The Parish Community: Our Life in Christ
“The Orthodox Parish in North America”
by: VRev. Thomas Hopko

After the family, we experience our life in Christ primarily in the parish. From birth to death, the parish community is where God “raises the infants, guides the young, supports the aged, encourages the faint-hearted, reunites the separated, leads back those who are in error and joins them to His Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.” (from the Anaphora prayers of St. Basil) The vitality of spiritual life in our families and personal prayer is nourished by the parish. All outreach to, and our relationships with, our neighborhoods, dioceses, the national church as well as the worldwide church flow from the parish community.

Many people today lament the state of our parish life in modern and secular North American society. There are many crises to be dealt with daily, simply because the devil hates and opposes the holiness and unity of a true parish community whose life is fully in Christ. The purpose of this paper is not to despair over these crises, but to examine our parish life, rejoice and give thanks for the godly aspects of our communities and enable us to see the shortcomings as challenges and opportunities to strengthen and grow our life in Christ.

Self-examination, whether as an individual or a community, is often a painful experience. It is not easy to admit failures. Change is never comfortable. It is also not our purpose to place blame for why failures and shortcomings exist. The task at hand is rather to state the essential things to be believed, understood and done if Orthodox parishes in North America today are to be Christian according to traditional Orthodox teaching and practice.

One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic

An Orthodox parish has only one God-given reason for being. It exists to be the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church of Christ. Whatever the original reasons and conditions for its founding, whatever other services and activities it may provide, whatever other desires and needs it may fulfill for its members, a community of Orthodox Christians must be Christ’s one holy Church. If it is not, then it is neither Christian nor Orthodox, whatever else it may be and do.

A parish must be the Church of Christ, and not simply a church, because, according to the Orthodox faith, every local community of Orthodox Christians with a priest must be, and theologically understood actually is the one Church of Christ. Theologically speaking, there are not many Orthodox Churches; there is only one. An Orthodox parish is this one Church or it is not an Orthodox church at all. Each parish, therefore, must be the one and only Church of Christ. The parish must be holy because Christ’s Church is holy. Everything in the parish, and everything about it, must be holy because God and Christ are holy. There can be no part of a parish that is not sanctified by the holiness of God and His Son Jesus Christ, “the holy One of God.” There can be no aspect of a parish not inspired and empowered by God’s Holy Spirit, who is the Spirit of God and of Christ.

Everything in and about a parish—its organization, structure, administration, finances and properties, as well as its theological and moral teachings and practices, and its liturgical and sacramental rites and services – must be of God. They must be determined by God, inspired by God and submitted to God for His glory and the good of His people.

The Christian parish must also be catholic. For the parish to be “catholic” means that it is full, complete and whole, lacking nothing in its mystical and sacramental being and life as Christ’s holy Church. In an Orthodox Christian parish the whole fullness of God must dwell, as in Christ’s body, with all the fullness of life and grace and truth, by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

The word catholic literally means full or whole or complete. It does not, in the first instance, mean universal or worldwide. Thus every local Christian community, every “parish” in the contemporary American meaning of the word, theologically, mystically and sacramentally is, in apostolic words, “Christ’s body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all.” (Ephesians 1:23) It is the “household of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth.” (1Tim 3:15) Everything expresses this. Everything testifies to this. This obviously does not mean that a parish will not be particular and limited in its human empirical, cultural and sociological forms. It has to be, since it is made up of human beings. But all of a parish’s particular aspects, with all of its teachings, services and activities, if they are Orthodox and Christian, will be open to the boundless fullness of God and will thereby be inclusive to everyone and everything that is good and holy and true.

And, according to the understanding of Christ’s Church in the Nicene creed, the Orthodox parish that is truly Christian will not only be the same Church of Christ with every other parish - one with God’s unity, holy with God’s holiness, and catholic with God’s fullness. It will also be apostolic with God’s own apostolicity which is found in the Church of Christ in all times and places.

An Orthodox parish, if it is Christ’s one holy Church, will be apostolic in at least two meanings of the term. It will be apostolic because it is founded upon Christ’s apostles and firmly rooted in apostolic doctrine and tradition. It will keep and live “the faith which was once and for all delivered to the saints.” (Jude 3) It will preserve and pass on the apostolic “deposit” (paratheke) which has been guarded and developed by Orthodox Christians, particularly through their bishops, in all times and places, from apostolic times to the present. (cf. 1 Timothy 6:20 ; 2 Timothy 1:12,14)

An Orthodox parish is apostolic also because it exists with God’s mission, which is the mission of Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, and the apostles of all ages, beginning with Christ’s own. The Greek word apostolo, from which the words apostle and apostolic are derived, means “to send.” So does the Latin word mitto, from which are derived the words mission and missionary. According to the scriptures, Jesus the Messiah is himself “the apostle.” (Hebrews 3:1) According to his scriptural testimony, especially the Gospel according to St. John, Jesus speaks the words, does the work, and accomplishes the will “of the Father, the One, who sent Him." (cf. John 6:29,44; 7:28,33; 17:3,18) In the same scriptures, the apostles, being filled with the Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Father and is sent by the Son, are themselves sent into the world by Jesus to proclaim the gospel of God’s Kingdom. “As the Father has sent me, even so I send you…Receive the Holy Spirit.” (John 20:21)

An Orthodox Christian parish, however it was founded and for whatever purpose it was organized, must understand itself to be an apostolic community with a missionary purpose. Its members, especially its leaders, must be conscious of themselves as people sent by Christ from God and empowered by the Holy Spirit to bring God’s unity, holiness and fullness to all human beings in this divided, sinful and fragmented world. If a parish has no awareness and consciousness of being “sent” by God to speak His words, to do His work, and to accomplish His will in this world, then it is not an Orthodox Christian parish. At best it is a bunch of decent people carrying on a bundle of benign activities for their own benefit. At worst, to use apocalyptic words, it is a “synagogue of Satan” perverting God’s gospel by its “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit (which) will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come.” (Revelation 2:9, 3:9; Matt. 12:31-32; Mark 3:28)

The members of an Orthodox parish must be motivated to keep God’s commandments as their
essential and ultimately exclusive reason for being. The life and activity of an Orthodox parish should be perfectly described by Jesus’ answer to the question concerning the first and great commandment of the law of God.
And one of the scribes…asked him, “Which commandment is first of all?”
Jesus answered, “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel, The Lord our God, the Lord is
one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your
soul, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your
Neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”
(Mark 12:28-31)
In the Gospel according to St. Matthew, Jesus teaches that “on these two commandments (Deut. 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18) depend all the law and the prophets. (Matthew 22:40) For our present purposes we can also say that on these two commandments depend the whole being and life of an Orthodox Christian parish.

Heart:
Liturgical Worship and Sacramental Service

Jesus says that God must be loved first of all with all one’s heart. In biblical usage, the heart is the center of a person’s being. It is the ground of a person’s life, the seat of a person’s will, and the source of a person’s activity, beginning with one’s words. It is the “place where God bears witness to himself,” according to St. Isaac of Syria; the place in a person, according to St. Macarius, which contains God himself, and Christ and the Holy Spirit, and the whole of creation, visible and invisible, spiritual and material, good and evil.

 A person’s heart reveals what he or she really is, and really thinks, and really wants and really does. “For where your treasure is,” Jesus tells us, “there will your heart be also.” (Matthew 6:21) The heart of a parish, if it is Christ’s one holy Church, will be totally given to God. In this sense, the heart of an Orthodox Christian parish will be its liturgical and sacramental worship. Worship will constitute the parish’s core. It will be the parish’s essential mode of self-realization. It will be its basic reason for being, the foundational purpose for its existence and life.

An Orthodox Christian parish is first and foremost a worshipping community. It exists to praise, bless and glorify God, to ceaselessly sing the thrice-holy hymn to the life-creating Trinity. Its essential purpose is to baptize people in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit; to enable them to die in Christ and to be raised with Him to newness of life; to be sealed with the gift of the Holy Spirit; to hear God’s word, to respond to God’s gospel, to confess and repent of our sins, to participate in the eucharistic sacrifice of Christ’s Body and Blood; and to actualize God’s Kingdom on earth, in spirit and truth, by faith and grace, until Christ comes in glory at the close of the age.

Soul: Spiritual Life and Pastoral Care

An Orthodox Christian parish must also be a community of people loving God with all their souls, as God’s law commands and Jesus confirms. The word soul (Greek psyche, Hebrew nefesh) literally means life and is often rendered as such in contemporary translations of the Bible in English.

Loving God with all one’s soul means loving Him with all of one’s thoughts, words and deeds in all of the routine thinking, talking and acting involved in everyday living. For an Orthodox Christian parish, if it is Christ’s holy church, this means that the community as a whole, and each individual member of it, is personally committed to living a Christian spiritual life by struggling to keep God’s commandments. “If you love me,” Jesus says in St. John’s Gospel, “you will keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and He will give you another Comforter (Greek: parakletos; counselor, advocate) to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him; you know him, for he dwells with you, and will be in you.” (John 14:15-17)
Christian spiritual life relates to every aspect of a person’s being and to every area of a person’s life and work. It has to do with his or her body and behavior, as well as to his or her thoughts and feelings. It has to do with sexuality as well as spirituality, with public and political action as well as with private and personal activity. People need help in living a Christian spiritual life in its fullness and depth. People do not mechanically become “members of Christ” and “temples of the Holy Spirit.” (1 Corinthians 6:15-19) and do not magically possess the “mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:16) and become “one spirit” with the Lord. (1 Corinthians 6:17)

Members of Christ’s Church must have spiritual guidance and direction. They require pastoral attention thoughts, and to overcome spiritual passions by partaking, through faith and grace, in Christ’s victory through the Holy Spirit. Such spiritual and pastoral services must be present in an Orthodox Christian parish if it is truly Christ’s holy Church. They need not, and indeed cannot be provided by the clergy alone. It is the duty of bishops and priests, however, to see that these services are provided by people capable of doing so, for the benefit of those willing to receive them. The Orthodox Christian parish is the proper place for this to happen. If it is not happening, then, once again, the parish community is not Christ’s Church.

