We find ourselves in a period of struggles and trials. The modernists and ecumenists use every epithet against us, telling us that we are outside the Church, schismatics, fanatics, and so forth. Though these epithets are, for us, medals, we will suffer in such trials. If these trials are, perhaps, a Golgotha, we must nonetheless endure; for anyone who wishes to confess his Faith must suffer the consequences. But after Golgotha, there is the Resurrection. And the day will come when we will be vindicated. In the meantime, we must work rightly and with care.
With regard to right work, we
should remember that the great errors of the innovators and the modernists in
the Church are reckoned nothing. Our smallest errors, on the other hand, are
considered great. The modernists are assiduously seeking reasons for condemning
us and to find fault with us and with our Church. For that reason, we must uphold
ourselves in unity and evangelical love. For where there is unity—unity in
Christ—there is strength, the strength which flows forth from humility. And
where there is strength, there is the ability to preserve good and reinforce
right action.
In preserving what is correct,
supported by the virtue of humility, we must adopt the ways of a learner—the
spirit of the neophyte. We must cultivate an appetite to learn more things and
to imitate and emulate that which is correct. One who thinks that he knows
everything falls immediately to error and to spiritual delusion and thus fails
at preserving the good or what is correct....
We must, in our struggle to
uphold the good and the true spirituality of our Church, imitate the bees. We
should mimic their obedience, their hard work, their good order and, indeed,
their piety.
Let me give you an example of
what the bees can teach us. There was a Priest of the Old Calendar—from the
island of Chios, as I recall—who was a beekeeper. He explained to me, once, why
he so much-loved bees.
"When I was a boy of eight
years old," he told me, "I recall a Great Thursday when my father had
gone to Church. He took antidoron from the Institution Liturgy to his beehives,
in order to bless them. It was beautiful day, so he left the antidoron at the opening
of one of the hives. He went home, intending to return the next day to remove
the antidoron, having thought this an appropriate blessing for his bees.
'Towards evening, however, he
became uneasy, saying to himself, 'What I did was not right. Perhaps some dog
or cat will come along, find the antidoron and eat it.' So he went back
to the hives to fetch it. However, it was not there. My father— he was a pious
man—began to weep. He was deeply upset, thinking that some animal had come and
eaten the antidoron.
"Then he thought, 'Let me
open the hive and have a look.' Opening it, what did he find? He found that the
bees had made a wax chalice and had placed the antidoron in it. Not only
that—since the sun had apparently dried the piece of antidoron and small
crumbs had broken away—, they had collected these and placed them on top of the
piece.
"Running home, he summoned
my mother, me, and the rest of the family, so that they could see this miracle
with their own eyes."
I remembered this miracle when I
was visiting a certain Church (unfortunately, one of our own) where, after
Liturgy, the Faithful received the antidoron in a hasty and incorrect
way. The floor, in fact, was covered with particles of the holy bread. Though
the Priest of the Church was pious, he had failed to understand the meaning of
the antidoron. In this apparently small matter, he had fallen to error.
I told the story of the bees to the Priest and those present, reminding them
that even the bees are often more pious than Christians.
How careful, then, we must be in
our spiritual lives. Like the bees, we must do everything with obedience and
order. We must cultivate piety. And we must give the modernists no reason to
condemn or to find fault with us, so that we can lead them back to the correct
Faith and justify our struggle.
Source: Orthodox Tradition, Vol. 8 (1991), No. 2, p.
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