It was August 15, 1997, the feast of the Assumption. Archbishop Raya, retired Melkite Metropolitan archbishop of Akko, Haifa, Nazareth, and all Galilee, was celebrating the Byzantine Liturgy in Our Lady of the Woods chapel.

I’d arrived in Madonna House Combermere literally minutes before in hopes of joining the community. This was my first Byzantine Liturgy there, and my first experience of the man who would teach me over the next three years that Truth wasn’t a thing, it was a Person.

But that first day I was listening only with my head, and my head quickly concluded that the man was spouting heresy. It occurred to me that it wasn’t too late to catch the bus back to Michigan.

In the end, I decided to stay, and not long after, we were again at the Byzantine Liturgy listening to the archbishop preach.

“God has made us free! Free! We are children, not slaves!” he shouted, stern and passionate. “God says, ‘Do this,’ and we say (sharply), ‘No!’ and he says (meekly), ‘Okay. Okay. Do what you want.’”

He then went on to describe our freedom in glowing, colorful, and absolute terms. No mention of grace or creaturely dependence or contingency. He nuanced nothing.

“Freedom! Aaah, freedom!”

So this time around, it seemed that God had almost nothing to do with our salvation, and that everything depended on us.

Two homilies back to back, both in some way technically heretical, both utterly heartfelt, and both totally contradicting each other.

What to make of this larger-than-life Lebanese man of God who commanded such deep respect and affection in this otherwise orthodox Catholic community?

I don’t know how it happened or exactly when, but I eventually realized that he wasn’t preaching to our heads, but to our hearts and spirits. And when I listened to him with my heart, I began to understand.

He was trying to wake us up, to help us grasp and embrace with our whole being all that it means to be a child of God. In this he became for me a teacher, a bishop in the truest sense.

The archbishop embodied what he preached. His own freedom was legendary, the source of hundreds of stories, adventures, and not a few scandals.

He wielded his words like weapons. He wove them together and threw them at us like works of art.

He didn’t try to communicate gospel truths as if they were so many bits of edifying information you would soon just file away on some interior shelf. Rather he wanted to shock you with the beauty of Truth himself; to crack open the source of Light in your soul; to demolish your inner prison; to reach your depths where Love and Truth were one, the source of life, wonder, and joy.

But how to do that? Words are too weak for the task. We need poetry and music and poetry put to music. Why not a little seemingly heretical exaggeration? Why not walk the line between paradox and contradiction, where symbols point to truth beyond our mind’s understanding?

Why not risk a little scandal? A small price to pay, I thought, for what he was trying to do. And the Spirit was always there to help out.

Yes, I understood why the Madonna House priests cringed every time he preached. Who can blame them? When we had young guests not yet formed in the faith listening eagerly with their minds open to the authoritative archbishop, damage control was necessary.

When teenagers heard him preach, “If you are going to sin, sin! Go ahead! Get your face down in the muck! Enjoy it!” some further clarification was helpful.

But for those who knew a bit about the method to his madness, what a feast it was!

Over the years I grew to love the archbishop. His Eastern heart and spirit balanced all that was too western in me, inside and out.

Mike Fagan, the Irish-born director of the men of the main house, himself a character, used to sing him a song that became a kind of theme song for the archbishop: “To Dream the Impossible Dream,” from the movie, The Man From La Mancha.

Of course it took on a whole new meaning for those who knew the archbishop. His windmills were unseen but real. His Dulcinea was the image of God in each person he met.

There was something distinctly noble about him. It was not just his Lebanese dignity transformed by the grace of his office and a life of faithful prayer and service. Rather it was like the nobililty of a Parcival who asked the right question, found the Grail, and in his joy embraced the foolishness of Christ to the end.

My last image of Madonna House was also my last image of the archbishop. It was August 15th, three years to the day when I first arrived.

We were celebrating his birthday at St. Mary’s in the afternoon. As I made my way to the door, Mike Fagan was standing at the head of one of the tables in the dining room, and singing with exaggerated melodramatic gestures, “To Dream the Impossible Dream,” to an absolutely delighted archbishop, who sat at the other end of the table swaying, his arms spread out, soaking it all in.