Written By: Archpriest Jovan Plamenac
Since many have presented their testimonies about Metropolitan Amfilohije, since his soul parted from his body, I also thought, trying to resist my own pride and not to boast that I knew him, not to put myself with him, to say something about the corner stone of the Montenegrin spiritual being of this time, aware that it is my the testimony of his personality is only an attempt to place in filjan the one to whom the universe was tight, as he said.
Metropolitan Amfilohije was home to Europe and he crossed the whole earth pattern, and he never left Moraca. He studied the highest schools, and remained a Montenegrin heavy. He was an interlocutor, side by side, to the most learned minds of the world, in their languages, and to his interlocutors in their localisms. He participated in resolving the most complex issues of the church, and ground disputes of Montenegrins. The powerful waited for him as he took upon himself the afflictions of the powerless.
A lot of black people are obsessed with her. Hundreds of churches, after he knocked on their scattered stones with his staff, were resurrected. With his prayer, new monasteries and many new churches grew up in Montenegro, even two that the Imperial Byzantium would be proud of at the peak of its glory.
The Holy Spirit, which in the form of burning tongues on the day of Pentecost descended upon the Holy Apostles, by the touch of his hand also descended upon hundreds of priests. His legs were trimmed with a huge bouquet of monks and nuns.
He was not only a shepherd from God entrusted to him the flock of this world, material, but also to his flock of the immaterial world. Baptized souls separated from bodies by the brutality of communist ideology, which were not worthy intoxicants because of the god-fighting of the regime, he became intoxicated, testifying to the unity of the being of the Church of this and that World.
On his omophor, that Samar of God entrusted to the bishop, was loaded a huge burden of sin, from monastic and priestly, and even Episcopal, to those of the smallest people (according to human gradation). The monks and nuns, and many others whose confession he received, regarded him as their spiritual master; some perceived the confession before him as a kind of dignity. "Who, I am a spiritual man; I am not a spiritual man to anyone," he said. He lived on the Holy Mountain, alongside one of the greatest spiritual leaders of the modern age, Elder Paisius, and felt the institution of spirituality up close. He did not engage in her vulgarization. He was obedient to God in the noise of the world.
Through his spiritual father Archimandrite Justin of cell, the angelic voice called him to return from the desert to the world, from the monastic ascendancy and silence, from the vestibule of the kingdom of heaven, to the whirlwind of the concerns of the material world. Just as God called out of the desert "the greatest of women born", his ancestor and Baptist, to return to the world and announce to Israel his coming, so also called hieromonk Amphilochius to sow his word in the fields of the Serbian people, which were greatly legislated. And just as St. John, fearlessly confessing the Lord before Herod, suffered with his head on the plate of a prostitute, God gave Metropolitan Amfilohije suffering in the sacrifice of the deification of the people to which he belonged. Out of this sacrifice came the bread that fed in the spirit the people that God entrusted to him and his fellow sufferer Bishop Joanikije, preparing him to receive the Holy Spirit who in this time of global suffering of the Church of Christ has grown right there, through the biblical scenes of lithios. Metropolitan Amfilohije, as the new Moses, led the people of Montenegro into exile from the slavery of the present new pagan Pharaoh.
By the force of his spirit, he lied to the Alamo of this world, which, carried with the wings of ideologies, first communist and then its natural extension globalist, pushed Christ out of the people's soul. "King of kings, and God of God. This means to God and heart, and soul, and being, and body, and to the King Paru – the tax due to him. And when the king asks for your soul and the soul of your child, when he wants to deprive you of you as an eternal being, to deprive you of Christ God – forgive me, who you are, I do not give you a soul, I do not give you faith, I do not give you Christ God,“ he said once in the bar.
As a defender of the Church in a storm of God-fighting, he had rare courage before God. He didn't go. This boldness resulted from his absolute trust in God, which elevated him above the status of God's servant, and above the status of the servant himself.
He was a pillar around which the God-loving Montenegrin people gathered together like a plastic. The glare of his grandiose personality burned the eyes of those who, before the Divine Light, fled into the darkness of disbelief in the blasphemies, from where they threw stones at him, screaming. He gave Christ a word that was Nagaya (Tatar short scourge) to the Christ-worshippers, and a balm to the Christ-lovers.
He saw what others did not see. For him, Kosovo and Metohija was not a territory, it was not just a blood-soaked land that blossomed into peonies, monasteries and churches, and the foundation of the Serbian self. Kosovo (with Metohija) was to him the kingdom of heaven in his choice with the offered pleasures of the material world: property, bodily pleasures and human glory; it was to him – the vow of Prince Lazar. With those eyes he saw the hunted and the Rumi.
He walked the earth with great strides. He wanted to get as far away as possible in that moment. He didn't ignore the little things, but he didn't bother with them. It was almost impossible to follow him. Sometimes difficult to understand. He did not reason emotionally, or often rationally.
It wasn't hard to fool him. Just as Scepan The Little Metropolitan Sava Petrović swore on the Gospel that he was the Russian Emperor Peter III, so did the Montenegrin new pagan Pharaoh Metropolitan Amfilohije on the relics of St. Peter of Cetinje, and with them on the hand of St. John the Baptist and a piece of the Holy Cross, on which the Lord Jesus Christ was crucified, he swore allegiance to the Church. He who washed it, and wanted it, could get under his skin and thus gain his favor, even the unjust. That affection, however, never turned into intimacy.
In his life, he said, "whatever." His weaknesses were, by human nature, part of his character. But they were not at the base of his being.
Carried away by the creative light of the West, by its light-skinned glow, he briefly departed from God, exposed his faith to doubt. This trace remained in his poetry, in the collection "in the Lamb is salvation". But, doubting his own doubt, he saved the Union of European Christian civilization and moved his soul and body to its place of origin, in Jelada. There, through the theology of St. Gregory Palamas, he came to know the essence of the non-divine light and, as the mother of the river, he gave himself to it with all his being, until the end of his earthly life. I am deeply convinced, now she lives in it.
*On the occasion of four years since the death of Metropolitan Amfilohije, from the collection "Cross told us" prepared by Slobodan Čurović APIs.
Title photo: svetigora.com
1. November 2024.
