A Catechumen's Journey from Hinduism
This is a very long read but well worth your time. Anjali is our newly illumined catechumen whose baptism video I posted earlier. What has always fascinated me about her is that she grew up as a Hindu and so her journey into Eastern Orthodoxy was quite different from those of us who came to it through the many Western Protestant and Catholic paths. I was surprised to learn as I read this that she had also journeyed through the Baha'i faith. Her insights gained from that experience remind me a lot of how Mormons seem to see themselves as well. I love to be in bible study with Anjali because I find her insights so valuable. Here she has offered this beautiful testimony of how she arrived at Eastern Orthodoxy and allowed me to publish it so all of you can read it too. I hope you find it as fascinating and wonderful as I have! It was originally composed, I think, as a post to an Orthodox forum to which she belongs.
In a nutshell: I was born and raised Hindu, then was Baha’i for 5 years (2002-2007) before becoming Christian and finding the Orthodox church.
How exactly did this happen? Well, as a Hindu, what I learned about other religions were that there are many paths up the same spiritual mountain to reach God. Maybe even the belief that the differences argued about between different religions are like the blind men in a room with an elephant, each feeling a different part and jumping to a different conclusion about what it is - each accurately describing in his own way what one aspect of the elephant was like, but unable to see the whole, and so thinking the others were wrong. So I didn't really care that other religions said different things on certain subjects, I just followed "my" way that I inherited from my family and culture. I believed there was great wisdom in it, and assumed that other religions probably also had great wisdom in them. I became interested in reading about other religions as a hobby - and loved seeing that the core spiritual teachings/messages seemed similar - about love, prayer, detachment, and renunciation of self. It should be noted I wasn't reading about hardcore theology of various religions - I was reading the writings of various spiritual masters, mystical works, mythology, stuff like that. I had no urge to look deeper into this mystery of how there were all these different religions, or of looking more closely at the differences; I thought it was a waste of time, foolish. One thing I didn't realize though, was that that whole blind men and elephant analogy? It assumes that no particular religion truly has an understanding of God - well, I understood that, but it didn't really bother me. It never occurred to me that possibly one of the religions actually sees the whole elephant, rather than only seeing a part. The idea was that it didn't matter - you didn't need to understand the elephant as an elephant to get to God, in fact maybe it was humanly impossible anyway, for people to conceive of these things. It never occurred to me that God might have ever approached us with a very particular way that He wanted us to approach Him, rather my focus was on our imperfect selves trying to reach towards God.
Then I came across the Baha'i Faith - it claimed to reveal the elephant itself, saying that in the past, people were only ready to be exposed to whatever particular part God saw was fit at the time. So all the previous religions were chapters in one book, leading up to this chapter called the Baha'i Faith that reveals the unity of all religions. But not in a mysterious way - it sought to provide distinct proofs for this. This is what finally made me start looking analytically and critically at all the world religions, including the Baha'i Faith, to see how God's web of different religions were really and truly connected. This was key - until I started being more demanding, I was undiscerning in my happiness to just accept all religions as they were, like different flavors of ice cream. I enjoyed what flowed; I ignored what clashed, figuring it was just to be expected, realistically. Different people will see through different lenses. But as a Baha'i, I was told that if I looked really hard, I would see that all the different religions really were one, and furthermore that all of them awaited a Messianic figure whom Baha'is believed to have come in the person of Baha'u'llah in the 19th century, founder of the Baha'i Faith. This fascinated me - and both to better educate myself and also to be able to teach members of other religions about the Baha'i Faith, I started studying.
Now rather than leaving it all up to mystery, I said the Baha'i faith had specific explanations as to how all the religions are different paths to one God, right? This was critical - in the Hindu mindset, I would never had tools/measuring sticks that I expected to actually work in this undertaking, so I would never seriously have undertaken it, or would not have had a way of disproving/testing/evaluating any of these beliefs about religions being essentially equal. At best, I would have prayed like Sri Ramakrishna, who claims that Jesus, Mohammed, and other figures came to him when he prayed, and so he believed whomever you prayed to, God would come to you in that form - he experienced that, so he believed that, never thinking maybe it was a delusion. As Orthodox monks say, you can have delusions, or you can even have demons that approach you as angels of light! Anyway, back to the story. The Baha'i Faith stated that all the different religions have the same, unchanging, essential, ethical and spiritual teachings about God and soul and our purpose, but have different social teachings about externals, or even about things like marriage - these changing teachings are meant to suit the particular people/culture/time to whom the religion is brought by a Prophet/Manifestation. However, sometimes even the unchanging spiritual teachings are lost or corrupted over time, and that also explains for some of the differences. We could only tell what was right by measuring it against Baha'u'llah's explanation of all that was true and false, for he had come to restore truth. This starts a nice and neat process of circular thinking for determining what was true and what was false in all the various world religions, to make them all match the Baha'i Faith. It can be used to explain away anything, to make night appear to be day - in fact, Baha'u'llah even says that you mustn't question the Prophet/Manifestation, that you should even accept that day is night if he tells you that. Then he also says we must be independent investigators of truth, listening to no one - all these contradictions, but everyone denies they are contradictory, believing all these paradoxes are true in some mysterious spiritually wise way.
Well. So there I was, studying along, when I hit on just one event that could not be explained away by Baha'i cleverness. The Resurrection. Here at last, was the only and most effective measuring stick of truth, to sort through the claims of religions unity. The Baha'i Faith, Islam, and Christianity clearly taught different things about who Jesus was. Well, the Baha'i Faith claimed to be able to reconcile these differences, but it was too contrary to all evidence. Christians claimed that Jesus was God, was the Son of God, and all this stuff about a trinity, which really I had no idea what they were talking about. They claimed this resurrection, which made no sense to me - not that I didn't believe Jesus couldn't rise from the dead if he were God, but I had no idea what possible relevance that could have, since I didn't know/understand about the Fall, sin, the Final Resurrection - I assumed these were all myths, with no more relevant deep meaning than a fairy tale, except maybe metaphorical spiritual meanings. I wasn't even interested, because I never understood what importance that event should have to me. No Christian had ever explained that to me - they'd just say crazy stuff like, "I've been washed in the blood of the Lamb, and now I'm saved! Jesus died for your sins! Don't you want to be saved?" then they'd paint portraits of Hell - it all made zero sense to me, just as though someone said, "My red balloon popped and then candy canes fell out of the sky, your rabbit is winking at me, doesn't all this make you want to buy a new Nissan??" I am not exaggerating - this nutshell "Gospel message" makes absolutely no sense to a non-Christian, no real meaningful sense, anyway. You just have no idea what they are so excited about - so Jesus rose from the dead, big whoop, so what? Good for him, but....so what? He healed people...he was loving, kind, innocent, born of a virgin, sinless.... so what? I didn't even grow up with same concept of sin as Christians do, so "sinless" vs. "sinner" didn't mean the same things to me as to a Christian anyway. In other words, we lacked the same language/doctrine/context, so the whole message was being lost in translation. The same things happen when Americans decide they are interested in Hindu things - I am always suspicious when I hear people throwing around words like karma and dharma, etc. Do they really understand what they are talking about? It also makes me suspicious that I here more Americans talking about tantric sex and other exotic things, whereas the Indian Hindus I knew were just taught to be devoted to God and pray and go to the temple. Sex was a taboo topic, maybe too taboo. Anyway, the point of this tangent is, I always felt very misunderstood by Christians who had these wild orgy type images of what it must be like for my family to be Hindu, and I felt almost equally misunderstood by Westerners who rejected their Christian upbringing to come to Hinduism thinking along similar lines.
Getting back to the story: Since I didn't have a firm grasp on what Christians were saying, it was easy to let other religions explain it to me. Hindus told me that Christ was an avatar just like any other Hindu avatar, or that Christ was actually a great yogi who had achieved self-realization. Indeed, when I read the Gospels as Hindu, that’s exactly how it came across when I was left to interpret things myself (so much for sola scriptura). The Baha'i Faith stated that Jesus was a Prophet/Manifestation, just like Mohammed and Baha'u'llah, Moses, Abraham, Zoroaster, Krishna, Buddha, Adam (I knew nothing about the Old Testament, so I had no idea that the specific way in which these figures were being likened to each other was highly dubious). He was born of a virgin, he was killed by crucifixion, but he was not physically resurrected. Some Baha'is are shocked to learn that it is in Baha'i scripture that there was NO physical resurrection or appearance to the disciples at all - most Baha'is think nothing is said about this subject other than if it happened, it wasn't significant anyway, what mattered was a "spiritual" resurrection of the dejected disciples, who after 3 days regained their faith and bravery and went out to teach the Gospel. I found it in scripture - NO physical resurrection. Mohammed taught that Jesus was not even crucified - how could a prophet of God be given a shameful death? No, he wasn't crucified at all, God took him up to heaven instead, and someone else was crucified in his place and made to appear to be him, tricking all who viewed it. And yet, if they were tricked to think it was Jesus, why are they being chastised by God for believing it was Jesus? That question is not answered, and yet this frightening Jesus is waiting till the end times to return and break all the crosses, judge all the Christians for believing in it, and to proclaim Islam as the true religion after all. In fact, Mohammed teaches that Jesus was a Muslim. Okay, this was getting too bizarre even for me, with my ability to rationalize any contradiction thanks to Baha’i mental gymnastics skills. Baha'u'llah said that Mohammed meant that Jesus' spirit could never be crucified, only his body - but I really felt that Mohammed meant exactly what he adamantly said.... so that made the first crack in my faith in Baha'u'llah's teachings. Also, the Baha'i Faith sought to explain the true meaning of the trinity, whereas Mohammed ranted about the trinity concept being a huge mistake - and described a false understanding of it to boot. So this stuff wasn't adding up.
To make it even more shocking, I started reading about evidence for Christ's resurrection - not only did I feel there was more evidence supporting this event than we have for other events which we take for granted as being historically true, from reading the Gospels and knowing the horrible deaths these apostles underwent, it became very clear to me that they really believed in a physical resurrection, and they were dying for something more than this “be nice to each other” message. The Baha'i explanation was that superstitions arose about the nature of Christ and his resurrection, whether it was shortly after Christ's death or as later belief, which caused people to re-interpret these historical happenings, to give a false interpretation of the Bible. Paul himself is quoted by Baha'is as evidence against the physical resurrection of Jesus or anybody else for that matter. I've even heard a Baha'i quote the story about doubting Thomas as evidence against the resurrection - pointing out that though Thomas asked to place his fingers into he wounds, when Christ appeared and offered, it doesn't state that Thomas actually DID.... the implication being that Jesus was not truly physically present and that had Thomas tried, he wouldn’t have managed to touch the wounds - guess Jesus just outsmarted him! Probably the only reason he “tricked” him was because (as with the rest of Christ's ministry, as described by the Baha'i faith) miracles were necessary for these backwards people. But later prophets, like Mohammed and Baha'u'llah, didn't give miracles, not because they didn't have power, but because people were supposed to be more mature than that. :-P
Anyway, the trouble is, as some Baha'is were forgetting, according to Baha'i scripture, there was no physical resurrection or reappearance of the material form of Jesus at all whatsoever. So the real, official Baha’I explanation is simply that the resurrection only means that the disciples regained their faith and courage after 3 days to go out and proclaim the Gospel. It was thus a “spiritual resurrection”. The Gospel (according to Baha'is) was simply Christ's spiritual teachings of how to lead a good life and to love God, and that he himself was a Prophet/Manifestation, so better listen up. And any tales of any other type of resurrection or Gospel were the result of later misinterpretations. However, Baha'u'llah states that the Bible is not corrupted; rather it is wrongly interpreted (unlike Muslims, who believe the Bible text has been corrupted itself - another difference between Baha'is and Muslims, despite Baha’i claims that both religions are one). So basically, the Gospels are supposed to be full of allegory, including the story of the resurrection. Here's the thing though, there are glitches. For example, Baha’is believe the virgin birth actually happened (Muslims believe this too). The healing/feeding miracles – Baha’is say some happened, but they should always be understood in a spiritual sense, since that is what is important, not these material things, of course! (Muslims just believe Jesus was granted the ability of miracles by God). The resurrection of Christ though – this miracle is flat out denied. Why is this the only miracle that is taboo to both Muslims and Baha'is? I wanted to know - why would all the other miracles be okay to believe, but not the resurrection? Also, if the Baha'i teaching that the New Testament is mainly allegory and spiritual teachings, not literal at all.... well, why did it read so matter-of-factly? It doesn't read like a mystical, symbolic work at all - it is very direct, simple, and to the point. I simply couldn’t believe that it was not intended to mean exactly what it said - and that the earliest martyrs did not believe in this resurrection - in fact, based on my research, the resurrection seemed to have been the most important part of the story, not relegated to the back-burner behind Christ's spiritual teachings, the way Baha'is would have it. If it were a false belief, what kind of God would corrupt the teachings so quickly? What would be the point? And back again to the question - what is the big deal about this resurrection? Why is everyone seeming fixated on this one crucial point that can't be agreed on, that simply must be denied by both Muslim and Baha'i scripture? I mean, he's already being born from a virgin, so what if he also rose from the dead?
This is what really made me start to feel suspicious that maybe the Gospel was more than the good news that this great Prophet named Jesus had come along to tell everyone to love each other and to love God. Not to belittle that message, but there was more to the story. I didn't know what that whole message was, but I decided I ought to find out what all this ranting and raving about the resurrection was all about and why I should care.
By this point I had already seen all the holes poked into the Baha'i Faith, so I officially resigned from the Baha'i Faith on July 7, 2007, and became a "Christian" by default. I know that is really weird, but that's exactly how it happened! I guess I labeled myself Christian, but I didn't know really what the Gospel was about - just that there was this guy Jesus who seemed to have been born of a virgin and died and then lived, and everyone was excited about it. It wasn't a religious experience or even a true understanding, so I don't know if I was really a Christian. I do know that I don't think any of this would have happened if a Christian friend of mine hadn't prayed for me at that time - seemed like I was lost in my happy web of delusion until after he prayed for me and it all came crashing down. So that gave me faith in this religion too. Basically, for the past year since resigning from the Baha’i Faith, I've just been studying. I wanted to find out what the original teachings of the apostles were, and what Jesus really meant to say to us, since this entire journey had made me keenly aware of the issue of corrupted teachings versus true teachings. And lo and behold, it turns out there were tons of books written by scholars ever since that event happened, trying to sort all of this out. I was glad the books were there, but I was even more confused – if this Resurrection was supposed to be so important, how could people have lost the original message of what it meant and what Jesus really wanted us to believe, what the apostles really taught? Why were people today still looking to uncover the original church of Biblical times (“based on the latest research!”) – I mean, how in the heck could they have lost that information if it was so important? How could they go around getting everyone (myself included) all riled up about worried about this, and then not be able to tell us what we needed to know about it?
At the time, I only had access to Protestant books, and they certainly helped some, but they still left me feeling that a lot was unexplained or random or didn't make sense. I didn't really start to understand the "Good News" until I was led to the Orthodox Church just this past April, on Good Friday. I was loaned the book "The Orthodox Church", and the rest was pretty much history - it convinced me that not only was the original faith of the apostles uncorrupted, that in that same line of reasoning/faith, the ancient church was still alive - and almost as proof, that book finally made the Gospel start to make sense to me! I definitely believed in the importance of the Holy Tradition - I never understood the sola scriptura thing I was reading in the Protestant Books - they didn't seem to realize there were large gaps in what they considered to be simple teachings/knowledge, because they were all interpreting according to some mysterious code that I hadn't been exposed to, but claiming it was just all "written in the Bible". Having read the New Testament first as a Hindu and then as a Baha'i, I knew firsthand that there are all kinds of different ways to sincerely misinterpret scripture. So I was grateful to finally come to a church that had the holy tradition guided by the Holy Spirit to explain things. Also, to know what we don't know too. My experience with the Baha'i faith and investigation into corruptions, etc., had built up my faith in what these earliest Christian people taught.... and I didn't understand why Protestants couldn't have this same faith? They lacked faith, and called it true faith. I didn't believe their idea that the church was corrupted until the first Protestants showed up.... it reminded me of the Baha'i way of thinking, a lack of faith, a hole which is later stopped up with creations/hopes/interpretations of one's own, all under the false pretense of "true knowledge" and "faith", when really they seem to be weaving a web of their own liking, without even realizing it. An unconscious denial of the power of the Holy Spirit, to either think the Holy Spirit has checked out, is too mysterious to know His workings, or to reduce His workings to only babbling, despite Jesus' promise to send the Holy Spirit who would lead to all truth, these seem like strange beliefs for people who really have faith in Christ and the Bible to believe.
Another thing I noticed that the few times I went to a Protestant non-denominational church prior to finding the Orthodox church, while I liked the sermons and I learned to like some of the songs, it distinctly felt like a memorial service for Christ. Well, he did say, "do this in remembrance of me", so that's exactly what it felt like...and the communion seemed really random. Like, well, this was the eccentric thing that Christ wanted us to do, so let's do it! I don't think the members of the church thought it was eccentric, but really - with no other meaning than the symbolic one, it just all seemed kind or strange to me - like some antiquated practice that withstood the test of time, the bread and wine eventually transformed to a cracker the size of a cheezit and a shot of grape juice, the same way the gladiatorial displays in the Roman coliseum have maybe been transformed into modern day football games in stadiums. I am not saying this at all to laugh about it or to make fun - I wasn't amused, I was just mystified, but willing to go along with it and figuring this was just the way it was. At the Orthodox church, it wasn't like a memorial service for someone who had passed on to the next world, it was worship - worship the way Hindus worship, truly believing that God was present, singing to God, not about him, not singing to ourselves, not singing for fellowship, not worshiping his idea, but actually presenting worship as a sacrifice within the presence of God. - and not being casual in his presence, but having a sense of holiness and respect - not because people wanted to be goody-two-shoes, but because if you actually believe that God is present, you'll be alert, rather than coming up with excuses about how God shouldn't care about this or that or the other, but naturally wanting to do your best in the presence of God out of love and respect and acknowledgment of his holiness. I don't know...I guess I felt like, as much as I liked the Protestant church (the minister was great!), I felt they were talking about something, about learning about something, whereas at the Orthodox Church actually had it present. I also instinctively felt that the Orthodox Church housed the wisdom of elders, whereas the Protestant church housed the rebellious self-confidence of a teenager. Also, whereas when I was growing up, I felt that Western Christians just looked down on Hindus as being completely wrong and ignorant, I felt the Orthodox church revealed the true way of worship, the true reaching out to God, that Hindus had been trying to do. It makes me think of what Paul said when he was in...Athens? That there was this idol of the unknown God, that they Greeks already tried to worship, well Paul was here to finally teach them who this God was, in the same way I feel that Christianity has brought to light what Hindus have tried to do from times before the Christ the Light came to earth, if that makes much sense? So maybe Hindus do in the dark what Christians do in the light? While fumbling and some wrong perceptions can be experienced, learned, and propagate even more of such wrong teachings in the dark, once you turn the light on, you realize - wait a minute! I thought I knew how this whole room was set up and how everything worked, but in reality, now I see it is different! Some is the same, but now I can go about things the way they were intended. Now, I no longer hold an elephant's trunk thinking it's a snake and once in a while wondering what else there is to it - now the lights are on, and I can see that wow! There is an elephant in the room! Such is the differing result of humans striving for truth in our spiritual darkness, vs. what happens when God himself bringing us the truth with his light.
While I think the stereotypical attitude of some Christians about Hinduism being totally corrupt and demonic and awful is unrealistic, I have, now that I am beginning to finally understand some of Christianity (thanks again, to the Orthodox church), I am starting to see troubling things that I had been blind to before. I came across a series of articles, which point out some fundamental differences which may have seemed irrelevant to me before becoming Christian, harmless when I first became Christian by default, and now are starting to seem troubling in a very real way. I don't know if I agree 100% with the articles, but they bring up some good points.
Right now, I am still overwhelmed by trying to learn and participate as much as I can as a catechumen - it's all very recent, after I attended the EO church for the first time on Good Friday, I became a catechumen on Pentecost - so it's all happening very fast. But eventually, I would like to write about Hinduism and the Baha'i Faith from an Orthodox perspective. Particularly the Baha'i Faith - I have even kept the core books of the Baha'i faith, some which are hard to come by actually, so that in the future I'll have them as reference. If you're at all interested in discussing more about this, the youngest of the world's religions, a messianic one where the founder claims to be the Return of Christ, I'm planning on adding a thread about it in the OC group "Battling Christian cults".
I feel very lucky to have been brought to the Orthodox Church. I feel lucky that it all happened so quickly once I became Christian, involving little effort on my own part, whereas others have searched many years as Christians before finding it. I feel convinced that it was definitely beyond my doing - I'm still amazed by it all. It has really made me believe in the power of sincere prayer in bringing others to Christ. Though I don’t feel ready to adequately bring anyone else to Christ right now, I firmly believe in praying for that to happen, praying really does have an effect that no amount of talking/reasoning can do. I would never have come on my own I think, despite all the arguments I encountered - I really believe it was because my friend prayed for me, and God brought it about. Until then, I was very happily lost in illusions with a nimble way to deflect anything a Christian might have said to me, to stay steeped in my beautiful cocoon, and a very hip one, at that - one that seemed very attractive on many sides. God had to wake me up to make me realize that beauty and wishful thinking are not the same as truth, which is even more beautiful (and terrible!) than someone lost in his or her illusions can even begin to imagine. There is so much wrapped up inside of Christianity that you really don't suspect from the little flyers people hand out on street corners:-) At least that's how it seems now that I feel I am being guided in the Orthodox way.
I know this was a really long-winded and winding story, but I hope that reading it will remind you again to pray for others to come to Christ, pray that God will lift them above the many, many layers of illusion and denial that keep them from Him, even those who might sincerely think that they do believe in Him when they really don’t. That’s the state that I was in when I was Hindu and Baha’i. I was more interested in my concepts of Him than in what He wanted me to believe. Also I hope that this account may have brought some points to mind that will help you become an even better teacher of the Gospel when you are approaching someone who comes from a completely non-Christian background. To not only bring them to Christ in a meaningful way, but to also bring them to the Orthodox church, because I truly believe that Eastern Orthodox Christianity is so incredible and can have a much stronger impact on a person (particularly of Eastern background perhaps?), whereas the Western approach to Christianity may just leave them wanting and wondering and thirsting still. This is a big generalization, but I worry that the Protestant or Catholic way of spreading the Gospel can do more harm than good, driving people away from Christ, whereas the Orthodox can bring healing and joy and understanding, drawing people towards Christ. Of course what do I know, I may be totally (or at least partially) wrong about this, but it’s a thought worth considering.
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THE LONG JOURNEY TO ORTHODOXY OF JOHANNA MCBRIDE FROM BELFAST, IRELAND
Sergei Mudrov
The McBride family lives on Ashfield Street in a typical neighborhood of two-storied houses in north Belfast. Everything here is familiar to those who know British and Irish cities and their residential areas, the only difference being a birch tree planted many years ago that grows near the McBrides’ house. True, the capital of Northern Ireland is a specific city: it has seen a division between Catholics and Protestants (the Republicans and the Loyalists). At one time, the political and religious confrontation in Ulster brought all the horrors of hatred and curses, terrorist attacks and armed clashes that took the lives of over 3000 people.
From local residents’ point of view, the McBride family are Catholics, since the head of the family, Pat (Patrick), and his three sons belong to the Roman Catholic Church. However, the McBrides are not entirely part of the Belfast Catholic community, since Pat's wife, Johanna (Astrid), as well as their daughter Lucy, are Orthodox Christians.
Perhaps there is no single beaten path for those who were born outside the Orthodox Church and have found their way to the faith that gave the world St. Seraphim of Sarov, Holy Hierarch John of Shanghai, Sts. Job and Amphilochius of Pochaev and many other wondrous saints. Some people, after learning about Orthodoxy, convert to the true faith very quickly; sometimes after several months. But for others this journey takes many years, accompanied by painful reflections, sometimes sorrow and long, heartfelt prayer. Motivations can vary—from disappointments and intellectual searchings to marriage with an Orthodox Christian.
Astrid Keil (her surname before marriage), who now lives in the north of Belfast, wasn’t born on Irish soil, but in Germany, to a Protestant family. From childhood she was raised in Lutheranism, in which there is no veneration of the Theotokos and the saints. Paradoxically, Astrid’s first encounter with Orthodoxy was in her own Lutheran family. Her father, a professor of Slavonic studies, enjoyed listening to Orthodox hymns when he wanted to rest mentally and spiritually. The little girl really liked Orthodox hymns—sometimes she listened to them without her father’s knowledge, entering his room unnoticed. These touching and pleasant childhood memories remained in her heart forever.
Astrid's childhood with its joyful “musical” encounter with Orthodoxy gave way to youth, and at the age of fifteen she encountered Orthodoxy again—now at a religious and liturgical level. A Greek Orthodox church was built in the area of Bonn where the Keils lived. The Greeks invited local Catholics and Protestants to the Paschal night service. Rolf-Dietrich decided to go to the festive service with his daughter.
“For me these were unusual, incomparable impressions,” Johanna relates. “I felt elation and joy. Everyone in the church spoke Greek. I didn’t understand them, but I saw joyful faces and positive emotions. One woman even hugged me—she was so happy on the feast of the Resurrection of Christ, and she wanted to share her happiness and joy with me.”
The joy of the encounter, the feeling of Christ's presence, kind emotions, the benevolence of unknown parishioners... It seemed that all conditions were interwoven for the young Lutheran woman to set foot on the path to Orthodoxy. But that didn’t happen. The Paschal service and emotions became a thing of the past. Astrid no longer went to services at the Greek church. It was necessary to wait for something else; apparently as a Protestant she needed to go through a special acceptance of the image reflecting the prototype—the Orthodox icon—in her religious search. For many Protestants, the veneration of icons was and still remains one of the stumbling blocks, which, alas, prevents them from coming closer to Orthodoxy. Even with sympathy for the deep theological sophistication and moral teachings of the Orthodox Church Fathers, Protestants sigh with doubt when they see burning candles in front of icons of the Most Holy Theotokos or St. Sergius of Radonezh. It is very difficult to overcome this stereotype of Protestant consciousness, especially when many generations have absorbed Protestant logic and dogmatics from childhood.
And again a miraculous encounter came through her family: Rolf-Dietrich brought two large posters about an icon exhibition from Moscow. On one of them there was an image of an icon of the Most Holy Theotokos, and on the other one, of St. John the Baptist. Surprisingly, these images, printed on paper, somehow resonated in the heart of the young Lutheran woman: She began to pray secretly in front of them.
“You see, I didn't know anything about holy icons,” Johanna continues. “I saw that one icon depicted the Virgin Mary, but as for the second one, at first I wasn’t even sure whether it was Christ or St. John the Baptist. Nevertheless, I began to pray in front of these icons. I had the feeling that St. John the Baptist was holding out his hands as if he wanted to receive thoughts and words addressed to him. I felt that I could share my desires, feelings and thoughts with him. Moreover, when I looked into his eyes, I felt how they was leading me to prayer.”
From that moment on, Astrid could no longer imagine her life without Orthodox icons. Another miracle followed in due course: through the icon of St. John the Baptist she received a revelation about her future daughter! According to Johanna, in 1996, when they were already raising three children, she caught herself thinking that God wanted to send them another child. During prayer Astrid saw a small image of a praying girl appear on St. John the Baptist’s icon. To dispel her doubts she called her husband. But Pat saw the same thing!