Mind: Education and Enlightenment

Essential also to an Orthodox parish, if it is Christ’s holy Church, is total mobilization of efforts to love God with all of one’s mind through enlightenment and education.
Jesus’ first title in the scripture is rabbi, which means teacher or master (Grk: didaskalos, Latin; magister). As messianic pastor and priest, Christ is also “the prophet” who brings ultimate and lasting judgment upon those who hear and reject him. (John 1:21, 6:14; Acts 3:22-26) The Lord’s first followers are called disciples or students. And the first thing that is said about those who believed in God’s gospel of Christ crucified and glorified is that they “continued steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine.”(Acts 2:42)

An Orthodox Christian parish, therefore, is essentially a teaching and learning community for all its members. It is a school of disciples whose master is Christ as He speaks within the community of believers, especially through the pastors and those with the charism and training for teaching and preaching.

An Orthodox parish without well-prepared evangelical and exegetical sermons at its liturgical services, and well-prepared doctrinal and catechetical sessions as part of its educational ministry, whatever else it might do, including having lots of liturgical services and loads of social events, can hardly be an Orthodox Christian Church. This is especially true now in North America when Christianity generally, not to speak of Orthodoxy, is not a respected, accepted and supported part of public life and education, but is rather warred against, scorned and ridiculed by powerful forces in society.

Strength: Mission and Philanthropy

Loving God with all one’s strength, particularly according to the Hebrew text of holy scripture, means that we are to love God with all that we possess, primarily our money and property. Strength, in this context, does not merely mean mental, emotional or physical might, though these, of course, are not to be excluded from our love for the Lord.

An Orthodox Christian parish, when it is Christ’s holy Church, is obliged to use all of its powers for God’s glory and the people’s good. Christians as individual persons, as well as families, parishes and dioceses, will have to give account to Christ for how they used their God-given strength. We will have to answer for our use of money and resources, property and possessions, positions and profits. We will be asked how we loved “in deed and in truth,” and not merely “in word or speech,” through concrete acts of charity for the hungry and thirsty, the sick and suffering, the homeless and naked, the persecuted and imprisoned. (cf. 1John 3:18; Matt. 25:31-46)

On judgment day, the Lord will not ask us about our parish size and facilities. Nor will He be interested in our liturgical schedule or style. He will not ask us how we dressed or what we ate. He will be indifferent to how large our church temples were, or where they were located, or how they were decorated and appointed. Nor will He ask us to recite the Nicene Creed, or to explain the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. All of these things are important, but their significance has only one end: the love of God with all one’s heart, soul, mind, and strength, expressed as it can only be expressed in this present age, in concrete acts of love for our neighbors, first of all the members of our own families and parishes, and most of all for those who hate and oppose us.

Love of God with all our strength through acts of love for our neighbors and enemies is enacted primarily in acts of evangelism and philanthropy. While sacramental participation in an Orthodox parish is strictly reserved for committed Orthodox Christians who take full responsibility for the Church’s faith and life, and completely identify with the Church’s path through history, the philanthropic and evangelical activities of an Orthodox Christian parish as well as its services of teaching, counseling, and prayerful intercession, have no bounds or limitations of any kind. They are to be exercised freely and without discrimination for all people regardless of their religion, nationality, race, sexual behavior, or relation to Christ’s church. The first Christians, as witnessed in the New Testament, and such saints as John Chrysostom and Olympia, and Fr. John of Kronstadt and Mother Maria Skobtsova, taught and practiced this Christian truth without the slightest hesitation, equivocation or compromise.

A parish without carefully planned and implemented evangelical and philanthropic activity directed both within and outside its parochial bounds, is, once again, simply not Orthodox or Christian.

Structure and Administration

In order for these aspects of parish life to be actualized, a parish community must have the proper Christian structure and administration. The head of the parish in its total life is the presbyter, who is ordained and assigned by the diocesan bishop. He is also embraced and accepted by the parish as the community’s spiritual and sacramental leader, father and pastor. The parish priest, properly understood in Christian Orthodoxy, is neither domineering nor servile. He is neither an authoritarian “stand-in” for an absent hierarch, nor a hired underling at the beck and call of a secularized board of trustees. He is rather a called, trained, tested and ordained teacher, pastor and priest who guarantees the presence and action of Christ in the community. His God-given task, confirmed and supported by the faithful, is to empower every parishioner to find and fulfill his or her calling as a member of Christ’s Body. He is the servant of servants, for God’s glory and the good of all people. When functioning properly in love, this structure maintains its identity and integrity as Christ’s Body, the household of God.

Unity and Variety

Until God’s Kingdom comes with power and the end of the age, Orthodox Christian parishes around the world will be struggling to be Christ’s holy Church. These parishes, certainly in the United States and Canada, will be of a great variety of sizes, shapes and styles, though each one, theologically and mystically, will be the very same Church of Christ. The parishes will be composed of different kinds of people. They will be of different cultures and traditions. They will have different emphases and possibilities in worship, education, pastoral care, and philanthropic and evangelical activity. None of them will claim that they can do everything by themselves. They will acknowledge that they need each other, that they are constrained by truth and love to cooperate with each other, that they must complete each other, but must complete each other in Christian service and ministry. They will know that the only way in which they should strive to outdo each other is in expressing godly zeal, brotherly affection, due honor and mutual respect. (cf. Romans 12:9-13)

Whatever confusions and difficulties confront Orthodox Christianity in North America today, whatever their origins and causes, and whatever temptations and trials they bring to believers, there is no good reason why an Orthodox Christian parish in the United States or Canada cannot be Christ’s holy Church. All that is required is that its members, beginning with its leaders, be firmly resolved to have it so. Their afflictions will be great, as Christ has promised, but their successes are assured by His victory. "In the world you have tribulation," Jesus says to his apostles, " but take courage, I have overcome the world." (John 16:33) "For what is impossible with men is possible with God." (Luke 18:27)

From the Editor: Fr. Christopher Calin

A Semandron is a long bar made of wood or metal which, when struck with a hammer, produces resonant music. It was used from the earliest years of the Church to call the faithful to the divine services and prayer. The instrument replaced church bells, which were forbidden to Christians living under Muslim rule. We have a large Semandron suspended in the vestibule of the Cathedral and a smaller one which is held and used for processions. The masthead of our newsletter features a drawing of a Semandron made for us by our former parishioner, Alexander Yovanovich, presently a monk at the Decani Monastery in Kosovo, Serbia since 1993. Pray for him, please.

This issue marks my twenty-third year as Editor of the Cathedral Newsletter. In 1991 we adopted the name “The Semandron—A Call to Prayer” and widened its scope to serve as an educational tool. Over the years we have tried to keep the contents germane to living a Christian life in a modern secular society, by featuring articles to inspire, instruct and challenge our members and friends to become thoughtful Christians, actively pursuing a life in Christ that is both informed and experiential in nature. I deeply believe that we must be actively engaged with the society around us in order to be agents of the enlightenment and sanctification of the Christ to all people.

How things have changed in these past 23 years! The earliest issues were all hand-typed and pasted up with noxious-smelling and clothing destroying spray adhesives. Then came the “new and amazing” press types letters which were great for titles and headlines. It was in 1990 that Olga Dorochovich, then secretary of the Cathedral, bought and donated a state of the art 386 desktop PC. It seemed that our abilities were limitless with all the fonts and formats, spell check and laser printing .We have moved on from then and currently use Microsoft Publisher on a 8 year old Dell laptop. I hope to move over to a Mac soon (this issue is late due to computer problems) and some things will change again. Although I have been greatly tempted numerous times, we have maintained the same general format and size. With the exponential growth of the internet, our resources for articles are almost limitless, however, we still seek and encourage members and friends to submit original articles, and are always grateful for reader’s feedback and letters. And while some issues are better than others, I like to think that each of them adds something of value to our reader’s spiritual journey on the Way of Christ.

This issue features a talk on Orthodoxy in the West given by Romanian Metropolitan Serafim Joanta at Columbia University in December; an article from the “Wall Street Journal” about a new book by Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople; and a feature article on Fr David Kirk who died last year, and his work at Emmaus House of Harlem. Emmaus House is in dire need of assistance and faces possible closure. I hope that by reading this article you may become inspired to help them.

Our cover features a photo from the Funeral of Archbishop Peter (L’Huillier) on November 28. He was our Diocesan Hierarch and Rector for 27 years and he deeply loved the Cathedral. We will miss him.
May he dwell among good things with the saints.

This issue will take us through the first week of the great and holy Fast in preparation for Pascha. I hope and pray that each of you had a spiritually profitable and joyous celebration of “the winter Pascha”, and that as we now begin to anticipate the “feast of feasts,” God will abundantly reward your good works and spiritual labors.



