COMING CLOSER

TO CHRIST

Confession and forgiveness

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh

First published in Great Britain in 2009

Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge

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Copyright © The Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh Foundation 2009

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978–0–281–06203–4

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Contents

Talks

1  Healing the whole Body

2  Confession as encounter with God

3  On confession and repentance

4  Contributions to a panel discussion

5  Youth leaders’ meeting on confession

Sermons

6  Our sinful condition

7  The prayer before Communion

8  Friendship with Christ

9  The priest as witness

10  Unfaithfulness

11  Forgiveness

12  Public confession

13  The priest as spiritual companion

Questions people ask

The Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh Foundation is a body of independent trustees whose principal task is to collect together and publish the writings of the late Metropolitan Anthony (1914–2003). Its website can be found at <www.metropolitan-anthony.org>.

TALKS

1

Healing the whole Body

October 1968

In talking about confession, my intention is to take a number of disjointed subjects which I believe are of importance, or else create problems for people. The link between them will be just that – that they are of importance to certain people and therefore in a way they are important to all of us. Confession is something which is very widely misunderstood and criticized in our times. It is full of possibilities which are not being used, and I would like to disentangle the various elements within the present-day practice of confession. I will speak of confession as it is made and understood by the Orthodox. I would not venture into speaking of confession from any other angle, because, obviously, I know nothing of it in other contexts except what I have heard from other people.

Being found out: a first step to holiness

Years ago, visiting one of the London prisons, I heard a statement made by one of the prisoners that impressed me very much. He said to me, ‘You do not know what a relief it is to be found out.’ We discussed the matter at some length because I wanted to understand and I wanted to see what he meant. What I discovered was that for years he had been aware that being a professional thief was not exactly what he had aimed at. He had a sense of honesty, of loyalty, of integrity, and yet this sense of integrity did not help him overcome his problem, because whenever he made an attempt at changing his life, everyone around him pricked up their ears. On the one hand people said, ‘What nonsense! Are you going to join the opposite camp? Are you going to become an honest man with all the evils that means – becoming as hypocritical as those who exploit others, as untruthful, as conventional, as lacking in authenticity, as alien to your most natural impulses?’ And others began to look at him with suspicion. People who had never discovered in the past that he was a thief began to see changes in him and began to imagine that he might very well be one. And even those people with whom he had a quite natural, good, honest relationship began to treat him with circumspection and suspicion.

So every attempt he made to change his behaviour, and to allow other sides of his personality to take over, was nipped in the bud – on the one hand by the reactions of his own clan, his own gang, his normal surroundings, and on the other by the people he wished to join, but who became the more alien to him as he began to try to become more like them, because every change exposed more of his predicament.

One day he was caught. There was a very great feeling of shame, of distress, and then a sense of liberation: ‘Now I have no need to hide who I am, or rather, who I was. There is no need to be hypocritical, to be what I am not. I can now become whatever I choose. I can either remain a thief, in which case there are ways in which I can behave well enough in prison to get out of it soon enough to go back to my job, having learnt a great deal from my fellow inmates – or else I can choose to change and start anew.’

This sense of relief and of joy in the liberation at being found out is, I feel, almost completely absent from our ordinary lives. We try so hard never to be found out. We try not to be found out as sinners with regard to each other, and we try not to be found out with regard to God as well, by finding conventional ways of putting things right as far as he is concerned. The result is that we can never jump out of the rut into true freedom, because we try to do that by such efforts of progressive readjustment that it would take probably three lives before we are out of the rut, and a few more before we can start on the road.

This is very important. I do not believe that we will ever be able to build up a truly creative society of Christians as long as this is our attitude. There are groups in Christendom who take another line, such as the Salvation Army and some other groups. In these groups we discover something which, I believe, is extremely interesting: the ability not to condemn. This is an ability of those who have already gone through the ordeal, and now have resettled in a new way, and of those who are still going through the ordeal: not to condemn, but to see the act of God, the mercy of God, the love of God in what has happened to a person, and to discover that the fact that he or she was a sinner, was a thief or this or that and the other, is a new reason to glorify God, to sing his praises, to admire him, worship and venerate him.

This one finds also in the New Testament. Take for instance the person and the life of St Paul. When he had undergone his conversion he never tried to blot out from the memory of people that he had been a persecutor and an enemy of Christ. On the contrary, he continually used his own past, a past he was ashamed of, a past that broke his heart, in order to show the greatness of God’s mercy. Why? Because for him, God mattered more than himself – and this is one of the reasons we cannot do it. God does not matter to us more than we matter to ourselves. What matters to us is that he should be there in order to save us, he should be there in order to protect us, he should be there at our beck and call, in order to serve us whenever we need him. When, therefore, something puts us to shame, we feel that infinitely more intensely and deeply than we feel the glory of God that could follow from the vision we could give of what we were, in contrast with what we are or are becoming. Apart from being already a great success in the spiritual life, it is already an immense achievement to have become someone who has the integrity and the respect for God which is needed to say, ‘This is what I am and I am ashamed of it, I am sorry and I want to start anew.’ I think it is probably a greater and more difficult step from being a hidden sinner to being a sinner that exposes himself to the judgement of God and other people, than all the subsequent path to holiness.

Public confession in the early Church: reintegration of the Body of Christ

Now let us return to the subject of confession. When we turn to the early Church we see something complex and very rich. We see first of all a community of people who are outlaws because of their faith, who are knit together as are communities made up of people rejected by others, a community in which each member is closer to the others, even than to their own families. Members of a family may be pagan, enemies of Christ, and very often, as the lives of the martyrs show, ready to deliver their own Christian brothers, sisters, daughters and sons, fathers and so on to the tormentors. In the family of the Church, then, the sense of oneness, the sense of belonging together and belonging to Christ, and the sense also that it matters that the Body of Christ, which is the Church, should not be wounded or disfigured by anyone’s sins or unfaithfulness, was very acute. That explains why public confession, which was the only form of confession used universally in the early Church, was possible.

Public confession requires several conditions. First, a person who has acted against the integrity of the Body, the integrity of its faith, must be prepared to expose himself because what matters is his salvation from death into life, the integrity of the Body to which he belongs and the honour of God. At the same time, what is needed is a community of people capable for the same reasons of receiving him and not rejecting him, able to redeem and renew him and not become estranged from him.

In the early days public confession was the rule for three sins. One was apostasy, an act by which a person renounces Christ, breaking the bond of love between him and the Lord. The second sin against love was murder, the radical lack or denial of love to one’s neighbour. And the third sin that required public confession was adultery, because it was a sin against the love that God had given to two people.

These three sins were incompatible with belonging to the Body of Christ, not in terms of a social group that had its rules, but in terms of simply being one Body living one life – the life of Christ himself, God himself, sharing all things, being an organism of love. When we read the early texts we discover that when someone was to make a public confession he had to prepare himself. Apart, of course, from the inner process that brought him to repentance, he had to prepare himself by prayer, by fasting, by all the spiritual exercises that gave an edge to his awareness and helped him to master the flesh – not just the physical flesh, but that flesh of which St Paul speaks when he talks of the work of the flesh (Romans 7—9).

Also, however, the community that was to receive a confession had to prepare itself. The people were told what would happen and they also prepared themselves by fasting and praying so that, by going into their own souls, they could judge themselves by standing before the judgement of God; and when the day of confession came, it was a meeting and not a judgement. It was a reintegration – not only of the person who had sinned into the community, but a reintegration of the whole community in the sense of regaining an integrity that had been lost through the sin, through the falling away of one of its members.

In a letter of Justin Martyr, written in the second century, there is a remarkable passage. He writes to a friend and explains to him how essential it is that this man, who had sinned, should come back to the community, should be reintegrated into the fellowship both of God and of the Body of Christ, because, he says, by your sin you have wounded the Body of Christ with a wound which no one can heal except you; and if you do not come back, this Body remains wounded. There was an acute sense of the oneness and the wholeness of the total Body, including God, including Christ, the Word of God incarnate. It was an act, therefore, not only of personal salvation, but with regard to God and to every other person, to come back and to be reintegrated, and also to give back integrity to the wounded Body. It was something that was an act of faith and an act of devotion, of loyalty, of fidelity to God and to others, and not only an act by which a person who had found himself in a wrong situation placed himself in the right one.

This is something which we have lost completely and is one of the things which we must somehow recover. We must recover it in its entirety, the sense of this oneness and of this wholeness. We must also recover the sense that sin is not something that affects one person, but affects the total body of the people, and therefore that our sins matter, however personal, however individual they may appear: they matter to the whole Body, not simply in terms of emotional solidarity of friendship, but on a much deeper level.

Repentance and the healing of the individual

We find also in the New Testament, in the Epistle of St James, a passage in which he advises those who are in need to come and to confess their sins to each other (James 5.16). We see again in the experience of the early and subsequent periods of the Church that people went, and continued to go, to those who have holiness and spiritual experience, in order to ask for their prayers and for their guidance. This is another aspect of the confession of sins, and is directed much more than the first towards the healing of the individual person who has fallen away from integrity.

Here we find a number of features. First of all there is the fact that this kind of confession – of sharing one’s inner life, one’s sin or the evil against which one is fighting, the problems which one is facing – is not connected with any kind of ministerial priesthood. We are called to go to those who are righteous, who are holy – that is, to people who have God’s own witness in their favour. It is not a question of sacramental or hierarchical action. It is a question of personal knowledge, holiness, the ability to heal and to save.

The second thing is that what is expected on the part of the one who receives such confession is, first of all, prayer. It is the prayer of the righteous that avails, and this is important.

Third, there is experience and guidance, but at the root of all that there is the recognition of one’s need, the courage to face oneself and to expose oneself, the readiness to be judged, and the readiness to be seen as we are and not as we try to appear. There is an effort to achieve integrity in an act which is not an escape, but is an act of courage and honesty.

The development of the practice of confession: from public to private

All these various strands seem to have come together gradually out of historical circumstances. I do not think that we can trace exactly the moment when things changed. But there are traditional descriptions of how it happened and I describe it in a traditional way, not in order to vindicate the historicity of this account, but to show the way in which things seem to have developed.

I have said that in order to make public confession possible you not only needed a repentant sinner, but also a community capable of receiving with reverence, with broken-heartedness, in an act of complete solidarity with the sinner and with God, the confession which was made. This lasted probably as long as the persecution of Christians lasted. It lasted as long as the Church was a small community with people joined together out of conviction: a community which had nothing to offer except God, a new relationship with him, an integration into the life of Christ, and newness of life between its members.

When, however, after the recognition of the Church in the time of Constantine, it became first of all permissible to be a Christian, and then fashionable to be one, then the community changed completely. Thousands of people probably threw themselves into this Christian Church because it had become the Church of the Emperor. As there was no danger and no personal commitment to God in the same degree of risk there had been before, there was also less commitment of one to another.

The result was that public confession became impractical. There was no longer a real community capable of reintegrating anyone. I can imagine a modern parish in which a repentant member would come forward and say, ‘My dear friends, I am a professional thief’ – and I can very well imagine that the first gesture of all the people there, except a few very saintly creatures, would be to grasp their handbag and to feel for their wallet. And I do not think that I am slandering anyone by saying this, because, even if we were able to restrain ourselves and not just stretch out towards the bags and the wallets, after such a confession the person would find himself in a worse position than before, alienated from the great majority of people in the parish. One would of course admire his courage and his honesty, his integrity and the virtue he had manifested, but one would still take into account the frailty of human nature, the fact that if by any chance he might have a slip and go back to thieving, it was safer to keep an eye on one’s handbag or wallet.

This is really, in a way, perhaps, what happened at the moment of change between the two epochs. People who had come out with all honesty, with the readiness to expose themselves, in order to seek reintegration and to give reintegration, found themselves rejected, alienated and estranged from the people.

We are told in the life of St John Chrysostom that he was faced with this problem because he had a deep and acute pastoral concern and felt that public confession no longer met the need and no longer gave the result of healing that had been expected in the beginning. The person who made the confession might be healed but the others were far from it, and even at times were wounded in a new way. So he acted in the name of the community. He began to act as the one who represents the community, who presides at the holy eucharistic meal of unity, and, in the name of those who were no longer capable, in spite of his passionate preaching, to live up to the ideal of Christianity, he began himself to receive sinners. People came to him, and made the confession they originally would have made to the total Body. He listened to them also in the capacity of a man of God as described in the Epistle of St James. He prayed, he gave advice, and he healed souls that had been wounded. And the result was that people who had not committed any of the major sins that in the beginning were objects of public confession came to him because of this coming together in him of the various functions of a saint of God: he was capable of praying, of advising, of healing a soul, as the representative of the community who could reintegrate them into the wholeness, the oneness of the Body. This is the point at which our modern practice of confession began.

If we look back at what happened we can say that however deeply and creatively confession is used today, there is one thing that we have lost – perhaps not irredeemably, but in a way that is difficult to change – that is, the reception of the person who had sinned by the whole community in an act of solidarity, not only with his return but also with his total state. What is lost is this sense of the oneness of the Body which needs reintegration whenever one of its members goes astray, and which gives reintegration in the mystery of solidarity and of mutual love. There is a great deal for us to think about here. Unless we rediscover this dimension, I think we will go on covering up our own sins and our mutual transgressions in such a way that makes it impossible at times for the person who seeks for healing to be healed.

We see for instance that organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous achieve healing and help people by that very thing: a person can speak of himself, open himself, expose himself without the fear of being rejected. Alcoholics Anonymous begins from the recognition that everyone is in the same predicament. Are we not all in the same predicament? We are not all guilty of all sins, but are we not aware that we are all in the same situation? And could we not begin to rethink our relationships in that respect so as to make this early practice into something which is healing and creative for both sides?

2

Confession as encounter with God

Diocesan Conference, Headington, 26–29 May 2000

The subject for my talk is ‘Confession as encounter with God’. I want to introduce it by reminding you of the parable of the Prodigal Son. I will come to it again in another context, but what is important for us, in this respect, is the return of the son. This young man left his home, rejecting his father, turning away from his family, renouncing all that was then a normal and decent life. And, after a time of reflection and tragedy, he came back. What I want to underline at this particular moment is that, from the moment this young man left home, rejecting father, family, friends, normality of life, cleanliness of life, the father had been coming out, probably not only daily but time and again, in the hope that his son would suddenly appear in the distance. And the Gospel tells us that, when this young man appeared, his father was there, waiting for him, expecting him to come, and rushed forward to meet him.

This is the relationship between God and ourselves in confession. We go away from him, but he does not go away from us. He waits for our return, he longs for our return; he cries over our misery and our betrayal of him and of ourselves, and the moment we appear in the distance, he is there waiting for us, rushing towards us to greet us, so that, when we come, we do not come as mendicants, we do not come as beggars, we do not have to come kneeling down before him who would stand there as a judge condemning us by his own righteousness. He rushes towards us, so that we can know that we are longed for, we are loved in our misery and in our sinfulness, not approved in our sinfulness, but loved with a love that never falters, never diminishes, that burns bright, that is perhaps more tragically deep than the quiet and peaceful love which a father can have for his son when there is nothing wrong in his life. This is, I believe, the best image of confession as an encounter with God, and there is nothing else in confession that matters. We, like the Prodigal Son, come in order to meet God from whom we have parted, whom we have rejected, whom we have discarded, and are met by a Father with open arms. This we must remember, because he is not meeting us as Judge but as Saviour.

On the other hand, we do not sin against God directly as often as we do indirectly, but the way in which we sin against him indirectly is as hurtful and as tragic. Directly, you’ll remember again the story of the Prodigal Son. The boy was happy in his father’s house and yet he wanted something else. He did not want the ordinariness of happiness. He wanted something exciting, something new. He did not want to wear his ordinary clothes, but wanted to be dressed up like a popinjay. He wanted the excitement of a life he had never experienced and known. And what did he do? This, I believe, was a terribly important moment: he turned to his father and said: ‘Look, I want another life. Living with you, living with mother, living with my brother, living in the surroundings which are mine by birth, is not exciting enough. And yet, you are not that old. I cannot wait until you die to be free of you. Let us agree between us that you are dead. Give me all that is to be mine when you are dead. I turn away from you, I leave home, I abandon everything that is dear to you and I forget you and the rest.’ The father does not say one word against it. The father shares out to him all that would have been his at his actual, real death. And the young man goes away and leads a riotous life.

Have you ever thought that this is something which we do all the time with regard to God? All the time we take from him everything he has got to give, and then we turn away to use it according to our own tastes. We do not say as daringly, as impertinently, as cruelly, to God, ‘I am not interested in you. I am interested only in your gifts.’ But isn’t it what we do so often? God gives us life. How do we use the life he gives us? In a way that is worthy of him and worthy of us and worthy of the gift of life? Don’t we take all that God gives us for granted? Don’t we take advantage of all the gifts of God without ever really turning to him in thought, only occasionally thinking, ‘Wasn’t it kind of him to give me good health, friends, wealth?’ We are very much like the Prodigal Son. We take everything he gives, but we take possession of everything; it becomes ours. Whether it is God’s or not originally is of no interest to us; it belongs to us now, we can use it as we want. In that sense, we sin against God.

If we ask ourselves what sinning means, we will find it is not simply a moral category of wrong acting. It is something which is deeper, more horrible in a way. It is a turning away, turning our back. There is a passage in one of the ancient writers in which it says something to the effect that to sin is like crossing a river. On one side of the river is God’s realm, on the other side of the river is the realm of Satan. And we choose to cross this river because, in that realm, on that side of the river, life is more interesting, more exciting, there is more to discover. And we leave God on the other side, alone, to cry over our betrayal, over us, because we have become orphans, because we are at the mercy of evil. But we have no care for him. That is what sin is. It is a moment when we turn our back on God, because there are other things more exciting, more interesting to us than God. We are concerned with ourselves and with these things, not with the One who loves us to the point that, when we did not exist, he loved us into existence at a total risk to himself. I have quoted to some of you a passage from an ancient writer, I don’t remember who it is, who gives us an image of the counsel between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit before creation. The Father says, ‘My Son, let us create a world and man.’ And the Son says, ‘Yes, Father.’ The Father continues and says, ‘Yes, but man will betray his vocation. He will turn away from us and renounce us, and he will have to die. And then, to save him, you will have to become man, put on his mortality and die the death he has created and introduced into the world. You will have to die for him.’ And the Son answers, ‘Let it be so, Father.’ And then the world and man are created. This is the cost of sin for God. He is abandoned and rejected, like the father of the Prodigal Son. But he is also condemned to die our death, to suffer death and all the limitations of a life from which God is banished. This is God’s love for us. This is the God to whom we say: ‘You are not interesting enough to me for me to renounce all other things. I am renouncing you. I am turning away from you. I will turn to you indeed when I need something, because you are not only the Creator, but the Provider, the Saviour and the Protector, but only then will I turn to you.’ Isn’t this what we do? Oh, we don’t speak as crudely as I am speaking now, but isn’t it what we do daily with regard to God?

In the prayer which we recite, or not, after meals, we say to God that we thank him for all his earthly gifts, and ask him to grant us also the gifts of the Kingdom. Doesn’t it mean that, at that moment, we realize that everything we have, our very being, our life, is of God, and yet that we treat it as part of a created material world, a world that, in our mind, in our imagination, in our illusion, we see as something God has made and then left adrift? And then we ask God: ‘Make it into thy Kingdom, all that is my life, all that is the world around me, make it, O Lord, into thy Kingdom.’

Is that not what we should do all the time, transform everything of this created and fallen world into God’s realm? But it isn’t what we do. We take what God makes, what God gives, and we take it away like the Prodigal Son, until one day we feel hungry. Why? Because these gifts, which we received, were stolen as it were from God when we snatched them from him by saying to him: ‘Die now, because I can’t wait until you are dead to enjoy the fruits of your work, of your sacrifice, of your love. Die now.’

We go away and we spend them. But what happens? As long as we are rich with what God gave us, we are surrounded with people who want to take from us what we possess, exactly on the same terms as we have behaved to God. As long as we are in possession of things, others are around us like parasites. The moment when we have nothing else to give, when we have spent what God has given us and are spent ourselves, deprived of everything, we are of no interest to people and they turn away from us. Is this the moment for which we must wait in order to realize what we have done? Alas, very often it is the moment. It is a moment when we realize that we have condemned God to death, that he has actually died on the cross for us, and that we have accepted his sacrifice in order to be redeemed.

We are not, though, redeemed mechanically by the death of Christ. We are only redeemed if we integrate ourselves into his death and eternal life. We have rejected and lost what God gave us, perhaps not completely, because otherwise we could not even think of God and repent, but we have rejected so much, and, now, what can we do? We can remember that there was a time when we lived in the Father’s house, when there was love, when there was not this desperate loneliness of rejection. And we can start on our way back.

But we do not only sin against God in this direct way of renouncing him and taking his gifts. We sin against him also by discarding and despising his gifts, as when, from time to time, people say, ‘I wish I could die, because life is too heavy.’ We also sin against God through the way in which we behave towards people and treat them. God has loved every one of us into existence, into life, and he has died so that every one of us can recapture the life we have discarded and lost. Every one is loved, and the measure of divine love is the death of Christ upon the cross, his descent into hell, to join for ever those who have been rejected. This is God’s measure of love of our neighbour. How do we treat our neighbour? Do we treat him as someone whom God has put in our charge? Do we treat him as someone for whom we care, who matters to us, who has been put in our path for us to do for him all, all we can – or do we, on the contrary, treat him with cruelty, coldness and indifference?

I have a notion of what I am saying. I belong to the early days of emigration from Russia, following the Communist Revolution, to a time of misery, violence, cruelty, homelessness and hunger. I remember that, when I was a boy of ten, twelve, thirteen, I thought that the world and life was a jungle, populated by wild beasts; that every person around me was a danger, someone who wanted my destruction; that survival meant fighting and becoming as hard as nails. That is how I saw the world around me. And that is how we make the world for others. The world changed all of a sudden when I discovered God; not through people, but through the gospel, through the presence of God, who made himself known. I remember how I looked then at people, after this discovery of God. I remember what happened when I suddenly felt that God exists, how the next day I came into the street, looked around at people and thought: ‘God loves every one of these people. I will love them even at the cost of my life, because I want to be with God and not without him.’ But otherwise for me every human being was an enemy, a danger, and life was a jungle. It is within this frightened perception of things that we sin against God, by the way in which we look at people and treat them. It is not surprising that Christ says, ‘If thou bringest thy gift to the altar and there rememberest that someone has aught against thee, leave thy gift there and go and make thy peace with him or her whom thou hast offended’ – because your gift is not acceptable unless you are forgiven and accepted by those whom you have reviled or wounded. There is a story in which a prophet prays to God and sees his prayer ascending gradually like smoke and then being wiped down by a strong wind, and not reaching God. And he says to God, ‘What is it? Why does my prayer not mount to you, ascend to you?’ And God answers, ‘Because you have offended an old widow, and she cries her misery to me. I can’t accept your prayer until she can forgive you and be at peace.’

Do we realize that there can be no confession, no repentance on our part unless we have made our peace with our neighbour or done all we could to make that possible? We can come and ask for forgiveness and kneel down and beg, but we may be rejected. Then we must ask ourselves why. Was the person so deeply wounded that even my begging could not elicit forgiveness for me? Or was he or she too hardened, or did he or she perceive, which happens so often, that my words did not express the cry of my soul, that it was words asking for forgiveness, but not my soul poured out and kneeling before this person, begging to be forgiven. We must ask ourselves these questions. When we come to confession, it is to Christ we come, not to anyone else: to Christ himself, who has given his life and his death for our salvation. But, as long as there is anyone who says, ‘No, Lord. No, Lord; he or she has rejected me. I am in hell because of this person. Can you give forgiveness without my being healed?’, it is him whom we wound. And this is why, before we come to confession, we must ask ourselves, ‘Have I made my peace with all those whom I have offended, with those whose memory sticks out in my memory and of whom I am aware, with shame, with pain, or perhaps with total, heartless indifference?’ Can I come to Christ and say: ‘Forgive me, Lord, all I have done against my neighbour, against myself and against you, because I have destroyed myself in body and soul. Give me forgiveness so that I can start life again’?

On what terms can we begin life again? On the old terms, having had, as it were, a cleansing moment, and then a return to evil? The first question we must ask ourselves is, ‘In what way have we sinned against God?’ Do we come like the Prodigal Son, who said to his father: ‘What I want is what you can give, not you. You are superfluous in my life. It is only your gifts that matter. Die, but leave me your inheritance’? We don’t speak so crudely, but we act as crudely very often with regard to God. Or do we come to God, prepare to come to God, by asking ourselves, ‘Is there anyone whom I have offended so deeply that God cannot receive me?’, because there is a cry arising from the earth, saying, ‘Lord, be merciful unto me; he has broken me, he has destroyed me’? Or, should we think of ourselves and ask, ‘What have I done to my own self? How have I perverted my mind? How have I perverted my heart? What have I done with my body?’

