Category Archives: Pastoral Matters

On Injustices in Church Life

The Church, the Incarnate Body of Christ, has always been the central battlefield between God and the world, whose prince is Satan. It is for this reason that the world constantly tries to destroy and corrupt the Church, infiltrating it with those who foolishly and blindly do Satan’s will. History is full of notorious examples of internal enemies and traitors in Church life. Indeed this was the foundation of monastic life in the fourth century. All this is because the presence of Christ is abhorrent to Satan, who wants the world for himself, as we see in the temptations of Christ, related in the Gospel of Matthew 4. Satan has always tried to make the Church into the world, to make Faith into a mere State or institutional ‘religion’. He makes bishops and priests into anti-pastors, into scribes (vain and pompous intellectuals like Arius and so many pompous academics who, puffed up with futile knowledge as the Apostle Paul describes (2 Tim 3, 4), think that they know everything) and pharisees (ritualists), not to mention persecutors and bureaucrats. Thus, in Church history, every heresy and every schism has been an attempt, usually unconscious because of the spiritual delusion of those who lead heresy and schism, to compromise the Church with the world.

Thus, in the seventh century in these Isles, disorganized but holy Irish monks were bewildered by organized but cold Roman religion; during the later first millennium the zealous monks of New Rome (Constantinople) were cruelly persecuted by iconoclast emperors and empresses with their pro-Islamic political projects; in the eleventh century Old Rome fell into the temptation of making its bishop into a universal emperor who commanded armies and tortureers, replaced God and from whom, they said, proceeded the Holy Spirit and so all truth and authority; a few centuries ago in Russia a great debate arose between non-possessing hermits and those who ran monasteries as economic units with farmlands and peasants; a little over a century ago the Russian Church, though with great institutions, was compromised as part of State machinery and the people flocked not to wealthy bishop-bureaucrats, city career priests and professional Italianate opera choirs in stone city churches, but to poor spirit-bearing elders in wooden chapels in provincial monasteries; and in our own times the greatest saint of the Diaspora, St John of Shanghai, was put on trial by bishops who backed secular-minded people who had money and power, and not the faithful and the true.

What are we to do in the face of injustices in Church life?

Firstly, we may be wrong: we can only know that we are right, if we are persecuted. Christ tells us so (Lk 21 and Jn. 16). So let us accept persecution provided that it does not force us into breaking the commandments. If it does mean compromising the commandments, we must leave for another canonical, and not uncanonical, diocese. For persecution is no self-justifying excuse for falling away into schism. The Church is everywhere littered with little groups, or rather sects of extreme, for instance of new calendarists and old calendarists, who were often initially victims of episcopal injustices, but who now have no canonical status and so have discredited themselves. But the Church calendar is also everywhere littered with those who bore injustices, only recently St Nectarius of Egina and St John of Shanghai, and so became saints. They did not take off their crowns.

Secondly, while you stay in the Church with those who cause injustice, do not participate in that injustice, side with the victims of the injustice. They are anti-pastors, but you must remain pastors, your conscience clean. The bullies, narcissists and manipulators of the naive, with their ‘gaslighting’ lies, hypocrisy and attempts to discredit, will not win. They do not think of the Last Judgement and tremble at it, but you do think of it and tremble at it.

Thirdly, we must know that, as they say, what goes round, comes round. Our persecutors should be trembling – in any case, they soon will be. I have seen so many who have persecuted Church people, terrible things have happened to them all sooner or later, without exception. Over the last forty years and more, I have seen them, bishops and priests dying suddenly after acting outrageously. They thought they could get away with it: they could not. Be patient: the Truth will out. God is always on the side of the good and the faithful. Be patient, justice is always done, for man proposes, but God disposes: Be not deceived; God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, that shall he also reap (Galatians 6, 7).

 

 

 

Pastoral Questions

 

Q: How can you belong to ROCOR, a Church that in the 1990s uncanonically opened parishes inside Russia and entered into communion with schismatic Greek Old Calendarists?

A: I could not and did not. I am afraid you have your facts wrong. Two (but possibly more) ROCOR bishops did what you describe. And in the Western European Diocese of ROCOR, to which I then belonged, we categorically refused to engage in either of the above because both these actions were and are uncanonical.

Q: Why do Catholics make the sign of the cross backwards?

A: Christ sits on the right hand of the Father. The Tradition has always been to start with the right – right foot first. Thus, just like Orthodox, even Catholics make the sign of the cross with the right hand and not the left. Priests turn to their right to say to the people ‘Peace be unto all’, we cross our hands left over right before communion, priests (as did laity once) receive communion with their right hand cupped in the left, which is how laypeople cup their hands to take a priest’s blessing.

The fact is that in the West people used to make the sign of the cross as Orthodox still do, from right to left. Thus, in the 1713 French ‘Simple, Literal and Historical Explanations of the Ceremonies of the Church’ by Dom Claude de Vert, Page 6, Rubric 1, we read: ‘The priest makes the sign of the cross with his five fingers (and not with the first three only according to the old practice – as some bishops, the Chartreuses and the Jacobins still do, being careful to extend only the thumb and the next two fingers, as in times past).

And if the priest touches the left shoulder before the right, it is not a matter of indifference, as we can see from a letter of Pope Leo IV (790-855) that formerly the right shoulder was indeed touched before the left’.

The question as to why Catholics changed from the Orthodox practice (after all, they keep Orthodox practices in many other domains) is unanswerable. However, the most likely suggestion is that Catholic laity wanted to do what they saw the Catholic priests doing when they face the people and bless them, that is, when they cross the people from left to right (which appears to laity as right to left, as they face the clergy). In other words, the change was caused by clericalism, by wanting to imitate the clergy.

