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On Metr Antony (Bloom) and Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov)

Q: You are one of the few people who knew well both Metr Antony (Bloom) and Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov). What do you think of them and their disputes?

A: I am not sure that I am one of the few, but I did know them both well.

The future Metr Antony was born on the same day as my grandfather, though twenty years after him. He was a typical Franco-Russian intellectual. He was very gifted, very open, to the point of liberalism, and very sincere. His father, Boris, was an Imperial diplomat who was interested in the occult and had the gift of hypnotism. His mother was the sister of the ‘mystical’, but very unOrthodox Russian composer Scriabin.

Andrei Bloom (as he then was) came to the faith in his teens and lived it in his own way. He did not study at seminary. He was completely unmercenary and lived very modestly. His interests were intellectual and in people and was very popular, especially among women. He was widely read in Western literature, but not so much in the Church Fathers or the literature of piety and the Lives of the Saints. He was really quite emotional and you can hear this in his sermons. His approach to the Faith was emotional, even sentimental, and cultural. That approach is very important to some.

Fr Sophrony was eighteen years older than Metr Antony and came from a well-off Russian family in Moscow, emigrated to France after the Revolution and was a huge intellectual, philosopher and artist who had belonged in his youth to the Art Nouveau Movement. He came to England in 1959, when a large property was given him by the Church of England in an ecumenical spirit. At that time he was still living in France, where for some 14 years he had been under the Patriarchate of Moscow after he had been expelled from Mt Athos. He had lived there for twenty years and was expelled by the Greek authorities for political reasons, together with two other Russian monks.

In 1965 he left the jurisdiction of Metr Antony of Moscow after twenty years and returned to the jurisdiction of Greek Constantinople. This happened after he had fallen out with Metr Antony, who wanted to close his monastery and ordain his priests, so he could expand his tiny diocese. Fr Sophrony (as we always called him – never starets) is now a local saint, canonised by the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and venerated in the monastery, or convent, which he founded just outside a village in the east of Essex.

So we can see that Metr Antony had an emotional approach to the Faith and is very attractive to the emotional and even sentimental, especially to women, and brought tens of thousands of Russians and others to Orthodoxy. On the other hand, Fr Sophrony had an intellectual and philosophical approach to the Faith and he is attractive to highly educated people of many nationalities, many of whom have doctorates, like his monks.

Thus, they were very different people. But both played a positive role. The point is that everyone is different and there is no reason to reject or condemn either of them, as some do. Having said that, neither was my ‘cup of tea’ personally. But so what? There is room in the Church for many different sorts of people and many sorts of people are needed. Let us not be narrow! Tastes vary.

We can see this in the views of other Orthodox. For example, the then Fr Vitaly (Ustinov), later Metropolitan of ROCOR, called, I think in 1948, the then Fr Antony (Bloom) ‘a priest of Satan’, simply because he belonged to the Patriarchate of Moscow, which had been revived by Stalin. However, we know that Metr Vitaly ended his life outside the Church in a sect. Metr Antony (Bloom) did not.

Another critic, and of both the ‘Western’ Metr Antony and of the ‘delusional’ Fr Sophrony (according to Professor Osipov), is the Russian academic, Professor A. I. Osipov. His lectures are interesting for beginners in Orthodox life and he was very popular, especially in the 1990s when 100 million Russians were baptised, virtually without instruction. Once more, he is just another personality, with his own approach, a third approach, that of the academic.

All three approaches are interesting, but I don’t see why they should be mutually exclusive. However, once more he is not my personal cup of tea. But he is the cup of tea of many others. People are different! Accept that everyone is different and stop falling into that trap of sectarian narrowness and condemnation that some Russians can be inclined to, with their cries of ‘That’s uncanonical’, ‘you’re a schismatic’, ‘that’s heretical’ etc. None of that is Christian. Moreover, it is this Russian intolerance that has caused the schism between Russians and Greeks today, all the purely political divisions in the Russian emigration (meaning that today ROCOR is out of communion with the Western European Archdiocese of the Russian Church), and all the divisions inside Russia from the seventeenth century until today, Sad.

2024: The Year of Incoming Boomerangs

Introduction: Karma

Incoming boomerangs are those which you threw, missed their targets, and are now heading back to you. Unless you change your position, they will inevitably hit you. They are what is popularly known as ‘karma’ or ‘chickens coming home to roost’, for ‘what goes around, comes around’. The ramifications of the millennial turning-point in world history which began to turn on 24 February 2022 are growing more visible almost daily. For the boomerangs launched by the USA since 1945 and even those thrown by the British (whose Imperial deviations and delusions the US foolishly followed) as long ago as the 19th century, in India, Afghanistan, China and the Crimea (1854-1856), let alone in the 20th century, in Israel, Iraq etc, are now all incoming, and all at the same time. There is nowhere to escape for the throwers and their spiritual descendants – unless they change their positions. Such a change is called repentance.

The Ukraine

Firstly, the conflict in the Ukraine has shown the whole world superior Russian military technology, and not just Mach 10 hypersonic missiles like the Kinzhal, which the West does not even have and can do nothing to counter. There is also an array of other weapons used by the very small part of the Russian Army (about 15% of it) – many of them Ukrainians, who are fighting for their freedom from the US-appointed Galician regime in Kiev – which is defending the Russians who live in the Ukraine. NATO’s weapons, used largely unsuccessfully even against untrained Iraqi conscripts and sandal-wearing goatherds firing kalashnikovs, have proved useless or obsolete against the more advanced Russian missiles, tanks, aircraft, helicopters and drones. It is now clear that the Soviet Ukraine, the construct of Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchov and so vigorously defended by the allegedly anti-Soviet West, is being wiped off the map, its troops the puppets vainly dying for a clique in Washington. Nearly all commentators are predicting the collapse of the Ukraine in 2024, perhaps in the first half of the year, perhaps quite soon. The south and east of the old Ukraine will go back to Russia and a few far western provinces will go back to Romania, Hungary and also Poland – if Poland wants them, which is doubtful. The rest, the old Central Ukraine around Kiev, will be a landlocked Russian Protectorate. The fake Church set up by the USA with the complicity of certain eminently bribable Turkish Greeks will disappear, discrediting those individuals and others responsible.

Africa, Latin America and Palestine

Secondly, inspired by Russia’s humiliation of the West in the Ukraine, the ‘Global South’, that is, the seven billion of the Rest of the world, are at last standing up to the one billion of the West of the world. Colonial France is being flung out of Africa, colonial Britain out of Latin America in Belize and Guyana, despite the laughable presence of a Victorian-style British gunboat, and the colonial USA out of Eurasia. Thus, the US Israeli vassal, the coastal settlement creation of the British Balfour, has been challenged by the long-oppressed Palestinians and has lost sympathy and credit worldwide. Although US bombs drop out of US aircraft flown by Israeli pilots and genocide Palestinian civilians in one of the greatest acts of ethnic cleansing since 1939, Israel has already lost its war through its moral suicide. If the US really loved Israel (or the Ukraine), it would be protecting it from its own stupidity and amorality. There is now no longer a ‘Two-State Solution’ in Palestine, only a One-State Solution and that State is called Palestine. The now unwelcome Israeli occupiers and colonists (‘settlers’) will sooner or later have to return as refugees to the USA and other countries, hated by the whole huge Muslim world.

