April 13, 2015 (Old Style)
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy
Spirit!
Your Eminence, Metropolitan Demetrius, President of our
Eparchial Synod in America;
Your Eminence, Metropolitan Moses of Toronto;
Your Grace, the Right Reverend Sergios, Bishop emeritus of
Portland;
Your Eminence, the Most Reverend Chrysostomos, Metropolitan emeritus
of Etna;
Archimandrite Akakios, Abbot of our Monastery;
Mother Elizabeth, Abbess of the Convent of St. Elizabeth the
Grand Duchess of Russia;
Beloved Presbyters and Deacons, our Fellow Servants in the
second and third ranks of the Priesthood;
Monastic Fathers and Mothers in Christ;
And the Royal Priesthood of the Faithful, my Brothers and
Sisters in Christ:
Χριστὸς Ἀνέστη! Христосъ Воскресе! Christ is Risen!
First, before I begin my formal
address, I want to make some extemporaneous comments and to thank His Eminence,
Metropolitan Demetrius for his very kind and beautiful words, inflated as they
may be, about my person. Above all, I beg Your Eminence, as I beg all of my
fellow Hierarchs, all of my fellow clergy, all of the monastics, and all of the
laity: forgive me for the many shortcomings in me, which are always apparent.
Anyone who knows me well knows them, indeed. I would entreat all of you to continue
your prayers for me, despite these shortcomings, that I might in some small
measure be able to merit the words of His Eminence and heed his wise
instruction. I am keenly aware of the weight of what lies before me, and with
bended knee and inclined heart, I earnestly beg of all of you to be patient, to
bear with me, and to support me by those prayers.
* * *
There is no shortage of materials
testifying to the lofty vocation of the Episcopacy and to the sacred,
sacrificial, and divinely sanctioned relationship between a Hierarch and his
Rational Sheep, his flock, which has as its prototype the relationship between
the Lord Himself and the whole Church. As resources for those wishing to deepen
their understanding of these matters, I can very enthusiastically refer them to
the consecration and enthronement addresses of the venerable Hierarchs here
present, and notably of our former First Hierarch, Metropolitan Cyprian of
Oropos and Phyle. Those thirsting for even deeper wells can expand their inquiry
to the writings and the lives of the Holy Fathers, the Church’s invaluable
heritage and indispensable resource for maturation in the Faith. Saints
Dionysios the Areopagite, Ignatios of Antioch, John Chrysostomos, Maximos the
Confessor, and Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain, to name but a few, depict an
image reflecting such high standards for the Hierarch, his flock, and the
relationship between the two, that I would not dare to repeat their words while
standing here before you, my own faults so obviously manifest and so much in
contrast to this image. Such words, which strip us of all pretense and
affectation and expose our shame, are best left for reading in private. There,
with genuine sincerity, we can weep for our nakedness and lament our lack of a
wedding garment that might signal acceptable efforts towards perfection or
assure us of a welcome at our Lord’s banquet.
What I will mention, as the theme
of my address, as I assume the guidance of our small diocese, is my own
perspective on the ills that plague the Church today and the challenges,
correspondingly, that confront us. Since the Church is in the world and draws
faithful into her nets from this same world, let me begin with some comments
about secular society.
In simple terms, the society
around us is fractured. No matter what lens one uses to examine it, the
divisions are evident and extensive. Our nations war with their enemies and
waiver in their allegiance to their allies. Factions within our governments war
with one another. Within each society, we suffer from endless divisions along
religious, ethnic, economic, political, racial, and generational lines. We war
with our cultural legacies, our moral codes, standards, and institutions. What
was once considered the foundation of all social units, the nuclear family, is
now an institution under siege. More and more children have experienced first
hand the traumatic and scarring dissolution of their own family—whether by
divorce, separation or abandonment—and the dispersion of its members. Finally,
the human personality itself is breaking apart, even to the point of
dissociation. Mental disease is epidemic; normalcy is unknown, uncertain,
misunderstood, or even denied. With each new scandal, assault, catastrophe, and
bizarre, unprecedented spectacle, we see in our day a greater realization of
St. Anthony’s prophecy, warning us that: “There will come a time when men will
be mad. If they see someone who is not mad, they will rise up against him and
will say, ‘You are mad,’ because he does not resemble them in their madness.”
[1]
We who share the invaluable
privilege of membership in the Church should not imagine that we are exempt
from these issues. Not only was the world our former home; its image animates
the “old man” that wars against us, both as individuals and as a fellowship of
believers.
