About twenty years ago, a very interesting experiment was made in America. The doctor-researcher experimented on himself with medicines that seemed to destroy the line between the conscious and the subconscious, the unconscious. He describes it in a very interesting way. He increased the doses under the control of his colleague. At first he felt himself as he was, then he discovered depths in himself that he did not know about... As he walked on, various images suddenly surfaced: images of ancestors, images of people who, in their clothes, in language, belonged to this or that era of the past, who were his flesh and blood, who seemed to live in his soul and whose fate was decided in his fate...

     That's my calculation, so you have no reason to believe what I'm saying. But for me it is very vivid, very convincing. And therefore, the fact that a person has not acquired faith does not mean that he is not preparing the ground for the opening of faith to some of his descendants. And through this descendant, he himself will be justified by God, because he will prove to be the soil on which this faith could grow. These may be my fantasies, but I'm not sure if they're fantasies. I am sure, for example, that Rahab the harlot was justified in Christ.

     That's my only explanation; Although there is another side. Faith comes from hearing, hearing from the word of God (Romans 10:17), but not only from hearing it, but from the one you meet. And aren't we, believers, to blame for the fact that the people around us, when they meet us, do not meet Christ? Do we dare to reproach the unbeliever for not being able to believe in Christ when he looks at us? Even the Apostle Paul said: "For your sake the name of God is blasphemed" (Romans 2:24). People would be happy to believe, but they think: "Lord, if these are Christ's disciples, then why should we join them?.." And for this we are responsible; And we condemn ourselves when we say: behold, these people do not believe, in spite of what we say... My spiritual father once told me: no one can turn away from the fallen world and turn to God if he does not see either on the face or in the eyes of at least one person the radiance of eternal life... If people now met Seraphim of Sarov, Sergius of Radonezh, John of Kronstadt (you can name a host of saints), they would stop, look and say: "What is there in this man that I have never seen anywhere before?.." The English writer Lewis says in one of his books: Every unbeliever who meets a believer should stop and exclaim: "The statue has become a living man, the stone statue has come to life.." But can this be said about us? And the answer to the question "why don't they believe?" is very simple: because they have not found in any of us a revelation about what a person who has met God is.

     Vladyka, one more question. There are Christians, at least people who call themselves so, who in some way identify Christianity, or at least Orthodoxy, with the Russian idea, with the Russian faith, who are convinced that the Russian people have a messianic destiny, in the sense that they bring God's truth to all other peoples. Is this possible after the "limited" messianic – that is, within the specific historical period spoken of in the Old Testament?

     I think that we can return to the thought of the chronicler Nestor; he says that each nation has some personal, peculiar qualities that it must include in the general harmony of all Christian peoples (this is not a quotation, but it is his thought); that all Christian nations should be like voices in a choir or like musical notes. Each of them should sound its own sound, with the utmost purity, but at the same time they should merge into one harmony, into one single complex, rich sound. In this sense, Christ is all-man, He is neither a Jew, nor a Russian, nor a German, nor a nobody; He is neither white, nor black, nor yellow; He is a Man through a capital "H". And quite rightly, the Chinese, the blacks, and the blacks – all – paint the image of Christ in their national form. There is an English Christ, there is a German Christ, a Russian icon, a Greek icon, etc. Therefore, we cannot say that any people is unique in its ontological essence.

     It can be said that historically this or that people, in this or that epoch, is destined to play this or that role. For example, there was a time when Orthodoxy flourished in Byzantium; Now we can't say that. Today's Constantinople is not ancient Byzantium. It can be said that in the Russian people there are such spiritual qualities that, perhaps, make it broader, more all-embracing. But this is accidental, it may be the work of a certain era.

     Let's say from my experience here: Russian Orthodoxy is understandable and accessible to the West, to Western people, but Greek Orthodoxy is not. Because the Greek is so ethnically conditioned, so Greek (I don't say "Hellenistic" because it presupposes culture, but Greek in the sense of narrow ethnics) that it does not reach the Westerners. I know two Orthodox Englishmen: a bishop and an archimandrite in the Greek Church; They were talking in front of me after the service in the Greek cathedral, and one of them said: if there were only Greek Orthodoxy, none of us would become Orthodox. Russian Orthodoxy is revealed to people in the West, just as Greek or Arabic Orthodoxy is not revealed.

     But when I was young, I belonged to a purely Russian Orthodox environment, where we did not even think of using foreign languages and including non-Russians in our environment. And now, over the past decades, Orthodoxy has become the faith of very many Western people. Firstly, because the fourth generation of children and young people grew up from the first emigration through mixed marriages with people of all nationalities; they no longer know the Russian language, they are not rooted in Russian culture in the sense in which people in the Soviet Union now or in pre-revolutionary Russia were culturally Russian. They are pure Englishmen, Germans, French, whatever you want. But they are Orthodox. In addition, we have several hundred converts simply from the local population; we have the English, in France the French, there are Germans – people who have nothing in common with Russian reality by blood, but who have found God, the Gospel, Christ, faith, the Church, a new life – in Orthodoxy. And it is impossible to say that these people are, as it were, second-class Orthodox; They are as Orthodox as the most native Russians.

     And the glory of Russian Orthodoxy in the West, it seems to me, is that we are not an ethnic church. We are the bearers of Russian spiritual culture, with its properties, with the experience of God as the ultimate beauty, truth, and truth, and life, embodied in divine services, in its reverent performance. The wholeness and simplicity of our theology, our openness to universal thought, the compassion that was born of great suffering – all these qualities reveal Orthodoxy to other people. Therefore, I am sure that the Russian people, Russia must speak the living word of Orthodoxy, especially after it has gone through the crucible of trials for more than 70 years, through persecution, horror, searching, through darkness and light. It can speak more convincingly than those Orthodox peoples who have not gone through tragedy, who have not regained their faith, already consciously, personally, maturely, in an adult way. But not because we are Russians, but because this was our fate.

     I say "our"... Of course, in the Soviet Union, a thousand times more was experienced than, say, my generation experienced in the West; But my generation has also experienced something. We have not sailed through the history of these seventy years without wounds, without pain, without anguish. And therefore I believe that the Russian people can be God-bearers. But this is not always visible; And sometimes you can't see it at all. There were epochs when other peoples were God-bearers; And we must be very careful, because it is very easy to fall from pride, feeling that we are the chosen ones...

     Do you think that the falling away of the vast masses from the Church, which has taken place in our recent history, is it a sign of some kind of chosenness, or is it a sin?

     This can be interpreted in different ways. We can say what I have already said: Russia was baptized, but was not enlightened; There was a lot of dark faith, a lot of superstition – and there was a lot of gold in the Russian people. But for the lack of enlightenment, for ignorance, for superstitions, the Church is, of course, responsible. I am not saying the Church as the Body of Christ, but simply a concrete church, you, me, and everyone who lived before us, who was given to teach people and who did not teach anyone or taught badly.

     That's one thing. On the other hand, it is time for judgment to begin with the house of God (1 Pet. 4:17). I remember that in my youth this phrase was used as proof that the Russian Church is the Church above all churches. I think this is a very optimistic interpretation; That might have been very pleasant, but it wasn't.

     But God did pronounce some kind of terrible judgment on the Russian ecclesiastical reality; And not only over the church, but also over the people's reality. The ways of God are inscrutable; we cannot know what God's ways are, we cannot know why, but we can know where. We can know that as a result of all the tragedies we have experienced, there has been some kind of revival, some new perception of the Gospel, of Christ, of God, of the Church as something living and completely new. And this is a great mercy of God.