Do you remember the passage in St Paul, which says: ‘Shall I take the limbs of Christ, my body which has become an extension of God’s incarnation through Baptism and Communion, and give them to a harlot?’ And it is not only that kind of sin which destroys; it is greed in all its forms, it is all the ways in which we soil this body of ours which should be holy for us in our eyes, because it is an extension of the incarnation through Baptism and Communion. It is this body we have soiled and are destroying. Do we ever think of this? We do not often relate our body to the reality of our spirit and our soul. Recently I had to preach in Southwark Cathedral on an occasion for people who had given the bodies of their nearest and dearest to the medical schools for anatomy, because they felt that, by doing this, their nearest and dearest were continuing to serve mankind; and a thought came back to me. When I was a medical student in the first year in a hospital, I had the care of a Russian who was dying a lonely death in a hospital bed, without language, without family, without anyone, and he discovered that I was a young Russian man. We made friends and he died. And a year later, in the anatomy theatre, I was confronted with his body for the study of anatomy. Can you imagine what I felt? A friend whom I had to dissect? Whose body I had to cut up, to examine because it was simply a human body that would teach me something about the body of man? It was one of the most tragic experiences of my life, because I did it. But with what a sense of veneration, and in what a worshipful manner, did I do this, because he was giving me, after his death, a knowledge that I would use to save human lives. His body was conveying something holy to me. So we must realize the importance of our bodies, of our mind, of our soul, of our will, of everything in us, and the significance of our neighbour, before we come to confession.

Very often we come to confession with the thought, ‘I will open my mind and my heart to such and such priest, because I think I can trust him, either because he will be loving and merciful, or because I need someone who has vigour and will not allow me to remain in my present condition.’ It is not to the priest we are coming. We are coming to Christ, whom we have crucified – we, ourselves, by every sin we have committed in thought or in action, with our own body and soul, and with the bodies and souls of others. There is a story in the life of one of the saints in which we are told of a priest who was so horrified by the sins of some of those in his surroundings that he turned to God and said, ‘Lord, when will you punish them, destroy them, because of what they are in spite of what you have been?’ And Christ appears to him and says: ‘Never ask for anyone to be punished. Ask for his or her forgiveness and salvation. If there was only one sinner left on earth, I would be incarnate again, and die again upon the cross for this one person, because I cannot endure that one person should perish.’

That is the situation of Christ, of God, with regard to each and every one of us. It is to him we come, but we cannot come unless we have gone first to the people for whom he has died and for whose sake his resurrected body is still wearing the marks of the crucifixion.

What, then, is the role of the priest? The priest says: ‘Lo, my child, Christ is standing invisibly before thee, receiving thy confession. Therefore be not afraid or ashamed of me, but speak in all truth. I am but a witness.’ What does it mean to be a witness? What is his role then, if he is not the one to whom you have come? There are three kinds of witnesses. There are the indifferent witnesses who see an accident or something happening in the street, and are asked by a policeman: ‘Have you seen what happened? Who was in the wrong? Who was in the right?’ Such a witness is totally truthful, within the limits of his understanding, but totally indifferent: he does not mind who is right or wrong as a person. No one whom he has witnessed is a friend or an enemy, so he can speak the truth with indifference, with justice. Then there are also witnesses in a court case: witnesses for the defence, who stand for the one who is accused and put forward all the reasons why this person should be forgiven; and witnesses for the accuser, who want to prove that this person is in the wrong.

What is the position of the priest? Who is he? He cannot be the one who stands indifferent. If he is a priest, and not a travesty, a Judas to his vocation, he must be there with compassion, with a broken heart, rent asunder by compassion and horror at the thought that this person may not find his way back to integrity and to a loving and faithful relationship with God and his neighbour. He is also there, as we are told, like the friend of the bridegroom. You remember the passage in the Gospel that speaks of St John the Baptist, calling him the friend of the Bridegroom. The friend of the bridegroom in Jewish society was the nearest, the closest, the dearest friend of the bride and the bridegroom. He was their witness at their marriage, he brought them to the bridal chamber, he locked the door behind them and lay down across it, making it impossible for anyone to break in, to interrupt the mystery of this encounter between the bride and the bridegroom in the mystery of mutual love and mutual gift of self to one another. This is the position of the priest. He is there, rejoicing because the sinner has come to his Saviour, and there is hope, there is joy, there is hope, hope ... but there is also the fact that the penitent is a sinner. There is pain and horror, and there is compassion: a compassion that rends the soul of the priest. That is his position. He is not there to intrude into the mystery of this mutual encounter. He is there to protect it against everything else.

Of course, the priest is not there only as a silent witness, but his witness can be silent. I have known two men who heard confessions without saying a word, who stood there crying over the penitent and praying for his or her forgiveness and then giving absolution. And I have known of a priest who, when he had heard the confession of people and come back in the evening to his room, performed acts of penance for the sins of every one of the penitents who had been with him, praying whole nights in the fear that the penitent did not do it to a sufficient depth. There are priests such as these, who have nothing to say because they leave it to God, but their compassion enfolds and carries the sinner and transforms him or her.

Then there are priests who are aware of their own sinfulness to such an extent that they cannot give you advice beyond a certain point. I will give you one example of this. I remember going to confession to a priest who was not an ordered man. He drank desperately. He was despised. He came to church drunk and he could not celebrate. I put him in a corner of the church, and stood in front of him in case he fell, so that he would fall on my back and not in front of the whole small congregation. Only later did I discover why he had come to this point. He was a young officer in the White Army (against the Revolution) at the moment when it left the Crimea. He was in one ship, and his wife and children were in another. Their ship was bombed and sunk, and he saw his wife and children die, drowned in the sea. I told the story to someone who needed it, and with horror what I heard was: ‘Why did he start drinking? Job did not drink. He repented or he prayed to God.’ God forbid that kind of reaction! But, as for this man, I went to confession to him at a moment when our parish priest had been put into prison by the occupying powers of France. I made my confession and he stood over me crying, not drunken tears, but tears of real compassion. And when I had finished my confession he said to me: ‘You know who and what I am. I am unworthy of hearing your confession and should not say a word of advice, but I will tell you one thing. You are still young. Struggle not to become what I have become, not to fall as low as I have fallen. Here is a passage from the Gospel which is an answer to your confession. Take it with you and forgive me for not being able to give you better advice.’ This is the greatest advice I ever heard. Not because of the passage of the Gospel, but because of the way in which this man spoke.

There are ways in which a priest, simply as a listener and a human being, can at times be helpful. I remember one or two occasions when a priest heard a confession and felt that the confession was not full, that there was something which should have been said and was not being said. Addressing himself to the penitent, he said: ‘All you have said is secondary. There is one thing you have not said, which is the thing that matters. What is it?’ And then the penitent burst into tears and said the only thing that was worth saying.

There are occasions when a priest can give advice, because in the struggle of the soul of a human being, in mind and body and self, towards righting of one’s life, we may need advice: do this or do that. And this should be done, but it should be done by a priest who is broken-hearted with compassion, who speaks to the person in all humility, broken-heartedly, not from the height of his wisdom, but from the depth of his own repentance; because a priest who listens to a confession makes simultaneously his own confession; he cries over his own unworthiness and sinfulness. He can give advice, yes; but – and this is another consideration – one must be able to receive it, knowing that, although it is possibly, probably, certainly imperfect, it is sincere and true. It is a moment when the priest opens his own heart and soul, accepts to be seen in his frailty, because when he gives advice he speaks from within his frailty and not from the height of his worthiness.

Again, there are times when a priest can say nothing. He can only say, ‘God has given me nothing for you.’ There are two occasions when St Ambrose of Optina said that to penitents. Twice penitents came to him, made their confession, asked for advice, and for two or three days he kept them waiting for a reply. And on two occasions a man came and said, ‘Father, we must go back to our villages, and you are not giving me a reply.’ And twice St Ambrose answered: ‘For three days have I prayed to the Mother of God for advice, but she is silent. What can I say? Go and pray to her for help.’ This is something which is legitimate, which does not mean that the priest is indifferent or is incapable of giving advice. It is a moment when he is so deeply aware that what he must do or say is what God gives him to do and say, that he cannot act from within his own alleged wisdom.

I now come to the last point. There are occasions when the priest has nothing to say and can do nothing. And there are occasions when a penitent must do something before he receives forgiveness. I give you an example of the last thing. I remember someone who came to confession to me years ago, and the substance of the confession was that he was in the habit of borrowing money and never giving it back. Having made his confession, having expressed his sorrow and his shame, he was just about to kneel down to receive absolution. And I said: ‘No! Nothing doing; no absolution. You go back and you pay your debts. And then you come and receive absolution.’ This is a very crude example, but this is something that should happen from time to time. From time to time, perhaps not every time; we must be very thoughtful and caring for the people who come to confession to us, not send them away unforgiven, unshriven or condemned by our words and behaviour. But there are moments when we must be able to say: ‘No, you are not going to receive God’s forgiveness without doing anything about what you have done to people. Put things right. There are things which cannot be put right immediately’ – the example I gave you is a simple example – ‘but begin to put things right, go and see the people you have offended. Ask. Explain to them that you are in the wrong. Make them feel and understand that you know that you are in the wrong, that they have the right and power to forgive you, to open for you the door of forgiveness by God. Then come and receive forgiveness at the altar.’

There are other occasions, other cases, which may be rare, when the priest knows he can do nothing and God alone can do something. And that is where I see a link between confession and Communion. I will tell you one story which I will never, never forget in my whole life. More than fifty years ago, when I came to this country, a young woman came to me and said: ‘I want to talk to you. I belong to a believing family. I am sent to receive Communion on Easter every year. And I believe neither in God nor in the Church, nor in Communion, nor in any such thing, and I can no longer face the betrayal of my own self when I come to Communion and receive Communion, believing nothing that it represents. What shall I do?’ And I said: ‘Don’t worry. Even if you came to Communion, I would not give you Communion. So you are safe. But let us meet and talk about it. I will try to share with you what I was taught, what I incipiently understand.’ She came to me every week in Lent, on Fridays, and I proved incapable of helping her at all. And on Good Friday, when she came, I said to her in shame with a deep pain in my heart: ‘I have been able to do nothing for you. If God does not help you ... I don’t know ... let us go to the chapel, kneel before the the icon of Christ in the tomb, and pray for advice.’ And this we did. I knelt down, she stood for a while, but then knelt down also, because she felt awkward standing above me, and I prayed to God and said: ‘I have nothing to say, I have nothing to give to this girl. She needs salvation, and yet I cannot give her anything. Open the door for her. Do something.’

And then I kept quiet and silent and desperate and a thought came to me. I turned to her and said: ‘Does it matter to you whether you find God or not, or is it a matter of indifference?’ She said to me: ‘It matters. For if God does not exist, life has no meaning and I do not want to live. What shall I do?’ And I said: ‘I don’t know.’ And I went on, asking God, asking God, and then another thought came to me, more frightening than the first one. I turned to her and said: ‘If you promise to do whatever I will tell you, in God’s name I promise you that you will find your way to him.’ She said: ‘I do promise. What shall I do?’ And I said: ‘I don’t know.’ I went on begging, begging, and then a third thought came, that frightened me more than I can say. I turned to her and said: ‘Tomorrow morning, Saturday in Holy Week, I will be celebrating the Liturgy. You come to Communion. And before you receive Communion, stand before the holy cup and say: “Lord, your Church has betrayed me, your priests have betrayed me, my family has betrayed me, and you also. I come now to you. I will receive Communion as I am told, but if you do not act, I renounce you once and for ever.” She said, ‘I can’t do that.’ I said, ‘Yes, you can do that, because I will answer for your blasphemy before God.’ And she came.

She stood before the holy cup, said these frightening words and then received Communion. I received a note from her a few days later: ‘I do not know whether God exists or not, but what I know for sure is that what I received was neither bread nor wine, but something else I can’t identify.’ That was the beginning of her conversion, of a deep, incredible change in her life. So there are moments when the priest can do nothing, except stand in awe, in compassion, broken-heartedly, in terror before God and before the person who has come to confession, and pray and pray, and then act in the way in which he can. Ultimately, as I said in the beginning, as I say now in the example I gave you of this young woman, confession is an encounter with Christ himself. The priest may be superfluous. The priest may, as it were, be absent. What he can do is receive the penitent’s confession; identify with it, broken-heartedly, in compassion, in suffering together; pray desperately – and then leave it to God to act freely. But the role of the penitent is then, if he has received forgiveness, to bear fruit of it, to choose those things he can do to repair the evil or the harm he has done. I remember how surprised I was when I went to Father Athanasy for the first time for confession. When I had finished, he said: ‘And now, think for a few moments. You have confessed a certain number of things. Which things are such that you can tackle them? Undertake to tackle those. The ones that are too big for you, leave for the moment, because when you will have conquered the smaller ones, you will be able to conquer the bigger ones.’

And a last thing. At times, old people say to me: ‘It is terrible. The older I become, the frailer I become, the less I am in command of myself, and the more horribly the things of the past emerge and prevent me from sleeping. All night I think of the evil I have done in my life, all the wrongs I have committed. What can I do? I went to the doctor, he gave me pills to help me sleep, but then instead of not sleeping and agonizing over my sins, I have nightmares. I don’t know what to do.’ I said to one of them: ‘You know what happens. We do not live our lives only once – not in terms of reincarnation, of course, but in the sense that we act in a certain way at each stage of our lives: when we are twenty, and thirty, and fifty, and sixty, according to the measure of our spiritual maturity, of our understanding. Years pass and we change. A moment comes when God brings out from the past the evil we have committed when we were too young to understand it, and confronts us with it within our present experience, and says to us: “If you were back in that situation, would you do the same?” If you can say: “Never!”, make the sign of the cross and say: “I am now free and forgiven”; it will go. But if you can say: “Yes, possibly I would”, then you will have your nightmare again.’ There are people who are more cynical. I remember a lady who came five or six times with the same confession. And I said: ‘Look, you have made this confession five or six times, you have received absolution. Why do you repeat it?’ And she looked at me with a touching expression in her eyes and said: ‘But, Father, it is so sweet to remember.’

3

On confession and repentance

Youth camp, April 1979

When we read the Gospel we find in it three types of passages. There are passages to which we don’t react at all, we don’t mind one way or the other. Well, yes, that’s God’s opinion, I am not against it, I am not for it. He has a right to his own opinion and that’s that. There are other passages, to which we really react by saying, ‘Oh well, no, not that!’ For instance, if you read a passage like, ‘If you are slapped on one cheek, turn the other.’ As long as you have not been hurt by anyone you are, probably, quite willing to do it. But the moment it happens you have no desire to turn the other cheek. And if you think of it, you may very well say, ‘No, I am not going to turn the left cheek, I am not going to do it.’ Well, then be honest about it and say: ‘At that point I disagree with God. He is right or I am right, but we are not both right. There is nothing to be done about it.’

And then there are other passages in the Gospel, which move us, which we find lovely or which we find inspiring. You know, there is a passage in St Luke’s Gospel, in which the pilgrims to Emmaus talk to Christ. And then when he has revealed himself to them and they rush back to Jerusalem, one of them says, ‘Wasn’t our heart burning within us, while he was talking to us?’ There is another passage in the Gospel, where Christ was saying things difficult to accept and a number of people went away. And Christ said to his disciples, ‘Are you also going to go?’ And Peter said, ‘No, where should we go? You have the words of eternal life.’ Well, by this he didn’t mean obviously that Christ could describe eternal life like no one else, but what he probably meant is that when Christ spoke, his words, the way he spoke, and his person, reaching out through his words, touched something in them that made them alive in a way in which they had never been alive before with a life which was God’s life, awakening in them all there was in them of beauty, of truth, of inspiration.

Well, there are passages in the Gospel which reach one or another of us that way, not the same passages because we are made differently: those passages of which you can say, ‘Oh, how beautiful!’, those passages which give you a feeling that your heart is happy, that your mind is clear, that your will is stirred into action, that even physically you feel better after having met that kind of saying or that kind of story, passages that tell you that you and God are of one mind and of one heart and of one will together. At that point you are already akin to God, his children, his brothers and sisters. And if you have discovered the passage like this which really expresses yourself, keep it, because if you break that one, if you sin against that one, if you act as though you had never felt any such thing, you are destroying yourself. You are not simply breaking a commandment, you are acting against your own self, your better self.

You know, we are told that we are made in the image of God. Well, supposing that instead of ‘image’ we use the Greek word for it, ‘icon’, and suppose that we look at ourselves and think, ‘I am an icon.’ How do I assess it? Well, there are little bits which are really the original beautiful icon which was painted, and then there are bits which have been damaged and bits which have been painted over. And the whole thing has been rather badly treated either by people or by the weather. And what is left? It is like an old icon of which there are parts which still retain the original beauty and other parts which have been badly damaged. Now, if you want to restore an icon, what you do is to look and study the parts which have not been damaged and then try to peel off the paint that was painted over to repair the parts by remaining as near the original as you can. Well, that is what one should do. Find in yourselves what is still in you in the likeness of God by finding what themes of God you can respond to wholeheartedly, joyfully, thinking, ‘Oh, that is true, that is beautiful!’ And then try to remove from you all that makes you ugly, because in a way sin is like a sickness: if you have pimples on your face you do something about it. You do not say that my face is made that way, it could be a nice face but it’s covered with pimples, that is all right. Or if you have got another illness you don’t say, ‘Oh, well, I am in good health, except for the fact of having leprosy, TB, cancer and a few more things.’

Well, it is the same as that: you do not want to be covered in spots, you do not want to be ill in one way or another, but you must start with the desire to be beautiful and in good health. There is no point in concentrating on leprosy, cancer, TB and I don’t know what and forget that apart from this there is in you an organism full of life and capable of struggle against all this. If you look at sin that way then you will realize that you can fight certain things with inspiration and other ones without any inspiration. If you find for instance that you have pimples you will fight against pimples with great energy, but if you have not got TB, no one of you will be stupid enough to try to get rid of TB. Well, that is what happens when one says: ‘Now, the Gospel says, I should be humble. All right, I’ll try to be humble.’ And there is no material for it. You don’t know how to do it.

But if you feel that you are being made ugly by your laziness, your cowardliness, by lying, by all sorts of things, then you can fight against it with inspiration because it is worth doing. So try whenever you prepare for confession first of all to ask yourself: what is there in me of which I am ashamed, which I dislike, which is ugly? Second, ask yourselves: what are the things which people find very unpleasant and ugly in me? Third, ask yourselves: what are the things which people find nice? Fourth, ask yourself: are they right? Am I such a charming creature, or am I just easy-going or hypocritical? And then ask yourself: what is my likeness to God? How much do I resemble all that is beautiful in me? What is there in me which makes me worse than I truly am? And then you will be able to make a quite interesting confession. I mean, interesting not for the priest who listens but useful for yourself.

That is really all that I wanted to say about it. Now, some practical points. To begin with, you could ask yourself, what do people think about me? Quite a lot of criticism of me comes to me, and every time I am told what it is people think of me, I have got to stop and ask myself: am I right or are they right? For instance: you may be very kind to people but have absolutely no warmth of heart. You may appear to be all sorts of things which you know inwardly aren’t there, and so also when people criticize you for something it’s very seldom that they are always completely wrong. They may be wrong in one case or another, but if usually people find that you are difficult to live with, is it not that everyone else is so difficult that they can’t live even with the charming person you are? At times you can ask someone, but then you must be very careful, because you may get an answer which you will not like at all. You know if you ask your best friend, ‘Well, what is wrong with me?’, and get five or six very painful remarks, you may change your mind about your friend, and that is very unfair because very often, you know, we find people delightful who find us delightful. But the moment they don’t, we begin to think that they are not as wonderful as we thought. But you can ask people, all right.

Also we must try not to make someone else’s confession. A confession should be personal and honest. I will give you an example. I remember a lady making confession, I remember who she is, I could tell you her name and I reminded her of that more than once in the last forty years. She was making a long, long, long confession. One could hear her sh-sh-sh and it was very, very long; and then the voice of our parish priest, who was rather deaf, saying loud and clear, ‘And now, V, that you have made the confession of all your friends and acquaintances, could we turn to your own confession?’

When children come, their confession looks like the opinion of their parents about them. And you know it has happened more than once: a child comes [along], trotty-trotty. I say, ‘Do you know what a confession is about?’ He looks, eagerly saying, ‘No, I don’t.’ I say, ‘Well, it is this and that.’ ‘Oh, yes, I know now. I’ll tell you what is wrong.’ And then bang, bang, bang – a long list of sins. So I say, ‘Oh, how do you know them?’ ‘Oh, mummy gave me the list this morning to learn by heart.’ Well, that is exactly what a confession shouldn’t be. Or else, a sort of mournful discourse about his misdeeds after which I say: ‘Are you sorry about that, because I don’t see any reason why you should be sorry.’ ‘No’, he says, ‘it is mummy who is sorry.’ Well, I think if you replace the word ‘mummy’ by the word ‘God’ there are a lot of grown-ups who make that kind of confession. You know, they take a list of sins and write them out because they know that it is wrong but they don’t really mind, it is God who minds. So they are polite to him.

Then another thing you should never do in confession is to use a nice word instead of a nasty one. For instance, I have had tens of occasions of people saying: ‘Oh, Father, I am afraid I have taken what was not mine.’ Well, ‘I am afraid’, it is not that he is afraid of God’s judgement, it is just a way of smoothing things down. And so I always say, ‘You mean that you are a thief?’ ‘Oh, Father, how can you call me a thief? I am an honest woman.’ I say, ‘No, you have been stealing you said to me.’ ‘No, not stealing, really. It’s taking someone else’s thing without asking.’ ‘Well, that’s what one calls “stealing” in whatever language really. All the languages say the same.’

Or another thing which I find very difficult is people saying to me, you know, with a mournful expression on their face, ‘I have committed all the sins, Father.’ And they think that they will get off with that. So I usually say, ‘What, you, a lady in your eighties, you have been committing adultery?’ ‘Oh, Father, how dare you!’ ‘You, an honest person, are stealing?’ ‘But you are insulting me!’ ‘You have not honoured your father and mother?’ ‘But, Father, are you mad, they died forty years ago.’ Then I say: ‘Well, so it means simply that you don’t care two hoots whether you have committed one sin or 22 sins or all the sins, none of them matters. Well, then, go home and think about it.’ I don’t do that now because everyone has learnt, but you know, the first couple of years I was in the parish I sent quite a lot of people home who had come out with a confession of that kind. So don’t come to me and say, ‘In all humility I have committed all the sins’ because, well, I’ll take you through all the list and we will find out.

Question: When I see something wrong in myself, I can take it as a challenge and I can look forward to doing something about it. And therefore already I’ve repented if you like, already I feel good about it and this is the direction I can go in and I am praying about it. I don’t know whether I would need to go to confession about that. Can you tell me I should, because I don’t quite see?

Metropolitan Anthony: I think, when you discover that something is wrong in you and say, ‘Oh, now I have something to fight against and something to fight for, you aren’t obliged to go to confession about it but only if you discover that, for instance, you know it should be that way, but it is so lovely to be sinful. You know, there is an old Russian story about an old lady coming to confession to the same priest year after year and rehearsing all the sins of her youth. And one day the priest said to her: ‘Now look, you have confessed that at least twenty times, I have given you absolution about twenty times. What is the point of repeating it again and again?’ And the old lady said, ‘Oh, it is so sweet to remember, Father.’ Well, you know, if you feel that one sin or another is so sweet to remember, or that, well, it would be so nice if God had other tastes and one could indulge in this or that without any problem, then you must come to confession and say, ‘I am worshipping an idol, my vanity, or this or that matters to me and I cling to it, I hug it.’ I think a confession should always be a programme for the future. If you have said this and that has gone wrong you must undertake to do something about it. It’s not just being washed in order to go back into the mud.

Awareness is already a little beginning. If you are aware that something is wrong but you don’t feel in your heart great stirrings about it, you can at least go, stand before God and say: ‘I have understood that and yet I feel nothing about it. Help me.’ It’s already something that you have stated it to God and not scattered around him.

If you have no incentive, if you have not yet understood that something is wrong in what you do, or if you have understood it vaguely, but if it does not block the way towards something which you wish to be, then you cannot do it. That’s why I think one must seek for inspiration in positive things and not in negative ones only. And then very often we don’t manage to conquer a sin because we allow it to remain vague. For instance, if you say, ‘I am prone to anger’, what can you do about being prone to anger in general? But if you ask yourself, ‘Now, what kind of occasions provoke me to anger? What kind of people?’, you will discover, that you are never angry with certain people whatever they do, but you are angry with other people very often, whatever they do. There are things that arouse you to anger although you know they are not very important. Other things arouse you to anger simply because they hit at something in you. I remember when I was already at university. Every morning I left for university and said to Granny, ‘Please, leave my window open to air my room.’ Then when I came back there was a very long street and from afar off I could see that the window was shut. And every time I arrived I said: ‘Granny, I asked you to leave my window open. Why did you shut it again?’ And she said very peacefully, ‘Because I thought it was better.’ And that was all. And I was very angry, until one day I thought: why should I be angry? Let me try to turn the tables. And so when I went out I said to Granny, ‘Granny, please don’t shut the window.’ Then when I was on my way back, before I rounded the corner I said to myself: I bet the window is shut. I turned round the corner and saw it was shut. I said: there it is, I am right! And I could have laughed about it instead of being cross. But there are people or things that do arouse us and others that don’t. So, if you discovered, for instance, that so and so always arouses anger, that this and this arouses anger, it is not the question of anger any more, it’s a question of the person. What is wrong with this person? I remember we had an old nun in the parish and we had a churchwarden. And the churchwarden was always very rude to the nun. And one day the old nun said to him, ‘But, Mr So-and-So, what is wrong with me?’ And he said, ‘It is enough for me to see your face, I am in a rage.’ Well, there it was a question of the face of the poor old woman. It was not anything she was doing or had done.

