Fr. Rafail Noica - In Search of God: My Journey to Orthodoxy, Man's Nature

Fr. Rafail Noica

I don’t really know where to begin, but I would like to tell you something about my life. I received a little bit of a Christian education at home. We would go to church from time to time, especially on Easter; we would light a candle and then go home to crack eggs–maybe a little more than this, but not much more. One day, when I began to realize that there was not only the Orthodox Church, but also a Catholic Church, and “repentants,” as they were called in Bucharest (“repentants” being a Protestant denomination), I asked my mother why so many Churches exist. I must tell you that my mother, being English, was baptized Anglican. She lived in Romania for 40 years, and sang in Orthodox choirs, especially at a church where the priest was a family friend, a very good man, to whom I am indebted, I believe, more than I realize, for his influence on my family as well. Despite all this, my mother did not understand the deeper significance of Orthodoxy, of the Orthodox Church. Neither did she have a Christian education. Her father had been a chanter in an English choir, at the Cathedral of Coventry, which was bombed in the last war, but, like many of his generation, became atheist. Otherwise, he was a good man and actually died with the Bible in his hands. So neither did my mother have a spiritual education. But both my mother and father taught me respect for holy things, for which I am always indebted to them. So I asked my mother why there were so many Churches: Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, and what were the differences between them. And my mother told me, poor woman: “Well, the difference is mainly that the Orthodox and Catholics think that they must serve God with all the beauty of the world, which He created, with icons, music, with all that is most beautiful, while Protestants think that they must lay all that aside, because they are not essential, and concentrate on prayer, in a more simple form, stripped of everything that is not essential.” 

I must tell you that I now see, at this age, that I always had a tendency toward the simple, the essential. And my mother’s statement impressed me, a reason for which I remained sympathetic to Protestants. Arriving in England, there was no Romanian Orthodox Church. There were one or two Russian churches and a few Greek churches, but I wasn’t going to go somewhere I didn’t understand the language. My mother took me multiple times to Anglican churches. I understood the language there, but the atmosphere was very impoverished, I would say now, very cold, even boring. Not in the sense that you would start yawning in church, but in the sense that it did not feed you with anything. My search took me through many crises. Look at one of them: why do we have to go to church, to pray? Can’t we pray at home? And many ask themselves this question even today, but many from my generation raised [this question], and, even though I didn’t pray at home, I found that it was enough to pray at home. So I was only seeking. I wasn’t praying, as we call prayer, but I was still seeking. And I met a community of Baptists led by a truly remarkable man. 

I must tell you that Protestants and Catholics in the West are not like those you encounter here [in Romania] because they are not people who have detached themselves from the Orthodox Church. They do not know anything else there. They only have what they received in the form they inherited it. And, so, there is not the spirit of those who have fallen away, who may be in an Orthodox country, in which many have detached themselves from the Orthodox Church for all kinds of reasons, or who come from outside, as happens here too, and try to fish Orthodox fish in Orthodox waters. 

I participated in the religious life, not tied to external forms, with the thought that I had found a more pure, simplified form of worshipping God in the form of the Baptists, in that church. I remained there for a year, a year and a half, until I reached, in my spiritual search, in France, a Romanian enclave (I was alone in England: there were few Romanians at the time and we saw each other every now and then, but there was no Romanian Church. The priest had gone to America and, so, not much remained in the 50’s). 

So, in France, I found myself in a Romanian environment, where I continued my search, especially through discussions with a man whom I appreciated very much for his simplicity, his humility, and, at the same time, the depth of his experience. And not only through conversations, but also through a difficult trial, through which the Lord led me; little by little the Mother of God drew me back to the Church in which I was born and baptized, this time with the discovery that the Orthodox Church is not one Church among many, but, simply put, it is the nature in which God created man. Orthodoxy’s essence is man’s nature. And historically it took the name of “right worship,” a name that is very beautiful and suggestive, that is, a name that betrays, if you will, that which the true Fathers sought, who sought neither worldly glory, nor a more true philosophy, but a single thing: to abide in right worship, revealed by God Himself; they tried to preserve this vision of man’s nature undefiled. 

