Anthony of Sourozh — Metropolitan Anthony Bloom — spent nearly his whole life in London and preached in English and French, yet he remained one of the most widely read Orthodox theologians in Russia.
He was born in 1914 in Lausanne, the son of a Russian diplomat. Childhood in Persia; then, after the revolution, emigration and Paris. As a young man he was a convinced atheist. Then, at seventeen, he read the Gospel — and something changed. "I felt that on the other side of the page there was a living presence."
He became a physician. During the war he worked in the Resistance, secretly a monk. Afterward he was ordained, and in time became a bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church in Great Britain. For fifty years he led his London parish.
His books — "Life. Illness. Death.", "Prayer and Life," his talks on prayer — are conversations about faith without sentimentality and without empty words. He spoke of doubt, of silence, of a God who does not console but demands. He died in 2003 and is buried in London.