Elsewhere in Eurasia

Thirdly, throughout Eurasia the story is much the same. The Yemenis, who threw the British out of Red Sea Aden which they once occupied, are now taking on the USA with $2,000 drones that have altered the patterns of billions of dollars of Western trade, though befriended Russian oil-tankers pass with ease through the Red Sea. Iran, subverted by the British and the Americans seventy years ago, is keen for revenge, as are Iraq and Syria, where angry local militias, opposed to the US-financed ISIS, are attacking illegal US bases. Then there is the once prosperous Libya, destroyed by French and British bombs. The US is also losing its ability to stem the desire for freedom of the repressed peoples in the Western Balkans, despite the recent failed, German-organised, pro-EU coup in Serbia, the Caucasus, Kazakhstan, where the US-orchestrated revolt of January 2022 failed due to Russian intervention, and in the rest of Central Asia. This latter now increasingly looks to China, where the West despite its best propaganda has been unable to foment dissent among Chinese Muslims. As for East Asia, everybody knows that Chinese Taiwan will return to China by 2049, perhaps entirely voluntarily, as Beijing has publicly announced. Then US-occupied Japan and a reunited Korea will also inevitably and quite naturally pass into the Chinese Superpower orbit.

The Literal Reorientation of Russia

Closing its window on a 300 year-old love affair, Russia has literally reoriented itself, that is, after opening a window on the West 300 years ago, it has turned back to the Orient. Its love affair with the West had already begun to turn sour in the Imperial period, then its greatest import from the West, German Marxism, turned really sour after 1917, and after the failure of that disastrous experiment with its many millions of victims the last three decades have proved bitter. The rapacious Collective West has stabbed Russia in the back again and again, not least in the so-called Ukraine over the last decade. Today Russia is being redefined as a Civilisational Centre, a Sovereign Power, the East Slav Union of the Russian Federation, Belarus and Malorossija (the Soviet Central Ukraine). Western thinking about Russia has proved to be nothing but wishful thinking, based on its delusions and belief in its own lies.

The End of Western Globalism

After setting up over 750 military bases worldwide in order to enforce its hegemony, the US is now in almost $34 trillion of debt. Its administration has also failed to control mass immigration from Latin America, whose masses it impoverished. Failing to provide any effective social system, decent education and worthy healthcare, tens of millions of its people live in abject poverty, illness and practical homelessness, suffering from poisoned, obesity-making foodstuffs and cheap chemically-made lethal drugs. The instruments the US elite has used over 75 years in order to dominate the Globe, including artificially separating Western Europe from Russia and destroying its industry, the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, the ICC, NATO, the EU, Hollywood, Disney, Coca Cola, MacDonald’s, KFC, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter X, Netflix are all discredited to various degrees. The seven billion of the Rest have understood that ‘Globalism’ only ever meant the control and domination of the Globe by the West, not the unity of the Globe on a mutually respectful basis. It was all a propaganda myth, brainwashing. There is now, however, an alternative, real Globalism, in which the different civilisational centres of the Globe work together freely for mutual benefit, while retaining their sovereign independence. This alternative is so new and has advanced so rapidly since Russia stood up to the West in the Ukraine that it still has no up-to-date name.

Conclusion: The Concert of the Nations

For the moment it is known as BRICS or BRICS +. It is a concert of nations, already more powerful than the G7 and it is going to expand rapidly from 1 January 2024. After this it will speed ahead with the further dedollarisation of world trade. Its sixteenth summit in Kazan in the Russian Federation in October 2024, by which time America’s war in the Ukraine against the Ukraine and Russia should be over, will be epoch-making. President Putin has stated that it is destined to establish ‘a fair world order’ at last. By then it will have become clear that BRICS will need a new name. As an Alliance of Sovereign Peoples, we suggest a name along the lines of The Confederation of Sovereign Nations. This makes the abbreviation CONSONA, literally consonant with harmony. Moreover, in Russian, such a name translated as ‘Soglasny’ also means ‘Agreed’, and an etymological translation would give ‘Sozvuch’e’, the word for ‘Harmony’, explaining that this really is a Concert of the Nations. Whatever name is given, here is a possible future at the end of the year of incoming boomerangs.

 

The Sorry Tale of the Anglo-American Empire

Not allowing our imperial history to be rubbished is important because if indeed our imperial history was all that they say it was, namely a litany of atrocity, then the moral authority of the West is eroded.

The Oxford Professor of Theology, Nigel Biggar, interviewed on the Conservativehome website, 16 September 2020

The Western Gulag

No people has ever with greater brutality better prepared its economic conquests with the sword and later ruthlessly defended them than the English Nation’.

Adolf Hitler (1)

When Gandhi was asked in London in the 1930s what he thought of Western Civilisation, he allegedly replied: ‘I think it is a very good idea’. It is what we Orthodox Christians think too. Ask any Serb, who knows all about the effects of Western depleted uranium shells on unborn children and RAF bombs marked ‘Happy Easter’, murdering women and children on Easter Night. The Anti-Civilisation of Gulags is an inherent part of all four materialist Western ideologies: the Feudalist, the Communist, the Fascist, the Globalist.

How else can you enforce your millennial ideology of organised violence on the rest of the world? For the Western world, with its British ‘rule of law’ or its US ‘international rules-based order’, law is a medieval construct of regulated force, legalised violence, the high priest of Imperialism, the theft of land and resources from native peoples with bits of parchment and paper. Ask the medieval European serfs, herded into concentration camp ‘villages’ beneath the newly-built castles, inhabited by ‘evil men’, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle wrote, such that English peasants thought that ‘Christ and His saints slept’. Ask the Irish. Ask the Native Americans. Ask the Africans. Ask the Asians. Ask the Aborigenes. Ask the Ukrainians about the feudal Blackrock corporation.

The USSR, like China, had its own State camp system, the Communist Gulag (the abbreviation ‘lag’ taken from the German Lager – camp – camps being the new castles), inspired by the latest Western ideology of Communism. But all the Feudalist empires had their Gulags too: Spain in most of South and Central America and Mexico; Portugal in Brazil and parts of Africa; France in West and North Africa and Indo-China; the Netherlands in the ‘Dutch East Indies’; Belgium in the Congo; Germany in South-West and East Africa; Austro-Hungary in Carpatho-Russia; Italy in Libya and ‘Abyssinia’.

