«Siluan»

Holy and venerable elder Silouan or, before the monastic tonsure at Athos, Semyon Antonov was one of the sons in a large peasant family.      He may have livedquite an ordinary life of a peasant, unless one day, as a boy of four, while talking to his father about the Lord, he said he would seek God when he grew up.     Further ahead, his life went on in a way not uncommon to a villager. He tilled land, did a joiner's work, and played the accordion.      He was a hefty and very strong fellow, popular with girls.     He could drink without becoming drunk, used his fists as he pleased and once very nearly killed one man, doing him serious bodily harm. According to him, he got one girl into trouble.      And so it would go on and on until, some fine day, he heard a voice of the Virgin Mary who told him: "You don't live right. I don't like the way you live, Semyon." Semyon felt ashamed of himself.    But more than anything he was stunned by the Virgin Mary's singular voice that sounded within him till the end of his days.     Since then his life and all his being changed drastically. He fell to thinking, gave up his accordion and idle gatherings on the village street and started, as he put it in his childhood, the search for God. And he did find Him, many years on, as he became a monk of Athos, frenziedly praying at the Savior's icon and thinking that God was unreachable and unable to hear him. But then, suddenly, the living Christ miraculously appeared before him. Christ's appearance was accompanied by such an intense luminance and a sensation of fire (“for our God is also a consuming fire", Hebrews 12.29 CV) that Silouan, as he recalls this, says: "If only Christ lingered another moment I wouldn't bear it and die."

     This is what needs to be briefly told, dear reader, to give you a clue about the issue dealt with below. To those, wishing to familiarize themselves at a greater length with the Saint's life, I recommend reading a book by archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov) about Silouan and one by a monk of Athos, Silouan's disciple, through whom I learned this saint's name and the texts of his sketches.
     Of course, Silouan never wrote any books and was poorly educated from the secular point of view. He was a monk with four classes of the parochial schooling. But it was he who, by God's providence, came by that Image and learned its meaning (which made the "learning" and the word by which it's described our most sought for assets). That word, however, does not apply to all the people who call themselves "learned" since they lack the Image, something this word is inseparably associated with.
     The texts had been collected mostly by hieromonk Sophrony from various scraps and sketches left after Silouan's death
as well from on-the-margin comments of the so called gardening books. Silouan had written them exclusively for himself and, as he confessed in one of those sketches, he couldn't help writing them. In my opinion, elder Silouan's history of sketches bears semblance to a history of Juan de la Cruz, another distinguished Catholic monk, also canonized. He had received a theological education at the University of Salamanca and known poetry. True, he had written few verses, but they are remarkable works composed in the simplest of words and conveying the finest, hardly describable, links between the human soul and the Lord. They explain the Lord's Love of the human soul its lust for the Lord. In this aspect, Juan's verses and Silouan's sketches are very much alike. Though, unlike Juan's works, Silouan's texts are not verses, they nevertheless are vibrant with poeticism which will surely be perceived so by a person versed in poetry. In addition, the rhymes, though seldom, do occur there, which, I believe, is no accident.
     The distinctive feature of Silouan's poetic prose is its saturation with pain about and compassion for all the people.
"Praying for people is like shedding blood for them". This, now famous, saying shows better than anything the monk's strivings and his, Silouan's, personal efforts. Whilst Juan was mostly concerned with Love and abnegation of everything for its sake, as well as with a desire to suffer for it (which in the end he got as time for this came) Silouan mainly bewailed the blindness and ignorance of people who, by Adam's sin, sold their birthright and life with God in heaven for a mess of pottage since they were  unaware that life on earth, full of passion to dominate somebody and to possess something, should be lived quickly as its end is near.
     The sin is truly understood not through mundane experience or via some human logic, though these can give some understanding.

The profound and all-embracing realization of its nature becomes clear only after the Divine luminance enters the human soul. That is when not only one's personal inconsistency and incongruence become obvious, but when one realizes a more important thing, i.e. Adam's sin and that of the whole mankind in all its entirety.
     Only through Divine Luminance a man can realize all the horror and sorrow of his ruinous condition in which he has sojourned since Adam's fall from grace.  This tempted and  transformed  the creatures'  entire  world,  transmuting  both  the  universe  and  the  creatures  inhabiting it.   The creatures accept their false existence in the false vanishing world and take the death in it as a natural phenomenon.

Such creatures are guided by the law that says – he is right who is stronger in the never-ending struggle for a place under the sun. Learning this, Silouan writes about Adam's cries. His writing is like crying, like that of Adam himself on the Babylon Rivers when he bewailed the Paradise lost, and the lost life in God. He writes with pain about us, blind people who have not learned God through the Holy Spirit and, hence, have learned nothing and continue to vegetate to no purpose. People, who lie, hate, rob and kill one another, unaware that the Lord's Infinite Love has laid in store for us both forgiveness, and life eternal in heaven with our true Father and Parent.
     "Like a bird striving to break loose from the tight cage and to fly to the green coppice…" these lines prompted in me the first wonderful motif of my small composition, which I subsequently expanded and enhanced. I did my best to handle, as sparingly as possible, those precious breathings of Silouan's soul, granted to me by the Lord. And still, I had to swop some words, to replace them with others, or, even to create some rhymes pursuant to the original's rhythm and reason. I hope the Saint will pardon me for failing to do the best possible job.   
To ease the listener's perception of the original text, I supply it in full.

    This composition was recorded at the Sound Recording Studio on Malaya Nikitskaya Street. Frankly speaking, the equipment is obsolete and must be replaced by a more advanced type. The accommodating facilities, too, should be re-equipped and renovated. No record, especially that of new music, no matter how simple but unknown to the performers, can be made without some difficulties. Usually they are eliminated by a certain number of rehearsalsuntil there are none. In addition, before the recording a conductor, author and sound producer come together to work on the score. They discuss how to implement it best of all, and what opportunities are provided by the sound-recording equipment, different groups of the orchestra and various instruments.All this takes time and entails spending.
    Should any of these requirements be not met, the quality will invariably suffer. One has either to accept this, or to continue work on the solution of those problems, or to recognize the effort as unsuccessful, and leave it till better times. I opted for the first scenario. So my work on this composition continues, and I plan to compose another part, hoping to release a CD in the future. I should say that despite our limited ways and means, we succeeded in doing generally a good job, thanks to the efforts of conductor Stanislav Dyachenko, soloist Tatiana Rubinskaya and musicians of the New Russia orchestra.

For this I thank all the contributors to the project.

    Finally, let's get down to business and listen to the music. For this, let's come up to the page top and click the word "Silouan" in the bottom right corner of Yelena Cherkasova's picture "Silouan's prayer," which she kindly made it available to me for placement on my site.

 

 

 

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