His Eminence Metropolitan Nikolozi is the Georgian Orthodox Bishop of Akhalkalaki, Kumurdo, and Kari. He converted to Orthodoxy in the early 1980s, during Soviet times. He was then ordained to the priesthood in 1991 by his Holiness the Catholicos, Patriarch Ilia, and was consecrated a bishop in 1996. He holds a PhD in Missiology and Patristics. His diocese in southern Georgia is about 97% Armenian, and there are seven Orthodox monasteries and one priest serving a number of parishes.
In our first interview, Met. Nikolozi spoke with us about his love for Fr. Seraphim (Rose) and his recent decision to locally canonize him in his diocese, and about what exactly that means.
In this second interview, His Eminence spoke about his personal acquaintance with St. Gabriel (Urgebadze) and about mission work in the Georgian Orthodox Church today.
We were also joined by Michelle from Punks and Monks, a spiritual daughter of Metropolitan Nikolozi.
—We spoke a bit in the first interview about how you personally knew St. Gabriel (Urgebadze), the Fool for Christ, a contemporary saint of Georgia. And you have spoken about him in other interviews as well. I recently watched your interview with Trisagion Films where you shared several stories about St. Gabriel, and rather than repeating what was said in that interview, we could begin with questions that arise from what you said there.
You said that St. Gabriel could see what was in your heart. How did you first realize that he had this spiritual gift from God, and what was your reaction? It could be rather intimidating to know that a holy man is able to know your thoughts.
—This is very a serious question. When I became Orthodox and started going to church, I had some questions that I asked my spiritual father, and he gave me very good answers, but there was one question I couldn’t ask because I didn’t know how to express it in words. Now I can tell you what it was.
So, we have older saints that everyone recognizes. For instance, nobody doubts that St. Nicholas is a saint. And there are modern saints as well, who lived among us and now are canonized. For example, we spoke about St. Gregory Peradze who was a professor at Warsaw University. Later, he was sent to Auschwitz, where he was killed. There are such people, who will be canonized in the future. And my question back then was who are these people and how can we find them? The first answer was that maybe they don’t exist anymore, because it’s modern times; everything has changed, there are no miracles. I felt like the Christian life was not life, but just mechanical rule-following. We read prayers. You have to pray, not read prayers. But we read them.
I remember the first time I saw St. Gabriel, I was completely shocked by his appearance. He looked like one of the ancient monks. He was very dirty on the outside, and he was speaking and behaving strangely. On the other hand, I was trying to understand the logic—how he formulates these strange sentences, and I wanted to watch and understand the meaning of his strange behavior. It was impossible to understand directly what he was speaking about, what he wanted. The first time I met him was 1989 or 1990, and then in 1995 he reposed, and I became a bishop in 1996. But I was a priest while he was alive, and I spent many hours with him.
And I tried to remember the things that I didn’t understand from him, and I always told myself maybe I would find the answers later. To understand him, you had to know his life, his personality, his positions on things. It was impossible for me to know all this together, and that’s why I tried to remember all this.
You see, I’m a physicist, and the idea is that we create models and try to prove them with experiments. And if something different happens, we change this model. So I tried to create a model about St. Gabriel, and to see if how he behaved, how he talked, fit with my model. And I was correcting this model and my understanding of who a saint is and what it means to be a holy person.
Sometimes he would ask me some very strange questions. “Do you trust me?” I didn’t understand what he was asking. I trust God. How can I trust him? Now I understand what he was asking, and of course I trusted him. He couldn’t just say, “I’m a saint. Do you trust me?” No. But I trusted that his understanding of God was true, and so I learned many things from him. For example, he was always vested. One time he was wearing his klobuk, and he had a piece of paper on his forehead with “God is love” written on it. And he was just smiling. And it was strange, because at that time I was thinking, “Oh, all the vestments are so holy and it’s not good to put something on them.” But later I thought a lot about what this means. This action explained more about the meaning of the words.
It doesn’t mean simply that God is love, but that it’s the most important thing to know. It’s the most important thing in our faith. And later, when I learned the Holy Fathers, I learned that they were the last words of the life of St. John the Theologian. When he became old, he would always repeat: “My beloved spiritual children, love each other.” And they asked him why he always repeated this. “Because these words include the most important teaching of the Bible,” he said.