And Britain had them almost everywhere, most notoriously and most literally in the slave plantations of the Caribbean and Virginia, in the Indian subcontinent and only five generations ago in South Africa. Camps, camps, camps – so much admired by Hitler that he copied Britain and made his own Fascist Gulag in Eastern Europe.  And after Hitler’s suicide, the British, perhaps flattered by his admiration, carried on their millions-strong Gulag in the late 1940s and 1950s, in Palestine (yes, Israel was a British invention, thank you Lloyd George and Balfour for your ‘contract with Jewry’, as you called it (2)), Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus and finally Northern Ireland under the heartless Thatcher (3).

However, the USA also copied the British Gulag, at home (‘Indian reservations’ = concentration camps for Native Americans on the worst land), in Hawaii, Cuba, the Philippines, Guam, Germany, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite the anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism of Wilson, Roosevelt and Kennedy (the latter got murdered for his), the awful British Empire survived and became the American Empire. First, there was Rhodes and then Milner, who wanted the US in. So in 1917 their followers engineered a coup to get the Russians out and a few weeks later they brought the US in. But in 1941, when Britain had gone bankrupt and could have starved, the US took over completely to keep the Germans down. The world was America’s and so they invented NATO to continue their out, in and down.

The American Empire

America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without going through the process of civilisation.

Oscar Wilde

A piece of European snobbery, proclaims the American on reading the above. And probably rightly so, for surely it is not just America, but much of the Western world which did not go through the process of civilisation. For what is America, if not a European colony? After 1945 the British elite presented their Empire as a bastion of anti-Communism and so sold it to the US, knowing that that was how to pull the Americans’ strings. And so, economically, they held on to it, even when militarily they had become bankrupt pygmies.

Where did you think the CIA got its waterboarding from? It had been a small part of the long-perfected British ‘dilution technique’ of beatings and torture. And Guantanamo? Just a copy of illegal detentions in Northern Ireland and elsewhere. Of course, the Americans never used the words ‘Empire’ or ‘Imperial’. Instead, they disguised the American Empire behind the words ‘Globalism’ and ‘Modernization’. And then the British copied them in turn, cottoning on to the slogan ‘Global Britain’ instead of ‘Imperial Britain’. Same thing. Just sounds better.

Yes, it is true that the hoodwinked Western peoples, at least outside the capitals and main cities, had little idea of what was being done abroad in their name by their elites. Most never went any further than a few neighbouring villages. They were told that it was all a ‘civilising mission to enlighten backward peoples’ – and they believed it, beneath the weight of the censorship and propaganda of the elite. Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde approach (the novella was written at the height of Victorian Imperialism in 1886), the beast inside and underneath, was always the Western approach. Ditto for Stoker’s Dracula in 1897, the symbol of Victorian blood-sucking Imperialism.

It is also reflected in the novels of Agatha Christie (and countless other imitators, like the inventor of Cluedo), in which a nice, quiet, innocent, English village becomes the scene of dastardly murder, committed by a member of the elite. The village-murder meeting of opposites was noted by George Orwell, inspired by the British example of the wartime British ‘Ministry of Information’, in fact the Ministry of Disinformation. In his 1948/1984 world of Doublethink he commented: ‘War is Peace’. ‘Freedom is Slavery’. It had virtually been the feudal slogan of Hitler’s death camps: Arbeit Macht Frei – Work Liberates. The Americans reflected it all in their satirical film Arsenic and Old Lace. Two sweetness and light old ladies, whom we might well nickname Freedom and Democracy, have their mad brother burying their dead victims, the ‘backward’ outcasts of society, in the cellar. ‘They are so much happier now’.

Charming politeness and law-abidingness on the surface, pitiless and ruthless bloodshed underneath, in the cellar of the Western world, that part of the house the polite never speak about, but hypocrisy will not make it go away. The whole of Western double standards is satirised. ‘Sorry we murdered you. But it was for your own good’. Such precisely is the history of Western Imperialism and its aerial bombing ‘back to the Stone Age’ (aerial bombing – another British invention from the 1920s, faithfully copied by the Americans). If you do not believe me, look at today’s murder of the Ukraine. ‘It is all for their own good’, claim the neocons. ‘Why, once all those who resist are dead, they will be civilised – like us’. If anyone is left. After all, they do want to fight ‘to the last Ukrainian’.

The Narcissist Club

The Capital of that beacon of light, the USA, is named after a slave-owner. How many slaves did he own and exploit – 200, or was it 300? It is as if Berlin was called Hitlerstadt. They would complain about that name, but not about the Washington name. Isn’t it time to give Washington a native name? The same hypocrisy goes for the British arch-imperialist Churchill. He complained about Hitler murdering 5.4 million Jews, but what about the 5.4 million Bengalis that he allowed to die in the Bengal famine of 1943? It did not matter. They were brown. The Jews were not. And, besides, the Jews had plenty of money. Isn’t it time to take down Churchill’s statue in London? We have had enough of the apologists for Western crimes. They are after all no more than apologists for Hitler.

I love Old Europe, but not New Europe. Like Dostoyevsky I approach New Europe as the cemetery of a dear friend. In the first millennium Europe gave us those who, surrounded by death, preached the Divine message of Resurrection from death and so offered Eternal Life. These are the saints of Europe, the apostles and martyrs in Rome and such as St Irenaeus in Lyon, St Maurice in Switzerland, St Ursula in Cologne, St Eulalia in Barcelona, St Ambrose in Milan, St Martin in Gaul, St John Cassian in Marseilles, St Patrick in Ireland, St Genevieve in Paris, St Benedict in Umbria, St David in Wales, St Martin in Braga, St Columba in Scotland, St Gregory in Rome, St Willibrord in the Netherlands, St Boniface in Germany, St Eulogius in Cordoba, St Anskar in Denmark, St Edmund in England, St Olaf in Norway, St Stephen in Hungary, St Sigfrid in Sweden.

In the second millennium Europe gave us those who, surrounded by death, preached the humanitarian message of Resistance to evil and so offered cultural life. Despite all the surrounding evils, they gave us such as Boccaccio and Dante, Giotto and Chaucer, Van Eyck and de Vinci, Michelangelo and Rembrandt, Shakespeare and Cervantes, Moliere and Mozart, Blake and Keats, Beethoven and Goethe, Chopin and Heine, Dickens and Strauss, Dvorak and Grieg, Rodin and Renoir, Monet and Mucha, Verne and Wells, Orwell and Mann. Then Europe began to dry up, as in 1914 it started on its long, slow and bloody process of suicide or rather genocide of the peoples of Europe by the elites. And that suicide/genocide is ongoing. This time in Zelenskyland, in a conflict which implicates the whole spineless European elite. Europe lost its way, and so its culture, when it lost its foundations, and so its principles.