And very often you cannot conquer a given sin by fighting against it but you can conquer it by asking yourself what is the root, what are the circumstances. And then at times, you can’t overcome things directly because you must prepare the ground for it. Say, if you have done no arithmetic in a lower form and discover that you can’t do the more advanced arithmetic later, it’s not by trying to do the advanced one but by trying to learn what you have forgotten to learn before that you will do it. So that’s it, there are tricks. At times you cannot jump from one thing to another. There is a story, which I must have repeated to you more than once, in the biography of Gandhi. He was accused at the end of his life of having been deceitful because they said, ‘You are preaching non-resistance to evil, now that you have won the day, but there was a time when you called dockers out on strike.’ He said: ‘No, I did the right thing because these men were cowards. If I had preached to them non-violence and humility, they would have remained cowards but they would have had a good beautiful alibi. They would say, “We are humble, we are meek, and we are non-violent.” So, I taught them violence to overcome cowardliness. And when they had overcome cowardliness I taught them non-violence to overcome violence.’ You know, at times we have no incentive in us to do the perfect thing, but we can do a second best.

4

Contributions to a panel discussion

29 March 1984

About secrecy in confession

I have come, in the course of years, to the conclusion that what makes a sacrament something so powerful is that it is a situation which is totally in God and – if I may put it this way – impervious to Satan. In Baptism we start with exorcisms, and Satan is excluded, he is out. In confession we do not do exorcisms, but I do believe that it is a human situation in which a human soul is face to face with the living God and no evil power can overhear, eavesdrop into what happens. If, on the other hand, you go around telling of the secret conversation with your God, then you must be prepared for the devil to take note of it and draw his own conclusions, and obviously to his own advantage, not to yours.

There was, in our civilized Russia of the Middle Ages, a rule that if a confessor repeated anything he had heard in confession he should have his tongue cut out. Fortunately, it does not happen now.

Question: Are there any rules about what advice should be given?

Metropolitan Anthony: It is the same situation which you have when you go to a doctor. You may complain about the same symptoms, having two quite different illnesses, and you may be advised to do quite opposite things. And I remember years back two ladies waiting for me for the end of confession and pouncing on me and saying: ‘We both told you this and that, and you told her this thing and me that one. Don’t you know what you mean to say?’ I said: ‘Yes. I know. I meant to say this to you and that to her, and that is the end of it.’

Because, you know, at times you say ‘Don’t drink’ and to another person you say ‘Drink a little wine’. That is an example taken from St Paul. It does not mean that he encourages the drunkard to drink and the abstemious not to. It means that he takes into account different situations and faces them, and, within the limits of wisdom or lack of wisdom on the part of the priest, it is the same thing. One can give different advice to two persons of a different type of maturity, to people who are capable of doing one thing or not. And when people simply compare notes they undermine the trust that they have in the priest. It may be foolish to have any trust, but that is another question: then go to another priest. But it should remain something between God and you, and the priest as a witness, as someone who comes into it by the permission and the grace of God and by permission and your own calling God into this meeting.

If you come as a matter of course to one person for confession, then under circumstances you go to someone else and come back and say to your habitual confessor, ‘I am not going to tell you what happened between him and me’, you prevent your confessor from forming any opinion and being able to give any advice. I think it is a matter of a triangular agreement. I have had it, for instance, with one or two priests. Someone was coming to confession to me and I came to a point when I did not see what I should say or what should be done and I advised this person to go to someone more experienced and wiser than I. Then this person undid the knot, but the person who used to come to me wished to continue to come to confession simply because of distance and circumstances. In that case there must be an agreement between the three persons that you can share it. Sharing something that was told you in confession with someone who hears confession is one thing, but discussing it and saying, ‘Do you know what Father Anthony said – what an extraordinary idea he had! Imagine!’ to people around you is not wise.

Question: Sometimes one is tempted to share an advice which proved helpful ...

Metropolitan Anthony: I think it is obvious that if you have received advice that has helped you and someone around you finds himself or herself in the same spiritual or outward conditions, you can of course use newly acquired knowledge to help, but this is quite different from sitting on a bench and comparing notes or simply babbling about one’s confession. There would be a question of a different kind if we still had public confession as the early centuries had it; but this is such an unreal situation as far as we are concerned that it is not worth discussing now.

Order and frequency of Communion

I know of no canon that forbids a Christian who is not under ban to come and receive Communion, which means that unless you have committed a sin that is incompatible with Communion and with the oneness of life with Christ, either because you have acted against him or against your neighbour or against yourself, there is no rule to prevent you from having Communion. This is why I do not feel I have any right, if a person has no formal reason to be debarred, to debar a person from Communion, whatever I personally feel about frequent or rare Communion – and I personally am in favour very definitely of rare Communion after long and thoughtful preparation rather than frequent Communion. There are two approaches, which I think are different, but both are legitimate. I remember [the theologian Vladimir] Lossky had Communion according to rhythms that corresponded to the Church’s year festivals. There were occasions where for some reason he had Communion in addition to this, but he would not let pass a festival without having Communion, because the centre of gravity for him was the event of salvation; it was the birth of Christ; it was the crucifixion; it was this and that. The absolute centre was God. And he adjusted to it by preparing himself very strictly, very severely, very soberly, but it was God who was the centre.

On the other hand, there are people who cannot address themselves to these rhythms. They are lost at that moment; particularly if one has got a secular job one may be simply thrown out of one’s depth. Then there are these people who turn to what I would call a lyrical approach to Communion. They come to Communion when they have a longing, a hunger for God and for Communion with Christ. And I think both are legitimate. Christ, I am sure, receives the ones and the others equally.

There are several approaches to Communion and attendance in church. I remember Professor Verkhovskoy held very definitely the view that as anyone who is a member of the Church is a maker of the sacraments, not the clergy who are doing something for a passive congregation, but the whole church is active, if I am not prepared to take part in receiving the sacrament I cannot take part in the making of it. And therefore when for one reason or another he intended not to receive Communion, he did not come to the Liturgy. At the other end of the scale you find a man like Theophan the Recluse who says that spiritual communion is a legitimate and normal thing. When we commune with God in prayer in the context of a sacramental event, we are in communion, even if we do not receive Communion physically, as it were. So one can come to church, and God, who has promised to give his grace in the sacraments, has never said he would not give his grace as fully if the sacraments are not received, not for reasons of carelessness or neglect but for some other, legitimate reason.

Question: Is it essential to make confession before receiving Communion?

Metropolitan Anthony: St Basil the Great, in an admonition which is printed in the service book, says that the role of the spiritual father does not consist only in distributing the sacrament but in debarring people who would take it unto judgement and condemnation. And this I think does not apply simply to major sins but to a light-mindedness, to a lightness of approach which must be gauged and judged in every single situation. I think it is very important that there are occasions when we need to make a confession to free ourselves from the weight of sin in order to approach Communion. But there are other occasions when we haven’t got the concreteness of sin within our awareness and when receiving Communion and entering into communion with God throws a light upon us that allows us afterwards to see what we could not see before and receive Communion. The ancient Church spoke of confession in terms of a bath and of Communion in terms of food. Well, I might venture to say that there are occasions when, coming back from work dirty, one must first have a bath and then come to a meal. But there are occasions when one may be tired to such an extent that one is not capable of doing anything before one has had a meal; and there are occasions when both must combine in different ways. I think that there are occasions when the priest who hears your confession can advise you to have Communion several times because it is what you need. On other occasions he may advise you to come to confession several times before you go to Communion because you are not ready for it. I don’t think that one can speak of strict rules which one could describe. It is something which passes between the people concerned.

Question: How should one prepare oneself to receive Communion?

Metropolitan Anthony: Anyone who wishes to receive Communion should have been at the evening service, and I believe it is right on the part both of the priest and of the people to come to confession. Here I think one should take into account a number of things. One should not indulge in confession, as one should not be careless about it. By indulgence I mean to say that at times one could come and say just a few words to the point when one sees that the service is about to start or well advanced, and reserve for a conversation or for a confession by appointment those confessions which require a long time. On the other hand, I have a very strong feeling that the sacraments interpenetrate one another. One is cleansed of one’s sins and united to the Church in Baptism. One is restored to the unity of the Church by confession. One communes with Christ in becoming a member of his Body through Baptism, and one receives Communion through actual liturgical eucharistic communion. Ultimately I think one could say that only those can receive Communion who are in communion with Christ and the Church. And so I do not feel personally deprived when, instead of celebrating the eucharistic Liturgy, I celebrate a service which is almost a Proskomedia, that is, a preparation of people worthily and openly to receive Communion. I do not say that this is right, but in a church, where there are too many people for the priest to hear confessions to make it possible for people to receive Communion, those who have a chance to come to confession often should, I think, step aside when they see that there are other people who need to come because they had no other occasion. I do believe that people should be very earnestly prepared to receive Communion.

Question: Surely, if you have stolen something, you should show your good faith by saying in confession that you intend to restore and make restitution.

Metropolitan Anthony: At times it would help if the priest suggested something that can be done and gave a task to fulfil, because a general statement of readiness on the part of the penitent or a general statement or advice on the part of the priest that things should be put right at times do not have sufficient concreteness. If one could say: ‘All right, you have confessed this and that. Here are two or three things which you will do between now and the next confession. You will report about the way in which you have done it, not so much about success but about the earnestness with which you have tried and fought, and if you have to confess that you have done nothing about it, then you will not receive absolution and will be debarred from Communion.’ That would probably be a much more dynamic way of doing things. I know from experience, both as a victim of the measure and as one who gives that kind of advice, that it does help to be told one or two things that can be done, not impossible things. At times one can even go farther and say to the person: ‘Here is what you should do between now and then. Now, what are you capable of?’ I remember the first time this question was asked of me. I felt terribly insulted because I thought that my spiritual father would say to me, ‘Do everything that is right and come back next time with a halo around your head’ – instead of which he doubted that I could do everything. This took me aback but I saw how realistic it was.

Question: We speak of confession and then Communion. But what about the absolution? Absolution is a miracle, like being baptized again. What a responsibility. We must not risk it unworthily ...

Metropolitan Anthony: If we ask ourselves about certain aspects of confession, absolution becomes extremely central. A number of people notice in their lives and say that when they come to make their confession they cannot summon the sense of contrition, the broken-heartedness, the horror of a committed sin which they had perceived, at times, weeks or days before, at the moment when they suddenly became aware of evil in their lives. At that moment they felt the searing pain, the horror of it. And then when days, weeks or months pass, according to circumstances, and they stand side by side with the priest before the icon of Christ, they can remember but cannot relive what happened. And I think it is important to realize what Alexander Elchaninov said in his diary, that the process of repentance, the process of one’s own reassessment of self and of broken-hearted contrition, of asking God’s forgiveness, of making true and concrete efforts for reconciliation should be real and not only in words. But all that begins at the moment when we have received absolution one day and moved to our next confession weeks or months later.

Every time we become aware of sin or of evil within our lives, we feel the pain and the horror and revulsion, we can turn to God with a sincere cry, with a burning feeling, but the thing we can never do for ourselves is forgive ourselves. It is not possible for a person to say, ‘Now there is no point any more for God or my neighbour to be cross with me.’ It amounts to saying to the person one has offended, ‘Look, how long are you going to sulk? I have forgotten it long since.’ It would be too insensitive and too impossible. So the moment of absolution is an essential moment, not only because we are set free but because something is done for us which we cannot do. And if we come to private or general confession and present to God those things which we have perceived in a burning, fiery manner but which we can only now imagine as something which we have earnestly recognized as evil, rejected in an act of will and determination, we come to him and ask: ‘Can you forgive? Can you absolve, that means – untie the knots that hold me?’

And it is important to realize what divine forgiveness means. Divine forgiveness is, as it were, a declaration by God that he accepts us, that he accepts our rejection of sin, our renunciation of sin, but that he accepts us as we are, not in spite of anything or in view of anything. He says, ‘Yes, now that you have come and you have declared that you want to be my friend, frail though you be, prone to sin though you remain.’ And this acceptance to me can be pictured in two ways. It may be in the image of the Good Shepherd seeking out the lost sheep, taking the lost sheep in his arms or on his shoulder, and carrying it to the fold. But it may also mean that Christ takes us on as he would take up his cross and carry us as a cross that is the cause of his crucifixion and death. And when we pray for forgiveness, absolution, freedom, reconciliation, I think we would be well advised to remember what St Seraphim said to one of his visitors: ‘If you pray the Lord in earnest to do something for you, he will do it, but remember at what cost he has acquired the right and the power to do it, and the cost is his death, his passion week, his descent into hell.’ In a way it is also his incarnation. And so when we ask for forgiveness, for reconciliation, to be integrated into the mysterious Body of Christ, we must remember the cost and not receive it with the sense that, having made our confession, we have a right to this.

Now, there is in the absolution another side. Very often people imagine that once they are absolved, set free from their sins, there should be in them an insuperable power to resist sin. This is not the case. What is given us is God’s help and a command, a commission to enter into the good fight, to struggle in God’s name and to overcome evil. And that is important. When we make a confession we make, as it were, a programme for the fight which is ahead of us, because we are not automatically healed unless our repentance was so fiery and so deep that nothing is left for us of the past, at least in one or another quarter. And we must enter into the good fight, knowing that God will be at our side, will help, will give us the strength, and it is for us to use the strength which God will give us. There is a service book of the sixteenth century in which confession is given in a way that indicates, perhaps more than our modern formula, something important. It says: ‘May the Lord forgive you to the extent to which you have truly repented. And to the extent to which it is good for you, may He free you from the burden of sin.’ It doesn’t mean that God gives us a limited forgiveness. But we must remember that as long as a given sin remains in us as an alluring temptation, not as an object of horror or something that has gone and become ashes, we will have to fight. And the absolution means that God forgives, but it does not mean that we are healed.

Question: Once a sin has been confessed, is there any point in confessing it again in a new situation?

Metropolitan Anthony: I think that there is a difference between recognizing a sin, inward disapproval of it, inward rejecting of it and yet remaining to a certain extent – greater or smaller – under its sway, enslaved, and what the apostle Paul calls to be ‘dead to sin’. I remember the case of a young man who came to confession and said: ‘I will state one sin that I have committed, but I am not in a position to speak of a burning repentance because the burning has taken place in such a way that I am no longer the person who committed this sin. The person who committed this sin has died. I am another person. And so I can proclaim this sin but I can no longer feel it is mine.’ And there is a remarkable passage in the writings of St Barsanuphius in the seventh century, in which he said that if we have perceived a sin in us, and if we have repented with all our being and washed ourselves clean with tears and are completely aware that we are dead to this sin, there is no point even in asking absolution from a priest, because nothing can be added to God’s forgiveness that corresponds, is simultaneous with this death to sin and this resurrection.

But most of the time we recognize our sins, we confess them and we slip into them again. And in that sense there are certain moments – not only perhaps our death bed or the monastic profession, but marriage or some decisive turn in our lives – when we can take a look at all our life and ask ourselves whether our successive acts of repentance, our tears, our sincere readiness to change, have been such that nothing is left of the evil there was in us. I remember – I will go a little beyond the limits of the question – I remember one of our old parishioners some fifty years ago coming up to me and saying: ‘I don’t know what to do. I can’t sleep at night and, like a film, all my past comes before my eyes. And yet it is only the evil, the ugly, dirty things. I have spoken to my doctor. He has given me sleeping pills and it doesn’t make any difference.’ I made a suggestion to her. I said: ‘Don’t you think that God wants us to relive our lives several times until we can free ourselves from our past. When these memories come, do not push them out of your consciousness. On the contrary, pour them in, look at them attentively. Place yourself in the context which they present to you. And now, once you are within it, ask yourself: with the experience of life which I have now, would I do the same thing, say the same words, be the same person as I was 60, 70 or 30 years ago? And if you can say completely, with all assurance, no, this person has died; I renounce this past ultimately and totally, it will go. But if there is still anything of it which is not the past, which is a trickle of evil that originates in this past but has run throughout your life and is still in you now, it will come again and again until you can renounce.’

And experience has proved on more than one occasion that this is exactly what happens. Being pushed back into the evil of the past, if we can wholeheartedly say, ‘I renounce it, O Lord; be it anathema’, it goes. As long as there is a response of our heart, ‘And yet’, it will come back, because it is not a sin of the past; it is a sin of the present. And so in a number of contexts of decisive situations it is these sins which should be brought back, even if absolution was given us in response to our good intention. We must present them again to God to be burnt ultimately in us or to our spiritual father in order to see some drastic measures applied that at last before we die, at last before we renounce the world and all that it represents in ascetic terms, we can be free of the past, not to drag the past through the gate of the present into a future which it will or can poison.

Now, I would like to go back a little, to the subject of restoration, of restitution. If we have sinned against other people, or if other people are either instrumental in our sin or victims of our sin, is it enough to come to confession or is there something more which we must do in order to be able to come to confession with honesty? In the works of [the nineteenth-century writer Nicolai] Leskov, there is a story about a remarkable Siberian who refuses to become a Christian because, he says, ‘If I become a Christian, no one will believe in my honesty.’ And the missionary says: ‘What do you mean? Isn’t it true that the Christian is honest in this and that?’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘in a very special way. Supposing I live near a forest with my wife and children. I am very poor. My children never drink a drop of milk and they cry all day. And my neighbour a little bit farther has a cow. I go and steal it. The next day my children are full of milk and the children of the other man cry. If I am a pagan, I’ll take the cow, bring it back to my neighbour, he’ll give me a sound beating, then we’ll shake hands and everything is all right. But if I am a Christian, I’ll go to a priest and tell him how ashamed I am of my theft. Then I will receive absolution and keep the cow.’ Well, the question I am asking is, isn’t there something which must be done with regard to the victim or the participant of sin before we come to receive absolution?

I remember a man came to confession seething with rage and said to me, ‘Father Anthony, before I make my confession I must tell you that I am absolutely murderously furious with the woman who was here before me and who spent ten minutes of our time making her confession.’ So I said, ‘I am very sorry’, and got my watch out of my pocket and put it on the desk. When he had finished his confession I said: ‘You have kept everyone waiting 15 minutes with your confession. Would you go to each person in the queue and apologize, and then you can come to receive absolution.’ That is the kind of thing I meant. It is a crude example, but a very real one. I think that it is very easy to feel broken-hearted, shed tears so that the desk is all wet, receive absolution, then go without having done a thing to heal the wound of another person. And as long as this other person is wounded, what is your repentance like? I do not mean to say that we can always heal, but we can always make an attempt, we can always do all we can for the healing. And I think that is very important. I remember the Lossky family: one day I came to them before they went to church, and I found the four children standing in a row and the father and mother kneeling down before each of them and asking for their forgiveness because they intended to go to confession and Communion. That, I suppose, has marked these children much more than all sorts of virtues which the parents may have had – this fact that a grown-up can beg for the forgiveness of a child.

Question: What is the essence of sin?

Metropolitan Anthony: I would like to begin with this quotation of a young man in his late teens who had seen one of his friends killed on the road, who reflected on his whole life and said, ‘I have come to realize that by not being a saint I robbed God of his glory and my neighbour of his due.’ The phrase was very beautiful and very true, that our vocation is to strive towards such perfection as to become the glory of God, that is the resplendence of God, and the salvation of our neighbour. If we think of ourselves as being the image of God but damaged by the process of heredity: we received this image in us already damaged, already profaned, already distorted, already restored awkwardly and in an ugly and destructive manner – if we think of ourselves as such an icon, an image of God, then we have from the very beginning a total responsibility for what we make of what we are and what we do. There are sins which obviously are our voluntary sins which we commit simply because we choose to do so in defiance of what our conscience or our heart or our intelligence or our experience says, or for carelessness’ sake – ‘Ugh, it would require too much effort and I do otherwise.’ But there are other sins which we commit against this very image by being thoughtless, forgetful, easy-going, etc., or by having evolved or imbibed wrong views which add to the distortion. I don’t believe sin is simply a moral category of good and evil. I believe that sin is a state of inner disharmony and brokenness for which we are responsible, not totally, but in an increasing way as we develop spiritually, intellectually, a separatedness from our neighbour, a separatedness from God. And all that is sin. The essence of sin is not the moral infringement. The moral infringement is either consequence or cause of the separatedness or the brokenness. But it is the brokenness which is the tragedy and the sin. So if I recognize in myself separatedness from God it is something which I can confess, over which I can cry, which I can feel is my sin at this moment even if it does not result in concrete actions or is not the result of any special concrete action. The moment I feel this separatedness I can confess it. As far as the inheritance of the sinful condition goes, I think it is a very interesting and important feature. We speak always of our inheritance of sin, but also we should look at the fact that two of the Gospels present us with a genealogy of Christ, and Christ said himself, ‘By its fruit he will judge the tree.’ The tree of all his genealogy is summed up in the Lord Jesus Christ, in him all this line of saints and sinners is redeemed. I think some of you may be interested in reading the book which is called Healing the Family Tree [by Kenneth McAll; published by Sheldon Press, 1986], which takes up the important theme of previous generations coming to be summed up in us and the responsibility we have to be the person who redeems, however little or partly, all of this family tree.

5

Youth leaders’ meeting on confession

17 May 1989

Today we continue with confession. And what I wanted to speak about is how one can examine oneself, what one should confess and how one can adjust that to different age groups because obviously in camp you have got the small ones and the older ones and you can’t expect that each age group will approach confession in the same way.

So let me say that I would draw a demarcation line between those who come to confession for the first time, and who are young, and the rest. And to speak of the first group, I would say, first of all, I would never advise any child to come to confession who has not yet in himself or herself a sense of right and wrong. I don’t think one should create a sense of right and wrong by projecting on to a child the point of view of the parents. I would not let any child come to confession who is not capable of passing a moral judgement and of discerning for himself or herself between what is right and wrong. I have had time and again children who came up to confession and who trotted out a certain number of ‘sins’ in inverted commas, that is, sins of which they should accuse themselves. And having listened to the tune of their voice I always say, ‘Tell me, do you really feel bad about it?’ ‘No.’ ‘Why did you confess all these things?’ ‘Well, that’s the list which mummy gave me. That’s the sins she is displeased with me about.’

That is a disaster because first of all it blurs for the child the sense of what is truly right and wrong because the fact that the parents dislike this and that, expect this or that, does not prove that it is right or wrong at all.

I can give you an example of this. A long time ago, in 1948, I took part in a conference at which a French child psychologist spoke, a woman called Françoise Dolto, who has since died, and she was telling us about her daughter who was a little girl of four. This little girl loved one particular prayer to the Mother of God, which they read every evening before going to bed and which she called ‘la belle’, the beautiful one. And one evening the child said to the mother very sadly, ‘Today we can’t say this prayer.’ And she said, ‘Why?’ ‘Because I have been evil,’ said the child. ‘In what way have you been evil?’ ‘I made a puddle in the drawing room on the carpet and you were very cross with me.’ The mother was intelligent. She said, ‘No, you made a puddle because you could not restrain yourself, but I was in the wrong. I shouldn’t have been cross with you. I should make sure that you go to the little place before you can’t contain yourself any more and when it’s happened I should realize that I was in the wrong and I should have wiped the carpet.’

So it is very important not to force upon a child views of what is right and wrong by reference to the judgement of parents, leaders, teachers, etc. It is not wrong because it is inconvenient for the parents or the teacher, or the leader. It may be right, it may be wrong; the leader, or the parent, or the teacher may be wrong. It is not a moral category, it’s a social category, it’s a practical category. One can very well punish a child for doing one thing or another because it breaks law and order in camp or at home, or at school, but you can not say it is morally wrong. And it’s very important not to make a child come to confession and confess things which do not damage him morally. So that is a first thing which I am stressing, because I think it’s terribly important. You will have children in camp whom you will assess and you will realize that they are still too young and too immature to pass a judgement sufficiently mature about what is right and wrong in their behaviour, and you should not push them into false categories.

The second thing is that a confession of a child who comes for the first time particularly for confession should not be a confession similar to that of a grown-up person. A child, a very young child, should not be asked whether he or she is obedient to the commandments of Christ, keeps the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament and this and that, because this is a second stage. The first question I would ask is, ‘Do you know anything about Christ?’

If the child says, ‘I know nothing’, then there is no term of reference for a confession, in terms of ‘Christ is invisibly present before you’. You may then begin to ask other questions, but you must be aware that this child has no point of reference with the Absolute.

