Karleusa Opens Up on Lunch With Serbian Orthodox Bishop
The singer said she personally reached out to a bishop of the Serbian Orthodox Church for a conversation and lunch, at a time when, she says, she was consumed by a desire for revenge.
Jelena Karleusa said in an interview for the YouTube channel “Ful skrin medija,” published on August 27 at 6:39 a.m., that she met a few weeks ago with a bishop of the Serbian Orthodox Church. The meeting, she said, came at a moment when she felt herself sinking into hatred and was, in her own words, “consumed by a desire for revenge.”
The singer was careful to specify who reached out to whom first, since that detail matters to the story: she was the one who contacted the bishop, not the other way around. She said that one evening she was watching television and came across a program in which the same bishop spoke about forgiveness. His words struck her so deeply that she called the owner of the television station where the bishop had appeared and asked for his phone number. When she finally reached him, Karleusa said, he was surprised by her call. He listened to her, and then told her, as she recounted it, that he had felt for some time a need to talk to her specifically, and that “nothing in life happens by chance.” Karleusa did not reveal the bishop’s name, saying only that he is a monk.
Her admission about hatred and revenge came as she explained why she needed that conversation in the first place. “For most of my life I’ve called myself an atheist,” she told Ful skrin medija, adding that during that period she felt a need to get back at people she believes had wronged her, even though, she says, that had never been like her before. She summed up that feeling in the line that defined her appearance on the show:
“I was consumed by a desire for revenge.”
The conversation with the bishop continued beyond the television screen, she said, at a lunch that she herself asked to arrange. At the very start of that meeting, she told him she was not a believer. “I am not a believer. He told me: those are the ones I love most,” Karleusa said, recounting his reply. She says the bishop told her, by the end of that evening, that in heart, in words, in emotion and in energy, she was more of a believer than many people he knows, and that the point of life is joy, something, he added, people have somehow lost along the way.
This is not the first time this summer that the singer has spoken openly about faith and forgiveness. In an Easter interview for Kurir, she said she forgives everyone, including former partners, friends and colleagues, and used a line she repeated now as well: “The best victory is to forgive.” She also explained why: when a person forgives, she said, it no longer hurts the one who forgave, but the one who was forgiven.
Karleusa has been open about other personal matters this season as well. We previously reported on her comments about her ex husband Dusko Tosic, whom she described to our outlet as “a bad husband, but a wonderful father.” The combination of a spiritual confession and an admission of hatred she says she managed to overcome fits the picture of a singer who, in recent months, has rarely shied away from personal topics, whether about her marriage, her family or, now, her faith.
The bishop has not publicly commented on the meeting or on the content of the conversation as Karleusa described it. She has not said whether she plans to speak about the topic again in a future appearance, but she made clear that the lunch marked a turning point for her, coming during a period when, by her own admission, she was closer to hatred than she had ever been before.