Here I am in France, yes, the independent France that existed until the CIA mounted its colour revolution against De Gaulle in 1968 and is now ruled by the effeminate banker ‘Micron’, as many call him. Here I was struck last week by the wording on the clothing of a little girl. I suppose she must have been about seven years old. She was wearing a T-shirt with words which surely she did not understand. They said, naturally in English: centre for self-love. And I thought how those words actually sum up the present-day Western world, with its Facebook and likes, me-time and iphone, Twitter and Instagram (‘I buy buy branded clothes, so I can take pictures of me wearing them and then post them on my Instagram account’). It is a selfie world, an ‘I-world’, an ‘I love me’ world, a world of narcissism. As such, it is therefore a doomed world. Creation only ever comes from sacrifice and suffering, whether from childbirth and concertos, never from egoism and self-satisfaction, from Tik Tok and Instagram. The century-long suicide of Europe continues, long ago exported to the rest of the West.

On account of its suicide/genocide, today we can no longer speak of Europe being able to stand alone, not even of Eurasia, but of Afro-Eurasia. It is Russia, Asia and Africa that can together still save the Half-Continent at the Western end of Darkest Europe from itself. (European Russia and Belarus already managed to save themselves from all four materialist Western ideologies of Feudalism, Communism, Fascism and Globalism – all variations on the same exploitative theme. We look to BRICS to save the North American Brave New World and to BRICS to save the Australian and New Zealand Brave New World. As for Europe, its only meaning now is, like Zelensky, to surrender and bear responsibility for the crimes of its millennial elites whom most Europeans obeyed. But first Europe must reject its aberrant Imperial history of pride and return to its roots of humility.

Notes:

  1. Mein Kampf
  2. Lloyd George, Memoirs 2: 721
  3. See, for example, Caroline Elkins’ excellent cataloguing of twentieth-century British Imperial genocidal crimes in her Legacy of Violence (London 2022). It confirmed everything we had long suspected and forms a suitable reply to the whitewashing of the British Empire by Lawrence James in his Rise and Fall of the British Empire, (was that part-funded by MI5?), or the absurd nonsense of Ferguson’s ‘the West and the Rest’ with his Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (paid for 2003 propaganda?) and Nigel Biggar’s pure Establishment Ethics and Empire project in 2017, in which like an extraterrestrial from Oxford academia he still appears to be clueless about the millennial reality. The West’s moral authority ‘eroded’? It never had any.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Persecution in Kiev

Although this journalist is secular, it shows that at last the US public is beginning to realise that the US-created puppet regime in Kiev is thoroughly anti-Christian. Together with the mass demonstrations in Germany, Italy, the Czech Lands, Moldova, France and even the UK, unreported by the censored Western media, against government-imposed poverty and the persecution of Christians in the Ukraine by the US and its allies, it witnesses to the revulsion of ordinary Western people to what has been done in their name.

https://gorthodox.com/en/news-item/zelensky-s-war-on-monks-turns-into-pr-debacle-as-major-us-media-blast-him

 

Commemoration of Our Father among the Saints Aidan, Bishop of Lindisfarne, Enlightener of Northumbria

THE 31ST DAY OF THE MONTH OF AUGUST

Commemoration of Our Father among the Saints Aidan, Bishop of Lindisfarne, Enlightener of Northumbria

At Vespers

At Lord, I have cried, 6 stichira: 3 for the Deposition of the Sash of the Mother of God and 3 for the holy hierarch, Tone VI, Spec. Mel.: ‘On the third day…’

Arise, you Christian peoples, and let us praise the wondrous Aidan, a hierarch blessed by God, a tireless husbandman of the vineyard of the Holy Church; and with cries of jubilation let us proclaim before all nations that he is our fervent intercessor before the throne of the Lord of lords.

O Lindisfarne, thou Holy Isle, washed everlastingly by the waves of the sea, as thou didst behold the spiritual struggles and feats of the holy hierarch Aidan, thy very stones bear witness to the glory he has won with Christ. Wherefore, as thou art exalted above the tides, raise us up to praise him.

Kings and nobles honoured thee, but thou gavest their gifts to the poor in Christ, thereby showing thyself to be a model of Christian virtue and love; wherefore, thou hast been crowned in the heavens by the right hand of the Almighty, O glorious Aidan.

Glory, Tone II.

The islands of the sea leap for joy at thy memory, O Aidan, for on the Isle of Scattery, in the Ireland of thy birth, thou didst first undertake the monastic life with the venerable Senan, on the blessed Island of Iona in the land of the Picts thou didst attain spiritual maturity under Segenius, and found thine own monastery on the Holy Isle of Lindisfarne on the coasts of Northumbria. Wherefore, in thee were the words of Isaiah the Prophet fulfilled, for thy sake was the glory of the Lord revealed in the isles of the sea, and the name of the Lord made glorious therein.

Now & ever, for the Deposition.

Aposticha of the Deposition and Glory, Tone VIII.

With the right-believing Kings Oswald and Oswin thou didst plant the Faith of Christ among the English, as a true apostle and disciple of the Saviour, O holy Aidan; and caring for orphans and children as an attentive father, thou didst instil in them true piety and the knowledge of God; and with coins entrusted to thee in Christian love thou didst purchase the freedom of many who languished in bitter thralldom and captivity. O holy hierarch, look down from heaven upon us, thy sinful children: by thine example teach us the virtues and lead us to the vision of God, and by thy supplications ransom us, the wretched, from slavery to death and the devil.

Now & ever, of the Deposition.

Troparion of the holy hierarch, Tone I.

A son of Ireland, transplanted to Iona, the isle of saints, tended there, thou didst grow to spiritual fruition; and when the field of Northumbria was ready to receive the seeds of the Christian Faith, thou wast sent there to plant the crop of salvation. Wherefore, labouring diligently day and night, thou didst produce a rich harvest for Christ. O godly Aidan our father, beseech Him earnestly that our souls may find mercy.

Glory… Now & ever… Troparion of the Deposition.

 

At Matins

At ‘God is the Lord’, the troparion of the Deposition, twice; Glory…. that of the holy hierarch, Now & ever…. that of the Deposition, once.

After the readings from the Psalter, the sessional hymns of the Deposition.

Canon I of the Deposition, with 6 troparia, including the irmos, which is sung twice; Canon II of the Deposition, with 4 troparia; and this canon of the holy hierarch, with 4 troparia, the acrostic whereof is “Eire, Scotland and England praise Aidan”, Tone I.

Ode I

Irmos: Let us sing a new hymn to the Lord Who made the impassable Red Sea dry land. He caused the children of Israel to cross it, and covered the adverse foe with the sea.

Eireann’s child Aidan, growing in wisdom and stature in the land of the Picts, became a true apostle and father to the English, so that multitudes came to sojourn on earth as they were angels and dwell now in the heavens.

Iona, the sacred isle of the venerable Columba, nurtured thee, O Aidan, with the Holy Scriptures and the writings of the fathers, so that thou didst excel in the monastic struggles, in prudence and all the virtues.

Rejecting the acquisition of worldly power and material possessions, like the disciples of Christ thou didst go humbly among thy flock, O wondrous hierarch, preferring to walk upon thy beautiful apostolic feet, rather than to ride.