For the healing of this nature, which corrupted itself through sin, God Himself needed to take on flesh and become a true human being, that is, not only in the sense of a human with flesh and bones but also without sin, a man without corruption, the New Adam. This Adam was inclined, both through death and through hell, to complete the journey that the first Adam did not finish, rising “on the third day according to the Scriptures,” and on the 40th day, ascending to heaven as a human being, he placed human nature on the right hand of the Father. And now, for the first time in Creation, the human being became a complete human being. This is the vision that the Holy Apostles received and which our Fathers preserved, remaining historically as right worship. Others wanted to be universalists, and others protested, each with his own philosophy and belief.

And, so, the Good God had mercy on me–instead of being angry with my deviations–just as the Prodigal Son was shown mercy by his father, who did not even let him finish saying his words of repentance, but clothed him with all the adornment of his inheritance, an inheritance that he had wasted until then–so too did God have mercy on me in this way. And year after year, it became more and more true–even in the West, where we are attacked and beaten by all the “winds” that exist on earth, from the most innocent, possibly, to the most demonic, Satanists–and with the help of God, year after year, I experienced prayer and our Liturgy there. And Elder Sophrony taught us to not be afraid of anything or anyone. We don’t preach in the sense of proselytizing, but whoever wants to find us, and, each in his own way, with his experience and the roots he left, sometimes finds consolation and understanding in us, in the midst of a world that is very dark and spiritually oppressive. 

In our monastery, we greatly cherish our connection with Orthodox people and countries, which strengthen us in the life and difficulties that we undergo. And, if you pray for me because you know me by name, I will be grateful, if you sometimes remember me in your holy prayers. 

Can you talk about the difficulties you had in the beginning, which you experienced, and your spiritual evolution that followed? 

My parents divorced so that my mother could regain her English citizenship, and eventually so that we could move to the West. My parents wanted to give us children (I have a sister) a childhood and education that was freer than what was anticipated for this country. We left in ‘55 with the hopes and plans that we found, many times afterward, in many who came to the West from this country, and we went through all the hardships and disappointments that they experienced. 

I was a child, and, without much spiritual education, I mixed freedom, as we understand it on earth–that is, freedom of expression, the ability to do anything you want, to travel–with freedom of spirit, prayer, and Church life. But, from early childhood, there was something in me that drew me to spiritual things, and I believe that–only God knows from where everything originates–the course of my life is tied to a moment in my childhood which I remember. I don’t know how it began, but I remember that at a given moment I had the sense of death, a vague sense. Someone had spoken to me about this, probably my mother, and I remember that I had a horror of death, as we all do. And I would ask myself: “If we are born, why do we have to die?” Not having a spiritual education, I didn’t know at the time (I learned this later) that God didn’t create death, and that death is an illness of man, the enemy of man. And I too tried to comfort myself, as those around me also did, that everyone dies, that this is how the world is made, that animals, leaves, and flowers have an end, and, thus, why don’t I as well? 

But death was not only a kind of nightmare in my life; without realizing it at the time, I was already on a path of spiritual seeking; there was something in my soul, that I can now formulate, but, naturally, back then I wouldn’t have been able to at all: it was an understanding through a reduction to the absurd. Death was the complete absurdity of life. My question, that I couldn’t formulate at the time, at the age of 6-7 years (maybe even earlier, I don’t remember), was: “If everything ends in death, then does life have any meaning?” But, for better or worse, I believed in God, and, thus, also in eternity; the reality of death really seemed impossible and truly without sense. If there is truly a God and life is reduced to death, then death must hide something, maybe the very meaning of life. 

