Venerable Gavril the Athonite, Episcope of Velika
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on us
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Spiritual Eldership
Spiritual eldership is a holy secret of the spiritual guidance of the Holy Spirit in the Church. The Elder is a holy or enlightened person or at the very least the one who has gone through a certain path in his spiritual life, in the spiritual struggle of purifying the heart from passions, enlightening the mind and deifying the whole person. He is a person who has acquired the enlightening gift from the Holy Spirit, with which he can lead and instruct other people in the Heavenly Kingdom, our only real aim in this life here on Earth. An Elder can be an episcope, a hieromonk and a priest, and even an ordinary monk who does not need to be old in age but in his spiritual experience.
“An Elder is a man with inner peace, through whom thousands of people can be saved. As a result of his prayer and self-denial, the Holy Spirit is given to him, the gift of judgment which allows him to “read” the secrets of people’s hearts, so that he answers not only the questions he is asked, but also the questions – usually much more thorough – which they did not even thought about asking. Together with the gift of judgment he possesses the gift of spiritual healing – he has the power to renew people’s souls, and often their bodies as well. He conducts this spiritual healing not only with his consoling words, but with his silence, and even with his sole presence. No matter how important his advice is, the intermediary prayer is much more important. He makes his (spiritual) children complete by constantly praying for them, putting himself in their place, accepting their happiness and their sorrow like his own, he takes upon himself the burden of their guilt and distraction. Nobody can be an Elder unless he persistently prays for the others”, says the episcope of Dioclea, Kalyst.
The Elders, according to their appearance, cannot be distinguished at all from the others; on first sight we can even get a false impression of them. However, if we get to know them better and have a conversation with them we can conclude that a great treasury is hidden inside them. That treasury is the experience of the Church itself, the experience of the Holy Spirit that is passed on from generation to generation in the Church. They are the bearers of the tradition of the Holy Spirit in the Church.
The sense of the guidance in the spiritual life through the personal relationship between the spiritual father and his spiritual child is a new quality of the relationship. That quality is the growing up in Christ, according to the image and likeness of God, the Holy Trinity; it is a sacramental, personal, unique, deep, honest, free and loving quality.
It is not a relation of enslaving but of liberating. The aim of the spiritual father is through their mutual relationships to raise, to teach, to educate and to set his spiritual child free from the slavery of the passions.
The relationship between the spiritual child and its spiritual father i.e. the Elder is an eternal relationship (since love is eternal) and continues even after death, until Doomsday. On Doomsday the Elder will say: “Here I am and here are my spiritual children”.
In our time, this disoriented time, a time of apostasy in faith and in the life of virtue such Elders are essentially needed. They are the Elders who will be able to take our sins upon themselves and to cure our weaknesses, to take us back to our original devotion according to God’s image and likeness and to take us to our fatherland, in the Kingdom of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
From this edition of “The 8th Day” on, we will try to regularly present one such elder, a contemporary holy father who shows that the Holy Spirit still breathes in the Church, and that it is possible even today to reach those spiritual values of the Christian life which we are devoted to (summoned for) and which in the ancient Church were more numerous.
One such elder, a spiritual father, is our father Gavril the Athonite, the Episcope of Velika from the Lesnovo Monastery in Macedonia, who we are going to talk about.
Venerable Gavril the Athonite, Episcope of Velika
The episcope of Velika Gavril was born in 1926 in Shtip to Orthodox parents Metodij (later with a monastic name Kiril) and Gorica Panadziev.
Since he was a young man, he was characterized by his special meekness and obedience. He was very clever in his studying and he had a special hereditary talent in art which he crowned with a Degree from the Belgrade University, sculpture department in 1955. He was one of the better sculptors in the country. Later he was employed as a professor of History of Art and Artistic Education in the Gymnasium in Shtip.
