The purpose of these pages is to give a truly Christian answer to the spiritual questions of many believers, a “practical” answer, outlining the “path”, rooted in Scripture and in the original Tradition, enabling the Christian to “express” his “in practice” in a way that would correspond to the content of faith itself.... In prayer, in the very practice of prayer, what the essence of a Christian consists of becomes visible, how a believer stands in the face of God and his neighbor. To sharpen this thought, one could say: only in prayer does a Christian reveal himself. Father Gabriel Bunge

The attentive reader of “Mean Vessels” will understand that there is nothing in the book that the author has not learned first of all himself, no matter what he went through and mastered from his own experience. In 1980, Hieromonk Gabriel Bunge became a hermit, finding his “desert” in the Swiss Alps, where he lives to this day according to the strict ancient monastic rules. In his church, Fr. Gabriel serves the Liturgy of St. Ambrose of Milan daily. Book by Fr. Gabriel Bunge, which grew out of the “life”, i.e. life and biography of its author, gives us not only the lessons he himself learned in prayer work, but also his communication with the apostles and holy fathers in the Church of Christ. This book, written in German and published in Germany in 1996, has already been translated into Italian , French, Catalan, Romanian.

When fate allowed me to meet Fr. Gabriel Bunge not only in his books, but “face to face”, I listened with admiration to his words, which testified not only to a sincere and genuine love for the Orthodox tradition, but also to an unexpectedly accurate understanding of the characteristics of Russian Orthodoxy and its especially current situation, as if he was experiencing it from the inside...Sergey Averintsev