When you have a problem and can’t find a resolution, you ask left and right, even though your questions sometimes have nothing to do with the problem. I asked, for example, at the age of seven when I was getting ready to go to school: “Why do people go to school?” I felt that it would be a waste of time, a waste of childhood, in the sense that it didn’t give me an answer to what I was seeking. No one knew how to answer me because neither did anyone understand what was in my soul. For me, the question could have been translated as: what is the meaning of life and what does school, learning contribute to the meaning of life? 

I was told that I needed a foundation, a culture, and I don’t know what else, something that, I am convinced, you all have heard. I felt, but I didn’t know how to argue, at seven, eight, or ten years old, that the answer to all of my unrest is God. And the Lord led me through all kinds of wanderings until I arrived at, as you see, monasticism. When this path was revealed to me–monasticism–I felt that, truly, it was what I had been seeking since childhood.

In the meantime I had wandered to other faiths as well, because I wasn’t aware of what the Church is, and I didn’t understand why there are multiple Churches. I believed that, more or less, all are valid, and, to a point, this too is a truth. However, something specific that I didn’t understand was Communion, Holy Communion in the Orthodox Church. I believed that it was a symbol, if it’s a symbol–amazing, isn’t it?–the bread as the body and red wine as blood, I was ready (maybe I “communed” in other churches, but I don’t remember) to go, and if the Lord said for us to do this, we do it. But I didn’t understand why. The Lord led me through Protestantism, and, as a good Protestant, I began to read the Bible. And in the Bible I stumbled in particular upon the sixth chapter of the Gospel of Saint John, in which the Lord speaks so clearly and openly about Holy Communion, but not as a symbol. There He speaks about His Body, saying that whoever doesn’t eat the Son of Man’s Body and doesn’t drink His Blood doesn’t have life in him. And I tried to understand what this meant, why was He speaking so concretely? However, I consoled myself a bit seeing that even the Apostles were confused by this saying that was difficult to understand, on account of which some abandoned Him, saying: “This is a difficult word to receive, and who can receive it?” And the Lord turned to the 12 disciples and asked them: “Will you too abandon me?” The Apostle Peter responded: “To whom shall we go, Lord, who else has the word of life?” And I clung to the Apostle Peter’s words with tooth and nail, and I remained undeceived, so to speak speak. That is, waiting until the Lord would show me my path.

Through a rather long story, with crises, which I now observe with much interest (at the time with much pain and difficulty, with anxiety–as it is called–with deep unrest and confusion, which I went through), the Lord finally showed me what Communion means. And see how. 

While I was till a Protestant, I provoked an Orthodox man to tell me why Orthodox have such reverence for their priests, to the point of kissing their hand. And he, being very humble and gentle, told me: “Well, I don’t know; I personally kiss the hand that gives me what I can’t have without a priest.” And I asked him: “What’s that? What can a man give you, that you, being a man like him, can’t have?” And he answered just as gently and humbly: “The Most Precious Body and Blood of our Lord and Saviour.” And then, all at once, I realized that he was speaking about what we in the Church call a “Mystery,” and for the first time I understood more concretely, more consciously, what Mystery is. And I believed in Mystery. Everything is a mystery in this life, even creation, even, I would say, information, in vogue these days (I too, in the monastery, used a computer and found a great mystery discovered by man). But, evidently, when we are speaking about the Spirit and God, about eternity, they are mysteries on another level. 

So, to return to what I was saying before, I asked the same man, through whom the Lord “hit” me over the head, to arrange with the priest for me to confess and commune, and from then I was again in the Orthodox Church. 

Something happened there, maybe the most important thing in my life. In my crisis, I kept trying to understand why Orthodoxy might be more true than Protestantism, which I believed in at the time, and which I considered to be a more pure form of Christianity, not like Orthodoxy, which seemed hardened over by all kind of things, with icons, adornments, chants, ceremonies. I believed that Protestantism was an essential Christianity and I see that the essential, the essence of things, always interested me. And, I would encourage and I always encourage young people and those with whom I speak to understand essential things, in depth, not superficially.   