Nine months later, another Christian soul came to our world... A whole book (in English) is devoted to this story: Anne-Marie... a Child of God, in which there is an account of this miracle, and of the ordeals endured by the little girl during her short life (Anne-Marie didn’t live more than three years; she died during a second heart operation).
Since the news of her daughter’s birth came through an icon that had arrived from Russia, Astrid decided to find a Russian church and talk to the priest there.
“I didn't want to go to a Romanian or Greek church because the icon was Russian,” Johanna recounts. “The nearest Russian parish was at Stradbally (a town in county Laois in Ireland’s midlands, southwest of Dublin, about 160 miles From Belfast). I talked to the priest there, and to some extent he agreed with me that Anne-Marie, whose birth I was expecting, should be baptized in Orthodoxy. But there were no Orthodox Christians in our family, so the bishop to whom the priest turned for advice decided that Orthodox Baptism for my daughter was possible if one of the parents became Orthodox. At that time I was Lutheran and my husband was a Roman Catholic. Therefore, we baptized Anne-Marie in the Catholic Church.”
But her interest in and respect for Orthodox icons never ceased to bear fruit. In the Church of St. Colman in Stradbally (ROCOR) Astrid noticed an icon of St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco. She seemed to feel the special presence of this saint there. And again it was a paradox: Astrid refused the priest's offer to embrace Orthodoxy, believing that Orthodoxy was open to Anne-Marie but not to her. It was obviously very hard for a Lutheran woman to embrace an unfamiliar, “foreign” faith, especially when no one in her family belongs to this faith. It took a while before Astrid’s inner convictions allowed her to begin preparations for Orthodox Baptism. She was a catechumen for over two years, beginning December 2000. And only in January 2003 was Astrid baptized in Orthodoxy with the name Johanna. The Baptism was performed in the Jordan River during her stay at the convent of Mt. of Olives in Jerusalem, where there is also a chapel of St. John the Baptist.
“There I made friends with one of the nuns, Sister Seraphima, and she came to visit us in Northern Ireland,” Johanna says. “At that time a new trial awaited us: Our son Pascal was diagnosed with cancer at the age of eleven. Nun Seraphima, who had a small portion of St. John of Shanghai’s vestments with her, gave us half of it. My son and I prayed in front of St. John’s icon for healing. By the way, Pascal confessed to me that while the doctor was speaking to him about his illness, he felt the presence of the Savior in the hospital ward. By the grace of God and through the prayers of St. John of Shanghai my son recovered, and we (taking his younger brother with us) went to San Francisco to thank the saint for his help.”
As Johanna recalls, in that California city, where the amazing Russian saint lived for many years, she really wanted to tell someone about the miracle of healing. She shared this with the monk who later showed her the house where St. John had lived, his office, the church where he often served, and the icon in front of which he prayed, offering up his petitions for orphans transported from China to the United States. That pilgrimage became an unforgettable joyful experience. When Johanna, Pascal and his younger brother returned to Belfast, the first thing the five-year-old boy exclaimed as he hugged his father who met them at the airport was, “Dad, I saw St. John!”
McBride family has bee marked with miraculous and amazing events, but this hadn’t yet brought them all to Orthodoxy. As Johanna points out, “I can’t force them. My eldest son says that Orthodoxy is the right faith, but there is also a road to this faith.” Surprisingly, Johanna’s only surviving daughter Lucy was the first among her children to convert to Orthodoxy—at the age of eight. The girl was very impressed by one of the family’s guests, priest Andrei Logvinov, who as Johanna said, “didn’t take a leave of absence from Christianity for a single moment; he was like a saint.” After talking with Fr. Andrei, Lucy told her mother (at the age of seven) that she would like to become an Orthodox nun! Of course, that childhood desire remained in the past, but the true faith of Christ entered Lucy’s life—through her familiarization with the Orthodox Church.
Now Lucy, like Pat’s and Johanna’s three sons, lives separately from her parents. So far only the female part of the McBride family has converted to Orthodoxy. The men remain Catholics despite their respect for the Orthodox Church. Will they embrace Orthodoxy in the future? We don’t know. But it is not easy for the Irish (especially from Ulster) to leave Catholicism and join the Church of the first Christians and apostles, even if they are convinced that the fullness of Christ shines in it. Incidentally, Johanna's parents departed this life as Lutherans, although her mother came to love St. John of Shanghai in a special way and even made the sign of the cross (for the first time in her life) in front of his icon a few moments before her death (which coincided with the feast of St. John).
After working in the British National Health Service for many years and then retiring, now Johanna carries out her missionary service at the Church of St. John of Shanghai, located (since November 2017) in the courtyard of the McBrides’ house on Ashfield Street. ROCOR clergy who travel from England celebrate the Liturgy here, usually once a month. On other Sundays, the typika is read by laypeople. The language of services is English, which is certainly convenient for parishioners of different nationalities and for local residents who are interested in Orthodoxy. It is gratifying that Johanna, having made the difficult journey from Lutheranism to Orthodoxy, has become not only a parishioner, but also an active organizer in the life of the parish community. In her service there is also help for those seeking to embrace Orthodoxy or wishing to learn more about the faith that gave our world many wonderful saints, including John of Shanghai and San Francisco, now glorified on Irish soil in a church bearing his name.
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Strange Fire
by Fr. Barnabas Powell
STRANGE FIRE
Recently, Dr. Vincent Synan, Dean of the Divinity School and Regent University and long time historian of the Pentecostal and Charismatics movements, commented on the explosive growth of the Pentecostal movement across the increasingly Christian Southern Hemisphere by saying that those who want to deal with Christians will not be able to ignore the Pentecostals since they are on track to become the predominant expression of the Christian faith in this growing part of the world.
Just a few days ago the New York Times published a story concerning a recent scientific study on the brain activity of someone while they spoke in tongues. As an aside, one wonders why the Times cannot hire an editor who knows enough about the religious world to know that Pentecostal is not spelled “Pentacostal!”
As a former Pentecostal pastor, I was once asked if I still speak in tongues now that I have converted to Eastern Orthodoxy. Having been raised in this sub-culture of the Christian faith, I was blessed to be pastored by a Pentecostal pastor who was also open to the wider Evangelical movement. He taught us to value education (not a widely held opinion in the older versions of Pentecostalism) and he taught us to learn from the wider Christian world. While he regrets my conversion to Orthodoxy, he has never treated me with anything less than love and respect.
Oh, and as for the question mentioned above, the answer is “no” I no longer speak in tongues, unless you consider liturgical Greek a gift of the Spirit.
I contend that the growth of Pentecostalism and the less strident Charismatic movement is a result of a theological poverty in Western Christianity that can be seen as early as the “filioque” controversy and the unintended theological consequences that followed. The emphasis of the West on rationalism and the weak and sometimes bizarre forms of mysticism that developed in the West gave rise to both the over reaction and sad necessity of the Reformation which gave rise to the even more rationalistic movements of Calvinism and legalistic, sterile, piety of the 1st and 2nd so-called “Great Awakenings.”
All of this led to the subsequent Holiness movements of the 19th century along with the multiplying of Christian “denominations” on the American continent, and eventually led to the outbreak of the Pentecostal movement at the turn of the 20th century.
The human longing that gave birth to the Pentecostal movement is not bad in itself. The fundamental and basic hunger that is addressed by Pentecostalism is a desire for intimacy with the Uncreated God. This is good and God-given. We were meant for intimacy with the Divine.
But the theological poverty that was the atmosphere of the birth of Pentecostalism guaranteed that the very good desire would be quickly corrupted by weak theological support. And the movement bears this out. All one has to do is turn on religious TV to discover both old and new heresies finding fertile ground in the hearts of ungrounded and disconnected Pentecostal believers.
One of the earliest heresies was the so-called “Oneness” heresy concerning the doctrine of the Trinity. Once again, the weak theological grounding of Western theologies concerning the Trinity produced the natural over reaction of some in the young Pentecostal movement to receive the “revelation” of the oneness of the Godhead. They began to teach a form of “modalism” and insist that God is not a trinity of Persons, but only One Person – Jesus. Beginning with the “new issue” of baptism only in the name of Jesus, these often sincere and fervent believers, cut off as they were from the wise theology of centuries of Christian theology, made it up as they went along.
One might have hoped that as the movement matured it would outgrow the excesses of its past, but the Oneness Pentecostals actually make up a third of all the Pentecostals in the world. The recent movie “Jesus Camp” is an example of both the biased view of the secular world toward people of faith and the easy target Pentecostals make of themselves by due to their being cut off from the wise and sobering theology of the Orthodox Christian faith.
But weak theology on the doctrine of the Trinity is not the only “strange fire” that burns in the fields of Pentecostalism. The so-called “Prosperity Gospel”, the hyper-individualism that seems to reign within the movement and all its offshoots, the emotionalism that leads to nothing more than religious sentimentalism, and even the weakness of dependence on ecstatic experiences that even seem to feed a tendency toward sexual immorality, can all be found in abundance in Pentecostal movements.
Reading this you may wonder if I see any good in my former Pentecostal roots. You may be surprised to read that I consider Pentecostalism the greatest hope for Western Christianity to correct the theological mistakes of its past. I am convinced that Pentecostalism is God’s gift to the West to draw Western Christianity back to a more ancient and healthier theological experience with God.
Pentecostalism is the poor man’s mysticism, and, as I said above, a clear cry for intimacy with God. I am indebted to my Pentecostal roots for fanning the flames of this desire for intimacy for God and for an experience in Christian community I cherish to this day. It eventually led me home to the Orthodox Church where, instead of burning my spiritual house down with “wild fire”, I found a wise fireplace for the fire kindled in my heart by my Pentecostal upbringing. Thank you, Brother Holder and Open Bible Tabernacle. I shall be in your debt forever.
But the only remedy for the spiritual sicknesses that pervades Pentecostalism is a return to, or perhaps a discovery for the first time of, the wisdom of the Undivided Church.
This must include rigorous theological work that take seriously the truth that we cannot truly understand what the Holy Spirit is saying to His Church today unless we understand what He has said to His Church in the past.
The foolish behavior of making final choices about deep theological truths before we have gathered all the relevant theological evidence has produced too many spiritual casualties to be allowed to continue.
Pentecostalism is not going away. Christians from the more ancient traditions of the Church had better become well acquainted with this religious movement because societies are increasingly affected by this religious phenomenon. Pentecostals must abandon the prideful notion that their movement dropped out of heaven completely disconnected from the historical realities around them. The shallow “me and Jesus got our own thing going” mentality will never lead to anything more than a perpetual spiritual kindergarten.
In the end, Pentecostalism may find itself increasingly dissimilar from Christianity.
Finally, as history shows, the Church eventually comes to grip with theological truths in the face of heretical threats. May the blessed and live-giving Holy Spirit give courage to the hearts of His people to pas on a robust and healthy Christian faith to future generations. The souls of precious and God-loved persons are at stake here.
THE FIRE IS KINDLED
Pentecostalism is poised to become the dominant expression of Christianity in the West. The phenomenal growth of Pentecostal and Charismatic churches as well as the mainstreaming of Charismatic worship “styles” means that Pentecostalism and its emphasis on the immediate and intimate experience of the Presence of God in a believer’s life is fast becoming normative for the vast majority of Western Christians.
I remember years ago as a boy in a classical Pentecostal church (Assemblies of God) hearing about the non-pentecostal churches in our area. They thought we were crazy and they warned their people to stay away from “those people.”
Now, those same non-pentecostal churches are singing worship choruses during services and their people are lifting their hands as they sing as a sign of worship. Eyes closed, hands raised, these people in these non-Pentecostal churches are following the successful and packed Pentecostal churches they see around them. In less than 30 years the influence of Pentecostalism has gone mainstream.
The vast majority of so called “mega-churches” are Pentecostal or Charismatic in nature.
As a former Pentecostal pastor, some have asked me if there is any benefit I see in my previous Pentecostal world.
As I think of this, I remember a relative of mine asking me if I’d ever consider returning to the Pentecostal fold. He asked in hopes of finding something that might convince me to abandon my “foolish” journey to Orthodoxy. I had to smile when he asked, knowing his sincerity and honest desire to “rescue” me from my folly. He really meant well. He really loved me and wanted the best for me.
But I had to look him in the face and say there was no way I’d go back after having discovered the “treasure hidden in the field.” I had “sold all I had” to “buy” this field and there was no need to go back.
I am grateful for my Pentecostal background but would have to actually “unlearn” much of what I have learned over the subsequent years to be able to return to what I believe is an inherently childish Christian theology.
Having said that, I would like to discuss briefly where I see the great value of Pentecostalism in remedying some theological poverty in the West.
One of the main reasons for the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment (mutually and historically connected events) was the scholasticism of the Roman Catholic world at the time. Scholasticism, in my opinion, was neither good nor bad, but, as with most historical developments, had both positive and negative consequences.
One of the negative consequences was the emphasis on a legalistic framing of theological truths.
It is no surprise that the vast majority of the Protestant Reformers were Augustinians. And it was the Augustinians who were at the forefront of the Scholastic movement in Roman Catholicism. There are sufficient numbers of Orthodox critics of Blessed Augustine, but I won’t join their chorus. However, I am convinced that the theological system initiated by this great doctor of the Undivided Church had tragic consequences centuries after the passing of this great man. Consequences unintended by him and certainly unforeseen.
The Protestant Reformation accepted the theological system of the day from the Roman Catholics lock, stock, and barrel. They simply came up with different answers to the same questions, hence the split in the Western Church. What then developed historically was a theological system that was left intact and unquestioned by the interlocutors. The fight was about the answers to established questions and not about the theological questions themselves.
Soon after the Reformation (some would call it a Revolution, the first of many more to come) there were divisions among the Reformers all along the same rationalistic and theological framework already accepted.
The results of this religious development rocked along for several centuries until the Methodist movement in England and the sorted “Awakenings” that occurred in Great Britain and then in the United States. These “revivals” of religious fervor were always marked by demonstrative displays, whether it was the “mourner’s bench” at the front of the church buildings that later developed into the “altar call” area in the front of many Pentecostal churches, or the ecstatic displays chronicled by reporters of these “Awakenings” during the height of these “outpourings.”
The people were hungry spiritually and gifted orators were able to whip this “hunger” into a frenzy of religious demonstration which turned into periods of religious devotion for a time. These movements also has a sociological component as well, reaching the poor and “great unwashed” masses with both a sense of hope and spiritual fulfillment.
But then there was a “need” for another “revival” when the devotion waned, as it always had in the past.
What followed was a successive number of “revival” movements that spawned whole new denominations
The so called “holiness” movement so important in the initial revival work of the Wesley brothers of Methodism developed into new “holiness” movements meant to either “recapture” the purity of the initial Methodist movement or to restore the perceived “power” of the “first century church.”
At the end of the 19th century several revival movements claimed to have rediscovered the “missing theological truth” that would propel the Christian message forward, and all of these movements depended on touching that part of the human soul that longed for true intimacy with God through Christ.
But the hunger of the human heart was still unsatisfied by these movements and the theological underpinnings of these various revival movements still left many cold. Especially when the natural maturing sociological pressures were brought to bear on these new Christian movements.
The beginning of the 20th century was then ripe in the West for “another” revivalistic movement, both spiritually and sociologically.
THE FIRE FALLS
As I scanned my previous historical overview, I noticed huge gaps in the narrative, but to fill in all those gaps would necessitate a book.
What I am trying to do is create some sense of context to the Pentecostal movement to give the reader a perspective as to why the Pentecostal movement happened and why it seems to be fast becoming the dominant Christian expression of the majority of Christians in the West.
I also intend in this post to begin talking about the positive aspects of the movement as I see it.
At the turn of the 20th century small groups of Christians began reporting certain people “speaking in tongues” first at a small Bible college in Topeka, Kansas and then at a small store front “holiness” church on Azuza Street in Los Angeles. Early Pentecostals were, for the most part, from “holiness” churches like Methodism or other “holiness” groups that believed in “second blessing holiness” or sanctification which gave the believer the “power” to lead a holy life.
When one looks at all these historical movements, from the early works of John and Charles Wesley, to the British Keswick “Higher Life” movements, to late 19th century “faith healers,” to the emergence of the Pentecostal movement, all these movements had one overriding motivation: to “restore” Christianity to its former glory and power.
Every offshoot since the beginning of the Pentecostal movement has similar goals.
Even when the “holiness” movement spit into Pentecostal (Assemblies of God, United Pentecostal Church, Church of God, and others) and non-Pentecostal movements (Nazarene Church, Wesleyan Churches, Christian and Missionary Alliance Churches) they still maintained this distinctive of believing their particular movement was some kind of restoration or rediscovery of the power of the Holy Spirit given to the first Apostles that had been “lost” somewhere along the way.
William Seymour
Typically, these Pentecostal churches were led by strong personalities, and this religious movement allowed both men and women to pastor. It didn’t discriminate as to race either. William Seymour, the pastor of the little church on Azuza Street where most say the modern Pentecostal movement started was an African-American. Many of the leaders, especially in the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World denomination, were black. There was an egalitarian value to this movement.
The movement was also marked by both personal demands for “holy” living, which usually meant that Pentecostal believers avoided the “worldly” entertainments of the day and strict prohibitions against alcoholic beverages, and by ecstatic religious experiences, the most notable being “speaking in tongues” or glossolalia.
It is not within the scope of these articles to explore this historical subject thoroughly, but the above should give the reader at least a beginning in understanding the infancy of Pentecostalism.
As a former Pentecostal layperson and as a former pastor of a Pentecostal church, I owe a debt to my upbringing. These folks taught me the name of Jesus and shaped me to be both passionate for God and devoted to Him.
The good I see in Pentecostalism, and the reason I believe that the movement can be of great help to Christians in the West in rediscovering an Orthodox Christian faith, is that:
First, Pentecostalism throws into start relief one of the fundamental poverties of Western Christian theology – The Person of the Holy Spirit. A whole series of books could be written to talk about this point alone.
When the West failed to balance the sterile effects of rationalism with a doctrinally and patristically informed mysticism, it set itself up for just the kind of pendulum swing it now sees in Pentecostalism. The human soul demands intimacy with God, and this intimacy is meant to be as real and as knowable as God is Himself. Reducing the faith to mere assent to propositional statements falls into the heresy of Docetism.
Second, Pentecostalism reinforces a sense of “mission” in their adherents. The whole point of receiving this “power” from the Holy Spirit was never just to make a person “feel good,” but to set that very person free to win the lost and spread the Good News. This movement is now sweeping through Central and South America, the African continent, and even in secularized Europe and the United States challenging the religious establishment everywhere it goes to try to match its missionary zeal.
Finally, Pentecostalism dares to believe in miracles and God’s direct intervention into the lives of everyday people. This “expectation” of God’s work in a person’s daily life makes God more than just a far off deity keeping score of your good and bad deeds. This God is a God Who cares about your sick child, your dire circumstances, and your eternal salvation. That kind of personal faith is a source of great comfort and encouragement.
These positive aspects of Pentecostalism are certainly not exclusive to this very young movement, but with the phenomenal growth of Pentecostalism, it certainly is important to note since your neighbor or even a relative is probably involved or touched by the Pentecostal movement.
THE FIRE FAILS
As I have said previously, I am convinced the modern Pentecostal movement offers the Christian Church a wonderful opportunity to reconnect with the timeless faith of the Apostles and the balance of mystery and rationalism that has all but been lost in the Christian West.
However, I also believe that Pentecostalism is a system of theology that cannot and will not bring anyone to the fullness of the faith
“once for all delivered to the saints.”
This is not because Pentecostal people are “bad.” It isn’t because Pentecostal or Charismatic theology is “wrong” or “evil.” It is because the underlying theological foundation for Pentecostal and Charismatic theology is poverty stricken. It is simply too weak to bear the weight of the fullness of the Apostolic faith.
Coming as I do from a Pentecostal background, that word “Apostolic” holds a particularly pregnant meaning. Unfortunately, my understanding of “apostolic” was quite deficient during my days as a Pentecostal.
In fact, the very tendency in the West to break off into “factions” and “denominations” is particularly strong among Pentecostals. This revealed itself early on in the movement over the issue of water baptism. Being cut off from the wisdom of the Church these sincere believers embodied all that was wrong about the Protestant innovation of “Sola Scriptura.” They did not have access to the wise understanding of the Trinity preserved in the Church so they mistook the trinitarian teaching for tri-theism and reacted against what they perceived as a heresy.
But this so-called “new issue” demonstrates the first theological poverty of Pentecostalism: A poverty of communion with the saints.
Since Protestantism tends to reduce the Christian faith to certain theological propositions, the Pentecostals allowed this reduction full flower in their attempts to “recapture” the power of the first century Church. Feeling no sense of connection with their fellow Christians throughout the ages, the Pentecostals only care for those first century believers that they see as their true heritage. They are also willing to adopt other heretical groups through the centuries that seemed to bolster their notions of ecstatic experiences as THE theological stamp of approval.
This lack of connection with the Church through the centuries meant that the Pentecostals were left to their own devices and fell into many, if not most, of the heresies of the past.
The second poverty of Pentecostalism is the rank individualism that permeates the entire movement. this again is a flowering in the Pentecostal movement of the general poverty of Western Christianity. Individualism reduces faith to “me and Jesus got our own thing going” and reduces Church to either a religious pep rally or, worse yet, a Christian self-help group. Worship is measured by how it made me “feel” rather than what it reveals about the Uncreated God. Hence Pentecostals and Charismatics tend to measure their spiritual growth by their experience of “victory” in their personal lives. But the narcissistic weakness of this religious poverty guarantees a perpetual spiritual “kindergarten” for these believers.
One of the unintended consequences” of this gross individualism is the “cult of personality” that naturally arises when a dependence on individual abilities is emphasized. Pentecostal groups are usually founded on some strong personality who has the gift of gab and a flare for the theatrical.
Unfortunately, “the arm of flesh will fail you” and the cultural landscape is littered with the sad lives of men (and some women) who simply could not maintain the fevered pitch expected of them from their loyal following. The stories of emotional, psychological, and event physical manipulation, all for “God’s glory,” are simply too numerous to mention.
Another poverty that I see in Pentecostalism is the weak theological dependence on ecstatic religious experiences. This true hunger in the soul of a person for an authentic and intimate experience of the presence of God cannot be truly satisfied with self-centered religious phenomena. In fact, much like sweets ruins your appetite, so the spiritual “cotton candy” of shallow ecstatic religious experiences, brought on as much by psychological peer pressure as by anything divine, deaden this good hunger and eventually creates an almost narcotic dependence on these less than satisfying religious events.
Interestingly enough this emphasis of emotional experiences not only leads to a kind of religious addiction, but also feeds other physical desires as well. Most Pentecostals do not like to talk about the strong minority of sexual weaknesses that tend to dominate many Pentecostal and Charismatic sub cultures. This emphasis on keeping the emotions heightened at all times, or reducing worship to experiencing a religious “high” tends to reinforce a lack of physical discipline. Recent events are the exceptions that many times prove the rule.
Finally, the greatest poverty I see in Pentecostalism is theological. While this is changing, Pentecostalism has traditionally been suspicious of theological training. Seminary instruction was considered suspect, and a reliance on the education of the “Spirit” was more valued. But beyond that there is a real and debilitating “historical amnesia” among Pentecostals that impoverishes their religious education.
There is so much wisdom preserved in the Church that is simply unknown to most Christians nowadays and that ignorance is dangerous. It means there are generations of believers who will have to learn all over again lessons already learned by their brothers and sisters of the past.
What you don’t know CAN hurt you.
There are hopeful signs. A recent Pew Poll found that speaking in tongues, a strong distinctive of Pentecostalism, is waning. Post-graduate work is becoming not only acceptable among Pentecostals but expected. And whole new denominations have formed by Pentecostals and Charismatics wanting to overcome the inherent weaknesses of their own shallow religious traditions by discovering the wisdom of ages past.
For me, however, the natural home for Pentecostals and Charismatic Christians is the Orthodox Christian Church. Here there is a trustworthy “fireplace” for the Pentecostal “fire.” Many are surprised to hear me say that it was my Pentecostalism that prepared me for my journey to Orthodoxy.
In Eastern Orthodoxy there is a comfort level theologically for paradox and mystery. As opposed to the West where rationalism has been allowed free reign, Orthodoxy’s emphasis on the present work of the Holy Spirit provides a theological balance for a sterile theological rationalism that may excite the mind but leaves the soul cold. Pentecostals and Charismatics will discover in Orthodoxy the wisdom necessary to avoid all the pitfalls so often present in the world of Pentecostalism.
There are theological remedies for and spiritual medicine that provide authentic healing and spiritual health for those weary of the eternal search for the everlasting “goose bump.”
Pentecostalism reveals the primary spiritual poverty of the West. This is its greatest gift to the Christian world. But we cannot remain ignorant of the fatal weaknesses of Pentecostalism without condemning generations of sincere believers to a life of a perpetual “spiritual kindergarten.”
So, to all my precious Pentecostal and Charismatic friends, I say to you what Philip said to Nathanael:
“Come and see!”
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THE THORNY PATH TO GOD
An interview with Elena Skorokhodova — actress, film director, and playwright
An accomplished actress on stage (sixteen years in the Pushkin Theatre, Moscow) and screen, Elena Skorokhodova is also a director, writer, and author of plays, including the prizewinning, Don’t Throw Ashes on the Floor. Her creative talent has led her to an acute perception of the unfolding drama of individuals along her life’s path, and the fate of her country.
– Elena, tell us about how you came to faith in God?
– I would have to tell you my entire life story in order for it to make sense. I was born in an atheistic soviet family. By the way, that atheism was superficial. We believed in goodness and justice, as something that goes without saying. No one ever looked deeper into the source of this belief in our souls. A true atheist is a terrible being, deprived of morality, and obsessed with no more than his own material gain by any means. After all, he has nothing other than this earthly life; there will be no other life for him, and therefore he has to grab the maximum of goods and pleasures here. As Dostoevsky wrote, “If there is no God, then everything is allowed.” But we, of course, were never that kind of atheist.
When I was four years old, my father once pointed to the sky and said that it was infinite. I remember that it took my breath away. I began to think about it. Later, when I became interested in mathematics, I tried to apply the principles of that science to my search for truth. If you logically seek the first cause of anything at all, you will inevitably run into that emptiness from which everything originated. But emptiness itself cannot produce something outside of a certain mysterious power. In general I thought a lot about this, drew graphics with the beginning point of existence (racking my brains over the question, “But what came before that point?”), read various philosophers, and even created my own philosophical concepts. Then the Gospels somehow came into my hands. This book created an amazing impression upon me. I suddenly had a sharp perception that the truth was precisely here. It was as if I saw with my own eyes how Christ preached, worked miracles, was crucified, and resurrected. Truly resurrected! No such perception of reality has ever occurred to me with any other reading. Well, my eyes having been opened, I ran to the church, bought a stack of books, immersed myself in Church life, and began to “terrorize” my family and friends. I am a very emotional person and easily carried away; and of course, my missionary attempts at converting my parents took on a somewhat aggressive character at first. But with God’s help, everything eventually normalized.
It seems to me that any person who purposefully seeks the truth will come sooner or later to an Orthodox church, regardless of his nationality, ancestral religion, or other factors. The truth is simply here, and nothing else has meaning.