Orthodoxy and the West
Metropolitan Serafim (Joanta)

For a long time now, Orthodoxy has no longer been simply 'Eastern'. It is present today on all five continents as a living witness to the undivided early Church, named in the Creed as 'One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic'. Because of this presence of the Orthodox in places that had been traditionally Catholic or Protestant, and especially because of the modern ecumenical movement, Christians of the East and the West are today able to know one another more accurately, and share in the specific values of one another's traditions. Perhaps in this age we can witness the Church once more 'breathing with two lungs.' (sic)

Western Christianity tends to be pragmatic in character, orientated towards the world and towards human persons in their existential context of suffering that is both of the body and of the soul. To be of loving and effectual service to humanity in its most pressing and concrete needs is, according to the Gospel, the fundamental criterion of the Last Judgment. Following from this pragmatic character, Western Christianity has always tended to be marked by a juridical and ethical (or moralistic) spirit. In the later Middle Ages the strong ecclesiastical centralism emanating from Rome, as well as the trend of Scholastic theology to try to explicate everything it could address, led to the reaction of the Reformation. The Reformation principles of Sola Scriptura and Sola Fide encouraged invidualism, to the detriment of Christian personalism. It was out of the spirit of the Reformation that were born the philosophies of humanism and rationalism, intellectual movements that tended to lock up the divinity in an inaccessible transcendentalism. Ultimately this societal philosophy led to a state where humanity no longer felt it necessary to have recourse to God at all. Man himself became 'the measure of all things'. Such a spirit can be seen in the French Revolutionary writers, stressing the rights of man in contradistinction to the rights of the divine. It is the same spirit we see summed up in Nietzsche's proclamation of the 'death of God', and his belief in the advent of the Superman.

This development had heavy consequences for the Christian life in the West, which began to lose its mystical force, desiring in many instances to accommodate to the spirit of the age. It involved, for example, the renunciation of the ascetical practice of fasting, and a turning away from the spirituality of asceticism in general, by which means the body is enabled to participate in the spiritual energies of purification and sanctification, which can often become enfeebled and exhausted by being engaged solely in exterior works to the detriment of the labor of transforming the heart.

Eastern Christianity, on the other hand, experienced in its own historical development a much more coherent and unitary pattern. Thanks to the collegial structure of its episcopate, and because of its strong sense that the church is only infallible in the sense that the people of God as a whole are possessed of that charism, it was able to overcome the great theological crises of it history (especially those of the first millennium), regardless of the schisms of the 5th century, and so preserve a remarkable internal unity between faith, theology, mysticism, the consecrated life of the ascetics, and life in the secular world: a unity, in short, in which all the disparate elements were orientated towards personal sanctification which was at one and the same time also that of the cosmos.

The Orthodox Church has the consciousness of being the historic continuation of the undivided Church precisely because she has kept unchanged the 'deposit of the apostolic faith' (I Tim. 6.20) in the face of all dilution or contamination from what the apostle calls 'pseudo-science'. Even so, this deposit of the faith cannot be instrumentalised, ideologized, or transformed into a theological science devoid of love, and this because it is
fundamentally a question of the Living God: He who is above all conceptual ideas, and above every form of speech.

The energy of Orthodoxy is exactly the humble force of its spirituality: a liturgical and personal spirituality which has as its center, its root, and .its basis, all the faculties and powers of the human being. It is the holy place of our baptismal grace which waits for, and expects, our collaboration by means of asceticism, in accord with an ascetical adage of Pauline inspiration: 'To receive the Spirit be ready to give your blood.' What ~. Paul himself said was : 'In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of your blood.' ( Heb. 12.4). And again: 'I treated my body harshly and I hold it subject, for fear that having once preached to others, I myself might find I am rejected.' (I Cor. 9. 27). On the one hand, then, we note the demands of severe asceticism, and on the other hand the awareness that all is grace; all is the free gift of God. Perfection, holiness, and salvation, are all the exclusive work of grace. Asceticism can only open up, or sensitize, our heart to the sovereign action of grace.

Asceticism is a fundamental dimension of Orthodox spirituality. There is no spirituality without ascetic effort: without constant engagement in the struggle against sinfulness, and the wicked passions. Christian life is a 'narrow path' made up of renunciation, of difficulties of sufferings. Ascetic effort is in permanent opposition to the spirit of this fallen world. It is precisely asceticism in its manifold forms (sobriety in all things, the service of the sick and the indigent, abstinence in terms of food and pleasures, dedication to prayer vigils, and prostrations) which keeps our spirit awake to faith and renews in us the power of the Holy Spirit. Without asceticism, sinfulness and the force of the wicked passions will overwhelm us, and make us enslaved.

Prayer is, without doubt, the greatest form of asceticism for the believer- especially for those who are spiritual beginners. Its accomplishment demands a special effort of the concentration of the spirit within the heart, where (as I mentioned earlier) are located all the faculties and inner powers of the human spirit. This, what the Fathers called the Nous or Spiritual Intellect, is an energy of the heart and must always remain in unity with the heart, if we are to experience 'peace of heart'. But in a state of sinfulness a human being cannot know this peace of heart, because sinfulness breaks the heart's unity, that is to say breaks the harmony of the psycho-physical energies that are concentrated in the heart. The intellect itself, when it forgets the heart, expands its range of action into the exterior life and concerns itself exclusively with the life of the material world where it can 'descend' ad libitum, in the sense of feeding its desires and needs by engaging in the delight of sensual pleasures.

As we know from experience, the human intellect enjoys by virtue of its imaginative faculties an incredible motility. Only prayer is able to arrest this fluid vagrancy of the intellect and make the intellectual powers of a human being descend quietly into the heart. The Hesychastic spiritual masters teach that during prayer it is necessary to 'lock up' the intellect in the words of the prayer, and to send the intellect down into the heart's holding. And so, to an extent, all true prayer is rightly called 'The prayer of the heart', for it is a prayer that engages all of the human being, and not simply the intellect, a misfortunate state of affairs that commonly occurs. This issue of remaining on the surface of a purely intellective encounter, is a danger that threatens all prayer. If it remains intellectual and surface it cannot descend into the depths of the heart. It will remain cold, and will wear us out rather than bring us interior peace. The same fathers also tell us that the secret of pure prayer, that prayer which truly engages the heart, is a matter of avid perseverance. To arrive at prayer which is more and more pure, a veritable fruit of grace, one must pray often.

Such prayer warms up the heart, pacifies it, and fills it with a love of all humanity, and for all of creation. Then, once the heart has been purified, united, and pacified, it rediscovers its ontological unity with the totality of the creation which lives in God. Such a person then lives as Christ himself did, and is no longer separated from anyone or anything, for such a one has recapitulated all things within. St Isaac the Syrian taught us that a person of pure heart will weep for the wickedness of the whole world, and will pray on-behalf of all humanity, and even for the very demons! Moreover such a heart is not merely ready on all occasions to serve its fellows; it becomes even ready to lay down its life for them.

We must also underline the fact that this process of purification and sanctification by means of asceticism and prayer, can only be accomplished in the communion of the Church, and in solidarity with our brothers and sisters in the faith. No one can be saved alone. Each one is saved in the measure that they help the salvation of others.

The social-activist consequences of such a personalist spirituality of communion, are very extensive. In the first instance the quest for 'peace of heart' (that interior equilibrium of the psychosomatic powers), is for contemporary human beings no less than a primary issue of survival. Moreover the extensive egoism and individualism that pervades and defines our contemporary societal life can find no other remedy than in this spirituality of communion.

In conclusion I would like to say that the phenomenon of globalisation sets both Eastern and Western forms of Christianity alike before a common destiny, and makes them stand together before the same enemy, which is secularization, and its ongoing loss of the very syntax of faith. The encounter between the two Christian traditions may perhaps be a chance for their survival; if they open up to one another, in mutual love and a respect that seeks to be mutually enriched, and to be mutually improved: Orthodoxy strong in its mystical life; Western Christianity excelling in its pragmatism set to the service of humanity in its concrete needs.



Metropolitan Serafim Joanta, Archbishop of the Romanian Orthodox Church in Central and Northern Germany was born on September 4, 1948, in Boholt, near Brasov in Romania. He graduated from the Sibiu Theological Institute in 1974 and was ordained to the priesthood in the same year. He studied in the advanced program of Early Christian thought and culture at the St. Sergius Institute in Paris in 1985, and received his doctorate there, with a thesis on the Hesychastic Spirituality of Romania. The work has since been published in several languages: its English Title is: Romania: Its Hesychast Tradition and Culture (Wildwood, Ca. 1992).

Metropolitan Serafim was tonsured as a monk in 1990 was consecrated Bishop of Fagaras, Vicar of the Diocese of Sibiu, later that same year. In 1994 he was elected by the Holy Synod of the Patriarchate of Romania to the position of Metropolitan of Central and Northern Europe, with a base first at Regensburg, and latterly at Nuremberg, where he has founded a monastic centre at the heart of the Archdiocese. In the early years after 1994 he was also Locum Tenens of the Romanian Orthodox Metropolitanate of Western Europe, before Archbishop Pop was elected to that see, based at Paris.

Metropolitan Serafim is known throughout the world as one of the leading theologians among the Orthodox. His wise counsel and ecumenical openness have endeared him greatly to Christians of all the families of churches, both catholic and protestant. Among the Orthodox he is widely known as a leading spiritual father, and one of the most dynamic and missionary hierarchs of the Romanian Orthodox Church today.