So it is that the same fault
lines around us, undermining secular society, have penetrated the Church,
threatening our faithful, families, parishes, dioceses, and even synods. Though
the Apostle warned that there “must be heresies” (I Corinthians 3:3) amongst
us, I do believe that extraordinary events of an unprecedented scale are
occurring amongst our Hierarchs and in our Synodal administrations. During the
last century, the Orthodox Church has seen its liturgical life fractured, its
national Church administrations ruptured, and its Patriarchates enter into
shameful, even childish competition with one another, imagining themselves, in
an astonishing fall to neo-papalism in the guise of Patriarchalism,
ecclesiastical potentates, understanding their administrative powers to be
somehow spiritual or doctrinal, and thus threatening the absolute equality of all
Orthodox Bishops. Even those of us in resistance, sadly enough, fall to
seeking titles, prerogatives of office, unique vesture specific to the highness
of some office, and trappings that suggest that administrative superiors are
somehow of greater authority than other Bishops, once again subtly tempting the
egos of those who forget that all Bishops are equal and that the Bishop of
Bishops is Christ Himself. Of late, Orthodox Church leaders of every kind are
enticed, despite the fact that they are servants, to give “orders,” rather than
to exhort; to fancy themselves “princes” and to look at the People of God as
their vassals; and to reckon themselves—servants of the Master—more than just a
fallen image of the Master Himself, Christ our Lord.
These lines of fracture did not
occur in a vacuum. They came in the midst of one of the most violent centuries
humanity has ever known, a century in which it is estimated that, unbelievably,
more than a hundred million souls perished in raging revolutions
and world wars. Sacred and time-honored institutions were abolished. Empires
fell. Society was transformed and distorted. Traditions were discarded and the
very idea of tradition was brought into question.
Slowly, the reverberations of
these traumatic events crept into the Church and provoked the aforementioned
disruptions within Her internal life. Most recently, we saw with our own eyes
what many had thought impossible: the capitulation of the venerable Russian
Orthodox Church Outside of Russian to the Moscow Patriarchate in the most
unprincipled way and under humiliating terms.
Let no one dismiss this event as
insignificant. This was a Church with a treasury of spiritual resources: pious and
devout laity, true monastics, martyrs, ascetics, intellectual giants, undaunted
apologists, saints, and holy hierarchs. On the international stage and in the
New World, no Church, let alone one of such relatively few numbers, gave such a
clarion witness to Orthodoxy. Her magnificent Churches reflected the priorities
and sacrifices of her clergy and faithful. In contrast to the comfortable pews,
theatrically inspired architecture, and organs of the surrounding modernist
Orthodox Churches, Her traditional architecture and iconography and her open
naves, free of the seating of the theatre and filled with faithful either
standing or prostrating in repentance, reflected the Church’s genuine ascetic
ethos, testifying to the externals of tradition that bespeak the Church’s
internal authenticity. Similarly, her clergy and faithful, more than any other
jurisdiction, respected the clergyman’s rason (cassock), his uncut beard
and hair, and the proper, modest apparel appropriate to the prophetic ministry of
the Priesthood and to the peculiar, otherworldly calling of the people of God,
the Royal Priesthood.
Again, unlike any other Orthodox
Church, ROCOR’s mission, proclaimed by her Hierarchy and apologists, was
crystal clear. First, she was to preserve and share, in the diaspora, the
legacy of the same Orthodoxy into which Rus’ had been baptized, producing a
millennium of sanctified believers now populating heavenly mansions. And
second, she was to facilitate the restoration of Orthodoxy in Russia by the Church’s
traditional means: repentance and a salvific Orthodox confession that would
include, among other things, a disavowal of the atheistically inspired betrayal
of Sergianism that so compromised the soviet Church’s internal life.
Sadly, the union of the ROCOR
with Moscow, at a time when its strong witness and observance of the Faith had
begun to wane, was anything but “crystal clear.” Issues of repentance and
Orthodox confession were obfuscated, principles were compromised, and even
though it was muffled by the distractions and confused rhetoric of the
dialogues, ROCOR suffered a violent rupture with her past. By her union with
Moscow, she annulled her previous Synodal acts and proclamations and committed
to a course of historical revisionism. Having been a Sister Church of our
former Synod in Resistance for ten years, it broke relations with us, as its
more forthright Bishops told us, because Moscow demanded this. Of course, our
Bishops would not have agreed to a union with Moscow under any circumstances
anyway. But the dictated rupture in communion was significant.