Although he served the secular service, he never forgot God’s service. He regularly used to be present at the Holy Liturgy in the Cathedral Church of Saint Nikola in Shtip. At that time although it was a time of a harsh atheism and communism with a programmed prosecution of the people from the Church, he never gave up God, he even taught his students in the faith. For Easter he regularly used to give each of them a red Easter egg, telling them: “Children, eat the eggs, crush the shell and spread it round the town so that everyone can see that Christ resurrected”.
Although he never fell behind his peers, he was in many things a step forward. His life was monastic in every view, even before he took the monastic vow. In his home he constantly stayed in his room reading, praying and living for God. And when they had guests in their home he politely greeted them and retreated again into his room as a bee into its basket. He considered virginity a great sanctity.
In 1963 he abandons the secular world and the secular service and leaves in order to serve only God with his whole life. He goes to the Holy Mount of Athos. He personally received a blessing for his stay there from the abbess of the Holy Mountain, the Holy Mother of God. It is said that when he reached the monastic country he came to the White Sea wanting to wash himself. Then he saw a woman who was looking at him tenderly. After a short time the woman disappeared in the same way she appeared. He thought for a while and concluded that it was the Holy Mother of God, since it is strictly forbidden for women to approach the Holy Mount. That event encouraged him in his further spiritual struggle.
Sadly, because he was Macedonian and did not want to write himself under a different nationality, while he was staying in the Holy Mount he had constant political problems with the authorities. However, God protected him the whole time. Two such events are mentioned, in two occasions they wanted to drive him away from the Holy Mount. On one occasion when he entered a cave a spider weaved a huge web so that the prosecutors could not see him, and in another case, he was protected by snakes.
There he struggled spiritually in the skete “Kamena” in a cave as a duty monk of father Tatjan (Russian) who sadly, after a short time rests in God. He usually went to a Liturgy and for a Communion in the monasteries Hilandar and Saint Paul, where, because of his exceptionally quiet character, he got the name The Invisible, since they did not see him when he came, nor when he left. They could only see him when he approached to receive the Holy Communion of the Holy, Salvation and Life-Giving secrets of Christ.
He took monastic vows in the monastery of Saint Paul with a monastic name, father Gavril
Nobody knows his spiritual struggles in the Holy Mount. They remained a secret for the people and in front of God, but knowing his life since 1971, when he came back to Macedonia, we can only suppose them. We can freely say that father Gavril is one of the greatest spiritual strugglers of present time. He almost never slept, and when he did, he lay on the ground on a hard reed mat. He fasted in the strictest way. He never ate food with oil, and he only ate one prosphora a week. On church holidays, because of his obedience to the church rules, he only used to touch his finger in the icon lamp and tasted it. He regularly served all the Liturgies in the monastery. He practiced the prayer of the mind in the spiritual struggle of purifying the heart from passions. He was constantly pronouncing Jesus’ name in the purified heart. He even acquired the prayer of the mind in the heart. From God he received the gift of perspicaciousness and miracle making.
There are a lot of evidence for the holiness of his life and his thirst for God. Once, a man that knew him very well told me: “I have never seen a man who loved God so much”. When he came back from the Holy Mountain in 1971 in search of peace, in order that he could constantly pray to God, he changed his place of living in several monasteries: Sveta Bogorodica (St. Mother of God) – Matka, Sveta Bogorodica (St. Mother of God) – Pobozje, Sveti Dimitrij (St. Dimitrius) – Marko’s monastery, Sveto Preobrazenie (St. Transfiguration of God) – Zrze, so that in 1975 he finally settles in the monastery of Saint Gavril of Lesnovo in the village of Lesnovo – Bregalnica Eparchy, then the Eparchy of Begalnica and Strumica. There he used to retreat from the monastery for days and live in the two nearby caves where St. Gavril of Lesnovo struggled spiritually as well. He always used to run away from crowds and troubles. He lived in a time of atheism. On one occasion when a group of soldiers came in his monastery, he locked himself in his cell and did not come out for a week until the soldiers left the monastery. There he lived in silence and permanent Jesus prayer, the prayer of the mind in the heart.