– Often newcomers to faith who have firmly decided to enter into Church life try through their zeal not according to knowledge to reach great spiritual heights, taking on asceticism beyond their strength. This usually has sad consequences. Were you able to avoid this?
– I made all the mistakes that could be made; because, as I said, I have a very emotional nature. When I understood that the truth is here, in Orthodoxy, I took off running it to meet it. It was like with the sports that I used to be involved in. I prayed and over-prayed… I threw away all my clothes, leaving only a long, black skirt, a formless sweater, and a faded headscarf. I renounced the fallen world. I had a crazy look in my eyes, and tried to convert everyone immediately. People simply ran away from me. But now I have calmed down. I live quietly, and perform no ascetical feats. I fast, but not as in a monastery, rather according to my strength. Without fanaticism. If I can get through the day without judging anyone or having vile thoughts, that’s good. I leave my close ones alone. Everyone has to go his own way. I can only attract people through my own example, and therefore I have to look at myself more, and not at others. I read an abbreviated prayer rule, I go to church every week and on the great feasts, and try to receive Communion once a month. I ask to be allowed, though unworthy. So far, they allow me. This is my rhythm.
– You are an author and playwright. Is it possible to write about the evil that surrounds us in a way that will not tempt those who doubt?
– I write in parables and place the accent on what I see as good and bad. My accents are definitely Orthodox Christian. I have one play, for example, about Khodja Nasreddin.[1] But in spite of its eastern flavor, this play is absolutely Orthodox Christian in accent. I took a particular blessing before beginning this work. After all, the characters in this play are not worshipping Christ. I was cautious about that theme. But they let me get into this story, and I am very glad that it turned out well.
– For whom do you write?
– I try to write in a language that worldly people can understand, those who are “not called to the King’s feast,” those who have not fallen into place spiritually, and are “sitting on the fence.” I know that state very well. We need to extend a hand to such people. We must not turn away those who are not yet with us, but who are no longer against us.
Although, my poem, “Song About Holy Prince Daniel of Moscow…” is a truly religious work, created, it could be said, at the request of the director of the Orthodox School of Art, Sergei Mikhailovich Mamai, and by the blessing of the school’s spiritual father, Priest Nicholai Pushkin. But I repeat that my creative work is mainly secular. I would say that it is aimed at those who came to the theatre and not to the church, so that they would want to go to church after watching the show. Or that they would at least think about something serious. After all, the most important thing is that they begin to think correctly. Then, with God’s help, good sense and thoughtfulness will take them where they need to go.
Of course my spiritual father, Fr. Nicholas (from the Church of the Icon of the Mother of God of the Sign in Peryaslavl Sloboda) knows about all of my creative searches. Batiushka’s wife, Matushka Vera, is the most valuable fan of my creative work in all its multi-faceted hypostases.
– What do you consider the most important mission of a cultural worker, an artist in the greatest sense of the word? And how does he keep from falling into the sin of vainglory?
– A true artist should transform the world, inspire it, uplift man above his animal nature, raise his thoughts to heaven, and reveal to him the image of God that is within himself. Bad art “animalizes” the viewer, arouses his instincts, and finally lowers his human dignity. Like the film currently popular in Russia, Stilyagi. It is a very talented film that wonderfully exalts vice. Would that we could exalt virtue just as brilliantly!
From their contact with a creative work, under its influence, people should become better, kinder, more merciful. Families should become stronger, alcoholics and drug addicts should become fewer, harlots should be changed… Any creative work should have a moral foundation under it.
Someone might ask, “What about the art flourishing all around us? Romanticized criminality, beautified debauchery, the charm of vice?” We should not orient ourselves toward what is flourishing around us. Check your actions against the reactions of your conscience. Your conscience will not deceive you. “O child of eternity, do not please the spirit of the times.”
How to struggle with vainglory? I do not know. My life seems to be such that it is hard to get overly vainglorious. All along my creative path there is always one person or another actively humiliating me, scolding me, or trying to prevent me from going on. Thank God for it, I suppose.
– Your play, Don’t Throw Ashes on the Floor, touches upon a painful theme in our country—drunkenness. You have thought much about the causes of this evil, and how to war against it. How do you think an Orthodox woman could help her husband who is unable to overcome his passion for drink?
– She can only help in such a situation with prayer. And with love. Hysterics and moralizing will only intensify his passion. A drinker falls into a vicious, closed circle: he drinks in order to forget his shame that he drinks. It is like the drunkard in the story, The Little Prince.[2] There is also the purely physiological dependency that develops, which is not so easy to break.
I have had an experience with this in my own life. I consciously married a man with a problem. I knew that he was a drinker, but I ignored that fact, assuming that we could overcome everything with God’s help. What is most important is that he himself had the desire to struggle. At first everything worked out beautifully, and I became overly proud. But later humility caught up with me; we were dealt a crushing blow, and his vice triumphed with renewed strength. I nearly lost my mind from despair. How many tears I shed… I was sobbing endlessly every day.
But now, when I analyze the situation from the beginning—that is, the decision to bind my life with him—I understand that is was all logical. And all in my style. I was looking for a podvig,[3] and rushed into it in a big way. But what is characteristic is that my former husband no longer drinks. At all. And I am sure that this is the result of his having stopped then. If he had not stopped, he would not be around today, most likely. A terrifying feeling of hopelessness exuded from him then, as if the finale was near. Of course, I could not just pass him by. I had to climb into the situation and begin saving a friend. Otherwise, it would not have been like me. But probably it was not a good idea to get married then. A marriage requires love. Christian love of neighbor is not enough for marriage. But during that euphoria of a temporary victory over vice, we both felt such an emotional upsurge that we mistook it for feelings of mutual love.
There is a certain story about Orthodox marriage, which migrates from one book to another. I am talking about the girl who brought various suitors whom she liked to her spiritual father, but the latter turned them all down. However, when the girl brought a young man whom she didn’t like at all, the spiritual father blessed her to marry him. So the girl married him out of humility, and twenty years later finally felt infinite love and gratefulness to this man for having provided such a happy family life. It is a good story, and probably has happened. But it should in no way be an example for blind emulation! That is the story that attracted and disoriented me then. Unanimity of views is a necessary condition, but it is not enough to create a family.
– Why do actors and actresses usually have troubled personal lives, and their marriages are not long-lasting?
– Because this profession is very bad for one’s emotional health. In the morning at rehearsal you love one person, in the afternoon at the shooting you love another, while in the evening at the show, you love a third. When you come home at night, you finally see your own beloved husband or wife, and you can’t understand who you really love. I have a play with this theme called, In Search of Lost Grig. The central figure is an actor who looses his own “self” in his roles.
When anyone comes to me for help in preparing themselves to enter a university level theatre school, I start by trying to talk them out of it. Acting is a dangerous field. It is an idle way of life, an outwardly easy existence… Bad endings… For every successful fate there are scores of broken ones. Even outward success often has a seamy side.
We play risky games. We play with life, with relationships. “Why are you so calm? Stir yourselves up!” That is what they would say to us in acting school. And we did stir ourselves up, because calmness is not a theatrical state. We would make ourselves look with lust at people of the opposite sex, because love between a man and a woman is the main theme of all theatre. But do you recall what the Gospels say about this? Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart (Mt. 5:28). We would intentionally arouse passions in ourselves, explode our tempers. The consequences of such behavior have been tragic.
The instability of actors’ and actress’s marriages are no coincidence. Non-traditional orientations are widespread. The problem of alcoholism is on a broader scale in acting spheres than anywhere else. Now drug addiction has been added. It has been added everywhere, but it is affecting actors and actresses on a grand scale. There are no official statistics; this is my own observation. But I am observing attentively.
– Does this mean that acting and Orthodoxy are not compatible?
– For the most part, of course they are not compatible. But on the other hand, The wind bloweth where it listest (Jn. 3:8). Acting is without a doubt a spiritually dangerous profession. A judge, for example, is also in a dangerous profession because he daily breaks the commandment, Judge not (Mt. 7:1). Or a teacher—My brethren, be not many masters [teachers], knowing that we shall receive the greater condemnation (Js. 3:1). But all these professions are nevertheless needed. People also need the world of culture, which means that those people who work in the arts are also needed, including actors and actresses.
– In your opinion, what should an Orthodox woman be like?
– It goes without saying that she should not be a sex-symbol. An Orthodox woman should be a symbol of virtue. But that does not mean that she is obligated to look like a bag lady. She should be beautiful, regal, decorous, radiating spirituality. Like our last Empress, Alexander Feodorovna Romanova. I mean the real one, and not the one in G. Panfilov’s film.
–Many Orthodox women (and men, for that matter) do not maintain their physical form, do not exercise or play sports, and consider all that unimportant (that is, not spiritual). You are a master figure skater, and studied as a child with the famous trainer, Elena Tchaikovskaya. A few years ago you were featured in a television program called “Aerobics,” where you introduced people to a healthy lifestyle. What can you say to people who have not experienced the “joy of fitness?”
– I would say that the body is the temple of the soul, and you can’t just let it go; you have to work on it. Of course, physical fitness should not turn into a goal by itself. No one needs any soulless Schwarzeneggers. But a rich inner essence should have an attractive outward form, in my opinion. When I see some Orthodox mothers and other married women in baggy “uniforms,” hunched and shapeless, I feel torturously pained. And I feel sorry for their poor husbands. It is especially hard for them now that they are surrounded by the propaganda of vice; on street advertisements, in the press, on television—half-naked beauties are everywhere… We need to intelligently stand up to all this with our own essentially different beauty. Glory be to God, lately I often see just such truly beautiful women in our church—attractive, shapely, well and tastefully dressed, but at the same time modest and decent, I hope.
– You loved mathematics from your childhood, and even intended to study in the math department of Moscow State University. A woman with a mathematical mind who also writes plays and poems is quite a rarity. Do your mathematical abilities aide your dramatic and poetic creativity?
– “In every science there is as much truth as there is math,” according to Immanuel Kant. I would add that this applies to every sphere of life. Mathematics penetrates everything; it is the skeleton of life, the frame. Math is logic. How could a playwright do without logic, without a chain of cause and effect, where one thing leads to another? It is impossible to write poems without an inner feeling of symmetry. I don’t understand what is meant by a “humanitarian mind.” Is it something deprived of a system and built upon feelings? I am sure that anyone who does not like math simply had bad math teachers. It is impossible not to love mathematics, because math is harmony. It is like nature, Mozart, Pushkin… By the way, toward the end of his life, Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin became interested in mathematics and various numerical systematizations. I read about this interest of his. If there had been good math teachers in Tsarskoe Selo,[4] then perhaps free-thinkers would not have come out of it, breeding the Decembrists and other anti-theistic movements. Mathematics is a very good stabilizer in life. All mathematicians are even-tempered, morally stable people—at least the ones I know.
– Elena, how did your parents raise you, and how do you raise your own son?
– I was raised strictly, in the soviet way. But I was raised without Christ. Therefore, we didn’t really understand why we had to be good. My child knows about Christ from infancy. He is consciously learning about Him. However, the world around us is more corrupt today than it was during my childhood. To make matters worse, my child is physically handsome. I had a more modest appearance at his age. I am afraid for him, and pray.
– What is a woman’s role in Russia’s spiritual and moral regeneration?
– Alexandra Feodorovna Romanova put it very well: “The influence of good women is the greatest power, after God’s mercy, to form good men.”
– You participated in the First All-Russia Forum of Orthodox Women. Tell us about this, please.
– To be honest, I came away with mixed impressions of that forum. The first day it was conducted in the Christ the Savior Cathedral, in the Church Council hall. There were very many people, television reporters, etc. T. A. Golikova, S. S. Zhurova, and other governmental representatives were presiding. All of them spoke some general words about mercy and virtues. But the most important issues, “juvenile court,”[5] for example, were left for the second day, which took place in the Pilgrimage Center on Lomonosov Prospect, without television cameras, and without the former presidium. Everyone was divided into four sections. In the section where I presented my report on how the mass media is corrupting us, there were thirty people—all upstanding matushkas. As a stage director, I can really feel when there is no action on the stage, but only text, because it gets boring right away. That is how it was at the forum. I immediately went on the attack when I got up to give my presentation, saying that everyone sitting there will of course agree with what I have to say. After all, we are of one mind. But it is important that those who make governmental decisions hear it. The situation in the country is catastrophic. The nation is dying out, the people are drinking themselves to death, families are breaking up, and the children’s homes are full to overflowing… Our long-time Russian values are no longer valued, everyone is obsessed with making money, and so we stupidly squander our natural resources. Industries are not developed, and science is locked up in the pen. We import everything we need in exchange for gas, oil, and coal. What good can come of it? What will we do when the resources are gone?
I am very worried about the fate of Russia. I am a patriot, and I feel my connection with my homeland in an incredibly emotional way, with my whole organism. I do not know if that is how I was raised, or if it is something inborn in me—this feeling of being part of the land, the roots, and this pain over the fate of my fatherland.
Russian people are in general a special people. I feel this very strongly when I interact with foreigners. Furthermore, what works there does not work for us. This is a particular country, with a particular culture, and a unique language which I think is the richest in the world, which arose and developed out of our national uniqueness. These are also our national resources, only they are spiritual resources, and likewise should not be sold on the market like gas, oil, and coal. They should be preserved, cultivated, and made the foundation for renewal, to the glory of God.
What I fear most of all is that calculating people who have no feeling for the country as their homeland might come and replace our current government. Glory be to God, our current government is Orthodox, and patriotic. There is hope that Russia can come out of its dead end; that it will not perish and disappear from the face of the Earth. Our main hope, of course, is in the Lord; but we the people should also act. The right words are not enough. We need action. Nothing comes without labor. That is how our world is made.
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Notes:
[1] Khodja Nasreddin is a character from Islamic Central Asian folklore that is well known to Russians thanks to the Russian language book, The Story of Khodja Nasreddin, by Leonind Soloviev.
[2] By Antoine de Saint-Exupery.
[3] A Russian word in spiritual lexicon that implies a specific spiritual labor, requiring emotional and spiritual strength.
[4] The poet Pushkin attended the university that existed in his time in Tsarskoe Selo, near St. Petersburg.
[5] The issue of a juvenile justice system is very poignant in Russia today. It refers to the laws now prevailing in Western Europe which lightly separate children from their parents for absurd reasons. For example: a family is poor—take the child to a children’s home. A mother slaps the child for misbehaving—child abuse! Take the child away. This is a system that could seriously undermine family traditions in Russia, and cause great personal tragedy.
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Shawn Goldman, Canada & Israel: My Journey from Judaism to Orthodox Christianity
This is Deep Heart Orthodox's first full video detailing Shawn's journey from Judaism to Orthodox Christianity through his son Kai's battle with brain cancer. After years of spiritual seeking, God finally called to Shawn through Kai's terrible illness. Watch this story of a father's love for his son that brought Shawn to the heart of the Father's love. Tragedy, triumph, courage and an openness to the call of the Spirit are all detailed in this moving opening episode on the Deep Heart Orthodox YouTube channel.
Deep Heart Orthodox is the YouTube channel for Shawn Goldman, M.Ed. Shawn grew up in a Jewish family in Toronto, Canada, and lived in Israel for seven years. He completed high school in Jerusalem and spent three years in a combat unit of the Israeli army. After having a moral crisis when serving on the West-Bank, Shawn left Israel and entered a long period of exploring various spiritual paths including existential philosophy, Buddhism, psychotherapy & shamanism, eventually making his way into the Eastern Orthodox Church.
Shawn obtained a B.A. in philosophy from the University of Toronto, and went on to complete a three-year certificate in transpersonal therapy. He later graduated from Canisius College with a Masters degree in education. He is also, slowly, working his way through a degree in theology. Currently, Shawn is writing about his experiences in the Israeli army, his journey to Orthodox Christianity and his time as a public school teacher in Toronto.
Deep Heart Orthodox YouTube channel will explore Shawn's journey from Judaism to Orthodox Christianity, along with the stops he made along the way. We will look at the similarities and differences between Orthodox Christianity, Judaism, Roman Catholicism, Buddhism, Eastern Catholicism, Shamanism and other paths. We will also explore the heart-centred spirituality of the Eastern Orthodox Church (Hesychasm), and how this tradition can offer meaning and healing for modern audiences. We will also explore issues around child-loss, women in the Church, the Israel-Palestine conflict, alternative health, the war in Ukraine, public education, mental health and suicide: all issues close to Shawn's heart.
Our first video will detail Shawn's journey to the Orthodox faith through his son Kai's battle with cancer, and how that battle actually brought Shawn back to a relationship with God after years of spiritual seeking. Our second video will explore the theological topic of God, evil and childhood cancer; how can a good and loving God inflict cancer on an innocent child?
Shawn is currently a member of the Greek Orthodox Church in Ontario, Canada, is a father of three children and teaches in the public school system.
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"MY CHOICE IS ORTHODOXY!"
"The depth I found in the Orthodox Faith is not found anywhere else. It is not easy to become Orthodox, considering how many religious conflicts there are in the world. But for me, the sign of God is the opportunity to become an Orthodox Christian and the opportunity to find my people.
No matter what trials await me, I accept them like a true Japanese warrior.
I am not afraid of death, I am afraid of being unworthy of God's love."
KARI-HIROYUKI TAGAWA - (Japanese-born American actor, martial artist)
INS.
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"I exist, seek to find Me!" - The conversion of the Dutch monk and hermit Jozef van den Berg (+2023), former actor, from atheism to Orthodoxy
Jozef (Joseph) Van den Berg was a Dutch former mime and a great famous stage actor. He was born on August 22, 1949 in Beers, Netherlands and had no relationship with God at all, he was an atheist. He was married with four children. Everything changed one day in a performance in which he played the role of an atheist and said: "There is no God, there is no God." He then heard a voice inside him saying: "I exist, seek to find me!" From that moment something changed in him. He truly sought and found Him!
In fact, he had a very good friend who informed him that she knew St. Porphyrios and that she would be going to Greece and if he wished to write him a letter, she would give it to him.
When his friend arrived in Greece, she went to St. Porphyrios and as soon as she told him about Joseph, he beamed with joy and told her that he had to see him. Indeed it happened, Joseph went and found him in Greece. St. Porphyrios spoke to Joseph about Orthodoxy. In Greece, he also met St. Paisios in Mount Athos. He also met with St. Sophrony Sakharov in Essex, England. Miraculously something changed inside him and he decided to give up everything, money, fame, family, friends, publicity to become an Orthodox Christian and live as a hermit in a hut in the Neerjinen forest in the Netherlands.
The only things he took with him when he set out to find God were a bicycle and a trunk with a few clothes. He was baptized and became an Orthodox Christian. His hut was visited daily by many people, also by priests and bishops from all over. He had recently come to Greece for health reasons where he was hospitalized and fell asleep in the Lord at the age of 74, in October 2023 in a monastery in Soho, near Thessaloniki. He had cancer. Ηe was unable to walk and was confined to a wheelchair.
ANT. INS.
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Letter To A Roman Catholic Friend
Can one be Roman Catholic and Orthodox? I would like to share with you a brief letter that was published some time ago in an Italian Orthodox parish newsletter. Its author, Archpriest Gregorio Cognetti, is the Dean of the Italian parishes under the Moscow Patriarchate. This letter was generally liked by the Italian Orthodox converts, and also received a high degree of appreciation among some cradle-born Orthodox (it was, for instance, translated into Romanian); I hope it may be prove an interesting reading and a source of inspiration for all of you.
* * *
Chapel Hill (U.S.), March 1982
Dear Bill,
Even though you never asked it directly, I feel from your words that you do not yet understand why I left the Roman Church to become Orthodox.
You were even a member of one of the least latinized Byzantine parishes, you seem to say, why, then?…
I guess I owe you an explanation, since, a long time ago, when we were both members of the Latin church, we shared the same feelings. These same feelings brought both of us to a Byzantine rite parish, and then myself to Orthodoxy. You could not have forgotten the criticisms that we moved to the Romans: the continual insertion of new traditions in place of the old ones, Scholasticism, the legalistic approach to spiritual life, the dogma of papal infallibility. At the same time we both reckoned the legitimacy and correctness of the Orthodox Church. A Uniate parish seemed the optimal solution. I remember what I was saying in that period:
I think like an Orthodox, I believe like an Orthodox, therefore I am Orthodox.
Entering officially into the Orthodox Church seemed to me just a useless formality. I even thought that remaining in communion with the Roman Church might be a positive fact, in view of the goal of a possible reunification of the Churches.
Well, Bill, I was wrong.
I believed I knew the Orthodox Faith, but it was just a smattering, and quite shallow for that. Otherwise I would not have failed to know the intrinsic contradiction between feeling Orthodox and not being reckoned as such by the very same Church whose faith I stated I was sharing. Only a non-Orthodox may conceive an absurdity like being Orthodox outside of Orthodoxy. Individual salvation does not only concern the single person, as many Westerners believe, but it must be seen in the wider frame of the whole Church Communion.
Each Orthodox Christian is like a leaf: how could he receive the life-giving sap if he is not connected to the vine? (John 15:5)
Orthodoxy is a way of life, not a rite. The beauty of the rite derives from the inner reality of the Orthodox Faith, and not from a search for forms. The Divine Liturgy is not a more picturesque way of saying Mass: it comes forth from, and strengthens, a theological reality that becomes void and inconsistent if excised from Orthodoxy.
When the spirit of the Orthodox Faith is present, even the most miserable service, done in a shack, with two paper icons placed on a couple of chairs to serve as the iconostasis, and a bunch of faithful out of tune as the choir, is incomparably higher than the services in my former Uniate parish, in the midst of magnificent 12th century Byzantine mosaics, and a well-instructed choir (when there was one).The almost paranoid observance of the ritual forms is the useless attempt to make up for the lack of a true Orthodox ethos. I was deluding myself when I believed I was able to be an Orthodox in the Roman communion.
It was a delusion because it is impossible.
The continual interference of Rome in the ecclesiatical life reminds you in due course who is in command. To pretend to ignore this is self-delusion. I tried to avoid the problem, feigning to be deaf and dumb, and repeating to myself that I belonged to the ideal “undivided Church”. My position was quite sinful. First of all, because the undivided Church still exists: it is the Church that never broke with Her past, and that is always identical to Herself: in other words, the Orthodox Church.
Then, because that feeling of being a member of the Undivided Church, which I considered so Christian and irenical, was instead a grave sin of pride. I was practically putting myself above Patriarchs and Popes. I believed I was one of the few who really understood the Truth, beyond old and sterile polemics.
I felt I had the right to ask the Eucharist both from the Romans and the Orthodox, and I felt unfairly treated when the latter denied it to me. I have a great debt of gratitude towards a priest who, in that time, refused to give me Communion. Instead of softly speaking of canonical impediments, as if the matter were a merely bureaucratic problem, he said me bare-facedly:
If it is true that you consider yourself an Orthodox, why is it that you keep belonging to heresy?
I was deeply shocked by those words, and for a long time I did not return to that Church. But he was right. I had understood what Saints, Fathers, Bishops and Priests had not understood for centuries.
According to me, the schism between East and West was a tragic misunderstanding based merely on political problems and the ponderings of the theologians. And in doing so I indirectly accused many holy people of calculation, superficiality and bigotry. And I was mistaking all of this for Christian charity…
No, Bill, it is impossible to be both Roman Catholic and Orthodox at the same time.
The rite is not all that important. After all, the Latins were Western Rite Orthodox for many centuries. I agree with you that, after the separation, the Romans and the Orthodox have still much in common, but this is not enough to consider both of them part of the same Church. Beyond the well-known doctrinal differences, there is the approach to the Supernatural, the same life of the Church that makes impossible to live the two religious realities at the same time.
We state in the Creed:
“and (I believe) in One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church”.
Until a unity of faith comes, they will be two churches.
The theory (also affirmed by John Paul II) that the Romans and the Orthodox are still the same one Church (despite the schism, and in a mysterious way) sounds well, but it doesn’t hold. It is based only on beautiful words. The differences of faith, on the other hand, do exist, and they are not a mere word-play.
Yes, I know that theological dialogue has been started, and it is even possible (everything is possible to the Lord) that eventually the unity will be reached. But beware! Many good Romans believe that the differences might be resolved by means of a clever statement that, owing to its genericness may sound acceptable by both parties. Having reached an agreement on this statement, both would interpret it according to their understanding, in fact keeping their opinions. Worse still, some propose a unity in diversity, without a formal commitment of faith from any part, but under the universal co-ordination of the Pope of Rome.
Well, all of this is impossible. The Fathers taught us that the the agreement on common faith must be univocal and unequivocal.
Orthodoxy follows the spirit of the Law, rather than the letter. And since it is impossible for the Orthodox Church to introduce new doctrines, it falls on the Romans to abandon a millennium of innovations, and unreservedly return to the faith of the Catholic and Apostolic Church.
This is the only possible platform for an agreement.
History has shown the fallacy of otherwise based unions. And now let me ask you a trivial question: Bill, is the Pope infallible (on his own and not by virtue of Church consensus, as specified in the 1870 dogma) or not? He may not be fallible and infallible at the same time, as it would happen if the two churches were still part of the same Church. One of the two must be wrong.
But Vatican II allowed a great freedom of opinions…
you may answer. Yet this is a sophism. The true Church may not fall in error. If you believe that your Church has erred, or that She is actually erring, you deny that She is the true Church.
I embrace you with unchanged friendship and love in Christ.
Gregorio.
(PS. For the record, Father Gregorio Cognetti told me that the recipient of this letter, soon afterwards, converted himself to Orthodoxy — he is now a tonsured reader of the O.C.A. in Florida — and that this letter was a major factor in his conversion)
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Study Finds More Converts Than Expected
by Nicole Neroulias
A new study of Orthodox Christians in America has found a larger-than-expected number of converts, mostly from Roman Catholic and evangelical Protestant backgrounds.
The report, released by the Patriarch Athenagoras Orthodox Institute in Berkeley, Calif., surveyed 1,000 members of Greek Orthodox or Orthodox Church in America congregations, which represent about 60 percent of America’s estimated 1.2 million Orthodox Christians.
Although Orthodox churches were historically immigrant communities, the study found that nine out of 10 parishioners are now American-born. Thousands of members had converted to the faith as adults: 29 percent of Greek Orthodox are converts, as are 51 percent of the OCA.
“I would not have expected this many,”
said Alexei Krindatch, the Orthodox Institute’s research director.
“My sense was that in Greek Orthodox, it would be around 15 percent, and OCA maybe one-third.”
The study also found unexpectedly high numbers of converts among clergy — 56 percent in the OCA, 14 percent in the Greek Orthodox church. In both cases, the higher OCA numbers reflect that group’s use of English in its worship services, he added.
These findings could mean that Orthodox churches are growing in America, assuming there aren’t equal or greater numbers of Orthodox Christians leaving for other faiths; researchers won’t know until they conduct a 2010 membership census. The findings, however, indicate that other Christians are increasingly seeking a more traditional worship experience, Krindatch said.
“In the case of Roman Catholics, those are mainly people who are not quite happy with the reforms of the Second Vatican Council; they are looking for the Catholic Church as it used to be in the past,”
he said.
“In the case of evangelical Christians, those are people who have very strong personal beliefs, they know the Bible very well, they are frequent churchgoers, and eventually they want to join an established church with deep, historical roots.”
Compared to a 2005 study of American Catholics, the survey found more Orthodox Christians responding that they could not imagine belonging to another faith group, and fewer agreeing that how a person lives is more important than his or her religious affiliation.