We are still witnessing and
measuring the consequences of this tragedy, an event that Bishop Photiy of
Triaditza, from our Sister Church of the Old Calendarists in Bulgaria, likens
to a descent from the Cross—a dreadful seduction by the last temptation that
our immortal enemy hurled at Our Lord at the time of His crucifixion. His
Eminence’s analysis is haunting:
To me, this was
the cruelest truth: becoming convinced that these people had begun to resemble
internally, in spirit, the Bishops of the Moscow Patriarchate. This means
cunning; it means aspirations towards the benefits of officialdom and of
worldly recognition, towards material profits and advantages. It means
embarking on the path of ecclesial diplomacy and politics, flexibility dictated
by self-interest, of double standards and the language of ecclesiastical
politics: ‘It may be both this way and that way. What matters is whether it
serves our political line.’ [2]
Of course, not only the ROCOR
hierarchy was harmed. A venerable and seemingly invulnerable institution had
fallen in the believers’ eyes, and their faith was shaken. For every believer
who looked to the “Synod”—even from outside her jurisdictional boundaries—for
inspiration and guidance, the tragedy begs important questions: If a bastion of
Orthodoxy can suffer such a fall, who is safe? Were we wrong to have such high
expectations for the ROCOR hierarchy, counting on them always to follow the
right course and to set the golden standard? Were we wrong to trust our
hierarchy? One can imagine the same tempting spirit that assailed our Lord now
screaming with delight, “No one is safe; your expectations were naive; your
trust unfounded! The Church this Nazarene founded is broken, schism and
disunity will prevail!”
The challenge of our generation
of Orthodox will be to rediscover and reaffirm the Church’s answer to these
difficult questions and to refute the slanderous replies of the tempter. Since
the Apostolic Succession of our own Church derives directly from the ROCOR,
this challenge is especially important for us.
As we labor for our response, we
should not be surprised that temptations towards easy answers already encompass
us.
On the left, numerous voices seem
to follow the disruptive forces infecting the Church to their logical end. They
no longer trust the Church’s traditional protocol or her hierarchy, let alone
the promises of her Divine Founder. Facilitated by the troublesome medium of
the Internet, without inhibition they protest and expound on lofty and
difficult matters, as though in their own persons they carried the full panoply
of spiritual gifts and synodal authority. They and their black-and-white,
simplistic opinions become the personal and rational criteria of tradition and
authenticity. In essence, they eventually come to a Protestant mentality.
On the right, we are tempted by a
backlash. Rather than succumb to the divisive forces invading the Church, we
imagine that we must shirk certain personal responsibilities and worship the
idol of authority, pomp, and institutional gravitas for its own sake, blindly
offering up our obedience and fidelity to the Church authorities who garner the
praise and respect of various worldly rulers and who, accordingly, appear to be
the most official and enduring of Church leaders. These are the Patriarchates,
which unhesitatingly proclaim themselves “official,” “canonical,” and even
“spiritually supreme,” despite the meaningless and unproven nature of these
claims. In such a spirit we have been primed to recognize, before the fact, the
Orthodox Synod scheduled to convene in 2016 as “Ecumenical” and inspired, even
if no one knows its outcome, suggesting that the decisions of the convocation
have been scripted in advance.
Our first duty is to avoid these
pitfalls as immature, as importations from Protestant and Catholic principles
that do not adequately express the unique mind-set of Orthodoxy, and as
solutions that violate the historical witness of the Church.
In the past, the Orthodox Church
has always solved her controversies by a conciliar process, founded on the
local Synodal system, where difficult issues were first adjudicated. It was
driven by the prophetic Spirit of God that spoke through particular luminaries—a
Saint Athanasios, Cyril of Alexandria, or Maximos the Confessor—who provided
clarity and inspired resolutions for the conflicts at hand. In particularly
difficult circumstances, the proposed resolutions were legislated in universal,
Ecumenical Synods. And in all cases, the resolutions were given final
ratification with their approval by the people of God, the Royal Priesthood,
who were the true “Rational Flock” and who, in their virtue, recognized the
voice of their True Shepherd resonating through the proclamations of their
hierarchy.
Everyone played his role in this
ecclesiastical system. And of course everyone had a responsibility to make sure
that his or her character facilitated, and did not oppose, the sacred system’s
mind-set and dynamics.
So, we must commit ourselves to
plumbing the depths of the Church’s experience and rediscovering a mind-set
which, for two millennia, has genuinely governed her life. It is the true
solution for our controversies. It alone heals our divisions. It alone secures
a genuine unity.
What, in our poverty and infancy,
can we say about this mind-set?