I was insatiably seeking true life, in all aspects of our life: in culture, in our spiritual journey, even in sin. And in sin, man, in the end, seeks his true purpose. But sin is not truth, and therefore what the Lord didn’t give us as a commandment we call sin, not in the moral or ethical sense, but in the ontological sense, of being. Even if we don’t fully understand the commandments, we have faith in God Who revealed to us what He knows best that we need, because He made us and He reveals to us, through His words, what our longing is and where we can find the food we seek with such desire, that is, eternal life. 

And shortly after my return to Orthodoxy, my monastic calling also came, which I felt was the answer to the questions I posed as a child, and, over time, I realized that death holds the meaning of life, and I now see that our existence here, on earth, is nothing but a second stage of our movement from nonbeing to what God call us, God’s being, that is, eternity. 

The first stage was our life in our mother’s womb. It was a “mechanical” gestation, in which this system was formed, this body made to live in the earthly existence that God gave us. In this existence, a second gestation takes place: we died so that we could be born here, we died to our preceeding life in our mother’s womb, and now, from the time our personality takes shape, our dialogue with God begins. From now, God doesn’t do anything in our life unless we allow Him, if we say “Amen” to His word, if we have faith in Him. Through all the forms that He gave us historically, the Lord calls us, gives us faith in Him, shows us what He can and wants to do with us, and through this dialogue between our soul and God, the heavenly Father continues the formation of man, this time not without man’s will. He doesn’t do anything without our will (this notion of man’s freedom is very important); God appeals to our freedom and teaches us in this life that it too is a “gestation” for the life to come, that is, eternal life. In our mother’s womb our bodily members were formed, members that we will not need there. What use do hands and feet have there; what use is a nose, ears, or mouth? These, however, were for the life that was to be after [the one in the womb]. 

Many of our intellectuals deceive themselves and don’t believe in prayer, in spiritual life, and this seems normal; with the intellect remaining within the limits of this life, one can’t see a reason for spiritual things, because they are the members of the life that is to be. However, in contrast to the state of being before birth, God doesn’t form these members except through our free will, a free will that expresses itself through faith that God encourages us to have and cultivates in us daily. I say that God cultivates it in us more than we cultivate it. So, responding to God with our free choice, we give Him the ability to continue His creation in us; God teaches us in this life to begin cutting the umbilical chord between us and the womb of this creation ourselves. And here begins, in the fallen state of man, the pain and tragedy of spiritual life, which must be seen in the perspective of eternal life. And, just as a child in its mother’s wombs doesn’t know anything, but lets nature do with it what it knows, so too we, in the womb of this life, must entrust ourselves wholly to the Lord. 

And we must actually collaborate, through prayer and our participation in the Church’s Sacraments, which are energies of the life to come. Beginning in Baptism, which Saint Paul says is already a death in Christ–we descend into death in the baptismal waters, and we come out renewed in new life, in Christ; through ascetic efforts in our life, we learn, little by little, to distance ourselves, to detach ourselves, to the degree that we are able, from the elements of this life and to taste something of eternal life, that is, the third stage. We will die bodily in the end, we will die definitively in this life, so that we can be born definitively in the one that is to come. 

Father Rafail, what was the greatest crisis of your life?

I keep thinking, but I haven’t yet found a complete answer. What I’ll tell you now is not a mathematical answer. Each crisis, when it comes, is the greatest one. I remember Elder Sophrony’s saying, that “the path of salvation is an climb up Golgotha.” Or, at each step, you make the same effort to lift yourself higher, with the same difficulty, to which is added, I would say, exhaustion. 

