In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

All right, so. I have just come out, after seeing the hermit I mentioned to you. I can’t tell you what we’ve talked about, because obviously it’s private, but also although this is not confession, I treat it very much like confession. That implies that I keep the sacrament secret. I’ve often noticed that people don’t realize that confession doesn’t simply mean that the confessor cannot speak about what has been discussed to other people; it doesn’t seem to mean that the confessor has to keep things secret. It also means that you, the one who has made the confession, keep the sacrament secret, that you keep the doors closed to the sacrament that unites the three of you, the three that are present in the sacrament: you, your confessor, and Christ himself.

Now, of course, what I talk about with these fathers shapes me, and that in turn informs what I talk to you about. Perhaps this is as good a time as any to say a few things about the relationship one has with one’s spiritual father, because I’ve noticed many of you don’t really know how to preserve what you have. Many of you have told me that you don’t have a spiritual father, and that brings a lot of pain in your life. But then when I speak to you about the relationships you have with the fathers who could be, who could become spiritual fathers to you, I notice a great deal of wrong attitudes and mistakes in the way you relate to them. I suppose it doesn’t hurt if I pointed those mistakes out, and hopefully found a way, found a good word to advise you how to properly interact with these people.

The basic understanding, the basic thing I wish you would remember is that the relationship with one’s spiritual father has to be protected. You have to fight for it; you have to protect it. For instance, I only come here, and I only go and visit this hermit when I have a real question. When I feel that I have a real question, when I feel I have something that can make or break me, when I look deep down at my sins, at my problems, at the things I struggle with, and I identify a source for all these problems, the root of all these problems, then I go through the torment of traveling three days here and three days back to speak to him for an hour or an hour and a half, and I ask just one or two questions, the questions that count.

God answers when things matter. God is present when things matter. Once I am there in his cell and we start talking, when I feel that my questions have been answered, I leave. It is my initiative. He never stands up or points to the door or says, “I think it’s time for you to go, Fr. Seraphim.” It is my initiative. I actually purposely cut short the conversation the minute when I feel all my questions have been answered. When the conversation descends to, let’s say, normal intensity, when I perceive that the Holy Spirit has finished talking and it is now just the two of us left in conversation, just me and the hermit, then I choose to end the conversation.

I choose to do that in order to protect him and in order to protect our relationship. He, for me, is a sacred vessel. He is a chalice by means of which I receive the word of God, and I don’t want anything else. I don’t want to put anything else in this chalice except for the word of God. Nothing else, no matter how tasty, so to say, nothing of this world should be in this chalice except the word of God. I don’t want to use this man for anything else except to ask for a word from God. I don’t need to know a lot about his personal life; I don’t need to agree or disagree with him concerning anything. I don’t need to agree with his politics; I don’t need to agree with his visions on culture or arts. In fact, I don’t even want to know his political opinions, and I would cut short in the most abrupt way any conversation leading towards that topic.

I try and I do my best—I actively do my best—to avoid any conversation that is not strictly and absolutely related to my spiritual life. I don’t need him to “get” me. I don’t need him to understand me as a human being, as a man, because that is all irrelevant. The only two things I’m concerned with is that he is, indeed, a vessel for the Holy Spirit, and that I do not mis-use him.

This may sound rather harsh to you, particularly as many of you have met me and you’ve seen I’m not a harsh person. By nature, I’m almost like a grandmother. It comes natural to me to have patience; it comes natural to me to try to put people at ease, and probably that is so because that is what I need also from my relationships with other people. But this is not a normal human relationship; this is a relationship like no other. He is not my friend, he is not my mother, he is not my father. I don’t do chit-chat with him. We don’t play football together.

And this is of course an image for you. The idea is we do not spend quality time together, as I’ve seen many of you do with your priests, with your confessors. I strongly advise you against that. I think—well, I know, I know with certainty that that is a bad idea. It can work in the beginning; it can work as a way to draw people in, and my suspicion is that’s why all these fathers initiate these secular events, secular contexts to draw you in when you are merely children in your spiritual life. But once those stages have been overcome, once you are no longer a babe in your spiritual life and you have the needs of a spiritual adult, you have to develop an adult spiritual relationship with your spiritual father.

