Just a few decades ago, the famous Jean Paul Sartre, immersed in the latent Western tradition rooted in himself, exclaimed: “l’enfer, c’est les autres” (hell is other people). Whoever they are, known and unknown; the face of every person whom I will encounter. In the process of relating to the others, something steals my time, my space, my mood; even in my tendency to win and dominate everything, these “others” with the same free will as mine, intercept me.
Since then, this phrase has covered as a banner every idea that wants man as merely an individual existence, without opening the self to the unknown “other”, because they really were hell.
But to anyone who smelled the frankincense of Orthodoxy, to anyone who tasted holy bread and koliva of the Soul Saturday, to anyone who even glimpsed the Orthodox people living the Church as their home, this idea can only be unknown. For us, the “other” can only be Eden, paradise; the opportunity for deification. And if the relationship with them is difficult, this should be” joy of joys”; this deification will also acquire a sense of martyrdom.
Do not think of all this as a simple theory. It is a living faith. I personally experienced the despair of the one, the individual. Alone in foreign countries, with no one speaking a language you understand. Being the only one with a different color and appearance, the only one with another faith. But there, when I had nothing but a booklet with the Prayer of the Unmercenary Saints, there was revealed to me the paradise of the Other, of the unknown image of God. The man who cannot speak to you and yet shares his bread. The child who will squeeze your knees with his arms. The tearful eyes at the sight of water. My unknown brothers from Greece who offered enough for us to build the Holy Trinity Church in a place where there had only been house churches. Those who said “yes” to my help request, so that now sixty tons of rice and thirty tons of water are daily distributed in areas throughout southern Madagascar, which have been plagued by drought for more than three years. To the fathers, mothers and lay people who commemorate my sick children in the hospitals of horror on their prayer rope. To you who show me every day that paradise is not in the clouds but in your faces.
A thank-you, a prayer and a walk in the paradise of your soul.
A grateful man,
† Prodromos of Toliara and Southern Madagascar
