Childhood
Career
Doing my part
Teachers
Dawns of Conversion
Holy Fathers
Liturgy: Pascha
Italy
Spiritual guidance
Romania
Music
Byzantine Music
Orthodoxy
Exhortation
Felipe is a 42-year-old Brazilian pianist. He graduated from the University of Sao Paolo and the Manhattan School of Music. He has performed in many countries around the world. The need to understand the realities of the world we live in led him through providential teachers to the study of religion. That is how he discovered Orthodoxy, which changed his life. He and his wife, Sara, came to Romania at the end of 2018 to live Orthodoxy in its very abode.
Childhood
I was born a Catholic, but I didn’t go to church. I had no religious, spiritual life at all.
Both my grandmothers, maternal and paternal, were very Catholic. They were the only ones that I knew who had religion. One of them used to have an image of Christ with a little electric lamp underneath it. She had made a promise to God—her husband had to travel— so if he came back all right after a long time, she would maintain this little lamp lit all her life underneath the image of God. When I was a kid, every time I walked into her room, I would see that image. That created a very strong image. It was a bit of a religious experience, very subtle. I remember that sometimes I would pray before it when I was a kid if I wanted something to happen.
Career
I started to learn playing the piano when I was nine years old. Right after my first musical class, I already knew that I wanted to do that my whole life. I developed myself quite quickly. Even as a kid I used to study a lot. Then I evolved. I went to the University of Sao Paolo. I did piano and orchestra conducting there. When I finished, I went to do my master’s at the Manhattan School of Music. I ended up spending five years in New York. I even performed at Carnegie Hall.
Then I met a very important, very famous pianist from Brazil called Nelson Freire. He was telling me that I should live a little bit in Europe to study with a particular teacher. I became friends with him. So, I went to Paris, and I studied at the Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris. I spent another five years in Paris. There I made my first record, which went quite well. And I performed a little bit too. But then I had some projects in Brazil around 2012–13. So, I went to Brazil, and I spent some time there, and I had quite a big project, so I was planning to stay for a while. And I met Sara on one of those projects. It was a small season of concerts that I organized there, and then she came in the audience, and after that she wrote a review about it and then she wrote to me, because she knew that I was the producer of that little festival. We started talking and we met.
Doing my part
Pretty soon in my career I started to develop this hunger for success and wanting to appear in front of the others the best way possible and to be loved by all the others and to get rich. It seemed to be like a black hole. It was never filled. It didn’t matter what I did.
From time to time, I would meet people who had achieved that—they were famous as pianists, and they had quite a bit of material comfort and riches—but they were not happy. They had the same problems as I. And I thought there’s something wrong about this dream of mine, because I’m seeing these examples and I don’t want to be like them. There was some sort of reality that I must have been missing. I always had this feeling. It’s not supposed to be like this.
It didn’t feel right. I used to say to myself when I was fighting for my objectives: "I’m going to do my part and I’ll do it the best I can, and I am sure that God or the Universe or whatever it was, would work with me if I do my part, it’s going to help me”. I cannot expect it to be done by itself, I have to do my portion. So, it has to be a cooperation. And if I am to do my part, I am sure that it’s going to do its part, too. So, I always had this sense, but I didn’t know what to call it—if I should call it God, if I should call it Universe. I had that modern way of thinking, the ignorant way of looking at things—ignorant cosmology.
And when I started to learn about God and about religion, and I started reading the lives of the saints, that’s when I thought: "Oh, my God! That’s it! It was in front of my eyes all this time, and I could have looked at that, but I never did. Of course, that’s what life is supposed to be, that’s the goal of a human being. That’s what it is to be a human. The rest is all distorted, if not diabolic.” Because through this process of trying to achieve my goals in music, I would go through some very difficult moments with the ego that is not fed enough. There was like an inflation of ego inside me, always unhappy, and things always turned out bad. Even though a lot of good things happened in my personal life, there were misunderstandings and no real relationships—everything was professional connections. It was all very artificial. I thought human relation was that. I thought that’s the world, that’s the way it is. But I was not convinced. I thought there is something wrong I’m doing. I’m falling in a cycle of mistakes, and I’m sure there’s a way out of this. There must be a way out of this cycle. That’s when I started to learn about God, and everything made sense.