He had a great love for the faithful people; he often used to gather them on the great church holidays when he held all-night vigils. He was strict towards himself and meek towards the others. He taught all of them in gentleness, love, patience, self-sacrifice, zeal for God, faith, prayer…
He had a great faith in God, so whatever he prayed God for, he was given. There are a lot of examples for his miracle-working. We would mention one example when the grandchild of one of his spiritual children was very ill and a difficult operation was ahead of him and the doctors did not guarantee for him to survive. In those hard moments of sorrow, his spiritual daughter forgot to visit her spiritual father, but on the day before the operation in a total forgetfulness she received an enlightening thought to go to Elder (Dedo) Gavril (a lot of people used to call him so) and she went there immediately. Father Gavril waited for her at the gates with the words: “Go home your grandchild is cured”. When she returned home, she was told about the miraculous healing of her grandchild, which the doctors were very astonished for. Also, the child Dj… is a living witness that after the prayers of father Gavril his tongue was loosened and he started to speak.
The Monastery of Lesnovo became a beehive for all the people that searched God at that time. People used to gather from all parts of the country, people from different profiles and professions and he became the beloved spiritual father to many people who searched God.
Father Gavril restored the old and ruined residence in the monastery and built the church Uspenie na Presveta Bogorodica (Dormition of the Holy Mother of God) in Probishtip which was the first and only church in the town.
Apart from all his spiritual struggles and responsibilities he studied and graduated from the Faculty of Theology in Skopje (among the first ones). He wrote books and essays in many church newspapers. Apart from his art reviews, he was the author of: the collection of poems “33 Poems of Jerusalem”, “The Holy Mountain – Heavenly Land” (1978), “Before the biggest Jubilee of Mankind” (1980), “The 2000th Anniversary of Christianity is on the Threshold” (1981), “The Rules and Regulations of the Orthodox Church for the Fast” (1994) and “Father Heruvim” (1998), the last two of them published posthumely.
In his pastor’s and spiritual activity he had three aims ahead:
- Restoration of the Monastery of Lesnovo;
- Renewal of monasticism;
- A solemn celebration of the 2000-year jubilee of Christianity.
His venerability was even respected outside of our Church. Before he came back from The Holy Mountain the Serbs wanted to make him a Bishop in the Serbian Orthodox Church, he also had a close relationship with father Emilian of Simonopetra, who was the abbot of the Meteori Monastery at that time and wanted to keep father Gavril as an abbot of one of the monasteries. Later, he was asked to be an abbot of the skete of Saint Hariton the Confessor in Jerusalem.
In 1981 the Synod (Church Council) of the Macedonian Orthodox Church promoted him into an archimandrite on 28th August on the church holiday of The Dormition of Our Most Holy Mother of God. In 1989 he was hirotonised into an Episcope with the title Velichki (of Velika).
He had foreseen his close death, and he himself served 40 Liturgies for the dead. He rested in God peacefully in prayer with his beloved Gospel on his chest and with a rosary in his hand. Before he died he had prepared everything for his funeral himself. On a piece of paper he wrote: “Prepare the food without oil”. He gathered all his spiritual children from Lesnovo, and he told them: “My dear children, I have been with you until this moment and now I go to the Heavenly Jerusalem and I will be with you again and will wait for you in the Heavenly Jerusalem”.
He rested in God on 12th January 1990 and he really did not leave his spiritual children. After his departure to the Heavenly Jerusalem he appeared in the dreams of many people. He appeared in the dream of one of his spiritual children who had started to lose his sight quickly; after he cured him he headed for the little church of the Ascension of Christ in Shtip. In the home of one of his spiritual children, a Consecrated Oil started to flow from his picture, which he gave him while he was alive. Even today there are a lot of signs and miracles on his grave, from which a pleasant smell is felt in the air. The villagers say that after his death on his grave they saw light in the form of a pillar.
Trough the prayers of our Holy Father Gavril the Athonite the Episcope of Velika, Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on us. Amen.
Fr. Gavril Galev
Abbot of the monastery “St. Clement of Ohrid”,
Kinglake, Melbourne, Australia
12 / 01 / 2023
