1. Source: The Daily Telegraph, excerpt from the article "Archbishop of Canterbury's sermon in full", 27 Feb 2003
(...) About twelve years ago, I was visiting an Orthodox monastery, and was taken to see one of the smaller and older chapels. It was a place intensely full of the memory and reality of prayer.
The monk showing me around pulled the curtain from in front of the sanctuary, and inside was a plain altar and one simple picture of Jesus, darkened and rather undistinguished.
But for some reason at that moment it was as if the veil of the temple was torn in two: I saw as I had never seen the simple fact of Jesus at the heart of all our words and worship, behind the curtain of our anxieties and our theories, our struggles and our suspicion. (...)
(...) «The Orthodox Church - which I am acquainted with and have loved from my teens - represents for me the predominant expression of the Christian faith and praxis, which has preserved the dogma, the Liturgy and the canons of personal sanctification and prayer, especially of the hesychast tradition. The various Orthodox Churches, like the others, are struggling nowadays to project their very rich Christian tradition in a society that is more and more individualistic, technological, impatient and greedy.
I know that the Church of Greece is faced with these challenges, and I know that She is responding more and more, with caring and creativity, to the duty of spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ. In Greece, as in other places, the Church is not an ideology or a theory: She is life - a life in communion with God and fellow-man; a life which is made manifest in the Divine Liturgy - the life of Jesus Christ, in the Holy Spirit». (...)