If you look at it from a distance and in the proper perspective, our life on earth is so brief and unimportant. It is just like the bright trail left in an August sky by a shooting star: it appears, glows for a moment, then vanishes forever.
For those who in one way or another have led distinguished lives, that trail might survive in a photographic film and people outside their close circle may know of them. For most of us however, we are nothing but a bright line, which sparkling for a moment, contributes infinitesimally to the superb starry sky for a tiny particle of time.
The lines which follow are steps of a personal spiritual journey. There is no logical sequence in their presentation here. It is just a fragmentary juxtaposition of some ideas an ordinary person might have, after an anguished struggle with the great and inexorable questions which every human being on this planet has to face. One of the reasons that made me start on this account is that many people, with settled points of view and opinions, would like to know the equivalent ideas of their fellow men, and particularly how and why they have come to these conclusions. In biographies and interviews with intellectuals you can, to a certain extent, find fragmentary answers to one or more of these questions. However, I do not think you often meet someone, who will tell you in detail how he stands on the problem of existence: what he accepts and what he rejects, and most importantly, why he made his choices.
You could accept an attempt made by a simple, unknown, common individual, not if he wanted to "lead" or influence others, but simply to express his points of view, expose them to well-disposed criticism and perhaps even (why not), revise his opinions if he is persuaded that they are wrong.
Let us clarify matters: the reader, of course, has the right to know from the beginning who I am and where I am going to take him as the reader. He is not obliged to read the whole book in order to find out the deeper reasons that led me to publish my views. I refer briefly to my personal history below. As to where I am going with the text, I hope it will become clear that the main purpose of writing this book is the pleasure of sharing opinions and attitudes with human beings, (who have not renounced the right of "clear thought"), and the gladness provided by the gift of the "fellowship of the Spirit"2.1.
I was born in an isolated mountain village in the region of Evritania, Greece, which belongs to the larger area known as "Agrafa" ("unrecorded"). It was so called because during the Turkish occupation, the conquerors could never get the inhabitants of these steep difficult mountains under control, or register them in the registers so they would pay poll-tax ("haratsi"). The difficulty of reaching these places and their consequent arduous communication with the outside world is witnessed by the tradition that during the period of Byzantium and the time of the disputes over the icons, many icon lovers with precious icons took refuge in these inaccessible areas to avoid persecution by the iconoclasts. It is said additionally, that once when messengers from the Emperor came with the order to forbid the veneration of icons, the conservative inhabitants of these villages, deeply rooted in tradition and opposed to change and new ideas, caught and slaughtered them.
This strange mixture of rebellious idiosyncrasy, spontaneous and illogical, irascible moodiness, and pioneering devotion to complete freedom on the one hand, and a stubborn, obdurate adherence to tradition on the other, naturally created a peculiar personality.
Moving from generalisation to fact: I was born in 1937 in one of the villages of Agrafa to an Orthodox family, I was baptized in the Greek Orthodox Church, and Orthodox I intend to die.
My father was a low ranking civil servant, with not much education but a big heart, one of those people who gave everything to his family. He was strong, reliable and had a lot of foresight. We were very grateful to him for this later on, when we realised what was happening. Even though he had his salary and worked in the main town of the prefecture, as soon as he "smelt" war was coming in 1940, and remembering his own hunger as prisoner of the Turks at Afion Karahisar during the Asia Minor disaster, he took leave of absence from work and came back to cultivate the infertile fields in our village, so that we managed to have our own bread and not to suffer hunger during the famine of 1941.
My father's personality was full of tender love for others, regardless of his gruff exterior.
Like most mothers, my mother was very sweet and kind, but she was almost illiterate; she had only finished the first two classes of primary school since in those days girls did not really go to school but mainly did housework. However, she always had a yearning to learn her letters, and would have had a great capacity for it. Clever, willing and tireless, she had, to the greatest degree, a quality missing from some mothers nowadays: good humour and the spirit of self-sacrifice for her family and for others.
My parents were from the same village, brought up in the Orthodox tradition as it was handed down from father to son, and they accepted those traditions without a shred of doubt and were careful to put them into practice. Although many of these traditions were loaded with the "ancient rust" of ignorance and superstition, there was never any discussion or doubt. I remember my mother trying valiantly to avoid household work on the eve of a Saint’s day or on a Sunday and, of course, to avoid chores on the actual Saint’s day itself, or trying not to wash clothes on the first few days of August before the Feast of the Assumption. There is no space here to make closer reference to other village customs, others of which are wonderful and picturesque, and others unintelligible. They were all part of "sacred tradition" and if you didn't faithfully uphold these customs it was considered a sin.
Naturally being the third and last child in the family, and spending most of my time with my mother, in the garden, forest and field, I had deeply rooted in me the same traditions and ideas. When I went to primary school - in those days it was morning and afternoon and Saturday mornings - we were taught our letters by a mild and exceptionally kind teacher, a family man who was excellent at his job. He passed on real and useful knowledge in a constructive way, without us having to do too much memorizing without understanding. I can still remember much of the information I learned at primary school.