And there were his mannerisms too. He wore this on his forehead for a whole week. So, I want to say that my model of what a saint is was never destroyed by his words or actions.
He was also a controversial person, and some people said many terrible things about him. There are people who say such terrible things about our Patriarch today too, and some people believe them. So this question of whom do you trust is very important. There’s a very nice modern movie for children called Second Hand Lions by Tim McCandless. I think it’s one of the best movies ever; it’s about whether to trust someone or not and what it means to trust. I think it’s somehow theological. I think this is the most important decision—to trust someone or not.
As I said, he was very controversial, but now I know how to respond to this.
—Michelle: I think an important point Meupe1 is trying to communicate is that when you trust someone’s intentions to be good, even when you misunderstand the words they’re saying, you can trust that the motivation is pure. Fr. Gabriel had some very peculiar mannerisms, some peculiar ways of communicating, of reaching the lost, but if you knew him personally or trusted that he was a holy man with pure intentions, you could look past some of these things that seemed peculiar and see his intention, see the message he was communicating. But if you didn’t believe, you could very easily take some of the things he said and the way he lived and construe it to be something that it wasn’t at all.
—And what he’s saying or how he’s acting in one particular instance might be incomprehensible to many, but the person sitting right next to him might understand his meaning. It’s a message specifically for that person, perhaps. It might not be for everybody, but for somebody it’s exactly what they need.
—Michelle: This is exactly what Christ did. He spoke in parables to His Disciples.
—And they often didn’t understand.
—Michelle: And they often did not understand what He was saying. But like Meupe is saying, the Apostles would memorize the words Christ said, and those words would come back to them later. There have been many times where I was reading Scripture and I had no idea what it was about, but months or years later that Scripture came back to my mind and I understood. There were more pieces of the puzzle that had to be put in place before I could understand. And with these men who are saints, it’s the same. We might not understand why he had “God is love” on his forehead, but sometime later we come to understand. Now I get it—he wasn’t crazy. He was a very holy man and there was a grand purpose to this, and now I understand his message.
—And Meupe, perhaps we could say a holy person is someone whose life matches what he preaches. So he put, “God is love” on his forehead; but of course, St. Gabriel himself was also full of love. I’m assuming you could feel his love.
—You see, now it’s easier for me to speak about him, because I’ve learned about some other examples like him. For example, there’s my new experience with Fr. George Calciu. I knew about him but I didn’t know everything that happened with him—how he was a prisoner for twenty-one years, and how it was possible to stay kind and forgive. His last words were that he forgave everybody, even those people who persecuted him. And how did it happen?
It was the same with Fr. Gabriel, because he had the same experience in a Soviet prison. They decided to kill him, and he later told us the story of what happened. They had a doctor examine him, and he knew that if he diagnosed St. Gabriel as mentally ill, then they wouldn’t execute him, and so that’s what he did. The doctor knew he wasn’t mentally ill, but he gave him this diagnosis anyway. And this is very similar to Fr. George Calciu, who also endured vicious beatings in prison. He was also examined by a doctor who helped him. But he was really martyred in prison, and that’s how he paid for this love.
From my point of view, Fr. George Calciu was a great martyr for what he went through, because they tortured him. They just demanded that he renounce his faith and he’d go free. But Fr. George refused, so he didn’t get his freedom. It was the same with Fr. Gabriel. He was a confessor, and the price for his confession was great. He was martyred. And that’s why after he endured all this and with God’s help he remained alive, he could allow himself everything—his behavior, to be a fool for Christ. Because on the inside he had great love for God, which he proved with his blood.
—Michelle: What Meupe is trying to communicate is that they may not have literally lost their lives, but they laid down their lives for the Gospel. They were also both physically tortured and their priesthood was temporarily stripped from them. And it was in laying down their lives that they were able to live in freedom.
—So they were taking up their cross daily. Carrying the cross with Christ. Martyrdom in that sense.
—It’s impossible now to repeat everything that Fr. Gabriel did. This goes back to what Fr. Seraphim said about inspiration in the article “In Step with Sts. Patrick and Gregory of Tours.” I can put “God is love” on my forehead. I could repeat what he did, but it would only be on the surface. It would be play-acting. Nobody would buy it and everybody would laugh at me.
We’re not supposed to literally copy the exact words and actions of the saints, but the important thing is to internalize the love of God that they were living out and ask them for help to find our own way to live out the love of God in today’s world.
