Bishop Maximos of Melitini: Our Memoriestranslated

Our Memories

Maximos Pafilis, Bishop of Melitini

Speech on the Gospel passage Matt. 8.28 – 34, 9.1.

There are people who live in tombs without knowing it. I don't mean stone tombs, I mean those hidden areas where one retreats when life has hurt him long and hard, the closed rooms of the soul with the curtains down, the silence that at first seems like a refuge and slowly becomes a prison. The modern traveler knows this geography well. He walks it every night, when he closes the screen and is alone with his own noises.

The evangelical episode of the Gergesenes (Matthew 8, 28-34) takes place in such a place, except that there the desolation was also external. A land of heathens, without ties to the God of Israel, and the herds of swine grazing on its mountains were, to the eyes of a Jew, the visible proof that here the divine commandments had ceased to count. In this landscape lived the two possessed. Outside the city, far from society, almost cut off from themselves. Passers-by avoided that road. And who would blame them?

What is most shocking...