“In all possible measures, belonging to a church is more important to Orthodox than Catholics,” Krindatch said.
The study’s other findings showed a majority of Orthodox Christians would support allowing married bishops, but not female priests. They also want their clergy to work with their Catholic and Protestant counterparts to coordinate a common date for Easter, which typically falls several weeks later for the Orthodox due to their use of an older liturgical calendar.
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On the Search for Faith and Orthodoxy in the USA
—Many scientists consider it impossible to believe in God. However, you are a man of science, and at the same time a believer…
—I came to the conviction that behind everything in the world stands Divine providence. Nothing happens by chance.
I rely on concrete data. We cannot close our eyes to the billions of miracles happening every day—the miracles that are truly everywhere around us. You go to church or travel to Mt. Athos and everywhere you hear about miracles. They can’t be just the fruit of speculation and fantasy. What, are millions of people throughout the whole world lying, as if they’re all part of an international organized disinformation structure? Why would they lie?
Every year, they send hundreds of photos to St. Anne’s Skete on Athos, of babies born to infertile couples that prayed at the wonderworking icon and relics of St. Anne. There is a huge volume with descriptions of these miracles, which happened not many centuries ago, but in our time.
A scientist should be able to explain what happens around him. A man of science doesn’t have the right to dismiss what doesn’t fit his longstanding ideas. To explain all miraculous supernatural events as coincidence and chance is anti-scientific. The most logical and sound explanation of what happens is the existence of the Triune God. When you accept this, then you will see that there are many striking phenomena, such as the creation of unceasing mental prayer. Moreover, you find yourself on the path of happiness, where God is love. Who would we have become if we didn’t have Christ?
—Tell us about your connections with the Holy Mountain.
—I try to go to Mt Athos every time I go to Greece, sometimes two or three times. There is a wondrous tranquility on Mt. Athos and in many places in Greece.
Athos immerses you in the mystical life and teaches prayer.
Elder Ephraim of Philotheou
—You are fortunate to be acquainted with Elder Ephraim of Philotheou. Tell us about your impression…
On the Search for Faith and Orthodoxy in the U.S.—I’ve been to the monastery the elder built in Arizona1 a few times. I’ve also visited other monasteries in the U.S. opened by Elder Ephraim of Philotheou (there’s twenty in all).
I’ve had the opportunity to speak with him a few times. I didn’t know St. Paisios or St. Porphyrios, but I’m happy that the Lord deemed me worthy of the chance to meet Elder Ephraim.
—Are there people who live the spiritual life in the U.S.?
—Greek Orthodox churches are full.
But then, does everyone who goes to church lead a spiritual life? I seriously doubt it. Elder Moses the Athonite wrote a good book about it. I have largely the same impression as he—many things in American Orthodoxy are alien to me. They use electric organs in the churches2 (which for me is unthinkable), many people commune without any kind of preparation, and they don’t live spiritual lives.
Churches have turned into clubs and community centers.
You can often find priests without beards and with Catholic elements to their garb.
The most grievous thing is the apostasy in dogmatic issues. I’ve been told that Catholics are allowed to commune in Orthodox parishes on the West coast. Inconceivable! An Orthodox can be blessed to marry a Lutheran under the pretense that she was baptized in the name of the Holy Trinity.
Many justify such precedents of condescension. But you can go very far astray this way.
The Paterikon contains the words of one elder: “Sin begins with a white lie.” According to him, large stones cannot fill up a container, but tiny bits of sand can fill it to the brim.
I rejoice when I meet priests who have not departed from Orthodoxy. Elder Ephraim of Philotheou does not accept such modernism and vociferously condemns it. It has caused definite friction with some representatives of the higher clergy, but someone has to stay on top of things and call a spade a spade.
On the other hand, I have met people who lead true spiritual lives. I have noticed there is a thirst for Orthodoxy in the world. Many Protestants and Catholics are coming to Orthodoxy because they crave spirituality, which their own doctors cannot give them. Western Christianity has degenerated.
Orthodoxy is not just going to church once a week on Sundays. We possess a great spiritual treasure—the Jesus Prayer, asceticism, prostrations, fasting…
I am certain that we must separate from Catholics and Protestants and not try to become like them. No compromises!
Many scientists in the U.S. are beginning to turn to Orthodoxy. They are reading the Paterikon and other Patristic texts. In Greece, we sometimes criticize the Church and priests, but we need to begin to peer into the depths of our own souls and to correct ourselves. A garden has both thorns and flowers. The real truth is standing in front of us—it is Christ. God is love. Can there be anything higher than to live in love? Dostoyevsky said that without God, everything is permitted. Perhaps the disorder and confusion of the modern world is due to the fact that we have lost all rules, values, and orientation?
—What would you like to say to young people about religion and Christianity?
—May God grant that all people would look at life rightly, that starting every new day we would say to ourselves, “Today I will try to give love,” and that we would strive to curb sin. Let us try not to deceive anyone—neither our neighbors, nor the state. If we try to act this way, our homeland will come out of this quagmire.
George Daliaris spoke with Prof. Nikos Stergiou
Translated by Jesse Dominick
AgionOros.ru
6/16/2017
http://orthochristian.com
AgionOros.ru has offered its readers an interview with the world-famous scientist and author of much innovative research Nikos Stergiou. Prof. Stergiou is the dean of the Biomechanics Department of Nebraska University Omaha.
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Father Thomas Carroll, Ireland: From Irish Soldier to Orthodox Priest
By Christos Mouzeviris
Father Thomas Carroll is a 70-year-old priest in Dublin, Ireland.
He grew up rural county Tipperary, in a family with strong military ties. His father fought in Gallipoli, while his great uncle was at the battle of Thessalonica during the first World War.
Growing up in a Catholic secondary school, he felt called to take holy orders but was told he was not ready, so he followed the family tradition and joined the military.
“We seem to be a family that was always involved militarily. There was discipline among us, but the rules were not too strict. Yet, I could never consider myself a free spirit,” he recalls.
It was while serving in Cyprus with the UN in the 1960s that Father Carroll’s life, vocation and future were set on a path that led him to a narrow brick-built church in the centre of Dublin. A church which stands out from others in the city because of richly gilded decorated screen which separates the altar from the nave, but also because it is orthodox.
To prevent its servicemen being influenced in anyway, the UN did not permit any interaction between them and either communities. However, Father Thomas could not entirely follow the discipline, that both the peace keeping forces and his family have edified him.
“I had a few acquaintances with Cypriots, but the only person that I had a lot of communication with, was a Greek orthodox priest in a village,” he recounts. Father Thomas would meet up with him on a regular basis, to talk about theology and argue regarding everything around it.
“We often could not agree on anything, but he left a lasting impression on me,” he continues.
That prompted him to explore the Orthodox religion further, but when he returned to Ireland there were only a handful of Greeks and Cypriots living in the country. They did not have an established community, so nobody could help him.
It was only when the Archbishop of Great Britain Methodios, established the first parish in Ireland in 1981, that became possible for him to talk to people with the same interest.
Prior to this he had contacted the Greek Orthodox archdioceses in London, but nobody responded to his letters. “They probably thought that I was some guy seeking only information,” Father Thomas says.
When the parish has been established by Methodios, a friend happened to mention it to him by chance. He then got around there straightaway, but it took him another 5 years before he decided to make the “big jump” and convert.
“I eventually became an Orthodox in 1986, so I do not do anything in a hurry as you see,” he jokes. “But after that, I was committed. I took early retirement from my job in 1996 and went to study theology for 5 years.”
After the conclusion of his studies, he initially served as a deacon for four years in his new parish, before eventually becoming a priest. And to him it is a vocation, not his profession.
Ultimately, it was the outward portrayal and the beautiful liturgies of the orthodox dogma, that attracted him to it.
“I came from the tradition that initially the Catholic Church came from, with many similarities in liturgy and rituals. But after the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council in the ‘60s, everything changed and became more simplified,” the priest explains.
For Father Thomas, the traditional poignant ceremonies had been stripped from the Catholic faith. Services had become to some extend “protestantized” in the method of worship, minimalised. So, he realised that it was not for him.
This inevitably left a big hole in his spiritual life, that he couldn’t relate to this new situation in the Catholic Church.
“This is where Orthodoxy entered my life and gave me something tangible to hold on to. Something about the church itself, its layout, the rituals even the smell of incense, would grab you straight away,” he describes.
At the time, among the Orthodox community in Ireland, there were about 20 nationalities. The original parish was founded for all orthodox Christians within the island of Ireland, regardless of any jurisdictions.
As immigration increased into Ireland, many of these new arrivals established their own communities and Father Thomas’ parish eventually became primarily Greek. The community has grown in recent years due to the increasing emigration from Greece, thus the future of his parish looks secure.
For Father Thomas, a church is a living thing and must adapt to society, rather than society adapting to it. Another reason why he admires the Greek Orthodox Church, is because it reaches out to every nationality.
“All Greek orthodox archdioceses in the UK, have up to 30% clergy that is non-Greek, thus the liturgies are commonly English speaking. Other jurisdictions like the Romanian or Russian, are operating in their language solely for their own people,” he says.
The priest believes that breaking down language and nationality barriers is very important for a modern religion, especially when attracting young individuals.
Otherwise they could be at the mercy of fundamentalist evangelical churches, while others may become attracted to radical Islam. “They are giving them something to live for, when often they have nothing,” claims Father Thomas.
He is the only one who converted to Greek orthodoxy in his family. “It did not make any difference to most of them, but I think today they would be happy with my choices,” he says.
“If you asked me how Ireland is responding to a church of different dogma about 50 years ago, there would be quite hostile reaction to it. Now nobody cares. At the last count, there were about 130 different religions the country, most of them established during the past 15 years,” Father Thomas explains.
About 50% of those are ethnic African churches. “But the people of Ireland are accepting all religions in their country now. Maybe the reason is that most of them do not go to the church themselves,” he continues.
“Young people particularly, who are carrying on the catholic faith in Ireland, have absolutely no animosity to anybody outside this tradition,” he concludes.
Father Thomas is one example of a man, who did not just follow a religion due to family, community or national traditions. He researched, reached out and when the time was right, he found what was best for him.
IRE2
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US Protestants are converting to Orthodoxy in large numbers
Another movement that the media fails to bring to your attention: the massive conversions of Protestants to Eastern Orthodoxy, the original form of Christianity.
More than 79% of clergy in Orthodox Churches were previously pastors of various denominations. There have been cases of entire parishes converting to Orthodoxy.
As some pastors-turned-priests explain, the switch is the 'natural' result of spiritual barrenness and dissatisfaction, as Protestant denominations adopt liberal stances and values, for example, legitimizing homosexuality.
These departures from normal Christian morals disappoint people and they start looking for the True Church.
The turning point was 1987 when 2,000 evangelicals from the Dallas Theological Seminary in Texas converted to Christianity.
A Russian bishop, Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeev, interviewed towards the end of the video, explains:
"Now in Protestant Churches and the Church of England, processes are taking place which bring believers to the question: Does it even make sense to remain in such a church?
I must say straight out that we do not consider the Protestant Church and the Church of England to be "Churches' in the true sense of the word. Because they don't have, probably the most essential characteristics of the Christian Church. They don't have the true comprehension of the sacraments, they've lost the Apostolic succession of hierarchy. And for the past 10 years, they have undergone such a horrifying process of liberalization that traditional Christian morality is not preached any longer in their churches".
INS.
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Arizona: "Peace at Last" - Father Ephraim (Antony - Frank Atwood) before his funeral
Father Ephraim (Frank Antony Atwood) prepared for his funeral in his monk's habit. May our Lord give him Eternal rest.
The state of Arizona executed Frank Atwood by lethal injection yesterday at the state prison in Florence. Atwood, 66, was sentenced in 1987 for the kidnapping and murder of an 8-year-old girl in Pima County, Vicki Lynne Hoskinson.
“Today marks final justice for our daughter Vicki Lynne. Our family has waited 37 years, eight months and 22 days for this day to come,” Debbie Carlson, Vicki Lynne's mother, said while choking back tears during the media briefing following the execution. “Vicki was a vibrant little girl with an infectious laugh and a smile that would melt your heart.”
According to Frank Strada, Arizona Department of Corrections director, this is Frank Atwood's final statement, first addressing Elder Paisios from the nearby Saint Anthony's Monastery who accompanied him to his execution:
“Thank you, precious Father, for coming today and shepherding me into faith. I want to thank my beautiful wife who has loved me with everything she has. I want to thank my friends and legal team, and most of all, Jesus Christ through this unfair judicial process that led to my salvation. I pray the Lord will have mercy on all of us and that the Lord will have mercy on me.”
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ARIZONA: FRANK ATWOOD, WHO WAS TONSURED A MONK WITH THE NAME EPHRAIM, HAS BEEN EXECUTED
June 8, 2022
It was confirmed not long ago that Frank Atwood was executed this morning by the State of Arizona through lethal injection. Atwood was sedated at 10:10 a.m. and was pronounced dead at 10:16 a.m., media witnesses said. He was 66 years old, having been sentenced in 1987 for the kidnapping and murder of an 8-year-old girl in Pima County, Vicki Lynne Hoskinson. Frank maintained his innocence till the end.
“Today marks final justice for our daughter Vicki Lynne. Our family has waited 37 years, eight months and 22 days for this day to come,” Debbie Carlson, Vicki Lynne's mother, said while choking back tears during the media briefing following the execution. “Vicki was a vibrant little girl with an infectious laugh and a smile that would melt your heart.”
According to Frank Strada, Arizona Department of Corrections director, this is Frank Atwood's final statement, first addressing Elder Paisios from the nearby Saint Anthony's Monastery who accompanied him to his execution:
“Thank you, precious Father, for coming today and shepherding me into faith. I want to thank my beautiful wife who has loved me with everything she has. I want to thank my friends and legal team, and most of all, Jesus Christ through this unfair judicial process that led to my salvation. I pray the Lord will have mercy on all of us and that the Lord will have mercy on me.”
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Orthodoxy Has A Great Future In Guatemala
Conversation with Abbess Ines, head of the Holy Trinity Monastery in Guatemala
Abbess Ines (Ayau Garcia) – Abbess Ines is the head of the only Orthodox parish in Guatemala – the Monastery of the Holy and Life-Giving Trinity, the “Lavra of Mambre”, under the Patriarchate of Antioch. She comes from an influential and well known family in Guatemala which has produced many outstanding individuals. When [then Catholic] Sister Ines was 36 years old, she made an extreme change in her life, leaving a Catholic monastic order and becoming an Orthodox nun.
Holy Trinity Monastery was founded by Mother Ines and Sister Maria Amistoso in April of 1986. In 1989, the engineer Federico Bauer donated a piece of land on the shores of Lake Amatitlan, not far from Guatemala City, to the monastery. The land is 1188 meters [about 3900 feet] above sea level and is located near Pacaya, one of the most active volcanoes in Central America.
On the day of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker in 1995, the “Act of Creating an Orthodox Church in Guatemala” was signed by Bishop (now Metropolitan) Antonio Chedraoui of Mexico, Venezuela, Central America and the Caribbean (of the Antiochian Patriarchate), and also by the head of the monastery, Mother Ines and her nuns, and 25 parishioners.
Buildings rose on the site donated by Federico Bauer and the consecration of the monastery took place in November, 2007, with 18 participating clerics, who came to Guatemala especially for this occasion.
The iconography in the Monastery church is being done by Russian masters from the International School of Icon Painting, based both in the town of Kostroma in Russia and in the USA.
In 1996, the government of Guatemala gave the monastery control of an orphanage built to house 800 children, the “House of Rafael Ayau” in the country’s capital, Guatemala City. At present they have just over 100 boys and girls – from newborn babies to 16 year old adolescents. The workers at the orphanage give the children a high-school education and familiarize them with basic Orthodox concepts. They also give them professional skills. Soon, the orphanage will be moved to the monastery.
In February of 1997, the church of the Transfiguration of the Lord was blessed in the orphanage building. In the absence of a priest, the services are led by a reader [called Reader’s Services]. Two children’s choirs sing antiphonally, where one choir sings one stanza, and then the other choir sings the next stanza. The exclamations and the dismissal are read by Mother Ines. The parish is made up of Guatemalans, Arabs, Greeks, Russians, and Ukrainians.
Holy Trinity Monastery has fairly large agricultural holdings, where rabbits and fish are raised and vegetables are grown. All that they produce goes to the orphanage.
In July of 2009, Mother Ines came to Russia to visit the holy places and to broaden her ties to the Russian Orthodox Church. The Abbess was accompanied Sister Maria and two teenagers from the orphanage.
This conversation with Mother Ines took place during that visit, on a trip from Sretensky Monastery to the Holy Trinity-St. Sergius Lavra. [lavra: a large monastery]
– Mother Ines, how did you become acquainted with the Orthodox faith?
– When I was 20 years old, I became a Catholic nun, and entered a monastery under the order of the Dormition of the Holy Theotokos. They gave me to read the conversations of St. Seraphim of Sarov with Nicholas Motovilov, and the texts of the Orthodox Liturgy. What I read astonished me to the depths of my soul. One of the nuns showed me several Orthodox icons, including a reproduction of Andrei Rublev’s “Holy Trinity.” I was interested, and I burned with a desire to find the roots of all of this. From that time, I began saying the “Jesus Prayer” [“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner”].
I studied theology for ten years – with the Salezians in Guatemala, with the monks of the Holy Spirit in Mexico, with the famous theologian Jean Daniélou in France, and with the Jesuits in Belgium and El Salvador. I continued to be bothered by one question: where are the treasures to be found that I came across at the beginning of my Monastic life? Once, in Brussels, the nun who was in charge of my spiritual growth brought me to a Russian Paschal [Easter] service. It was held in a chapel on the second floor of a private home, but even then, I did not find an answer to my question.
I did not want to serve in Latin America: in those years, because of the spread of “liberation theology”, Church-government relations had become seriously strained. I received permission to go to the Philippines. There, to my amazement, I met more Sisters of the Dormition, who were seeking the same thing I was. We found out about Eastern Rite Catholics, and considered reforming our community to use the Eastern Rite. Unfortunately, most of the Sisters left, and several got married. Only the native-Philippine Sister Maria and I remained. The nuns of my order, which has great influence in the Philippines, asked me to leave the country, because they thought I was spreading revolutionary sentiments.
I went to Jerusalem, where I finally came into contact with real Orthodoxy. Sister Maria came to me from the Philippines, and together we traveled across the Holy Land, started to learn different liturgical services, and talked to priests.
– How did your family take your conversion to Orthodoxy?
– My father is a very educated person, but when I told him that I want to join Orthodoxy, he said “What do you mean? This does not exist in nature!” Nevertheless, our conversation intrigued him. In a few weeks, Dad went to Turkey. When he got there, he hailed a cab, and told the taxi to take him to an Orthodox church where he could see an Orthodox service. After that, he went by ship to the Holy Land, where he did the same thing. From that time, Orthodoxy became for him a reality.
My mother supported my decision right away. She was interested in Russia, and read a lot about it. She read a book about the activities of the Russian Orthodox Church in Alaska with great interest. When the Antiochian Bishop Antonio Chedraoui, during his first visit to Guatemala, received some Arabs into Orthodoxy, my mother also went forward and was received into the Orthodox Church through chrismation. Later, my father also became Orthodox.
– How did you join the Antiochian Church?
– Sister Mary and I decided to form an Orthodox monastery in Guatemala. On our way from Israel, we stopped in the Swiss town of Chambésy [not far from Geneva], where we visited Metropolitan Damaskenos Papandreu of Switzerland (Patriarchate of Constantinople). He blessed the opening of our Monastery, and said that we had to join a jurisdiction of one of the Orthodox patriarchates. To do this was not easy. The Orthodox Churches that had a presence in Latin America then did not have a particular interest in the local population. The Patriarchate of Constantinople served the Greeks, the Patriarchate of Antioch – Arabs, the Russian Patriarchate – Russians. Only after asking for ten years did we get accepted by the Antiochian Church’s Metropolitan Antonio (Cherdaoui).
For the registration of a parish, we needed 25 signatures of Guatemalan citizens. We did not have that many parishioners. So my relatives, the relatives of another nun, Sister Ivonne, and our friends also signed the petition.
– Why did your community choose the ancient Russian style when building your church?
– We sincerely love Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church. The crosses on our cupolas are Byzantine, but everything else is Russian: the architecture, the icons, and the frescos. People, when they see the Russian cupolas, understand right away that there is an Orthodox church before them. Our parish keeps to Russian traditions in the services, keeps to the Julian calendar; and the nuns wear the Russian monastic habit.
– Where is the monastery?
– We built the monastery 20 kilometers [about 12½ miles] from Guatemala City, on the top of a hill. Around us there are woods, and not far away, Lake Amatitlan. It is a very beautiful place, although it’s true that it is not entirely fitting for a holy monastery because we are so close to the city and come across the problems that exist in any suburb of a large Latin American city–overpopulation and the drug trade.
–How large is the Sisterhood?
– Three nuns live in the monastery. Besides me, there is Sister Maria Amistoso, who is a native of the Philippines, and Sister Ivonne Sommerkramp who came to the monastery five years after it was founded. She is a Guatemalan with German roots. Earlier, we had more nuns.
– Who performs services?
– We do not have a permanent priest yet. Two times a month, groups of missionaries and volunteers come from places such as the USA, Norway, Japan and other countries; and those groups always have a priest. Russian priests have also been with us: Protopriest Basil Movchanuk – head of the church of Sts. Peter and Paul in Yartsevo, in the Smolensk region; and Protopriest Igor Kropochev – a helper for the missionary department of the Kemerovo diocese.
–Tell us about the monastery’s orphanage please.
– Our orphanage, the oldest and largest in our country, is located right in the heart of Guatemala City. My ancestor, Rafael Ayau, organized it in 1857. He was a philanthropist, and a very pious person. Monks from the charity organization “Caridad” took control of the orphanage from [my ancestor] don Rafael when he, from France, invited them to do so. In 1960, the government deported the members of “Caridad”, and the government itself took over the care of the orphanage. After 40 years, President Alvaro Arsu handed over control of the orphanage, which was in terrible shape, to our monastery. It is unlikely that any other politician would have done that; they are afraid of Orthodox people. Arsu was not afraid, because there were some Orthodox people in his family.
Because of changes in the social laws, our orphanage began to look more like a boarding school. In twelve years, over 1000 children from poor and underprivileged families have gone through our orphanage. All of them are raised in the Orthodox spirit. Many of them return to their parents, but do not break their ties to the monastery, and continue to go to liturgy on Sundays. Over 300 of our orphans have been adopted by Orthodox families, mostly in the USA.
The Russian ambassador to Guatemala, Nicholas Vladimir, had told me that the Russian government grants stipends for higher education in Russia to young people from other countries, and we have taken advantage of that opportunity. Two of our children, Reina and Edgar Rolando, have come with us to Moscow. They will start studying Information [Computer] Science and Engineering at a Russian university in September.
– How are your monastery’s relations with the Catholic Church?
– We have a warm, friendly attitude towards them, but the Catholic Church has been quietly waging war against us, warily, secretly. For example, after we sent our petition to register the parish with the [Guatemalan] Ministry of Foreign Affairs, we did not know what happened to it for several years. When President Arsu asked the monastery to take the orphanage under its wing, I said that we could not do it, because we did not officially exist. The President entrusted his lawyer with solving the problem. As it turned out, our documents had been located in the curia the entire time; Catholics had spirited them away. Fortunately, President Arsu then gave the Holy Trinity Parish the status of a jurisdictional body by special decree.
Protestant denominations, of which there are hundreds now, do not worry the Catholics. Orthodoxy puts fear into them. There are several reasons for this, but, the biggest reason is that the Catholic hierarchy fears that the Orthodox Church will convert some of their flock. The Cardinal of Guatemala admitted this to the Russian ambassador.
Nonetheless, it is impossible to escape contact with the Catholic Church. Catholicism dominates Guatemala. My father is a public person; I was a Catholic nun for 16 years; the Cardinal is the cousin of my godfather, and has known me since childhood.
–What are Orthodoxy’s prospects in Guatemala, in your opinion?
– I am convinced that Orthodoxy has a great future in our country. Two priests, one 20 years ago, and another recently, [unofficially] converted to Orthodoxy from Catholicism, and brought their flocks with them. In total, that is over 100,000 people. They consider themselves Orthodox, though they have not been officially joined to the Orthodox Church, and, from my observations, know very little of Eastern Christianity. Among them are Ladinos (descendants of the Spanish) and Indians. Both groups intend to ask for entrance into the Russian Orthodox Church.
– What are your impressions of Russia from your visit?
– I have no words to describe the feelings that I have when I am here. I am astonished by everything: the architecture, and the interior decoration of the churches and monasteries, the architecture of the cities and towns, the nature [flora and fauna]… I especially notice the piety of the people, their deep faith, which they have preserved through decades of the godless Communist regime.
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An Unforgettable Baptism in Taiwan
In Tainan
Fr. Jonah Mourtos
November 18, 2009
Fragrance of Asia
This past Friday I went to Tainan, a large city of Taiwan. A Christian of ours urged me to go see a couple. The husband, around 42 years old, undergoes a kidney dialysis every week! The doctor told him he has no chance of living beyond ten years. This is the tenth year.
This Christian happened to meet them somewhere, and gave them the book The Way of a Pilgrim (it was translated by Catholics a while ago and recently republished). It should be noted that this couple were not Christians, and as the majority here they do not have a religion. In their younger years they went to the typical temples of idols as do all the Chinese. Slowly the book inspired them to start praying noetically, and this began to change them. The husband told me it gives him deep peace and calmness.
They had prepared a table for me in the office of their small company. I marvelled at their love. The wife had done everything in her power to bear the burdens of the office in order for her husband to peacefully do his work. They work together, you understand. They have two children.
They also bought a Holy Bible, but they didn’t know where to begin, so they started reading the Acts of the Apostles!
They deeply moved me. Naturally, they were willing for me to read a prayer for the sick, and I wore my epitracheli (stole). In fact, the husband makes sketches out of the stories of the Holy Bible and he explains them to his 2-3 employees during break time! See below the story of Job! I thought it very unbecoming to take pictures of them, but I was touched and took a photo of this one.
I explained to them that God was not playing with the devil, making Job suffer without purpose, but the opposite, showing forth Job as a teacher of angels, men and even demons what it means to love God….
We spoke of noetic prayer. I told them that if they want me to come every one or two weeks to talk, to read from the book together, provided that they would pay me nothing, I would go completely for free, which is something unheard of here, as every pastor takes something. I told them on Saturdays, but the husband does his kidney dialysis then. I await their reply, and I ask that you pray for them, and for the health of the husband, and that at sometime they be baptized. I don’t even know their name. I await their reply and your prayers.
An Unforgettable Baptism
Fr. Jonah Mourtos
February 26, 2011
Fragrance of Asia
Yesterday, Friday, we went to Tainan to baptize a couple. I had written of them in an old post dated November 18, 2009.
A few months ago these blessed people invited me. They felt the need to become Orthodox! I asked them why. They told me they felt like they loved someone and they desire to marry Him. Now is the end of hesitations.
I taught them twice a week through Skype and I visited them often. (See, this is why I write so little as I have no time). In the end we decided for the baptism to take place on a Friday after their work.
They confessed, but I cried. They had no sins! Such rare people.
The husband does kidney dialysis twice a week for the past ten years. It was not possible for them to come to Taipei. Besides, one year ago when we met the doctor told them that the husband didn’t have any life left, but God gave it to Him.