—And St. Gabriel didn’t just one day decide to go burn a picture of Lenin, which got him persecuted. He was living the spiritual life that gave him the boldness to do that, that gave him the strength of faith to then endure the consequences. So for us to just imitate the outward action would be play acting, unless we have the spiritual life to back it up.
He had done great spiritual work already before this. In this Soviet period, he would go to Bethany Monastery, near Tbilisi, to two saints who were living there. One was from Mt. Athos and the other from Georgia. They were the only monks living in the monastery then, and they worked very hard, enduring WWII, to provide food for the whole village around the monastery. They were St. Gabriel’s teachers, and he learned from them how to pray, how to fast, and so on.
So burning the picture of Lenin wasn’t the beginning, but the result. He was ready to end his life with this, which he believed would happen. But he ended up living a long time after that.
—In your interview with Trisagion Films, you spoke about how you watched Fr. Gabriel commune in the altar one time, and how completely serious he was. You said you’d never seen anyone more serious. So, he was a fool on the one hand, and absolutely serious on the other. How do these two things fit together in the same person? What unites these two?
—First of all, we have to understand what foolishness means. When somebody says something that seems untimely or their behavior is strange—if I would do something strange in this interview—we would say it is foolishness. But to be a fool for Christ is the most difficult manner of Christian living. No one was calling him a fool for Christ while he was alive. This came later. He was a very serious person, but his behavior was not understandable.
But in this situation, when he came to take Communion, all the strangeness melted away, and at that time I didn’t realize what was happening to me. Something happened inside of me. Later I tried to remember all his movements—how he came to the chalice—and I tried to repeat it. But of course, it’s impossible to repeat. And now, as I’m thinking about this, I remember that it didn’t happen visually. It happened inside of me, and it was a witness. When you see someone who is a saint, it means he has living contact with God, so it was only possible to feel it.
I want to repeat again that there is a difference between reading prayers and praying. There’s a difference between taking Communion and communing. This was real Communion. I can’t explain why, but I can just say that it was. It made a deep, lasting impression on me. So that’s what I mean that he was completely serious. I can only compare him to our Patriarch. For me, he’s a real, living saint. I’ve met many people, many clergy, but these two are on another level.
— The Patriarch knew St. Gabriel, and St. Gabriel honored him, so maybe he received some of that spirit from St. Gabriel.
—It’s impossible to describe our life in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Our Patriarch was absolutely isolated, and he couldn’t say exactly what he wanted to say. It was impossible for him to go find St. Gabriel and bring him into church, because he wasn’t allowed. When the Patriarch first heard that Metropolitan Daniel, who is my spiritual father, who was a priest at the time, found him and took him to his home, he was very happy. He couldn’t officially bless us, but he blessed us to be with him. And later he elevated St. Gabriel to the rank of archimandrite, which was the only thing he could do at that time. And then he blessed him to go live in the convent at Samtavro.
—And it was when he lived at Samtavro that you would often serve with him, correct?
—That’s right.
—Something else from your interview with Trisagion Films: You mentioned that one time you asked St. Gabriel for forgiveness because you felt like he was such a person that you should leave everything, including your family, and go be with him, but you couldn’t. If I may ask, how did he respond? I can’t imagine there are many people who would ask someone for forgiveness for something like that.
—Being a fool for Christ is very interesting because it means you never give a direct answer; it means you say something that people have to think about it later. And just like when he was taking Communion and he was absolutely serious, when I told him this, he looked at me, silently, and in his eyes I understood that he understood what I was saying and that he forgave me. It all happened in just a second. And it was absolutely understandable.
I was thinking a lot about how I could leave my wife and my child and go with him, and I felt that it was my weakness that made it impossible to do.
—Since we’ve raised this topic, maybe we should explain. You were married and have children, so how did it come about that you became a bishop?
—It was a long path. From the beginning, my wife and I started studying the Scriptures and the examples of the saints, and it was her idea to learn about holy families, like we see in the life of St. Nina. When she turned twelve, all the members of her family decided to go to different monasteries, and God blessed this idea. So we wanted to know if it was possible in our day, and we thought a lot about it. I asked some priests and some monks about it who are educated in theology.