Teachers
Right after meeting Sara, I encountered on the Internet, on YouTube, a wonderful teacher, who’s been changing the whole Brazil. He’s like a miracle. His name is Olavo de Carvalho.
At that time, I was trying to understand the political situation of the country because it was very messy. There were a lot of political protests in Brazil. Brazil was and is still trying to avoid a communist regime, a modern type of communism. The Workers’ Party was in power then, changing people’s mind with the whole agenda of ideologies, of minorities, gender ideology—many things that are all over the world right now. And they were in power of the state and people, and people were protesting against some things but couldn’t see exactly what this party was doing to Brazil. Olavo was the guy who put everything into words and described reality in a way that no one could and changed everyone’s mind. His books are bestsellers in Brazil.
He is so clever. I was learning things with him: a bit of philosophy, a bit of politics, a bit of geo-politics. He would show us things that were all in front of our noses and we didn’t notice them. He would not talk too much about religion; he would mention it here and there. He would recommend people to pray to Jesus Christ, pray to the Mother of God, that that was the only way out, the most important thing; that the only reality that exists is the Verb, the word of God.
I was struck by this information. This very same guy who explained the situation of the world in such an intelligent manner would also speak of Jesus Christ, and the Virgin Mary, and religion. And I thought to myself: "Oh, that’s interesting. I never heard anybody speaking of that before.” For me, religion was something for very simple people, for ignorant people. I thought: "Maybe I should take him seriously because this guy changed my mind in many ways. Maybe he’s right about that, too.” I tried to do what he was teaching, to pray a little bit. But it was still very uncertain.
Through him I met his son, Luis Gonzaga de Carvalho, who is a great teacher of religion, especially of Christianism. Fantastic teacher. I also met him through the Internet first, and then I wrote to him to participate in his courses, and eventually we became friends.
Dawns of Conversion
Luis Gonzaga would explain to us the spiritual meaning of each passage of the Scriptures, what was tradition in Christianity and what was not, the whole history of the Church in general, and the lives of the saints. He was speaking about spiritual life, he was speaking about mystical life and basic things, the necessity of having discipline, doing things constantly.
He would talk about symbology, and at the end of the lesson he would say: "Look, all of this that I’m explaining, in order to understand this, you must pray every day. This was developed by people who prayed every day. This discipline. I’m very sorry, but if you don’t do that, you’re not going to learn. At the beginning you learn something, and then it becomes a little harder, and then the barrier becomes impossible to cross if you don’t pray. You spent all your life trusting your teachers from school, trusting TV, trusting I don’t know whom. Try to trust Jesus Christ, or Moses, for one year in your life. Just try. And you have to do it out of trust for me.” He was very rough.
He would explain spiritual life in many ways, and he was—he still is—very intense. He’s a very spiritual man. You can feel it when you meet him. He is the kind of guy who can change one’s life in a single meeting—very strong.
Holy Fathers
I started praying and that began to grow and grow. So, we went back to the Catholic Church. I was reading the Holy Fathers at the same time. And I could see that there was a very big difference from what I read and I thought was the origin of religion, and the way the Catholic Church was doing things and the way the faithful would practice that nowadays. There was a big distance. The Liturgy was very short, very light, it was kind of a mundane atmosphere.
And I wondered where people practice religion like I’m reading here with the Desert Fathers…
Liturgy: Pascha
Through Luiz Gonzaga we met an Orthodox priest that was a friend of his, and he became a good friend of ours. He invited us for his Liturgy. It was Pascha. So, the first Liturgy that we saw in our lives in the Orthodox Church was for Pascha. It was absolutely magical. We thought that this was what we were looking for and we didn’t know that it actually exists.
