When St. Gabriel the Fool Visited a Synagogue, a Mosque and a Baptist Church

Fr. Gabriel often visited people who had different religious views. He tried to share grace with everyone and lead them to the true faith. He says himself:

"Once, dressed as I was in my monastic schema, I went to the Synagogue. At the entrance hung a large portrait of Moses. I venerated it. The attendees liked this. Moses was a great prophet and I gave him his due respect. I had entered as they were reading from the Bible. Few were there and they looked at me with surprise. I began to preach, and when they heard about Christ they called for their High Priest. He came out but he did not stop me. Afterwards he invited me into his office. He listened with great interest and attention to what I said about Christ. Finally, he thanked me and we bid farewell.

Why A Chinese Buddhist Became an Orthodox Athonite Monk

By Fr. Libyos

On my last trip to Mount Athos I visited the Monastery of Simonopetra. It is a majestic monastery and the sky was fully blue. There I met a graceful novice monk from China. In truth, he surprised me by his presence. An Orthodox cassock on a Chinese man? I was moved somewhat. I had never seen this before up close, only in pictures of missions. An inheritor of a great cultural tradition and for him to embrace Christianity? My friends and I got curious to ask him about this.

"Brother, how did you, a Chinese man, embrace Orthodox Christian monasticism coming from such a great cultural tradition? Were you a Buddhist?"

"Yes, of course, I was a Buddhist."

"What won you over to Christianity?"

"Divine companionship!"

"Excuse me?"

"Yes, yes, Father, hahahahaha!", he laughed, since out of every three words the Chinese seem to laugh at two. "In Buddhism, my Father, you are very very much alone. There is no God. Your entire struggle is with yourself. You are alone with yourself, with your ego. You are totally alone in this path. Great loneliness, Father. But here you have an assistant, a companion and a fellow-traveler in God. You are not alone. You have someone who loves you, who cares about you. He cares even if you don't understand Him. You speak with Him. You tell Him how you feel, what you would have hoped for - there is a relationship. You are not alone in the difficult struggles of life and spiritual perfection.

I realized things in those days. A severe fever bound me to bed. No doctor could find anything wrong with me. The clinical picture wasn't clear, at least the doctors couldn't see anything. The pain was unbearable and there was absolutely no pain killer that could stop it. I changed three different pain killers and still the pain was not alleviated.

At this time I got the news that the brother of my father, whose name I bear, had an advanced form of cancer in the vocal cords and larynx. He had a largyngectomy. It was the result of chronic alcohol consumption and smoking. Generally he lived a bad life, without any quality.

Then I felt something a former Buddhist and now a Christian monk on Mount Athos told me, that you need to have a God you can talk to; to perceive and to feel someone besides yourself Who hears you.

I don't know if it's wrong or right. I only know it is a deep need of man. This is evidenced by life itself. Even these Buddhists, who are from a non-theistic religion, created various deities. Even in dream language and worlds. But they have a need to refer to someone, to something, someone beyond and outside themselves, even if it's dreamy. Besides, reality and truth is something very relevant and will always remain so. It is an enigma, a mystery."

With this I remembered the words of Saint Gregory the Theologian, who had a sensitive and melancholic nature, when he said: "When you are not well, or not feeling so, speak. Speak even if it is to the wind."

Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.

Christianity Not A Religion, But A Revelation

By St. Nikolai Velimirovich

If someone loses his faith in God, he is recompensed with stupidity. Of all stupidities, it is difficult to say whether there is a greater one than this: that someone who calls himself a Christian and then proceeds to gather pathetic proofs for God and eternal life from other beliefs and philosophies. He who does not find gold among the wealthy; how will he find it among the poor? The revelation of eternal life, of facts, of proofs, of signs, and of actual visions of the spiritual world - all of these not only constitute the foundation of the Christian faith, but constitute its walls, floors, ornaments, all the furnishings, the roof and the domes of the majestic building of the Christian faith. A single ray from the spiritual world glistens through every word of the Gospels, not to mention the miraculous events, both in Evangelical and Post-Evangelical times as well as throughout the entire history of the Church for two-thousand years. Christianity has thrown open wide the gates of that world in so great a measure, that it should not be necessary to call it a religion, in order not to confuse it with other faiths and religions. It is a revelation! God's revelation!

Elder Paisios on Religion and Societal Problems

Elder Paisios the Athonite said the following in June of 1985, shortly before the fall of Balkan and Soviet communism:

They were going to abolish religion, because they thought religion creates problems. Now they slowly see that humans, when they don't have a faith, they don't have boundaries and they become beastly; they have nothing to stand on without ideals.

The Author of the Book "The Gurus, the Young Man, and Elder Paisios"

There is a popular Orthodox book in English titled "The Gurus, the Young Man, and Elder Paisios" by someone who does not want to reveal his identity and gives himself the pseudonym "Dionysios Farasiotis". But in a lecture back in 2011, a noted author in Greece who has written other serious books about Elder Paisios revealed that he was indeed the author of the book "The Gurus, the Young Man, and Elder Paisios". His name is Athanasios Rakovalis, a professor of Physics. Below is a brief outline of what he said in the lecture, and the video can be seen below the text.