Encounters of the first kind

...The people to whom the potential convert was assigned must have been Orthodox for at least five years...

...Andrew Walker's obituary in the Independent quotes Metropolitan Anthony: "No one could turn toward eternity if he had not seen in the eyes or in the face of one person the shining of eternal life...

...He suggested that another book might be in the offing, although this was a little vague in the correspondence that preceded the trip I learned later that his books were generated by talks and were transcribed by others...

...We were in England, and I wanted to see if he might do another book for Temple-gate...

...Some of his affection for Evangelicals might have come from his own conversion experience...

...As exarch of Western Europe, he served as the patriarch's representative...

...OF THE SEVERAL MINDS JOHN GARVEY ENCOUNTERS OF THE FIRST KIND Remembering Anthony Bloom Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh, the head of the Russian Orthodox Patriarchal Church in Great Britain, died on August 4,2003...

...I can honestly say that I have never met a man whose presence was so much like fire...

...That obituary mentioned his fondness for Evangelical Christians, and quoted him as saying he never preached Orthodoxy, only Christ...

...He was an atheist as a teenager...

...We got business out of the way early in the conversation, and the rest of the afternoon shaded into dusk as we talked...

...He was the author of a number of good books on prayer and the spiritual life, including Living Prayer, which my father's company, Templegate, published in the United States...

...An English Catholic theologian once told me that he thought Metropolitan Anthony was a witch...

...When I visited him in London, I noticed that there was nothing extra in his apartment...

...but instead of being discouraging, the experience was encouraging: this is what we are called to, and it is possible with God's help...

...But when Alek-sandr Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Union and was denounced by a senior bishop of the Moscow patriarchate, Metropolitan Anthony resigned as exarch and wrote a letter to the London Times in which he praised Solzhenitsyn and said, "He believes that a nation which cannot openly face its recent past, cannot solve its problems in the present and in the future...

...I think that is what we saw there...

...I liked the thought that a person so ascetic could be at the same time so attentive and observant a fruit of true asceticism, perhaps...

...it was more a radical simplicity, and as a good obituary in the Independent noted, he believed that Orthodoxy was the simplest way...

...I know only that Regina and I were overwhelmed by what we met in him, and were changed in some way...

...He offered us tea, and there was a dish of candies for visitors...

...He counseled patience, and said, "Never join a community that does not pray...

...Born Andre Borisovich Bloom in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1914, he trained as a physician in France, and while working as a doctor joined the Resistance against the German occupation...

...When I asked what he meant, he said, "Those eyes...

...In his love and endeavor he does not stand alone in Russia or abroad...

...they kept only what they needed, and gave the rest away...

...He took secret monastic vows during that period, and was professed as a monk in 1943...

...Asked why, he said, "I want them to have lost their convert's enthusiasm...

...After a few chapters he became so strongly aware of Christ's presence that he said he never after that experience doubted the existence of God...

...Ordained a priest in 1948, he was sent to London to serve the emigre Russian community, eventually becoming metropolitan, a rank in Russian Orthodoxy second only to the patriarch...

...It was important, he believed, to make sure that people encountered Orthodoxy as it is actually lived, at home and in the parish church, rather than to have an idea of Orthodoxy...

...His apartment, as I said, was spare...

...Moscow had heard of it already, and church officials there were not happy...

...When we left, one detail impressed me greatly...

...he never wrote anything for publication but he agreed to meet us...

...I answered that what you see in those eyes came from something true...

...It was as if my own life had been thrown into relief, and revealed for the sloppy thing it was and is...

...He was a remarkable man who changed many lives, mine among them, through his writing (the way I first encountered him), his preaching, and his personal witness...

...Did you make it yourself...

...What struck us most of all was his gaze piercing, totally focused...

...Anyone interested in joining the Orthodox community would be assigned to a family in the parish, and would spend the liturgical year worshiping with them...

...Bloom and his mother lived as simply as they could when he lived with her in Paris...

...That's how my wife Regina and I met Bloom...

...He asked his mother which Gospel was the shortest, sat down with the New Testament, and began to read the Gospel of Mark...

...When we rang, he came to the door himself unusual for a bishop and invited us upstairs...

...Bloom held a service during which he prayed for the rights of dissidents and, he told me, the phone was ringing when he got back to his apartment...

...It was November and cold outside...

...He spoke of his own way of receiving converts...

...He was ascetic without making it dramatic...

...It wasn't exactly ostentatiously ascetic, but it was a very spare place...

...Bloom was not in any way a proselytiz-er, and when I spoke of my interest in Orthodoxy he said that if that was where God wanted me to be, it would become clear to me, but in God's time and not my own...

...Regina had made a grey cloak, lined, and as he was helping her into it Metropolitan Anthony said, "This is beautiful work...

...When a priest addressed his youth group, he was so irritated by the lecture that he wanted to refute him by using the Bible itself...