We saw more normal people. Everything had more weight, the Liturgy, the way of praying, the posture, the iconography, not the music, the music there was terrible. Everything had more weight. We thought, okay, this is a religion with more "meat”. The other one [Roman Catholic] feels like the structure is there, the bones are there—because they have the doctrine—but there is no meat, it was emptied.
We were not married yet. We started to go to this church, we became Orthodox, and then we talked to the priest about us getting married. He arranged the wedding two months after.
Italy
The situation of the Orthodox Church in Brazil is much improvised. The parishes are small, mainly for immigrants, and the immigrants got old. The music is all distorted. The situation there is very rough. We decided to come to Europe, to get closer to the traditional Orthodox countries. We had the opportunity to go to Italy since I have Italian citizenship, and Sara had a friend who was inviting her to work. We thought we can travel and visit Orthodox churches and monasteries. So, we went to Italy. We looked for the nearest Orthodox church, and it was a Romanian one in Verona. And we would go there. Immediately when we met the father there, I loved him so much because he is such a great priest. He has a very beautiful figure and such loving eyes.
Spiritual guidance
I very much wanted to find a guide to develop myself in the spiritual life. I didn’t want to be just a faithful that goes to church on Sundays and prays for a few minutes and that’s it. I wanted to improve, to be close to God. I wanted to evolve. And I could see that in the Roman Catholic Church, there was no such thing, except for some monks in a particular community. But for regular lay people, there is no spiritual guidance. They have somebody called a "spiritual director,” already the name bothers me very much, "director”—like a company. That’s very bureaucratic… You confess, but it’s not like a real spiritual guide who is going to watch over you and tell you what to do next. There isn’t such an organic or independent way of the fathers to interact with their spiritual children, to prescribe what they need. I wanted that; I was dreaming of that. In Orthodoxy, I had the feeling—and the information, but had not found it yet—that spiritual guidance was still alive.
I had seen a documentary and some books of Father Gabriel Bunge. He was living three hours from us, in Switzerland, almost on the border. I wanted to meet him so much. I even wrote him a letter. He never replied. But we managed to find a way to get to him through a parish near him. He lives in the Swiss mountains. He lived there isolated for almost 40 years. Now there are two other priests with him, but he was alone there all by himself. He is also a convert. He was a Benedictine monk, Roman Catholic. He became Orthodox, and he is already a great schema monk—Archimandrite Gabriel. We went there, and we loved him so much; it was so fantastic. And we became his spiritual children. So, we would go there once a month to Liturgy, Confession, and sometimes just to speak with him a little bit.
Every time I meet Father Gabriel, there is a sense of peace that really gets into us and spreads throughout our life during a certain number of days. When I met him for the first time it was just like being drunk. Even the sense of smell in the air, when I was close to him, changed. It seemed that nothing else existed, just his figure. Time stopped. I was completely hypnotized by him when I saw him for the first time. There is this mixture of sweetness and being tough. Sweet and tough. I had no reference of people like this in my life before. People who are like that are similar to God in a way, because God is also sweet and tough. They imitate that very naturally. Father Gabriel is exactly like this. He’s very straight to the point and can be very rough, and at the same time, when you speak to him, you have the feeling that you are at the same level with him, intellectually and spiritually. You feel that he’s your friend, that you are both at the same level. This of course, is not the truth, but you feel like this, that you can say anything. And when I’m close to him, I don’t want to go away. I want to stay there. I want to be close to him. Father Gabriel became the biggest reference of a human being that I know. He and Luis Gonzaga, the teacher.
Romania
Due to bureaucratic things our situation in Italy became unfavorable. We had a lot of Romanian friends already, and we had been to Romania to visit in 2017. So, we thought it was a good moment to finally spend some time in an Orthodox country. We came at the end of 2018.