On Sundays and feast days we always went to Church. Most of the time we young ones sat on the steps outside the sanctuary beside the Royal doors. We listened to the Service near the choir, and followed everything that was going on. We had heard it so many times that we knew most of it off by heart and strangest of all, even though the language of the liturgy was not our everyday Greek, but New Testament and Byzantine Greek, we really understood most of it and knew what it meant. The priest, who was a lean, dark, serious man, never gave us a sermon. His face was tanned by the sun, because he worked in the fields each day just like his fellow villagers, and etched with pain, as one of his five children had been struck down by meningitis, with serious consequences. He was a living sermon himself, full of patience, endurance, dignity and voluntary submission to the will of God. You never heard him utter a sigh or word of complaint, and he never let anyone suspect or have an inkling of his problems.
He was much hurt by his fellow villagers who were often bad mannered and grudging in giving him his "tithe", a few measures of grain, a sort of meager wage to sustain himself and his family.
With all this ecclesiastical education, supplemented by daily conversations with my mother (we seldom saw my father as he worked in the town) full of advice and admonition, garnished with old stories, traditions and proverbs, what was the final conclusion that our childish minds reached? When we were small "and the devil hadn’t entered our breeches" as they used to say at the grocer or in the village coffee shop, the greatest sin for us was to idle in bed after the church bells had rung, enjoying a last delightful nap.
Our mother’s voice, sweet and caressing to begin with, but getting louder and more severe as time went on, tried to put us on our honour. She always managed to get us up in the end, but only she knew in her soul how much we worried her every time.
Even today, I have this engraved deeply in my heart, from my mother's early teaching: that one of the worst crimes was not to go to Church on Sunday. Now I can understand what this "duty" taught us, together with other obligations we had then: that life was not always easy, but full of hardship and pressures and this helped us to face all the unfavorable things that happened later.
As for the rest, the serious stuff, (like love, caring for others, selfishness), she never made us feel guilty. Living in that stiflingly narrow atmosphere in a small isolated mountain village, she could have had clashes every day with the villagers, who were also, after all, mostly relatives. There were unavoidable consequences of the struggle for survival: the division of the meager water supply from springs for irrigation; whose turn it was at harvest or threshing time; whose beast had broken into your land and eaten the crops; all the little annoyances of everyday life. On all these occasions, which for others were a chance for rivalry and quarrels that left their share of antipathy and hatred, she put into practice an old principle of her father's: "give place unto wrath"2.2. The old saying (which she often heard at Church services but did not really understand): "and if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also"2.3 was the simple, unhurried yet painful manifestation of her kind heart, never thought of by herself as something done against her will.
We grew up in an atmosphere of love and harmony with our neighbours, though we did not realise that this was not necessarily a normal situation but the expression of our mother’s Christian way of life, a conscious attempt by her, which must sometimes have been very painful.
Unfortunately, a few years later came the curse of the Civil War, and our normal situation of relative peace was shattered by acts of violence and hate: beatings, tortures, and murder, all of which were part of this hurricane of destruction. This upheaval uprooted us from our beloved village and brought us as refugees to the nearest town, where our fears lessened a little. We were given the chance there to come into contact, some of us more than others, with a Christian movement which had started then and sprung up all over Greece.
I would like to state from the beginning that, despite errors which I was able to recognise later, I owe a lot to this movement: the personal relationship with Jesus, the sincere and brotherly friendships, some of which have lasted for me to this day and which I consider a precious gift from God, their way of thinking and facing life’s big question marks, but also simple trivial things. In this environment our "natural" and theologically unrefined Orthodox culture has been enriched and improved.
This period coincided with the time of my adolescence and early manhood, and naturally the main issue we were concerned with, and that they encouraged us to be concerned with, because they had given it central importance in Christian teaching, was the "sexual problem" or the "moral issue" as they tactfully used to call it. Of course, they discussed all the other matters in Christianity, but priority was given to the moral life, to mission, to the fulfillment of our duty to worship, following tradition closely, and the strict upholding of the canons.
In this way, love, the central message and the heart of Christian teaching, without being totally neglected, was discreetly placed on the sidelines and was often used as an auxiliary aid and tool for the missionary zeal, which characterised this movement. As I have already said, these were well-intentioned people who were willing to sacrifice themselves.
Unfortunately, all good deeds (and I make no exception) hide the innate weakness which more or less characterises every human action: to consider itself as "The Action". The hard reality which followed, unavoidably brought release from this delusion, but many people had by then tasted one of the bitterest experiences of this life: disappointment. It is a blessing, however, that sooner or later mistakes are recognised, and the good intentions which have never been doubted find new ways of "offering".
"That's how loves get to heaven
they always find their way through the abyss"2.4.
[2.1] Phil. 2, 1
[2.2] Rom. 12, 19
[2.3] Mat. 5, 40
[2.4] The verse is from a modern Greek song, sung
by George Dalaras.
Abyss = Middle English abissus, from Late Latin abyssus, from Greek abyssos, from
abyssos, adjective, bottomless, from a- + byssos= depth; perhaps akin to Greek bathys=deep.
1 : the bottomless gulf, pit, or chaos of the old cosmogonies
2 a: an immeasurably deep gulf or great space b: intellectual or moral depths
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