This article was delivered at First Annual Symposium of Romanian Orthodox Spirituality sponsored by the Archdiocese of the Romanian Orthodox Church in the Americas at Columbia University on December 7, 2007.

News & ANNOUNCEMENTS
PARISH STATISTICS
The average attendance for the past twelve weeks (11/11—01/27) has been 135 for Sunday Liturgy and 26 for Saturday Vigil. For Christmas there were 82 people for Vigil and 110 for Liturgy.

2008 PARISH COUNCIL APPOINTMENTS
Administrative Ministry (Executive Board) Chair: Fr Christopher Calin
Associate Clergy: Archdeacon Michael Suvak, Dn. Patrick Baumgarth
Parish Council Warden: George Elia Assistant Warden: Gregory Galterio
Parish Council Secretaries: Mary Eden Walker, Kristina Baktis
Finance Ministry Treasurer: Archdeacon Michael Suvak Auditor: Mary Gelement,
Candle Desk Trustees: Sonia Salogub, Dave Martin, Valentina Novikova, Luke Helenius Bookstore: Archdeacon Michael. Ketevan Bakuradze, Anna Magradze, Luke Helenius
Greeters Ministry: Madeline Nicastro, Kristina Baktis, Charles Webb
Hospitality Ministry: Valerica Mantali, Olga Igoumnova, Jaana Hinnkanen
Liturgical Ministry: David Ninoshvili, Manana Ninua, Mark Bird
Benevolence Ministry: Natia Mosashvili Youth Ministry: Kristina Baktis
Building Ministry: Archdeacon Michael, George Elia, Olga Doudkina
Education Ministry: Maria Logis, Jeff Michler, Charissa Martin, Elizabeth Bird
Special Events and Activities Director: Jennifer Cross

MARRIAGES
John Jacob Walker and Mary Eden Teagle on January 6, 2008
Sponsors: Christopher Orr and Grace Pettijohn
Daniel Christian Doeschner and Alexa Luisa Avila Bront on January 19, 2008
Sponsors: Petrica and Florica Radu
Wilfred Sepulveda and Irina Kacharava on January 20, 2008.
Sponsors: Daniel Sepulveda and Ketevan Hall
BAPTISMS
John Jacob Walker, an adult, was baptized on January 5, 2008. Sponsor: Archdeacon Michael.

News and Notes… •The Sale of Christmas trees yielded a profit of $1018. Our gratitude to all who volunteered to sell trees throughout the month of December. •Congratulations to Stephanos and Juliana Bibas on the birth of a son, Hariton Bibas on January 6th. •We enjoyed a visit from the Holubka Ukrainian Dance ensemble on January 27 and hope to see more of them. • The Annual Memorial for ROJL members and Danny Tashman on Jaunary 27 saw many good friends of the Cathedral here. It is always so nice to see them. •Pray for all who are homebound or otherwise unable to be with us, Olga Dorochovich, Mary Bob, Maria Dobrawsky, Maria Kulcsar. We miss you! •The St. Petersburg Men’s Ensemble sang at the Liturtgy and gave a Concert here on 11/18/07. •We supported Emmaus House, IOCC, OCMC, 9th Precinct Police.

To regret religion is to regret Western civilization.
Theodore Dalrymple
From City Journal, Autumn 2007

The British parliament’s first avowedly atheist member, Charles Bradlaugh, would stride into public meetings in the 1880s, take out his pocket watch, and challenge God to strike him dead in 60 seconds. God bided his time, but got Bradlaugh in the end. A slightly later atheist, Bertrand Russell, was once asked what he would do if it proved that he was mistaken and if he met his maker in the hereafter. He would demand to know, Russell replied with all the high-pitched fervor of his pedantry, why God had not made the evidence of his existence plainer and more irrefutable. And Jean-Paul Sartre* came up with a memorable line: “God doesn’t exist—the bastard!”

Sartre’s wonderful outburst of disappointed rage suggests that it is not as easy as one might suppose to rid oneself of the notion of God. (Perhaps this is the time to declare that I am not myself a believer.) At the very least, Sartre’s line implies that God’s existence would solve some kind of problem—actually, a profound one: the transcendent purpose of human existence. Few of us, especially as we grow older, are entirely comfortable with the idea that life is full of sound and fury but signifies nothing. However much philosophers tell us that it is illogical to fear death, and that at worst it is only the process of dying that we should fear, people still fear death as much as ever. In like fashion, however many times philosophers say that it is up to us ourselves, and to no one else, to find the meaning of life, we continue to long for a transcendent purpose immanent in existence itself, independent of our own wills. To tell us that we should not feel this longing is a bit like telling someone in the first flush of love that the object of his affections is not worthy of them. The heart hath its reasons that reason knows not of.

Of course, men—that is to say, some men—have denied this truth ever since the Enlightenment, and have sought to find a way of life based entirely on reason. Far as I am from decrying reason, the attempt leads at best to Gradgrind and at worst to Stalin. Reason can never be the absolute dictator of man’s mental or moral economy.

The search for the pure guiding light of reason, uncontaminated by human passion or metaphysical principles that go beyond all possible evidence, continues, however; and recently, an epidemic rash of books has declared success, at least if success consists of having slain the inveterate enemy of reason, namely religion. The philosophers Daniel Dennett, A. C. Grayling, Michel Onfray, and Sam Harris, biologist Richard Dawkins, and journalist and critic Christopher Hitchens have all written books roundly condemning religion and its works. Evidently, there is a tide in the affairs, if not of men, at least of authors.

The curious thing about these books is that the authors often appear to think that they are saying something new and brave. They imagine themselves to be like the intrepid explorer Sir Richard Burton, who in 1853 disguised himself as a Muslim merchant, went to Mecca, and then wrote a book about his unprecedented feat. The public appears to agree, for the neo-atheist books have sold by the hundred thousand. Yet with the possible exception of Dennett’s, they advance no argument that I, the village atheist, could not have made by the age of 14 (Saint Anselm’s ontological argument for God’s existence gave me the greatest difficulty, but I had taken Hume to heart on the weakness of the argument from design).

I first doubted God’s existence at about the age of nine. It was at the school assembly that I lost my faith. We had been given to understand that if we opened our eyes during prayers God would depart the assembly hall. I wanted to test this hypothesis. Surely, if I opened my eyes suddenly, I would glimpse the fleeing God? What I saw instead, it turned out, was the headmaster, Mr. Clinton, intoning the prayer with one eye closed and the other open, with which he beadily surveyed the children below for transgressions. I quickly concluded that Mr. Clinton did not believe what he said about the need to keep our eyes shut. And if he did not believe that, why should I believe in his God? In such illogical leaps do our beliefs often originate, to be disciplined later in life (if we receive enough education) by elaborate rationalization.

Dennett’s Breaking the Spell is the least bad-tempered of the new atheist books, but it is deeply condescending to all religious people. Dennett argues that religion is explicable in evolutionary terms—for example, by our inborn human propensity, at one time valuable for our survival on the African savannahs, to attribute animate agency to threatening events.

For Dennett, to prove the biological origin of belief in God is to show its irrationality, to break its spell. But of course it is a necessary part of the argument that all possible human beliefs, including belief in evolution, must be explicable in precisely the same way; or else why single out religion for this treatment? Either we test ideas according to arguments in their favor, independent of their origins, thus making the argument from evolution irrelevant, or all possible beliefs come under the same suspicion of being only evolutionary adaptations—and thus biologically contingent rather than true or false. We find ourselves facing a version of the paradox of the Cretan liar: all beliefs, including this one, are the products of evolution, and all beliefs that are products of evolution cannot be known to be true.

One striking aspect of Dennett’s book is his failure to avoid the language of purpose, intention, and ontological moral evaluation, despite his fierce opposition to teleological views of existence: the coyote’s “methods of locomotion have been ruthlessly optimized for efficiency.” Or: “The stinginess of Nature can be seen everywhere we look.” Or again: “This is a good example of Mother Nature’s stinginess in the final accounting combined with absurd profligacy in the methods.” I could go on, but I hope the point is clear. (And Dennett is not alone in this difficulty: Michel Onfray’s Atheist Manifesto, so rich in errors and inexactitudes that it would take a book as long as his to correct them, says on its second page that religion prevents mankind from facing up to “reality in all its naked cruelty.” But how can reality have any moral quality without having an immanent or transcendent purpose?)

No doubt Dennett would reply that he is writing in metaphors for the layman and that he could translate all his statements into a language without either moral evaluation or purpose included in it. Perhaps he would argue that his language is evidence that the spell still has a hold over even him, the breaker of the spell for the rest of humanity. But I am not sure that this response would be psychologically accurate. I think Dennett’s use of the language of evaluation and purpose is evidence of a deep-seated metaphysical belief (however caused) that Providence exists in the universe, a belief that few people, confronted by the mystery of beauty and of existence itself, escape entirely. At any rate, it ill behooves Dennett to condescend to those poor primitives who still have a religious or providential view of the world: a view that, at base, is no more refutable than Dennett’s metaphysical faith in evolution.

Dennett is not the only new atheist to employ religious language. In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins quotes with approval a new set of Ten Commandments for atheists, which he obtained from an atheist website, without considering odd the idea that atheists require commandments at all, let alone precisely ten of them; nor does their metaphysical status seem to worry him. The last of the atheist’s Ten Commandments ends with the following: “Question everything.” Everything? Including the need to question everything, and so on ad infinitum?