They live by selling photovoltaics. See the photos. In the office reception room they have a Gospel book! How many companies do you know that do this?
We did everything together during the Divine Liturgy, as was the order in the ancient Church:
Dedication
Beginning of Liturgy
Entrance
Baptism-Chrismation
Wedding
Trisagion (“All who have been baptized…”)
Readings for a wedding and baptism
Great Entrance
Holy Communion
Dance of Isaiah around the small table which was the holy altar and holy communion, as in the ancient Church.
I was very moved and afraid because when I took the hand of the husband I felt the plastic tubes he had for veins…how would I do the triple circle procession? The same for the “All who have been baptized….”
Yet it happened and he felt better. Afterwards they had a dinner. The restaurant was called “Eureka” as you can see, but nobody knew why.
We missed the quick train. We returned to Taipei at four in the morning with the bus. Naturally, I will go very frequently to do a Liturgy.
Their names are:
Tien Hen (husband)
Li Tsin (wife)
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December 2009 – A Historical Day In Fiji
Wednesday the 16th December 2009, the feast day of Saint Porphyrios of Aigaiou, Theophane of Basilissa and Medestos Patriarch of Jerusalem. Eight o’clock in the morning. T he contractor and his team are taking the blessing and are beginning to measure and put the indicator markers for the foundation so as to follow the design of the Church of Saint Paraskevi in the yard of the Missionary Center in Sambeto, Nandi. The day before yesterday the Cyclone passed with its frightful momentum and its incessant rains which transformed all the surrounding meadows into lakes, harassing the trees and animals and forcing the birds to hide in their dens, carrying away some men to death and leaving many areas for many days in darkness due to the loss of electrical power. Now, however, a boundless calm is spread everywhere. The clear-blue sky and the warm sun remind man, whose life returns to its normal rhythm, of the first days after the flood of Noah. The yards and surrounding trees are full of birds which fly joyfully and please their listeners with their sweet chirping. Today is very beautiful and joyful. Nothing is by accident. The first Orthodox Church in Fiji is founded in the heart of the Pacific Ocean. The elements of nature participate in their own way with our own joy, so that with much gratitude we thank and glorify our all-powerful and gift-giving God, honouring and magnifying as well His holy martyr Paraskevi, whose name and joy will from today be imprinted beautifully on this place of retreat. Archbishop of New Zealand, † Amfilochios
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Newly Baptized in the Fiji Islands
Four young Fijian girls adopted the Orthodox faith and were baptized at the Missionary Center of the Holy Metropolis of New Zealand in Fiji.
His Eminence Metropolitan Amfilochios assisted Archimandrite Fr. Christodoulos and the Priest Father Bartholomew in completing the Baptisms.
The Newly-illumined received the names Maria, Anastasia and Sophronia. May the holy name of our Lord Jesus Christ be glorified.
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One Soul-Stirring Experience (Fiji)
Everything seemed fine from the moment when we entered the catamaran and, leaving behind us the port of Nandi, we began to approach one after another beautiful little islands with pure-white beaches and tropical vegetation. Until, that is, we arrived at Yasawa, Ira Ira, the island of our newly-illumined sister Sophronia.
The boat was full of passengers, white tourists and brown natives, the former going to spend summer vacations the latter returning with supplies from Nandi. The Captain and crew, all natives, were completely organized and very well mannered. We looked admiringly at every island with its picturesque barges dancing upon the waves as they came alongside the boat in order to pick up and transport passengers and their baggage.
I was thinking that this was the method on the smaller islands and that for our own larger island, just as it appeared on the brochure, there would be some platform for the boat to draw alongside. Contrary to my expectation, when we arrived we saw that here as well the barges would come and take passengers and baggage and then depart quickly in the same way. They were going to Yasawa, Ira Ira.
We disembarked into one of these barges following the same procedure as the preceding boats. Our own boat was more slow-moving and therefore we couldn’t see the other boats which had passed around the cape. We were eight people inside the boat. The further we progressed the more I was thinking the Pacific Ocean was showing us its true colours. The wind began to blow with force and the waves of the sea were swelling dangerously and were literally roaring as they relentlessly hit up against the side of our boat splashing us with their salty contents. Now, however, we saw that we were passing one cape after another and the port was nowhere to be seen; we began to worry.
From the very salty water our eyes were burning unbearably and I could not see in front of me, perhaps from my little experience I would have said something to the boatman in order to assist him. He himself could not have had clear vision since he was often spreading his hand in order to take the water from his eyes.
By now we were in the open sea which necessarily we should have had to pass in order to arrive at the opposite shore where I was suspecting the port and the village of our destination would be. I began to get uneasy. The only refuge in similar circumstances is prayer. I chanted secretly the Paraklesis of our Panaghia believing that she would not leave us unprotected. “To whom else shall I flee o Pure one? And to whom else shall I run for help and be saved? Where shall I go, and where shall I find a safe retreat?” (Words from the Great Paraklesis to the Most Holy Virgin)
We approached with much effort the beach while not seeing either a port or a village. We would have to pass many more capes in order to hear from Presbytera Lydia that behind the next cape was the village. However, it was not the next cape, but rather the one after the next. After four hours struggling with the waves we finally arrived at the end of our trip. We disembarked from the boat half-swimming because there was no platform or plank, only one pure-white beach which was covered with trees providing a deep-shade.
This is the village of our newly-illumined Sophronia. I consider how for her joy and the joy of her family and her three-hundred fellow villagers who welcomed us with special joy and honour and offered us hospitality that the weariness of our arduous journey was worth it. Orthodoxy imprinted its footprint here on this remote island of the Pacific.
May the name of the Lord be glorified.
March 2010 – News from the Monastery (New Zealand)
The last several weeks have seen, with the help and grace of God, the construction of the churches of the Holy Archangels and Saint Basileios in the Monastery of our Holy Metropolis.
Recently the frame has been finished and we are awaiting now the weatherboard, the roof, electrical installation and the plumbing.
Thanks to the hard work and sacrifice of all those who evolved we expect to celebrate the Divine Mysteries inside our newly erected churches in the next two months.
God willing another spring of life and renewal is being planted, by the right hand of our good God, in New Zealand.
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December 2009 – The Baptism of an Orthodox Maori (New Zealand)
“Today let companies of High Priests in spirit leap for joy, as with us they honour your memory, venerable Hierarch Chrysostom, illuminary of the Church.“
We thank the Triune God for the limitless gifts which he offers to us every day. One such gift was received on this day by as many of us who met inside the Holy Parish of Saint Demetrios in the city of Hastings.
Today the first Orthodox Maori was baptized. Archimandrite Father Christodoulos and Hieromonk Ioakeim completed first the holy mystery of baptism of the Maori—Micheal, and later the holy mystery of marriage for Michael and his Greek wife Ephigenia.
Later in the evening our joy was completed with the baptism of their three children: Stephanos, Sophia and Athanasios.
We welcome our newly baptized brothers into the Great Church of Christ, may His holy name be glorified.
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Saint Nicholas Kasatkin of Japan (+1912) and the conversion of the Samurai
Despite Saint Nicholas’ fondness for Japanese culture, the Japanese were quite xenophobic at that time and it was very difficult being a foreigner. At one point, while Nicholas was still studying, the samurai Sawabe Takuma came to the Saint’s home and pulled his sword, telling him he was going to kill him before he could start his preaching. St Nicholas Kasatkin responded to this threat of violence with peace. He asked the samurai why he was going to kill him before he knows what he will preach. Saint Nicholas proposed that the two sit together so that he might explain his message to Sawabe. Then at the end, if Sawabe does not like it, he may kill Saint Nicholas. The honourable samurai agreed. By the end of the conversation, Sawabe was convinced of the truth of Christianity and became the first convert, and eventually the first Japanese Orthodox priest.
http://apantaortodoxias.blogspot.com/2021/02/saint-nicholas-of-japan-and-conversion.html
ΥΤ. INS
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The Uncreated Map: Christ as the Light of Yoga
Fr. Joseph Magnus Frangipani, Alaska, USA
I’m reminded of pilgrims at the Himalayan foothills seeking passage around the icy mouth of the Ganges River. Among these hikers were two very different men, one an intelligent geologist and the other a simple backpacker.
The geologist put every trust in his mind.
As he told others, “I know all there is about the composition of mountains and valleys. I know how they’re formed and why they’re here. Look, I understand everything and really don’t need backcountry camping lessons, nor do I have time to get in shape for this journey.”
So, he left unprepared, but very confident for the hard journey ahead.
Meanwhile, the simple backpacker didn’t count on his intelligence alone. Rather, he worked out every day, getting his body into good health, also while getting to know the locals who passed through these mountains. He learned where to find shelter, what places and people to avoid, and knew precisely where he was going. He was very humble about this undertaking.
At the first snowstorm the first man panicked. He forgot all about geology and his journey grew difficult and painful. The simpler man, however, brought to mind what he learned from those before him, drawing on ancient wisdom and, remembering his maps, actually wound around these mountains with much effort but safely.
One man arrived from his journey to new land.
The proud man was never found.
The secret closet, man’s heart, is the starting place where we embark on this journey. It is concealed by many thorns and bushes, within the folds of our passions, thoughts and ego. Our life, then, may seem a Russian nesting doll. When Christ comes like a gardener, we may not recognize Him. Sometimes it is only when we don’t experience Him, though, that like the Prodigal Son we remember His bread and turn to face Him, which is what repentance is all about.
When we taste life apart from Him, which is not truly life but pigs and husks, we experience a foretaste of hell. This often has profound effects upon a person. One may experience a fear of God, depending of course to the degree they are oriented toward the spiritual life, and this fear encourages us to depend on His will, on His love and grace, developing humility so that entrust our minds and hearts once more to the Holy Trinity. Each time we reorient ourselves, we experience a minor death, where we can rightfully say with St. Paul, that I die daily, and that to die is to gain, for when the hour of death comes to us, we will not die, but live eternally within the Lord.
So it is perhaps helpful here to remember our soul as depicted in Church iconography, if you remember, in iconography, the soul is often portrayed as a swaddled infant held in the arms of our Father in Christ. In this way, we remember our dependence upon God and cling to our Father, leaping into His arms and carried away by His love.
In these ways, we continue uniting ourselves to Christ.
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Now, during the service of Baptism and Chrismation, we see our union with Christ expressed in no uncertain terms. For instance, after renouncing and spitting on Satan, we announce three times we’ve united ourselves to Christ. It is Orthodox baptism – and Orthodox baptism alone – which begins to fulfill the saving work of our Lord in the human person. Here, we begin restoration of the true self and recovery from a state of corruption – perhaps, we might say the ’embryo’ sparks to life.
Contrast all this against the phenomenon coined as yoga.
Whereas in the Orthodox Church we’re called to and affirm ongoing union with Christ, yoga – which means ‘yoke,’ to bind or harness yourself to something, to establish an intricate union with – is explicitly union with someone or something other than Christ.
In learned and devoted practitioner of yoga understands techniques often involve incantations to Hindu deities, physical postures named after and dedicated to Hindu gods and goddesses, and the awakening of Kundalini Shakti – a created energy represented by a coiled serpent dormant in the spine. The creator of yoga, according to yoga, is Shiva the god of destruction.
Nevertheless, in America yoga is likened to stretching but yoga is not stretching. Yoga is a physical, mental and spiritual discipline rooted in Vedic philosophy and Hindu religion. It provides tools to unlock, or rather unblock, mysterious energies very foreign to the Orthodox Christian. Stretching is merely the physical relaxation of a muscle and little, or nothing else.
In yoga, many poses have names of gods and goddesses. For example, the pose called Viranchyasana – after the Hindu deity Viranchya – is dedicated to Brahma. Vishnua is a popular god mentioned in the Vedas and there are several poses dedicated to his avatars, to his human and animal incarnations. Then there’s Ananta, a god who even took the form of a snake, and we have the Anantasana pose named after him. The snake then reincarnated into a human, into Patanjali, author of the yogic bible, the Yogic Sutras of Pantanjali.
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Many yogic body positions also directly correspond to chakras. A chakra is what we might refer to as an invisible, spiritual pressure point. In the same way we might rub a pressure point on the physical body increasing blood or lymphatic flow, yoga contends we have a subtle body, too. Yogic postures sort of massages these points, encouraging particular channels to open up thereby attracting ‘spiritual energy.’
A lot of yogis talk about how the universe, and everything within it, is in fact musical, vibratory, and relates to frequency. For example, saying a mantra gets you in touch with some beings, a guru, a god or goddess, on one frequency, in one dimension. Putting yourself into a particular asana will also put out a vibration, a calling card, attracting energy – various subtle energies, – the way we might put a light in the window attracting someone’s attention. It doesn’t matter whether we realize this or not, believe it or not, the reality is the soul and body are intricately linked.
Yogic poses, rooted in the Hindu pantheon of gods and goddess, with names of gods and goddesses, working on subtle areas of your body and mind, are dangerous. You know, perhaps we can look at yogic poses as a sort of combination to a lock. Each asana or pattern of asanas, certainly over time, are supposed may unlock various energies.
Now this is very important: in the vast world of yoga, we find many methods of ‘picking’ these locks, many back doors corresponding to varieties of hidden powers. These powers influence ourselves and others, and are known even in yoga as white magic and black magic. I was personally initiated into these arts, in the Yoga Capital of the World.
One goal within this discipline of yoga is unlocking these chakras, these gates, within the body and soul, inviting energy to climb within you. This energy is often depicted and described as a coiled snake, known as Shakti, or kundalini, and the purpose here as most everywhere in yoga is to raise this energy into the mind so we attain the realization we are identical tGod.
So what are we yoking ourselves to during yoga?
Asanas, and really all signs and patterns within yoga – especially mantras – are false lights, like those of deep sea angler fish. This reminds me. In a yoga class, it’s not unusual to hear Sanskrit mantras and sometimes be invited by instructors to chant them, especially in the beginning and at the end of the session. These mantras might not be spoken by you, but rather to you, played through music played in the background, or depicted on clothing and on temple, ashram and yoga studio walls.
Just as the sign of the Cross corresponds to the Giver of Life, Jesus Christ, signs prevalent throughout yoga correspond to the influence of Shiva, Lord of Death. These signs and patterns include diagrams and amulets supposedly possessing occult powers in astrological and magical forms, and are known as mantras, mandalas, and yantras.
As Orthodox Christians, we should never attend schools grounded in satanic philosophy. We certainly shouldn’t twist our bodies and minds into postures dedicated to satan, even if we don’t worship him. The devil himself appears as an angel of light.
Like moths, we are often attracted to false, created lights. When Christ comes like a gardener, will we recognize Him? There is only one pattern of life, one Uncreated Map for mankind, Who is the Truth, the Way, and the Life. He is the Incarnate Logos, the Christ the God-Man.
https://deathtotheworld.com/articles/the-uncreated-map-christ-as-the-light-of-yoga/
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Noted British Author Paul Kingsworth Baptized at Orthodox Monastery in Ireland
The noted British author, thinker, and activist Paul Kingsnorth was united to Christ in holy Baptism at the Romanian Orthodox monastery in Shannonbridge, Ireland, on the feast of Christ’s Baptism on January 6 this year.
“As a Western newcomer to Orthodoxy, I have a lifetime’s learning journey ahead of me, but I already feel like I have arrived home,” he commented on this momentous step.
Kingsnorth, 49, who lives in rural Galway, Ireland, is known for both his fiction books and essays on the environment, as well as the environmental-activist Dark Mountain Project, which he founded in 2009 and directed until 2017. However, he was never a materialist, like many others in the movement, he says. Instead, he has been searching for the deeper Truth for many years.
“I first discovered Christian Orthodoxy four years ago when I walked into a small church in Bucharest. That powerful experience stayed with me, but I could not have known that it would lead me on a journey that would lead to me becoming a member of the Romanian Church,”
Kingsnorth told the Basilica News Agency.
“I felt both joyful and peaceful afterwards … and cold! But a stronger sense that I had arrived somewhere I was meant to be. My reception into the Church has been a great privilege, and the [Romanian] community here in Ireland has been so welcoming to me and my family,” the writer said.
Father Tudor Ghi??, who baptized Kingsnorth, recalls that he impressed upon the famous writer that being a Christian is a never-ending work that should bring spiritual joy, deeper than the initial feelings of enthusiasm upon finding Orthodoxy.
On his own website, Kingsnorth writes that he was on a long spiritual search that led him through Zen Buddhism, Taoism, mythology, Sufism, traditionalism, Wicca, and various other practices. However, something was always missing.
He writes:
Then, in 2020, as the world was turned upside down, so was I. Unexpectedly, and initially against my will, I found myself being pulled determinedly towards Christianity. It’s a long story, which I might tell one day. Suffice it to say that I started the year as an eclectic eco-pagan with a long-held, unformed ache in my heart, and ended it a practicing Christian, the ache gone and replaced by the thing that, all along, I turned out to have been looking for. In January 2021 I was baptised and received into the Eastern Orthodox Church. I don’t know where the path leads from here, but at last I know how to walk it.
Rod Dreher, an Orthodox author and admirer of Kingsnorth, who once recommended him to read Kyriacos Markide’s The Mountain of Silence, writes that,
“Paul is different. He sees the emptiness of our mechanical civilization with much wiser and more searching eyes than Houellebecq, but he also has hope, because even before he was a Christian, Paul believed in the sacred. He sensed the presence of the divine immanent in nature. He only needed to make contact with the Source.”
In September, OrthoChristian reported that Orthodox actor and musician Jonathan Jackson moved to Ireland to help support the newly-established Monastery of the Life-Giving Spring Romanian Orthodox Monastery in Shannonbridge.
INS
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Ksenia Kim, Korea: The Greatest Gift in the World
Orthodox Korean Ksenia Kim Talks About Her Path To The Church
Today we are publishing an English translation of Fr. George Maximov’s interview with Ksenia Kim, an Orthodox Korean missionary. She talks about her difficult personal choice of faith, the history of Orthodoxy among the Korean people as well as the life of Korean Orthodox community in Moscow and their hopes and expectations.
Fr. George Maksimov: Hello. You are watching My Path To God, a program about people who during their journey to Orthodoxy had to give up many things and re-consider their ways. We will talk to our guests about things that motivate them and give them strength.
Today our guest is Ksenia Kim, a descendant of Korean people who settled in the Russian Empire more than 150 years ago and seamlessly integrated into the family of peoples of our country. Even before the revolution of 1917, hieromartyr John (Vostorgov) wrote that every year many Japanese, Chinese and Korean people settle in the Russian Empire. He noted that Koreans are the most open to converting to Orthodoxy. Surprisingly, the initiative to convert often came from the Koreans themselves rather than from the Russian authorities or Orthodox clergy. This was the wish of their souls, although, of course, not all the newcomers had it. The revolution of 1917 was followed by a challenging period and the Russian Koreans, just like other peoples of our country, lived through the period of atheism that was forcefully imposed upon our society. Tell me what was the situation in your family and how did you start moving toward Orthodox faith.
Ksenia Kim: I was born in a regular Korean family. Koreans have a difficult spiritual legacy—It is a mixture of Buddhism and shamanism. I remember that my grandmother followed certain rituals. For example, she used to prepare special food and go outside to feed the fallen spirits to please them or ask for help. So if I followed in the footsteps of my ancestors, I would have probably gone in the same direction. However, God gives the right of choice to every person and after comparison and analysis we can make the best decision. My journey wasn’t easy. I studied Islam and Eastern religions, even joined Protestants for a short while. I understood that the truth was in Orthodoxy. It was the only faith that truly touched my heart and I really felt the presence of God there.
Fr. George: How did you truly discover Orthodoxy? Obviously, you saw churches earlier and maybe even walked into some of them. Yet at some point, you discovered the profundity of Orthodoxy. How did it happen?
Ksenia Kim: When hieromartyr Daniel Sysoyev was murdered in 2009, many people learned about him and started studying the legacy he left behind. My Orthodox acquaintance was one of such people. She gave me the book Instructions For Immortals, or What To Do If You’re Already Dead. I would recommend everybody to read this book. It is fairly short—one can read it in one day—but it totally changes the way you see the world. This is exactly what happened to me. In this book, Father Daniel discusses the Church’s teaching about what happens to people after death. After reading the book, I understood that my prospects were poor. In other words, I was heading straight to hell. But why should I go there, if there is a way to avoid this? I understood that I had to repent. For a long time, several months, I was preparing for confession. It was difficult to remember everything that was done in my lifetime. My first confession took place before Easter. It was a long confession—I entered the church on Holy Saturday at 9 am and left around 4 pm. I still keep in touch with the priest who heard my confession and he still supports me.
Fr. George: If you went to confession, this means that you were already baptized?
Ksenia Kim: Yes, I was indeed baptized in an Orthodox Church when I was 19, but this wasn’t serious for me then. My friend told me that she was going to be baptized and I decided that I’d do this as well, to keep her company. We memorized the Lord’s Prayer and went to the baptism ceremony. There was no mandatory catechesis at that time and I knew nothing about Orthodoxy, so this did not influence my life in any way. My real conversion happened after reading Father Daniel’s book and after my confession I started leading the church-based way of life. Later, I found the address of the Church of Apostle Thomas on Kantemirovskaya street in this book, so I came to this church and became a parishioner. So Father Daniel Sysoyev through his book influenced my life and my enchurchment. The blood of martyrs is indeed the seed of the Church. My conversion was directly influenced by the death that God bestowed upon Father Daniel. During the years of my enchurchment, I met other people who came to God either after the death of Father Daniel or after listening to or reading this works. Nobody really knows the number of such people, but I’m sure that this number is high.
Fr. George: Yes, I also know such people and I think their number will be growing. How did your relatives react to such change of your life priorities? Were they sympathetic, did they follow your choice?
Ksenia Kim: Their first reaction wasn’t very positive, but now my relatives (about thirty of them in Moscow) are fairly tolerant and even sympathetic to a certain extent. That is why I’m hoping that God will gradually grant them the joy of being Orthodox. My sister who lives in Irkutsk has already been baptized. This was quite a story—we had to fight fallen spirits for her, as they didn’t want to let her go. They tempted and scared her so much, that we had to ask the priests for help. A week before her baptism demons started visiting her, she actually saw them, they seized her by the throat, attacked her in other ways, knocked on the door. She couldn’t’ sleep a wink for a week. We were afraid that she would lose her sanity, so I called some priests I knew and they said that my sister should rejoice. I was very surprised to hear that as it seemed that there was nothing to be happy about, but the priest said:
“She should rejoice, for if God allows her to see them, it logically means that the opposite is true too, in other words that means that there are good spirits too and that God exists too”.
The demons try to make people stop believing in their existence and in the existence of supernatural world altogether, and here their actions were so obvious that they couldn’t be ignored.
Fr. George: Did those attacks of evil spirits stop after the baptism?
Ksenia Kim: Pretty much. They continued for some time after that, but soon stopped completely.
Fr. George: It’s important to emphasize this, because it is not only your sister; I also know about other similar cases that happened when adult people realized that they needed to be baptized. Sometimes evil spirits try to stop them. All of a sudden people don’t feel well, some even faint right before the baptism. Evil spirits try to attack or tempt such people. However, after baptism the evil spirits lose their powers and all the attacks stop, just as happened with your sister.
Ksenia Kim: It is interesting to note that I, as a participant in those events, was also affected. Despite thousands of kilometers between us (I was in Moscow, while she was in Irkutsk), when these events occurred over there, my faith was tested too. Once I came home and saw that my place was swarming with large flies, although when I left all doors and windows were closed and everything was fine. This was very strange. Where would those files come from all of a sudden? It took me several days to get rid of them. When later I mentioned this to my Orthodox friend, he said: “Didn’t you realize what that was? Do you remember that one of Satan’s names is Beelzebub? It is translated as “lord of the flies”. So, this means that he visited my home.
Fr. George: The hagiography of one ancient hermit mentions that to distract him from praying, Satan filled the hermit’s cave with a multitude of insects. But he didn’t succeed. The event you described clearly shows that Satan has very little power over Christians. We know that evil spirits would like to destroy the human race, but because God protects Christians, all the evil one could do was this petty trick in hope to confuse the person. God’s blessing protects Orthodox Christians who lead a church life. Of course, Satan would like to harm us more, but Got won’t let him. Whenever God allows any temptations to happen to us, including those that involve direct contact with evil forces, this is never beyond our strength. Only as much as a person can withstand. And God is always nearby; He is always willing to give His help to those who ask. The experience of every believer proves that.
Ksenia Kim: There was another event with my sister. I sent her Orthodox leaflets and books about baptism, confession and communion for distribution in churches before the Epiphany. When she had to go to the airport to pick up these materials, she felt so sick that she nearly died. They managed somehow to find people who picked the materials up. Later she told me: “Can you imagine, as soon as I delivered those materials to churches, everything was back to normal”. The sickness came out of nowhere and was gone inexplicably.
Fr. George: Thank God! I know that it is not only you and your sister, other Koreans also find their path to Orthodoxy. I even know that we have a Korean Orthodox community here in Moscow and that you are an active member. Could you tell us more about it?
Ksenia Kim: Yes, there is a Korean Orthodox community in Zaikonospassky monastery in Moscow. First attempts to establish this community were made in 2001 when we organized catechesis studies for Koreans. Later we also organized some children programs, field trips and pilgrimages. The activities were on and off. Finally, God’s will was to send us a priest, Father Alexander Son, and now the community has a priest of Korean descent who takes care of us.
Fr. George: Does your community cooperate with other public organizations of Russian Koreans?
Ksenia Kim: Yes, of course. We worked with the Korean Youth Club. There is also a newspaper, Rossiyskiye Koreytsy (Russian Koreans), which has a staff employee designated for interacting with the Orthodox Church. We also actively work with the Russian Association of Koreans. With the help of Zaikonospassky monastery and this association, we organized a big conference, Koreans and Orthodoxy, in the spring of 2014. This event was dedicated to the 150th anniversary of Koreans’ settlement in Russia. We had a round table with the heads of regional branches of the Association of Koreans where we adopted a resolution on starting a project for development of regional missions in Russia. We wrote an application to His Holiness. Our hierocracy supported the project and active work to establish contact between the missionary departments of dioceses of Russian Orthodox Church and regional branches of Association of Koreans is currently under way. Three pilot projects are already in the works in Southern, Central and Far East federal districts.
Fr. George: Are there places in Russia where the Korean population is larger?
Ksenia Kim: Historically, many Koreans live in the Far East, specifically in Khabarovsk and Primorsky Krai. According to statistics, Koreans are the third largest ethnic group there. Naturally, our priority is working in those regions, but we hope that with God’s help we will expand into other cities.
Fr. George: I remember how I felt when I was reading the notes of missionaries and people who lived in Korea more than century ago. They saw that for a long time the Korean people were caught in the middle between China and Japan and were periodically subjected to oppression by their neighbours. Korean people did not benefit from it. I saw that as soon as Korea became an independent country, Korean people made a huge step in their development. It clearly shows that its potential was previously supressed. Korean people were exhausted by their long-time neighbours. At that time the Japanese and Chinese were fighting over the right to rule the Korean people. When the Koreans learned that they had a third neighbour, Russia, they were very happy. That was when the extensive immigration started. It is a known fact that the Korean Queen Min was assassinated because she was leaning toward Russia. King Gojong and royal prince were actually placed under house arrest.