Q: Why in the British Isles do you say ‘He is risen indeed’ in answer to ‘Christ is risen’? Elsewhere the response is ‘Truly He is risen’, which, after all, is the literal translation.

A: This relates to the King James translation of the words of Luke and Cleopas to the other disciples in Luke 24, 34, after they had come back from Emmaus and talked to Christ: ‘Saying, the Lord is risen indeed’. (In the Greek, ‘ondos’ – really, in the Russian ‘istinno’ – truly). This translation simply relates to the emphatic British English usage of the word ‘indeed’ (for example, the phrase, ‘Did he indeed?’), whereas other English-speaking peoples would use ‘truly’ or ‘really’. The merit of the translation ‘indeed’ is that it implies ‘in action’, not just ‘in theory’.

Q: Why are some converts eccentric?

A: I recently visited a ‘convert church’ which had a notice by the entrance with the words: ‘Warning: This Church May Contain Nuts’.

We are talking now about a small minority, an eccentric fringe, so we should not get things out of proportion. I think that those who consider that they are ‘converts’ are not Orthodox; those for whom Orthodoxy is a way of life and have forgotten a time when they were not in the Church are simply Orthodox. Orthodoxy is second nature to us. But ‘converts’ (that is, a minority of converts) seem to cultivate exotic eccentricity, especially strange dress and hairstyles. And yet the Mother of God was a ‘convert’, as were all the apostles. But they never spoke of themselves as ‘converts’ and we never think of them as ‘converts’. Of course not – because they were converted – i.e. finished products.

Here we come to the essence of the matter: there are ‘converts’ and there are the converted. The difference is that ‘converts’ are people who want to remain in a stew for beginners, for ever and ever, and there are people who have been converted and are trying to improve themselves. In other words, quite simply, there are neophytes and there are Christians.

Those who are neophytes want to remain at the Church doors, for ever ranting against their former beliefs (there is nothing so anti-Anglican as an ex-Anglican) and there are those who have entered the Church and really cannot be bothered by what goes on at the Church doors. Those who remain at the doors for ever read books for converts (Bloom, Ware, Schmemann, The Way of a Pilgrim, Kalomiros etc) and cultivate eccentricity and exoticism in dress, hairstyle or speech, sometimes for some pathological reason (to look different from others); they are ‘converts’. It is time for them to move on and become normal Christians, which is what the word Orthodox actually means.

The word ‘eccentric’ is another word for vanity, the desire to be different, to be attention-seeking. Such ‘converts’ need to move on from the first course to the main course, with its meat, which has the promise of the sweet dessert to come. Those who remain converts need to be converted. But they must first want to be converted and not remain ‘converts’.

Q: What do you think of the opinion ‘Religion is the opium of the people’?

A: Personally, I am against religion, that is, the artificial invention by States of religious establishments in order to repress people. However, I am for faith, that is, for spiritual experience, the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, which is the foundation of the Orthodox Church. To Marx, whose birth was 200 years ago and who wrote this opinion 175 years ago, I would say: ‘And atheism is the opium of the intellectuals’.

Q: Are some people chosen by God to carry out some special task, to fulfil some special destiny in this world? Are you such a person?

A: All of us without exception have been chosen by God for some special task, it is just that only some are aware of it. As for myself, I have been aware for over four decades that I have to preach Orthodoxy in Western Europe. This is in order to gather the lost sheep together, that is, to reintegrate at least a small number of Western Europeans and our saints back into the Church. This is to make ready for the restoration of the Christian Empire in Russia to resist Antichrist, whose coming the globalists are preparing.

 

 

On Church Life: Questions and Answers from Early May 2018

Q: Why did you end up in ROCOR (the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia) and not in the Sourozh Diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church, which is now bigger?

A: As regards size, that is not the main thing, it is quality that counts. There were only 12 apostles, not 12,000.

The short answer is because the Church Outside Russia had a saint, St John of Shanghai, the Sourozh Diocese did not. Instead, it was renowned for intolerant renovationism that persecuted the faithful Orthodox minority, the real core of the Church. 25 years later, when there were more Orthodox faithful, this led directly and inevitably to an anti-Orthodox and anti-Russian schism from it by the new minority (which had been the persecuting majority earlier). And that led directly to the entry of the Sourozh Diocese into communion with ROCOR. There is nothing so intolerant as liberalism.

However, there were also all the usual reasons: For example, how could we outside Russia face lies about the nature of the Soviet regime in the Soviet-controlled Patriarchate? For example, the Church Outside Russian canonized the saints, St John of Kronstadt, St Xenia of Saint Petersburg, the New Martyrs and Confessors, which the enslaved Patriarchate could not, so who wanted to be subject to an enslaved Church, which was so weak that it could not even recognize its own saints? For example, quite a few of the senior clergy of the Patriarchate outside Russia were renovationists or in other ways corrupt.

Beyond all this, however, there is yet another reason, which is in the very names: ‘The Sourozh Diocese’. Or ‘The Russian Orthodox Diocese of Great Britain and Ireland’ (And our first bishop carried the title: ‘Bishop of London’). Obviously, for anyone born in this country, the second option is the clear winner. It is time that the name ‘Sourozh’ be dropped. Either we are the foundation of a new Local Church or else we are just another immigrant group with the name of an unknown place in a foreign country destined to be assimilated and so die out, like all those in the past. I do not wish to belong to such a group.

Q: Who are the renovationists inside Russia today?

A: There are the ageing ultra-modernists and ecumenists Fr George Kochetkov and his handful of followers, the anti-Russian academic Fr George Mitrofanov, other superficial academics like ‘I. V. Smyslov’ and D. Anashkin and the scandalous gossip and sacked Protodeacon Andrei Kuraev. But there are few of them, despite their noisy blogs, and they are discredited by real theology (which they condemn as ‘revisionism’ (sic!). Real theology lives in the monasteries, among the parish priests and the faithful, who are the real backbone of the Church and are ready to die for the authentic Faith – unlike the renovationists. They are here today, gone tomorrow. Nothing to worry about.