The second question, if the child says, ‘Yes, I do know something about Christ’ – ‘Do you like him? If you met him, would you choose to be friends?’ If the child says, ‘Yes, I like him, I would make friends’, I would say, ‘And what do you know about what he likes and dislikes, what he approves of and disapproves of?’ If he is a little older I might even say, ‘What do you know of the things because of which he was killed?’ And if the child says, ‘I am aware that he likes this, he likes that, he dislikes this, he dislikes that, disapproves, approves’, I would say, ‘And now, where do you stand about it? Are you a faithful and loyal friend? Do you behave to him as you would behave just to a school friend – being loyal, faithful, ready to do all you can to be at one with him, struggling against your laziness, your cowardliness, the fear you may have of others, of the ridicule of being a friend of someone who is not popular?’ – whatever you can say in that line. And see what the child can say, because Christianity is primarily, first of all, a way of relating to God and relating to Christ and seeing where I stand. If one of your friends among you was ridiculed, would you have the courage to say, ‘I stand by him, he is my friend’? Or would you join the jeering crowd? If one of your friends were being beaten up, would you go to the rescue or would you say, ‘Well, I’ll keep out of the fray’? And that is the question I would ask of a child, perhaps not in these words but in this kind of direction, and then the child could begin to judge himself in the terms which are accessible to him. Every child of any age knows what it is to have a friend, to love someone, to like someone, to be loyal, to be a good comrade, to be fair in games, not to be a traitor, not to betray. All these things in greater or smaller measure are understandable to anyone. I am not speaking of children of three years of age but of the age when they might come to confession, and that’s where I would start.

The next stage you may say: ‘Well, this being so, do you think you have done something which is disloyal to your Friend? You have just told me that Christ is your Friend. Is there anything you can think, oh, I wish I hadn’t done it? Or – which perhaps is even worse – I’ve done it, I wish you will never learn about it – because then it means that there will be a lie between you and him, and that you cannot allow if you want to have a relationship which is clean, direct and faithful.’ And, beginning with this, one can go on.

But this is, I think, very important in confession when you deal with children who have never been to confession, and you may find such in camp, or who are small and who must be prepared to come to confession in terms of truth and reality, not from the point of view of the priest, the leader, the parents or a book, or a list of sins, because a confession must be personal, it must be mine, not a universal confession.

Now, from this moment I am turning to another age group, to anyone who is capable of discerning what is right, what is wrong, what is good, what is bad, what is dark and what is light, what is clean and what is dirty. That begins very soon. Of course it will be different in age groups, people mature, they grow intellectually, they grow in experience. And so there will be a change of point of view, there will be a different approach, things that seem to be very small at a certain moment may appear to be very important at another, and vice versa. But basically once you are in the category of people who can say, yes, that is right and that is wrong, you are within a big group of people whose maturity will change, whose judgement will become more refined, but who are within the same category.

Now, that means that any one of you, any one of the older children, your parents, your leaders, whoever else, have got to face themselves in the process. How can one face oneself with justice? Now, you will hear from practically everyone something which I will contradict at the outset because my conviction is very strong, that one should not tell people ‘Ask yourself what is wrong with you’ – because at that point it means that I will spend my life looking into a mirror and asking myself not where is God’s image in me but where is my ugliness. It will be a search for what is ugly.

I remember an old parishioner of ours; she is now dead and no one of you knows her. She lived for a while with me in the parish house. She was curiosity incarnate, she sniffed right and left and everywhere. On a magnificent spring day I was in search of her and I thought she had gone to shop, so looked out of the window of the kitchen; then I lowered my gaze and saw her in the little yard in front of the house where the dustbin stood. She had leaned over the edge of the dustbin, only her hind part was appearing and from the waist down she was immersed in the dustbin in search of scraps of letters, which she could read. Above her there was the blue sky, there was the fresh air, there was the greenery of spring, there were the birds – and she was totally immersed rooting in the delicious scents of the dustbin.

Well, I think that when you are told, ‘You must look into yourself and see what is ugly, what is wrong, what is rotten’, you are exactly in this position. Life is vast, the sky is blue, spring is about you, and you see nothing but a dustbin. There is nothing else to you.

Well, so that is the first thing if you have got to talk to boys and girls. You don’t need to put it in this way, put it whatever way you want, but say, don’t start by looking at what is wrong. Neither do you take the Gospel or lists of sins to see what are the possible sins and ask yourself, have I done it, haven’t I done it. I remember a friend of mine, who is much older than me, has written a book or a big pamphlet called What is Sin from an Orthodox Point of View. And it was translated into French by a second-rate translator: How to Sin the Orthodox Way. Well, I think very often if you turn to pious books, what you discover is a variety of sins you had never thought about and you think, this is sin – interesting! That is what I personally have against the Canon of St Andrew of Crete. I never suspected there were such sins that he described and now I know they exist. So what can you do about it?

Well, I had a girl that came here a few years ago. She sat with the most miserable expression on her face and said, ‘Father Anthony, I perish through vanity.’ And I said, ‘How do you do that?’ ‘Whenever I look into the mirror, I find that I am lovely to look at. What can I do?’ I said: ‘I’ll tell you what you do. You take your stand before the mirror and you detail all the features of your face and whenever you see that something is lovely, you say, “How lovely it is, how wonderful that God has made me so beautiful!” And when you have discovered that your face, the whole of it is just loveliness, you thank God for it; and then you turn to him in repentance for one thing, because all the loveliness is of God and the sour expression, which you have now on your face, is the only contribution you have made to it.’

Well, I think that is the way in which one should think of things. Ask yourself first of all directly, personally, what is there in me which is true and right, and beautiful, or can develop into beautiful characteristics. I am truthful, I am honest, I am loyal, I am this, I am that, make an honest list of what you see. You may later on qualify it and say that I am not as loyal as I imagined or I am not as intelligent as I thought, but that’s another question. That will be qualified by life and by you later, but ask yourself first, what is the best there is in me? And then ask yourself, and how faithful am I to all the beauty and truth there is in me of which I am aware? I love the truth – how often do I lie? How often do I cheat? How often am I too cowardly to behave according to the truth? I am loyal, yes, I am basically loyal, and yet the other day I was disloyal to a friend of mine. He was being mocked and I tried not to be seen by him and to escape, and so forth. You can imagine yourself in all these situations. And then you will have discovered that against everything which is truly right and good, you have done something at one moment or another which is below your mark, something that is unworthy of you. I was a coward, I was a cheat; and yet I am not a coward and I am not a cheat. What have I got to do to fight that? You can ask yourself that question. But when you stand before your own conscience, I am speaking of your conscience first of all – how do I judge myself? I am wrong in this, I am wrong in that ...

That is a first step of self-examination. Start with beauty and say: ‘Goodness, what a horrible expression I’ve put upon this beautiful face of mine! I am, as it were, an icon of Christ and I have painted a funny feature on it or scratched something, disfigured it.’ But look first and foremost to the beauty of it because, you know (that’s for this girl), if you were given an ancient painting that had been badly disfigured by vandals, by bad weather, by carelessness and so on, you would not concentrate on what had gone wrong, you would try to find everything that had survived of the beauty. And then say, all right, I will look into it, I will try to see it and then I will try learning from what I see of what has survived to restore, to repair what has gone wrong. You will not start with what has gone wrong to reinvent a painting or a piece of art. Well, that’s how you should approach yourself – you are a piece of art. The boy, the girl who is asking questions is a piece of art, is a piece of beauty which God has created and which has got damaged. Let him look at what subsists of beauty and then see how I can extend this beauty by repairing a little here, repairing there, and see it more, and more, and more taking shape and becoming a whole beauty. This is not always enough because we haven’t got enough judgement, enough vision. Then you can ask yourself, what does the Gospel teach me? And take the Gospel, and read it, and read it as one reads a book, not with a pious expression on your face or with determination to say, yes, yes, yes to everything because it’s a holy book and therefore it can’t be wrong and you are wrong whatever you think of it. Take it and read it as you would read any book, as you would listen to anyone speaking, and you will find that there are passages about which you would say, ‘Oh, that is so beautiful, oh, that is true! How it is wonderful!’ Well, that means that, at this point, it may be a very minute point, but it’s a very important point, you and God are of one mind, of one heart. You understand him and he understands you, you have met, and then you can say, this is me at the best and I must try to remember that and to be faithful to this because in this I am the best person I can be, because I am like God in that respect.

There will be other passages, which will mean nothing to you. You will then turn to God and say, ‘I am sorry, I am not yet grown to understand that.’ There will be passages about which you will say, ‘Oh, not for me, thank you very much.’ Then you can pause and say, ‘And I have said that I am Christ’s friend. And I have discovered earlier that we have so much in common and now that I find this or that, I say, nothing doing! I don’t want to have anything to do with you if that’s what you are.’ Then you weigh the pros and cons, you ask yourself what is more important to you. Is it the way you know Christ as your friend or is it that it’s too dangerous, too difficult, too unpleasant, not understandable enough for you to be his friend on his terms? That would apply to all of you between yourselves. Am I prepared to be your friend on your terms and not only on mine? And vice versa. So that’s a second stage: you can check yourself not only against what you know about yourself – to be good, to be healthy, to be vigorous – but against what God reveals of himself in Christ in a human person, but so great, so beautiful as to be at one with God in his entirety, while we are at one with God in glimpses, in just points of contact.

And then there are one or two more things you can do. You can ask yourself: ‘What do people think of me, what will they say to me? And what do they say about me behind my back?’ That’s the only occasion in which gossip may come in useful. Gossip is one of the ugliest things one can invent, but at times a remark reaches you, which no one would dare make to your face. I have had it this year and last year, quite a lot of people saying, could Father Anthony stop giving talks. He repeats himself endlessly, he has become a bore. Well, no one said that to my face, but it was repeated to me and I have paid attention to it. I am working on lines which I have not worked on before because I don’t want that. It’s not the criticism that hurts me, it’s that I have gone wrong. I have betrayed a trust.

So you can listen to gossip in that respect when it reaches you. But what is important, you should listen to people who are your friends and are prepared to tell you what they think of you, to tell you honestly. I don’t mean brutally – at times very delicately, make a passing remark, which you do not hear or I do not hear because I have no desire to hear it. It’s much nicer to think that I am a nice person than to think, as someone said to me on the telephone lately, ‘Don’t you realize that you are a toothless geriatric?’ Well, all right, I stopped at that. I know that I am toothless, I have just broken three teeth, but to what extent am I geriatric or to what extent am I lazy, in what way I am wrong in that? I can’t help being 75 but I can help being a lazy, careless 75. So all that can be taken into account.

Now, if you listen to what people say about you or think of you, even if they give you just a hint, a passing remark, then you must use also some of your discernment because you may be praised for the wrong reason and criticized for the wrong reason, praised for the right reason and criticized for the right reason. You know, you may be praised because you are easy to live with, but you may be easy to live with because you are cowardly, slack, easy-going, or because you are an inspiration to others. It makes a lot of difference. So when you hear criticism or praise, ask yourself, what is true about it? That this person sees me that way, yes, that is true, but why? Is it because it is so convenient that I am like this? Or because it is so inspiring that I am like this? Or, on the contrary, is it that it is so inconvenient for him or her that I am like that, or that it is good that I am like this, that I am a challenge – I brought, I bring, a sense of vigour into it. So here is again a way in which we can examine ourselves.

Now, if you project that on to the children around you, if children in camp ask you, what should we do? Well, you can say, ‘Tell me, what are you really good at?’ ‘I am good at cricket.’ ‘Do you ever cheat? Do you ever lie? Are you loyal to others? Are you always ready to hear someone else’s praise, or are you trying at times to steal their glory?’ Just an example, but you can imagine all sorts of things which you can think out and apply that way. You can also say, ‘You have heard the reading of the Gospel this morning. It said this and that, what do you think of that?’ Oh, well, that’s all right for grown-ups, or that’s all right for Christ, I don’t want to have anything to do with it, it’s far too costly. Where do you stand with regard to Christ in terms of a loyal friendship? Indirectly, where do you stand with regard to other boys and girls in terms of loyalty because it’s only by being like Christ that you are truly loyal to them. And again, what do your friends, people who live in the same tent as you, think of you? What do they say about you? Do they like you, dislike you, what do they criticize you for? You can find a list – one, two, three things. And what do you think of it? Are they right or wrong? They are right here, they are wrong here. All right, then here is something, you have sinned not against the administration of the camp, against law and order, you have done something wrong to these people by doing this. You have been disloyal to them, unfaithful to them. If because of you your tent has come down in the list of honours, as it were, you have let them down. It’s disloyalty, it’s not a joke. Well, here is the list of sins you can confess. But then it will be the confession of this particular girl or this particular boy, not a passepartout confession that can be trotted out: I have sinned against everything or I have sinned against the Ten Commandments, or I have sinned against the Beatitudes. It means nothing to anyone, grown-up, clergy or little boy or girl. It must be as concrete as that.

And if a boy or a girl comes to confession and says, ‘Really I have nothing to say’, that’s the priest’s business to see what he does. He can do a variety of things. He can say, ‘Don’t you?’ and try to lead the way towards something. Or he can very well say, ‘Oh, how wonderful. You made a confession a week ago and in the course of this week nothing has happened to mar you, to destroy the harmony between you and your companions, to make you ashamed of God or God ashamed of you. Let us thank God for it and let us rejoice.’ That is also something very important.

And then when all that is done, I think it’s very important if you have got to prepare children for confession to tell them that a confession is a look at the past, but once you have looked at the past and assessed it, it’s a programme for the future. If I recognize that I have been this, that and the other in the past, of which I am ashamed, which is ugly, now that I have recognized it, I must undertake to change something, not to change absolutely. It’s absurd to ask anyone to change absolutely, but you can ask someone to change something, and here you must also be able to help. If someone says, I feel this and that about myself, you can say, ‘Well, you can’t solve the whole problem, but how much can you do in that direction?’ and just help him to find enough for him to be able to win a victory, because every time we win a victory, we acquire more courage to fight. And if you help a boy or a girl to win one little victory after the other, gradually they will learn that they can fight and they can win. And the moment they are sure that they can win when they fight, they will be able to face much greater odds.

So that is it. The rest is the priest’s business: what he can advise them to do, how he can give absolution, what he will say in terms of advice. But this you can do to prepare boys and girls for confession.

Answers to questions from youth leaders

Question: Other people’s opinion of you – sometimes it reaches you, sometimes you should bring it to the person; how to do it, and who should do it?

Metropolitan Anthony: I will give you an answer, which you may take to be a little ambiguous. It’s not always his leader who must do it. It must be someone in camp whom the child trusts or someone with whom he is friends.

I remember very well one case when I was a very young leader in camp. There was a boy in my group with whom I was friends, and he was a difficult boy, but I tried to protect him against criticism, and then it came to a pitch when I couldn’t endure it and we parted company. Long before that the doctor of the camp had said to me, ‘I would like to talk to you about Kirill, he worries me.’ I didn’t want to talk about him in the period when we were very close friends so I dodged. But when our friendship collapsed, I went to see a doctor and said, ‘Alexander Alexandrovich, you wanted to talk to me about Kirill’, and he looked at me and said, ‘I wanted to talk to you about Kirill when you were friends; now you don’t love him any more, I am not talking to you about him.’ And I think it was devastating for me and terribly wise of him because someone else had to talk to him; out of my irritation or out of my coldness I could not help him. The doctor talked to him because he was wise. I was 17 and wouldn’t have helped Kirill.

One must never allow something to fester or to harden. You know, there is a period when things are still fluid. If you allow them to harden, then it’s much more difficult to do something. But then ask yourself, who in this camp (it may even be a contemporary of his or of her, it may be someone in the kitchen, it may be even the priest, it may be anyone) has a relationship of mutual trust and who can talk to this boy or girl without putting him into the dock? And it’s no good pretending that you are open and saying, ‘My dear, let’s talk, let’s have a walk’, because he will know from the first moment that he is now in fetters and he will be interrogated. So that is the only answer I can give – you must find someone but you must not let go of the thing.

Question: Also, in a camp, children go all together to Communion, ‘to keep each other company’; how do you deal with that?

Metropolitan Anthony: I don’t know. I disagree with you, I disagree with two things. I disagree with everyone going to Communion because I am not in favour of frequent Communion in general, and I disagree with the fact that someone should be allowed to go to Communion on the cheap.

You know, to me to go to Communion is like giving a kiss to someone. If a child, for instance, a little child who is playing in the garden, suddenly feels, ‘I am lonely, I want to climb on mother’s knees, I want to hug and kiss her’, that’s it. If a boy and a girl love one another deeply and give one another a kiss, which is an embodiment of tenderness and love, all right, but if it is a perfunctory action, to me it’s blasphemy, it’s prostitution in a way. You know the way in which in certain families a child would be dragged into the drawing room and told, ‘Come and kiss Aunty Sue,’ and the boy or girl says, ‘I don’t want to kiss Aunty Sue,’ and then on another occasion you will be told, ‘Look here, last time you said you wouldn’t, you will see what you get if you don’t kiss Aunty Sue, you go!’ And the child goes, and ‘chmok’, and that is Judas’ kiss, it’s no kiss whatever, it’s not as bad as Judas’ kiss, but it’s just no kiss at all.

And I think Communion should be something of that kind, something which you do because you have a warm feeling, because it’s a way in which you can meet Christ, meet God, share with him, even if you don’t understand more about it. You don’t need to understand more about it in order to share a meal in the way in which people will say, ‘Oh, let’s have a cup of tea together.’ That would be better than doing it because it is Sunday or it’s a name’s day, or it’s Transfiguration day, or whatever else. But at that point I am expressing my opinion.

We have had something different in one camp, and I am not sure it was right. We had a court of honour. We had a boy who was 16 and was not only objectionable in the sense that he was disruptive and of bad behaviour, but he was intentionally nasty to others. And it came to a point when I felt, I can punish him but he will feel he is right because I am the leader of the camp; I am punishing him and he can take his stand up against me as it were. I am the enemy, I am authority, I am the law. And I thought, well, he must get a lesson. So we gathered a court of honour of all his contemporaries; he was summoned and he was accused by his contemporaries, and he had to answer. And the court decided without my intervening on what should be done to him. He was ostracized, I think, for several days, no one would talk to him, if I remember well, but what was decided is of little importance. What was important is that he suddenly realized that it was not the camp administration that was displeased, that he had done wrong to the brotherhood, to the community of people, he had betrayed the very people to whom he belonged and who belonged together with him. And he could not go to Communion simply because he didn’t belong. You cannot go to Communion as an alien who rejects everyone else who receives Communion with you.

But this I give you as an example of what has happened, and I am not saying it is right. It worked on that particular occasion. What he had been doing was really extremely ugly. I remember it very well. It was in 1936, but I still remember it clearly. And Communion and the rejection, his rejection of everyone else and the decision of everyone else that we cannot accept him on his terms but only on terms which are neither ours, nor his, but on terms of integrity, moral integrity, played a role.

Question: Please speak of the relation between a private and general confession; could the general confession always replace the private confession?

Metropolitan Anthony: Well, the question of a general confession is not just simple. I have introduced here general confessions at each of our four retreats and I have found that a number of people who did not know how to make a confession have learnt how one does – examine oneself and make a confession. People who were immature in spite of advanced age or ‘mature age’ in inverted commas, simply number of years, discovered that they had never known what it means to look at oneself facing God and facing one’s own conscience and facing the people around. And a number of people who in the course of years have come to general confession have then begun to come to confession in a quite different way privately. Other people are much simpler in a good sense, not stupid but more uncomplicated, and for them the general confessions, which we have, are quite sufficient. They can find themselves in these confessions, join inwardly, repent very often truly with tears and a deep feeling and receive absolution as though they made a confession, because this confession spoke of their own condition, as it were.

Now, if I was aware that a grown-up person or a child wishes to come to a general confession because it would allow him or her to escape a private confession, I would mention it to the priest and I would advise the priest after the general confession or before the day of the general confession to talk to this child and to help him make a confession. And here I would take two different lines. On certain occasions, having talked to a girl or a boy, one can say, ‘Now, if you have understood our conversation, come. Let us pray together and then confess the two or three things of which you have now become aware in our conversation.’ There is another line, which I give you as an example, but not as something which I think is applicable in camp.

In the days of pre-revolutionary Russia quite a number of peasants went from the Russian villages to Mount Athos and they wanted to receive Communion, and they wanted to pour their life out, but they were too uneducated, too primitive to know how to do it, and there were spiritual guides, confessors, who had taken the following line – they would invite one of these peasants and say: ‘Come and see me, let’s have a cup of tea together. Well, tell me about your village, tell me about your life.’ And the man would sit and talk, and tell about the external features of life, then about his relationships and about his reactions, and about his feelings, and what he had done, and then when he had finished, the priest would say, ‘All right, now let us pray together and I will give you absolution.’ And quite often the peasant said, ‘But I have not made a confession to you!’ And the confessor would say: ‘Do you think you have not told me about yourself all there is to say? Is there anything you could add to what you have said?’ ‘No, not really.’ ‘Then you have made your confession.’

So there is even that kind of elbow room in that. And I have had occasion with people, I am thinking of one or two persons in France who had never made a confession, who had never been in church and who for some reason, well, came into contact with the Church through me because they came to me as patients when I was a doctor, and who poured out all their lives to me. And they said, ‘You know, I couldn’t go to confession because I would feel it’s totally artificial for me to come, to stand in front of a desk and to speak to a priest with whom I have nothing in common.’ And I had agreed (I was a layman then), I had agreed with a priest that in such cases I would say to him, ‘Here is someone who came, who poured all his life out, who truly, heart-brokenly rejects all evil of the past, who wants a new life. Could you pray with this person and in God’s name declare to him or to her forgiveness so that this person can start a new life?’ Later this person began to come to confession on concrete things that had happened from that moment but not before, not in the course of the first 40 years of life at times. So that is all I can say.

Question: Sometimes the first confession is unsuccessful (and afterwards it is impossible to convince a person to go again for confession) because the priest did not understand the person, gave impossible advice, did not take into account all circumstances of the person’s life. What should one do with such a priest?

Metropolitan Anthony: I don’t think you can force anyone to go to confession. I think it would be wrong because it would make it into a mechanical and immoral thing. What I would do, and we have the same problem in Russia, I would go to the priest and say: ‘You heard the confession of so and so. You have upset him very deeply by saying this and this, and I want to explain to you the circumstances of his life, his situation, the fact that he is not yet mature enough to understand what you said.’ I don’t think that, say, being you, you should say to an old priest, ‘And you are not mature enough to understand what he says’, but basically if you put it in delicate terms, you can convey to him that he has shown no understanding at all and that someone has come to be healed and has been slashed. But to the other one I would say: ‘Look, here is a standard, which you are not aware of, which you don’t understand, which is beyond you and beyond me. Don’t be troubled, mature until you understand and in the meanwhile be who you are.’ And there is a tremendous saying of St Mark the Ascetic in one in his writings in which he said, ‘Even if God stood before you and told you to do something to which your heart could not answer “Amen”, don’t do it because God does not need your submissiveness, your action, what he needs is harmony with you.’

But I think a priest who is in the wrong has as much right to be put right as anyone else. I think one of the calamities in life is that priests, officials, officers in the army never get any feedback. It doesn’t always work well, mind you. I remember when I was in the army in the war as a non-commissioned officer, we had a young lieutenant, very young and very silly, who thought that he could rule everyone just by giving orders, and he made a fool of himself, and I felt terribly sorry for him. So I went to his place, knocked at the door, came in, stood to attention. He said, ‘Come near.’ So I trotted up and stood. He said, ‘What’s the matter?’ I said, ‘Lieutenant, I have come to say to you that you are making a fool of yourself by behaving as you do.’ And he looked at me and said, ‘What?!’ I said, ‘Yes, this, this, this is what you are doing and everyone is laughing at you because you make yourself ridiculous.’ So he got up and said, ‘Get out of here before you are under arrest,’ and so I was out. But he was wrong, it was his chance and he missed it.

And I believe any intelligent priest or teacher should be prepared to be told, ‘Look, you have missed the point; your intention was to heal and you have wounded; your intention was to make someone understand and you have closed his mind definitively.’ And I think I remember the first confession, which I made with Father Afanasiy who had become then my spiritual father. I went to him because he was a mature monk and I thought he would guide me with a rod of iron because I wanted discipline, I wanted to be taught. And I made a confession, and I expected from him that he would say, ‘Now you do this, this, this, this, and if you don’t do it – chop! – the guillotine.’ Instead of which he listened and said, ‘I’ll tell you what you should do’ – and he told me a certain number of things. ‘And now be silent, reflect and tell me: of all that, how much can you undertake honestly to do within your good will, within your circumstances and within your determination?’

And at that moment I was so disappointed. I thought he would take me by the hair and bring me to heaven, instead of which he said, ‘Well, trot along, trot along.’ But he was right because when I told him how much I could do and how much I had understood, I could do it. Had I accepted the absolute, within 24 hours I would have fallen short of it and the whole thing would have been ruined. But a priest who does that should be helped to understand. A priest has a right to be helped. Priests may be foolish or lack experience or not understand one particular person while they understand another given person.

Question: When one comes for a confession with a priest whom one does not know, it is difficult to open one’s soul. It is one side – your sins, it is clear that they should be confessed. On the other hand, there is all your life, the advice you will get ...

