by Penelope Sarrou and Iraklis Filios
‘And I want to tell you that we came into this world where we live in order to be useful’ (Papa-Stratis)
A short while ago, the well-known figure
Papa-Stratis departed this life. He was the priest at the church of
Saint George in Kalloni, Lesvos, and lost his battle against cancer at
the age of 57. His efforts were so great that the United Nations High
Commission for Refugees called him ’the Good Samaritan’ and the New York
Times mentioned him and his work [in an article on 5 August 2015].
From 2007, Papa-Stratis devoted his time
to the rescuing refugees and migrants (he helped about 10,000 people),
as well as to the financial relief of the residents of Lesvos, who, we
all know, are suffering the consequences of the economic crisis.
Together with the residents of Lesvos, he devoted himself to rescuing
refugees from the sea, made them welcome, gave them food, clothing and a
place to stay, as well as psychological support. This despite the fact
that he himself had suffered for years from a respiratory sickness and
always had to have a tube on him to provide oxygen directly into the
lungs.
He had the following to say about Angalia
(‘Embrace’), which was set up as an NGO: ‘Embrace started out-
unofficially in 2007, officially in 2009- as a way of providing shelter
for people coming from the coast opposite’. Referring to the
inspiration for the name, he remarked: ‘Our vision of Embrace came from
the Cross, where Christ Crucified had His arms outstretched, embracing
the whole world’.
As a man of God, Papa-Stratis acted with
the words of Christ in his mind: ‘I came not to be served but to
serve’. He made no distinctions in his service to people, applying
faithfully what the Lord talks about in the Gospel text about the
Judgment. With joy and dedication, he welcomed the divine words of the
reading, according to which Christ taught: ‘For I was hungry and you
gave me food, thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you took me
in, naked and you clothed me, sick and you visited me, in prison and you
came to me’. All of this is, of course, is engraved on the base of
Christ’s teaching on love, since, according to Saint John, ‘God is
love’.
Just as Christ preached to everyone,
healed people regardless of their race, color, religion or
socio-economic class, and spoke to the harlot, the tax-collector, the
stranger, so Papa-Stratis ‘girded with a towel’, with no regard at all
for any differences in the other people, dealt with human pain with
self-denial and love. Concerning this he said: ‘We see neither race, nor
nationality, religion or anything else; we see people. In any case, God
made people, and we all have the same hunger, we all love, we all fall
in love’.
At this point we ought to make an
important observation. It is certainly the case that, in the matter
which is the subject of this article, human kindness is the main
feature. But what human kindness is this? There are adherents of the
Enlightenment; Nietzsche’s ‘supermen’; and adherents of Saint Paul. At
first sight, all three teachings have the human person as their center,
but there’s a telling difference between Western humanism and that of
the Orthodox East.
Adherents of the Enlightenment are those
who have acquired rights and the principle of equality before the law
and the state, but do not recognize that these benefits come from the
will of God. Indeed, they are indifferent to God. In the face of the
weakness of human nature, Nietzsche’s ‘superman’ attempts to deify
humankind (hence the ‘revaluation of values’ which Nietzsche talked
about), though without experiencing God in this deification (i.e. as in
Athanasios the Great’s sense of ‘so that we may be made gods’).
Adherents of the Enlightenment and those of Nietzsche do not see the
human person in Christ, nor God in the human person, as does the
theology of the Orthodox East.
For Saint Paul, all people are God’s
creation, whose human nature has been tarnished but not lost. People
attempt, by God’s Grace, to become sharers in Christ’s sacraments. And
the most important thing is, that for Saint Paul, people are
individuals, themselves, standing before the Triune God, even if they’re
different from the rest of us, other than us, strangers to us.
According to the Apostle of the Gentiles, that stranger isn’t our enemy,
nor an infidel who has to be annihilated. This stranger is an excellent
and holy opportunity for us to be together as fellow-travelers and
companions on the road of life, which was created by God the Father of
us all. This ‘migration of love’ as Professor Stamoulis mentions in his
book, is God’s love for all people all over the world.
So in his remarks about there being no
difference between people, [the lack of discernment among people,] Saint
Paul says boldly, in his Epistle to the Galatians: ‘there is
no Jew, no Greek, no slave, no free, no male, no female. For you are all
in Jesus Christ. And if you belong to Christ, you are therefore the
seed of Abraham and heirs according to the promise’. Linking the words
of Saint Paul with those of Papa-Stratis, the latter says that: ‘for us
they’re people in need, and when you see someone cast up by the sea on
the beaches of Lesvos, or a mother and child crying, you’re not ever
going to open your mouth to ask whether they’re Christian before you
feed them… they had some religion, they believed in some God and they
had some hope for the next life’.
Papa-Stratis saw in others the stranger
mentioned in the title of this article. And here we have an ontological
reference to ourselves and the others. We don’t simply give something to
the stranger, we embrace them and take them in, with our own different
views and idiosyncrasies. The phrase ‘give me that stranger’ which comes
from the wonderful, poetic doxastiko for Great Saturday, is quite
different from ‘give to the stranger’. Papa-Stratis practiced this with
faith and unfailing generosity of spirit. Together with the residents
and volunteers of the beautiful island of Mytilini, he gave himself to
the Syrian refugees and the migrants, who had left their country, their
families, their homes, their native earth, not because they wanted to
but because they were ‘hounded out by the bullets of war’, as
Papa-Stratis put it.
This sacrificial effort on the part of
Papa-Stratis is an enterprise which began with a single person, a priest
and servant of the Most High, who conceived the idea but naturally
could never have put it into effect all on his own. Human kindness is
the special feature of Orthodox humanism and it is foreign to any form
of exclusion or segregation and is far removed from trite, banal
notions. In the nobility of its nature, it embraces the whole person. It
doesn’t deal with one person, but with all people, all societies.
Activating people through a sense of service to others is something that
affects all races, all nations. It is entirely foreign to any and all
segregation be it national, racial or religious, and, as the supreme
vocation towards other people, has nothing to do with nationalist fervor
or religious intolerance.
‘Greece hasn’t been lost by foreigners,
but by Greeks. I say this all the time. We’ve lost our morals, our
customs, our traditions. We’ve built luxurious houses, but we’ve
forgotten how to hug. We have to realize that we’re dealing with people
here. They’re God’s creatures, they’ve been made by the same God. To
love God, we must first love people. I’m not interested in religion. I’m
interested in people. People who love the world’ (Papa-Stratis).
Source-pemptousia.com
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