I do my absolute best to build high walls around my relationship with my spiritual father and my spiritual advisor in order to keep it what it is: a gift from Christ, a most wonderful gift from Christ. Try to imagine that Christ would somehow appear to you. You have a vision of Christ, in which Christ puts in your hands a most beautiful piece of cloth. You receive it from Christ’s own hands. It comes from the kingdom. Would you use that cloth to dust with, to wash your dishes with, to clean your shoes with? Or would you keep that cloth in the best and most honorable place in the home, only looking at it from time to time with awe and with care, and you would only use it to keep—I don’t know—very holy things like a piece of relic in it? Or maybe to wipe your lips after you’ve received Communion? It’s the same thing with one’s spiritual father. One has to fight to keep a spiritual relationship from degrading into a human one, because no matter how beautiful, how inner-reaching a human relationship is, they cannot compare by any means with a spiritual relationship.

The purpose of a spiritual relationship is not primarily to develop a relation with the other human in it, with the spiritual father, for instance, but to develop a relationship with Christ himself, through the other human person. There is, of course, a personal, semi-human, so to say, relationship that is being developed between the two persons involved in this, but that relationship between the two human beings comes of the relationship they both witness between the other one and Christ. When you go to war, for instance, I imagine the common experience of war creates the most extraordinary relationships. It’s the same here. When you see each other react before Christ, when you witness the nakedness, the weakness, the fallenness, but also the hope, the love, the craving, the longing for Christ of the other one, the bond between the two of you will be deeper than any human relationship.

That’s pretty much all I wanted to say today: Fight for your spiritual father. Sacrifice in order to develop the relationship, as I’ve told you in the previous podcast, and fight to preserve the relationship with him on a spiritual level. Even if he wants to become a friend, even if he wants to get closer in a human way, because perhaps they feel that this will keep you closer to the Church, you should not allow it.

I had actually told my spiritual father that he was not my friend, and I will share this with you although perhaps I shouldn’t. There was a moment when I felt very lonely, very much like I was abandoned by everyone. The way I phrased it was that I have no friend; I have no one I could speak to as a friend. And my spiritual father said, “But I can be your friend,” and I felt both the temptation of having him as a friend, but also I perceived with perfect clarity—glory be to God, with perfect clarity—the danger of our spiritual relationship degrading once we have lowered it to the level of a human friendship. Don’t lower a spiritual relationship to yet another human one. Don’t use a gift from Christ for an undignified purpose.

As I am walking now, I am remembering all those sayings from the Desert Fathers. There is that saying, that example of a disciple asking an abba, “Why are there no more spiritual fathers like in the past?” And the answer was, “Because there are no longer the spiritual sons of the past.” There is a saying as well in Romanian that one fathers his own spiritual father, because it is all in the attitude we have towards our spiritual guides. They become what we allow them to become, the way flowers grow to the extent that they have the space to grow, and a tree will grow to the extent that it will have the space and the light to grow. If we want a friend, our priest, our parish priest, will become our friend. If we want a spiritual father and we relate to them as spiritual fathers, in real life and in the way we pray for them, then be certain, be sure that you are slowly giving birth to your spiritual father.

I have to start walking again, because I am all alone on these paths, and you know by now I don’t feel very comfortable surrounded by woods and tiny wolves waiting for a tiny person to bless their lunch or indeed become their lunch.

One’s spiritual father is the greatest gift that Christ can give you. Apart from giving himself to us and the kingdom and all the saints of the kingdom, with the Mother of God leading all of them—apart from what he has already done for us through his incarnation, his crucifixion and resurrection, sending us the gift of a spiritual father, the gift of a spiritual advisor is higher than anything else.

Be ready to sacrifice for that gift, and not only be ready to sacrifice but be willing to sacrifice. It is a joy, it is an honor for me to eat less in order to put aside the money to see my spiritual father, because I know that all that suffering—ooh, I’m so tired—all this tiredness, will be converted by Christ, will be turned by Christ into grace, which I am receiving, which I have just received a few minutes ago, from this hermit, whom Christ himself sent my way. Be ready to sacrifice, and then be ready to fight in order to protect that gift as holy, as sacred, as clean and pure as it was when Christ gave it to you.

Oh! May Christ give all his wonderful gifts to all of us, both here in this world, but especially so in the kingdom. May we all be blessed. I pray for you here; please pray for me wherever you are, and for the monastery. And don’t forget to help us, to support us, to make things a bit easier for us so we keep on working to bring Christianity, to bring Orthodoxy back to the Celtic isles of Scotland. God bless all of us, again and again and again. Amen.