Q: What are the two most dangerous temptations for Orthodox today?

A: From the left side, there is so-called spirituality and from the right side there is so-called zeal.

Spirituality because it is most dangerous (the demons are spiritual beings and have spirituality). Only recently I heard of a woman who had interested herself in Hinduism and started meditation and yoga. Within two weeks she was hearing a voice and had become mentally fragile. Meditation of such a sort is infinitely harmful since it sets the imagination (the haunt of the demons) to work. There is something anti-Incarnational and therefore anti-Christian in this ‘spirituality’. It always ends up badly.

Zeal is also most dangerous because if it is not according to knowledge, as the apostle Paul says, it can cause great harm. For example, Muslim suicide-bombers are zealous and look where it leads them. All sects began with zeal. Most recently we can see it with old calendarists of various nationalities. Such zeal, not according to knowledge, however much it may be based on book knowledge, is always emotional and so leads to pride and division; authentic zeal, according to knowledge, is always sober and so leads to humility and unity.

Q: Why are Eastern European Orthodox countries so corrupt?

A: I think your question should be why are all countries so corrupt. Thus, the UK is run by freemasons (if not the Rotary Club or the golf club) and instead of bribes you constantly have to pay fines. France and Italy are mafia-run. Yes, Eastern Europe is also corrupt (Catholic or Orthodox). For example, in Lithuania (a Catholic country), they say that ‘Lithuania is the second most corrupt country in the world, but only because it bribed the actual second most corrupt country in the world to take its place as the most corrupt country in the world’. The reason for this corruption is two or three generations of atheism. You can have no morality under amoral atheism with its persecution of all spiritual values. Until these countries return from post-Communist money-grubbing Capitalism, they will remain utterly corrupt.

Q: What is essential before a Church can become Autonomous?

A: Apart from the request from a local Metropolia on a specific territory which wants Autonomy and the consent of the Mother-Church, which presupposes a certain maturity of infrastructure in the Metropolia – such as numbers of Orthodox bishops, priests, churches and faithful – there must be monastic life, a monastery and a convent, both with numbers of monks and nuns. That is essential.

Q: What are the political tendencies of the Diaspora?

A: In the USA we can see clearly how poor immigrants (Greeks, but not only) vote Democrat, the OCA is Democrat (in the UK they would be centre-left Liberal Democrats), whereas many White Russians are vaguely or clearly Republicans. Some are extremists, thus in academic theology there are two tendencies, to be moralisingly Evangelical-fundamentalist (Antiochians) or liberal-modernist (the Greeks outside Fr Ephraim) and the OCA. It is all wrong. We should be above politics and worldly academic theology, in the realm of the grace of the Holy Spirit.

In the UK we can see this in the fact that disused Protestant churches often either become mosques or else night clubs. It is the same anti-spiritual fundamentalist/liberal modernist divide.

Q: What is the origin of St Silouan the Athonite’s saying: ‘Keep your mind in hell and do not despair’?

A: There is nothing new here, it is simply the New Testament. There comes to mind the Apostle Peter’s saying: ‘Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour, whom resist, steadfast in the faith (I Peter 5, 8-9). In I Peter 5, 12 the apostle actually refers to Silvanus (Silouan in Russian!).

Q: Why do we wear our neck cross inside our clothes and not outside?

A: Because our Faith is not about showy externals, like that of the pharisees. Our cross remains next to our heart, on the inside. True, priests wear an external cross, but only doing the services and at formal occasions with a bishop etc. Otherwise they take it off. If we want to witness to our faith, it is not about wearing T-shirts with silly slogans, growing long beards, wearing crosses on the outside, it is about living a Christian way of life, loving our neighbours, whoever they are. This is what we shall be judged by, as Our Lord tells us quite clearly in the Gospels.

Q: Why are there different traditions in the Church regarding confession and communion?

A: There are not! The Tradition is confession before communion – unless you have a blessing from the priest not to come to confession every single time before communion (in the case of children, for example, or with several liturgies in the same week). Any other custom is pure decadence, usually a recent custom adopted from heterodoxy (as adopted in many Constantinople churches in recent decades).

Q: What is the origin of the Russian triple kiss?

A: The Russian triple kiss was universal among peasants (not among aristocrats) before the Revolution. Today it is common among family members and close friends, but you rarely see it in churches in Russia, where the sense of the parish was all but destroyed by the Soviets. This is ironic because its origin is purely Christian, it is the liturgical kiss of peace.

Q: If a miracle happened and the Russian Empire were restored – an impossible daydream as far as I am concerned – what sort of political union could be formed?

A: Who knows? Clearly, a restored Russian Empire would certainly have to cultivate good relations with China, with which it would have a huge border. But I could also suggest a global Northern Alliance between the lands of a restored Russian Empire, reunited with Alaska, together with Scandinavia (Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark), the British Isles and Ireland, Greenland and Canada. This northern quarter of the planet forms just over 25% of the world’s land surface, 37.7 million square kilometres out of the total of 149.6 million, but less than 6% of the world population.

Q: Is having a tattoo sinful?

A: I would say that it is a sign of suffering. The Gospel tells us that the whole of our faith consists in ‘loving God and loving our neighbour as ourselves’. Eight words. Do we really need a doctoral thesis to understand that? The modern world has ceased to love God (atheism), ceased to love its neighbour (genocide) and now hates itself – suicide and self-mutilation (that includes tattoos). Those who tattoo themselves are dissatisfied with themselves, they have a psychological problem, a ‘complex’, as they say. In other words, they are not simple, but complicated – like sin itself.

