The life of St Sophrony of Essex
There, among fellow Russian emigres, he returned to the faith of his childhood, set painting aside, and in 1925 left Paris for Mount Athos, entering the Russian monastery of St Panteleimon the following year under the name Sophrony. Ordained deacon in 1930 by the future St Nicolai Velimirovich, he became in that same year the spiritual son of the elder Silouan, whose direction shaped the rest of his life. After Silouan's death in 1938, Sophrony kept his notebooks for years before returning to Paris and publishing them, work that brought Silouan's teaching before the wider Church for the first time and made Sophrony himself a spiritual writer of note. In 1958 he moved to England and, with a small community gathered around him, founded the monastery of St John the Baptist at Tolleshunt Knights in Essex, guiding it as its first abbot. He reposed there on July 11, 1993, at the age of ninety-six. The Ecumenical Patriarchate numbered him among the saints in 2019, remembered chiefly as the one who carried his own elder's hidden teaching into the light.