Metropolitan Anthony: I don’t think one can establish absolute rules, I think it depends very much on the kind of priest. There are priests with whom one has an immediate contact simply by the way in which he receives you, prays with you and starts you off. Basically a priest is standing there, and if necessary he should say so, that he stands there in the name of the whole congregation to witness to God that this person is bone of our bones, flesh of our flesh and we stand solid with him and if you reject him, reject us also but we will not betray or renounce this person. And on the other hand, he stands for God there, ready to witness before this penitent, that God loves him in spite of all, or not even in spite of all, simply loves him, and that he can be confident and open. At times there is an advantage of not knowing a person because there is a sort of objectivity in your listening. At times you may very well be foxed into a wrong judgement because there are people who will make their own confession indeed, and will not charge someone else for some sins they have committed, while the real reason lies with another person, the provocation was so violent.

And I think there is a prejudice that we should never mention another person. I think one is not in need of giving names but of explaining a situation truthfully. There are people who always think, it’s the other person who is wrong. I remember I preached a sermon ages back and an old lady, the same one who was standing headlong in a dustbin, came up to me and said, ‘Thank you, Father Anthony, for having spoken so sharply to my daughter.’ And I said, ‘It’s not your daughter. I was speaking to you.’ Then the daughter came and said, ‘Thank you, Father Anthony, you gave a good shaking to my mother.’ I said, ‘I didn’t intend to give a shaking to your mother. It’s about you I was speaking in my sermon.’

So had I not known one of the two, I might have taken the one to be the victim and the other one to be the criminal, the murderer. Well, they were simply like a scorpion and a tarantula fighting one another, until one would kill the other.

I think of a situation, for instance, like the parish. I have been in this parish 40 years. It’s very difficult for me not to know people, and if someone says something to me, I must have enormous talent not to see whom it refers to. So it’s much simpler if the person clearly says: ‘Look here, that is the situation. I know that you will not take advantage of what I say against so and so or against the person who is the cause of my rage or my sin, but that is the situation.’ If we know who it is, we can do something about the other person also. I don’t mean go and challenge the person, but take into account a weakness or a frailty, or a degree of ill will, or of hypocrisy, which we did not know of or suspect, and we can be helpful to the other person. So both have benefited in a difficult situation. It is what it is.

As I said, after 40 years here it is very difficult for me to abstract myself completely and say, I haven’t got a clue as to who Tony is, although I have known his father, and his mother, and it’s unrealistic. I can stand with my eyes shut and I still will perceive a voice or a personality coming through or recognize something already said. I think one should make of confession something much more open. You come to someone as you would come to a physician, that is what the admonition says. If you come to a physician, you will speak of your illness, and the physician can very well say, ‘Look, you have scarlet fever. Where did you get that?’ or, ‘To whom did you go to supper yesterday that you have got such indigestion?’ because it may be important.

I remember one occasion in which a cook came to see me. He had dysentery. He was working in a restaurant, and I said to him his duty was to be treated but to ask for leave until he was healed. He said, ‘Never, I get too good a salary.’ Technically speaking I had no right to do anything about it. What I did was totally contrary to the law. I knew someone who worked in the restaurant and I said, talk to the owner about it, so that the cook was dismissed. I had no right to do it and yet, in the balance, was it right to allow every single person coming to the restaurant to fall ill? So it is not a mechanical and simple thing. And also the fact that a priest takes responsibility for what you have said. He takes responsibility for hearing and how he hears, he takes responsibility for what he says, and he is responsible further for what will happen to you because unless you come out of the blue and disappear in the blue, he will see you around and, knowing what you said, he may very well watch and one day catch you and say, ‘Look, be careful. You told me that you want to get rid of this or not to do that or not to be this, you are slipping again. Be careful.’ And if necessary, put a barrier to it.

SERMONS

6

Our sinful condition

12 August 1984

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

So often we ask ourselves and one another a very tormenting question: how can I deal with my sinful condition? What can I do? I cannot avoid committing sins; Christ alone is sinless. I cannot, for lack of determination, or courage, or ability truly repent when I do commit a sin, or, in general, of my sinful condition. What is left to me? I am tormented, I fight like one drowning, and I see no solution ...

And there is a word which was spoken once by a Russian staretz (a holy elder), one of the last elders of Optina. He said to a visitor of his: ‘No one can live without sin, few know how to repent in such a way that their sins are washed as white as fleece, but there is one thing which we all can do. When we can neither avoid sin, nor repent truly, we can then bear the burden of sin, bear it patiently, bear it with pain, bear it without doing anything to avoid the pain and the agony of it, bear it as one would bear a cross; not Christ’s cross, not the cross of true discipleship, but the cross of the thief who was crucified next to him. Didn’t the thief say to his companion who was blaspheming the Lord: “We are enduring because we have committed crimes – he endures sinlessly ...” And it is to him, because he had accepted the punishment, the pain, the agony, the consequences indeed of evil he had committed, of being the man he was, that Christ said, “Thou shalt be with Me today in Paradise ...”’

I remember the life of one of the divines, the story of one who had come to him and had said that he had always led a life that was evil, impure, unworthy both of God and of himself; and then he had repented, he had rejected all the evil he had done; and yet, he was in the power of the same evil. And the divine said to him: ‘There was a time when you lapped up all this filth with delight; now you perceive it as filth and you feel that you are drowning in it with horror, with disgust. Take this to be your reward for your past, and endure ...’

This is something which all of us can do: to endure the consequences, to endure the enslavement which is ours, patiently, humbly, with a broken heart; not with indifference, not with a sense that as we are abandoned to it by God, then, why not sin? But taking it as a healing perception of what sin is, of what it does to us, of the horror of it. And if we patiently endure, a day will come when our inner rejection of sin will bear fruit, and when freedom will be given us.

So, if we can, in all the ways we can, let us avoid sin in all its forms, even those sins which seem to be so unimportant, because the slightest crack in a dam sooner or later leads to its bursting. If we can, let us truly repent, that is, turn away from our past in a heroic, determined act. But if we can do neither of them, let us carry humbly and patiently all the pain and all the consequences. And this will also be accounted one day by the Lord who in a popular life of Moses, in response to his angels saying, ‘How long shall you endure their sins?’ – the sins of the Jews in the wilderness – answered: ‘I will reject them when the measure of their sins will exceed the measure of their suffering.’

Let us therefore accept the pain as a redeeming pain, even if we cannot offer it as pain pure of stain. Amen.

7

The prayer before Communion

18 September 1988

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

In the Orthodox Church, every time we come to Communion we say to the Lord that we come to him who is the Saviour of sinners, but we also state that we consider ourselves as the greatest of all. How much truth is there in such a statement when we make it? Or how can we make such a statement? Is it true? Can we truly say that we do consider ourselves the worst of all sinners? John of Kronstadt in his Diary makes a point which I believe is very important. He says that he also asks himself this very question, and he can answer it in all honesty, because, he says, if others had been given so much love, so much grace, so much Divine revelation as was given to him, they would have borne fruit which he proved unable to bear.

And so, this is a way in which we can ask ourselves questions when we come up to Communion, and say the words of the prayer before Communion. Is it simply that we repeat them because they are written in the books? Or is it that we are aware – but aware of what? Aware of being sinners? Yes, we all are aware of being sinners, more or less; but are we aware of how much we have received from God and how little fruit we have borne? It is only if we see vividly, clearly, the contrast between all that was possible – indeed, all that is possible – and all that we are, that we can honestly say such words.

Let us reflect on them, because we cannot speak words of courtesy, words of empty politeness to God when we pray. What we say must be true, and we must make of every prayer a test of the truth of our conscience and of our lives.

Let us take this with us until we receive Communion again, so that one day, perhaps not at our next Communion, but after a long life of searching, of praying, of passing judgement on ourselves, we can say truly, ‘God, O God! How much you have given me, and how little fruit I have borne! If anyone had been given what you gave me, he would already be a saint of God.’ Amen.

8

Friendship with Christ

12 September 1999

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

I was asked to give a certain number of sermons on confession, because many come to confession and repeat only things which they have read in manuals of devotion or which other people have told them about. And I would like to start where I start with a child and attract your attention to the fact that our situation is the same.

When a child comes to confession, usually he brings either on paper or by memory a long list, or a short list, of sins. And when he has finished, I always say, ‘Are these things which break your heart? Are these things which you feel are wrong in you? Did you invent for yourself this confession?’ And most of the time the answer is, ‘No, my mother gave me this list because that makes her cross!’ After that I usually have a conversation with the mother. But as far as the child is concerned, it has nothing to do with him, it is not his confession. It is the judgement which the parents have established, accusations against him. And the same could be asked about grown-up people who come with lists of sins which they have found in manuals, or been told to consider by their spiritual fathers. And the answer is always the same: it is not my confession, yet it is a challenge which I was given.

And then, the next move, indeed, is to ask: ‘What do you know of Christ? Does he attract you? Do you like him? Does he mean anything to you?’ And the answer is varied. Some say: ‘No, I know him from afar off, I know him from the Church, from what I was taught, but I never had a personal attitude to him.’ Then the answer is: ‘Find out. Read the Gospel and try to find out what Christ is like.’

And the next move: ask yourself, ‘Do I like him? Would I wish to be his disciple, his friend?’ If the answer is ‘No’, then begin to think about your whole situation, because if Christ means nothing, if you dislike him, if he is no image of what you would like to be, then you must start a long, long way away. But if you can say, ‘Yes! I like him, I can respect him, I can admire him. Yes, I would like to be his personal friend if he was here’, then my next question will be, ‘Do you know what friendship is?’

Friendship consists most of all in choosing someone among all the people to be to you the one you treasure above all, whom you admire, by whom you are prepared to stand in case of danger or unpleasantness; one to whom you wish to give joy.

Ask yourself these questions with regard to Christ; and ask yourself, in what way have you tried in the past week to give some joy to the Lord Jesus Christ, or in what way have you been for him a cause of pain? ‘I have loved him to the point of giving my life and my death for him and he does not care at all. Not for my suffering or my death, but for me.’

If that is the conclusion, begin to re-examine all your status as a Christian. If you can say, ‘Yes, I choose him as a friend’, begin to ask yourself every day, every day, ‘What have I done, said, thought, felt, been, which can be to him a joy or a pain?’

And when you come to confession that is what you must bring to confession; between the last confession and today’s confession this is what I have been: an unfaithful friend, an indifferent friend, a cowardly friend, or on the contrary, no, I have chosen him for my friend and I stood by him ...

Think in those terms; and we will see in the following sermons of mine what else we can think and do, and prepare, to pronounce a confession that will be your own; the truth, the rock bottom of your life and heart, the truth about your relationship with Christ. Amen.

9

The priest as witness

26 September 1999

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

When we come to confession we come to meet a friend face to face. We are not coming to be judged and condemned. We do not come in terror of what will happen. We come to the One who, being God, beyond suffering, beyond death, has chosen, for the love of us, to become man, to take upon himself all our human destiny and to give his life for us. His life, his death are to us evidence that we are so loved of God that we can come up to him whether we are good or bad with hope that he will receive us with open arms; that if anyone is to cry over our unworthiness and our sins it is him, for compassion, for pity, for love – with a readiness, as he said in a vision to one of the saints, that if there was only one sinner in the world he would again become man and again die for him, because he cannot endure the thought of anyone perishing.

This is the God, the Christ, to whom we come when we come to confession – to the One who is open to us with all his life and death; One who waits for us to come to be healed, to be consoled, to be supported – not to be condemned, not to be judged.

And then, what is the role of the priest? In the prayer which is read before confession we are told, ‘I am but a witness.’ What does it mean? A witness to what? To the fact that you have come? That would not be enough. But think what witnesses are. There are accidental, occasional witnesses. You are present in the street when an accident takes place. You are asked, ‘What happened?’ You are neither in favour of the one or the other. You are just telling of what your eyes have seen. It’s for others to judge and to know.

There are other forms of witness. At times a friend of ours is brought to judgement. And we come to defend him, to testify for him, to save him. That’s another kind of witness.

And then there is the witness which the holy Gospel mentions speaking of St John the Baptist: as the friend of the Bride-groom, the one who comes to the wedding, invited both by the bride and the bridegroom, because he is the nearest, the closest, to them both. And he is there to share their joy, the miracle of their encounter, the miracle of a blessing that will come upon them and out of two make one, unite them so that they are inseparable for ever in the mystery of eternal love, of divine love shared with them.

This is the position of the priest. He is called by Christ to be before the person, the sinner, a witness to the fact that he, the sinner, is loved, that Christ is there, that he has no other desire or intention but the salvation and the joy eternal of the one who has come today. And the priest comes also in the name of the sinner saying: ‘Christ, my God, our Lord, this person has sinned, yes, but look, he trusts in you, he believes in you, we all love him with the same love as you possess. We are prepared to give our lives for him to be reconciled and find peace and joy and be at one with you, our Lord, our God, our Saviour, our Lover.’

When you come to confession next time, think of these things. Think of the way you come: not with fear of punishment or of rejection, but with an open heart to pour out everything evil or doubtful there is in this heart. And Christ will receive you. Your confession may be to him a new crucifixion, but he accepts it. He doesn’t reject it. He does not reject you. Come, open your heart, speak in all truth to him, knowing that you are loved beyond judgement, to the point of sacrifice and death: his death, and your life – life in time and life eternal. Amen.

10

Unfaithfulness

31 October 1999

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

Continuing my short sermons on confession, I would like to say that in the first place confession is an encounter and a reconciliation. It is our encounter with Christ whose love for us has no limits, who loves us with all his life and all his death, who never turns away from us, but from whom we sometimes, perhaps even often, walk away. It is an encounter that can be pure joy when during a lapse of time nothing separates us from Christ, when our friendship is pure, is whole, when our friendship isn’t broken by any unfaithfulness. Then we can come to Christ joyfully, happily. We can come to confession and say: ‘Lord! Thank you for your friendship. Thank you for your love, thank you for all that you are. Thank you that you allow me to come near you; thank you for everything. O, my Joy! O, my Happiness! Accept me and bless me to commune with your Holy Mysteries, that is, to unite to you even more perfectly, for my joy to be perfect.’

It may happen. Perhaps it doesn’t happen often. But sometimes such an encounter can fill all our life, be an inspiration for all our life, and give us the strength and power to live.

But more often we come to Christ after some kind of separation. Sometimes the separation was not a cruel one, not inimical; sometimes the separation was because we have forgotten him, life has submerged us, we didn’t have time to remember him. There was so much in life. And all of a sudden we remember that apart from all that was our inspiration, our joy for some time, there is Christ, there is such a friend who never forgets us, from whom we walked away and who is now alone. Then we must hurry to him and say: ‘Lord, forgive – I was submerged by life, I was carried away by this, by that and something else. Accept me back. You know that this enthusiasm is superficial but that the true thing is our friendship.’ But before we can say that, we must ask ourselves a question: is it true that my friendship with Christ is deep enough so that my temporary forgetfulness cannot overshadow, still less destroy it?

But it happens that we have sinned before God. We have sinned by unfaithfulness, not in something small but in something very deep. It can be a moment that has separated us in a very deep manner. You remember what happened when Christ was facing the Sanhedrin. A servant came to Peter and said, ‘But this one also was with him!’ And Peter became afraid. He was frightened by what they would do to him because of the fact that he was with Christ; and he began to swear, ‘No, I do not know this man!’ He could no longer stay in this yard and see through the window Christ undergoing judgement. And at that moment Christ turned his head and looked at Peter. The All-knowing Son of God didn’t hear with his ears those words but they hit him in his soul: one of his nearest disciples had declared that he didn’t know him, didn’t want to know him, that he preferred life, that he preferred tranquillity. This look hit Peter in his soul in such a manner that he began to weep and went out.

It was just one moment of radical, frightful unfaithfulness. And later on, when Mary Magdalene met the Saviour in the garden after his resurrection, he instructed her, ‘Go to my disciples and Peter and tell them that I am risen’ – because Peter couldn’t any more consider himself as one of the disciples, he was a traitor. He had renounced Christ, and that is why Christ mentioned him especially, for him to know that he was not rejected, that the disciples fled away in fear, but without renouncing, and he fled away and renounced; but the love of Christ held him firmly. He can meet him face to face. Oh, he can fall down at his feet, he can ask for forgiveness, but he knows that he is loved as he was loved in the most faithful times.

And there are also times when we come to confession – I use this word reluctantly, as a matter of routine – because we want to renew the closeness that, so to speak, has been shaken. At those moments we must come to Christ knowing that we are loved by all his life and all his death, that we are loved for ever, to the depths of our hearts; and that we can come. But in order to become friends anew we must open our souls, tell him everything for him to know from us what is wrong with us, what is the infringement of our friendship. And here we should not have recourse to lists of sins, we should not search even in the holy Scriptures for the sins we might have committed; but we should ask ourselves a question: in what have I personally sinned before God, in what have I personally revealed myself unfaithful?

And to do this there is a simple means. First of all, look at one’s conscience. What have I preferred to Christ? I will not give you lists, but every one of us can say: yes, to my closeness with Christ I have preferred this or that – shame! But apart from that, we can ask ourselves: what am I constantly, invariably? To do this we can take and read the holy Gospel and mark in it not the passages that accuse us, but things about which we can say as the disciples said, going with Christ to Emmaus: didn’t our hearts burn within us when he was talking to us on the road?

So, look in the Gospel for the passages that made your heart burn, even for a moment, passages that touched you in the depths of your soul, passages which made you feel that you and Christ, you and Christ, are sharing the same feelings, the same thoughts, that you are one – yes, we are one with him; there are passages of which we can say that his thoughts are our thoughts, his feelings our feelings; we are one with him, one with him at that moment. And when all of a sudden we discover that we have transgressed this moment, trampled it under our feet, turned away from it, that we were at one with him and turned away – it means that we renounced the little holiness, perhaps, that is in us. In a sense it is of no importance that we have transgressed some rules, but here we have transgressed in a most frightful way our unity with the Beloved and the One who loves us. And we should reread these passages, check ourselves against them; not seeking in what way we are guilty, but in what way we have lost our faithfulness, our friendship, our love in what exists already; because on the part of Christ it is inalienable, it is we who have renounced it.

So, that is what we should bring to confession. And it can be something quite frightful, like the renouncing of him.

So when we prepare for confession, let us ask ourselves a question: here is the encounter with our closest friend, the beloved One, with the One with whom we want to be at one, inseparable, for ever, completely, in our depths. And we have transgressed this friendship of ours where it already existed as is witnessed by our heart, our memory, our mind, when we remember those passages that made our heart burn, our mind become clear, our will move towards good, our body grow quiet, forgetful that it is flesh and become body, a sacred thing, sacred because through Baptism it has united with the humanity of Christ, through Chrismation it has become a vessel of the Holy Spirit, through our Communion it has become the Body of Christ, however incipiently.

That is what we should bring to confession. May God help us to come that way, and then we will be able to repent, we will be able to regret not that there is in some list a sin that we have touched in passing, but that something has been broken in my friendship, in my unity with Christ, my Saviour, Friend, Beloved. Amen.

11

Forgiveness

5 December 1999

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

For the fourth time I endeavour to speak on confession. And what I want to touch upon is the mystery of forgiveness. When we come to confession, as I have said before, we come into the presence of God. But God is not a judge; God is our Saviour. God is our Friend, the one who has loved us in such a way that he has given his life that we may believe in his love, and given his life to save us from condemnation. And it is to him, as to a Friend, and to a Saviour, that we come.

We confess to him, we open our hearts to him. We tell him, as I tried to explain on other occasions, all that separates us from him; not lists of formal sins but what we feel in our hearts is our unfaithfulness; what we feel in our hearts separates us, because in spite of the words of love and of veneration which we pronounce, we act in a way that nails him to the cross again.

We lie; and we create a world in which only death can triumph. We reject our neighbour and we close our own way into the Kingdom of God, because, unless we can say ‘Our Father’ and not ‘My Father’, there is no place for us in his Kingdom.

And so we ask the Lord for forgiveness – but not a formal word that will say, ‘You have been unworthy of my friendship, but I’m great-hearted and I forgive.’ No, that is not the point. It’s not that kind of forgiveness which we must seek. It’s a true reconciliation, in which we pour out our heart to God, the truth that there is to be said, in which we tell him all the ways in which we have been unfaithful to him – not only directly, but being unfaithful to our neighbour, to our friends, to our relatives, to anyone around us. The way, also, in which we have treated the world he has created with contempt and indifference, a world which he has so loved as to call it into existence.

And when we have said that, we must ask him, as I have said a minute before, for reconciliation. ‘Let us be friends again, Lord. I know I have not changed yet. It is only your friendship – unshakeable, faithful – that can prompt me to become different. If you reject me, if you turn away from me, I have no reason to change. I am damned, I am damned in this world, whatever happens in the future world.’ The only reason why I can change is that the Lord said: ‘In spite of all, I remain your friend. In spite of all, I love you with all my life and all my death. Can you in response to this love, show a little faithfulness? I don’t expect from you a total, immediate change. But change step by step. Hold on to me. I will support you, I’ll help you, I’ll protect you, I’ll guide you, I’ll give you strength – but do change. And when you receive forgiveness in my name from the priest, don’t imagine that the past does not exist. The past will have gone only when you have become so alien to this past that it is no longer yours.’

It may sound very strange. But we all live a complex life. I remember an old woman who came and said to me that she does not know how to live. She spends her whole nights seeing in her dreams and in her memories all the evil she has done. She went to the doctor, who gave her pills, and it was only worse because from her memories it became hallucinations. What can she do?

And I said to her, ‘Remember, God grants us not only once to live through our life but to live and relive our lives time and again until all the evil of it is expurgated. When evil stands up from the past before you, ask yourself: now, with the experience of life I have acquired, now, would I be the person I was then? Would I say these murderous words, would I do such and such action which was evil? And if you can say sincerely: oh no, with what I have learnt from life, now, placed in the same situation, I would never, never do the same – then you can say, “Lord, forgive me this particular moment of my past”, and know that you are free. If you can say that with all your heart, with all sincerity, with all the truth there is in you, then it will not come back to you.’

And so it happened to this old woman. And so it should happen to each of us. We cannot in a moment be free of our past. We must renounce the evil there is in it. We must turn to Christ our God and promise to struggle for faithfulness, ask for his help, and then, step by step free ourselves of the past. It does not mean that we are not forgiven, because forgiven means accepted in love, accepted with tenderness by someone who will never forget our weakness, never forget what has gone wrong with us, because to forget means that he will expose us to the same temptation without protection.

And so it is with us when we receive forgiveness from God. Yes, our estrangement from him is gone. Yes, there is nothing that separates us from him as far as love is concerned – his love – and as far as our longing – our longing – is concerned. But we must struggle and change and become new, new creatures, with his help. Forgiveness does not erase the past. It heals it in co-operation between God and us.

Let us therefore come to confession in this spirit. Let us confess ourselves daily to God, sincerely; open our hearts, make our peace with him, enter into reconciliation; and know that reconciliation means that we have undertaken to be faithful to him; and fight, and fight ourselves, and fight evil, and fight for the people around us, whom we wound, and for God, whom we crucify.

Let us reflect on this. And then, when we come to confession, the prayer of absolution will have a true and real meaning: the re-establishment of a friendship that cannot be broken on God’s part, but was broken on ours and is now restored in intention. And this intention must be determination; and determination must be action, and new life in us. Amen.

12

Public confession

12 December 1999

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

Many are those among you who have come to confession on occasions before you received Communion, and I want you to reflect later on a very important point. The early Church knew nothing of the private confession which we use nowadays. People came to confess their sins to the whole community, to all their brothers and sisters in Christ because it was felt – as it should be felt by us but is very little perceived – that when one member of the Body sins the whole Body is wounded, that whatever sin I commit it soils and pollutes the whole Body, and moreover that whenever I commit a sin against a brother, against a sister, indeed against myself I am partaking in the crucifixion of Christ. Because he came into the world to save sinners and whoever is a sinner is to a greater or lesser extent responsible for the incarnation he accepted in order to die for us. And in the early Church people had an intense sense of community and therefore when sin was committed it was confessed to all the community.

And I know of two communities in the early days of the Russian Revolution when two spiritual guides, whenever anyone wanted to make a confession, called together all their spiritual children and the confession was made aloud before all in [the presence of the guides], standing there as the [friends] of the bridegroom and endowed with the power to forgive or to bind which was given by Christ to his disciples. And when the sinner had confessed his misdeeds these spiritual guides turned to the community and said: ‘You have heard now, are you prepared to carry the weight of his sin, are you prepared to take him on as a beloved brother or sister, are you aware that you are sharing with him his misery? If you are prepared to take him on whole- heartedly, completely, unreservedly in the name of Christ I can give him forgiveness; if you refuse to do this, I cannot do it, but also you will be answerable before God for having rejected one for whom Christ had given his life.’

This was the early attitude of the Church: come to the whole community and open one’s heart. And this was possible as long as the community was small, as long as it was persecuted, as long as it was an act of heroism to be a member of the Body of Christ. But when the Church was recognized by the state, when there was no danger in belonging to it, moreover when it was easy and advantageous to belong to it, then a confession of that kind was impossible because it was not received by people who considered that the sin of their brother was their own sin and that they had to carry one another’s wounds and weaknesses; and therefore individual confession was introduced.

