About salvation and salvation

If we exclude the famous names of our Church who have left us great literary works - which are still read today by researchers of our literary history - there are few literarily educated people today who, apart from theology, sermons and Christian epistles, warnings and announcements and general messages, know how to show their gift through literature in today's sense of the word.

When it comes to literature, the people of the Church are outdated both in the choice of topics and in expression, they are outdated in their views on the world they live in, they are fascinated by the nation and politics. Archibald Rice once noticed this - so much abused here - saying that our clergy is more oriented towards politics than religion. In addition, they are often angry and narrow-minded. If someone thinks that they adhere to "canons", I would say that it is not about canons, but about enslavement to forms and closedness. By reducing the world to form, its essence is lost. (I remember that at one time the mosaics of the painter Mladen Srbinović, which he did for the Žiča monastery, were proscribed as "out of the canon".) I think that such an attitude hinders the entry of the Church into contemporary life and the world of contemporary art, thus creating an obstacle for those who want to accept its basic thought and mission.

Are our gifted monks hindered by their separation from us secular people or do their faith and belief lead them past our questions, wanderings and delusions, are we far from each other, so we cannot harmonize basic values ​​- I think we have no answer to that question the answer is neither them nor us. If we care about knowing, we must face common secrets, doubts, needs, fears, anxieties and doubts, because we are all one enigmatic puzzle.

We secular people live with the prejudice that we are more imperfect, more sinful and more distant from purity and truth than monks. We are in a bigger gap because we are faced with the chaos of everyday life, with the chaos that we ourselves create, for us that chaos is a daily challenge, for some it is a calling, for some it is an obligation and a burden, and for some it is an interest. The monks renounced what we have to bear, sometimes with ease, and more often with anguish. Monastic renunciation is much greater than ours, but that is why our joys and sorrows are numerous, so sometimes there are more sorrows than joys. But that makes us – who are capable of understanding ourselves – human beings as such. Is it a form of our imperfection or the strength of our strong and courageous animality, to use this vitalist expression of Rastko Petrović? Both the monks and us are the ones who are constantly going somewhere, some one step forward, some step back. The path towards the goal can be both progress and regression, all depending on our difficulties, anguish, sighs and exhalations. Everything depends on the tour guide.

In connection with this, I would add that today a lot of books written by members of the Church - both monks and priests - are published here, but we should not exaggerate and proclaim every book published by "saints" as significant literary examples of contemporary literature. I am afraid that it will not serve either our literature or the Church.

A book of questioning

Bishop Grigorije with his book Heavenly Yards - Living Pictures he did not want to convey theological learning, but he had the need to show his personal ways. Those ways of his are disturbing. It is not a book for writing and reading, it is a book reexamination, she brings the reader into doubt and restlessness because she questions the truth about the writer, explores his fear and anxiety, his rapture, his hidden and revealed, asks the question about the other that is part of himself, about the mysterious, clear and unclear, about the society in which he lives and in which he preaches his faith, about the contradictions in which we live, about the rise and fall of us here today.

The theme of this book is the war in Bosnia in the 1990s, the suffering of the people there, and especially the suffering of the residents from the region where the author's relatives and friends are from. In that horror and turmoil, Mladen Durić (then a student of theology in Belgrade) tried, through his acquaintances and acquaintances, to calm the people there from all national and nationalist sides and to explain to them - as it turned out in the end - the inexplicable and tragic.

Now the writer of this book, Bishop Grigori, faced two big problems. He found himself between his relatives, whom he was trying to save from what happened to them in the war at that time, and with his spiritual desire to devote himself to monastic life. This is the most important theme of this book for me. But he does not hesitate in his confession. Because he has his own important stronghold - it is his role model (if I may assume so) Old Man Siluan, whose words, not without concealment, he states: "Keep your mind in hell and do not despair". By this he wants to say that we live there in that Hades, in sin, that Hades is in us and around us, that we are divided, troubled and vulnerable beings, and that reminding us of Hades warns us not that we are sinful by nature , than that anxiety torments, persecutes and burdens us. Is there anyone in this white world who doesn't think of that? He knows two ways - either to save or to be saved.

At one point in the book, the author again refers to Elder Siluan through the words of Elder Sophronius: "From the pale and unbound words of ours, it is impossible to get a true idea of ​​that wonderful life in which the ultimate suffering that man can bear is combined with the ultimate bliss that man can to experience. Each helps the other in a strange way. If there were only suffering, man would not be able to bear it, and if there were only bliss, man would also be unable to bear it.” But in the book, he refers to Elder Siluan for the third time, to words that seem contradictory in today's time: "The more love, the deeper the suffering of the soul." Are there contradictions in these words? The apostle Paul would say that there is. But modern man wonders if all men are brothers. In the book, Bishop Grigorije mentions his grandfather, who told him: "You will succeed in life because you are your own." And in another place, the writer says that "in every man I see not only a brother, but also sebe”, and that self he emphasizes - that "something or someone becomes only when we leave, leave or lose it". What and who are we at this crossroads?

The special value of this book is its last act - the monasticism of Mladen Durić. On the last pages, in the Afterword, the monk Grigorije writes: "We have agreed that my name will be Grigorije, after Grigori the Theologian. As the rule and tradition dictates, I lay down on the floor and touched the stone with my forehead, and then somehow, through that stone, the earth smelled like the substance from which I was made. One would think that monasticism is an insurmountable feat, a burden that is difficult to bear, but what happened to me, well, at that moment, I felt how from my back, from my mind and soul, from my whole being, it goes to that earth and disappears my pain It was such a nice feeling that I wanted to stay in it forever. I was so enraptured by him that I didn't hear when they said to me: Stand up. "

As a reader of this book, this description is the moment of the One Saved. Is this saved one saved? Did he find a solution and peace? Or will they look for it in this world of chaos, separation, doubt and anxiety? I don't know. Like I don't even know my own way. ¶