Fr. Rafail Noica: We Must Relearn All the Spiritual Language of the Church
"We hear a word and we understand it according to our everyday experience, but our everyday experience may not be spiritual, and then we understand it in a psychological sense, or even physical."
00:13:00
We must relearn all the spiritual language of the Church. As I said before: we don’t speak the language of our Holy Fathers. Among other things, Fr. Sophrony had the charisma of speaking ancient things in our modern language and to explain, that is to present—he didn’t explain, he didn’t teach—but to present the things of old, ancient wisdom, in our terminology.
Yes, but I always felt the need to return to terminology corresponding to our spiritual life. Why, for example, do doctors not speak in our language? Well, there are certain things that would be impolite for them to say in our language, therefore they say it in medical, clinical language. Why does each profession have its specific language? Then why do we think we can express all the mysterious things of the Church in a so-called accessible language for everyone? No, this is a first step in the Church’s mission, but we must, becoming more churched, make it our duty to learn the Church’s language, just as a lawyer learns the language of lawyers, a doctor learns medical, scientific language, and so on. And we must not only learn the terminology, but also its true meaning.
The difficulty that arises here is that we hear a word—I’ll come back to repentance—we hear a word and we understand it according to our everyday experience, but our everyday experience may not be spiritual, and then we understand it in a psychological sense, or even physical. It is not true—it can be correct but not true. For example, purity of soul: all that Holy Scripture tells us, if you have not experienced this purity for even a second, you don’t know what it is. We have an idea, we know about soap and water and other things; we know about pure thoughts and so on, but many times we confuse things, because we have not experienced its true meaning.
Myself, I was and am amazed by the meaning of the Mother of God’s purity. How is she, a Virgin without comparison as no other virgin ever was in history, so close to women who want to give birth? Fr. Ephraim, whom you saw, distributes pieces of the Mother of God’s sash, he puts strings on it and blesses them, and women put them around their waist so that they can give birth. How can the Mother of God be concerned with such things and not be revolted, exactly her who…Ha, exactly her! But what is true purity? I ask the Mother of God to reveal it to you, both men and women.