Each crisis that comes upon a person is for the first time, and this question interests me because now I am beginning to realize that each crisis was, truly, a continuation of the path. The fact that a crisis doesn’t come without enrichment is very important. And I thank whoever asked this question, especially because it made me become aware of this enrichment. All that is painful in this life is nothing but a birth, beginning with the very first curse that man suffered after the Fall. God told Eve that she will bear children in pain. And I observed–and now it is more and more clear–not only that children are born in pain, but also each pain is the birth of a child, and that child is you, who bears the pain, who goes through the crisis. In fact, a professor of theology in Paris explains the fact that the notion of “crisis” comes from the Greek word “krisis,” which means judgement. In a crisis, God judges my life. Thus, a crisis is a judgement that God manifests before me or before a nation (the professor was speaking about the crises and perils that Israel underwent in the Old Testament, its enslavement to other nations, etc.) by which God invites me to also judge my life. Through a crisis, the Lord’s thought is for me to see what is true and what is not true in my life. So, a crisis is a moment in which we too can judge, in which God’s judgement is manifested. 

I regret the fact that there are no words in Romanian such as “defy” or “challenge” in English; there is a similar term “provocare” [provocation], that is more pejorative than in the West; so, it is at the same time a provocation and an invitation by God to go further. And, so, each ciris is a step forward; each crisis, because we haven’t gone through it, is the greatest. And in this sense, you fearfully wait to see what other crises life brings you; and I would say that I too wait. But you wait with hope as well, with other blessings, and you remain in prayer: “Lord, as You know, have mercy on us all.”

Did you ever write a book in the West?

I wrote a single book that is called “Thoughts.” I wrote it especially because someone who was waiting for [Constantin] Noica’s son to write a book urged me. And when he opened this book, the first page was white, the second was white, and all the others as well. Now, at the end of my life, I’m thinking of writing another book named “Memories,” because that is what all great people write. But, since I lost my memory, this book will be similar to the first! 

Undoubtedly, you have very much to share in regard to the spiritual life. Can you refer to aspects of it that nourish the soul that come to mind or are easier express? 

We begin with philosophy, because many of you have heard of professor [Constantin] Noica. Many of you know, probably, that the word “philosophia” means “love of wisdom” in Greek. And, for us, wisdom is the Wisdom of God, it is the Son of God Himself incarnate–Christ. And, for us, no other wisdom exists. And, if this wisdom is madness–and it’s madness to this world–them let’s also be “lunatics,” because the wisdom of this world is disastrous for man. 

Love is the word that we can reduce all of God’s commandments to. God, Who made man according to His image and likeness, Who made the heavens and the earth, knows, without a doubt, why He made man, what he seeks, why man lives, and, especially, why man dies. God gave us the commandment to love Him and to love others. In this word “love,” says the Lord, is contained all the law and the Prophets and, we can add, everything else. Why? Because God is Himself love. 

Another saying that I thought of was a word that Elder Sophrony gave us in a short homily, when he tonsured me a monk in 1965. I confess to you that I didn’t hear part of his homily because my mind seemed to be in another place. But a word that he told me woke me up, namely that we can’t not be victorious. So, I asked the Lord to grant me to understand in the monastic life what are the conditions that make victory possible. And I think I understood. It is about keeping the word of the Lord.

 You went through hell and it wasn’t the first time, because our nation, like other nations, especially Orthodox ones, went through hell. The devil knows where to attack. But, like Job or Joseph in the Old Testament, if we hold onto the word of God, He Who is holier than all the saints, it is impossible to not be victorious. Only we must remain with the Lord. 

My travels helped me with something very important. I always had a small problem with a sentiment that was too patriotic or too nationalistic. I thought that if I had been born in someonelse’s nation, I would’ve had the same “hang up” over the origin. And, in my travels, in the 70’s, I too tried to do something for my nation and language, and I wanted to translate the life of Saint Silouan into Romanian. I have to tell you that the first word stumped me; in the very first word that I encountered, I realized that I was nothing but a stranger, that not much of my Romanian-ness had remained. 

In the 80’s, I again had contact with Romanian literature and the language came back to me. But the 70’s were the poorest period. I almost forgot the language; I was no longer used to using it. In ‘72 my father came to visit us and I spoke with him in Romanian, however, with much difficulty. I couldn’t find the words. My memory of Romanian words was “rusty.” 