I didn’t speak with the Patriarch about it, but when I became a priest, in 1992, His Holiness gave me his blessing to become the abbot of a monastery. It’s quite unusual in the Church for a priest with a family to become an abbot, and he proposed that I get tonsured. He gave me three days to think about it. My wife and I discussed it, and I ended up telling him no, it’s impossible. A few years later, he made the same proposal and told me he wanted me to become a bishop. I discussed it with my wife again, and she said she wasn’t ready for it. I was very disappointed—it had been her idea at first.
But we prayed about it for a whole year. I woke up at 6 AM every day, and after a year His Holiness summoned me and asked me about it again. And this time my wife said yes. So it was a process. I had three daughters by this point, and my parents lived with us—all of us together in a very small apartment. But I knew that my father would take care of the family, and all of the children grew up with his care.
—I think it’s an important point that this was the initiative and blessing of the Patriarch.
—Michelle: It was actually his wife and his sister who first encouraged him to go to church. His sister ended up becoming the abbess of a very important monastery in Georgia, and his wife eventually agreed to him becoming a bishop.
—You’ve borne this episcopal cross for several decades now. Of course, St. Gabriel was never a bishop, but how does he continue to inspire and guide you in your episcopal ministry?
—Of course, I never forget my obligations as a bishop, but I also never forget how I felt when I was a layman and how I would greet priests and bishops. Once our Patriarch told us: “When I speak with priests, I’m a little afraid of them, because they have fire in their hands.” I learned many things from him; he always respected priests and bishops. And nothing has changed for me—when I meet another bishop or a priest, I forget who I am, and I go to get their blessing.
Of course, this is uncommon in the Church, for a bishop to get a blessing from a priest, but I find myself doing it. Even with abbesses, even with nuns. It’s very important that if you feel that you are somebody, you have to prove it with your actions, with your care for people. And for that reason, Fr. Gabriel was a saint. When I meet such people now, I try to venerate their hand, and of course they try not to give their hand for veneration.
—That reminds me of the life of St. Mary of Egypt, where she asks for Fr. Zosima’s blessing and he asks for her blessing. He says, “You’re the holy ascetic.”
—But she says, “No, you’re the priest. You celebrate the Holy Eucharist.”
—It seems to me that the English-speaking Orthodox world is not so familiar with most of the Georgian saints. Other than St. Gabriel, are there other Georgian saints in particular that you would like people to know about?
—Yes, but the problem is that because of our history, there is much that isn’t so well known. In ancient times, our country was always at war with the giants around us. We’re a very small country, and we’ve been surrounded by huge countries, kingdoms. And our citizens were always holding their swords. There are about 3 million Georgians in the country now, and that’s it. There are maybe 5 million in the whole world.
In the nineteenth century, we were under the Russian Empire, and it was forbidden to serve in the Georgian language. In the Soviet times, it was impossible to peacefully study theology or the history of the Church, so we don’t know much about Georgian saints. Every Saturday I make a video about the saint we commemorate that day. And throughout this four-year project there have been some Georgian saints, and of course I tried to learn about them from primary sources. Of course, you have the book The Lives of the Georgian Saints, with some brief information about them, but the full stories need to be translated to make our saints familiar for the whole world.
Yes, they lived long ago, but how do we participate in their experience, and how do they participate in our lives?
—Michelle: One of the things that make his Saturday presentations unique is that he doesn’t just provide historical facts. He researches all of the sources, about how these people interacted in their time periods, and then he talks about how that can speak to us today. So it’s a factual recounting of what happened, plus how we can take those principles and apply them to us today.
—If you find a diamond, by itself it’s very nice, but if you put it in a crown, it begins to shine. As St. Gregory of Tours says, it’s not the lives of the saints, but the life of all the saints. And when I speak about the Georgian saints, or about Spanish saints of the seventh century, for example, I can see that our Georgian saints are members of this same family.
This was Fr. Seraphim’s idea as well, which he got from St. John (Maximovitch). He would often go and tell the brothers about his research into the Western saints—about St. Alban, for example. There are many saints like this, and in this family, of course the Georgian saints have their place.
—It’s interesting that you’re not just conveying information, but talking about how to apply the example of the saints today. And obviously mission work is very important for you. You’re the Vice Chairman of the Patriarchal Missionary Department, you have a degree in missiology, your thesis was on missionary work. Tell us, please, about missionary work in Georgia, in your diocese, and how the examples of Fr. Seraphim and St. Gabriel contribute to that.