Hymn to the Mother of God: Ever-virgin art thou, O all-holy and blessed Sovereign Lady, Queen of all creation, for the Son and Word from before eternity has preserved thy purity undefiled, from thy birth to this day, and time without end.

Katavasia: The irmoi of the Exaltation of the Cross.

Ode III

Irmos: O Lord, establish the Church which Thou hast acquired by the power of Thy Cross, whereby Thou didst vanquish the enemy and hast enlightened the whole world.

Senan, thy tutor in faith and piety, sent thee to Segenius to train as a champion in the contest against all manner of temptations; and, strengthened by the supplications of both preceptors, O Aidan, thou didst vanquish the hordes of Satan.

Called to the episcopate because of thine exceeding great discretion, thou didst tend the sheep and lambs of thy flock for Christ, the Chief Shepherd, Who has crowned thee gloriously with an unfading wreath.

O the grace which filled thee, body and soul, O wondrous Aidan! For, sensing the power of the Almighty working in thee, the waves of the sea stilled their raging when the oil thou didst provide was poured forth thereon.

Hymn to the Mother of God: Tenderly didst thou feed thine own Creator at thy breast, O Virgin Mother; wherefore, He Whom thou didst cradle in thine all-pure arms took thy pristine soul into His own hands when it departed from thine immaculate body.

Kontakion of the holy hierarch, Tone V.

With great pastoral prudence, O holy hierarch Aidan, thou didst feed the lambs of thy new flock with the milk of piety; and when they were filled with such wholesome spiritual sustenance, thou gavest them the solid food of Orthodox teaching, thereby confirming their souls in godly reverence and true devotion.

Ikos: Arise and praise Aidan, O Northumbria! O Holy Isle of Lindisfarne, rejoice and be glad! Ye kings and princes, lords and commons, lift up your voices in jubilation! For the blessed hierarch ever imparts to your land the mercy and favour of the Most High, shedding the rays thereof on your cities, villages and towns. Wherefore, let the streams of the Humber carry his fame to all the world, and let the cities of York, Durham and Bamburgh declare his glory to all Christendom, that every nation may glorify God, Who is wondrous in His saints, that He may confirm our souls in godly reverence and true devotion.

Sessional hymn of the Deposition; then, Glory…. that of the holy hierarch, Tone VIII, Spec. Mel.: ‘Of the Wisdom…’

Well didst thou heed the words of David the Psalmist, O Aidan, for thou didst take care not to be as the horse or as the mule which have no understanding, whose jaws must be held with bit and bridle; wherefore, when a costly steed was bestowed upon thee by the pious king, thou didst straightway give it away to a poor man, reproving the sovereign when he protested at thy liberality, for the poor in Christ, who are always with us, are higher in value than all the horses of this world.

Now & ever…. Sessional hymn of the Deposition, again.

Ode IV

Irmos: Thy grace has shone forth upon the nations, and the ends of the earth have beheld Thy glory, for by Thy Cross Thou hast saved the whole world.

Let all the ends of the earth rejoice today in the memory of the holy hierarch Aidan, who cast down the idols of the heathen and shone forth the grace of God in the Kingdoms of Deira and Bernicia.

All Orthodox nations exult greatly today, praising the apostolic struggles and journeys of the wondrous Aidan, by whose tireless efforts the Faith of Christ was established.

Now let us all emulate the blessed Aidan, the model for monastics and paragon of Christian virtues, that having like him pleased our heavenly Master, we may enter into His gracious joy.

Hymn to the Mother of God: Despairing of our salvation because of our manifold transgressions, in fear we flee to thee, O most immaculate one; and, clasping thy precious feet, we beseech thy mighty intercession.

Ode V

Irmos: Once, the seraph, taking up tongs, took up a burning ember and touched it to Isaiah’s lips; and, purified, he proclaimed unto all: Learn ye righteousness!

Alms didst thou constantly receive from the mighty of the world, O Aidan; and these didst thou straightaway give away among the poor and needy. Wherefore, great is thy treasure in the heavens.

Neither silver nor gold didst thou keep for thyself, O friend of the Most High, but didst hold the poor in spirit to be thy true treasure; and therein thy heart didst delight, O God-bearer.

Despondency and all the fleshly passions didst thou dispel from thy soul by the rigours of abstinence and ascetic struggles, O venerable one. Wherefore, thou becamest a true model for monks.

Hymn to the Mother of God: Even the most eloquent of orators is utterly at a loss how to describe the mighty works which thine all-powerful Son has wrought through thee, O most pure Maiden.

Ode VI

Irmos: Emulating the Prophet Jonah, I cry out: O Good One, free my life from corruption! O Saviour of the world, save me who cry out: Glory to Thee!

Nailing the uprisings of thy flesh to the fear of God, thou didst earnestly take up thy cross and follow after Christ Jesus thy Lord, by Whose sufferings we have been redeemed.

Glory and majesty shine forth on this day of thy memorial, O blessed one; for having shed the old man like a garment, thou didst put on Christ, Who shines with uncreated light.

Lowly and humble, O Aidan, thou didst yet consort with kings, princes and highborn nobles, teaching them to repent, in that the mighty will be cast down and those of low degree will be exalted.

Hymn to the Mother of God: All-blessed art thou, O Lady Birthgiver of God, for within thy pure womb the Author of all deigned to dwell, so that it surpasses all the heavenly heights in glory.

Kontakion & ikos of the Deposition.

Ode VII

Irmos: O Lord God of our fathers, Who didst appear to the law-giver in the fiery bush and therein prefigure Thy nativity from the Virgin: Blessed art Thou!

Still now do the tides sunder thy Holy Isle from the coastal lands, O Aidan our helmsman; yet during thy life naught could part thee from the love of thy Lord.

Devoutly the pious Oswald granted thee the islands of the sea, O boast of monks: wherefore, on Lindisfarne thou didst found a mighty monastery; while Farne witnessed thy solitary struggles in prayer.

Prudence, the highest of pastoral virtues, reigned supreme in thy life, so that multitudes of the heathen, perceiving the light of Christ shining forth from thee, glorified God, crying: Blessed art Thou!

Hymn to the Mother of God: Robed in gold inwrought with many colours, the all-immaculate Queen and Mother stands in majesty at the throne of the Most High, mercifully interceding for her sinful servants.

Ode VIII

Irmos: Hymn the Lord, Who preserved the children in the burning fiery furnace and descended to them in the form of an angel, and exalt Him supremely forever!

At thy preaching, O godly hierarch Aidan, the hearts of men were opened to the teachings of Christ Jesus; for as thou didst teach, so didst thou live, conforming thyself to the divine precepts.

In time of strife, when pagan hordes strove to burn the royal city to the ground, O Aidan, thou didst set their malice at nought, and by the power of God didst turn back against them the very flames which they kindled.

Singing the praises of God, like the youths in the furnace, while fires threatened to consume Bamburgh, by thine entreaty thou didst preserve the Christian city unharmed by the flames, turning them back upon the evildoers.