Q: Would you take part in an anti-abortion march or demonstration?

A: Only if I thought it would achieve something. I fear that in present-day post-Christian and anti-Christian society such outward displays of convert zeal might even be negative. Let us look to ourselves first. Only if inward mentalities change and a majority turns against abortion, should we hold processions behind the Cross held high.

Q: Who are the Jehovah’s witnesses?

A: They are Jews who venerate the prophet Jesus, never having accepted the New Testament, neither the Holy Trinity (which they regard as paganism), nor the God-man Christ.

Q: Why do so many Anglican churches fly the LGBT rainbow flag?

A: The Church of England is a State Church and was founded as such. It therefore does whatever the State orders it to do. Thus, now that the State, under Cameron and May, has approved LGBT, it flies their flag. What I have always wanted to know is why it is so strict on divorce when it was founded by Henry VIII, so that he could give himself a divorce.

Three Types of Clergy and Their Temptations

Introduction

As the decades roll by, we realize that we have in our lifetimes met several dozen Orthodox bishops and many hundreds of Orthodox priests, of different generations and different nationalities. Among them we can begin to see three different typologies, three tendencies. All of these are in themselves good, but all of them have their temptations. What are they?

The Administrator

Every bishop and every priest has, among other things, to be an administrator. If we take the finest saint of the Diaspora, St John of Shanghai, as an example, we know that he was a fine administrator (not at all a fool-for-Christ, as some have imagined), spending much of his time almost every day answering letters, dealing with financial and other difficulties, not least at his cathedrals in Shanghai and San Francisco, and pastoral questions, administrating. But he never confined himself to administration, becoming a bureaucrat, forgetting human-beings, leaving aside other necessary qualities, making it an end in itself. The description of a bishop or priest as ‘just an administrator’ or, in today’s jargon’, ‘an effective manager’, can be one of the worst insults. Why?

It is because such fall inevitably into the double temptation of money and power. They become civil servants, like so many State appointees before the Revolution in Russia and in State Churches today, in Greece and Romania. Their allegiance is therefore more with the State than the Church, with this world, not the other world. At worst, those who love money more than God become simoniacs and those who love power more than God ally themselves with the local national State apparatus – like the notorious defrocked ‘Patriarch of Kiev’, Filaret, who as a Communist spy built himself a palace and today calls for the genocide of the Ukrainian people. Such mercenary people end up losing their faith, believing in nothing at all – if they ever did.

The Intellectual

Every bishop and every priest has to be educated. The Church Fathers were highly educated. Indeed, they could in one sense be called intellectuals. If we take the finest saint of the Diaspora, St John of Shanghai, as an example, we know that he was well-educated and wrote several theological works. However, his theology, like that of the Fathers, was inspired by his prayer, not by his brain. In the Church, the brain is just a tool used to express the Holy Spirit, it is not an end in itself. It is embarrassing to meet a bishop or priest who lacks basic knowledge of the Church, the services, the lives of the saints, the Fathers and the Holy Scriptures. However, the description of a bishop or priest as ‘just an intellectual’ can be one of the worst insults. Why?

It is because those who confine themselves to intellectualism, making it an end in itself, are inevitably bad pastors, better with books than with people. If bishops, they dislike their priests and flocks and insult and condemn them, refusing to spend time with them; if priests, they dislike their flock, mock them and flee them. If bishops, they can wreck the Church, if allowed to do so, treating their flock like a mob. They dislike listening to confessions because they dislike people. Many such proud intellectuals, usually very vain to the point of narcissisism, are driven by some private ideology or pathology or both; to make of the Church an ideology or pathology is always fatal because it is to cease being a pastor, to cease loving others. That is spiritual death.

The Unworldly

Every bishop and every priest has to be unworldly. If we take the finest saint of the Diaspora, St John of Shanghai, as an example, we know that he was unworldly, without any attachment to the things of this world. Such unworldliness may mean that they are impractical or incompetent – which is why most monks make neither parish priests nor bishops. However, this is not necessarily always so. This is because the unworldly can delegate – to the right people, which is vital. If they are married priests, they can be supported by the right wife. Many an unworldly married priest depends on his wife in this way. Unworldliness seems therefore to be essential and yet the description of a bishop or priest as ‘unworldly’ can be one of the worst insults. Why?

It is because there are the false unworldly, those who pretend to be unworldly, the frauds. They make themselves into gurus, imitating real pastors with long hair and long beards. We have seen their affectations, which deceive only the new or the naïve. In fact, such are not unworldly at all, but are attached to their own persons. Their desire and ability are not in gaining money or power, in the sense of obtaining power the Church, but in gaining power over human souls. Sometimes using the power of hypnotism to create dependency on themselves, such frauds are known as false elders. Lacking spiritual experience and so discernment, they want to control and, deluded themselves, they give deluded advice, which leads to catastrophe, loss of faith or even suicide.

Conclusion

Of course, the separation of the above tendencies is very rare. In reality, the best clergy have mixtures of all three of these qualities, being good administrators, educated and unworldly, like St John. Only a few fall into the temptations which exclude the qualities. Nevertheless, the temptations have to be resisted. We have seen too many falls.

 

A Question on ‘Pan-Orthodoxy’

There is a custom in the capitals of certain countries of the Orthodox Diaspora of holding a service called ‘Pan-Orthodox Vespers’ on the evening of the Sunday of Orthodoxy. I first attended such an event in 1975 at the Serbian Church in Birmingham, when the then Fr Vladimir Rodzianko preached against ‘jurisdictions’. I am sure that most of the people present had no idea what he was talking about. Apparently the custom continues, over 40 years later, though few Orthodox know about it or are interested in it. We know who we are, we confess the same Faith, and we have no need of political demonstrations, which change nothing for the rest of the year.