Not to belabor the point, but if I questioned whether George Washington died in 1799, I could spend a lifetime trying to prove it and find myself still, at the end of my efforts, having to make a leap, or perhaps several leaps, of faith in order to believe the rather banal fact that I had set out to prove. Metaphysics is like nature: though you throw it out with a pitchfork, yet it always returns. What is confounded here is surely the abstract right to question everything with the actual exercise of that right on all possible occasions. Anyone who did exercise his right on all possible occasions would wind up a short-lived fool.

This sloppiness and lack of intellectual scruple, with the assumption of certainty where there is none, combined with adolescent shrillness and intolerance, reach an apogee in Sam Harris’s book The End of Faith. It is not easy to do justice to the book’s nastiness; it makes Dawkins’s claim that religious education constitutes child abuse look sane and moderate.

Harris tells us, for example, that “we must find our way to a time when faith, without evidence, disgraces anyone who would claim it. Given the present state of the world, there appears to be no other future worth wanting.” I am glad that I am old enough that I shall not see the future of reason as laid down by Harris; but I am puzzled by the status of the compulsion in the first sentence that I have quoted. Is Harris writing of a historical inevitability? Of a categorical imperative? Or is he merely making a legislative proposal? This is who-will-rid-me-of-this-troublesome-priest language, ambiguous no doubt, but not open to a generous interpretation.

It becomes even more sinister when considered in conjunction with the following sentences, quite possibly the most disgraceful that I have read in a book by a man posing as a rationalist: “The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions are so dangerous that it may be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live.”

Let us leave aside the metaphysical problems that these three sentences raise. For Harris, the most important question about genocide would seem to be: “Who is genociding whom?” To adapt Dostoyevsky slightly, starting from universal reason, I arrive at universal madness.

Lying not far beneath the surface of all the neo-atheist books is the kind of historiography that many of us adopted in our hormone-disturbed adolescence, furious at the discovery that our parents sometimes told lies and violated their own precepts and rules. It can be summed up in Christopher Hitchens’s drumbeat in God Is Not Great: “Religion spoils everything.”

What? The Saint Matthew Passion? The Cathedral of Chartres? The emblematic religious person in these books seems to be a Glasgow Airport bomber—a type unrepresentative of Muslims, let alone communicants of the poor old Church of England. It is surely not news, except to someone so ignorant that he probably wouldn’t be interested in these books in the first place, that religious conflict has often been murderous and that religious people have committed hideous atrocities. But so have secularists and atheists, and though they have had less time to prove their mettle in this area, they have proved it amply. If religious belief is not synonymous with good behavior, neither is absence of belief, to put it mildly.

In fact, one can write the history of anything as a chronicle of crime and folly. Science and technology spoil everything: without trains and IG Farben, no Auschwitz; without transistor radios and mass-produced machetes, no Rwandan genocide. First you decide what you hate, and then you gather evidence for its hatefulness. Since man is a fallen creature (I use the term metaphorically rather than in its religious sense), there is always much to find.

The thinness of the new atheism is evident in its approach to our civilization, which until recently was religious to its core. To regret religion is, in fact, to regret our civilization and its monuments, its achievements, and its legacy. And in my own view, the absence of religious faith, provided that such faith is not murderously intolerant, can have a deleterious effect upon human character and personality. If you empty the world of purpose, make it one of brute fact alone, you empty it (for many people, at any rate) of reasons for gratitude, and a sense of gratitude is necessary for both happiness and decency. For what can soon, and all too easily, replace gratitude is a sense of entitlement. Without gratitude, it is hard to appreciate, or be satisfied with, what you have: and life will become an existential shopping spree that no product satisfies.

A few years back, the National Gallery held an exhibition of Spanish still-life paintings. One of these paintings had a physical effect on the people who sauntered in, stopping them in their tracks; some even gasped. I have never seen an image have such an impact on people. The painting, by Juan Sánchez Cotán, now hangs in the San Diego Museum of Art. It showed four fruits and vegetables, two suspended by string, forming a parabola in a gray stone window. (Ed. Note: This image appears on our cover)

Even if you did not know that Sánchez Cotán was a seventeenth-century Spanish priest, you could know that the painter was religious: for this picture is a visual testimony of gratitude for the beauty of those things that sustain us. Once you have seen it, and concentrated your attention on it, you will never take the existence of the humble cabbage—or of anything else—quite so much for granted, but will see its beauty and be thankful for it. The painting is a permanent call to contemplation of the meaning of human life, and as such it arrested people who ordinarily were not, I suspect, much given to quiet contemplation.

The same holds true with the work of the great Dutch still-life painters. On the neo-atheist view, the religious connection between Catholic Spain and Protestant Holland is one of conflict, war, and massacre only: and certainly one cannot deny this history. And yet something more exists. As with Sánchez Cotán, only a deep reverence, an ability not to take existence for granted, could turn a representation of a herring on a pewter plate into an object of transcendent beauty, worthy of serious reflection.

I recently had occasion to compare the writings of the neo-atheists with those of Anglican divines of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I was visiting some friends at their country house in England, which had a library of old volumes; since the family of the previous owners had a churchman in every generation, many of the books were religious. In my own neo-atheist days, I would have scorned these works as pertaining to a nonexistent entity and containing nothing of value. I would have considered the authors deluded men, who probably sought to delude others for reasons that Marx might have enumerated.

But looking, say, into the works of Joseph Hall, D.D., I found myself moved: much more moved, it goes without saying, than by any of the books of the new atheists. Hall was bishop of Exeter and then of Norwich; though a moderate Puritan, he took the Royalist side in the English civil war and lost his see, dying in 1656 while Cromwell was still Lord Protector.

Except by specialists, Hall remains almost entirely forgotten today. I opened one of the volumes at random, his Contemplations Upon the Principal Passages of the Holy Story. Here was the contemplation on the sickness of Hezekiah:

Hezekiah was freed from the siege of the Assyrians, but he is surprised with a disease. He, that delivered him from the hand of his enemies, smites him with sickness. God doth not let us loose from all afflictions, when he redeems us from one.

To think that Hezekiah was either not thankful enough for his deliverance, or too much lifted up with the glory of so miraculous a favour, were an injurious misconstruction of the hand of God, and an uncharitable censure of a holy prince; for, though no flesh and blood can avoid the just desert of bodily punishment, yet God doth not always strike with an intuition of sin: sometimes he regards the benefit of our trial; sometimes, the glory of his mercy in our cure.

Hall surely means us to infer that whatever happens to us, however unpleasant, has a meaning and purpose; and this enables us to bear our sorrows with greater dignity and less suffering. And it is part of the existential reality of human life that we shall always need consolation, no matter what progress we make. Hall continues:

When, as yet, he had not so much as the comfort of a child to succeed him, thy prophet is sent to him, with the heavy message of his death: “Set thine house in order; for thou shalt die, and not live.” It is no small mercy of God, that he gives us warning of our end. . . . No soul can want important affairs, to be ordered for a final dissolution.

This is the language not of rights and entitlements, but of something much deeper—a universal respect for the condition of being human.

For Hall, life is instinct with meaning: a meaning capable of controlling man’s pride at his good fortune and consoling him for his ill fortune. Here is an extract from Hall’s Characters of Virtues and Vices:

He is an happy man, that hath learned to read himself, more than all books; and hath so taken out this lesson, that he can never forget it: that knows the world, and cares not for it; that, after many traverses of thoughts, is grown to know what he may trust to; and stands now equally armed for all events: that hath got the mastery at home; so as he can cross his will without a mutiny, and so please it that he makes it not a wanton: that, in earthly things, wishes no more than nature; in spiritual, is ever graciously ambitious: that, for his condition, stands on his own feet, not needing to lean upon the great; and can so frame his thoughts to his estate, that when he hath least, he cannot want, because he is as free from desire, as superfluity: that hath seasonably broken the headstrong restiness of prosperity; and can now manage it, at pleasure: upon whom, all smaller crosses light as hailstones upon a roof; and, for the greater calamities, he can take them as tributes of life and tokens of love; and, if his ship be tossed, yet he is sure his anchor is fast. If all the world were his, he could be no other than he is; no whit gladder of himself, no whit higher in his carriage; because he knows, that contentment lies not in the things he hath, but in the mind that values them.
Though eloquent, this appeal to moderation as the key to happiness is not original; but such moderation comes more naturally to the man who believes in something not merely higher than himself, but higher than mankind. After all, the greatest enjoyment of the usages of this world, even to excess, might seem rational when the usages of this world are all that there is.

In his Occasional Meditations, Hall takes perfectly ordinary scenes—ordinary, of course, for his times—and derives meaning from them. Here is his meditation “Upon the Flies Gathering to a Galled Horse”:

How these flies swarm to the galled part of this poor beast; and there sit, feeding upon that worst piece of his flesh, not meddling with the other sound parts of his skin! Even thus do malicious tongues of detractors: if a man have any infirmity in his person or actions, that they will be sure to gather unto, and dwell upon; whereas, his commendable parts and well-deservings are passed by, without mention, without regard. It is an envious self-love and base cruelty, that causeth this ill disposition in men: in the mean time, this only they have gained; it must needs be a filthy creature, that feeds upon nothing but corruption.

