Unlearning and Learning

Father Rafail Noica speaks to us

- Father, how can one acquire the gift of the Holy Spirit in such an agitated world? Time passes quickly, we have little time for prayer, and many temptations come upon us...

- I would like to begin with these words found in the funeral service:“Vanity are all human things that do not remain after death.” And everything in the Church, as well as the word of God, the word of Christ, calls us from this world to God's eternity.

Man is greatly led astray in the West, especially in the West, I believe, because he does not realize. He tries to make a better man in the Church, he tries to create a more just society, but he overlooks too much that, ultimately, the Church does not essentially have in view but what follows from death onward. Because death does not exist and man cannot die.

The reception of the Holy Spirit, prayer, and all that the Church has given us, the experience of the Church, the experience of those who have lived, of our Fathers, is the treasure of silence, of poverty in this world ‒ the treasure of dying to this world, I would say, little by little. Not only do we die little by little through old age and exhaustion, but we learn to put this world to death within ourselves. It is not about death itself, but about gaining the other life. Only in this life can we gain the other life! That is why the Church condemns suicide.

Nevertheless, this life, especially since the fall of Adam, also has an ambiguous role, in the sense that it becomes an obstacle for us, placing an insurmountable wall between us and eternal life. Therefore, the asceticism of the Church isto gradually unlearn this world, inasmuch as, by unlearning it, we learn the other. By moving away from this world, we enter into mystical experiences, experiences of the heart, which belong to the other world.

These are not psychological moments; we experience them in the heart, we experience them as tenderness, as humility, as all sorts of feelings that we can confuse with psychology, but they are, in fact, spiritual experiences that introduce us into the life of the Holy Trinity.

In our troubled days, it is very difficult to renounce the world in which you live, because the entire culture of silence, of hesychia, in which we try to hear the word of God in the mystery of our souls, is a word without words, without voice ‒ the Spirit speaks without voice in the human heart. However, we can no longer hear due to the turmoil of our lives, for everything must be done in haste, everything must be finished before it even begins, and so on. And yet, Father Sophrony says that there are no conditions, and there cannot be conditions, under which the word of God would not be valid and, I would say, able to save. There are no conditions, and there cannot be conditions, that would impede salvation, the living of the word of God.

From "The Other Noica," a speech delivered in 1992