Although the custom is not bad in itself, I have always found it very strange. It does not exist in Orthodox countries, where the average town of, say 50,000-100,000 people, will have several Orthodox parishes, each of which lives its own life. Nobody has ever thought of meeting together as parishes on one Sunday evening a year. (True, the parish rector and one lay representative from each parish do meet when their bishop calls them to a yearly Diocesan meeting). And in the town where I serve, where there are several Anglican and Catholic parishes (the Catholic parishes represent different national groups), the local Anglican or Catholic churches would never dream of holding a ‘Pan-Anglican’ or ‘Pan-Catholic’ Vespers once a year.

It is said that ‘Pan-Orthodox Vespers’ promotes Orthodox unity, although I cannot see how. But why is this necessary? The fact is that all the Orthodox churches are already spiritually united. There is simply an administrative and linguistic division, which occurs in any case and always has and will. For example, in Orthodox countries, parishes are divided between dioceses (sometimes using different languages) and the link of unity is provided by meetings and synods of their bishops, who represent each diocese. In the Diaspora, it is the same thing, only the various dioceses are for some reason not called dioceses, but  ‘jurisdictions’, which is a purely secular term.

And there is something very strange here: the term ‘Pan-Orthodox’ has come to be divisive! Even the foreign term ‘Pan’ (as opposed to the English word ‘All’) suggests that there is something narrowly ethnic here. And the minority who promote ‘Pan-Orthodox’ Vespers often represent very divisive trends. For example, many of them do not use the Orthodox calendar for the fixed feasts, as do 80% of Orthodox, but aggressively use the papal calendar and want to impose the papal Paschalia. Surely, if they were concerned by unity, they would return to the majority Orthodox calendar, which 100 years ago was universal, and not try to promote a heterodox calendar and sometimes heterodox values?

Then these promoters of unity engage in such practices as abandoning the sacrament of confession, have no iconostases in their churches, sing Protestant Christmas carols during the Nativity liturgy after the troparia, shout out names for commemoration at the proskomidia during the Divine Liturgy (which they call ‘the holy liturgy’), and ban all languages other than English! One day perhaps someone will explain such things to me. I have been waiting for an answer for 43 years. I have always thought that Orthodox unity can only be based on the Universal Orthodox Faith, not on minority modernist deviations.

Common Sense and Wisdom

It is often said that the modern world lacks common sense. If this is so, it must be because many people are no longer learning from life, because the source of common sense is experience of life. Indeed, this may be true, for people more and more live not in the real world, but in a virtual world, a world of artifice and so lack of experience and so of immaturity. Without experience of life there is no common sense, only ideology, or theory, or naivety, or else just plain stupidity.

Even more seriously, as our knowledge of facts has in recent times hugely increased (partly through the internet), there seems to be less wisdom. Wisdom is being replaced by mere factual knowledge and the latter guarantees no understanding, no ability to interpret facts. For there is no correlation between knowledge of facts, with its mere technological progress, and wisdom, with its spiritual, and so moral and cultural, progress. So what is the source of wisdom?

The answer can be found in two words in Church Slavonic. Firstly, there is the word ‘tselomudrie’. Although this means ‘chastity’, it literally means ‘wisdom from wholeness’. Therefore, in order to understand what chastity means we must go beyond the superficiality of Puritanism which understands chastity only in the outward sense. Thus, in the Orthodox wedding service we pray that the couple to be wed may preserve their chastity. Chastity is not necessarily about virginity.

For from the Gospel (as from life) we know that there are foolish virgins, just as there are wise married couples. In other words, what chastity actually means is integrity, keeping our wholeness with Christ, despite distractions, such as money or, for that matter, unrestrained (= unchaste) sexual activity. This is what we express in Church services by the words ‘let us entrust our whole life to Christ our God’. Chastity means wholeness, the integrity of our devotion to Christ.

Secondly, there is the Slavonic word ‘smirennomudrie’, which means wisdom from humility. This is the wisdom that angelic, pure and innocent children (still uncorrupted and non-sexualized) can have. They too are ‘chaste’, that is, they have wholeness and integrity, that is, they have humility. However, such wisdom from humility can also come from accepting life’s sufferings positively. For example, old soldiers, who have seen suffering and suffered, are often very humble.

We can see this also with academics. Some are humble and have wisdom, others are pompous and only have knowledge. The pompous are mocked openly or behind their backs; their level of wisdom is less than that of many children and they just seem childish and silly. Little wonder that in English the word ‘pompous’ goes with ‘ass’. They suffer from what the apostle Paul calls a ‘puffed up mind’. In fact such people, suffering from intellectual pride, become ‘humility-proof’.

Thus we see children who are wise, but old people who are not wise. In today’s world, the sources of wisdom, outward integrity (chastity), inward integrity, humility and suffering are all derided. Perhaps that is why there is less wisdom today. For wisdom does not come from experience of life, like common sense. Wisdom comes from inner purity. As we say: ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God’. And Who is God? He is Supreme Wisdom, obtained only through inner purity.

 

 

Three Obstacles to Building Parishes

Introduction

The vital pastoral activity of building parishes is both spiritual and practical, Divine and human, as it concerns both gathering the flock in the Name of God and also finding and preparing buildings. And gathering the flock means being open to all, not just to some particular nationality or class. And all Church buildings are the fruit of the Incarnation of the Faith, for a Church that does not have its own buildings is not incarnate, but is just an idea, a theory without foundation. There are three obstacles to setting up parishes. These are:

Gathering in the Name of Lack of Faith

The first obstacle is when there are those who wish to frequent the church not in the Name of Christ, but in the name of some social or ethnic activity. Such people have a welfare state mentality: they will not commit because of a lack of devotion and knowledge, they expect to be served, ‘the priest will do all that’. Thus, parishes often depend on an inner core of 10% or 20% of parishioners; the other 80% or 90% are initially visitors who do not wish to involve themselves in Church life, but may become involved only with time.