1. First of all, the notion of a
common mentality that is reflective of healthy Church life is not an
innovation. It is scriptural, patristic, and at the very core of the Christian
message. In the Acts of the Apostles, we read that the first Christians “were
of one heart and of one soul” (Acts 4:32). St. Paul refers to having the mind
of Christ. And he specifically instructs the Corinthians to be renewed by the
transformation of their minds. From the patristic exegesis of Scripture and
from a corresponding exegesis of the writings of the Church Fathers themselves,
we derive the vast majority of the Church’s theological texts, illustrating the
simple fact that faithful children of the Church have always striven for a
commonality with their predecessors: to think, to say, and to do what came before.
In theological literature we refer to this goal as the acquisition of the “mind
of the Fathers.”
2. Secondly, this commonality in
a shared mind is not mimicry, even if some of our fledgling efforts may make it
appear as such. As Saint Paul hints, the acquisition of this mind is
accomplished by an internal “renewal” and “transformation” (cf. Romans 12:2)
effected by communion with our Lord Himself, Who “yesterday, and to day, and
for ever” (Hebrews 13:8), with His Unbegotten Father and His Life-giving
Spirit, remains available to every believer. As a fount of living water, a
fire, a vine onto which we are grafted, He inhabits our soul’s temple. The
acquisition of the “Mind of the Fathers” is also not intellectual, the
equivalent of “book knowledge”—though, as I will mention below, studying has
its place. This communion is a gift of God. It is the mind that we acquire
through union with Christ, Who, as St. Athanasios the Great affirms, “became
man, so that man might become God,” “partaking,” as the Apostle Peter tells us
in his second catholic epistle, “of the Divine nature” (1:4). While we have
clear duties in cultivating and receiving this gift of communion and union, its
origin and workings remain mysterious, as the Lord Himself makes clear when He
compares the acquisition of the Kingdom of Heaven to a man casting seed into
the ground and then, after sleeping and rising night and day, seeing the seed,
without his knowing how, “spring and grow up” (cf. St. Mark 4:26–27).
3. Thirdly, we must commit
ourselves to perennial remedial education in the Faith. This is not only a
motivational exercise, though surely we are responsible for stirring up our
flagging spirits by a recollection of the mercy we have received and a
consideration of the good example of others. It is also our sacred duty to
“search the Scriptures” (St. John 5:39) and to “study,” to show ourselves
“approved” (II St. Timothy 2:15), and to be ever ready to “give an answer to
every man that asketh…a reason” (II St. Peter 3:15) for the hope within us.
Furthermore, ignorance and forgetfulness are vices that rob us of our spiritual
treasures and open the door to the Evil One, whose cunning minions are arrayed
against us, and about whose devices the Apostle warns that we must not be ignorant.
Our unsleeping enemy is a liar, a murderer, a slanderer, an obfuscater, and a
deceiver. The world, understood as the passions that captivate and rule over
men, is Satan’s realm. To the extent that we must be in but not of this world,
we must train ourselves to see through its deceit, lest it entangle us in its
nets.
From a personal experience, I
will give you a minute example of understanding these evil devices. In my
formal doctoral studies in liturgics, I used to wonder about the ultimate
motivations of some of the scholars who invested entire careers to resolving
the smallest minutiae of Christian worship. From a human standpoint, the
returns seemed minimal (perhaps one might receive a standing ovation at a
conference—there is no Nobel Prize for liturgics!), and the materials on which
these scholars focused always seemed dry. Then one day I read an article by
Metropolitan Chrysostomos, addressing contemporary anti-religious polemics from
some scientific writers. He mentioned the simple but poignant fact that, for
these people, the notion of a Divine guidance of history, what we call
Providence, is anathema. Forgive my own simplemindedness, but just as in
mathematics, where one is tasked to reduce a complex equation with multiple
variables into its simplest expression, the tangled arguments and analyses of these
problematic liturgical writers all fell apart in my head, and I saw the driving
force behind them: analyze in such a manner that there is no room for God!
It was a small insight, but the
experience reinforced a broader principle that His Eminence has stressed for
his readers and students: it is in the nature of evil for it not to disclose
its existence or mechanisms. Like a viper, once it acts, it quickly retreats to
its nest. Combined with our own vices of neglect, ignorance, and forgetfulness,
we face a dangerous, even lethal scenario. Through vigilance and training, we
must be as wise as the wily serpent lurking within the confusing temptations of
the world, and then go for its head, forcing it to reveal its master and
disclose its strategy, thereby inoculating ourselves against further strikes.