Hymn to the Mother of God: Exalting thee among all women, Christ made His abode within thee, O pure Birthgiver of God, miraculously issuing forth from thee at His birth without breaking the seal of thy virginity.

Ode IX

Irmos: With hymns do we magnify Thee, the God and man, Who wast first begotten without mother, and then wast born without father.

As a good shepherd, and not a hireling, O Aidan, thou didst call upon the infidels to cast away their unbelief and to enter, rejoicing, into the fold of the Church, embracing the one true Faith.

Instructing believers in word and deed, O holy hierarch, thou didst strengthen them in the doing of good deeds, that their faith might be alive within them and bear the ripe fruits of piety.

Devoting thyself to monastic ideals, thou didst found many monasteries and convents throughout Northumbria, O most glorious one, nurturing generations of monastics in continence, and uprooting the passions from them like tares.

Again and again the timbers of the church where thou didst repose were utterly reduced to ashes, O holy Aidan; yet the wooden buttress whereon thou didst lean when thy soul took flight was never touched or consumed by the flames.

Hymn to the Mother of God: Now let us entreat the intercession of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of the all-seeing Judge Who has forgiven mankind, Whose sufferings, resurrection and ascension the wondrous Aidan gloriously preached.

Exapostilarion of the Deposition; Glory…. that of the holy hierarch, Spec. Mel.: ‘Hearken, you women…’

Great was thy mastery of the Christian virtues, O Aidan, for thou wast utterly free of greed and avarice. Readily didst thou tend to the needs of the souls of thy new flock, unceasingly preaching to them the words of life. Wherefore, the sheep and lambs entrusted to thee by the Chief Shepherd greatly increased in number through thy pious ministrations.

Now & ever…. Exapostilarion of the Deposition, again.

At the Praises, 4 stichira of the Deposition; and Glory…. of the holy hierarch, Tone VI.

O royal Bamburgh, be thou exalted among all the towns of England, for within thy precincts did the holy Aidan commit his soul into the hands of his Master. And thou, O Holy Isle of Lindisfarne, whose soil was hallowed by the sacred remains of the athlete of Christ, shine forth upon us the grace of the Almighty, as the sun sheds its rays on the whole world, that, enlightened thereby, our eyes may clearly behold the straight and narrow path which Aidan trod and which leads us surely to the mansions of heaven.

Now & ever, of the Deposition.

At Liturgy

See rubrics for Deposition of the Cincture of the Mother of God.

 

Portrait of a Parish

ST JOHN’S ORTHODOX CHURCH

Military Road, Colchester, Essex CO1 2AN, England

 www.facebook.com/stjohnsorthodoxcolchester

 The Church of St John of Shanghai, built in 1855 for the British Army, is today the largest Russian Orthodox church building and the largest wooden church in the British Isles and possibly in Western Europe. It is situated in eastern England, in Colchester, the Roman capital of Britain before London, which is located 80 kilometres to the south-west of Colchester.

The church was bought by Orthodox through an internet appeal on the Orthodox England website in 2008. It was at once converted to Russian Orthodox use in a town where there had never been any Russian Orthodox presence before. It is therefore a completely new parish. It is attended by 4,000 Orthodox of 24 nationalities, with 200-300 parishioners who attend every Sunday and some 150 baptisms per year. The vast majority of parishioners are aged under 40 and there is a very large number of children. The church and all its buildings belong to the East of England Orthodox Church Trust (Charity No. 1081707), which cares for grassroots Orthodox all over the East of England. The Trust has set up two other churches in East Anglia over the last six years, one in Norwich and another just outside Cambridge.

It has three priests, the rector, Archpriest Andrew Phillips, who was born in Colchester and has served as a clergyman for nearly 37 years, including in Meudon outside Paris and in Lisbon in Portugal. There are also Fr Ioan Iana, who is Romanian and married to a Russian, and Fr George Petrovsky, who is from Latvia. Sunday communions are from three chalices. We at last have two deacons to help us. The parish runs a talk and discussion circle about the Faith, and for children, a Sunday school, a Russian school, a construction club and a sewing club. It also publishes many unique booklets in English, issues a quarterly youth magazine called Searchlight and a monthly newsletter called The Eastern Orthodox.

Apart from the main church, measuring 650 square metres, and two halls, there is also a small church dedicated to All the Saints of the British Isles and Ireland.

This veneration of the local saints was in part inspired by St John of Shanghai, who promoted the veneration of Western saints. Indeed, Fr Andrew was ordained by a spiritual son of St John, the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva (1910-1993). This Archpastor’s very rare values coincide with our own and inspire us. They are:

– To unite all Orthodox, whatever their nationality, into the One  Orthodox Church in these islands.

– To keep the purity of Holy Orthodoxy free from political meddling from whatever great power and from bureaucracy, from both the left (modernists) and from the right (sectarians), keeping to the royal path of the unity of Truth and Mercy.

­- To be faithful to the best of Imperial Orthodoxy and the spirit of the Imperial Family, who stood above factions, confessing the Faith as protectors of the unique Christian Civilisation of the Orthodox world and confessing the Faith, ready to be persecuted and martyred when required.

– To remain multinational, inevitable in the Western European context, carrying out the missionary task  assigned to us by Providence among the peoples of the world, in faithfulness to the words of Christ (Matt, 28, 19-20).

This multinational aspect is reflected by the 24 nationalities which make up the flock here and our three main liturgical languages, Slavonic, English and Romanian, although the choir director is French and the deacons are Moldovan and English. But you will find Australian, Turkish, Maltese, Greek, Estonian and Chinese among the parishioners. The parish has set up several parishes and communities elsewhere in the region, notably those mentioned above in Norwich and Cambridgeshire, but also in Suffolk and beyond. The parish is characterised by the family and community spirit of the parishioners, despite national differences and various languages, and the willingness of all to learn about the Faith with humility and to help one another, both in prayer and also materially. This deep unity comes from our common faith, prayer, fasting and frequent confession and communion.

To commemorate the centenary of the Russian Diaspora in 2020, the parish commissioned an Icon of the three Saints of the Russian Emigration, the Three New Hierarchs, the Three New Pillars of Orthodoxy. These are: St Jonah of Hankou (+ 1925), St Seraphim of Boguchar (+ 1950) and our former Archbishop, St John of Shanghai and San Francisco (+ 1966). In this Icon of this global age, we see all six inhabited continents of the planet beneath the Protecting Veil of the Kursk Root Icon of the Mother of God, blessed by the Three New Hierarchs, St Jonah, St Seraphim and St John, who lived on different continents. Together they represent the essential identity, unique service, planetary mission and future of our whole Orthodox Church, come forth from the past of Imperial Russia, now living in the present and worldwide.

May the Lord help us and bring us all to salvation!