When I was about to come, I asked Father Gabriel if he would give us the blessing to come to live in Romania for some time. We discussed it a little bit and he gave us the blessing. And then he said to me: "If you go to Bucharest, you have to go to a monastery called Stavropoleos, and speak to a father called părintele Iustin.” We eventually went, it is five minutes from where we live, and părintele Iustin received us so well, so beautifully and the sisters were so welcoming to us, so nice. We like Stavropoleos very much, it was such a surprise. Everything is so beautiful. The whole Liturgy is perfectly done. Everything is so nice.
I feel that there are two aspects of Romania. The first one, the one that brought us here, besides our interest in the Church, was the fact that Romanians are real people. When we, from Brazil, spoke to Romanians, we had the feeling that we had real human beings in front of us. Because sometimes, and in some countries more than others, there is a sense that when we talk to people, there is like a barrier, like a plastic thing between you and the person, you cannot go beyond that. And with Romanians everything is very honest, what you see is what you get. It’s very open. And we are a bit like this too, so we identify with it. And also, I’ve never seen—and I’m not just saying this to say nice things about Romanians—I’ve never seen such generous people. When you need something, when there’s some problem, our Romanian friends are always there and are very reliable. It’s unbelievable. This generosity aspect is very striking.
Music
Music struck me naturally from the beginning. But eventually music became a means to an end that was not music. It became the means to receiving something that I thought was the good of the world.
My conversion changed my perspective of my profession, of my art. It brought a new sense of what real music means, and what the real purpose of beauty, of art, is. When I started praying, when I started practicing religion, I could see all of a sudden, all those pieces of music that I didn’t think were exciting. I saw the simplicity, and the beauty, and the purity of it, almost a sensitivity of it. So, my conversion changed my taste, my palate for simplicity and for a certain kind of aesthetic qualities that were completely passing me by without being noticed.
Music became something I really try to do for God. I think that now the work of cooperation still exists, but it’s really up to God when it’s going to come out nice. I cannot control it that much; I can control it just to a certain extent. Before I tended to think that I could control everything, or if I did something wrong, it was because I didn’t control everything the way I should have controlled it. And now the sense of control changed very much. I’m much more condescending to the results. Not with the work. I’m still very demanding with myself, because I want to do the best I can. But with the results I’m much more conscious that I have control over them just to a certain point. After that, I cannot do much. Anyway, that’s not even that important—it used to be like that, to think that if my work didn’t come out well, that meant that I was not a good person or I was mediocre—because whatever people think of me while I’m playing, that’s not me. They’re being pleased or not with a part of what I do.
Today I teach, I have this musical online project and I write music. If I have the opportunity, I perform. For me it is something that I like very much, but my treasure is not there. My heart is there but just up to a certain part. To me the most important thing is to follow the path that has been strewn with fathers, with mothers, with monks, with saints, with the writings of the Holy Fathers—that’s the path. That’s what I want from life. The rest is just a means to support my family, not the goal of my life anymore.
Byzantine Music
Byzantine music became something fascinating for me, something that I love very, very dearly. I’m always very interested if there is anything about Byzantine music, if somebody is speaking of it. Or if somebody is singing in a particular monastery, sometimes we go to listen and to pray.
Byzantine music is very authentic. What struck me very much was this mixture of simplicity with complexity because you have very simple base notes, on the ison, just a few notes. With very few notes on the base, different kinds of melodies are being developed on top of it. That’s a totally different kind of balance than what you find in classical music. That taught me a lot about how much you don’t need, that much variation. With just those notes you can have everything. And then the melodies struck me very much because they’re very rich. A sense of musical phrase that is spread through, sometimes, a minute, or more, a very long, long phrase. I’ve never seen that in classical music. So long. The base changes very little. And when the base changes—wow!—it’s like Heaven opens to us.