Surely Hall is not suggesting (unlike Dennett in his unguarded moments) that the biological purpose of flies is to feed off injured horses, but rather that a sight in nature can be the occasion for us to reflect imaginatively on our morality. He is not raising a biological theory about flies, in contradistinction to the theory of evolution, but thinking morally about human existence. It is true that he would say that everything is part of God’s providence, but, again, this is no more (and no less) a metaphysical belief than the belief in natural selection as an all-explanatory principle.

Let us compare Hall’s meditation “Upon the Sight of a Harlot Carted” with Harris’s statement that some people ought perhaps to be killed for their beliefs:
With what noise, and tumult, and zeal of solemn justice, is this sin punished! The streets are not more full of beholders, than clamours. Every one strives to express his detestation of the fact, by some token of revenge: one casts mire, another water, another rotten eggs, upon the miserable offender. Neither, indeed, is she worthy of less: but, in the mean time, no man looks home to himself. It is no uncharity to say, that too many insult in this just punishment, who have deserved more. . . . Public sins have more shame; private may have more guilt. If the world cannot charge me of those, it is enough, that I can charge my soul of worse. Let others rejoice, in these public executions: let me pity the sins of others, and be humbled under the sense of my own.

Who sounds more charitable, more generous, more just, more profound, more honest, more humane: Sam Harris or Joseph Hall, D.D., late lord bishop of Exeter and of Norwich?

No doubt it helps that Hall lived at a time of sonorous prose, prose that merely because of its sonority resonates in our souls; prose of the kind that none of us, because of the time in which we live, could ever equal. But the style applies to the thought as well as the prose; and I prefer Hall’s charity to Harris’s intolerance.

Theodore Dalrymple, a physician, is a contributing editor of City Journal and the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

* This quotation is from Samuel Beckett, not Sartre. We regret the error.

REVIEW/Dave Bruno
Warning: Plot spoilers throughout this review!
Harry Potter 7 Is Saint Matthew 6

Fans of Harry Potter find out so much in the last book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. No single review could hope to cover all that we find. And I could not hope to pretend I have found all that there is to be uncovered. Here I am concerned to point out one of the more obvious discoveries, namely, that the great Headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry Albus Dumbledore read the Bible. Moreover, he seems not only to have read the Bible but to have understood it.

Observers of Harry Potter have argued (sometimes rather viciously) over J. K. Rowling’s alleged use or misuse or non-use of Christian themes. The idea that Rowling has not used Christian themes throughout Harry Potter must seem foolish to honest readers aquatinted with both the Harry Potter books and the Bible. But that wrongheaded notion is put to rest for sure in Deathly Hallows when Rowling quotes two Scripture passages word-for-word.

Though Rowling has used Christian themes in Harry Potter, it is possible, as some commentators suggest, that her uses are empty of traditional Christian orthodoxy. Deathly Hallows begins with quotes from Aeschylus and William Penn, which might hint that Rowling has a non-orthodox view of Christ and salvation not unlike some Quaker theology. That is possible, I think. And the sure-fire way to find out is to see what she says of her religious beliefs when the interviews start rolling in. For what it is worth, I’d be surprised if Rowling does not line up more properly with traditional Christianity. More on my reasons for that after returning to the subject of Dumbledore’s understanding of the Bible.

Albus Dumbledore quotes the Bible word-for-word by placing an inscription on the tomb of his mother and sister, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matthew 6:21). On this point my wife (who possesses encyclopedic Harry Potter knowledge) and I disagree. I believe that Dumbledore is, in fact, quoting the Bible. The reason I think this is because he, well, is. This is not an allusion to a Scripture passage. This is not a paraphrase of a Scripture passage. This is a word-for-word quote from a Scripture passage. The quote is on a tombstone in a graveyard behind a real church where people are singing a real carol on a real Christmas Eve night. (next page)

Startlingly, one of the most explicitly religious aspects of the Harry Potter series is one of the most controversial. Many critics have lambasted Rowling for removing religion from her world. But then why are there so many churches? Reread the books (I know, it will take a long time) and notice how many churches there are and how often she mentions churches at critical junctures. And why do wizards and Muggles alike sing Christmas carols? Are we, for criticism’s sake, supposed to imagine that in the Harry Potter books the Christmas carols are not about Christmas? Critics can say what they want. An honest read, however, must include the recognition that religion, and particularly Christianity, has its place in the world of Harry Potter.

But back to the Scripture passage Dumbledore quotes. We need to ask ourselves why he choses this verse from the Sermon on the Mount. The circumstances surrounding the death of his sister help us understand why he marks her grave with this passage. Dumbledore’s greed for the most precious of earthly treasures, the Deathly Hallows, ultimately led to his sister’s death. Suffice to say that Dumbledore’s sister Ariana was one of the most tragic characters in the whole Harry Potter series. Her life was one of immeasurable hurt. Her need was the need of the poorest among us. She required love. Sacrificial love. Her brother Albus failed her. Dumbledore’s failure which led to the death of his sister helped him to comprehend one of the other truths in Matthew 6, “No one can serve two masters” (Matthew 6:24). The pursuit of possessions of power, even with benevolent intentions, can ultimately only lead to destruction and ruin. As he puts it in his own words Dumbledore understood that he, the most powerful wizard of his day, “Was not to be trusted with power.”

It was that very conflict of interest that ruined Severus Snape. He attempted to serve two masters, his love for Harry Potter’s mother Lily Evans and his devotion to the possession of earthly power. Snape lived out the rest of that verse in Matthew 6, perhaps as tragically as any character in literature, “He will be devoted to one and despise the other” (Matthew 6:24). Near the end of Dumbledore’s life Snape reveals to the Headmaster his patronus, a doe. The doe is Lily Evans. When he sees Snape’s patronus Dumbledore’s eyes fill with tears, realizing that for all these years Snape has remained devoted to Lily. His love for her was his master. But so too was Snape mastered by his desire to possess, especially power. Snape could not serve both his masters. In the end, to his ruin and credit, he remained devoted to Lily and despised his opportunity for a place of power.

How do we know all this for sure? It’s in their eyes. And again, it is in Matthew 6. If there is one thing we know for sure about Harry Potter, it is that he has his mother’s eyes. Her green eyes. How many times are we told how Harry’s green eyes are the same as his mother’s? Contrast them with Snape’s eyes. His dark eyes. How many times have we seen Snape look into Harry’s eyes? Always, we think, Snape looks with hatred. But really he looks at Harry’s eyes feeling anguished and conflicted. Snape sees the eyes of Lily Evans, whom he has always loved with devotion. Also Snape sees Harry Potter, whom he despises. For Snape, Harry Potter personifies all that he cannot possess, the love of Lily Evans and a position of earthly power. In Deathly Hallows we see the two sets of eyes face off one last time as Snape dies while looking at Harry. “The green eyes found the black, but after a second, something in the depths of the dark pair seemed to vanish.” And so we again must turn to Matthew 6, “If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!” (v. 24). Dumbledore had pitied Snape, his best quality was his most hidden secret. “My word, Severus, that I shall never reveal the best of you?” If love is hidden behind darkness, how great is the darkness indeed!

Though Snape’s eyes go forever dark, Harry’s eyes remain bright, perhaps shine more brightly than at any time before. “Slowly, very slowly, he sat up, and as he did so he felt more alive and more aware of his own living body than ever before.” In the culmination of knowledge Harry gains after Snape’s death, he knows that he must die as a sacrifice. Harry must walk willingly, eyes wide open, to his death at the hands of Voldemort. He must choose to love his friends above himself and sacrifice himself to save them. And so appreciating “what a miracle he was” Harry goes into the Forbidden Forest where Voldemort is waiting. As he walks he discovers the last of the Deathly Hallows, the Resurrection Stone. And by its power those close to him who have died return and walk with him for a while. Harry’s mother joins him. “She pushed her long hair back as she drew close to him, and her green eyes, so like his, searched his face hungrily, as though she would never be able to look at him enough... His eyes feasted on her, and he thought that he would like to stand and look at her forever, and that would be enough.” Why is it enough for both of them to look into each others’ eyes forever? Is it just the profound love of a mother and a son that they see? I contend it is more.

Lily and Harry see not only each others’ eyes and the love they have for each other, but also the profound place of loving sacrifice to which each of them had come. It is not enough that they are mother and son. It is enough that they both possess the truest love, sacrificial love. And their eyes tell them so. “The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light” (Matthew 6:22). That light, the light of Lily’s and Harry’s eyes, comes only from one source, sacrificial love. And their sacrificial love, like all true sacrificial love, comes only after everything else - all possessions and all self-interest, everything - is set aside for love’s sake. Continued on Page 10
(From Page 7)
So is that it? Is Rowling’s Harry Potter a narrative exposition of Matthew 6:19-24? Is Dumbledore a metaphor of “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also?” Is Snape a metaphor of “he will be devoted to the one and despise the other?” Is Harry a metaphor of the “eye is the lamp of the body?” Is the narrative as didactic as it is delightful? We ought to seek heavenly treasure. We cannot attempt to serve the two masters of heavenly treasure and earthly treasure. We are full of light only when we seek the ultimate heavenly treasure, sacrificial love. Nutters as it sounds, I think Harry Potter 7 is Saint Matthew 6.