Gathering in the Name of Money

Secondly, there are those who consider that parish life is about gathering together in the name of money or, more simply, gathering money, not souls. For them the Church is a money-making operation, a mere business to make profits. Simony thrives among bishops with this mentality and greed among priests with this mentality. They do not gather, but divide and chase away the flock. Fortunately, they are a very small minority, but they do discolour the rest, who may then become unjustly tarred with their dirty brush.

Gathering in the Name of Power

Finally, there are those who gather to gain power over others, the self-appointed, ego-tripping gurus who want to manipulate others in their ‘private church’ and personality cult. These frauds are drawn to the Church because they have psychological (and sometimes psychosexual) problems or are social failures. They use the Church in order to try and exercise power over others through their personal ideology. They often fall into intellectualism, which is abstract, always sectarian, clubbish, cliquish, even snobbish.

Successful parish life is then built on and around Christ. Any deviation from the centrality of Christ will result in the collapse of any present or future parish. In the Gospels Our Lord says: ‘For where two or three are gathered together in My Name, there am I in the midst of them’ (Matt. 18, 20). Thus, all the obstacles to the foundation of parishes are concerned with gathering together NOT in His Name, as we see above. ‘Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you’.

 

 

Q and A since Easter 2018

Q: What would have happened if ROCOR and the Russian Patriarchate had not signed the Act of Canonical Communion in 2007?

A: First of all, if the two parts had not been reconciled by depoliticizing themselves (i. e. repenting), the Russian Orthodox Church would quite simply not have been reconstituted. Everything else flows from this one vital fact. The 2007 agreement was the necessary return to Church roots by all those who had strayed from Church Truth beneath the weight of Cold War politics.

For example, without even the preparation for this reconstitution, the Patriarchate would have continued to suffer from its fringes. Thus, the cleansing Sourozh schism of 2006 would not have happened, and instead of the Church being freed, She would have continued to have been oppressed by the fringes and their spiritual impurities. Then also, without ROCOR, the increase in the understanding of the universal meaning of the sacrifice of the Royal Martyrs and the desire to oppose old-fashioned ecumenism would have been far weaker within the Patriarchate.

On the other hand, ROCOR would have disintegrated, being deserted massively by its core clergy and people who would have gone to the Patriarchate, once it had repented. Myself among them, at least after the Sourozh schism after 2006. Our patience had already been wearing thin in the 1990s with the uncanonical and ‘un-catholic’ (= anti-soborny) actions of Metr Vitaly in accepting into the Church sectarian individuals and even criminals (though he did not know that) inside Russia (whereas we are precisely the Church Outside Russia). Equally, there was the nonsense promoted by the theologically ignorant or else CIA-paid (like Bp Gregory Grabbe) about the Patriarchal sacraments being graceless (sic!), which had begun after 1945 with the West’s declaration of the Cold War. Thus, ROCOR would have disappeared, leaving just a few tiny, irrelevant, politically-based, CIA-funded, pharisaical old-people’s sects, whose theology is non-existent and which spend their time cursing and warring with each other and against the Church of God.

Q: At the moment both parts of the Russian Church are present in Western Europe in separate but parallel dioceses and jurisdictions. Which part will emerge the victor?

A: By ‘victor’, I presume you mean the majority? The answer is very simple: the ‘victor’ will be the more pastorally and spiritually competent (or the less pastorally and spiritually incompetent, according to your viewpoint). The same is true of all Orthodox jurisdictions, not just Russian, and is also true everywhere in the Diaspora, not just in Western Europe.

Thus, there are those ‘jurisdictions’ that are destined to disappear (‘let the dead bury the dead’), because they are shackled to some modernist political ideology (large parts of the OCA, the Finnish Jurisdiction and the Paris Jurisdiction), or else to some ethnic/nationalist ideology or simoniac ghetto (the ‘ethnic’ or rather mononational jurisdictions), and those that will survive and become the dynamic foundations of new Local Churches.

Q: Why do you not take part in any internet fora?

A: Apart from the fact that I am too busy doing Orthodoxy, I believe that most such time-wasting fringe fora tend to encourage people with psychological problems. We should not encourage self-righteousness, priggishness, pompousness and the clericalism that comes from the Protestant world and has nothing to do with real Orthodoxy. The vast majority of Orthodox have nothing to do with internet fora. If you did not know that, you will have had a very warped view of Orthodox.

Q: The old generation of Anglican converts, now dead or else in their late 70s, 80s or 90s, is dying out and is not being replaced. Does this not suggest that the idea of English Orthodoxy has been a failure?

A: Not in the slightest. All this proves is that the theologically absurd idea of ‘Anglican Orthodoxy’, that of old-fashioned ecumenists like Nikolai Zernov, who died over 35 years ago, has been a failure. But those of us who were never took part in such a fantasy have always known this to be a failure and that it would die out. Either you are Anglican or else you are Orthodox, you cannot be both.

With rare exceptions, Anglicans do not become Orthodox, but, even after formally joining the Church, remain in a sort of Anglican world bubble. This is regardless of whether it is an arch-conservative Anglo-Catholic, clericalist, puritanical, misogynistic and old calendarist bubble, or an arch-liberal, Liberal Democrat, anti-clericalist, modernistic, feminist and new calendarist bubble. (The two are simply the opposite sides of exactly the same Non-Orthodox coin).