They managed to escape to the Russian consulate and for more than a year the king was ruling the country from there because it was unsafe for him to leave the consulate. Everybody understood what was going on. This, basically, explains the choice the Koreans made about immigration to Russia and why the Koreans, both those who immigrated to Russia and those who stayed in Korea, began converting to Orthodoxy… It was a voluntarily decision of the people. That is why I hope that with God’s help the work that the Korean community is currently doing will be crowned with success. This would be the result of the choice many Koreans made over a hundred years ago, but that process was, one might say, frozen by the period of Soviet atheistic rule. I’d like to ask you your personal opinion: To what extent do contemporary Koreans have a need for Orthodoxy?
Ksenia Kim: Thank you for this historical side note and your question. Our current missionary activities in the region are primarily aimed at counteracting the Protestants who actively preach among the Russian Koreans, presenting Protestantism as the true Korean religion. They misguide our people, saying that it is the Korean religion, while in fact Orthodoxy is our historic legacy and spiritual tradition. When our ancestors received the citizenship of the Russian Empire, they also received baptism. It was a deliberate and voluntary action. That is why it is important to inform the people and do something lest 20 years from now all Russian Koreans are Protestants. I would not like that to happen, but risk of this happening is quite real because the Protestant missionaries are very active. First of all, we need to pray for deliverance of our people from this, dare I say it, sectarian slavery. There are many active sects in the Russian Federation and one of them has three hundred Korean members. Based on that we can estimate the size of those sects.
Fr. George: Of course, people have the right to learn the truth about Orthodoxy. They should know that Orthodoxy is not simply a part of the Russian culture, but that it is the Church founded by Jesus Christ Our Lord himself. That way rather than making their choice based on some unverified information, they can do so knowing where the truth is and where the true Church of Christ is. Naturally, this requires a lot of effort.
Ksenia Kim: Yes, the desire to find the truth is also needed. It is amazing, that despite the small number of Orthodox Koreans, God leads us to himself. Even more amazing is that people in South Korea, where the majority profess Protestantism, are also converting to Orthodoxy. We hope that God would give us a chance to build the church, because even now when we try to oppose Protestants in Moscow, we unfortunately can’t offer an alternative to people who are used to active community life. All Orthodox Koreans go to various churches and only gather in Zaikonospassky monastery for some joint events or studies. I think that for the purposes of missionary work it would be great to have a church that Koreans could visit for quiet prayer. So that there is no misunderstanding among the parishioners. If a hundred Koreans come to one church, this would probably give the Russian old ladies quite a scare (laughs).
Fr. George: By the way, how did the parishioners of Zaikonospassky monastery receive your community?
Ksenia Kim: They got used to us gradually. However we don’t go there in hundreds, usually there are about twenty of us there during the service. It’s not a large percentage of the total number of parishioners. They know that there is Father Alexander who takes care of us, so they are friendly toward us.
Fr. George: I also wanted to ask you if you had any contacts with people from Korea who temporarily or permanently reside in Moscow. Do you have a rapport with them? I once talked to an Orthodox Korean who grew up in the Far East, then moved to South Korea for some time and later came back to Russia. He told me that living in his historical homeland was difficult for him. Everything was strange and unclear. He even had some kind of culture shock. We have very few people from North Korea here, but what is your relationship with people of South Korean descent? If you had any experience, what was your impression?
Ksenia Kim: Yes, I’ve met South Koreans. As a rule, most of them are leaning toward Protestantism. Very few are Orthodox. In general, they adapt here without problems and get on well with the locals. Mostly they are businessmen from South Korea and students. We had an idea to organize Russian language lessons for these Koreans from Korea. The newly passed law requires foreign citizens intending to live in the Russian Federation to speak Russian, know Russian history and culture, and pass a special test. We would like to help people with this. And of course we wouldn’t be helping South Koreans only. For example, we recently received a letter from a priest from Siberia who baptized a North Korean. This North Korean didn’t even speak Russian, so I can’t imagine how this miracle could happen…That man was sick, and as he was in a grave condition, he stayed at a hospice. The priest asked us to send him Orthodox prayers in Korean as soon as possible. So we had to find Korean translations of Lord’s Prayer, “Theotokos and Virgin rejoice…” and Creed.
Fr. George: What else does the Moscow Korean Orthodox community do?
Ksenia Kim: With the help of Zaikonospassky monastery, our community holds theological courses for adult Koreans. The course subjects include liturgics, Church Slavonic language, catechesis, and Gospel according to the Holy Fathers. For missionary purposes, we also organized free Korean language courses in Zaikonospassky monastery. In addition, our community organizes various field trips, pilgrimages and meetings. We are also planning to cooperate with the Korean Youth Committee in social networks and websites.
Fr. George: This is a very valuable experience. I saw similar initiatives from Orthodox people of various ethnic backgrounds, for example Orthodox Kurds or Kazakhs that live in Moscow. They also wanted to get together in a single group in some parish, but unfortunately these attempts did not come to fruition even though it was a grassroots initiative that came directly from the people. Moscow Koreans, thank God, succeeded, so I think that the example of your Korean community could be useful not only for Koreans, but for other ethnic groups as well.
Ksenia Kim: God indeed is very benevolent toward us; we can feel it because we get a lot of help from everywhere. A lot of God’s grace too. Unlike Russians who have numerous saints and many people praying for them, it is very difficult for us. Every third Russian has people who served God somehow, maybe even saints, among his or her relatives. Russian people get tremendous spiritual support from this multitude of people who pray for them. We don’t have that. In many cases, we are descendants of atheists, pagans and shamans. Our people only now are gradually becoming Orthodox, and that is why God bestows us with His special grace. How Russian monks are rejoicing looking at us is particularly amazing. This is great. They are sincerely, almost child-like, happy to see that we, non-Russians, Koreans, are in fact Orthodox. It is very important to know that God is with us, that He doesn’t abandon us and gives us His support. This, of course, gives us a strong motivation to do more. We have many plans and a great desire to promote spiritual education of children, do social activities, work with youth, and many other things. We hope that God will help us and ask you to pray for the salvation of the Korean people. You know, God doesn’t differentiate between nationalities or ranks.
Fr. George: Of course, the truth is for everyone. I believe that God arranges the life of every person. It is not an accident that you and other Koreans are in Russia and that you were raised in a culture with Christian roots. This is God’s loving gift to you. I have another question for you: Can you tell us any stories about conversion of other members of Korean community? How does God lead them to Orthodoxy?
Ksenia Kim: Sure. There is a story of one woman that I remember particularly well. I won’t mention her name. She had a terrible experience—her child fell out of the window of a multi-storied building. This Korean woman was not a very religious person, but she knew about Orthodoxy and Mary the Mother of God. By some miracle, when she saw the open window and realized what happened, she threw herself down on her knees and cried:
“Mother of God, please have mercy on my son!”
When that woman came down, she saw that amazingly her child was safe and sound and didn’t even have a scratch. They called the ambulance, of course. It turned out that the child only had a broken ankle. His spine, head, arms and legs were not harmed. This made such a great impression on her husband and herself that they went to church and started living a church-based life. God moves in mysterious ways. Some people take a long journey seeking the truth, while others are converted through such incredible events.
Personally, I am eternally grateful to God for arranging things so that I was born in Russia, an Orthodox country, and making me an Orthodox Christian. I think this is the greatest gift in the world. I am even more grateful for it than I am grateful for my life. I can honestly tell you, that when I attend a service, my eyes are filled with tears, the tears of gratefulness for allowing me to be a part of this great spiritual legacy of humankind. And I am very sad when I see Russian people, people who have everything—a great number of saints and pious ancestors who pray for them—and yet these people do not participate in the Church life, do not receive Communion and do not go to church. I feel pain and sadness for such people. God led us, non-Russians, to this greatest legacy, this Noah’s Ark, this huge ship, while some people reject all this on their own accord.
Fr. George: I read hieromartyr Grigori’s (Lebedev) explanation of Jesus’s words A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house. (Mark, 6:4). He said that this applies not only to Jesus Christ or a saint, but to Christianity in general. It is without honour in the community that has Christian roots and maybe even exists because in the past ancestors of these people became Christian. There is also a negative effect, when people from Orthodox ethnic backgrounds, not only Russians, are satisfied by a very superficial knowledge of Orthodoxy—they pick up holy water, bless an Easter cake, light a candle—and that is it. Even though that is all they know about Christianity, they have a false impression that since Christianity is ours anyway, it is not very interesting. When such a person starts his or her spiritual quest, he or she thinks:
“Well, Christianity is just Easter cakes and candles. This is not interesting. Spiritual things must be somewhere far way, it can’t be nearby”.
So sometimes Russian people have to make a very long journey and wander the darkest corners of the world only to discover with amazement that the Truth they were searching for is where they least expected it to be. Thank you for reminding us about this and for your story. I wish you God’s help in your spiritual journey and the activities of your community.
Ksenia Kim: Thank you.
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Congo, 2021: African prostitute baptized an Orthodox Christian two hours before she passed away
Father Chariton Musungayi from Goma in the Eastern Congo:
"...It was six in the afternoon. It was already dark when a young woman unknown to me was knocking persistently on the door of my house waiting for me to open it. I responded, and I asked her what she wanted.
-Father, I want you to read me a blessing.' She looked very upset, she spoke abruptly. She did not tell me many things, she just asked me to pray for her. We went into the church and I read a blessing over her. She departed without saying a word, not giving me any other information about her life, nor explaining why she wanted me to read her a blessing. Three days later, she came to me again. She again asked me to pray for her. We entered the church, I read a blessing over her, and, when I finished, she asked me:
-Father, are you afraid of me?'
-No, I replied.
Her face was much calmer than before. She again departed without a word, with her head bowed down.
Three days passed and she once again came to me, late at night. When I read the blessing over her, I asked her to not come so late. She looked at me and I noticed her eyes were full of tears... She said to me:
-Father, I am a prostitute, this is my job. I do not move about during the day, because everyone knows who I am and I am ashamed to be seen in public. That's why I came and came again in the evenings. I come to you because I feel good when I enter the Church. I want to tell you that the first time I came here, I felt an inexplicable force inside me and that night I did not sin. I have nothing to do with the Church, nor am I Orthodox.
After that, she departed and I never saw her again. Sometimes I would ask the church guard if he had seen that young woman circulating in our city, and he always replied in the negative.
Six months passed, and one afternoon she came again, this time her body supported by a friend. She smiled when she saw me. I recognized her immediately. I brought her in, and made her lay down on a bench that we had in the Church. As her friend explained to me, she had asked for her help, saying:
-I want you to take me to the Orthodox Church, with the many ringing bells. I want you to take me there today, not tomorrow!
I looked at her and she said:
-Bless me, Father, bless me.
I immediately thought of something, so I asked her:
-Do you want me to baptize you, to become a Christian?
She replied:
-Yes, Father, you will give me much joy if you baptize me. God will help me.
I began the preparations for Holy Baptism. I also gave her a baptismal gown, and she put it on. After reading the Catechism, I baptized her, “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”, and I gave her the name Georgia. I also put a Cross around her neck; then I brought out the portion of Holy Communion that is kept in the Artophorion and she received Holy Communion. Her face was calm and happy.
She said:
-Father, I thank you very much. I give glory to God for this moment, which made me worthy to be baptized. The doctors were tired of my illness and they told me to go home. I beg God to forgive me for everything that I have done in my life. Please, father, I want to take this baptismal gown with me, so that they can dress me with it when I die. I do not want anything else!
I was amazed at hearing these words and gave her the gown. Her friend thanked me, she took Georgia and they departed. As they left, I looked at the time: it was 6:30 in the afternoon. Two hours later, I was informed that Georgia the prostitute had fallen asleep! God had called her into His heavenly Kingdom!
Our God is just. He had prepared her in a way that our mind cannot grasp. People spoke very badly of her; everyone regarded her as garbage - but not her Creator. We buried her, wearing her baptismal gown and the Cross that I put around her neck... How beautiful was our Georgia!
God’s notion of justice is one thing, and man’s idea of justice is entirely different. God does not desire the loss of a single soul, as long as they acknowledge Him as their Savior and Redeemer".
The event of Georgia’s baptism and her death was narrated to us in a letter by Father Chariton Musungayi from Goma in the Eastern Congo.
Source:
http://grforafrica.blogspot.com/2021/03/congo-prostitute-baptized-orthodox.html
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A letter from the first Taiwanese Orthodox Christian missionary Pelagia Yu to the Greek people
I am Chinese, born in Taiwan and my Christian name is Pelagia. I was a Protestant Christian, and it took me five years to become Orthodox. I love to read the Holy Bible and have all of its publications in the Chinese language.
I have visited Greece and discovered that it is a truly unique country. While travelling in your country, even before I arrived, on the plane I saw how different in temperament Greek people were, how cheerfully they conversed with each other, how they laughed and how they applauded the pilot after the landing, something unheard of for us Asians, who are more conservative and do not easily display emotion. I learnt after this experience that the expression of freedom requires passion and liveliness.
In Greece, I visited many churches, I participated in the Divine Liturgy, and when I received Holy Communion it reduced me to tears even though I did not understand the Greek language, because the Orthodox faith is the same, no matter what the language.
I would have liked to be born Greek, to have been born Orthodox, to have received Holy Communion and venerated holy icons from my years of infancy right up until my death.
I cry for me and my compatriots, because instead of Holy Communion, we eat and drink food sacrificed to idols.
I would have liked to be born Greek, so my ears may be filled with holy hymns.
I cry for me and my compatriots, whose ears are filled with the noise of sutras and the screeches of those who worship the idols.
I would have liked to be born Greek, so that I may smell the sweet aroma of incense.
I cry for me and my compatriots, who are constantly assaulted by the pungent smell of the smoke rising up from the sacrifices offered up to the idols.
I would have liked to be born Greek, so that my hands could touch the holy icons, the holy relics of the Saints and be filled with the love of Christ.
I cry for me and my compatriots, whose hands touch the idols and the things sacrificed to them, but who in reality are holding on to nothing.
I would have liked to be born Greek, so that I may light candles to Christ – not like here, where we burn money as an offering to the spirits.
I was searching for the Truth, using more than 30 different publications of the Holy Bible, which unfortunately, were all full of errors (translated by non-Orthodox).
I would have liked to be born Greek, so that I may read the Holy Bible in its original form!
I cry for me and my compatriots, because, although we have eyes, we are blind.
I would have liked to be born Greek, so that I may be able to see the grace of God all around me.
I cry for me and my compatriots, who are surrounded by temples dedicated to false gods.
Yes, I am Orthodox, but living in Taiwan, I have very limited opportunities to experience the Orthodox Christian way of life.
I cry for me, because I do not have the ability to show my compatriots the greatness of our faith. The people here want to see signs and miracles.
I cry for me and my compatriots, because we do not have the gift of hearing of and seeing so many miracles, so many holy words that you have seen and heard over 2000 years in Greece, and which you still see. Taiwan is not an Orthodox country, our feast days and holy days do not look at all like yours.
I am disappointed that in Greece, although you have so many beautiful mountains, you do not look after them, you burn them down. However, I am amazed that practically every mountain in Greece has at least one monastery. We have mountains filled with Buddhist temples and monasteries.
I would have liked to be born Greek, so that I may go and pray at an Orthodox monastery easily.
I cry for me and my compatriots. For the first time, I visited an Orthodox monastery dedicated to St John the Forerunner in Pelion. I travelled to Greece from Taiwan – 16 hours on the plane, a few hours on the train to Larisa and another hour with the monastery car, that was driven by one of the nuns.
I saw the ancient ruins of the Holy Monastery, I saw so many other places in Greece that have been abandoned and my heart bled. In Taiwan, we do not have such a wealth of archaeological artefacts, holy and beautiful places, but you do not appreciate them.
I cry that we do not have beautiful icons. I cry because I feel like Christ is weak and naked here.
Greeks, you think you are poor due to the economic crisis you are going through, but you do not know how truly rich you are.
Taiwan is a country with a huge amount of material development and progress, and yet it remains in the darkness of Satan and our spiritual life is empty.
In Greece, I saw a lot of people, especially on Sundays, drinking and celebrating and not going to church. But here in Taiwan our fellow citizens, mainly young people, even if they wanted to, find it impossible to come to church, because the only Orthodox church in the entire country is a small room on the 4th floor of a huge apartment building on the outskirts of Taipei. Many times, people cannot fit into the church and remain outside for the duration of the services.
My brothers and sisters in Greece, even though I am spiritually handicapped, I still have my legs active so that I can kneel before you and beg.
I pray that you consider me like the poor man Lazarus, so that you may throw to me some crumbs from the spiritual treasures you have, of the gifts you give to your churches, of the many little churches you build on all corners of your homeland.
Our Orthodox flock in Taiwan, as you know, is small – less than 100 people. We are not wealthy. We do not have the means to buy a decent place in the city that will be able to meet our needs for worship, catechism and teaching. Fr. Ionas conducts lessons on a regular basis, targeted mainly at the young people of our city and of course, open to whomever wants to come and meet us in person; those people that up until now have only had the opportunity to see the Orthodox Church in Taiwan through the Internet.
We do not ask for help to build an Orthodox church building here. It would cost millions. Please help us to buy a bigger place in the city centre, which we will convert into a church, for the sake of our nation, our brothers and sisters, who have never had the opportunity to hear about and know our Christ. We are a country of 23 million people! And yet we have need of your help.
My brothers and sisters in Christ, if the need arises, I will do whatever is in my power to repay a little of your love. I will do whatever is needed with all my heart and for the duration of my life.
I thank you. Forgive me.
Pelagia Yu.
Source: Translated by P.S.Z. This article was originally published in Greek in the Periodicαl “Agios Kosmas o Aitolos” (Issue 84 – first quarter 2011) and online at http://www.iersyn.gr/pelagias_letter.php (Tuesday 22nd February 2011).
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Japanese fighter baptized Orthodox Christian
September 29, 2012
From his childhood years he focused on the martial arts, which led him to study traditional Eastern religions, especially Buddhism.
After a period of many years, Tokashi Kishi came to know Christianity, the result of having read very many books. Christianity for Tokashi was another ethical teaching and appeared to him something like Buddhism.
After a visit to Russia he felt an inner desire to learn more about Orthodoxy. His desire to become a Christian became even stronger when he returned to Japan, where following his Catechism in the Japanese language, he accepted the Orthodox Church.
A short while ago he visited Russia again, and announced his desire to be baptized an Orthodox Christian. With the blessing of Metropolitan John of Belgorod, the Japanese martial arts fighter was baptized and received the name of Saint John the Baptist.
https://www.johnsanidopoulos.com/2012/10/japanese-fighter-baptized-orthodox.html
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2001: Abel-Tasos Gkiouzelis, Greece - My conversion from atheism and Protestantism ("No Name Church", "2x2's", "Workers & Friends") to Orthodox Christianity
Hi my dear friends! My name is Abel-Tasos Gkiouzelis (Abel-Anastasios Gkiouzelis) and I will tell you about my conversion from the Protestantism to Orthodox Christian Church (Eastern Orthodox Church).
I was born in Athens, Greece, in 1981 in the Protestantism, in the small Protestant sect of “Workers”, in the Worker Sect which also called “Church Without Name”, “Two by Two Church”, “Friends & Workers”, “The Truth”, “Christians”, “The Non-Denominational Church”, “Christian Convention Church”, “The Christian Church”, “No-Name Church”, “The Faith Missioners”, “Nameless House Church”, “The Damnation Army”, “Dippers”, “Go Preachers”, “The Jesus-Way”, “The New Testament Church”, “Pilgrims”, “The Reidites”, “Tramp Preachers”, “The Testimony”, “The Way”, and with at least 20 still concrete names, who was founded in Ireland on 1897 by William Irvine, Edward Cooney and Jack Carroll, for this reason also the are known and as “Cooneyites”, “Irvinites” or “Carrollites”.
Until 1997, 16 years old, Ι went regularly to meetings of “Workers” believing that this is the Truth. At home but also in entire building in which I stayed, often hosted all over the world preachers who call themselves “brothers and sisters Workers” and teaches that it is the first successors of the Apostles. Unfortunately, I could not imagine that there were “false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves apostles of Christ”(2 Corinthians 11:13 ), which in deed make and women in “Apostles”, which is not testified in the New Testament.
In 1997, 16 years old, Ι started to find the meetings of “Workers” boring and so stopped going to them. The months went I began to feel hate for this “Christianity” those whom I had known since birth. My dislike for Christianity gave the baton to a complete disregard for God and indifference for God led me to atheism. And my soul, however, was actually empty. I felt a void that I wanted to fill ti with something. And I tried to fill my void with the rock music. I tried to imitate the life of hippies of the 1960s. I had the hippies as model in dressing, music and ideas. I was believing that there is not sin and that all permits. So, when the “Workers ” visited our house, I put deliberately hard rock music. I wanted with this way to show them that I had break away from their team. From their “Christianity”.
Deep my soul, however, I wished the faith in the God. But now I hated, I felt a repulsion for the Christianity. So I began to read for the ancient Egyptian religion of Pharaoh, placing in my room several Egyptian idols.
I had changed. I was not henceforth the “Worker meeting young boy”. The “meetings old boy” had changed. I tried to make new friends who would not know the old “meetings boy”. After one year, in 1998, 17 years old, I Knew experienced some Christians Orthodox persons, aged 20-21 years old, students in TEI-University of Athens, which is in the neighborhood, feeling very glad that I found this good friends company where one help and supports each other in difficult times. I was avoiding talk to them about God. I had enough discussions about God. The “Workers” occasionally asked me what I’m thinking about my future and jokingly, I replied that I want to be a hippie. And he tried to explain me what were the hippies and that this is not a good choice for the life of somebody.
Next year, in 7 September 1999 in Athens, where I lived, there was a great earthquake which was new to me. For several days were aftershocks and day by day more and accumulate within the fear of something worse leading evenings I could not, not to sleep, nor even to lie on the bed. One evening, while I was awake and the rest my family slept, thought to settle my library so as it turned from it all books and other things, deep in a shelf and powder I found in a small New Testament which he had given several years before.
I arranged the library and, as I had the whole evening in front of, I thought to read some New Testament, since not sleep nor did anything else. With that in spring in a random page and I began reading I was surprised. My heart was filled with calmness, courage and joy. All fright which I had accumulated in me from the first earthquake and repeated aftershocks disappeared immediately. Plus I do not feel fear of aftershocks. Immediately thought that God exists and that He just showed it to me!
The next morning I got happy phone my friends and I told them: “Do you know what to do to avoid fear the earthquakes? Still read the New Testament!”. They were surprised with what they hear. They never expected to hear something like that, because I never had left might appear my Christian side. So I began to believe again that God exists and Sunday for the first time after two years I went back to meetings of “Workers”. Everyone there was glad to see me and welcomed me with a warm “welcome”. So from then normally go again to meetings of “Workers” and particularly first of all.
One day I tried to talk to a girl person, called P., with whom were friends, about the meetings of “Workers” where I was going. I told her that every Sunday in the apartment building that I was living, we have some “meetings” where we read the Gospel and sung several Christian hymns suggesting her to come if she want it. P. with the thought that I found in some Christian sect that are now trying to muzzle proselytizing heresy, left shocked, turbulent, hurried, not knowing what to the fork and how to troubleshoot the call on heretical gatherings. And I could not understand why she left. I asked her the next day and received no answer.
One day P. asked me if I am baptized Orthodox Christian. I fell into embarrassment. I was afraid of saying the truth because I did not know how she felt. So I told her, “I don’t Know”. She replied me “You must Know if you are baptized Orthodox or not”. Cluttered and awkward again I said her that I would call in my house to ask about it… I asked my mother if I am baptized Christian Orthodox and she told me: “Don’t you know? What are you ask me? Of course you’re not”. I said to her, and she showed convulsed and embarrassed for once and formal learning that I’m not Orthodox Christian.
Next day my friends with a calm manner tried to talk to me, telling me that I was in the fallacy of heresy and the Christian Orthodox Church is the Truth of Christ. Then I stopped being the calm “boy of meetings” and I filled rage. I forgot that I discuss with someone who really loves me, with my friends, with-full of rage I began to speak against the Orthodox Church, accusing it of not properly clergy, not knowing that there are reverent and proper clergy. My friends embarrassed about the behavior of me and they stopped the discussion and they tried to calm down me.
The next day on when I had calmed down, my friends company from TEI-University tried again to explain to me that I am in heresy. I answered them again filled rage, talking them with hate about the Christian Orthodox Church, leading my friends company to grieve much for the bad behavior of me, for the bad behavior of their friend. I understand that I spoke badly but my ego will not let me admit it.
Next day, my friends again for other one time, with calm manner and love of Christ tried again to explain to me that I was in fallacy. But it was very difficult from them because they did not know the Holy Bible by heart. While they started with calmly about the Christian Orthodox Church and while I still full of rage prepared to respond to them I though in myself:
“I know that these persons really love me and they have demonstrated it too many times to various problems and difficulties in TEI (University) etc. Also never they have told me lies. Never they have derided me. Regarding the Christian Orthodox Church about they are trying to talk to me at this moment… I know nothing about the Christian Orthodox Church. How can I be sure how all that they say to my are wrong? First I must go to see what is the Christian Orthodox Church and after I will can to have a conclusion…”.
So, instead of angrily replied, I replied them with calm and I assured my friends that I will go to looking for where is the Truth, going to see what is the Christian Orthodox Church, too.
After few day, I decided to go alone in the Christian Orthodox Church of my neighborhood and while I stund from a Picture-Icon of Christ and Virgin Mary I maked (I was doing) my Cross and I said to Christ:
“My Christ I don’t Know if the place, the Orthodox Church, in which I find this moment is correct. Also I don’t Know if the way with which this moment I pray, that I pray with Your Picture-Icon and that I make-doing my Cross, is correct. However, I Know that You say in the Holy Bible, “If someone knocks Me I will open him” give me an answer where is the Truth. Is it in the “Workers” or in the Christian Orthodox Church? And if You give me an answer I will not deny You! And before you see to me where is the Truth I will not discuss with any Christian Orthodox clergyman in order to explain to me what the Orthodox Church teaches or any “Worker” in order to explain to me what the “Workers” are believe. I will wait to see me where is the Truth. Please, answer me where is the Truth and I will not deny You! Amen”.
From that day my friends didn’t told me again about the Christian Orthodox Church. Some day just told me that I will must make-doing my cross whenever I passed in front of a Church. And I accepted. And I started to go alone on a Sunday the Orthodox Liturgy prayed sincerely to see God ‘s Truth and one Sunday alternately I went in meetings of “Workers” praying again warmly to see me our God where is the Truth. Also, each night knelt to bed before lying down, praying again to God to see me the Truth. My friends did not tell me anything on this matter, but they knew from me that I was going to the Christian Orthodox Liturgy, too.
One day, early in 2000, offer my friends if I wanted to go one day excursion to Aegina Island (Greece) to visit the Monastery of St. Nectarios. And I answered “Yes, let’s go”, thinking that it had nothing waning.
Over the monastery of St. Nectarios I asked them to stay a little lonely. I took a walk and I went to the place where was the tomb of St. Nectarios. I saw some persons to kneel in front of the tomb of St. Nectarios and to prayed. It seemed strange to me, but I did impressions.
When empty the small chapel with the tomb of St. Nectarios and I stayed alone I knelt and said to the Saint: “St. Nectarios, if you are live in the heaven with God and hear me and if the Christian Orthodox Church is the Truth, help me and show me…”.