You have a certain experience of what this common confession can be at retreats when the priest having prayed with you, talked to you, standing before God with you, makes aloud his own confession before God. You participate in his own confession and you can identify with him as he accepts to share with you his frailty, his sinfulness and his need of forgiveness. This is a small approximation but we must learn to share together the burden of one another’s sins.

I remember by hearsay the story of a Russian officer who came to a youth conference in the 1920s and said to the priest in confession that he was in a position to mention all the sins he had committed but his heart was of ice and of stone and he had no feeling about it. He could give a list but not shed a tear. And this priest, Father Alexander Elchaninov, commanded him not to make his confession to him but the next morning when the Liturgy would be celebrated to come before the Liturgy and to all the youth conference assembled there to make the confession he intended to make to the priest. And this man, feeling the desperate need of his resurrection from the dead, because he was dead at heart, came out, explained what he was about to do. He expected that everyone would move away from him in horror; instead of which he felt that all the conference moved towards him in compassion, in sympathy, in oneness; he began to speak his confession and his heart broke and he burst into tears and he was redeemed.

And therefore when we come to confession let us not be content to come to the priest and to speak in his presence to the Lord Jesus Christ who stands there with the wounds of the crucifixion to which we have added our own. But let us turn to everyone whom we may have offended individually between our last confession, or perhaps a long, long time before, open our heart, tell the truth, obtain forgiveness for our victim, heal that limb of the Body of Christ which we have wounded at times almost mortally and then only come to the priest and confess our sins to the Lord Jesus Christ who stands crucified and obtain from the priest in his name forgiveness of the sins for which we have truly repented. Amen.

13

The priest as spiritual companion

11 March 2001

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

I want to say something, which is not a commentary on the Gospel. Time and again, not only I but every priest is asked by someone or other to become his spiritual father. And many are troubled by the fact that all of us say no; this we cannot do. This is beyond our strength.

This is not a refusal to care; it is not a refusal to take upon our shoulders the lost sheep. No; it is an assertion that we can be your companions on the journey to the Kingdom of God but we ourselves are not mature enough to show you all the way.

Each of us can say to those of you who come: ‘I have walked part of the road. I will be your companion on the road. And then, when we come to a point which I have not yet myself trod, let us walk together, following the only One who can be our guide; indeed, the only One who is not only our guide but our Saviour, who is the road itself, and the truth, and life.’

And therefore, when you come to a priest in confession, open your hearts to him, or more truly to the Lord Jesus Christ in his presence, and he, according to the prayer, which we read before confession, will be the witness of your openness, sincerity, truth and repentance. He will listen to what you say to Christ. He will pray that Christ receives you as he receives every sinner – at the cost of his life and death. He will pray. And he will never forget either you or your confession. He will accept to be a martyr, not only a witness, but carrying the pain, the horror, the suffering of the sins he can hear of. Everyone who comes to confession to a priest puts on his shoulders the burden of his own sins, and it is in compassion that the priest will for ever carry them before God.

Therefore be content with the love, with the compassion, with the honesty of the priest to whom you come. Don’t ask him to do the impossible. If we go into the mountains we ask a guide who has gone all the way already and come back alive. None of us can say that we have gone all the way to the Kingdom of God and entered into it. We can only say, ‘We are on the way and we shall walk with you, share with you all our knowledge, support you at moments of weakness, do all we can for you to reach the Kingdom of God.’

Who of us can say that he has? St Seraphim of Sarov refused to be the spiritual father of those who came. He promised to pray for them. He promised to hold them before God; and indeed his prayer was salvation. And in the Life of St Macarius of Egypt we hear that when he died a disciple of his, in a dream, saw the soul of St Macarius moving heavenwards; and the devils had set barriers on the way. And at each barrier they tested him on one or another sin. And he passed, free. And when he reached the gates of the Kingdom, the devils saw that at least in one thing they could try to destroy him. At the very gate of the Kingdom they applauded him and shouted, ‘Macarius, you have conquered us.’ And Macarius turned round, smiled, so his Life says, and said, ‘Not yet’. And only then did he enter into the Kingdom.

This is far beyond anything we priests can do. But what we can do is to walk step by step with you, be a light to hold you before the face of God, and ask him who is the way, who is the truth, who is life, who is our salvation, to be your guide, your way and your salvation. Amen.

QUESTIONS PEOPLE ASK

Question: Excuse me, Vladyko, I was just wondering, is pride the same as sin? I mean if you have been hurt, for example.

Metropolitan Anthony: Pride is one of the varieties of sin. You know, pride is something which we know, on the whole, rather little about. Pride in its full sense is the attitude of Satan, who says: ‘I am the judge of all things. I don’t care for God’s judgement.’ More often what we know is vanity, the sense that we are worthy of admiration, or of respect. That is our measure of pride. But the word which the Fathers use for pride applies to the words of Satan, of Lucifer: ‘I will set my throne as high as God’s. I don’t need God’s judgement. I am my own judge. I need no one’s judgement. I am my own judge. And of course, as my own judge, I am always right.’ In the case of vanity, St John of the Ladder says, ‘A vain person is a coward before the judgement of men and arrogant before the judgement of God.’ He is afraid of the people who surround him, because they are there, and accusing him or judging him, while God is somewhere away in the sky. And I think we must remember that vanity is a form of cowardice.

Also, at times, vanity is misplaced or can be conquered. I will give you an example. A number of years ago, a young woman came to me and sat with her head bent and a horrible expression on her face. And I said: ‘What is the matter with you?’ ‘I am a sinner.’ I said: ‘Oh well, we all know that. But why is this condition?’ ‘I am a sinner.’ ‘And in what particular way?’ ‘Whenever I see my face in a mirror I find that I am lovely.’ I said, ‘You know, it is true!’ And she looked at me in horror and said, ‘So there is no hope for me?’ I said: ‘Yes! There is hope for you! You know what you do? Between pride or vanity, on the one hand, and humility, of which you know nothing and I know nothing, so I can’t teach it to you, there is a halfway house. This halfway house is called gratitude. So whenever you see your face, be grateful for it. And here is a rule for you. Three times a day, place yourself before a mirror and look at every feature in your face. If you find that your forehead, your brow, your eyes, your nose, your lips, your cheeks, your ears, are well shaped and lovely, look at them and say: ‘How lovely! Oh God, thank you for making me a present of such lovely things, because I have done nothing to have them.’ And when you will have finished all that you add: ‘Lord, forgive me, for putting on this lovely face this horrible expression.’’

And I think I told her the truth, because to jump from pride, of which, I believe, no one knows anything really, or vanity, which we all know very well and too well, to humility, of which we do not know anything, there is this halfway place: gratitude. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are those who know that they possess nothing, that they are nothing, except that they possess such a wealth of blessings given by God, and are creatures whom God has loved to the point of giving his life for them and waiting for them to come into eternity. There is room for gratitude, connected with the sense that I possess nothing, and yet I have got everything by God’s mercy, grace and love.

Question: I wonder if you could say something about people who, in their childhood, have been so abused and wounded that they don’t have within them the capacity to perceive where they have gone wrong.

Metropolitan Anthony: People who have been so abused in their childhood that they cannot see any more what is wrong cannot repent for what they don’t see, but they can long for what they still can perceive as being beauty and truth and right, and leave it to God to heal them. But also, I think one should remember that, however abused one is and however one perceives one’s own person as soiled, we must be prepared to accept the fact that, soiled or not, we are beloved by God, that he does not love us for our purity, for our integrity; he loves us because we are the people we are. He loves us, not even in spite of all, he simply loves us. And therefore, instead of concentrating on our humiliation, our abasement, we must turn to God and say: ‘You can love me as I am. If I am loved by you, the measure of my personality is your love, not what has happened to my body or to my soul.’ It is not something one can do easily oneself. I think it is something with which we can be helped, but we must remember that, if we are loved by God in such a way, and if we are loved by certain people, who know us, in the same way in which God loves us, we can turn to ourselves and say, ‘I can love myself.’ Not with pride, but with humility, with amazement. But love.

Question: You said never to ask for anyone to be punished, but to ask for his salvation. But then I am wondering if there isn’t a contradiction between that and the Paschal prayer that we say, which says, ‘even so let the ungodly perish at the presence of God, but let the righteous rejoice’.

Metropolitan Anthony: This is a question which is mighty difficult to answer, because this passage of the Old Testament expresses the attitude of an Old Testamental body before the revelation of Love Divine as it is revealed in Christ. It does not mean that we are not on that level from time to time, that when we see unrighteousness and evil we do not cry inwardly, ‘Let it be destroyed.’ But, it is because we haven’t got in ourselves the depth and love and oneness with Christ that would allow us to take the burden upon ourselves. I remember a shameful event in which I took part. I had invited a clergyman of another denomination to speak to a group of Russian pupils. He gave a talk in which he reviled our faith from end to end, and I burned with rage and indignation, but, being the host, I could do nothing much about it. Going home, I remember running down the steps in the Metro and reciting the words of one of the psalms: ‘May his road be darkness, and an angel of God offending him; may his road be slippery and an angel of God beating him up.’ And then I realized that this wasn’t quite Christian, but I found myself exactly in the mood of one of the psalms. But this is outgrown in the New Testament. I think we must learn to carry one another’s burdens to the last. And these words, as so many others, we repeat because they are in the psalms, but they are outgrown as it were. I remember speaking to someone about Judas, and saying how terrible it was that he was condemned for all eternity for what he had done on earth. Peter had met Christ again, asked forgiveness and was forgiven. And the wise man to whom I had turned said to me, ‘Yes, but when Christ descended into hell he met Judas, and perhaps Judas was saved also.’

Question: During today’s talk you were saying that man, depending on his spiritual condition, lives several lives. I know from my own experience that often the heart hardens. How do you keep the heart in a state of loving, especially when your relations are reproaching you for acting wrongly, and there arises an enmity within the family? What can you do to keep your heart from becoming embittered?

Metropolitan Anthony: I think I can only answer theoretically, in the sense that I have not reached this level, but I am always struck by the words of the apostle Paul, who says, ‘Bear ye one another’s burdens and so fulfil the law of Christ.’ When we read this, we always think that, when a person is in difficulty or in pain, we can take him on our shoulders and carry him. But the most difficult is actually to bear, that is, to take on our shoulders, the anger, the hate and the rejection of other people. And I would say that, of those two, the victim is in the better position, in the sense that the person doing the hating is destroying himself or is already destroyed to a frightening degree. It is the hater we have to feel sorry for. That is not to say that it is easy, that it comes naturally. Yes, about the victim it can be said that he is losing blood. But the one full of hate is burning in a fire. And if you think like that about the person, you can suddenly feel very sorry for him, deeply sorry. I have come across this in certain situations, shall we say during the war, especially in human relationships. How destructive it is for one human being to hate another! One is wounded and the other is torn apart from within. I do not have a recipe for this. But, as I know that this happens, it should be possible to re-adjust our attitude: poor him or her. I know of such people, not of particularly tragic inclination but who have very bad mutual relationships, rudeness of behaviour etc. And if you look closely, you will think: who is the more hurt? It is the one who carries hate within himself, and not the one who endures it. It does not make it easy, but it rearranges the whole perspective.

Can anyone else say something to help us understand more deeply?

Contributor: I can only add to this. I have often found myself in similar situations. The answer that I found in my case at that time was that, after an inner struggle, you had to stand and pray, ‘Lord, allow me to love with your love because I do not have my own.’ This is why I have an unlimited appreciation for St John Chrysostom’s short prayers, who not for nothing says: ‘Renew within my heart the dew of thy grace. Send thy grace to my aid so that I might glorify thy name.’ I can only tell you that the Lord somehow had pity on me and gave me enough strength to keep my heart in love.

Question: You must not see people as being full of hate. It is as if they were not themselves. They are God’s image. This is all from the devil and his doings and the people are not to blame. Therefore you must love the image of God and not see these works of the devil. Can you think like this?

Metropolitan Anthony: I think that we can say the person is overwhelmed by hate, which strictly speaking is not his own but is instilled in him. But you must be careful in the sense of not blaming the devil in what you yourself do, because it is easy to say that all the evil that I do is imposed on me, and all the good is my own with the help of God. You must act with caution, because it sometimes happens, and perhaps often happens, that we do evil from within ourselves and not only by suggestion. In some overall way we can say that, of course, all evil comes from the evil spirit. But it is too easy to apply that to every situation.

Question: We have spoken of forgiveness. We often think that we have forgiven, but in reality ... From my own experience, it seems to me that I have forgiven, for example events from my first marriage, but then comes a moment when I again feel a certain pain and grievance. How do I overcome this and how will I know that I have finally forgiven?

Metropolitan Anthony: Occasionally it happens that you are overwhelmed by hate and you do not know how to cope with it. I had such an occasion. When I was a youth, I fell out irreparably, mortally, with a friend. It is more than seventy years ago, but I still remember that his name was Kirill. And so, after a grandiose row, I returned home and suddenly, saying the Lord’s Prayer, I stopped. ‘Forgive me my sins as I forgive others.’ I thought, ‘I cannot say this, because I shall never forgive him.’ I thought thus and could not carry on. Then I approached Father Athanasiy, who was my spiritual father. He said: ‘Oh well, so what is the problem? When you get to this point, just say, “Lord, do not forgive me my sins, as I shall never forgive Kirill.” And I said to him that I could not do that because I wanted to be forgiven. He said, ‘Then it cannot be solved. Go home.’ I went home and, of course, I could not say this to God. I returned to Father Athanasiy and told him: ‘I don’t know what to do. I can’t say this!’ ‘Well, when you get to that point, try to skip over it.’ I got to that point, and could not skip over it because I wanted to be forgiven. I have enough sins of my own to want to be forgiven. So I returned and said to him, ‘I can’t.’ ‘Do you very much want God to forgive you?’ ‘Yes!’ ‘But could you have a word with God about forgiving you to the extent that you forgive Kirill?’ ‘I don’t want to forgive him.’ ‘Well, then there is nothing to be done.’

And so he led me by the nose up to the moment when I said, ‘Yes, forgive because I want to forgive.’ And then I thought, ‘Yes, all right, I wish to forgive, but nevertheless it is not true forgiveness and therefore God still does not forgive me.’ And so I struggled over months, time after time, until the moment came when I thought, ‘Lord! I want God, GOD who is such a wonderful being, to forgive me, to love me, to love me tenderly, to count me among his own!’ And suddenly it appeared that I was able to say, ‘Forgive as I forgive’, because I realized, yes, I can forgive, because in such a context I cannot not forgive, not because I am afraid on my own behalf but because all this is incomparable: the love of God, on the one hand, that I am rejecting, and my friendship with this Kirill, with whom I then became great friends. So I think that the struggle can last a very long time. When I tell this, it sounds childishly awkward or funny, but in reality at the time it was for me anything but funny, for it meant rejecting God’s love.

Question: So the process of forgiveness can take a long time?

Metropolitan Anthony: Yes; it is a process. We cannot immediately hack off the negative side. Sometimes it is possible that you suddenly come to your senses. But otherwise it is a whole process of struggling. It appears that you have forgiven completely, and yet it comes to the surface again. Then you must ask yourself, ‘What has hooked me?’ It has surfaced; not wholesale, not in its entirety, but as a splinter. What sort of splinter is it? What did he do to me or what did he say that I had not previously noticed in the general quantity of all the injuries, and now a few injuries remain and individual splinters are coming up? Now, let me look at the individual splinters, and I will see which one I can pull out. First, you are not going to pull out all of them at once, and, second, it is not always possible to do this at a given moment. You can forgive one thing and not forgive another. I do not have the strength to forgive wholesale, nor can I forgive this particular word or this particular act. But then it is minor. Yes, I can cope with this and, scraping a little, I can take out this splinter. Then, when it has healed, you notice there are slightly larger areas for other splinters which are coming up. But you cannot do it all at once. Or perhaps, when there is an inner catastrophe taking place, a shock. But you cannot count on it.

What I wanted to say when I spoke of how we experience our life several times over, is something I consider to be important. Although the majority of you are still young, you will find that, as the years pass by, memories are surfacing. When these are childhood memories, this is still all right. But when more serious adulthood memories, which have not been overcome, suddenly surface, then I have to cope. I cannot say in hindsight, ‘Well, I am going to forgive you!’, because you did not forgive then and now it is not possible to forgive, [even] though that [was] something that took place 20 years ago. But it is possible to say, as I tried to do earlier, that if this were to happen to me now with my present life experience, surely I would not react in that way when I know what life is, how it spins and beats people. Could I now, for example, hate this person for something that seemed so colossal then, but which now in this context appears much smaller? And so, from year to year, memories rise up until all the past is cleansed. We must not try to forget them, we must not say, ‘That is in the past; it has now gone.’ It has not gone while it lasts. On the other hand, it is such a mercy of God when such memories rise up in a new context. You look at yourself and you think: ‘How could I have acted like that? How could I have said such a thing? How could I have survived those things and thought those thoughts?’ And in a certain sense, this does require a transformation, a new life. This is our short life even if we live to a hundred; it is still short compared with eternity.

Question: Some time ago, you were telling the following incident from your life: a person had come to confess his grave sin relating to someone who was already dead, but he could not free himself from this heavy burden. You advised him to ask for forgiveness from this dead person, and he began to feel better. What if, when you ask for forgiveness from a dead person, your conscience does not stop plaguing you? However many times you may go to confession, the conscience keeps gnawing at you. Should one still keep up the repentance and confession?

Metropolitan Anthony: First, I think that, even if you keep going to confession ten times about the same sin, you will not necessarily become free of it. Perhaps you have not all heard of this incident; forgive me, I shall tell you. I was hearing a person’s confession. He was then 84 years of age. He told me that, during the retreat of the White Army from the Crimea, there were battles. In his unit there was a nurse whom he loved deeply. And she, too, fell in love with him. They decided to marry as soon as they were free. During a battle, she came out too soon and he shot her dead. He could not afterwards find any peace. He was 22 years old when it happened. Now he was 84, and all these years he had lived in suffering because he had killed his beloved, and he could not ask her to forgive him because she was dead. He was advised to go to confession, to give alms, to do all sorts of things. But nothing helped.

And I remember that I said at the time: ‘You know, you have been at confession with a priest who has not been killed and who can easily read the prayer of absolution. But have you ever thought of turning to Masha and talking to her?’ ‘But she has died.’ ‘Listen. Either she died bodily but lives in eternity with God, or she no longer exists at all. If you do not believe that she exists, then there is nothing to worry about. The business is finished. But if you believe that she lives in eternity, then you can address her. She is the only one who can give you peace. When you prepare in the evening for the night’s sleep, go and sit in the armchair and talk with Masha. Tell her everything that took place: how it happened that you shot her, what a horror it was for you and what a horror it has remained, how you live with this horror and how you have not been able to come to terms with it, and finish by saying to her: ‘Listen, Masha. You loved me and I love you. If you still love me, and have forgiven me, ask God to send down peace for my soul.’ And he did this. Next day, when I saw him, he said to me: ‘You know, I did everything as you said. I talked with her for such a long time, and I asked her to ask God for peace for my soul. And suddenly my soul grew so quiet that I now know she has forgiven me and nothing any longer separates us.’

So that is what it was all about, and I think that, in the end, whether the person lives on earth or has died and lives in eternity, the one who appears as the victim can set you free. I remember a wonderful chapter in a book by Jean Daniélou, where he speaks of what will be at the end of time: God cannot forgive anyone whom his victim has not forgiven. But if the victim will not forgive, then the victim is bound to him with the unforgiving. And neither the victim nor he can enter into eternal peace until the victim understands and until he accepts the forgiveness. This is an exceedingly important question because, in a lifetime, there are situations when it is very difficult to forgive. When we shall stand at God’s judgement seat, we shall see, in comparison with the divine crucifixion and the divine love and forgiveness, what has taken place. I think we shall probably say, ‘Yes, I can forgive and I can accept forgiveness.’ That is how it seems to me. Have I answered or have I not answered? I am not sure.

Question: I was asking that, if you continue asking for forgiveness from a dead person – and I am convinced that he must forgive because he is a close member of the family – and this does not bring peace, what can you do?

Metropolitan Anthony: Then I think that you must not only ask for forgiveness but also you have to pray for this person, that God would allow him to unite with his unfathomable divine love. I do not have any other answer. Perhaps [someone else] does?

Contributor: I have worked a great deal with people who have suffered, especially after the earthquake in Armenia. There were terrible situations there. And that experience truly confirms what you just said, as it seems to me, very exactly. Grief and forgiveness do not consist in the whole experience, but in a multitude of minor details and a multitude of little things, and they have all got to be concluded. Perhaps sometimes only a little catch remains, like a little stone in your shoe, but it can so torment the whole body. Likewise in grief and in forgiveness, sometimes trifles remain, which do not torment by their scope but by the regularity of the anxiety they cause. I remember one occasion when a young girl did not have time to warn her beloved, and the train killed him right under her eyes. After a few years, she married a friend of this man but, almost every day, she would go to the cemetery and spend her day there. These trips to the cemetery drove the entire family mad. She was not a church-going person, though she was a believer. When she came to me, she started talking. It was simply a chat about the church catechism. I said this to her: ‘Your relations with a dead person are like a corridor in which you see only him and yourself. Neither your child nor your husband can enter it. When there is a service for the departed in church, many people pray for their own. Go there to this service, help them with your prayers and they will also pray for your dead. Then the horizon will widen, and they will help each other and so will you. If you still have a sorrow, then maybe it is an attempt of the person over there to remind you to pray for him. We are not granted peace, because he needs us.’

And indeed, you discover that there are a million things to be done in grief and forgiveness, because there is a psychological rule of incomplete, unfinished unity, and during a lifetime with another person we have many good intentions, such as to say something to him, write a good letter, to do something. But when he is dead and relations with him are broken off, the intentions have gone nowhere, they have remained. As soon as we connect with one of those good intentions by association, it turns out that it is now impossible and we are seized by a feeling of guilt, pain etc. This is why it is really a long and difficult process.

Question: I have the following problem. You choose a path and you follow it for perhaps several years. It seems that the choice was right and that life is generally good. But then comes a moment when you think you could have done something else, chosen another path. But the framework of your situation does not allow the possibility of a free choice, because not only are you important in life but also your friends, the life around you. I don’t know – is it better to act within a framework that is no longer so important for you or to jettison everything and start from the beginning? How should you see this in spiritual terms?

Metropolitan Anthony: I think it is very difficult to answer this question.

Contributor: I know one of the answers from monastic literature. I tried to test it on my experience. I had many unclear situations of the sort you mention. Experienced monks, say the Fathers of Optina, counsel a very simple prayer: ‘Lord, show me the way and I shall walk in it.’ But I have to warn you that this prayer can only help if you pray from your whole heart. But that does not mean that it will help you in half an hour. From my own experience, I was convinced after three years. But then he did show the way. This prayer works; that I know.

Metropolitan Anthony: If I dare to add anything, I shall say that this prayer is not without its risks, in the sense that sometimes God will show you a way that you do not want to follow at all. And then you will have to renew your struggle, because he may say to you, ‘Here is a straight way, like a table surface, go your way, then all will be well.’ But suddenly he will say something that is even more difficult than your present situation. So, if one can speak so impiously, to ask God for advice is sometimes a very risky business. But yes, it is possible to pray like this, asking God for enlightenment, but you have to be prepared to do everything; on the one hand, to carry out the advice if it can be grasped by the heart and the mind, and, on the other, not to take one’s own thought too easily as ‘inspired by God’ or ‘God-given’ thoughts.

Question: What do you have to do when someone is hurting you without noticing it and without feeling guilty about it?

Metropolitan Anthony: I would say that if a person does not want to ask for forgiveness because he does not feel guilty, the only thing that we can do is to pray for that person. To pray, not that he would change but simply on his behalf, to hold him before the face of God so that God will do with him what he wants, so that God’s light and warmth will penetrate this person and that what follows will be God’s will. I do not know of any other answer.

Question: Once I hurt somebody’s feelings and then I tried several times to ask him for forgiveness, but it irritated him. What do we have to do to be forgiven? Can one go to confession and Communion?

Metropolitan Anthony: I think you cannot be answerable for this other person’s unwillingness to forgive you if you have sincerely been sorry for what happened, and if you do not feel irritation in return: ‘How dare you not forgive me!’ In such a case, one has to go to confession oneself, go to Communion and pray for that person; not for him to change in one way or another, but that the grace of God will descend on him and that God will do with him what is good and useful.

Question: If we forgive but the pain does not go, does it mean that we have not really forgiven?

Metropolitan Anthony: To forgive does not mean to forget. To forgive means to say to God that I lay no claim on this person, that inwardly I have made peace with him. But sometimes we can do no more, in the sense that we cannot act as if nothing had happened, if he is not ready for it.

I shall give you an example, not from the spiritual domain but from another. We had a lady parishioner, from an older generation than myself, who drank like a fish. She was placed in a hospital. During a whole year, she was being treated and finally she was pronounced healthy. Her family, out of joy, greeted her return with a bottle of wine. That was the end of her recovery. And in that sense, this bottle of wine was forgiveness, the past was no more. But, unfortunately, this bottle proved to be the beginning of the future and not the end of the past. And for this reason, if a person is spiritually ill with something, shall we say with anger, irritation or something like that, we can pray for him but we cannot behave as if nothing had ever happened, because as long as this is in him, there is a risk that it will blow up.