So, being stumped by the first word and discovering that I was nothing but a stranger, that all the languages I knew were nothing, more or less, than foreign languages, I painfully experienced this realization and felt a kind of freedom that your origin isn’t more important than the fact that you exist. I don’t think that a person enriches himself by disdaining reality. Your origin is your nest, like that of birds. A bird is born in a nest, it grows in that nest until it grows wings and takes flight, but afterward, manytimes, it never returns to the same nest. Man, in any case, forms spiritual wings according to his nature, to his eternal life, and flies there, to eternity. And this was a step in my search, manytimes unconscious, to what is eternal and essential and the hidden message in what would otherwise be an unspeakable horror–death. 

You see, in my search I reached monasticism as well. I passed through many phases, but never through atheism. I had an intuition that never let me negate, that is, to oppose myself to the thought of God. But I had many doubts and misunderstandings. I went, like all the world that searches, through crises, more or less deep, that brought me to a more or less spectacular result. One of the greatest, maybe the greatest, was my return to Orthodoxy, and the Good God, profiting off my stupidity, instead of punishing me–as we think God does (because we too often make a god according to our image and likeness) revealed Orthodoxy to me as man’s nature. 

Through the Fall, man left this nature, fell from his nature, and God Himself had to come into human history and “roll up His sleeves” and say: “Look, man, I am coming to be human, because you didn’t realize, you didn’t know who you are.” God entered history so that He could be human, lived all of our misery and the results of our Fall, had to experience our death, to pass through hell as well, and there God gave a single blow. Until then God was as gentle as a lamb, but there the Lamb destroyed the gates of hades and as we sing in the Resurrection, by death He trampled upon death, doing something that the first Adam didn’t know how and wasn’t able to do because of the Fall. But through the Resurrection, Ascension, and sitting at the right hand of the Father, He paved the road that at least one man had to travel, and so, in Christ, man was perfected and changed. This is the meaning of the New Testament. 

I would like to encourage you all to see what is inner and essential, because once this is reached, man can’t die. And these are the words that Elder Sophrony said to me many times, especially in his final four years. Death doesn’t exist for man, and, in the most tragic moments of life, in any way they may be tragic, a great comfort is that man can’t die. It is a great comfort to know that all the waves of life are temporary. Compared to the time in which we felt the tragedy of closing our eyes to the all the beauty of the world, now I more and more see that this beauty is nothing but a symbol of the ultimate reality. So, I see life here and now in two aspects. One aspect I would call functional. For example: eating, drinking, and all the things that keep you alive only have a function. Even the things that inebriate us with beauty and all kinds of attractions are functional. Without them, to a certain degree, we die or decline in life. However, there is also a symbolic aspect that betrays something of eternity. And man’s perception clings to this symbol as if it were reality. 

The Church, our Mother: it births us into eternity, showing us that we must detach ourselves from these, because they are nothing but revelations in a very reduced form of what the eye couldn’t see, the ear couldn’t hear, and what couldn’t enter man’s heart, that is, the things that God prepared for those who love Him. So, I will stop at this. 

I experienced the Church as a mother’s womb and the whole world is the Church in its symbolic sense. The Church is where God’s creation and God’s voice calls man from nonbeing into existence and from existence into the Church, again into the being of God. The Church is where man realizes this call of God and where he cultivates what is most true in these symbols, their most truthful aspects, through which they can present eternity. I’m thinking of iconography, liturgical poetry, liturgical music. What else can I say about the essential things of the Church, that is, prayer, which is man’s personal conversation with God and the Holy Trinity, which are the nourishment and strength of things we must enact and are impossible for man on his own? Because, we need to know this as well, namely that what we are asked to fulfill in the Church is not difficult; it is impossible. But what is impossible with man, God Himself fulfills for man. And here the Sacraments of the Church and their power nourish this birth and growth into eternity in each soul.  

Source:

https://rafailnoica.wordpress.com/category/drumul-catre-ortodoxie-1993/