In my experience, the few Anglicans who still exist in this country are generally either aged over 60 or else Afro-Carribeans. Our interest has never been in converting Anglicans. Our interest has always been in firstly looking after our own Orthodox and secondly witnessing to the rest of the world – the 99% of the population who are not Anglican or have no idea what Anglicanism is.

The future in these islands is in English (English-language) Orthodoxy and it always has been. It has never been in a fake and fantasy ‘Anglican-Orthodoxy’. This is why we should pass by jurisdictions and parishes where you never become Orthodox and which keep converts in a state of delusion, that they are Orthodox when in fact they are in a fool’s paradise of thinking that they are Orthodox when they are not, but just in a state of foolish intellectual pride.

You recognize such people because they are well-read (all the wrong books) and rage on about having ‘the true faith’. But what is the true faith? It is the Christian way of life. In the Gospels it is described as clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, visiting the sick and those in prison etc. It is not reading books by self-appointed experts on ‘Orthodoxy’.

An elderly Anglican lady wrote to me some years ago about her son who had ‘become Orthodox’ and refused to attend the funeral of her husband (a retired Anglican vicar) as the son ‘could not pray with heretics’. She was outraged, though not as much as me. I told her that her son had not become Orthodox, but belonged to a sect of Pharisees that was not in communion with the Orthodox Church (all of which was true). To some extent she was relieved, to some extent she was worried because he had been taken over by a sectarian guru. I told her that all she could do was pray for him, for ‘a mother’s prayer avails much’.

Q: Someone said that most converts in English-speaking countries are Celts, with for example Irish names. Is this true?

A: I think this is largely racist and sentimental nonsense. It is in the same style as ‘Only Greeks/Russians/Romanians/Georgians/Serbs etc can be Orthodox’ because ‘God only speaks Greek/Russian/Romanian/ Georgian/ Serb’ etc. I have only known eight Irish people in Ireland who have joined the Orthodox Church in the last 45 years. Generally, Roman Catholics from any European country do not join the Orthodox Church because of their brainwashing and conditioning that the only Christians in the world are Catholics – either you are Catholic or else you are nothing. Similarly I only know a handful of Scottish and Welsh people who have become Orthodox in that period. This is because although Protestants do join the Church, generally they do not become Orthodox because they remain with their baggage of the Protestant moralistic mindset and so stay on the fringes of the Church. This is especially true of Calvinism which still dominates the religious (and anti-religious) mindset of the Scots and the Welsh.

However, there is a more serious point here. In order to become Orthodox (sadly, that should be the same as joining the Orthodox Church, but it is not), you have to give up the mythical superiority of your cultural prejudices, cleansing yourself of them and putting Christ above them. For many, less educated people, that is easy because they have never had the mythical superiority of cultural prejudices anyway. But for those who belong to the Establishment, this is virtually impossible. This is because the Establishment is wholly based on cultural prejudices, i. e. on not putting Christ first.

An example of this is the tragic case of the late David Balfour (1903-1989), who as a British spy and friend of the late Fr Sophrony Sakharov, obtained a Western passport for him in Paris after the latter’s expulsion from Mt Athos after World War II. Balfour was an Establishment figure and intellectual who had become a Jesuit, then got himself ordained as a Greek Orthodox priest and became the confessor of King George II of Greece. At the same time as this, he was working in Athens as a British spy, betraying all the secrets of confession of the King during World War II. He was of course eventually defrocked. (As for the King who was known for election-rigging, he was thrown out of Greece and went to live with his mistress in an expensive part of London, but that is another story).

Balfour’s story is a very typical story of someone who put the Western Establishment first. There have been many other converts like him, most of them who got ordained (often through simony), then get defrocked or sidelined. I have seen so many of them, washed-up intellectuals with their doctorates, and/or private school aristocrats who have never made it, never having been accepted by the Orthodox people. What a pity that the Greek Church was so naïve that it received this predatory individual Balfour. I only met him in the 70s, when he still came over as an incredibly arrogant and unrepentant person. I hope he did repent before the end.

Q: Whom do you hope to see canonized in your lifetime?

A: There are many figures, but I hope that the first will be the visionary Elder Nikolai (Guryanov), who bore the prophetic message that is already coming true. He carried a revelation from heaven who may help change the destiny of the world by helping to bring about mass repentance in Russia that we are still waiting for. Only after mass repentance can Russia begins its universal mission of preaching repentance to the rest of the world, which another prophet, St Seraphim of Sarov, canonized on the insistence of the martyred Tsar, spoke of. This is all necessary in order to prepare the world before the end.

Q: Do you consider that as Russian Orthodox in the West we should be, as it were, ‘ambassadors’ of the Russian Federation?

A: Not at all! What a terrible idea! The Russian Federation is a temporary and secular political settlement to a problem caused by 1917 and is not long for this world. However, what we are is ambassadors of the once and future Christian Empire and Emperor, which will be restored. Restored, but only after we have overcome the Soviet subculture of today’s Russian Federation and the petty Balkan racism and disintegration in the rest of the once Orthodox world, as we so clearly saw at the pathetic forum in Crete in 2016.

 

Questions and Answers from Lent 2018: A Compendium

Q: Is it true that after the fall of the Soviet Union, Communism was replaced by Orthodoxy?

A: If only it were so! The rotten fruit of Communism (in which probably no-one any longer believed, except for old people and some in a few remote provinces), was 95% replaced by Mammonism, what is called Western consumerism, and 5% by living (and not nominal) Orthodoxy. This is no surprise, since it took Communism three generations to destroy 95% of Orthodoxy. As I have said many times over the last 27 years since the fall of Communism, it will take three generations to restore Orthodoxy there even to the very low pre-Revolutionary level (unless there is a sudden miracle, which we are all praying for). And we do not want the level of before the Revolution, because that is precisely what caused the Revolution.

