What I am today is not summed up in my curriculum vitae, nor in the choices I once thought sprang from my will alone. What I am is more like a river that received its waters from unseen springs, which yet burst forth in the heart through doors opened to me undeservedly. That greater part of me — the part that breathes, and believes, and weeps in its prayer — returns with an inexhaustible gratitude to one man: Metropolitan George Khodr; a man whose heart and mind are cast upon God.
The door of the Church was, at my beginning, narrow and heavy, but the Orthodox Youth Movement lifted its leaf to the width of the horizon. Between the meetings and the awe of the Liturgy I found the Church a living pulse. In the glow of that awakening, my question was no longer "What do we believe?" but "Whom do we love?"
The Bible, there precisely, in the embrace of the Movement, ceased to be a book merely recited. It turned into a transparent mirror from which the dust of the centuries had cleared away, and behold, I stood face to face before a person pulsing with life: Jesus of Nazareth. The Bible did not present to me a cold doctrine, for it introduced me to a face divine and human, to glances of compassion, and tales of fish and bread, and tears, and the silence of Golgotha. It was as one who has a film lifted from his eyes, to see the light for the first time — but the light had features.
And yet that messianic face remained a beautiful dream, until the moment of the second vision came, when I saw Him in the face of Metropolitan George Khodr.
Yes, I saw Christ in the face of a man of flesh and blood, his features carved with the wrinkles of age and prayer. George Khodr was not a "translator" of Christ; he was a mirror that does not distort the image but manifests it. When he spoke, I heard the voice of the shepherd seeking the lost sheep, and when he was silent, I read in his eyes the sorrow of the prophet over his people and the tenderness of a mother over her child. Every letter he wrote, and every whisper in his lectures, became a Gospel written anew, in the flesh of our time and the blood of our cares.
George Khodr did not teach me how to be a "Christian"; he taught me how to be a human being. He revealed to me that the encounter with Christ takes place not only in the temple, but in the ache of the days.
I am indebted to him, not because he gave me ready-made answers, but because he taught me how to seek, how to believe, and how to remain human.
He taught me that thought is prayer, that love is a form of knowledge, and that the Church loses its meaning if it does not become a home for freedom and mercy.
Today, when I review the map of my life, I find that my compass points to three inseparable waypoints: the door of the Movement which opened my eyes, the pages of the Gospel which introduced me to the truth, and the face of George Khodr which embodied that truth and made it tangible.
Thank you for making Christ near, and making the near one a Gospel, and making the Gospel a face I once saw, and which will never vanish from my sight.