Epilogue

All us Harry Potter fans must have our theories and explanations. I have shared with you mine. And with a genuine smile on my face, I will not begrudge you if you think me, in the words of Ron Weasley, “Mental.” Since you have made it this far, however, I will briefly mention the second quotation from the Bible and why I think it likely that Rowling fits more squarely into traditional Christianity.
After Harry and Hermione discover the grave of Dumbledore’s mother and sister, they come upon the grave of Harry’s parents. On that tombstone too is an epitaph, another word-for-word quote from the Bible, “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26). I think it most likely that Dumbledore is responsible for this inscription also, as there seems to be no other person in the Potters’ lives who would take precedence over him in this decision. Now in the context of that Scripture passage it is the death and literal resurrection of Jesus that conquers death. Rowling and Dumbledore could have put anything on the Potters’ tombstone. They did not have to quote the Bible. They did not have to reference the New Testament passage that most explicitly connects Jesus’ death and resurrection with a vital faith. But they did quote that very passage. She seems to me too careful a writer to make this reference without its fullest meaning in mind.

Dave Bruno is co founder of christianaudio.com and blogs regularly at stuckinstuff.com where this article first appeared. It was later
published in an edited form in Christianity Today.

Standing Conference of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of the Americas
Pastoral Letter on Suicide
May 25, 2007

The following "Pastoral Letter on Suicide" was adopted by the Standing Conference of the Canonical Orthodox Bishops in the Americas (SCOBA) at their May 23, 2007 Session held at St. Vladimir's Seminary in Crestwood, NY. The document was prepared by the SCOBA Social and Moral Issues Commission (SMIC). The Letter offers pastoral perspectives, consistent with both Holy Tradition and current medical and psychological thought, to clergy and laity alike on this human tragedy and how best to minister to those whose lives are so deeply affected by it.

The tragedy of suicide has been a part of the human story from very early on, and it continues to affect the lives of our faithful today. As Hierarchs of the Standing Conference of Canonical Orthodox Bishops in the Americas, we are asked frequently to clarify the Church's teachings on this critical issue. Our desire is to offer a pastoral perspective that is consistent with both the Tradition of our Orthodox Church and our improved understanding of the medical and psychological factors that might lead one to take his or her life.

The Sacredness of Life

As Orthodox Christians, we believe that life is a gift from God. The All-Holy and Life-Giving Trinity created all things and granted life to all living creatures. Out of His love, God made us, human beings, in His own divine image and likeness, entrusting us as stewards - not owners - of our lives, blessing us with the capacity of freedom, and calling us to a life of loving communion.

Our ancestors' original rebellion against God was a misuse of freedom, which ushered in the reality of both spiritual and physical death. Throughout history, God has acted to redeem the fallen race and to restore the communion and life that had been forfeited. Indeed, our Lord Jesus Christ identifies the very purpose of His incarnation and earthly mission with the gift of life, proclaiming, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). Remaining faithful to the Lord’s Gospel, the Orthodox Church invites all human beings to enter into the living body of Christ, to be sustained through the life-giving sacraments, and to preserve and perpetuate both spiritual and physical life.

Suicide and the Orthodox Tradition

While a precise and unproblematic definition of "suicide" is difficult to articulate, we can say that the type of suicide here being addressed pertains to the intentional causing of one’s own physical death through a decisive act. Understood in this way, suicide is regarded generally within the Orthodox Tradition as a rejection of God's gift of physical life, a failure of stewardship, an act of despair, and a transgression of the sixth commandment, "You shall not kill" (Exodus 20:13).

Historically, the Church was called upon to address the issue of suicide from the outset. When the Gospel was first being preached, philosophical and religious teachings prevalent in the Greco-Roman world tended both to disparage the body and to endorse suicide in circumstances of severe hardship. The Cynics, Epicureans, Stoics, and Gnostics, for example, all endorsed voluntary death for reasons consistent with each group's broader ethical vision. The early Church's condemnation of suicide, as reflected in the teachings of Clement of Alexandria, Lactantius, St. Augustine, and others, thus served to affirm teachings that were sharply different from those of the broader culture: the sacredness of each human being, the holiness of our bodies as Temples of the Holy Spirit, and, especially, the call for each one of us to maintain faith and hope even in the midst of extreme adversity. While these core teachings provided a Christian witness to Greco-Roman society, they also were reflected internally, to the members of the early Church, through the condemnation of all attempts to hasten one's entry into the Kingdom by self-sought martyrdom. Clement of Alexandria, for instance, condemns both suicide and such martyrdom when he writes, "He who presents himself before the judgment-seat becomes guilty of his own death. And such is also the case with him who does not avoid persecution, but out of daring presents himself for capture. Such a person…becomes an accomplice in the crime of the persecutor" (Stromateis 4.77.1).

Notwithstanding its strong general stance against the moral permissibility of suicide, the Church, historically, has offered a balanced teaching on this issue. On the one hand, the Church has maintained the normative position described above by condemning acts of suicide and by declining to offer a funeral service and burial to suicide victims. This dimension of the Church's teaching has underscored the sacredness of physical life and the responsibility of human beings to express proper self-love, gratitude, and hope. This dimension has also served as an intended deterrent for those suffering suicidal thoughts.

On the other hand, in her wisdom, the Church has acknowledged the complex etiology and emotionally charged character of a suicide. The corruption of human nature, brought about by the ancestral sin, carried profound implications for both the spiritual and physical dimensions of the human person. While human freedom was not annihilated in the fall, both spiritual factors, like acedia (spiritual torpor), and physical factors, like depression, can severely compromise a person's ability to reason clearly and act freely. In regard to suicide, the Church has taken very seriously such spiritual and physical factors, and has responded pastorally by offering a funeral service and burial to suicide victims whose capacities for judgment and action were found to be significantly diminished. Thus, Canon 14 of Timothy of Alexandria states that liturgical services should be offered, "if a man having no control of himself lays violent hands on himself or hurls himself to destruction." And the patristic interpretation of this teaching states that services should be offered when a suicide victim "is not of sound mind, whether it be as a result of a demon or of an ailment of some sort." Question XIV of the 18 Canons of Timothy, Archbishop of Alexandria. Pedalion, p. 898

Suicide and Science

Through advances in science we now have a better understanding of the relationship between suicide and depression, as well as a more accurate account of the causes of depression. Depression is an illness caused by both medical and psychological factors. It is characterized by feelings of marked worthlessness and hopelessness and is often accompanied by physical changes such as loss of appetite, weight loss, or in some cases, weight gain. Both insomnia and hypersomnia are common symptoms.

Current medical knowledge helps us to understand that all depressions are multi-factorial. Genetic, hormonal, neurochemical, environmental, and psychological contributions can combine to create a depressive picture. Furthermore, depression can present as the only expression of an underlying physical illness such as occult cancers, thyroid dysfunction, and drug reactions.

Sometimes depressions are very severe and psychotic in nature. These can be accompanied by delusions, hallucinations, and an altered sense of reality. In most instances, the depressed person is less impaired. Nonetheless, in all cases, depression is determined by non-rational psychological and physical internal events. Even an apparently rational and clear-thinking person may have his or her outlook and choices strongly affected by those non-rational internal events.

Pastoral Recommendation

In light of the above theological and scientific reflections, it is clear that the articulation of a proper Orthodox response to the tragedy of suicide is both acutely needed and particularly challenging. We are sensitive to the difficulty of maintaining a balance between the call of every human person to responsible stewardship of his or her physical life and the call of the Church to consider how advances in medical knowledge impact Orthodox pastoral ministry. Conscious of this need for discernment, we offer the following guidelines for ministering in the wake of a suicide.

First, we must remain mindful that the primary focus of the Church and its pastoral ministry in cases where a suicide has taken place is on the living, the family and friends of the deceased. We should maintain a certain humility while remembering that the state of the suicide victim is and must remain in the hands of God. Those left behind carry a great burden – of hurt, guilt, and often shame – with the realization that their loved one has taken his or her own life. They look to the Church and, especially, to the parish family, for strength and hope regarding the deceased, and for the support and love they themselves so urgently need. In addition to their personal pastoral response, clergy should direct grief-stricken family and friends to crisis counseling resources in the area, which can complement the healing ministry of the Church.

Second, as we have studied this issue, it has become clear to us that far more cases of suicide than have previously been recognized involve spiritual and/or physiological factors that significantly compromise a person's rationality and freedom. While not removing moral culpability from all suicide cases or changing our general stance against suicide's moral permissibility, we affirm the deep relationship between physical and spiritual factors in human agency and we acknowledge that, in most instances, the complex web of causes contributing to a suicide lies beyond our full understanding.

Finally, because of the complexity of suicide, both in terms of determining causes and in terms of ministering to those most affected, the parish priest should always consult with his diocesan hierarch in order to discern the proper course of action, the general pastoral recommendation being that a church burial and memorial services could be granted unless there were an absence of significantly diminished capacities.

CONCLUSION

In his beautiful description of the Church as the "body of Christ," St. Paul writes, "If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together." (1 Cor 12:26) The suicide of an Orthodox Christian is a tragedy that is suffered by the entire Church. As hierarchs of the Orthodox Church, we are acutely mindful of the need to maintain a perspective on suicide that is consistent with our identity and mission as the unified body of Christ. We believe that the perspective outlined in this statement, which reflects our common mind, accomplishes this purpose by drawing from our Holy Tradition as well as our deepened understanding of suicide’s causes.