Archpriest Andrew Phillips,

Colchester, Essex

13 May 2021

From Correspondence – May-June 2020

Pastoral Matters

Q: Do you think that the government restrictions against churches during the coronavirus lockdown were really necessary?

A: Were government restrictions on churches during the peak of the coronavirus epidemic really necessary? What began as sometimes relatively sensible restrictions (stay at home if you are ill, stand back from others) to protect the poor health of the tiny minority of vulnerable in society has been used all over the world as an excuse to persecute us. Supermarkets were open for bread for the body, but bread for the soul did not matter. Car boot sales and beaches have for weeks been full, with thousands of people milling around. But churches are still officially closed.

This is all part of the persecution against us, from various channels. Clearly, the devil is behind it. If Christ had overturned the tables of the moneychangers, today’s Pharisees, now bureaucrats and literalists, would imprison Him, demanding a health and safety review, a risk assessment and impose fines because Christ was not wearing a mask and standing two metres away. Such is the cunning and ongoing persecution of the Church today, conducted from behind the (transparent) screen of health and safety and political correctness and promoted by all those internal traitors and narcissists who always swim with the secular tide.

There are those in the governing elite who, having seen this virus and the zomby-isation of large parts of the population under relentless State propaganda, who are thinking of the next time and how much further they can go then. Unless there is repentance, this really is the beginning of the end.

Q: What should our attitude to the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement be? I have heard that an Antiochian priest in America has excommunicated anyone who takes part in their demonstrations.

A: Obviously, we would never support violence, anarchy, law-breaking, looting etc or Marxists or LGBT activists who have jumped on the bandwagon in the USA. However, those are just the opportunist fringes, it is not what that movement is about. It is about restoring the human rights of all human-beings. All Lives Matter. I cannot see how anyone can be against that. As for some untrained and unintegrated crazy American convert, or rather semi-convert, from the conservative evangelicals, I think we can forget him. No priest has the right to excommunicate anyone.

Q: Why do many people look on different religions in such an unstable way, always changing just as they might change the brand of goods they buy in a shop?

A: That is the reflection of the secular approach, imported from the USA under the name of ‘globalisation’, that is, of American imperialism. Secular people think of themselves as consumers and of churches as different supermarkets. The most important thing for them is not the Truth (which alone sets free), but their own individual choice, like a consumer in a supermarket, choosing a brand which suits their own comfort. Secular society is founded on selfishness, on whatever makes you comfortable. On the other hand, the Truth does not make us comfortable, but challenges us to repentance, to change, making us free.

The traditional approach to faith is not in selfish, individual and temporary choice, in some passing fad, but in our roots in a place and in our shared values. This creates stability.

Q: How do we square St Paul’s statement that ‘man is the head of woman’ with modern values?

A: You mean squaring it with secular values? It is impossible. For Orthodox Christians, as in the universal Orthodox proverb: ‘Man is the head and woman is the neck’. Or to put it more poetically: The king rules the country, but the queen rules the king’s heart.

Q: If a homosexual is not actively homosexual, why should he not become a priest or a bishop?

A: The problem is that even a sexually inactive homosexual still has a homosexual psychology. This psychology combines the worst temptations of both men and women, the male weakness being pride, the desire for power and control, which creates backstabbing jealousy and bitchiness, the female weakness being vanity, which creates the love of money and luxury.

Jealousy comes when homosexual bishops see married priests who have everything they cannot have: a wife and children. Homosexual bishops then ordain boyfriends and persecute the married clergy, trying to obtain power over them. This compounds as gay mafias form and this corruption destroys. I knew just such a Greek archbishop, not to mention others. One of his ordinees, a former boyfriend, realised the depth of the corruption he was in and, in despair, turned to alcohol.

The love of luxury – and the need for money to fund this – also corrupts Church life. Whistleblowers are suspended or sidelined. Let us recall that the main reason why the practice of married bishops stopped was because married priests were passing on Church property to their children. Yet the same sort of corruption is now happening because of homosexual bishops, whose interest in amassing money is so that they can live in luxury. A real monk loves poverty and has no interest in villas, luxury cars, antiques, ‘beautiful objects’ etc.

The only solution is to make only real monks, those who have spent many years in a monastery first, bishops. Celibacy cannot be the main criterion to become a bishop. That just creates career opportunities for homosexuals.

Q: What do you think about how some papists have both male and female names? Is this, ironically, the root of contemporary gender confusion and widespread sexual sins (sodomy and all that follows)? Seems like seeing names like “Jose Maria” should tip everyone off that something is remarkably off, but I’ve never seen this addressed anywhere.

A: I don’t think we should read too much into this. The Latin tradition (Romanians keep it as well) is to have two names, the name you like first and then a second name, to whom the child is dedicated, especially the Virgin. For example, the Romanians will call a girl, say, Christelle, but she will be baptised Maria. I think this is purely cultural. There are lots of Romanian men called Marian, Marius etc.

But I do think that the current gender confusion comes from Catholicism/Protestantism, whose Puritanism (it is deeply anchored in both of them) suppressed sexual identity. The present satanic movement is a revolt against this.

Q: What Orthodox name would you suggest for someone called Roxana?

A: Alexandra.

Q: What is a spiritual father?

A: The term ‘spiritual father’ is vastly overused, all too often used by the psychologically disturbed and weak who want a guru. Already in nineteenth-century Russia spiritual writers said that there were no more spiritual fathers left. Its use in Western Europe today, where and when there are certainly no spiritual fathers left, indicates dependency and psychological strangeness. The term confessor is, however, worthy of spiritual maturity.

Q: What is the difference between academic theology and theology that comes from ascetic suffering?

A: An academic theologian knows but does not understand. A real theologian knows and understands.

Contemporary Life

Q: A priest told me that the greatest problem of the Church today is that we have no leadership. What do you think of that?

A: I would agree, but we must first be very careful to define the word ‘leadership’. Many think of it in a secular sense, that what we need is some bishop or patriarch who can manipulate the media, who is good at PR and soundbites. That is nonsense, that would be to fall into the same secularism as the current Roman popes. I am talking about those who have the authority of the Holy Spirit, who have spiritual presence, that is, apostolicity. And this is the problem today, the ‘shortage’ of the Holy Spirit in our leaders because real leadership is the fruit of the Holy Spirit, neither the fruit of academic and theoretical study, nor of the ability to manipulate journalists.

Q: Why are people suddenly talking about fake news nowadays?

A: Fake news is the result of the virtual, or fake, reality which is all around us. People are more and more living in a bubble world of fakery. This is the result of computer life, virtual life, the use of the imagination, which leads to spiritual emptiness. There is nothing more dangerous than living in the imagination. That is where the demons live.

Q: What do you think of the book ‘Being as Communion’ by Metr John Zizioulas.

A: This is philosophy, not the Gospel. I don’t even understand the title and I rather think the fishermen of Galilee would not have understood it either.

Q: Why do so many modern churches have such hideous architecture, made of great concrete blocks? Some of them look like gymnasiums or offices, but not like churches.