After a few minutes I got up and went to meet my friends who waited for me at the exit of the monastery. Just my friends saw me, they thinking that something awful happens to me. And with interest asked me, “Are you Ok? You somehow appear… Does you happens something good or something ugly?”. Full query, I ensured them that all it’s well, realising however that I felt a calm which rather it they had distinguished my friends who uneasy asked me if I am fine of not. I ensured them one more time that all it is a joy and that only that I done it was prayer as doing all there in the Monastery. The calm which I felt I didn’t interpreted and I didn’t reported it to my friends. Just I knew that I had felt it.
The next day when we came back in Athens I called P. to tell her my impressions from the monastery of St. Nectarios of Aegina Island. Before I called her I knew very well that the day before we had gone to St. Nectarios of Aegina. When, however, I called P. I said her that we had gone to Monastery of St. Andrew (Apostle Andrew) of Aigina! But there isn’t “St. Andrew of Aigine”. There is only St. Apostle Andrew. And there is not any Monastery with the name of St. Andrew in Aegina.
My friend P. thought that I was made (that I was doing) jokes and she was wondering how can I don’t remember where we had gone just the day before. I had completely forgotten the name of St. Nectarios and I insisted that we go to the St. Andrew of Aegina. When P. reminded me that we had gone to the St. Nectarios of Aegina and not to the St. Andew, immediately I remembered where we had gone and with amazement how could I forget I said her, “Oh, yes, I’m sorry”.
The months are going on and I was going one Sunday to the meetings of “Workers” and one Sunday alternately to the Liturgy of Orthodox Church, praying always hotly to the God to answer me where is Truth. All these months I and my friends from TEI-University did not have any discussion about where is the Truth. They did not wanted to pressure me. Simply they prayed for me knowing that no prayer does not go lost. Even smallest.
In the summer of 2000 my friends company of TEI-University, offer me if I wanted to going to Church of the Virgin Mary in Tinos Island, Greece. I accepted thinking again that it had nothing waning. In Tinos Island (Greece) stayed for two days because it was far away. The first day we visited the church-chapel of the Virgin Mary in Tinos Island that there is the miraculous Icon of Virgin Mary. I went front to the Icon of Virgin Mary where she has the Christ in her arms and with heartfelt prayer I said: “My Jesus Christ, show me where is the Truth and I will not deny You!”.
After, while we left from the church-chapel of Virgin Mary, my friends stopped in a bench outside from the Church that there sold small candles, Icons of Virgin Mary, books etc. and I was waitting them. Someone from my friends told me: “If you want buy a small Icon of Virgin Mary”. So I bought one small icon of Virgin Mary.
In the evening we went to our rooms at the hotel and I put the small icon into a sachets on the nightstand and light up a candle wax. I lied in bed and fell asleep without even noticing. In the middle of the night I woke suddenly startled and immediately I saw that the candle towards the bedside table had melted and the wooden nightstand catched fire (it was on fire). I got up quickly and awestruck with a cloth, put out the fire. Since then I looked at the sachets the small icon on the nightstand, I thought that possibly the Virgin Mary help me to wake up so suddenly and promptly anticipating the fire before it spread further.
The next day when we came back in Athens, I hung the small icon of Virgin Mary on a wall inside my room. I didn’t believe yet that the Christian Orthodox Church is the Truth Church of Christ, but something told me that Virgin Mary had helped me to woke up in time before to expand the fire. And for these reason I decided to put the small icon of Virgin Mary in my room. So I waited for with distress how would react my parents when they will see the small Orthodox Icon. After some hours at evening my parents were saw the small Icon and for first time they occupied that their son (me) relates himself with the Christian Orthodox Church. They told me with anger and neurously to throw out and I tried to explain them that I didn’t doing something wrong-bad and that I has every right to have in my room everything that I want. The troubles were continued on a daily basis. For the fear to they throw the small Icon of Virgin Mary when I was absent from the house was taking with me the small Icon and when I came back I was hanging it again.
One night my mother insisted that I throw the small icon. She said to me that “if the icon of Virgin Mary tomorrow morning it will here in your room I will throw it”. And, this time, I told her calmly “You can doing what ever the God illuminated you… “, thinking to myself that if God accepts Orthodoxy as Truth He illuminated her not to throw it. And if God accepts the “Workers” as Truth illuminated her to throw it. And so I understand what the Truth is.
When the next morning I woke up at 7:00 to go to TEI-University, I saw that my mother went to her job and she hadn’t throw away the small Icon of Virgin Mary. I felt very glad that she didn’t throw the small Icon but… I was not yet isconvinced about where is the Truth. So, I left from my home to go in University. I left the small Icon in the wall. The midday I came back in my house, and I realized astonished that the Icon was absent. My brother and my sisters came back at home and someone of them was hiding the Icon under a book. I fount it and I didn’t tell them something about the small Icon of Virgin Mary.
At 14:00 I was distressed because I could not unterstand where is it the Truth and I began to prepared in to meeting at 15:00 my friend P., in the centre of Athens, in Plaka, for a time-walk. But when I was absent my mother at 15:30 would returned from her job in the house. And I thought if it would be supposed to left the icon hung in my room or I would must be took it with me from the fear to throw my mother the Icon as to told me previous evening. So I decided to left the small Icon in the house and whether that will happened (if she throw the Icon or not) that will was a proof about where it is the Truth. With the hope that the God answer me where is the Truth, I maded my Cross, I kissed the small icon of Virgin Mary and I left it hung in the wall.
So I met in Plaka of Athens my friend P. and as we walked at some point P. said me that she did not feel well and that dizzy. She had indeed pale and I told her to sit down on a bench that was near there and I went to buy her an orange juice. As I put my hand in my pants pocket to pull out money to pay, knowing that in my pocket I had only money and keys, I thought it catch a shaped object “Q”, that is object with like crick. Over the agony, I paid with no attention, I paid the orange juice and gave it to P. and she drank it and she assembled.
They continued to walk in the Plaka of Athens, and after half an hour, whilst just walked in silence for something specific, I wondered to myself if it was my idea of what I looked it catch in my pocket half an hour ago shaped “Q “, like something with crick and spontaneously I put my hand in my pocket to municipalities if indeed caught something or was just my idea. Surprised to discover that in my pocket was the small icon of Virgin Mary, and “Q” which in shape was caught was the crick that the small icon has to hang!
Immediately I told to P. what happened but she did not believe me. She told me whether I took the small icon with me like other times and that I did not remember it. And I replied her that I took it this time with me and that even left the small icon at home as a criterion to where is the Truth. My friend P. didn’t believe me and she said to me: “Ok, when you come back at home, you hang the small icon again to see what your parents tell you”. So the afternoon as I came back home I was hang the small icon and when my parents saw it created a fuss. The evening before lying down to sleep, to corp the icon for fear my parents throw away.
The next morning I left for TEI (University) and I took together the small icon and when I returned home in the evening I hang it again in the wall of my room.
When my mother saw it, made a great fuss and she said me with angry: “I told you that if you would hang the icon again I throw it. But you hung it and I take it and after you went and took it from me, inside my bathrobe”.
When I hear these words, I was surprised. I know that something supernatural had happened, but in any case I don’t expect that will confirm it and my mother. And I told her exactly what had happened, stressing that I didn’t took the icon from her bathrobe, but miraculously founded in my pocket. My mother quickly went to my room and corp the small icon by opening the windows to be discarded. I run anticipating before she throw it.
With all these I just believed that our God showed me that the Christian Orthodox Church is the Truth. So I decided to talk with an Christian Orthodox clergyman-priest. I went in the Orthodox Church of my neighborhood and I spoke with priest Father Andrew, narrating to him the whole story of how I believed to Cristian Orthodox Church. Father Andrew listened to me carefully and he said to me in the end: “You have every right to believe what you want but because you live with your parents in the same house, is better to you have the small icon with you together, not to sag it for not having troubles at home. And in the future, God first, in your home you will bore what you want”.
Since, I had the small icon with me together and I went every Sunday only to the Orthodox Church.
My father before married and maked family had become “Worker” with the result can be interpreted the Holy Bible in the Protestant way, ie misinterpreting and omitting several passages hagiography (verses). So he called me with a view to demonstrate how through Holy Bible proves that the Orthodox Church is not the Truth. I had hoped that I could be proved otherwise. But I knew nothing of anti-heretical hagiographic (verses from Holy Bible) argument.
My father began arguing that the holy icons are idolatry and I answered him that it is not idolatry because we don’t worship the wood or the pictured saints and the veneration that is honorable and not worship, something with which my father did not agree. Then my father began to show various hagiographic (verses) without which he argue was against holy confession, Priesthood, fasting and, as well, against the Saints and the Virgin Mary. Unfortunately, although I know that it is not right, I didn’t not know how to prove it hagiography (verses), preferring not to answer at all.
The days went by and every day my father asking me to show me and other hagiographic passages (verses) which, as mistakenly claimed, proves that the Orthodox Church is wrong. Sometimes I went to talk with him, because he insisted and sometimes not, because I know that my father misunderstand the Holy Bible and that I was not at a position to prove it because I didn’t knew about Holy Bible. One morning as I was leaving for TEI-University, I was stopped by my father to show me something in the Holy Bible. Began to bring me back argument against Orthodoxy and this time he managed to convince me that Orthodoxy is located in fallacy.
So I convinced that Orthodoxy is wrong heading into TEI-University thinking if I should made to the company that eventually became convinced from his father that the Orthodox Church is wrong. So, under punching my hand and thinking that I agree with my father that Orthodoxy is false, I decided that I will tell it to them.
In TEI-University I met my friend P. and I told her that I was convinced from my father that Orthodoxy is wrong. So P. without anger but with emphasis and tears in her eyes said to me: “Are you forget everything that Virgin Mary did to you? Are you forget everything?”.
When I listened these words severally mentally shaken and immediately I said to myself: “She has right. I asked Christ to show me where is the Truth and He showed me, knowing that I will be continuous war must remain solid and will come also the time during which learn and how through Holy Bible proves that the only Truth is the Christian Orthodox Church”. So when I returned at noon in my home, with these same words that I said to myself, I said to my father confessing that the Orthodox Church is the Truth regardless at the moment I do not know how to prove it by Holy Bible.
The days passed and I keeps going steadily every Sunday to the Orthodox Liturgy and I felt to grow up in more a leaf in favor of the Orthodox Church. So one day I said to Father Andrew that I would like to be baptized Christian Orthodox. Fr. Andrew answered me that “To be baptized Christian Orthodox you should really believe rather than at the barrel e.g whether to marry an Orthodox girl or for other reasons”. I assured him that I really believe that the Orthodox Church is the Truth and that the Orthodox Church is the Church that founded by Christ and I wants with my heart to come in His Church and I don’t doing it for other reasons”. So, Fr. Andrew said me that we should find a godfather.
Unfortunately, months went by, and we didn’t find a godfather. Father Andrew wanted to baptism me but he was told me that he wanted to find a trusted person for godfather and I answered him: “God will find someone”.
One morning in late March 2001, I passed outside a church-chapel near the neighborhood and thinking that it has ever been in this church decided to lit a small candle. The small church was dedicated to St. Apostle Andrew. As prayed into the small church the vicar priest of the church, Father Emmanuel asked me: “Who are you? Where are you from? Are you from this neighborhood? We haven’t seen again here”. I surprised, I took his blessing (I kissed him hand) and I told him that I’m a neighbor. After I told him my story, about how I believed and that I want to be baptized Orthodox. Fr. Emmanuel surprised looked the sacristan-woman who was also there and told her that if I desire they can indeed baptized me there. Then Fr. Emmanuel explained to the resurrection that I be baptized must truly believe and not barrel for any other reason. And I assured him that every day more and a leaf growing in favor of Orthodoxy.
So, by the Grace of God after two weeks of catechism, on 7 April 2001, Saturday of Lazarus I baptized Christian Orthodox, with godfather the son of Fr. Emmanuel, in this church of St. Apostle Andrew.
On the occasion that I was baptized in a chuch (chapel) of St. Apostle Andrew and “St. Andrew of Aegina” which I had said instead of “St. Nektarios”, I thought that maybe St. Nektarios had helped me to believe and be baptized, as I requested him. So, I bought a book of his life in order to ask more about his life. As I read surprised found that the folk name of St. Nectarios, before he became a monk was “Anastasios”. Like me. And after when the St. Nectarios became a monk named “Lazarus”. And I baptized “Saturday of Lazarus” (feast day of St. Lazarus). And that then St. Nectarios became a priest named “Nektarios”.
Almost immediately I remembered an incident from the time when I was at school, about 1993, 12 years old. In the time of Gymnastics I sat with peers who were discussing something and I heard them without myself taking part in the discussion. Suddenly, without myself to the will, inconsiderate, I switches them from the discussion by asking so spontaneously: “Hey Guys, how about we become when we will are 20 years old?”.
My classmates started laughing about this question and I realizing that I told something “wrong” by talking and I tried to fix it by saying “uh… e… I say how I am when I’m 20 years old”. Realizing, however, that I said something irrelevant to discussion I didn’t asked again.
Just now, after 8 years I found that those which I said at the time in high school was not an ordinary recklessness. Because on 31 March 2001 I was 20 years old (I was born 31/3/1981) and after one week, on 7 April 2001, I baptized Christian Orthodox.
I thought all of them can be simple coincidences and that really St. Nektarios had helped me to believe in the real Truth. In to the unbroken apostolic succession Orthodox Church. In the Church founded by Christ. And for which he said “I build my Church, and the gates of hades will not prevail against it”(Matthew 16:18 ). I remembered that one of the names of “Worker Sect” is “The Truth”. But the “Truth” of “Workers” is false. It’s a lying “Truth”.
With the Grace of God, I continued to damage the spiritual life in the Orthodox Church, in real Truth. However, the devil did not remain inactive and before spending two months from my baptism, the devil began to sow heretics thoughts against the embassy of the Saints. So I started thinking why would I pray to the Saints and not only pray directly to Christ. Although I know that these thoughts were heretical and wrong, I could not with anything to get it out of my mind. I kicked again and again. I felt clearly that the devil makes war of putting all these thoughts, but I could not doing nothing. So, I asked for help from God.
On the afternoon of 8 May 2001 while I was in the Church in the evening prayer of the feast of St. Christopher and continues all these heretical thoughts, when I saw the icon-image of St. Christopher started patiently enter thoughts against this particular Saint. The icon-picture of St. Christofer to pass a river, having at the back of Christ as a child. I could not understand how this is done, from the moment the St. Christopher lived in the 3rd century A.D..
At the end of the Vespers a lady gave to me an identical plasticized small icon of St. Christopher saying me that the St. Christopher is a patron of drivers. I was perplexed and asked her to learn about the life of St. Christofer. She told me that he was idolatry to originate cannibal tribe, but he was very good and virtuous. He was big with great physical strength and so very often help disability, elderly and children to cross a raging river much of the area where they lived. One time as he tried to lift a child to spend it on the opposite bank found surprised that despite his power, he could not lift it. After he was revealed that this child was the Christ, and appeared to congratulate him for a job well help and love which offers fellows. And then St. Christopher believed in Christ, was baptized and became worthy to Witness and now he is a Saint Martyr who killed for Christ.
I was glad for the life of St. Christopher. The heretical thoughts continued and I begged St. Christopher to help me to stop the bad thoughts. I did not like to bore thoughts against the Saints. I feel that someone else whispering bad thoughts constantly in my mind. And I realized that he was the devil. While the bad thoughts like “Why do you pray to the Saints and not only to Christ?”, continued, and I could not stop them, begging God to help me.
This time (2001) I went to TEI-University and I worked in McDonalds (2000-2002) of the centre of Athens, too.
So, in May 2001, after a few days, when I finished from my work-McDonalds at noon and I led for my home with my car, I realized that from fatigue sleepy and my eyes closed. As I tried to hold open unwisely thought the Avenue of Athens-Corinth from which I was going is a straight and that we would be able to keep my eyes open and while running at higher speed to be faster, I would arrive in a fourth at my home well. As I started to cross the avenue and increasing speed to reach home sooner, my eyes closed and hastily exposures. I opened the windows of car and the music radio.
I thought it was a quarter that should have patience and barrel would reach. As I began to drive in the bridge of Kifisos I heard a loud collision while I thought someone crashed while I opened my eyes, which I were not understood that it was closed and I saw broken panes. And then I saw that I had crashed myself. Immediately I came out and I was surprised when I saw where I was. Moving up the bridge of Kifisos without realizing I had fallen asleep and crossed the entire bridge asleep, and that part of the avenue after the bridge crashed in cars that were stopped In first traffic light after the bridge and causing pile. The frond of my car crashed very match but had not anything happening to myself.
So, straight my mind went to the St. Christopher and generally the embassies of the Saints. Immediately I realized that I had helped by St. Christopher and that Christ accepts our pray to the Saints, who after death is not in a stupor as they say the heretical, but also they live after death, they can hear, they can see, they can understand and help people. Like the Prophet Moses had died though (Deuteronomy 34:5) he appeared in the Transfiguration of Christ (Matthew 17:3-4 ) and as though Abraham who also died in about 1800 B.C., from heaven “saw it and was glad”(John 8:56) (he saw the Incarnation of Christ). And so by Grace and the help of God completely dissolved from my mind the heretical thoughts against the Saints.
After, I began to feel the desire to get to know other young persons that are conscious Orthodox Christians inside the Church and I began to pray to God to send me some persons. And God answered immediately with a reply which He had “preparation” many years ago. Our family dentist who had come in my baptism and has extended family, said me that her children go to a priest in the center of Athens, who engaged in anti-heretical and apologetic work of the Church and that every Sunday makes speeches on youth in style Q & A (questions and answers), where they were asking questions about faith and disbelief and he answered to them. And she offer to go there, me too. And she told me that I will have the chance to meet a lot of new young persons from the Orthodox Church and yet I can ask the priest various questions that I have been on the Orthodox Faith.
So, on June 2001 I went to meet the priest who called Father John. Father John asked me to tell him my story of how I believed and was baptized and happily I recounted his. When I finished my narration Fr. John said to me: “You believed in a miracle. But that the Orthodox Church is the only Truth is not only established through the wonders but also only from Holy Bible. Because and the devil can doing wonders. And Buddhists do wonders and many others with the power of the devil doing wonders. But God loves you and He maked a wonder in your life to believe Him”.
I surprised with what I heard and I asked Fr. John to explain me that reveals this up during the Holy Bible. Also wondered how my parents just read Holy Bible and being outside the Church and Fr. John replied that they misunderstand the Holy Bible.
Then he mentioned the words of Christ Himself who said of his Church that it will establish and will not be interrupted when your work forever and ever: “I will build my Church, and the gates of hades will not prevail against it”(Matthew 16:18). Roman Catholics were detached from the body of the Church in 1054 AD and the Protestants left from Roman Catholics on 1517 AD. And then as now established at least 33,000 different Protestant heresies where one does not accept the other and all claims that the Church had stopped Her work and its restarted when themselves founding the protestants sects. So the words of our Lord “build my Church, and the gates of hades will not prevail against it”(Matthew 16:18 ) match only the Christian Orthodox Church. The Christian Orthodox Church is the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church founded by Christ and His Apostles on 33 A.D.. Also, the Christian Orthodox Church has the Apostolic Succession.
The Christian Orthodox Church is also called Eastern Orthodox Church, Orthodox Catholic Church, Orthodox Church and Orthodoxy. (But, be careful: Christian Orthodox Church is not same with Coptic Orthodox Church, Eastern Catholic Churches, Church of Armenia, Oriental Orthodoxy and Eastern Christianity, that they are also called Monophysites, Copts and Chalkedonians and they are heretical false sects because they left from Christian Orthodox Church on 451 A.D.)
On September 2001 I started going in speeches for young people which they have Fr. John in style A&Q. I asked many questions, quite benevolent wonder which I had on how all those who teach the Orthodox Church, having abolished the Protestants like Holy Icons, Virgin Mary, Priesthood, Confession etc., it turns up during the Holy Bible.
Fr. John answered to me many questions but because I had a lot of questions told me to come after speaking to his office to give me an anti-heretical book. And he gave me one that automatically negate the heretical protestants teachings with only hagiographies passages (verses) from Holy Bible. So I read the anti-heretical this book and God blessed me to believe the Christian Orthodox Church from the Holy Bible, too.
After a few months, on 2002, I learned that Fr. John want to build a monastery in Attica, Greece, which will deal divine confession and apology against heresies, atheists, buddhists etc. with anti-heretical books. And Ι said to Fr. John that I want abided by his monastery.
So, on 29 November 2002, the eve of St. Apostle Andrew, I came officially escorted of Fr. John, and I waiting and making daily prayer to God given us a place monastery.
In the summers of 2002 and 2003, I worked with my father as painters. These two summers I had gone with my father to Mykonos Island (Greece) to paint a new hotel. There I asked as to whether there is some local Saint and I learned about St. Manuel of Mykonos, who was married in Mykonos and he was martyred in Chios Island, Greece. The memory day of St. Manuel is on 15 March (+1792).
So, I asked Fr John to pray every day to St. Manuel of Mykonos and he said me: “Ok, pray to help us to find a place for our monastery”. So I prayed to Christ, to Virgin Mary and St. Manuel of Mykonos to help us to find a place to build monastery.
After 5 years, with God’s Grace we found a temporary place for Monastery and on 25 November 2007 I went to lived there. And to show me our God, for another one time, that the Saints of God helps us and that we must invoke them without any hesitation on 15 March 2008, the feast day of St. Manuel of Mykonos, I was tonsured an Orthodox monk with the name “Abel” that gave me the Bishop of Piraeus in honor of St. Forefather Abel (Adam’s son in Old Testament) noting surprised that on 29 November where I desided on 2002 to be a monk, is the feast day of another Saint who called St. Abel of Valaam, Russia (+1831).
After 6 years, on 2013, we find a place from monastery and now we went there.
Every day and every night I pray for all the people to coming inside the House of Christ, to the Orthodox Christian Church (Eastern Orthodox Church).
I wish you all the best!
Abel-Tasos Gkiouzelis
Email: gkiouz.abel@gmail.com
Feel free to email me...!
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Conversions of murderers to Holy Confession
The late Preacher and Father Confessor Archimandrite Venedictos Petrakis (+1961) reports:
"Through the preaching and the Sacrament of Confession at least ten planned murders were prevented!
One of those who renounced his murderous plans, as soon as he came out of the church after confession, began to say to those who were in the square: 'Everyone, run to Father Confessor to make you human!' He himself, not only did he disown murder and forgive his enemy, but he also managed to bring him to confession.
In another village, an old woman whose only son had been murdered, as soon as she came out of the church after confession rushed to the shop, approached the murderer of her son and forgave him, and she even urged him to confess! The murderer, deeply moved, proceeded to the Sacrament of the Holy Confession in tears!
In another village of the same area, some people who had come under orders and decision to execute me, also repented and confessed...".
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The conversion of Fr. Nikolaοs Loudovikos from atheism to Orthodoxy with the help of Saint Porphyrios of Kafsokalyvia, Athens & Oropos, Greece (+1991)
Fr. Nikolaos Loudovikos, Greece:
When I was 20 years old, I was an anarchist...
I had long hair, I had earrings and I was tyrannical to
spiritual people, my teachers...
They sent me to a Christian boarding school and I caused havoc...
One day, at the urging of an uncle, I decided to visit Saint Porphyrios...
I thought I would meet a naive old man, but I was quickly proved wrong...!!!!!
As soon as the Saint Porphyrios saw me he said:
"Ηey you, you want to believe, but your strong mind won't let you...!
But one way or another, know that He loves you, Christ is waiting for you and will win you over one day...!!!
Hey, come tomorrow and we'll talk !"
The next day I went to talk to him...!
As soon as the Saint Porphyrios saw me he said:
"Hey you, do you like poems? Because I'm a poet, too.
Shall we go to the forest to recite to you?"
He took me by the hand and started reciting poems...!
As I listened, I burst into tears and cried. Why...?
Because the poems that the Saint Porphyrios was reciting were my poems...!!!
The ones I had written and hidden in a notebook, believing that one day I would publish them...
I was shocked!
INS
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A young man in Athens, Greece, in 1963, during the summer months was tempted in the flesh beyond his strength. He made up his mind to put an end to the struggles of abstinence, for as he said he could no longer bear the weight of the flesh. He thought of his Elder, the Elder Amfilochios Makris of Patmos Island, Greece, but he was too far away to help him. He left his aboad and headed towads the center of Athens. It was getting dark. The journey took an hour. He kept on praying but the flame of the flesh would not cool down. So, the young man who had never been to the cinema before, said to himself: "Let me start with an X- rated movie", which was then showing at the Rex cinema. He bought a ticket and stood near the advertising posters. Inexperienced as he was, he understood almost nothing. As he squinted to look, he turned his face away in case someone he knew saw him. And there beside him was the figure of Elder Amfilochios with tears in his eyes! That's where it all stopped. He returned home and wept bitterly like Peter.
INS.
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The conversion of an Australian man from Hinduism to Orthodoxy with the help of Saint Gabriela Papagiannis missionary of India, from Greece (+1992)
Saint Gabrielia Papayanni (+1992), missionary of India:
«Once, in India, there was a very great "master", of those so called guru (at the time I was working in the small hospital that belonged to his ashram - his "monastery"). One day, a very cute 26 year old youngster from Australia came to the ashram, having brought with him a big box. He showed up where this great "master" was, surrounded by people who heard him speak... When this young man entered, he blushed with joy and excitement, looking at the "master" the way we look at, if I may say, the icon of a Saint! So after the "master" took a good look at him, he said: "So you're the one who came from Australia? What have you brought us?" The poor guy could not speak from excitement, and yet the other one insisted: "Did you bring us bananas? Did you bring us fruit? Did you bring us sweets? What did you bring us?" The poor guy began to open the box and took out papers and more papers and more papers... "Hey, show us now what you're going to give us." In the end he took out tapes and the tape recorder he had brought to record the voice of this great "master"! "Oh!.... Is that it? Is that all you've got? Go show him his room!".
So the poor guy went to his room, sat down, locked himself in and didn't want to come out at all. He was shocked! He expected to see a man who had almost deified him, and now he saw him waiting for bananas and fruit like a commoner, finally telling him to go to his room since he hadn't brought anything... But the poor guy had come to capture the guru's voice and send it back to Australia (... for everyone to admire his achievement, because of course, in all this there was a little bit of ego...) The young man, as you may have gathered, was in real shock. The next day they tried to get him out of his room to go and listen to the teachings, but he did not want to.
One day he told me: "You tell me that when God wills something, it is done, and that when you leave yourself free in God's hands, He does it for you, and that the only way to reach God is through Christ, who takes you by the hand and educates you and takes you where you need to go; and all you have to do is leave yourself in His hands." "Yes," I said to him, "as long as you really let go of yourself in Him!" Another day he said to me: "You say that we must leave ourselves completely in God's hands, and then... Fine! So let's go the two of us with no money to a mountain, to an unknown place, to see... Will we find food and shelter, as you say?" "No question about it! Of course we will!" "So you're sure?" "I am sure." "If I see this, I will believe in Christ and give up all the "masters" and all the gurus."
But my children, the Bible says "do not tempt the Lord your God, and do not seek a sign". But then I had such a longing and certainty that this young man, having been born in a Christian country, must not lose his Christ. What could happen now? So I said to him, "Yes, we will go." We only had enough money for the train and for sleeping the first night; very little, a rupee (something like a hundred drachmas). The next day we would wait and see what would happen. I was so sure! It was as if I was going to a familiar place... Well, this young man had brought some fruit and we took it along with us.
