St. Sophrony of Essex

He was born Sergei Sakharov in Moscow in 1896 and grew up in a pious family, becoming a gifted painter. In his youth, seeking the absolute through art and for a time through the meditation of the East, he passed through a period far from the faith of his childhood, until the love of Christ and the dread of a merely impersonal absolute drew him back to the living and personal God.

Leaving Russia in the years of revolution, he came at last to the Holy Mountain of Athos and entered the Monastery of St. Panteleimon in 1925. There he met the monk Silouan, and became his close disciple in the last years of the elder's life, and it was Sophrony who preserved and after Silouan's death made known his writings and his life. After his elder reposed, Sophrony withdrew to live as a hermit in the wilderness of Athos.

Ill health and the care of disciples brought him from the Holy Mountain to France, and then in 1959 to England, where with a small brotherhood and sisterhood he founded the Monastery of St. John the Baptist at Tolleshunt Knights in Essex. There he served as spiritual father to monastics and to the many who came to him from every nation for some thirty years.

From his own long experience he wrote of the prayer of Gethsemane and of the whole Adam, of the vision of the Uncreated Light, and of the way in which the human person, made in the image of the personal God, is called to bear the whole of mankind in love and prayer. His book on St. Silouan and his later writings have become, for many in the West, a door into the depths of the Orthodox tradition.

He reposed in Essex on the eleventh of July, 1993. The Ecumenical Patriarchate numbered him among the saints in 2019, and the Church keeps his memory on the eleventh of July, honoring Sophrony of Essex, the disciple of St. Silouan.