Apostasy and Our Obedience

Petr Mar

Source: Pravoslavnaya Rus', 1979, No. 9, p. 10.

 

We live in a terrible time, when the “ideological” preparation of humanity for the acceptance of the Antichrist has already arrived, taking on its final form in its open struggle against the faith and the commandments of Christ.

We, the children of our Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, which preserves the Truth and purity of Orthodoxy in its entirety without corruption, seeing all manner of false paths of Apostasy (Falling Away) from the Truth around us, involuntarily feel ourselves to be alone in this unstable ecclesiastical-contemporary Christian world. But in this solitude, we must not forget our obedience — the true confessing of the Church’s Truth, preserved by our Church Abroad, which walks its own path, though lonely, yet without any compromise with the wolves in sheep’s clothing in our enslaved Homeland. In this obedience, we remember those words once spoken by St. Mark of Ephesus to the Uniates: “Even if the whole world communes with them, I alone will not commune…”

In this obedience, as we are strengthened in the awareness of serving the Truth, we will preserve that spiritual self-preservation which, in the days of universal Apostasy, will give us strength to stand and spiritual vigilance against the efforts of the secret and open agents of Apostasy, who present themselves as zealots of “conciliarity” and call us to “keep pace with the times” and with the demands of the principles of democracy and modernism in the Church. But these demands, deceptively flattering, are nothing other than a confession of unbelief in their service to human weaknesses. And this service leads to the adoption of the new style, to the shortening of all-night vigils, and to the neglect of the fasts. Yet such harmful influences of the servants of Apostasy are further compounded by calls for ecumenical “unity” of all faiths. — “God is one and we are all His children — why do we need another, ‘incomplete’ Truth — let us unite in one truth of common faith and thereby attain salvation.”

And thus, in this poisoned fog of ecumenical Apostasy, we, in bearing our worldly obedience within the bosom of our Russian Church Abroad, must know and firmly remember that now, in this sinful world of universal preparation for the final period of Apostasy, there exists only one true Orthodox Church, of which our Church Abroad is a living branch, preserving the fullness of the Truth, which is also upheld in our Homeland by the Catacomb Church.

They will say to us with a smirk: “It is arrogance on your part to think that only your Church Abroad possesses the fullness of the Truth and preserves It without corruption! Let us all unite instead, and then we will possess the fullness of the Truth!”

If the Lord has led us onto the paths of our worldwide dispersion, is it not so that, in our worldly obedience, we might manifest in our spiritual awakening the faithfulness to Christ’s Truth in all its fullness, as it was commanded to us by the holy ascetics of Rus’?

And in the wanderings of today’s universal Apostasy, we, walking the paths of this our worldly salvific obedience, open the possibility even to the whole world that is falling away from Christ to come to the knowledge of the true faith of Orthodoxy.

And if on these paths we encounter even in the Orthodox Diaspora overly “learned and wise people,” calling us to go “in step” with the world on the paths of its spiritual perdition, then let us remember the Divine warning: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent”...

Then we will preserve our spiritual chastity, and with all the fullness of our spiritual strength, we will preserve to the end our obedience, laid upon us from above, within the saving enclosure of our Church Abroad, though found in solitude, yet serving as a stronghold in the abyss of the fearful waves of Apostasy.