You may say that there is often no such love between ideological opponents—this is even more frightening, it is not better; It is no consolation to say that I cannot talk to a person who is my ideological opponent, because I have already excluded him from the sphere of this love. Have I already condemned him in a final trial? Is there no place for him either on earth or in eternity where I hope to be? It's scary to think! And that's what we do when we refuse a human encounter. Of course, there are periods when circumstances do not allow for a conversation, an argument, a dialogue, on a large scale, but there are no such circumstances or times when people cannot even grope for each other, when people who are honest cannot try to listen to the other and understand how he can feel and think this way.

     And we have something to say.

There is no point in speaking against man; As soon as you speak against a person, he will, of course, defend himself, because everyone is afraid of being destroyed, everyone is afraid to be proven his inadequacy.

     Once, in the twenties, at a time when it was still possible, one of Patriarch Tikhon's subdeacons, Vladimir Filimonovich Martsinkovsky[12], spoke in disputes. And in one of his articles he wrote a wonderful word: never speak against your questioner, speak above him, so that he listens and grows above himself and admires what he could be, if only he could rise above his own level... You can talk to anyone like that.

     And what can we say about man? We can accept man as he is in the experience of any atheist, any atheist, any person who has never met God and who is not an ideological atheist, but simply lives practically only in the earthly, material plane, and we can talk with him about the depths we know about man.

     I want to give you an example from a related field. In the life of Elder Silouan, about whom some of you know or have read, there is a story about how he discussed missionary work with one of the Russian bishops who lived in the East. This bishop was very direct, very convinced and very fanatical. And Silouan asked him: how do you try to persuade, to convert to Christianity the people who surround you? He answered him: I go to the Buddhist temple and address all those present, I tell them: what you see, all these statues are idols, these are stones, this tree, this is nothing; throw it down, smash it, believe in the true God.. Silouan said to him: "What happens to you then?" The missionary answered him: "These insensitive, insane people are throwing me out of the church and beating me.. Silouan said to him: do you know that you could achieve better results if you came to their church, looked at the reverence with which these people pray, how they honor their faith, would call several of them to sit on the stairs outside and say: tell me about your faith... And every time what they say would give occasion for it, you could say to them: how wonderful what you just said! If only you could add such and such a thought to this, how would it blossom into full beauty.. And so you would introduce into their worldview here and there this or that thought from the Gospel or from the Orthodox faith. You wouldn't convert them right away, but you would enrich them with what Christ brought to earth...

     In a respect, as a parallel, we could do something similar when dealing with people who see in man only an earthly being, if we were to discover those depths of which they have no idea. But here we encounter another difficulty.

     I remember how my spiritual father once said to me: no one can renounce the earth and seek the Kingdom of God who has not seen in the eyes or on the face of at least one person the radiance of eternal life... Some of you have read the Gospel and remember the story of how Christ healed a man who was blind from birth. This man has never seen the world around him, he has never seen a human face, he has never seen human eyes; and at the moment when Christ healed him, the first thing he saw was the face of Christ, that is, the face of the incarnate God and the eyes of God's mercy and love. But who would dare to assert (of any one of us, but first of all of himself) that when another person meets us, he could say: I see in his face, I see in his eyes the radiance of some life of which I have no idea, from him pours the light which he calls eternity, of which I have no idea, for whom I have no name..

     And it happens. It happens when you meet some people. Those who met Seraphim of Sarov, Sergius of Radonezh, John of Kronstadt, and many others stopped in a daze; They stopped because behind their faces they saw something that they had never seen before. One of the English writers said that every time a person meets a believer, he should look at him and exclaim: the statue has become a living person.. Each of us is like a stone statue only – and then the stone statue became alive. This is what could happen if this beauty, this light poured out of us. We cannot, of course, seek this in order to convert others; but if we were to seek our rootedness in God, sooner or later it would happen to one degree or another.