—Mission work isn’t a stale idea—it’s life. The one Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church has a double meaning. It's the Church established by the Apostles, and the Church that is apostolic—a missionary Church. We must never forget this. We are Apostles and we have to go and bring this message to the whole world.
And this is another one of Fr. Seraphim’s ideas. He says you are a Christian always, everywhere, or you’re not Christian. If you live your Christianity only when you’re at church, then you’re not Christian. And this is what we try to teach our youth. This is a long story. We’ve had summer camps for students since 2001, and other programs.
So this is mission work. We are missionaries.
And we began to do this with the St. Nina’s Way pilgrimage. After the Soviet period, the people weren’t even baptized. There was one day in 1989 when so many people came to us that it was impossible to baptize them all in the church. We brought all the people, the priests blessed the river (I was a layman still), and baptized all these people in the river. And we continued to do it all over Georgia. I have baptized at least hundreds, probably thousands of people myself.
—After the fall of the USSR, there was this fervor of people returning to the faith; but have they stayed? Or is this a problem in the Georgian Church? How do you work to keep people in the Church and going deeper?
—It’s not easy, because to be Orthodox means to do it every day, from the moment you open your eyes. I’d like to use another fundamental idea from Fr. Seraphim (Rose). He says you have to make an injection of Orthodoxy every day. Don’t miss a day. It’s not easy. The only way for your preaching to be successful is to show an example. You have to do it yourself first—fast, pray, don’t miss the services, read Holy Scripture and the Holy Fathers. If you’re not doing this and trying to teach others, even if you’re a bishop, it won’t be successful at all. It’s hard work. But the person who is doing this work is successful in his preaching and will have parishioners. But we are very lucky to have a Patriarch who is doing all this for us, and we just have to follow him. This brings fruit.
—Michelle: Under Patriarch Ilia there were something like fifty churches at the end of the Soviet period, and now there are about 3,000.
—And all the bishops of our Church were consecrated under him. He’s a real father for our Church.
—He’s been guiding the Church as Patriarch for forty-five years now, right?
—But he’s been a monk for about seventy years. That’s why we say he’s an entire epoch in the Church himself.
—In your diocese, you’re doing a lot of work to bring mountain village people back, and parishes are opening, but for the time being you only have one priest to serve them. Are there any candidates for the priesthood in these parishes?
It’s not too easy to find someone who wants to come here, because we have many problems: ethnic problems, climate, and it’s a little far from the rest of Georgia. So we have to find young people from this area, and we’re doing this, but it won’t happen quickly.
In my opinion, a priest needs to be educated—first of all in theology, but not only. He needs to know about the challenges of the modern world. That’s why we created this special master’s degree in theology. We have some young people now, but we haven’t ordained any yet. We have many children in the Church now. About half of the church in Akhalkalaki is children ten and under.
—God-willing, you will find some worthy candidates. And do you have any parting words for us?
—When I first read the life of St. Nicholas, I read that he began to work miracles before he was born. And when he was born, as a three-day-old child, he was standing in the baptistery, and then he was fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays, not eating milk. When I read this, I was completely inspired, but on the other hand, I was disappointed, because I wasn’t doing this, and it seemed I would never be close to him.
But then I begin to read the life of modern saints who were born in the same situation, who maybe graduated from some university like me. Fr. Seraphim studied linguistics, which is very close to mathematics; and when I was learning mathematics and physics, and then I came to the Church and read his words about how he felt at home when he became Orthodox, it gave me an example that I can do the same; an example of how it’s possible.
And if it’s possible to be saved, then it’s an obligation. And this is very important for our days, because people may say, “You teach us to pray and fast, but I’m not a saint, and I won’t do all this.” But why aren’t you a saint?
—During Lent, I reread the biography of St. Joseph the Hesychast, written by Elder Ephraim. He reposed in 1959, so he was not quite as contemporary as Fr. Seraphim or St. Gabriel, but he was basically our contemporary. And it’s amazing to see his complete dedication to Christ, his level of asceticism from somebody in basically our own times. People may think his example is too lofty, but you can always be inspired to at least take a bit of his spirit and do a little bit more.
—Small steps.
—Meupe, we thank you again for your time and this profitable talk. And thank you again, Michelle.
—May God bless you always.