And now I will ask [one of the other contributors] again, if he has an answer.

Contributor: Rather, I have a question for you, Vladyko. If we are ready to ask for forgiveness and the situation is somehow sorting itself out, but we can see that it is inappropriate, silly, embarrassing from the point of view of the person before whom we are guilty, how should we behave in that case? Should we nevertheless push ourselves forward with our request for forgiveness?

Metropolitan Anthony: You know, I cannot give a sensible answer. I can only say that you can ask for forgiveness, or forgive, only when you see that the other person is capable of receiving your words. Otherwise it will be taken as offence or humiliation: ‘I forgive you’ or ‘Forgive me’, as grovelling in the eyes of people who are not ready. Therefore asking and granting forgiveness has to be done with discernment. It is not enough to say ‘I forgive you’ and ‘Forgive me’ in order for it to bear fruit, as the wound is sometimes too deep for it to be healed simply by your words. Sometimes the person has not grown sufficiently to receive those words, so that sometimes you have to endure, wait for the person to grow in order to ask him for forgiveness. Of course we have to take preliminary measures. You cannot just sit and wait for him to change by a miracle. You can undermine, if you can put it like that, his anger or grief or hurt. Or you can prepare the way for the person to be able to forgive, placing him in a preparatory stage for this. It would be too easy to walk up to the person and to say, ‘Forgive me, I have hurt you,’ or, ‘I forgive you.’

Very often it seems to us that it is enough to think that I am guilty, I shall ask for forgiveness, and that person must forgive me since I am asking to be forgiven – or vice versa. But here a careful preparation is needed. Sometimes the person is so wounded, not in what you are asking but in his whole life. Your hurt, what you have done to this person, is simply the conclusion of a whole tendency in life. And therefore for this person to be able to forgive you, it is necessary for a whole area of life to be healed. I remember one person who could not forgive anyone or anything in essence, because she was so wounded that she could not touch her wound. This elderly lady had been sent at the age of 14 to a concentration camp. When, at the age of 18 or 20, she was released, she was a tramp and all the hurts that thereafter accumulated were piling up on top of all this. To heal that period was not so easy.

So that, sometimes, I think that a person can say honestly: ‘I cannot forgive you. I would like to, but I cannot because I do not have the strength of forgiveness within me, this impulse of strength which is necessary, or I cannot receive the forgiveness you are offering me because it requires openness. I cannot allow myself this openness; if I open up, blood will flow to death.’ Here it is necessary to give help to the person, sometimes for years, not necessarily by someone who is involved in the matter but by all the people around who need to assume responsibility so that he could, step by step, forgive at least something. Sometimes there remains a parcel of unforgiveness here or there, which the person cannot at the moment forgive, that can only be resolved perhaps after his death. That is, I am certain that it will be resolved, though maybe not before death.

Question: It can happen in a marriage that one partner keeps tormenting the other, then asks for forgiveness and then starts again – and again asks for forgiveness etc., but never fully repents. And it keeps going round like a vicious circle. From the Christian point of view, ‘Love your neighbour like yourself’; when someone is ill with something, you cannot leave him, but on the other hand this results in the fact that you are helping him to live unjustly. Is there a way out of this circle? And how to pray for him? If you ask God on his behalf that he should take that away from him – but God does not force us to do something, and the person himself is not asking for it.

Metropolitan Anthony: Well, this question again is considerably psychological. It seems to me that when someone is ill, with some kind of a habit or something like that, and understands that it is not right and promises not to do it again, then one must search for where it started. The question is why this person behaves like that, why he returns to this or that. And often it happens that it is the only way for him, or the simplest way out; that, for example, if he did not do that he would have to do something else to change the mood. And it seems to me that then the question must be, not that the person is weaned from what now discredits him and ruins other people’s lives, but a fundamental question that is perhaps not so easy to resolve in family life or in our modest circle. What happened to him so that he started behaving like that, perhaps in his childhood or in his younger years, or in what circumstances, so that he started looking for a way out in this offensive or just unfortunate fashion?

Question: Vladyko Anthony, you have reminded us that you don’t like lists of sins that priests sometimes recommend to bring to confession. In Russia many years ago, I heard about a piece of advice that a priest was giving his spiritual children, to keep a journal and write in it every evening all the wrong things done during the day. Even if this piece of advice was not addressed to me, it seemed to me very interesting, because I think that such a system can lead to spiritual discipline, when the person learns step by step to look at him- or herself and to analyse what was done wrong. And the priest also said that it is not necessary to bring all these notes to confession, but to write a summary and bring that. It seems to me that these sorts of notes might be useful to some people. Perhaps someone needs this kind of discipline of looking into himself, an analysis of each day, and then it is easier to separate the necessary from the unnecessary and bring that to confession.

Metropolitan Anthony: I fully agree with this. If a person reflects every evening on his day and writes down all his sins, falls, failures, but also reflects on the good, and then brings it to confession when possible, then in a general sense I would say, ‘Yes’. What I spoke of earlier was something different. I have had a whole string of cases when the person coming to confession brings printed lists with an endless number of sins in alphabetical order, which he did not even understand but knew that they existed. In the Great Trebnik or Book of Needs, there is a whole list of sins, and when you bring such a list, it may not correspond in any way to your own situation. There are sins that you have not committed, but they are on this list and it is a lie to God to say that I have done such-and-such when I have never done it. But to say that I am a sinner and therefore surely I have committed all the sins if only in imagination, that is also an untruth, not to speak of those sins, whose names you do not even understand on the Church Slavonic list. Therefore we are talking about different things. That which you have just spoken of, I am prepared to accept fully. But if a person brings an endless list of sins which he has collected from all over, from all the ascetic works, and reads them out as if they were his own, that is an untruth, a lie before God. Not to speak of the difficulty that, if you are confessing twenty-five or thirty or seventy sins, you cannot take hold of any one in particular. But if you bring to confession some two or three things which really distress or wound you, then I can say that these things I will pick up. I shall start as Father Afanasiy advised me, from the smallest, because my spiritual muscles will pick up strength with the smallest and then proceed to the bigger ones. And when that is done, then experience will be accumulated.

Confessing one’s soul is very like excavating. When the archaeologist decides to excavate some parcel of land, he starts by brushing away the sand. And there he suddenly finds some object. That is his first find. Then he goes further, and the further he goes, the more different objects he finds. But if he says that first he wants to get to the foundations, let’s start digging, then he will destroy the whole building and will not get at anything. And thus, I think, one has to build one’s confession. That which I have in front of my eyes, that is the object of my present worry. When I start to cope with that, then it will become apparent that, from underneath the sand, other objects will appear, and then I shall start coping with them. That, in my opinion, is what is important. So artificial confessional lists, where we confess the sins of all the ascetics who have ever lived and written down their sins, cannot give us anything. Of course, here and there you will find something, but it is not your confession.

Question: We have been called to a Christian love towards everyone. But in our lives we feel how often we love subjectively, according to our mood, someone more and someone less. In the Gospel, we read that Christ had a favourite disciple. Towards what should we aim; that is, what should this model of Christian love look like, which would contain our personal relationship as well as that which we could call Christian love? How would we recognize it?

Metropolitan Anthony: If we start from the standpoint that I will love everyone I hate, then I will forget how to love those who are dear to me. I think we have to learn to love in a light-filled, life-giving way those people whom we love now, and to learn to love them in the most perfect way possible. I am not talking about heroically or sacrificially, but that our love should as little as possible be mixed with self-love and the wish to possess that person, etc. To the extent that we love more those people who are dear to us, we begin to find out what it means to love someone, we begin to discover in other people attributes that we know in our beloved, and that lets us approach them and love them, etc. But to talk about learning to love everybody with an equal love, that is just a day-dream. We have to learn really to love those whom we already love, to love them more perfectly, and this love will open the ability to love other people also.

Question: I have a slightly different experience with the struggle of not forgiving. I think that it does not only concern me and the other person, but Christ too. And I struggle desperately to forgive, even though it hurts, in order not to lose grace. Otherwise it is like suicide, as if a shadow fell across the soul and there is no joy in anything. And for me there is no choice but to struggle in order not to lose God, oneself and all the people, so that anger and irritation would not erupt, and so on. I don’t know how it is possible to live without forgiving or without this struggle. Is that so or not?

Metropolitan Anthony: In the full sense, to live without forgiving is impossible, because the soul would wither away as flowers wither without water. But we cannot always forgive at once and fully. Sometimes the struggle to grow to love someone who does not want to be loved is beyond our strength, like a continuous exercise. There comes a moment when you have to say: ‘I cannot struggle with this now, I have no strength left. I have to plunge into God, or into joy, so that the soul will revive and only then shall I be able to return to this.’

Question: But there is no joy and you don’t even want to pray. Perhaps we should turn to God with a cry from the soul, because this unforgiveness stands between us?

Metropolitan Anthony: I think you can do two things. Either cry out like a child or say: ‘Lord, forgive me. I am not capable even of this. I shall simply be silent, but understand thou my silence with thine understanding.’

Question: How do you prepare a child to receive Communion so that he has more awareness about what he is doing?

Metropolitan Anthony: I don’t know how you would prepare children, because as a child I never went to church and do not have any experience of it. But I think that, judging by the children who come to Communion and whom I have seen in the last fifty years, say to him: ‘Now we are going to Communion; Christ is giving himself to you through Communion.’ When you bring a small child into church, I think it is very important that the mother take Communion first, and only after that the child. Often the child is frightened, and if he sees that the mother has taken Communion, and she does this with joy, so will the child. So this is very important, It is difficult to explain much, but he can see this directly: that his mother wants to receive what the priest gives, and she does this with a happy expression, which is not the same as some bitter cough medicine. ‘I, too, want to go.’

On the other hand, it seems to me that a child, and even a grown-up, can perceive spontaneously things that cannot be explained. Can we really explain to an adult what happens when he receives the Holy Gifts? He may know that this is the precious Body and Blood of Christ, but that this should reach the awareness, the heart – that is another matter. And so, if the child sees that receiving the Holy Gifts changes you, makes you happy, that you are lit with a divine light, so will he take Communion. Consequently, he will rely on his own experience: ‘Yes, when I received Communion it was as if some kind of a happiness flooded me,’ I was told by a woman who was not a believer and whom I had asked to go to Communion on my responsibility (she went to Communion and then wrote me a note): ‘I do not know yet whether I received the Body and Blood of Christ, but I do know absolutely that what I received from the cup was neither bread nor wine but something else.’ This very ‘something else’, the child can perceive. But you will not be able to explain that this is the Body and Blood of Christ. Sometimes parents can be too precise in their explanations. I know of a whole family where the children stopped taking Communion as soon as they could escape from their parents, because the father told them that this is the Body and Blood of Christ, but he explained it in such a way that they thought they would eat the flesh of Christ and drink his blood.

Later, it can be explained to the child that, according to the Church’s teaching and the Fathers, when he approaches, the divine corporality of Christ unites with his corporality and that, to borrow a phrase from Father Sergei Bulgakov, ‘through Baptism and Communion, man becomes the embodied presence of Christ on earth’. To explain this all at once is not possible: first, because you will not be able to explain it – as I don’t know how to – and, second, it can be interpreted in such a false way as if I were already Christ or something like that, which becomes a distortion.

Question: What is a mortal sin, the concept of mortal sin and what kind of death is it?

Metropolitan Anthony: Sin is separation from God, in whatever form. At the moment when Adam and Eve turned away from God and made an attempt to live independently, they already lost eternal life in the sense that eternal life consists of God’s life being poured into us. And so death and sin are linked to man’s turning away from God and saying, ‘I shall seek in my own way.’ But he cannot achieve eternal life by his own means; he can only live a temporal life. It is interesting that, in the Old Testament, there is a list of Adam’s offspring, and then it says, ‘And gradually death was established.’ We can see from that list that, in the course of time, people started to die younger and younger (relatively, because 950 years is not that young!); gradually lifetimes were becoming shorter with the exception of two. One of these died young because he had ripened for eternal life, and the other, Methuselah, died very old because he was needed on earth for God. Therefore sin and death are tied up with each other in this way. We cannot overcome death in this sense, even when we unite with God as much as possible. But the question is not about uniting with God in such a way as to live as long as possible, because it is not about living longer but about entering into God. There is a place in the apostle Paul which astounded me, where he says: ‘Life for me is Christ and death is how to acquire it. Because as long as I live in the flesh, I am separated from Christ.’ So, on the one hand, death is a tragedy which follows from the Fall (that is, sin, separation from God), but, on the other hand, in the fallen world, death is the only door through which we can enter into full communion with God. So we can cease fearing death, shunning it, because it is an open door into eternity after Christ’s incarnation, life, death and resurrection.

Question: Vladyko, I have a question on children. Nowadays in Moscow, there are certain priests who do not recommend baptizing infants so that later they can consciously choose Christianity. I would like to hear your views on this. I feel instinctively that this is not right.

Metropolitan Anthony: I shall start by saying that at no age, nor at any given moment, do human beings know what will happen to them when they are baptized, because this is something that you only know afterwards, from experience when it has already happened. It resembles inoculation. For example, when a dying shoot is grafted to a living stem or branches of a strong tree, as St Paul describes it; the gardener cuts off a shoot which is only barely alive. So the shoot is already doomed to death, although before cutting it was alive. And then a living branch is cut and the dying is laid wound to wound with the life-giving. And so the life flows from the life-giving one to the dying one, joining it to eternal life. This same thing happens at Baptism. But it is difficult to explain to a person. He can be prepared for this, not in the realm of mysteries but in that of communion with God, of union with him. You can prepare him to understand that he is now half-alive. Join up with life and you will be revived. It does not mean that you will revive in an instant. Life will start to flow into you like the living force of the tree flows gradually into the shoot; it cannot be explained. You can look at people to whom it has happened and ask the question, ‘Are they the same as others, or are they different?’

Neither the adult nor the child can understand in advance what is going to happen to him. The encounter with God does not happen through the mind or even through the will. It happens in the depths of the human being. Therefore the mystery can reach those depths of attachment to God, and from there comes all that God can give, that can flourish in the mind, in the heart, in the will, in the body. For that reason, we can baptize little children to whom we cannot explain anything. For, this gift of God will reach those depths where no explanations will ever reach. You know, it is a bit like trying to explain what love or friendship mean. If he does not know what it is, you can explain till you are blue in the face and he will still not understand. In English literature there is a book called Alice in Wonderland, where, in the beginning, the younger sister is perplexed: ‘Why does my older sister read a book which has no pictures or conversation and has printed text page after page?’ This is how a person reacts before he has his own experience, even the slightest.

You do not need to expect a wide experience, but it should reach the heart. Therefore I am convinced that we can baptize infants, because their relating goes into those depths and they are linked to God. How it will develop later is dependent on the child’s environment, starting with his parents and others, who will help the powers of his soul, heart and so on to integrate this experience which already exists in him. That is what education is about. I remember how Father Georges Florovsky was once talking to me about how this gift exists as an entirety, but the awareness of it comes gradually. Because first we live something through feelings, in the heart; then we comprehend in the mind with the help of others; we start to live through the will according to what we have already understood and experienced with what we have. It seems to me to be an important point.

The same goes for receiving the Holy Mysteries. We can bring to Communion infants to whom we cannot explain anything. But can we explain to an adult? The adult may, up to a point, understand what we are talking about, but he cannot experience it before he bodily unites with the Holy Mysteries. And then he may not know from the beginning to what he has united. I have already given you the example of that young woman who said: ‘I know that it was not bread and wine but something else. But I cannot yet say that it is the Body and Blood of Christ, because that would be untruthful on my part. I only know that it is not bread and wine.’

The child also develops gradually; intellectually, he does not express himself like that, but he grows gradually in understanding and knowledge. If we talk about Communion, I would say that we can bring infants to Communion every Sunday or every time there is a Liturgy, because children especially do not have an intellectual barrier or a rejection by the mind; they are open to receive this grace. On the other hand, we can say, and St Justin the Philosopher wrote about this, that if a person is baptized, that is, if he unites with the divine humanity in his flesh, if he receives the Holy Spirit in Holy Unction and just once receives the Holy Mysteries, then that may be enough for his whole life. We unite repeatedly, either because we are full of God’s grace and there is no barrier between Christ and us, or because we have lost something and we are renewing that contact. But this contact becomes lost only on the surface, since God’s gifts are inalienable. When he unites us to himself, we remain united for ever. So there are people who rightly want to unite more often and fully. They want to commune in order to keep contact with a much loved person in one form or another. I remember that St Parfeniy of Kiev said how wonderful it is when you fall deeply in love with a person and become one with him, never to see him, because every time that you see him (this is me developing his theme) you encounter external elements: his face, voice, mind and so forth, but when he has entered your depths, you communicate with his essence. So it is not particularly simple, but you cannot base relations with God simply on encountering him.

The English writer C. S. Lewis writes about a person who has become alive in God and compares him with an atheist, a person who has no God. He says the atheist may look wonderful, but he is like a stone sculpture, a wonderful statue, but dead. The believing person may be not at all that wonderful, but he is alive. The difference between the believer and the non-believer lies in the fact that the believer may be in many ways bad, but he is alive. And the sculpture is not bad in any way, because it cannot be either bad or good; it is dead stone or dead timber. Have I answered your question?

Question: During Holy Communion we feel a sense of joy, of fervour. But we do not always feel like this, and it seems that perhaps we have done it wrong, we feel dispirited. How should we react to our feelings, and what should we expect after Communion?

Metropolitan Anthony: I think one should not expect anything. If you start expecting something specific and you get something different, you will not notice it or you will reject it. If you will expect joy or a deepening, or something or other, and the Lord comes to you in a different way, you will not notice him and will keep on looking for something. Therefore we must be open and ready to receive whatever comes. And besides, we must be prepared for nothing palpable to be given.

I had a friend, about ten years older than me – he is still alive – who once said to me: ‘Most often when I receive Communion, I accept that which is given and it goes into some kind of recesses and only after a day or two a conscious wave of that encounter arises.’ That is one example. But you must not expect that, having now received Communion, you will start experiencing something. The important thing is that this encounter with Christ should pierce you and go into the depths, even if you do not experience anything emotionally, because it is inside you; the gifts of God are inalienable and that which God gives will remain in you for ever.

Question: You said that an unbelieving person is like a statue, but sometimes it happens that this unbeliever lives in such a way that his life is more like the life of a believer – and even better than some people who go to church and receive Communion. Is it right that I call them innerly believing, even though they do not know it themselves?

Metropolitan Anthony: I think that it is the correct approach. To be consciously a believer is not the first step. This consciousness can come later. Sometimes it happens that you are, in your faith, already one with God without knowing it.

I remember an incident. On the steps of the Hotel Ukraina a young officer approached me and said, ‘Dressed like that, you must be a believer.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And I am an atheist.’ ‘So much worse for you.’ ‘But tell me, what can I have in common with God to enable me to meet him?’ ‘Do you believe in anything?’ ‘Yes; I believe in man.’ ‘Precisely! In that belief you have a faith in common with God, because God so believed in man that he created man, became man, died on behalf of man and called us to divine life. So that you do have something absolutely fundamental in common with God.’ I said this perfectly seriously; it was not an attempt to bypass the question. And I think that very many people cannot believe in God such as we represent him to be. Often God, such as he is described by some people to other people, becomes such an extraordinary oddity that (I wanted to say, God forbid!) it is impossible to believe in him. I would not want my God to be as some people describe him to be. And when a person refuses to believe in this oddity that people around him call ‘god’, then he is right, and surely God is pleased that there is one person who does not denigrate him.

Question: Vladyko, how often should one receive the Holy Gifts? It seems different for each one. How can I come to an understanding of how often I should come to the holy cup?

Metropolitan Anthony: Oh, this question is very dangerous for me. In the way that devout people would say to you, ‘Receive Communion as often as possible, open yourself to God as much as you can, even if it is a small crack, and come forward’, I am not capable of it. For me, the encounter is a very difficult task. Before I was a priest, I came for the encounter five or six times a year. Since becoming a priest, I have to receive Communion each time I serve the Liturgy. But then I say: ‘Lord, forgive me. May I not give thee a kiss like Judas. That is all I can say. I unite myself according to thy promise that thou wilt not burn me, for I do not unite in an insulting way, by saying that I have a right to this, I have no right whatever. But I have to receive Communion from duty.’

As to what concerns those people who are not bound by duty, I think that each one has to find his or her own rhythm. I remember that once one of my superiors said that you should unite to and live with what you are given. And only go again when you feel that you have used up all that you were given. No, it wasn’t said quite like that. Not what you were given, but the response that you were able to give to the boundless and infinite gift.

Therefore each can behave differently. Justinian the Philosopher felt that uniting once was something you were given once and for all, and you should just return to your depths and you would find everything there. Others say: unite again, for if it is all in your depths, your depths are deep; they are as deep as your encounter with God. And therefore re-unite, because you will unite with God according to your measure. There is a very problematic saying of Symeon the New Theologian, where he says, ‘If we receive Communion unworthily, do we really blaspheme and become worthy of eternal damnation?’ And Symeon says that, in order that we should not fall into temptation if we approach the Holy Mysteries unworthily, Christ in his compassion leaves the bread and wine and allows us to receive Communion of bread and wine only and not of his presence, until such time that we repent and cease our confusion. I cannot give any sort of explanation of this, but it is also mentioned.

How to work out in ourselves such a purity that will make us capable of receiving Communion, and through that Communion to unite with God? I think the question has to be turned around. Only our ties with God can create such a purity. We cannot, in our corruption, cleanse ourselves and then, being a clean vessel, receive God. The apostle Paul says that we carry holiness in earthen vessels. The vessel is not fit for what is in it. And we cannot first prepare a worthy vessel and then receive in it the gift of the Holy Spirit. But we can come to God and openly say to him: ‘Lord, come! Lord, flow into me! Unite me with yourself! I know that I am not worthy, but be thou like fire which burns away the thorns, not as fire that will burn me away completely in the horror of hell.’ And this is something that happens gradually. If you waited to unite with the Holy Gifts till you became worthy, no one would be able to do it. For a start, one would have to say to the person who says, ‘Today I shall go to Communion because I am worthy’, ‘Oh, no! Not today, because you are puffed with pride or else have lost your senses. More likely than not, lost your senses.’ What else could one say? If a person comes forward and says, ‘I am totally unworthy, but you became man in order to save me’, that is possible.

Question: Vladyko, it is said sometimes that it is not necessary to go to confession every time before Communion, that it is good but not absolutely necessary. This upsets me and confuses me. What could you say? Does one have to go to confession before every Communion without fail, or are there circumstances when one cannot do so?

Metropolitan Anthony: This is a very just question, and my answer will be such that I might be stoned for it. I am convinced that confession and Communion are totally different things, and therefore the mystery of confession must not be used as a stepping-stone in order to partake of the Holy Gifts. They are two different things. I am convinced that you must come to confession when there is something weighing upon you that separates you from God. I do not talk about trifles, but something real. And in such a case it is not devout to partake of the Holy Gifts. But, on the other hand, there are moments when you must partake of the Holy Gifts. I’ll give you an example. Sometimes it happens that a person comes to confession, makes his confession and the priest is perfectly clear about what he has to say in answer. Incidentally, naturally I am not talking intellectually, not theologically, but God has laid upon the priest’s heart an answer for this person, for him personally, an exact answer. Then you can give that answer.

Sometimes, though, it happens that the priest does not have an answer for the penitent, that there is a common answer for those sins that were spoken of. Then it is possible to say to the person: ‘I have nothing from God personally for you, but in the Scriptures, in the Gospels, such-and-such is said, which relates directly to your words. But you must yourself reflect on these words and see how they respond to your innermost situation, and not only to what you have been able to express.’

Sometimes it happens that the priest knows that there is nothing he can say, but that God can do something with this person. I know this from personal experience. I have said to one or two persons: ‘I cannot give you any instructions. But I shall bless you to go to Communion, because God is going to give you an answer in those depths where I cannot even reach.’ This has happened. I don’t mean it happens regularly, but it does happen.

And so confession has to be partaken of when you have something to confess. Not superficial things, but when you ask yourself the question, ‘Does something or other separate me from God, does it appear as a barrier between me and him, does it make me unable to approach him as a friend?’ – then you must come to confession. But if it is possible to say, ‘Yes, I was impatient or did this or that which did not reach my soul, that I was not scratched, but it only flashed past me,’ then you can stand before God in church or at home and say it all to God and not search for a special absolving prayer. That is my conviction. It is also what Father Georges Florovsky thought in his time, and some other people. You have to go to confession when you have something to confess. If we talk about general sinfulness, it is obvious that you can go to confession every day, and several times a day, about general sinfulness, but it does not separate us from God, it is our field of battle. If it was not for that, we would already be in God and in the heavenly Kingdom. Therefore it is my conviction that you must come to confession when you have something separating you from God, from your own self – that is, something is making you unworthy of your own self or is separating you from others – but do not come to confess trivialities.

