Dr. Nikolaos Koios, Content Coach of Pemptousia
It’s a profound conviction of
the Orthodox Church that every epoch has its own saints and there’s not a
single age without them. In every era, the saints are proof and
demonstration of the grace of Christ, the love of the Father and the
communion of the Holy Spirit, in place and time, among us. When saints
leave this earth for their celestial abode, they leave to the generation
which knew them the privilege of Saint John the Theologian (I Jn. 1,2)
to declare ‘what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we
have looked at and touched with our hands’.
Our own generation knew three Elders,
Iakovos, Porfyrios and Païsios, who have now been entered officially
into the Book of Saints of the Orthodox Church. Most of us were in
primary, secondary or tertiary education when we went to visit them and
receive their blessing. We understood little from their words and
personalities. We went either because we were encouraged to do so by our
families or because of the reputation they’d acquired in the Church,
among the people of God. Usually we went along because everyone else was
going.
Sometimes, not often, we found the
opportunity to reveal our adolescent thoughts to one of the three saints
and we’d receive spiritual comfort and valuable advice, which we
usually didn’t follow. But we kept it in our hearts and minds as a
valuable ‘deposit’ which would come in useful later, when the
difficulties of life required it. Mostly we received a portion of grace
in the few moments we were with them. Grace and inexplicable joy. Time
stopped. The cares of life were effortlessly set aside. Thoughts and
considerations about our individual self faded away. At that moment, we
weren’t concerned about our problems. There was a sense of eternity,
that what we were experiencing then would continue forever.
But when we left, this feeling lessened
and in a short time we landed- sometimes smoothly, other times not so
much- back in the harsh reality of our normal lives. Not only our own
routine, but also that of other people, close or distant. All those we
hear about every day and those who are closest. We listen to the latter,
see them, touch them, to the point where we get accustomed to them, are
bored by them, annoyed by them, consider them obstacles in our way and
even hate them. And all of this without initially having any bad
intentions. On the contrary, we all enter the struggle of life with the
best of intentions, with a desire for progress and productivity. But
time and reality prove us wrong. We don’t get what we want, or what we
think we deserve. We become disappointed in others. Especially those who
are particularly high in our estimation. They don’t give us the
sympathy and comfort we’re looking for and of which we have an
increasing need as time goes by. The recollection of our personal
contact with the saints, the three saints of our generation, seems
distant in terms of our situation and this often worries or sometimes
even shocks us. Why shouldn’t these saints be with us all the time? Why
won’t they send us even just a ripple of that grace we felt when we met
them in our younger days? Why have they left us to manage on our own,
deprived of any sense of their blessedness, in circumstances which are
increasingly harsh?
We mentioned at the beginning that each
era has its own saints. They’re its own saints not only because they
lived at a particular time and place, but also because God’s providence
for that specific generation was manifested in them. Our own generation
was that of the prosperity which followed the Second World War and, in
Greece, the Civil War and the concomitant political instability. The
previous generation was concerned more with healing wounds, in order to
get back to its feet. Ours wanted nothing to do with the past,
preferring to enjoy, with extreme optimism, the present, with no
particular interest in the future. Inevitably, that future then became
the present. And prosperity and irrational optimism were replaced by a
general crisis and by pessimism. Our generation wasn’t brought up to
face pain and difficulties. It was a generation that had it easy. This
is why its saints saw them and felt them in this way. The saints of
grace, of comfort and of joy. It was easy for them to pass these on when
we were with them. But we never wondered how they themselves acquired
them. We would read in the ascetic books and the Sayings of the Elders
about ‘giving blood and receiving the Spirit’, but we never really
experienced it as part of us.
Yet in the end, the three great saints
didn’t actually abandon us. They returned a few years later with their
canonization in our Church. The Church, the Body of Christ of which
we’re all members, understands that this generation is seriously ill. It
suffers from the sickness of fleeting and ill-founded prosperity and
ease and isn’t robust enough to face the trials brought on by the
crisis. Our Holy Church brings the saints back onto centre stage by
honouring their lives and, above all, the manner of their death.
If we look closely at the saints of each
era, we’ll see that they had certain things in common, certain
characteristics. The saints of the Apostolic age, the martyrs of the
Early Church, the ascetics of the desert, the great fathers of the
Ecumenical Synods, the theologians of the experience of the uncreated
light, the Athonite saints, the new martyrs and many other groups of
saints in every era, though they can’t all be mentioned here. In the
three saints of our own time we see two common characteristics- not the
only ones, but those which correspond to the predicaments of our age:
pain and hope. All three shared deeply the pain of the millions of
people in our generation: the pain of sickness, of abandonment, of
poverty. Especially the pain of illness, the most obvious sign of
dissolution and mortality. Which people today try with all available
means to avoid and banish. None of these three saints escaped it. Each
of the three had quite a collection of illnesses, which they bore
themselves, while curing those of others. And although all three died in
terrible pain, according to the testimony of those who were with them
at the time, they left something to our once prosperous, now floundering
generation. They bequeathed hope, through their living presence in the
Church; hope that at some stage we’ll once again feel that inexplicable
grace and joy in their presence.
May we have their blessing.