Orthodoxy
For me, beauty is the power of the reality to attract you. I spent my life trying to develop an aesthetic sense for beauty because I was sensitive to that, I was developing that with music very much, with a lot of discipline; that sense of balance and harmony between things. If you study music, you can apply everything you learn in music to any sensible material thing of the world. You can apply to all a sense of balance; you can observe everything in a musical way. So, I could not accept that when I looked at things for God or from God, I wouldn’t find this in the most perfect way possible. So when I would work a lot with the work of Mozart, of Bach, that are very beautiful masterpieces—manmade in a certain way, up to a certain point—and I would go to a Roman Catholic church and see some things there, I wouldn’t find it harmonious, like there was something strange. The subject is very noble, very beautiful, but the way it is being portrayed doesn’t seem to fit, there was something missing.
And then I saw Orthodoxy, the beauty and delicacy of iconography—I was so seduced by the images, I wanted to be surrounded by icons—the beauty of the lives of monks, the lives of hermits, and the simplicity and the capacity of really being straight to the point, not only with what they say but how they act; the beauty of the Liturgy, the beauty of Byzantine music that I didn’t know—it was a whole new universe that opened up for me—the mystical aspect of it. That was a type of beauty that struck me very much. I felt that since beauty is this power of things to attract us, to get us, I really was expecting it from God’s Church, from the way God lets humans express His manifestations. I would expect that. I was very disappointed when I didn’t see that. I thought it was inadequate and maybe disrespectful even. I wanted the math to fit; the results to be right. And that’s what I found in Orthodoxy. Of course, not in every parish; some are more beautiful than others; some monasteries are more beautiful than others. But, in general, the way to behave, the way to approach prayers, the way to look at an icon, the way traditional icons are written, the way to take care about the danger of too much philosophy inside religion, the care of losing its mystery and mysticism and ending up with a bureaucratic thing that has nothing to do with God and has more to do with public office, everything was very balanced, very consciously balanced. So that’s the beauty that I found in Orthodoxy.
For me the important and most beautiful thing is this aspect, of priests and monks being tough as men, as real men, and at the same time, sweet. This balance was musical. Very musical.
I think Orthodoxy has the power of carrying to people the Christianity like the first Christians did. I think that if it weren’t for Orthodoxy, that would have been lost. For me, Orthodoxy is the original religion—really the true and the original one. When we are in an Orthodox church, and we talk to an Orthodox father, when we see anything that has to do with religion, we can always feel that it’s still the same religion of the Holy Fathers, the continuation of the New Testament. We can still feel that.
The only problem that I can see, particularly for me as a Brazilian, is that Orthodoxy is not very much interested, maybe for the right reasons, in missionary work. So for someone who doesn’t come from a country that is already Orthodox, it’s very difficult to find the translations of the saints, to understand what’s going on, it’s a big search. That’s the only aspect that sometimes suffers a little bit.
Exhortation
Be very, very selective just like you are selective when you look for something that you want to buy, to purchase, to take home. Be selective also with where you go, with whom you learn, with what some people say to you. You have to dig deep because you have to investigate just like when you go to a doctor; if you’re not satisfied, you go to another one. It’s the same way with everything. In religion is the same thing.
Another thing that I believe is crucial is to correct our cosmology, the way we learned to perceive the world. Without going into traditional cosmology and put effort to correct all of our mundane and "scientistic,” mechanical, and Cartesian view, it’s going to be almost impossible to truly believe in God any more still to have real religion.
As far as I know right now, if you want the real religion, you must try to find the living saints of today and learn with them. They may not come with the credentials that you would expect, they might be completely different than what you have in mind, but that’s what you must look for. Only trusting authorities just because it is more convenient, could be somehow safe, but I truly believe that this behavior doesn’t give you what I am talking about. My point of view is that you must look for the ones that actually have that, the ones, who when they speak, it’s not just like somebody who memorized a book, but they speak from within, with personal experience, with authority. Usually, in the world we live in today, they have no option but to be a little bit hidden. So, like I said… we have to dig deep.