4. Fourth and finally, the
imperative for us to recover the mind of the Fathers means that our labors must
be focused inwardly, toward our own rational soul, just as much, if not more,
than they are focused on those around us. Of course, one cannot be a Christian
in a vacuum. We are incarnate, and all labors within this world, properly
directed, impact our souls. But the inner life of self-focus is indispensable.
The Kingdom of God begins within
each one of us. Our focus must be there, if we want to find both the cause
and the cure for all illnesses. This orientation is richly illustrated in the
lives of our Saints. Even those who were most active in public service were,
nevertheless, also men of spirit who would, like the Lord Himself, withdraw for
a time and be given to solitary prayer. And the fact that the root of evil is
disclosed and battled internally is a recurring scriptural and patristic theme.
St. James notes that wars and strife are the direct outcome of our internal passions.
St. John Chrysostomos remarks that, in truth, no one can do us evil if we do
not provide internal consent. In the life of St. Basil the Great, one of
the Church’s most adroit and active administrators, we read that he would
withdraw to solitary prayer and shed copious tears, accusing himself for the
world’s calamities.
I have always been particularly
touched by the thoughts of a contemporary writer, Professor Ivan Andreyev, who
wrote the article “Weep!” in response to a mother’s brutal slaying of her
two-year-old infant in their New York City apartment. Andreyev contemplates the
horrors accompanying this inhuman act, but quickly moves beyond the obvious
guilt of the mother. As Christians, he notes, we must all assume responsibility
for her horrendous act and offer contrite and burning tears of repentance. The
paucity of our inner lives and our inattention to the struggle that it demands
are the things that allow evil to go uncorrected and to slay innocent souls.
It is not God,
but we ourselves that we must reproach for the evils surrounding us. One for
all and all for one we are all guilty before one another…. We are all guilty
before the face of this little tortured lamb found on West 84th Street in New
York City. Since we are all sinners, we create evil and our evil becomes a part
of the world’s treasury of evil. This evil coalesces into a huge energy of evil
which seeks vessels of graceless bodies to pour itself into, and when it finds
them, it will be incarnated in them and they will do great acts of evil. We are
all brothers and sisters. All mankind is one large family and this tortured
infant is our brother and his “mother”-killer is our sister. [3]
Our inner lives are sadly and
sinfully disconnected from those of others; however, just as illuminating our
souls, as St. Seraphim of Sarov tells us, will prove successful in enlightening
many around us, so by failing to acquire the mind of Christ by inward
vigilance, we will invite disaster on those around us. We become in our sinful
neglect complicit in their evil and in the loss of their souls.
With this in mind, I offer the
humble thought that the true path to the mind of the Fathers—to an
ecclesiastical mentality that promotes the healthy dynamic of the Church,
safeguards us against evil and divisive threats, and promotes healing of
division and fragmentation, no matter where there might be found—begins with
our embracing the suffering of our fellow man as well as our admiration of his
nobility. It is not enough to strive to see the image of God in one another. We
must see our link to, and even our responsibility for, our neighbor’s sins
through our own genuine repentance and the discovery of the roots of sin and
the wells of evil within our own souls. Such an orientation is appropriate for
us who have been exiled from the paradisical garden; it is productive for the
virtues and deeds that our Lord expects when He seeks fruits worthy of
repentance; it checks the perpetuation of contention and division by
restraining us from judging others—for how do we dare condemn others for that
to which we contribute? It is also consonant with the historical witness of the
choir of saints and righteous ones who labored and were crowned, and it holds
out for us the promise of healing, of restoration, and of exaltation, as was
the case with the Canaanite woman who lamented her possessed daughter. For the
sake of her humble self-conception as a dog begging at her Master’s table, she
received not only the morsels of nourishment and healing, but even our Lord’s
abundant praise as a woman of unsurpassed faith.
To quote the famous Synodikon
read on the Sunday of Orthodoxy, “This is the Faith of the Apostles, this
is the Faith of the Fathers, this is the Faith of the Orthodox, this
is the Faith which establisheth the whole world.”
Through the prayers of our
Holy Fathers, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us and save us.
NOTES
1. The Evergetinos: A Complete Text, Book III,
Hypothesis XXV, §A.7, ed. and trans. Archbishop Chrysostomos and Hieromonk
Patapios (Etna, CA: Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies, 2008), p. 177.
2. Bishop Photii of Triaditza, “On the Current State of the
Russian Orthodox Church Abroad” (2006), pp. 8–9 (http://hsir.org/p/w6v).
3. I.M. Andreyev, “Weep!” Orthodox Life, Vol. 43, No.
2 (March–April 1993), p. 41.
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