Bartolomeu Anania (2011) was a well known Romanian Orthodox metropolitan, translator, writer and poet.
During the Communist Regime he was arrested by the authorities for his Christian faith and spent 6 years in the Communist prisons. On 1 December, 1967, he was assigned to the cathedral in Detroit of the Romanian Orthodox Archdiocese of America and Canada. In 1969, he served in the Romanian parish of Saint George in Windsor, Ontario.
In this wonderful recording he talks about the Taboric Light as it is presented in the Hesychastic practice and shows how the uncreated light of Jesus Christ can be seen even with our created eyes.
Metropolitan Bartolomeu:
“The disciples, being even mortal, alive, having body, were worthy to see with their created eyes, the uncreated light that poured out of Jesus Christ…
Hence the conclusion that the spiritual man, having an improved inner self, is able to see this light.
You may have heard in the newer or older literature about hesychasm, hesychasts and the Hesychastic practice.
It is about that monastic movement in Eastern Europe, the Orthodox East, that through asceticism and a very long ascetic practice, through a spiritual life following dispassion, through prayer and contemplation, some of them, not many, were able to see the Taboric Light in their moments of spiritual ecstasy and rapture… The uncreated light of Jesus Christ…
Not for a long time, maybe only a few seconds, like the three disciples of the Lord… But the testimonies of these saints tell us that their joy was so great that it was like the joy of the three apostles to find themselves together with the translucent Jesus and the two prophets that they did not want to leave that place.
The one who comes back from such a moment of spiritual ecstasy feels bad that this has not been prolonged to infinity, until his death and beyond his death.
However… do not be sad my lovers thinking that you are not and you will not become hesychasts…
I was not, I am not and I do not think I will ever be a hesychast either… in the poverty of my human being…
But in the end, this is what we understand by salvation… What is the paradise, the heaven to which we dream and which we want, other than our partake in the uncreated light of God.
God’s inner, intimate nature will never be accessible to us because there is this separation between Creator and creature…
But God pours out his uncreated energies as they were called by a great Holy Father of the Eastern Orthodox Church [St. Gregory Palamas], the uncreated energies that are nothing else but the uncreated Taboric light bundles, which pour out of God’s being and envelop the universe of those who are saved…“