Orthodoxy then was marked by the betrayal of the aristocratic elite, whether liberal or conservative, who exploited the poor masses, and by mass nominalism, by Theological Academies which the ever-memorable Metr Antony of Kiev (himself slandered as a heretic by some of today’s ‘Orthodox’ academics!) called ‘the graves of Orthodoxy’, by seminaries with thieves like Stalin in them, by simony, ambition, careerism and by priests who were not priests but ‘popy’. (418 such ‘priests’ actually defrocked themselves immediately after the Revolution, proving that they had no faith, but were just State civil servants, ritualists making money from the naïve). Mass Orthodoxy has not been restored in Russia because there has not yet been mass repentance. The Tsar and his followers are still slandered in the mass media and not least by notorious, pseudo-Orthodox academics in today’s Academies of Theology and seminaries. Careerism (often taking the form of ecumenism) and love of money have revived. Even the monastic revival only concerns only some 10,000.

There is very far to go. The spiritual disease of nominalism is rampant in today’s Russian Church. Only when another 100,000 churches have been built, superstition and ritualism are overcome, shopping malls are no longer built, people dress decently in the streets, abortion is outlawed, the education and health systems and the media reflect Orthodoxy, the State has returned to the Orthodox calendar and such righteous people as St Maria (Vyrubova) of Helsinki and Elder Nikolai (Guryanov) have been canonized, will we be able to say that ‘Communism was replaced by Orthodoxy’.

Q: Why are so many Eastern Europeans so passive as regards Church activities?

A: This is the fruit of Communism, State control, among many people. Many do not think that they are the Church – which they are. They expect everything to be done for them, by ‘professionals’, from clergy to paid choirs. Such nominal Orthodox think of the Church as a ‘show’, a piece of ‘theatre’, just like the aristocrats from before the Revolution.

Q: Do you agree that the main problem of Orthodox life in the Diaspora is the jurisdictions?

A: No, definitely not. Jurisdictions are just an effect, not the cause. The cause is the mentality of what I would call ‘clubbism’, which is the bane of the Church in the Diaspora. Yes, it is nice to be with the like-minded, but that is not what the Church is about. It is about the salvation of the soul from evil. Yes, I agree, in so-called Orthodox countries (they do not exist any more), you will find different sorts of parish in the same town and those parishes are sociologically defined, but in the Diaspora it is much worse. Thus in this country you can find parishes which are in fact Greek clubs (usually subdivided into Cypriot clubs, Cretan clubs and mainland Greek clubs), Romanian clubs, Russian clubs, Serbian clubs, ex-Anglican clubs, ex-Anglo-Catholic clubs, ex-sectarian clubs, liberal Anglican clubs, upper-middle class intellectual clubs etc. This bane of the Diaspora comes from the fact that people do not seek the Kingdom of God first, but put their own interests above it.

Q: Why did Christ say the words: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me’?

A: Until the time of Christ all human souls went down to Hades in death. Here they were held captive in torment. Thus, at death Christ in His human nature felt forsaken by God, for Hades is the place where God is not because He is rejected there. Thanks to Christ, Who, as sinless, the devil could not hold captive, all in Hades who accepted Christ’s message were freed. This is what we can see on icons of the Resurrection, Christ freeing humanity through Adam and Eve. This is what we mean by the harrowing of hell.

Q: What is the origin of the word Lent?

A: It is the Old English word for spring (‘lenctan’) and it means the period when the days lengthen – Lent and lengthen are the same word. However, already in ancient time it came to mean the spring fast. Lent therefore is the English for ‘the Great Fast’. This is why it is absurd to talk about ‘the Great Fast’, like Fr Alexander Schmemann did (English was his third language).

Q: Why is sitting with crossed legs or standing with your arms behind your back not acceptable in Orthodox churches?

A: Quite simply because such an attitude does not denote a prayerful attitude. We should stand with our arms by our sides.

Q: Can you see a visible difference between Patriarchal and ROCOR priests?

A: Yes, you often can, quite literally. The Patriarchate (like the Rue Daru jurisdiction also) hands out awards like confetti! It is a standing joke in Moscow about how grey-haired ROCOR priests have almost no awards, while Patriarchal priests, twenty years younger, are covered with them! Such are ROCOR bishops!

Q: What words would you like on your gravestone, apart from your name and date?

A: What an unusual question, though I think I was asked the same thing before. I would like the words: ‘The truth will set you free’.

Q: What is the first thing you have on Easter Night, once Lent is over?

A: A mug of milky tea.

 

In Memoriam: Michael McCall

Christ is Risen!

It has always been the desire of devout Orthodox Christians to die on the Resurrection Day of Easter. Thus, we recall the life of a righteous layman, Michael McCall, who lived without a television, a car or a mobile phone. He fell asleep peacefully at his home on the Isle of Wight on 8 April, Orthodox Easter Day, at the age of 62, having suffered stomach pains since Great Friday.

Nobody would have guessed that Michael had a Cambridge doctorate in mathematics, so modest was he. A bachelor, he joined the Orthodox Church 25 years ago and was known for his almost monastic life and great modesty. A pilgrim to Jerusalem and frequently partaking in pilgrimages to Iona (near where his ancestors had come from), he was a very generous donor to various churches. Among them the Colchester parish, to which he donated £50,000 and the Norwich parish, to which he donated £5,000. It is only now that we reveal his generosity, for he donated strictly on condition that this would not be revealed in his lifetime.

Michael wrote to me only on Great Wednesday, confirming that he would be coming to us for the Ascension. His Ascension is taking place now.

Michael was an example to us all. Funeral details are yet to be announced, but her will be interred in the Orthodox cemetery at Brookwood near Woking.

To the servant of God the Righteous Pilgrim Michael: Eternal Memory!

He is Risen Indeed!