“No matter how hard you look for the kind, the perfect priest, the perfect community, the perfect parish…you won’t find it! Just like you won’t find the perfect marriage, or the perfect husband, or the perfect family, etc. You don’t enter the Church as if you were in a political party, where you begin to judge and do justice, and find right and wrong. In the Church you’re on a ship with patients who have been rescued from the sea… We are not saints, we are not angels! Neither the priest, nor the bishop, nor the laity, we all have passions and weaknesses, but we want to stay here, until the end… we want to be saved from the storm of the sea. We stay within the church, which is the ship, the ark of salvation!”
St. Sophronius Sakharov
Translated by Dr. Nick Stergiou
The perfect priest
