No niin, terveisiä sinne missä Leksa istuu

Teidän "valonne" loistaa nyt koko maailmaan /New York Times:

For Father Repo, the hardest part of all this has been the demand that he stop working as a priest. “I heard from my parents that already at 5 I wanted to be a priest,” he said with a laugh. “I imitated my father.” Father Repo was the ninth of 13 children. “At 7 I’d decided I’d become an archbishop,” he said with a deep chuckle.
Recalling Orthodoxy’s Slavic roots, he added: “The Eastern Orthodox world has much to give Western Europe — its sincerity, its emotional way.”
He added: “The soul of Fyodor Dostoyevsky is something we need in Europe.”
The bishops’ decision does not mean Father Repo ceases to be a priest, but only that he cannot function as such or wear the garb of a priest in public. So now he has replaced cassock and cross with a white shirt, suit and tie, though his business card still identifies him as “pastor” and has a picture of Helsinki’s onion-domed Ouspensky Cathedral.
He sees himself as part of an Orthodox tradition that dates from Byzantine times, in which the line between public figure and priest blurred. He cited Archbishop Makarios, who in the 1970s was Archbishop of Cyprus and leader of the Greek Cypriot community there, but also Russian Orthodox priests who in 1919 and again in the early 1990s were active in parliamentary politics.
BUT Jyrki Harkonen, the theological secretary of the church, said different times demanded different policies. “We were very isolated then, the independence of the churches was not respected as it is today in the European Union,” he said.
“The synod encouraged him to participate in public life,” Mr. Harkonen said, “but as a simple person, not as an Orthodox priest.”
But Father Repo objects that “in the Byzantine tradition, from which Orthodoxy went forth, it is not normal spirituality to say, ‘I am a Christian only in my interior life.’ Parliaments are discussing morality and ethics, and I think I can have a spirituality as a representative of Eastern European countries and cultures.”

Yet, Father Repo must for now content himself with an interior spiritual life. In the evenings, when he can, he often retreats to a rustic cottage that he built, with a tiny chapel decorated with icons he himself painted, for a relaxing sauna, a dip in a nearby pond and fervent prayer.

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