When I was introduced to the archbishop, I found myself stammering, “I am so ashamed of what my people are doing to your people.”

“Sweetheart,” he said, “you and I know this is a family affair. But when Christians love and forgive, we show the world the face of Our Lord Jesus Christ, who is Love. If we do this, he will be visible, and the Jews will know him too. This is our job!”

Carrying out this “job” lent a particular intensity to the relationship between Archbishop Raya and myself during the next 35 years. The pain we both carried was an inexpressible bond.

We rarely referred to it, but I remember him saying to me one day, “We always remain part of the people into which we are born. We bear in our flesh the wounds of history.” He was speaking for us both.

During my eight years at Madonna House in Paris, Archbishop Raya visited us almost annually. Traveling from Lebanon, where he first taught in the seminary, then served for several years as Bishop of Marjeyoun, he would often arrive during Easter Week.

In the early 1990’s he would stop in Paris in the summer months, on his way to or from the Melkite Synod. Like most Lebanese of his generation, he spoke fluent French. He was at home in Paris and we would accompany him on walks, on visits to friends, to restaurants, films and opera.

He loved French literature. There was much to share, and as I learned to be at ease with him, a real friendship developed.

One of his visits coincided with my return from my first trip to Russia in 1992. I was literally spilling over with impressions of a totally new world.

The archbishop listened with genuine fascination to the descriptions of my Russian friends, spiritual children of the recently martyred Fr. Alexander Men, and the renascent Orthodox Church to which they introduced me.

I told him how I had understood what he was always trying to explain to us about icons when I saw Our Lady of Vladimir and Rublev’s Trinity and The Savior in the Tretyakov Gallery.

The divine presence emanating from them was so palpable that it transformed the museum into a church. I found myself praying before them, as had so many other Christians during the Soviet era.

On the other hand, he was totally opposed to the opening of a Madonna House field house in Magadan, the infamous capital of Stalin’s gulag in northeastern Russia.

“But we are not going there to evangelize, to ‘Romanize’, to impose our ways or to preach,” I wrote him. “We go to live, to learn, to listen and to share love. In this foundation, more than any other, we will be trying to live out what you yourself have taught us these many years.”

Scarred by his own experience of a colonialistic Pre-Vatican Church II in the Middle East, Archbishop Raya could not differentiate between these memories and what he saw as Madonna House’s participation in a similar venture. Although he kept reaffirming his love for us as individuals, it was a painful situation.

Whenever I was back in Combermere from MH Russia and sat at his table during a meal, I and most of the staff did our best to keep the conversation as far from Russia as possible.

Most of the time it succeeded, but one Sunday at brunch after the Byzantine Liturgy, someone asked me about Catholic-Orthodox relations in Russia and would not be deterred. The archbishop’s face got darker and darker, and finally he exploded.

There was nothing I could say, for I couldn’t contradict him publicly. When the meal ended and he turned to me and said, “Sweetheart, don’t let it bother you.” I felt there was no way I could respond. For the first time ever, I shrugged and turned away.

It was terrible.

The following Saturday, I received a message that the archbishop wanted to talk to me at his house. Someone drove me up. The archbishop received me graciously, but it seemed to me that he was as nervous as I was. He offered me something to drink and we sat down.

Slowly, painfully, wanting me to understand, he recounted the tragic history of cultural hegemony, human arrogance, ignorance and misunderstanding, all masked as religion.

He told me of his seminary experiences of a rigid and Jansenistic Roman Catholicism, so at variance with the vibrant, incarnational Byzantine faith of his childhood. He spoke of his pain as a young priest, when he was forbidden to give communion to his sister because she had married an Orthodox. The memory was seared into his being.

He could not bear the thought that history was repeating itself again in contemporary Russia. He could not bear the thought that his beloved Madonna House was implicated in this process. “But last Sunday,” he continued, “after I saw you walk away, I came back here after breakfast and said to myself, what does it matter? What does it matter?”

How many times has Archbishop Raya impressed on us that the essence of Christianity is relationship! “God is not a lonely bachelor in the sky!” he would exclaim, “He is Father, Son and Holy Spirit…” The expression of our faith is the love we have for each other, and he considered this more important than any theology, any system of thought or canon law.

He was telling me he had been on the brink of betraying precisely that in which he most deeply believed.

I knew he still did not understand that I and the rest of us in MH Magadan were living something totally different than he thought. His human wounds remained. In this context, it wasn’t what mattered.

For anyone, it takes violence to self in order to bypass emotions and reason and to say, “I was wrong. I hurt you.” With the archbishop, there is an added dimension, an “otherness” one has to remember and respect, a certain distance created by the difference in culture, generation and, of course, his ecclesial rank.

He was now reaching across this gap, and across the abyss he himself had created, because it was the only way he could remain consistent with himself.

My eyes filled with tears as I realized what I was witnessing.

Take off your shoes, for the ground is holy.