A: This is because those who built these monstrosities confused humility with bad taste. You can build beautiful buildings quite cheaply. Good taste is almost always cheaper than bad taste. You don’t need to use gold and marble (indeed perhaps those materials should be banned, though marble can be cheap if it comes from the local area). But also you don’t need to build eyesores. The whole point of Church Art (for some, of all Art) is to point to the sacred and transcendent, but using and so sanctifying human materials. Theologically, this represents the Incarnation. If the sense of the sacred is missing, then this is not a Church building, just a building of fallen humanity, without any presence of the Divine, as you say, an office or a gymnasium.

Western History

Q: What in your view is the essential difference between Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy?

A: If I may rephrase your question, the difference between Christianity and the Western deformations of Christianity is this:

Christianity is the faith in Christ the Life-Giver, as related in His triumph over Death in the Gospels, but the Western deviations are essentially a form of Gothic barbarianism with a Christian veneer. For example, the first, full-blown, anti-Orthodox form of Church architecture is known as Gothic, because it looks so barbarian. In the nineteenth century this dead style was revived and called ‘Gothic revival’ or ‘Neo-Gothic’ (the London Parliament was built in that style). In that century Dostoyevsky visited Western Europe and related that it was like visiting a cemetery, where dear friends had been buried. It was in the same century that the West became obsessed with reviving the dead, with novels like Frankenstein and Dracula and the concept of blood-sucking exploitation (Marx). Today the same obsession is there with the cult of death, with ‘Goths’, Hallowe’en, zombies and the undead. Having rejected the life in Christ, the Western world is haunted by death.

Q: When did it become normal for Catholics to kneel down to pray and hold up and fold their hands in prayer?

A: The position of feudal homage of the vassal began in the first half of the twelfth century. Until then it seems to have been unknown. It represents the feudalisation of Christianity in the West, its compromise with pagan culture, in the same way as the new ‘theology’ of Scholasticism represents the paganisation of Christian theology by Aristotelianism. This movement, beginning after 1050, later triumphed in the total repaganisation of the Renaissance with its largely pornographic art, painted by homosexuals like Michelangelo and those in Venice, and Caravaggio (probably also like many others in Florence a pedophile) or sex maniacs like Titian. No Christians ever did this or do this, though Protestants (and a few marginal Orthodox) imitate them.

Q: I find the Orthodox Church attractive, but it is all so disorganised. Surely that is wrong?

A: I have faith and live by faith. Faith comes from real spiritual (if you like ‘mystical’) experience. Therefore, quite naturally, one of the things that I dislike the most is religion. Religion is a fraud, a purely manmade manipulation used by the powers that be to control the masses. We can see this quite clearly in the Pharisees at the Temple in the time of Christ. We can see it in the elitist religion of Western Europe (Catholicism/Protestantism – it is all the same thing, the two sides of the same coin), which are designed to line up, make stand up and sit down, to order and to control. The more religion is organised or institutional, the worse it is. I therefore much prefer our Orthodox ‘disorganised religion’, that is to say, our faith, which is our spiritual belief made incarnate. Beware of organised, institutional religion, it is the practice of the scribes and the Pharisees (woe to them), atheists, careerists, bureaucrats with their paperwork and protocols, of those who have lost the faith – if they ever had it.

 

The Crisis

Our bishops and clergy have to obey State authorities which forbid gatherings of people and impose ‘social distancing’. For the last four weeks, there have only been 8 churches open in the whole of the UK, all of them are Russian Orthodox: No Greek Orthodox, no Antiochian Orthodox, no Romanian Orthodox, no Anglicans, no Protestants, no Catholics.

Eight canonical churches for the whole country. We are besieged by Greeks, Romanians and others who are scandalised by what they see, rightly or wrongly, as their bishops’ apostasy in closing their churches down completely, not doing any services and refusing to give holy communion.

Our church in Colchester has been open for the last three weeks on Saturday mornings to give confession and communion to those who wish, individually or in family groups. The rest of the week, whenever there are no services behind closed doors, we travel to people’s homes and give confession and communion. We wash our hands, wear masks, use alcohol to clean the communion spoons and take all possible precautions.

Our parish covers 15,000 square kilometres now. It is exhausting.  I have visited and am visiting and will visit Essex, East London, Suffolk, Kent and Cambridgeshire. Fortunately Fr Ion helps me in Essex and Suffolk and Fr Spasimir takes care of Norfolk.

However, this is not the USSR where churches were closed down for 70 years, this is only a temporary measure, an interruption of normality to which we shall return. But is it a preparation or rehearsal for something more sinister in a possible future? If we are being pressed to see if we are hard or soft and will resist the spirit of this world or not, we can say that we are resisting.

From the very start, this virus has been very puzzling. Clearly, this was going to be a bad flu for those aged over 70, for the long-term ill, for diabetic, smokers, drinkers etc. Clearly, tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands at least would die of its consequences (no-one actually dies of it, but of its results). It might even be as bad as, or perhaps even worse than, swine flu (500,000 mainly elderly and long-term ill dead in nine months) in 2009-10.

But no-one ever closed down the economy because of the flu. So why this time? Why commit economic suicide by closing down? How have the manipulators (the media) been manipulated? Now the internet is awash with conspiracy theories as to why. Basically, each theory is even more ridiculous then the first.

Only one idea seems to make any sense, that this is for some a sort of rehearsal, planned or unplanned, for a possible future in which we will all be controlled, our every movement, our every action controlled. Maybe we are being given a preview of what will come, a possible future – unless we resist. Maybe we are being tested to see how weak – or strong – we are. Maybe we are being warned. Maybe we are seeing whether we still have salt in us or whether our salt has lost its savour. As this Holy Week begins, it is up to us to show what we are made of. All the Holy week services can be followed at:

Full Suite of Texts for Holy Week: Readers Services for Every Day of Passion Week, For Those Homebound During the Period of Covid-19 Pandemic Restrictions | Тексты для домашнего совершения на Страстной неделе

 

While the Wolves Are Running

‘The Box of Delights’, the 1935 children’s book written by the English Poet Laureate John Masefield, is subtitled ‘When the Wolves were Running’. The story concerns crooks who dress up as clergymen and try to stop the Christmas celebration of the thousandth anniversary of a mythical Tatchester Cathedral, founded in 935.

It is an apt parallel for what is happening today in Constantinople and the Ukraine. The latest news, that President Poroshenko, the Uniat?/Jew?/atheist?, who presided his own State ‘Church Council’ in Kiev, closed Kiev airport until the Phanariot Greeks, who had given a false legitimacy to his meeting, had signed Poroshenko’s papers.

Wolves in sheep’s clothing indeed. However, as Metr Hilarion of Volokalamsk, has noted: The two bishops who were uncanonically accepted into the Patriarchate of Constantinople from the 85 bishops of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church represent percentagewise a far smaller number of traitors than the one disciple from the twelve who betrayed Christ.