God-bearing fathers who instituted their beckonings.” He was not even
close to being a Pharisee; he was just faithful—faithful to stand before the
fathers and give them their due. We are in great need of that same spirit now.
As a deacon
he spent five years peacefully studying, reading and writing for five years
without being bothered. What a nice life! He looked back on that period as a
treasure. In 1961he was ordained a priest by Metropolitan Ambrose of
Eleutheropolis, who deeply loved him. Fr. Epiphanios loved the priesthood. He
used to marvel at archimandrites who were dissatisfied with being simply
priests and wanted to become bishops. He had absolutely no idea what their
problem was, and he mentioned it often—it’s like someone with the richest fare
and they’re just not satisfied. He loved being a priest and serving the Holy
Mysteries. He even loved not having to be a bishop and he refused the request
of the Church to become a bishop more times than anyone can count. He was offered
many offices but rejected them because he loved just serving, praying, hearing
confessions, and writing and reading. He loved his cassock. Aunt Alexandra said
if she hadn’t been there at the birth and known otherwise she would have been
sworn that the man was born wearing a cassock. Once someone asked him what he
would do if the Church of Greece banned cassocks. He said “I would live in
seclusion.”
He served his
entire ministry in a little chapel in downtown Athens dedicated to the Three
Holy Hierarchs, and refused to receive a single penny in payment. He made a
deal with God that he would keep his pockets empty through charity if He would
keep his pockets full. He ended up building churches and a beautiful monastery,
helping students go through university, and taking care of the poor. He was a
machine of almsgiving because he stayed true to his promise to God. He edited
publications for the austere publishing house of the Papademetriou Brothers
which brought him income for food, but he remained unpaid and uninsured his
entire life.
He had a very
serious personal Typicon. He woke up and prayed and served the services from
4-9, studied from 9-12, and then opened his confessional from 12-5 or 6,
nonstop every day. After Vespers he went to the hospitals and visited the sick,
and then he went to bed. That was the basic cycle of his life: prayer, study,
confession, services, hospital, sleep.
In addition
to refusing to become bishop, he sacrificed a full professorship, the offer to
become the chief secretary of the Synod of Bishops of the Church of Greece, to
be the rector in a magnificent large church, and to be the director of a
missionary brotherhood. He just wanted to live peacefully with his stole that
he could put on people’s heads and reconcile them with God through Confession.
Confession was his greatest happiness. It was his own personal crucifixion with
Christ to accept this many sins and he wrote, “There is no greater satisfaction
for me than to remain for many hours on the seat of the confessional and to
reconcile man with God.” Once he said to a spiritual child who had behavioral
problems, causing himself and others great grief, “Now I can explain why you
are acting like this. I have not placed you particularly in my prayers, but
from today, this evening, I will do it.” He saw the person’s behavior and
blamed himself—because he had been given to him by God as a spiritual child but
he hadn’t particularly prayed for him. So he decided to start that night.
He had
terrible insomnia, and three times in his life it was so bad that he begged God
to deliver him from it. Each time, when he couldn’t bear to go on, he let the
New Testament fall open, and each time it fell open to 2 Cor. 12 where the Lord
said to St. Paul that He had given him a thorn in the flesh so that he might
not boast of the revelations he was able to see, that he could become strong in
his weakness. After the third time he never complained or asked God again,
recognizing that it was from God, that he could depend on God in weakness.
In 1976, he
founded a monastery of the Mother of God, "Full of Grace," in
Trizina, in the Peloponnese near his birthplace. From then on he split his time
between his Three Holy Hierarchs chapel and the monastery, where he provided
spiritual direction. He was absolutely devoted to the Holy Mountain and the
monastic way though he himself chose to serve God in the city. Once a nun came
to him asking very complex spiritual advice about the Jesus Prayer, and with
the humility which distinguished him he told her, “I am a man who lives in the
world. I am on the one hand a celibate clergyman, but in the end, I live in the
world. I will tell you a few technical simple things, but you would do well to
seek the counsel of an agiorite[1] father.” He told her of a particular monk
who especially practiced and taught hesychasm. The sister answered him, “But
elder, he is the one who sent me to you.”
Δεν υπάρχουν σχόλια:
Δημοσίευση σχολίου