We extend our fervent prayers for the victims of suicide and for all whose lives and faith have been shaken by the suicide of a loved one. Furthermore, as Orthodox bishops and members of SCOBA, we affirm that we will work together rigorously in order both to prevent suicides from occurring and to provide a unified pastoral response when they do, one characterized by the faith, hope, and love made possible by God, in Whom "we live and move and have our being." (Acts 17:28)

RESPONSES FROM OUR ON-LINE FORUM:

I just want to thank you for posting this. I was able to share it with an Orthodox friend who lost his wife last year to suicide after struggling for years with depression and you could see the solace break across his face. I
admire our beloved Church even more for being able to rethink teachings as new information emerges.
Rachel Andreyev

I lost an acquaintance a few years back around the time of the Pentecost and Father Alex told me that was the only time we were allowed to acknowledge those who committed suicide. I was very happy to hear about these changes too.
Debi Marino

For what it's worth, it hit me at Liturgy on Sunday that we pray for every single living and reposed person that had ever lived every Sunday. After the epiklesis, and after the hymn to the Theotokos we pray for our hierarch "and for all (hu)mankind" with no stipulations. That means everyone, including the non-Orthodox and those that committed suicide.

Fr. Ephrem Lash's translation of the Greek usage also adds the Deacon saying, "Remember too, Lord, those whom each one has in mind" - again, regardless of their status vis a vis the Church.

I privately pray for a number of non-Orthodox and a three suicides at the appropriate commemorations of the departed in the litanies, as well as for a large number of non-Orthodox (living and dead) at the appropriate times since most people I know are not Orthodox.

We always pray for everyone, we just don't necessarily pray for everyone by name in the litanies or remember them at the Proskomidia or at Pannikhidas. The explanation I read once said that this was because it would actually cause the departed 'pain'; this goes together with the fact that for Orthodox, hell is the unprepared and unrepentant experience of God: for the repentant this is bliss, for the unrepentant it is agony and burning (see the Prayers before Communion). By commemorating the non-Orthodox in the Proskomidia we are in some way uniting them more closely in the afterlife to God, and thus 'increasing' their pain of unrepentance (they are outside of time then and unable to 'change' and repent, they are 'fixed' in some way beyond our understanding). And yet, our prayers can effect change for them; my prayers are probably shielded enough from anything divine to offer a little help without being too Light bearing.
Christopher Orr

Is it on the Pentecost that those who ended their lives by suicide are prayed for specifically?
Debi Marino

At the Kneeling Vespers on Pentecost even, we pray explicitly for the souls in Hades.
"Master of all things, our God and Saviour... who have also been pleased on this most perfect and saving Feast to receive suppliant prayers of atonement for those who are immured in Hell, granting us great hopes that repose and comfort will be sent down from you to the departed from the pains which hold them, hear us, lowly and wretched, who entreat you, and give rest to the souls of your servants who have fallen asleep before us in a place of light, a place of green pasture, a place of refreshment, from which all grief, sorrow and sighing have fled away, and establish their spirits in the tents of the Just and count them worthy of peace and repose. Because the dead will not praise you, O Lord, nor do those in Hell have the freedom to offer you thanksgiving, but we the living bless you and implore you and bring before you atoning prayers and sacrifices on behalf of their souls." http://anastasis.org.uk/PentAll.htm
Dn Patrick Baumgarth
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SUICIDE: THE LAST GENOCIDE by Monk Damascene

Only one chance. Even the longest life is so short, in the face of the eternity which spreads out behind it and before it, and which we will never understand in this life but will experience someday, whether we choose to or not. No matter how long we live, when we look back on this life, it will all seem so short, as if one day.

Only one chance. There are so many things which we have not experienced, which we could experience. Only one chance to learn what real love is, for the first time. And we have never learned, if we are not ready to sacrifice ourselves for it--and more than that, to die for it a hundred times. After we die, we can never again make that sacrifice, can never again taste the sweetness of that pain.

Only one chance. Only one chance to find out that the philosophy, mindset and religion of the 1990's are not the only ones. And that perhaps there were better ones in the past, in other places. And that it's not true what we've been taught--about how what is more modern is better. Only one chance to no longer be a slave to times and fashions, of the modern counterculture as well as the culture. Especially when both the culture and the counterculture have failed us.

Only one chance to be alive. Only one chance to show courage. Only one chance to change things, and to change course. Only one chance to rise above the state of irresolution and passivity and doubt into which we've been placed by television and other electronic media stimulation. Only one chance to live virtuously.

Only one chance to go to the mountains and watch the evening sun filtering through the trees. Only one chance to sit on a cliff over the ocean and wonder why you're here. Only one chance to see the stars. Only one chance to hear a heart beat.

Only one chance to be free. True freedom comes not from taking life, but from giving it. Suicide is the only unforgivable crime, because it is the only crime after which you cannot ask forgiveness. After that, you enter a future life in which there are no more chances. And that, if you have not taken the one chance you've been given, is true hell.

Suicide takes the lives of 6,000 of the young generation in the U.S. each year. This phenomenon is something unheard of in the history of the world. Why should this be, if the world is truly becoming a better place? Suicide is the last Genocide.

From DEATH TO THE WORLD is a zine to inspire Truth-seeking and soul-searching amidst the modern age of nihilism and despair, promoting the ancient principles of the last true rebellion -- being dead to this world
and alive to the other world.

C O N T E N T S

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Volume 18 Number 3

May 25 - July 5, 2003

Thoughts Concerning the Church

By New Martyr Patriarch Tikhon



A Manual of Divine Services

By Archpriest D. Sokolof

Volume 20 Number 2

March, 2003

THE GREAT LENT - A WEEK BY WEEK MEANING

Rev. George Mastrantonis

Volume 18-20 Number 1

January, 2003

Love: The Foundation of Existence
in Our World

By Metropolitan Macarius

On the Feast of the Meeting of
the Lord

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Volume 17 Number 7

November 10 ­ December 21 , 2002

About Ministry and Ecclesiastical
Hierachy Bishop Alexander (Mileant)

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Signs of the Times

By Fr. Seraphim Rose

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PAGE 3



Volume 20 Number 4

June 22, 2002

Martyrdom of Nun
Barbara, The New Martyr Of Russia by Archimandrite Demetrios Serfes

Volume 17 Number 3

May 12 – June 22, 2002

CHRIST IS RISEN!



On Pascha from Arimathea

Mid-Pentecost from Anastasis



Volume 17 Number 1

February 3 – March 16, 2002



Report of the Cathedral Dean Igumen
Christopher (Calin)

Germs & the Reception of Holy
Communion

The Holy Gospel and It’s
Study by Bishop Joseph of Arianzos

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Volume 17 Number 2

March 17 ­ April 27, 2002

Archpastoral
Message for Great Lent from Metropolitan Theodosius

The Ascetic Podvig of Living in
the World by Metropolitan Laurus

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Volume 16 Number 6

September 23 ­ November 3, 2001



Statement of the Holy Synod
of Bishops on the Terrorist Attacks - September 11, 2001

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Thoughts Concerning the Church

By New Martyr Patriarch Tikhon

From various sermons delivered while he was Bishop of North America and the
Aleutian Isles

In Christ's Church peace is spread abroad. Here we pray for the peace of the
whole world, for the union of all; here everyone calls one another brother,
they help one another. Christians are called to love everyone; they even forgive
their enemies and do good to them. And when Christians are obedient to the voice
of the Church and live according to its precepts, then they truly experience
peace and love. Let us only recall the first Christians, who had one heart,
one soul, who even owned what they had in common (cf. Acts 4:32). By contrast,
when people distance themselves from the Holy Church and live according to their
own will, then there reigns self-love, divisions, discord, wars.



Ought we not to rejoice and thank the Lord that He, in His merciful kindness,
regards His Church and preserves her unharmed and invincible even to this very
day? After all, it was not only in the first centuries of her history that Christ's
Church endured various troubles and was subject to persecutions, and it was
not only during the time of the ‘cumenical Councils that she was attacked
by false teachers, who elevated their minds above the mind of God. From the
first days of its existence and to the end of time she will be like a ship with
passengers, sailing upon a tempestuous sea that is ready at any minute to capsize
the ship and swallow its cargo. And it seems that the further the ship sails,
the more fiercely the waves lash against it. In the early centuries the Christians
endured persecution from without, from the pagans. But when the Church proved
victorious over them, an even greater danger arose, this time from another side:
while troubles from the pagans ceased, there arose troubles from her own, troubles
from false brothers, attacks from within. From within the bosom of Christianity
itself there appeared one heresy and schism after another. Of course, the truth
of God vanquished human falsehood, but members of the Church can never retire
their weapons. They must wage war no longer against ancient heretics, but against
new enemies: against unbelievers, against those who deny the truth, against
those who pretend to be representatives of a powerful science. And we cannot
say that with the passage of time this war has abated; no sooner does the Church
manage to conquer one foe, than she is confronted with a new antagonist. Evil
is like some hydra; as one head is decapitated, another appears in its place.



How can we not rejoice on seeing that Christ's Church-a kingdom not of this
world, a kingdom that has no worldly means at its disposal, no earthly enticements;
a kingdom that is despised, persecuted, powerless-has not only not perished
in this world, but has grown and has conquered the world. How can we not rejoice
at the thought that in spite of all manner of coercion, attacks, and opposition,
the Orthodox Church has preserved the faith of Christ as a precious treasure,
in its original purity and entirety, unharmed, so that our faith is the faith
of the apostles, the faith of the fathers, the Orthodox faith....



Translated from Pravoslavnaya Rus', No. 16, 2000, where it was excerpted
and reprinted from Vechnoye, June 1964.

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