Question: It seems to me that the Liturgy is like a feast, we are all invited and we come to Communion every Sunday because we are simply invited, that the meaning of the Liturgy is this feast.

Metropolitan Anthony: There is a place in the Gospels where people were invited to a feast. When they gathered from all the roads and alleyways, the angels received them, took their rags from them, took them to the bath-house, washed them and dressed them in festal clothes, and brought them to the dining room. Only one of those present refused, when the angels approached him, to wash himself: ‘I did not come here in order to wash. I came to gorge myself’, and he went straight to the dining room. When the host came and looked around, he saw that all were washed, dressed and clean except that one, who smelled of manure and was all dirty. He was put outside.

Therefore you cannot simply say that it is a feast to which all are invited. Yes, we are invited, but we shall have to wash and get dressed up. That is not just something formal. When you say, ‘I shall make a confession and repent of what I have done’, that does not mean that you would not do the same thing again.

I remember one incident. I was called to hear the confession of a woman who was dying, one of our old ladies. She confessed beautifully her whole life and soul. I asked her if there was anything that she had not confessed. She looked at me with some surprise and said: ‘Yes, how did you know? There is still something. I loathe my son-in-law and shall never forgive him.’ ‘In that case, I cannot give you the prayer of absolution and I cannot give you Communion, because you cannot enter into the heavenly Kingdom, God’s Kingdom, with anger in your soul. Goodbye. I shall come back in an hour. If you have had time to reconsider, I shall read the prayer and I shall give you the Holy Gifts. Otherwise, I am very sorry, you will have to die and speak to God in person and explain.’ I came back in an hour, and she was radiant: ‘After you put the question like that, I phoned my son-in-law. He came, we made peace and kissed. I can now receive Communion.’ I gave her the prayer of absolution as well as Communion.

You can come to the feast in rags, but you cannot stay at the feast in rags. The question is not about you having become so pious, so wonderful, but that you have become so open to God that there is no shadow left between you and him, that you would be able to tell everything to him: ‘Lord, I can tell you everything because you will not turn away from me and will not despise me. You will not hate me. You can find out everything about me because I believe in your love.’ And when you have done that, it will become apparent that mutual love has worked some kind of a miracle.

Question: What can we do to preserve these grace-giving feelings?

Metropolitan Anthony: I think the first thing is that we have to be vigilant; that is, attentive to what is happening in us. If we allow one crack, temptations will flow through it. One of the saints has a story about how man gives in to temptations. The devil is compared to a seller of coney skins. He comes and knocks at your door. You can simply not answer. You can approach the door and ask, ‘Who is there and what do you want?’ ‘I am a coney-skin seller.’ ‘I do not need your skins! Go away!’ The temptation ends.

But if you suddenly, at that moment, feel curiosity, the seller will say to you: ‘You chase me away, but you have not even looked at the skins. You ought to look at them and see how wonderful they are.’ ‘All right then. I will not buy, but to have a look at them; that is all right.’ And so you have opened the door – the danger has increased. ‘Look!’ ‘Yes, beautiful skins. Thank you.’ ‘But look, you should stroke them. How wonderful they are! Here, touch them. They are good value.’ ‘What do you sell them for?’ ‘For so much.’ ‘Oh, no, I will not pay that much.’ ‘All right then, out of friendship I’ll sell them cheaper. Are they not worth it?’ ‘Yes, at such a price, perhaps, it is worthwhile buying a skin.’ ‘What do you intend to make out of it?’ ‘Well, I’ll have a hat made.’ ‘To make out of such skins only a hat, when you have such a worn coat! I shall give you a further reduction, and then you will be able to buy enough skins to dress yourself from top to toe.’ ‘Oh, yes! Indeed it is not expensive.’ And at that moment you are already lost, you have bought yourself skins for a coat and a hat and he has gone contented. So if you give an opportunity for a crack to appear, it is the same as opening the door and looking at the skins. It will end with you bargaining about those skins. Therefore this is the first thing you have to do: be sober and vigilant. These two things will not necessarily save us, because the devil is more experienced than we are. He has overcome with cunning people who are more experienced than we are, and he knows how to make his approach. He can try a different tactic and say, ‘If you will do this, think about how much good you will do the other person’, etc. And then gradually the door opens up, and opens and opens, and so vigilance is the first measure.

The second is sobriety, which will allow you to say any moment, ‘No’. And resoluteness. And finally, the ability to turn round towards one’s conscience and to God and to say: ‘Shame on me! I was ready to dip into mud because it seemed to me not particularly important.’

These, I think, are the basic steps that have to be taken into account.

Question: About confession and Communion: sometimes it is impossible to express with words clearly what is happening in the soul and one would like simply to stand silent in the presence of the priest in front of God. Can one ask for this?

Metropolitan Anthony: I think it depends to a significant degree on who is hearing your confession. If you come to an unknown priest and ask for this, he will not understand. If you come to a priest who knows you, and you tell him that you want to stand before God and open to him your soul, but you don’t want to put into words that which cannot be expressed with words, then if the priest understands what is happening, he will surely consent. Sometimes it happens that a person in a certain situation cannot confess to another human being, a priest. I shall give you an example.

I was a prison chaplain, and there was a time when there was fighting in Cyprus and the terrorists were being brought to prison in London. But they were no longer able to see Greek priests, as some of the priests had been acting as couriers or had passed instructions. So I was asked to become involved with the Greek terrorists. I remember there was one who was a terrible man. He was a terrorist in all directions: that is, he served the English secret service as well as the terrorist organization in Cyprus, and earned a great deal of money and betrayed both sides quite without qualms. Around Easter, he desired to have confession and Communion. He said to me: ‘You know, I do not trust you, because I do not know whether you are obliged to denounce me and divulge the contents of my confession. Whatever you say, I cannot believe you. What are we going to do?’ We talked together further, and I came to the conviction that he genuinely wanted to repent but could not take the risk that his confession might reach the court. I said to him: ‘Listen. Stand before God, and I shall stand beside you. You will confess to him everything, to the very last, and throughout your confession, I shall pray that the Lord will give you truthfulness and courage to tell him everything. And when you have said everything, you will let me know that you have finished your confession, and then I shall grant you the prayer of absolution.’

At that time there was an additional reason: the police. I gave him the prayer of absolution, because I was convinced from the way he had spoken to me beforehand, and how he stood silent before God and how his tears flowed before God.

So when you ask whether one can stand in silence during confession, I think yes, but the priest needs to know you sufficiently and not think that this is simply a loophole to get out of confessing. But I think it is possible to stand before God beside a priest who joins you with compassion and agrees to carry the whole burden of your confession, the whole pain, shame, awfulness. It is not responsibility in the sense that he could answer for a killing or theft, but he can be responsible for what is happening in you. It needs the understanding of the priest that this is not a loophole or a way to avoid speaking the truth. You may not say the whole truth in a human tongue, but you can fling wide open your soul and say: ‘Lord, look inside and see everything. I do not want anything to be hidden from thee.’ But this is my private opinion.

I would like to add one thing about the connection between confession and Communion. It seems to me that, sometimes, a person needs to confess and to conclude everything with this: that if he confesses to the very depths, then he has no more ability to receive anything else and that he can confess, weep through everything and thus let himself go deep inside and live in a new purity, as it were, and have Communion maybe the same day, or by agreement with the priest, after a week or some other time. And it seems to me that sometimes a person has to go to confession and wait for the Communion, because these are two different events, two meetings of different kinds. And sometimes a person must, with the agreement of the priest, go to Communion even when he has not developed fully to the point of confession, when he has not been able to fully confess, when something has remained unresolved (I am not saying that he hid something), and then the priest, if he is experienced, can say, ‘Come to Communion, and the Lord will do with you what I cannot do, and what your own confession cannot do.’ So that now, under my bad influence, we have introduced such a rule: that people come to confession and Communion, or do not come to Communion, by agreement with the priest or, having confessed, receive the priest’s blessing to come several times in a row to receive the Holy Gifts while they have the openness and there lies nothing dark on the soul, and then again, when they need to, to come to confession. That is why I systematically divide confession from Communion in this sense, because it seems to me that they are two different things. If I can give a vulgar example: there is a difference between going to the bath-house and going to dinner. These two things can coincide, but sometimes one needs to have a wash and sometimes the hunger is such that washing is irrelevant. Sometimes a person is so tired that he cannot, after working in the fields and having returned exhausted, go right away and have a wash without having a bite to eat first. And sometimes he has worked, gathered strength, and can go and wash and then go to table.

This is something that has to be decided between the priest and the penitent, and confession/Communion cannot just automatically be established – if you want Communion, then you must without fail go to confession – as the person sometimes is not yet ready for the one or the other. But again it is a question of the relationship between the spiritual father, or the priest, and the person who goes to confession, his parishioner.

Question: I saw in Poland and in Russia how a bishop or priest gave the prayer of absolution to a crowd of faithful at the so-called general confession. Vladyko, what is your opinion, and how do you evaluate such general confessions?

Metropolitan Anthony: Twenty years ago I introduced in our parish the general confession. I conduct it as follows. Before the confession, we have a one-day retreat. First I give a talk, which prepares people for confession, then we have a silence of half-an-hour to an hour, when everybody can reflect on the basis of what he heard or what has been aroused in his soul. Then there is a second talk and a second silence, and then I do a confession aloud. Mostly I read the Canon of Repentance of the Saviour, and at every paragraph of that Canon, depending on how it affects me, I say my own confession. I openly confess my own soul against the background of this general confession. And so we go over from one song of the Canon to the other and I confess aloud. I do not go into such details that might be seductive, as, for example, ‘Forgive me, I was not honest at such and such an event.’ But it is my confession, and therefore I confess with pain in my soul and openly. And I invite people to hear this confession and to react to it with their own confession; not necessarily to repent for what I repent, but on the background of what I have read and said; on the basis of what I have said in everybody’s hearing of my own sinfulness, everyone can say their own. When the general confession has finished (it usually takes 40 minutes), after a short silence all get on their knees and I read the prayer of absolution. If anyone has anything that does not fit into this framework, and he wants to confess separately, this can be done afterwards and he can receive a separate absolving prayer, as if the general prayer of absolution had not reached him, because he could not receive it without confessing his soul. I think this an important moment, because very many people do not know how to confess, and it is one’s own soul that needs confessing and not the universal sinful soul. Then it would be very easy, as some have tried to do with me, bringing a list of sins and reading them one by one and saying, ‘Yes, Father, in each case I am guilty of everything.’

Sometimes an additional confession has to be made because, as I remember, twice in my life I have had to hear the confession of killers. Of course, in my life I have not killed and so in my confession I did not repent of killing. But these two people who had killed could not receive the absolving prayer in a wholesale fashion. So they came separately to confess the killing; not all the rest, but specifically the killing.

Sometimes it happens that a person must make confession in a more concrete way. I am not thinking of the general confession but of the private one. I remember how a very distinguished, well-respected society lady came to me and said, ‘I am guilty, Father.’ I said: ‘I know that already. But of what?’ ‘I am guilty.’ ‘Yes, but tell me of what?’ ‘Of everything.’ ‘Really of everything? Why do you say that?’ ‘I have broken all the commandments, Father.’ ‘All the Ten Commandments in the Bible?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Listen, we have always respected you, but it turns out you are a thief!’ ‘Father, how dare you insult me!’ ‘Excuse me, but there is a commandment: do not steal. If you are guilty of everything, it means you are a thief.’ ‘No, naturally I am not a thief.’ ‘And in spite of how we see you, you are an adulteress?’ ‘Father, how dare you?’ ‘In the Ten Commandments it says: Do not commit adultery.’ ‘No, Father, you must not talk like that.’ ‘Oh, yes, we must talk precisely like that. You have come here to confess your sins, and not to throw wholesale in my face sins which you have not committed. So go home and think about what you have done, and then come back to confess. But to give you a prayer of absolution for blaspheming God, committing adultery, stealing etc., when you have not done it, no, I am not prepared to do that.’

So this is an example of what it is sometimes very easy to say, ‘I am guilty of everything’, but it is too irresponsible, too frightening. It shows that you do not even have an idea of what it means to be a sinner and what is separating you from God, from other people, how it makes you a stranger to the Kingdom of God. Therefore it is better to come to confession with a small number of real sins that you have really committed, that you have consciously realized to be sins, leaving the rest for another time but repenting of these. And next time you will confess others. But you cannot repent from lists.

Question: What is the most important thing in preparation for the mystery of the Eucharist? In Russia, confession and Communion are never separated.

Metropolitan Anthony: I shall answer from my point of view. These are not my fantasies, but what I have been taught by people of deep spirituality and great asceticism. The preparation for Communion must start by opening to God through and through, and by repenting inwardly of everything that separates us from God, whether it is a formal or informal sin: one needs to pray to God in such a way that even before Communion (the evening before), an encounter takes place in which you can explain yourself to God, talk, even say to him, ‘Lord, I love you, even though I am not worthy of you.’ Just as in human relations, we can say to each other, ‘Yes, I love this person deeply, but I do not love him with a perfect love and sometimes I act in a way that one should not, but it does not mean that I do not love him.’

Then there are formal moments. There are prescribed prayers for confession which may be read or, in my sinful opinion, not read.

I have suggested to people who want to take part in the Church’s experience in this, that if you want to take Communion the following Sunday, you should divide those prayers so that you read a few each day. But read in such a way that each prayer can be brought to God as a truthful expression of the situation. But when people read the whole rule, they cannot fit it into their soul. They can ram it in; that is a simple matter, but they cannot fit in all at once everything that is said in these prayers. Therefore I would say, divide them over a week or two if necessary, never mind, but read them and explain to God what you can say from yourself as well as the saints, or what you cannot say from yourself, in all honesty. And this pertains to the whole rule.

Now there is the rule of the fast, for example. The fast is founded on the idea that you should be freed to have all your life-forces. If the fast causes you to lose all your strength and there is nothing left but only tiredness and a wish that it would all cease, then the fast has no purpose. On the other hand, as the apostle Paul said, food does not bring us closer to God but neither does it distance him, if it is not connected with greed or sensuality. I shall give you an example. I had a student in a Russian college during the German occupation, the son of very poor parents. I was their doctor and treated them for free. And so one day the son said to me: ‘We have been saving money during Lent in order to invite you to dinner. Can you come on Friday?’ This Friday was the Good Friday of Holy Week. I agreed. I came. On the table there was a chicken, not a live one, but cooked. I looked at this chicken with horror, as if it were a dragon who sat there and wanted to tear me up. The whole of Lent I had fasted brutally, and here we have a chicken. I ate a piece of this chicken, and then I went to Father Afanasiy and said: ‘I have ruined the entire fast. During the whole of Lent, I fasted, prayed by the rule and ate nothing, and so on. And now I have spoiled the whole fast on Good Friday, having eaten chicken.’ Father Afanasiy looked at me and said: ‘You know, God looked at you and thought: he has so many sins that a little chicken will not add anything.’

And I think there is a great truth here. One can fast, not eat anything forbidden and, in spite of that, not be fasting. And one can eat and not notice. Sometimes there are circumstances when fasting would not be right. I remember one year when I fasted according to the rules. I was then a doctor and I had such a ringing in my ears from fasting that I could not hear either the lungs or hearts of my patients. By that time, Father Afanasiy had died. I went to another priest, explained, and asked for a blessing to drink some milk. He said: ‘The Church has decreed that, during fasting, milk is forbidden. Therefore I cannot give you permission. If you drink milk, then you will have to answer for it at the Last Judgement. That is all!’ I decided, so be it, I shall be responsible for it at the Last Judgement and those patients whom I will save from tuberculosis or a heart attack can stand up and say: ‘Lord, forgive him. I would have died if he had carried on fasting according to the rules.’

Question: Father John spoke today about sinning against the Holy Spirit. It made a great impression on me, because my grandmother in my childhood used to say that the biggest sin of all is the sin against the Holy Spirit. He said the heart becomes hardened. I do not understand how you feel that you are sinning against the Holy Spirit?

Metropolitan Anthony: I shall answer not very theologically. If you think about the Holy Trinity, of the Son and the Holy Spirit, the Son appears in front of us, we can see him, hear him, we can receive his words. But that is all we can do. The Holy Spirit is like fire, like warmth that permeates us. The difference lies in the fact that you can hear, read the words, and they may not reach you and you can say: ‘I cannot believe this, because it has not reached me.’ But if the warmth has reached you and you have been thawed right through, and you say, ‘There is no warmth here. I am as cold as I was before’, then nothing can put you right. You are lying against the reality of your own experience. In that lies, I think, the sin against the Holy Spirit, when you know from experience something and yet you deny it because it is inconvenient and undesired. When we hear Christ’s sermon and cannot receive it for one reason or another, this can be forgiven us because we have not yet grown into it.

Question: I have a question that was put to a young priest. A young girl came to him for confession, and said: ‘I have cursed God, because I had a kitten that was ill and I prayed the whole night that he would get better. But in the morning he died, and I cursed God.’ This young priest was absolutely stunned by this and did not know how to answer. What could you advise?

Metropolitan Anthony: I am going to reply obliquely. The measure of our anger mostly reflects the measure of our pain. From the amount of anger we are expressing, you can tell how much pain we are in, rather than being in real anger.

I want to give you an example. During the war, I was a junior surgeon at the front and we had several German prisoners of war. They had the right to be treated by a German surgeon. This surgeon was very harsh and unfeeling. I remember one wounded patient, who had an enormous boil on his foot. I suggested to the surgeon that we should give the patient anaesthetic, and it was his right to make this decision, but he said, ‘Rubbish. This man is young and he can endure.’ And without any anaesthetics, he lanced the boil. The young soldier started shouting, then he started abusing the doctor, then cursing him and cursing God. When the operation was finished, this young soldier stretched himself out on the operating table and said, ‘Sir, forgive me for addressing you in those abusive terms.’ And to this, the surgeon answered rather splendidly: ‘That is nothing; the abuse depends on the degree of pain. If it is not very painful, you would be shouting. If it were still more painful, you would be abusing me. But it was clearly extremely painful, because you were cursing God.’

And that is my answer to your question. That girl never cursed God. She was shouting in her pain in the most agonizing way possible. There was nothing worse that she could say. If she could have cried so that the whole house shook, she would have done so. This was somehow more accessible.

Question: To what degree can we prepare for confession at home? You know that there is a rule that we read the three Canons of Repentance? In Russia, this rule is adhered to fairly strictly, but in the West, not so strictly. What would you recommend as preparation for confession as a domestic rule?

Metropolitan Anthony: The first thing I shall say is that the confession must be your confession, your own. Therefore you must stand up before the face of your own conscience and ask yourself the question: ‘What am I ashamed of? What if all the people suddenly saw me such as I am, what would I be ashamed to show them?’ And then you will see that there is a whole gradation of sinfulness: there are formal little sins which do not mean anything in particular, for example a moment of irritation or something casual happening, but there are some more substantial things, say, my continuing dislike of a certain person or some particular race or members of some particular political or religious grouping. And when you have discovered such an attitude in yourself, then you can take the next step. We can be helped by the saints’ advice on confession, but they surpass by such a significant degree our own measure. Therefore, comparing oneself with St Basil the Great, St John Chrysostom, or any other saints, is not always helpful, because what they confessed as sins would not even have occurred to us. We cannot even imagine what they suffered; we do not know these sufferings as such, nor can we touch them.

It has happened a couple of times that parishioners coming from Russia have come to confession with me in London and have brought lengthy lists of sins, and have started reading them out. I remember one of them who read out several lines of them. I stopped him and said: ‘So, do you know what the expression you have just used means?’ ‘No.’ ‘Then why do you repent of it?’ ‘I am guilty of everything, so I am guilty of that as well.’

If that constitutes a confession, then, no thanks, God does not need it. What God needs is for you to judge yourself on your relations with God, with yourself, with other people, with life. But reading out lists of sins that some saints have, over the centuries, discovered in themselves is simply useless. So I always say to people, ‘Confess what you have yourself experienced.’ And besides, to tell someone that some sin or other is not worth confessing is not right. Sometimes a very insignificant action or some word without importance can express a very deep condition. I remember how a very distinguished lady came to confession, and when I asked her what she wanted to confess, she replied, ‘I cannot receive Communion without a prayer of absolution.’ ‘What happened?’ ‘This morning I kicked the cat.’ If you think of the cat, then it is shameful to confess that. But if you think that she kicked the cat because she was irritated, perhaps she was even angry, not towards the cat but in general, that this cat just happened to be underfoot and suffered, then that is another matter. So we did not talk about the cat but about herself, why she had gathered so much irritation that the cat found itself under her feet and suffered.

Have I answered enough?

Question: Yes and no, because, on the one hand, that was a general piece of advice, a general direction in which we should move, and that is important. But in order to move in that direction, we have to take that step and that is difficult. It is in the shadows, inaccessible because of idols and forms which the person holds up instead of himself. Sometimes that is the practical justification. And as a priest, I know that, if a person does not take that step towards himself, he will not take it towards God either. So how do you wrench that foot away that is held by the gravity of the earth, and take the first step towards yourself?

Metropolitan Anthony: The first thing is that, if I am preparing myself for confession, then I put this question to myself: ‘In what does my conscience reproach me, in what do I feel that I am not clean, not by the criteria of the Gospel but simply unclean, not upright; am I being cunning, etc.?’ But we do not always see ourselves clearly, so the second point is: ‘How do other people see me?’ This is very important, because often other people do not see us at all as we do. They see in us good that we are not conscious of, and bad that we do not wish to see or that we reinterpret (‘they are not right; we are right’). And put this question to yourself: ‘I am being accused of this or that. As a rule, I do not accept this accusation. But am I right in that? What if they are right? Let me think it over.’ And, third, what do the Gospels say? Moreover, I do not seek only those places in the Gospels which clearly condemn me, but those that I can relate to. What I am trying to say is that not necessarily all the places which condemn are applicable to oneself, but the ones where you suddenly notice, ‘Yes, that resembles me.’ They are the places where you look at yourself, and you see yourself as unclean, the way other people see you when they criticize you, and see what you don’t even want to see or hear. If you look like this at yourself, you find which places in the Gospels really speak to you personally, and you say to yourself, ‘No, my friend, that will not do.’ All this, it seems to me, is good preparation for a real confession.

Question: Vladyko, how do you balance a private confession, your own confession during prayer at home, and confession to a priest? There are many hidden traps here. If you come too often to confession with a priest, it will take too much time, confession can become automatic, without feeling etc. How do you balance these two types of confession?

Metropolitan Anthony: I am going to take advantage of the fact that the question comes from a doctor, and I shall answer him that you can go to your doctor every day for him to examine you and perhaps find some illness. Or you can go to him when an illness has appeared. In the first case, it is simply a waste of time for you and for him. In the second case, when you go to him with some kind of illness or you need something, it can be healing. I think that with confession it is the same. If a person goes to confession, shall we say each week, then he might bring to this confession purely formal things, that is, find something in himself that is not right; it is always possible. But does it mean that you are wounded by sin? That is another matter. Or you come to confession when you have something serious to say, that you want to share not with the priest but with God, to say to him: ‘Lord, You have found in me this and this. I bring it to you with pain, with shame, with repentance and I want healing. For that I need a meeting with you face to face. A silent and reverential meeting and forgiveness, which will mean that, in spite of having been found unworthy of myself and yourself and of people, you will not reject me but invite me to grow to the full measure of my calling.’

Question: When I know that I have sinned, I am ashamed, but I do not feel any kind of pain whatever. What should one do with such a sin? On the one hand, it has to be eliminated; but, on the other, how do you eliminate it if there is no pain?

Metropolitan Anthony: I shall answer perhaps very primitively. Sometimes you go to a dentist because your tooth is very painful. But to avoid such situations, one must go periodically to be checked, so the infection does not get to the nerve. So when you become conscious that you have some sinfulness, ask yourself if it is beginning to eat at you, if the tooth is beginning to corrode, how far it is to the nerve. When it comes to a sharp pain, you will understand yourself; that is not a problem. But until then, one has to preserve one’s health. Now, the preserving of health is not done by continually asking yourself: does it hurt or does it not hurt? You must read the Gospel on an entirely different principle. You must not seek in the Gospel whether there is something that condemns you, but seek that which inspires you and try to live on that level. Because if you attempt to seek only that which condemns, then, first, you will find a great deal that does not reach the soul. If, though, you look and find in the Gospels several places which so affect your heart that you become alive, vibrant, then that means that you and God are in harmony, and if you violate that, then you will be violating your own most precious essence. You must busy yourself with this positive constructiveness. On the way, you will discover those characteristics or conditions which hamper it. Those will be sins with which you will have to wrestle. But seek in yourself that which is in harmony with God, and live trying to reach such harmony as if it were a note of music. When there are any deviations, seek the reason, and that reason could be called sin.

Table of Contents

T alks

1  Healing the whole Body

2  Confession as encounter with God

3  On confession and repentance

4  Contributions to a panel discussion

5  Youth leaders’ meeting on confession

Sermons

6  Our sinful condition

7  The prayer before Communion

8  Friendship with Christ

9  The priest as witness

10  Unfaithfulness

11  Forgiveness

12  Public confession

13  The priest as spiritual companion

Questions people ask