     Another question is this: we often look at a dissident, as an adversary, and as a result, we do not see him, we see him only as an enemy. I remember a meeting in London at which Pastor Niemöller, the head of the Confessing Church in Germany during the Nazi era, spoke. He spoke to the German pastors of London and England; I was invited, but he did not know that I was there, and so he spoke regardless of my presence. He spoke of his experiences during Hitler's rule, and among other things said that his most tragic memory, the one for which he condemned himself, was that in all the time of his activity he had never thought that the fascists, the opponents of Christianity and its Church, were not enemies, but the lost sheep of the flock of Christ, that he was responsible for them, that he had to go to them. that they were children of God who had lost their way – and he had forgotten about them, or rather, treated them only as enemies. And he added a wonderful thing; he said: the Russian Church has never separated herself from those who persecuted her... This idea is illustrated by the words of Patriarch Alexy, to whom I once posed the question: how would he define the Church; he told me: the Church is the body of Christ, crucified for the salvation of its tormentors... Here's the approach; A completely different approach, of course, is not at all practical, not political, not militant.

     And here we need to learn something else: we need to learn to grow to the measure of our Christian humanity, which we have not achieved; We are below our own level, despite the colossal gifts we receive. After all, what do we receive in communion of the Holy Mysteries: the Body of Christ is poured into us, the Blood of Christ runs through our vessels, the humanity of Christ is united with our humanity – and we do not notice it, we do not change because of it, it passes through us and goes somewhere away from us... And at the same time, it happens that even without the sacraments, the presence of God reaches a person. I want to give you an example. Fifteen or twenty years ago, an Englishman came to our church in London. He was simply an atheist; he was instructed to bring a parcel for a parishioner; He very thoughtfully calculated his arrival so that he would be late for the service and come back after everyone began to disperse. But the Lord judged otherwise, and he came to church while the service was still going on. Distressed, he sat down in the back to wait for the end. And this is what he told me later. He sat down and waited for "all this" to end; At first he was impatient about it, then he began to calm down and suddenly felt that there was some kind of "density" in this church, the presence of something. He began to explain it: this is the intoxication of incense, this stupefaction from the melodies that were sung, this flickering of candles, this is the collective hysteria of believers – he understood everything, of course; And yet he became curious, and he asked me for permission to come to the church when no one was there to see what was happening then. He come, set for two hours, and then said to me, you know, this Presence is all here; there is no singing, no incense, no flickering of candles, no believers, but the Presence is... He began to walk when there was no one around, and when there was a service, and after a while he said to me, you know, I walked for quite a long time, because I thought, okay, suppose this is God; but what do I care about your God, if He simply lives in this temple and it does not make it easier for anyone; if it's a passive God that doesn't change people, I don't need Him... And suddenly it turned out that when he looked at the faithful praying and especially at those who were receiving Communion, he saw on their faces, at least for a moment, some kind of radiance that he had never seen anywhere. He said to me: I do not know whether they are finally made better, but they are made different, a different creature, as it were; And I need to become different, I want you to teach me and baptize me... I prepared it and baptized it at one time.

     Here is an example of how God, even in addition to the sacraments, can act simply by His presence, by what He is. But we, too, must learn, as it were, to see the image of God through the shell of another person. I remember a priest in France who once told me that when God looks at us, He does not see our non-existent virtues or non-existent successes, He sees in the depths of our being, often hidden by tinsel and dirt and darkening, His own image, shining like light in the darkness. And this is what we must learn. We must learn to look at the enemy, at the enemy, and forget that he is an enemy, that he is an adversary, and see in him the image of God, an icon: a damaged icon, a corrupt icon, an icon that is sometimes barely recognizable, and because it is so corrupt, because it is so defiled, we must feel sorry for it even more than if it were in glory. An icon in glory – yes, we venerate it; But an icon that was trampled underfoot, shot through, an icon that was trampled underfoot – with what reverence we should treat it. This is a sacred thing that is defiled by human malice; The same is true of a person who does not know that he is an icon, and we should know this. Do we know this? –hardly; In any case, this is not always visible in our mutual relations, not only in relation to dissidents, but even to our close friends. We forget this, we only see that a person is difficult, and that he is sacred – no, we rarely remember.

     And here is the present problem for you, as for us in the West (of course, there is a huge difference in approaches, in situations), the central, real problem is that we must believe in man with the same faith as we believe in God, the same absolute, resolute, passionate, and we must learn to see in man the image of God, the holiness that we are called to bring back to life and glory. Just as the restorer is called upon to return to glory the icon, damaged, trampled, shot through, which is given to him. It begins with ourselves, but it must also be addressed to others; and to other Christians, whom we so easily judge, and to our closest and dearest. And to dissidents.

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