The next day in the morning, we set off for the mountain. We climbed and climbed and climbed... And it was noon. At one point we sat down on a hill to rest. He said to me: "No miracle yet." I said, "You're in too much of a hurry. I told you that tonight, God willing, we will find a place to stay." "Fine", he said. But not before long the sun began to set, for we were on a mountain where it was setting fast. We looked down into the valley, and to tell you the truth, I was beginning to think that somehow... the miracles I was expecting were a little late in coming, but God knows best ... He turned to me and said: "And now what do you say?" "I say tonight we'll sleep where God wants us to sleep." And not before long, as dusk approached, just as the sun was about to set, we saw a tropical hat slowly coming up from below the hill, then a face, and then two Indian figures. Soon we saw that the face with the tropical hat was a woman wearing glasses; she seemed to be old and European. The two Indians were young girls. Gradually their faces were coming up until they finally reached us.
"Good evening." "Good evening." "Where are you coming from"? "We're coming from down there." "Where are you going?" "To friends". He glared at me. He might have wondered whether I was lying. "So where are you from?" "I'm from Greece and the young man's from Australia." She said:"And I'm from Holland. I was brought up in America and these two Indian girls you see, are two of the six daughters I've adopted here and I've helped them study nursing. What do you do for a living?" I said: "I teach physiotherapy and now I've just finished from a hospital." "Ah! God sent you. Are you perhaps free to come to our house tonight? These two girls of mine are on leave for a month. Maybe you'd like to teach them a little..." I said, "I'd love to... But I have this young man with me and we were going..." "I've also adopted a boy. They'll share his room, and tonight we'll all be a family." "Thank you and God for bringing us together. The young man from Australia, indeed, was completely dumbfounded...
God had worked his miracle and I was elated! At that time I had an indescribable excitement. India was my great adventure with the Faith of God, for I had gone there without knowing anything, in a foreign country and in a foreign language. Anyway, we arrived at their little house in the mountains. It was a nice house on a hill. She told me how she had left for other places when she was young, how she had lived there for so many years, and that it was only her friends who supported her because she didn't belong to any organization and all that, and how God had blessed her.
That night, the Australian guy was so moved that he told me with tears in his eyes "My sister Lila, sit down at the piano and let's play all the Christmas songs now! Christ has just been born in me!" And I sat at the piano and we started singing in high summer all the Christmas songs! And the girls started singing with their mother and her son and everybody... And this guy, Alan, was literally in the bliss of God.
But you see, God performs his miracles as and when He needs to. Because this young man was so misguided in other directions and because God wanted him, He did all of this for us. And I was so sure that he couldn't be lost like that, at 26, with all these workouts that cause squint and all sorts of other things, when they are not... Anyway. We stayed there for a fortnight. I showed the girls what they wanted, and then he went back to Australia. This lady, the missionary, had invited me every summer ever since and I used to spend some time with her. They never forgot that story, especially when I told them what happened to that young man later because his story wasn't over...
Another year had passed, and another, and he was back to the workouts and the others there. I had gone far away, up a mountain and no one could find me. As he told me later, he remembered what I had told him and thought: "Just as Sister Lila says yes when she is invited, so will I say yes this time and wherever it takes me", for again he wasn't happy there. So he got up and went to the place where he thought he would find me, where we first met. But they told him "She won't be coming back this year, she's up on the mountain." Now look at this coincidence! Someone came to where I was and said to me "You know, Alan from Australia is in that place." "Oh", I thought, "I'll send him a letter to come here", not knowing the recent troubles he had gone through... And as he was waiting for an invitation from someone else for a big change in his life or I don't know what, here comes my letter. It was the only invitation he got!
Back on the road, he came to that mountain where there were no Europeans, only he and I. So he came and said to me: " What happened then was good and holy. But in the meantime, I saw a lot of things not being done the way you said. That is why I came back to India, in search of the Truth." "But I've already told you, my boy, that the Truth is not a theory, it is Christ who said, 'I am the Truth'. What else do you want? Do you want more miracles?" "But you say you always live in miracles." "Yes, I live in miracles. The fact that you are alive and came back, that we have our eyes and our feet, all this is a miracle. You see where I work with the lepers? You see the blind? You see all these sick people here? Why them and not us? Did you ever ask that? By Grace, we have it all! By Grace! In spite of all our sin! By Grace we are as we are. By the Blood of Christ's sacrifice! Don't you understand that? And as we were talking, an old man came crying... "Run, my boy is seriously ill in the hospital. Come on!" And off we went. This little village was very small and the hospital was not very... The doctor said to me: "You've come to see the boy. He fell from a scaffold and it seems to me that his spine is broken and that he will be dead by morning." We saw the boy. He was eighteen years old. I was so moved to see this boy that I started to stroke his forehead a little, and I said to his father :"No. God's miracles are great! The boy will live. Don't worry."
"Then you will call, and the Lord will answer; you will cry for help, and he will say: Here I am." (Isaiah 58:9)
At that moment, the boy opened his eyes a little. His father expected him to die. But when he heard that his boy could live, he turned to me and said: "Hey, if my boy is going to live, give me some money to go eat, because I'm hungry." The instinct of self-preservation! I said: "I don't have any money, this guy will give it to you", and the young man from Australia gave it to him. We left. The next morning he said to me: "Let's go and see if the boy is still alive." When we got there, we found the doctor at the door and he said: "I'll tell you one thing, you'll be surprised. Nature sometimes plays games like this! The boy is well and this morning he set off on foot with his father to their village, ten miles away." Hey... The Australian guy this time almost fell down! He was really overwhelmed. He turned to me and said: "Now, I believe in the omnipotence of God. I believe in Christ! I am a Christian in my soul! I'm going back to Australia! I have found what I was looking for!"
The young man left... The years went by. I left India, too... I went to Bethany, became a dokime and one day I got a letter from this young man again, saying: "My great pride has brought me to despair. Three young women almost drowned while swimming, and because I was a very good swimmer, I jumped into the water and rescued them. But I had such a great pride that I loudly announced it to the whole world, and in the end I lost my mind and they put me in a mental hospital. I got out afterwards, they said I'm fine, but I don't feel good. Now what do you advise me to do?" At that time I had met Father Lazarus, the English Orthodox in India. I said to him, "Go back to India. But this time go straight to Father Lazarus, I beg you." I sat and wrote to Father Lazarus. The young man went to him...
When Father Lazarus wrote to me, he told me that for a whole year the young man was just looking at him. He attended the Divine Liturgy every day but didn't speak to him at all. Ηe was an enigma. One morning he said to him: "Father, I've known Sister Lila for so many years, but she never asked me whether I had been baptized, nor if I was a Christian. She must have thought that, since I was born in Australia, I would be. But I am not baptized. I'm not even a Christian! Please, baptize me!" Father Lazarus' joy was great. He baptized him and named him Adrian. He changed his name from Alan to Adrian. He received his blessing and went off to become a missionary... These are the great and astonishing miracles of God!"».
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An Orthodox priest from Exeter, England, tells us his own unique story of how he came to know Orthodoxy
One of the priests of the parish of Exeter, England, the eldest one, told us his own unique story through which he came to know Orthodoxy:
I was in Paris, it was raining and I had to go somewhere to stay dry. I saw a door near me and entered. I can't say I saw the exterior of the church because it was raining; I just saw the door and entered. If it hadn't rained, I wouldn't have gone in! Opening the outer door abruptly, I tripped and fell into another door and so I got into the church. Not wanting to disturb anyone, I sat back in the corner and watched. Once I became more confident, I went ahead because I wanted to know what was going on, where I was. I saw the icons, the crosses and thought it must be a church. I wondered if it was a synagogue, because I'd never seen vestments worn in such a way. I liked the vestments, the incense, the whole visual impression of the service, and I didn't want to leave. I heard the choir in a completely different language, not even French. It was Slavic. I was sitting and looking at the icons. And if they had told me then that in eight years I would be doing the same thing as a Deacon, I wouldn't have believed them at all.
While I was in the temple and I saw the way in which the service was taking place, the order of the priests and the faithful, I felt that heaven was there and I thought: 'If there is a God - because I was wondering until that moment if there was - this is the way He should be worshipped.' Since then, in our parish, they say that 'Nicanor went into the temple to be protected from the rain of heaven and he found himself in Heaven! I always say to anyone who comes to the Orthodox Church for the first time, 'Enter the temple, go to the middle of the church and you will see in front of you the gates of Paradise!', which is nothing but the iconostasis.
Before I became Orthodox, I was a believer in the English sense of the word: God was always there! I knew how to pray when I wanted to. Besides, for I happened to come from a military family, I had the mentality that 'if God is good enough for the Royal Navy, then it is good enough for me!' That was the depth of my theology!
I went back to England and heard that there was a bishop in London, Antony Bloom, but I didn't pursue the matter. One day I was watching a film on television about the French Revolution. At that time the television programme ended at midnight and it was the custom on the BBC to invite someone to end the day. The epilogue that night was some prayers presented by Bishop Bloom of the Russian Orthodox Church. I was about to turn off the television, but I tripped on the carpet in front of it and so I could not turn it off. Listening to the prayers, I was surprised and sat down again to watch the rest. Then, the icons from the church in Paris came to my mind!
I did not have his address, but I wrote him a letter saying 'I heard you on television a week ago and I am interested in becoming Orthodox. Could I meet you sometime?' I wrote on the envelope 'Bishop Antony Bloom, Russian Church, London', I knew nothing else. After all, there wouldn't be many such churches in London! Finally he replied and I met him for a whole afternoon. Later he suggested that I contact a priest. I was in correspondence with him on matters of Orthodoxy, so we had something like a correspondence course in Orthodoxy! We continued this communication for quite some time and one Easter I became Orthodox and after a few years a Deacon".
ANT. INS.
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Reason #1: the ever-changing church
This series of articles are from the “Becoming Orthodox” blog.
This is the first in a series of posts highlighting reasons why I have converted to the Orthodox Church. They are listed in no particular order. Some are big, important reasons; others may be small, wonderful but non-essential reasons. I hope they offer food for thought.
A few months ago I read an article in Christianity Today that highlighted a Christian movement in Mexico. It’s been awhile since I read the article and I can no longer recall the particulars, but one line really stood out: “How will the church in Mexico continue to change?” asked the columnist.
If the church is the pillar of truth (1 Timothy 3:15), then it should be unchanged since the day that it was founded by Jesus. Yet in any particular church group (save one) you will find numerous changes. Roman Catholics have a pretty long history, but they change the rules all the time. Protestantism is no different, being that it was borne out of a desire for change; a desire that certainly continues to this day when we have thousands of different denominations.
I’m disturbed by all of these changes. Truth doesn’t change. Neither should the Church.
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Evangelism and Culture
by Fr. Michael J. Oleksa,
Missionary in Alaska
The most obvious gospel paradigm for the theme evangelism and culture is the parable of the sower. The seed is the Word of God.
But as St. Maximos the Confessor wrote in the seventh century, the Word of God is constantly revealing himself, becoming “embodied.” The Word establishes the created universe, the heavens tell his glory, the firmament his handiwork, for it is by the Word that everything that was made came into existence and is sustained in being. The Word is embodied first of all in the entire cosmos. The Word in the Cosmos has been misunderstood, after all. It was as if the Message revealed by the Word was written, as C.S. Lewis once said, in letters too large for us to read clearly. In the pre-Christian societies, he was wrongly identified with Neptune, Zeus, Adonus, Apollo, or in the modern world with the forces of the natural world, with the “laws” of chemistry, physiology, genetics.
So in the second embodiment the Word became easier to decipher. The Word of God is also embodied in the Holy Scriptures, in some ways in amore focused and understandable form. Even there, the possibility of misinterpretation arose, and the Scribes and Pharisees were constantly criticized for missing the intended meaning of the Law and the Prophets.
So ultimately, at the fullness of time, the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. He is called “Wonderful, Counsellor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.” He is called “the Messiah.” “the Christ,” the Way, the Truth and the Life.” He calls himself “the Living Bread,” “the Son of Man,” “Living Water,” “the Good Shepherd.”
All of this is the Word of God, the seed in the parable of sower- and more. The gospel is also the Church, the mystical body of Christ, and the scattered seed can refer to the evangelical establishment of the church as the faith spreads geographically throughout the world. And fullness of the gospel, of the Christian faith, is Orthodoxy. The seed then means all these-the Word of God in all embodiments, the Gospel of Repentance, of the Kingdom, the sacramental and iconographic presence of Christ, the Truth of the Orthodox faith. And none of these existed in a vacuum. The seed always requires a specific place, some oil, in which to grow.
The Word of God as scripture must be expressed in human language, and language is culture. The gospel of the kingdom must be preached in human words, and words are culture. The presence of Christ must convey, manifested with signs, symbols, art, music, liturgical action, sacrament, and all this is culture. The Truth, like the seed, needs soil in which to grow, and the soil is culture.
The seed in the parable is scattered and some grows, some does not. But even the seed that reaches maturity produces different harvests, some thirty or sixty or a hundredfold. The same truth, the same gospel, the same Christ, when introduced into specific cultural context produces a unique harvest, for different soils have different levels of fertility. Climatic conditions vary from time to time and place to place. The reception of the Word of God varies accordingly, not only as individuals hear the gospel, understand the Truth, confront Christ, enter the church, but as cultures do as well.
No one plants without expecting a harvest. The results the church anticipates and for which it prepares, the goal of all that it says and does, is revealed in the gospel passage read on more Sundays during church year than any other: John ch. 17.
It is no accident that the church presents our Lord’s prayer for unity to us more often than any other, for this is the ultimate goal of his life and mission, the fulfillment of the gospel. In the end, the scriptures tell us, Christ will be “all in all.” He will hold us, all people of all races, nationalities, ethnic groups, political parties, religious sects and creeds, and with all others, our friends, neighbours, and the enemies Jesus Christ commanded us to forgive, to bless, to love. For those who have loved and served him- and the neighbour the have abused, despised, rejected, exploited, hated- will be their sorrow, humiliation, their torment, their hell. Heaven and hell are not places we “go to,” but spiritual conditions we are already in.
We must become one, the way our Lord prayed to his heavenly Father, as the Holy Trinity is one, in total humility and love, each of us fulfilling the will of the Father as the son and the Holy Spirit perfectly and eternally do. This is the end toward which the church labours and strives. The church plants the seed in order to reap this harvest. No one can be the image of the Holy Trinity alone, as isolated individual. While only human beings, by an acct of faith and commitment, can be saved, no one is saved alone. There is no such thing as an individual salvation, for salvation is to enter into the community of interpersonal love, love of God, fulfilling his will in all things, and the love of one’s neighbour, the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets.
This is the goal, the harvest the church expects, awaits, and in which it invites all humanity to participate.
The church’s vision, her soteriology and eschatology, while focused on Christ, is not exclusively Christocentric but Trinitarian. And the essence of his interpersonal unity-in-love, the possibly for many persons to be one, is revealed in divine love, tri-personal Agape, which, which makes the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit, the three equally divine persons, one. We must always keep the thirteenth chapter of St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians in mind in all the evangelists think, say and do. There is no place for coercion, persecution, intolerance or violence in planting the seed, in announcing the good news to the nations, for these tactics would render the ultimate goal, total Agape, unattainable.
Syncretism and inculturation
Perhaps no question is more heatedly discussed in various ecumenical mission conferences today than the attempt to distinguish theologically between syncretism and inculturation. Within the World Council of Churches, the problem, it seems to me, is that there are different kinds of seed. In this context, the temptation to syncretism is inescapable.
What is syncretism? It has been difficult if not impossible for many Protestant theologians to arrive at consensus, a definition of exactly what constitutes syncretism, but the historic, patristic Orthodox tradition offers us clear guidelines. The church, during the period of ecumenical councils, sought to express its faith in terms intelligible to Hellenic culture without being distorted, without being “contaminated” by it in the process. This was no easy task, and it required five centuries and seven councils to accomplish it. Syncretism was successfully voided. The church, guided by the Holy Spirit, did not add to its doctrines, practices, beliefs, anything extraneous or incompatible with the faith of the Apostles, the witness of sacred scripture, the Truth revealed in Christ.
Syncretism is precisely the introduction into Christian doctrine or worship elements that are incompatible with the fullness of the Apostolic tradition.
Thus, when we learned Chinese Protestant theologian attempted to include within her presentation at Canberra general assembly of the World Council of the Churches an act of reverence to the Chinese goddess of mercy, the Orthodox were correct in rejecting such an inclusion as syncretistic. There is no place for “goddesses of mercy” in Christian doctrine or piety. (Orthodox missionaries, however, encountering a culture with a personification of a merciful feminine principle might attempt to present this pre-Christian intuition as typologically prefiguring the Theo-okos.
If syncretism must at all costs be avoided as distorting or corrupting the gospel message, inculturation, on the other hand, is inevitable and necessary. However, inculturation is only possible when the evangelist knows the Orthodox tradition and can therefore discern what is and what is not compatible with it. Inculturation is the planting of the gospel, the seed, the presence of Christ, in the unique soil of new culture, and allowing it, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, to mature at its own pace, to produce ultimately a new, indigenous church.
The Alaskan Orthodox mission
When, for example, the Valaam Mission analyzed the spirituality of the Kodiak native peoples in 1795, they expressed a willingness to tolerate certain aberrations (such as polygamy) for a short time, to discuss others (the belief in the inua/yua) and to overlook still others (for example, fasting norms).
Polygamy endured for one generation after the baptism of the Kodiak Alutiiqs. This was a necessary accommodation, since to require the separation of multiple wives from their husbands would have created severe social upheaval and economical hardship for women and children. Fasting norms could not be enforced in a land of hunter-gatherers whose food supplies were never stable or predictable, and starvation was an annual possibility.
Only today, after two centuries, is fasting being gradually introduced. Everywhere, however, the reception of the gospel ended inter-tribal warfare and the enslavement and mistreatment of the prisoners. This was seldom recognized or even noticed by later observers, who had not complained that the Orthodox natives had not absorbed much doctrine, had not memorized much scripture, and thus had not, in their estimation, been properly evangelized.
Belief in the Yua persists. The Yua, in Yup’ik Eskimo culture, is the spirit that makes a living thing to be alive. It is the life force, which in pre-contact times was believed to be conscious but interpersonal. Animals and human beings have essentially the same Yua, and differ only in their outward physical form.
Animals have abilities that surpass those of human beings. They see, smell, and hear what we cannot. They have strengths and capabilities that surpass ours. They are not viewed as inferior beings, but in some ways as superior creatures. Their sensory input permits them to know things that we cannot perceive. To be changed into an animal in all native Alaskan folklore is viewed not as a curse (typical of European stories; – “the Frog Prince,” “Beauty and The Beast,” werewolves, etc.), but as a promotion. Some Alutiiq stories end with the hero deciding to remain an animal and “live happily ever after.” This belief in the intelligence, sensitivity and even superiority of the animals made traditional Alaskan peoples reverent towards the game they needed to kill in order to feed themselves, in order to survive. And it is the universal beliefs that since the animals know more, see more, hear more, sense more, they are willing victims who offer to the hunter. But they only sacrifice themselves to feed those human beings who treat them reverently, respectfully, not only during the hunt, in the act of killing the and butchering them, but in the way the meat is thoroughly eaten, wasting none of it, and how various parts of the animal (such as the pelts) are used. The unusable remains must also be treated respectfully, returned to the habitat from which the animal was taken. Recycling is an ancient practice in the Arctic.
Orthodox missionaries did not discourage this belief that life in all its form should be treated reverently. Their Alaskan converts heard the Paschal gospel from within the context of their traditional worldview, and saw Christ in the whole created universe, the Word of God in the Cosmos, in a way even the missionaries had not seen him before. The life of the world, the life of all, yes-all the Yua are really him. And the first chapter to the Colossians took on a meaning that was always there, but had gone unnoticed, or at least under appreciated, for centuries.
The seed found especially fertile ground, for the text “He is before all things and in him all things subsist” affirmed that what the Alaskans had intuited centuries before was now affirmed in the gospel. Only now they knew his identity. Alaskan Orthodoxy affirms a cosmic dimension to the Christian faith that many, perhaps most, modern Christians fail to grasp. John 3:16 is probably the most widely memorized verse in the New Testament, few who study the Bible in English translation grasp its full meaning the way most Eskimos do. The original text speaks of God’s love for the world, and most suppose the Greek word here is oikoumene, the inhabited earth, the human beings, and indeed the evangelist could have chosen this word. In fact, however, he did not. This famous verse affirms “For God so loved cosmos the sent his son.”
In the missionary context of the industrialized world, where secularism is in some instances giving way to a revival of “paganism” or the emergence of “new age” spirituality, or an interest in oriental religions, the theology of St. Maximos, in which the “logoi”: of God are affirmed, in which the created universe plays a mediating and sanctifying role in God’s divine plan, which the cosmos is to be blessed, reclaimed, transfigured and transformed, sanctified and blessed to become “the Kingdom of our God and His Christ” presents a Christian alternative.
The Alaskan church goes forth in procession each January for the great blessing of water, in most places walking on the frozen river, standing on the ice in subzero temperatures, to sanctify the one small piece of the cosmos on which their lives have always depended. The river is their highway, their cleansing, their supermarket, their home, their life. In their pre-Christian past they thanked the animal spirits for offering themselves, sacrificing themselves to feed the people, and put their inflated intestines and bladders through the holes in the ice in order to recycle their Yua. Now they go to the river and bless the waters, putting the cross through a cruciform hole in the ice; it is Christ they bless, Christ they thank, for his sacrifice, prefigured in the cycle of the natural world as they understood it.
This not, I would submit, syncretistic, for these patterns were always there, in the liturgical life of the church. The gospel texts were always there, within the hearing of all believers. But the Eskimos have discovered a meaning hidden from those of other cultures and they offer this meaning back to the church. This the pattern of all genuine inculturation-the missionary, and, through the evangelist, the whole church, discovers heretofore unnoticed or disclosed treasures of her own sacred heritage.
When Navajo Indians of the American southwest were asked to make a film about production of their famous rugs, they submitted a video depicting a sunrise, wild flowers blooming, rain falling, sheep grazing, wind blowing, the sun setting, and finally a few seconds showing a half-finished rug on a traditional loom. The producers who had commissioned the film were confused and disappointed. They had expected to see wool being spun, dyed and woven, and none of this was included in the video. But to the Navajo, it takes more than wool, vegetable dyes, a loom and a grandmother to make a rug. They assumed a much wider frame of reference: The sun must rise. The rain must fall. The flower must bloom. The sheep must graze. And if all is harmony, you can get rugs out of it. It takes the whole cosmos to make a rug.
It this not equally true of our Eucharastic Gifts?
We so often perceive it as merely bread- flour, water and yeast. But what does it take to produce that flour? The sun must shine. The wind must blow. The rain must fall. The earth must be fertile. Human beings must appropriately interact with it. And if all is in harmony, you can make bread. On every altar, in every church we offer the universe in joy and thanksgiving back to God. But our frame of reference can be too small.
Christ fed thousands with only a few a few loaves and two fish. Those who witnessed this considered it a miracle. Our Lord also said, “The son only does the works he sees his Father do.”
The Father is always taking a little wheat and feeding thousands, but we fail to see it, we don’t get the message. He is taking some seeds each spring and making food in every wheat and corn field, but the pagans said it was Apollo or Zeus or Minerva or “Mother Nature” at work, and secularists say it is all “natural processes.” So the Son does the same thing he sees his Father do, but on a smaller scale and a faster speed, and suddenly the miraculous element becomes evident. It is the same Word of God made manifest and the feeding of the thousands will have its full impact when we can recognize it continuously in the miracle of the cosmos, the Word written in letters so large we could not read the message before.
Be reminding the church of the cosmic dimensions of its faith and mission, the Greek evangelized become evangelists. In the Patristic age, Greek language, Greek culture, Greek philosophical language enriched the life of the church forever.
As the seed, the gospel, the church, as Christ’s presence enters into the context of other cultures, these too offer something back to God. The same seed, the same faith, the same Orthodox truth, implanted in another culture produces a unique harvest, a Serbian, a Romanian, a Russian, a Ukrainian, an Albanian, an African, an Alaskan, an Indonesian, a Korean or Japanese (or even an American), expression, each the product of the same holy faith, yet each irreplaceable and unique.
Father Alexander Schmemann defined in his most famous book, For the Life of the World, what it means to be Christian.
“A Christian, “ he wrote, “is someone who, wherever he/she looks sees Christ and rejoices Him.”
I read this book many times. I was blessed for several years to attend Father Alexander’s lectures. I read Holy Fathers. But it was my Eskimo parishioners who revealed to me the depth of the passage, revealed to me the cosmic dimension of the prologue to the gospel according to St. John, showed me the magnificence of the Apostle Paul’s Christocentric experience and vision. This is what inculturation means for the church. Unlike syncretism, which distorts the gospel, corrupts the faith, renders a Christian harvest impossible, inculturation enriches and deepens and expands the genuine apprehension of the Apostolic faith, to the glory of God and building up of his holy church. The church, while resisting any syncretism, delights and rejoices in inculturation.
Conclusion
The church scatters the seed, offering the gospel to all, and in so doing, discovers the new harvest dimensions of the faith it had not consciously known, noticed or appreciated fully before. Evangelism enriches the church. Inculturation blesses the church. Our Greek patristic legacy is the historic evidence of the creative process. The seed always needs soil in which to grow-the gospel always needs a culture in which to be planted, and the Holy Spirit produces various harvests in each culture and in each of us.
Evangelism and Culture. 1995. International Review of Mission. Authentic Witness Within Each Culture. Section 1; Conference on World Mission and Evangelism (Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, 1996). LXXXIV No. 335, October 1995. The World Council of Churches. 387-393.
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“BIBLE ANSWER MAN” HANK HANEGRAAFF JOINS ORTHODOX CHURCH
Known to millions as the “Bible Answer Man,” 67-year-old Hank Hanegraaff and his wife were received into the Orthodox Church this year on the great feast of Palm Sunday, at St. Nektarios Greek Orthodox Church in Charlotte, NC.
Mr. Hanegraaff can be seen kneeling with a lit candle under a priest’s epitrachelion in the picture to the right. His wife’s hands can be seen as well. The picture originates from the Facebook page of the parish, but has been removed after an influx of comments, including negative remarks from those who appreciated Hanegraaff’s work as a Protestant.
The Bible Answer Man addressed his conversion to the Orthodox faith on his program yesterday, in response to a caller who had seen remarks claiming that, in becoming Orthodox, Mr. Hanegraaff had left the Christian faith. He responded:
«I am now a member of an Orthodox Church, but nothing has changed in my faith. I have been attending an Orthodox church for a long time—for over two years, really, as a result of what happened when I went to China, many years ago. I saw Chinese Christians who were deeply in love with the Lord, and I learned that while they may not have had as much intellectual acumen or knowledge as I did, they had life. And so I learned that while truth matters, life matters more, and I remember flying back from China after spending time with just common people who had a deep, intense love for the Lord, and wondering, “Was I even a Christian?”
I was comparing my ability to communicate truth with their deep and abiding love for the Lord Jesus Christ… One man, by the way, said to me, truth matters but life matters more. In other words, it is not just knowing about Jesus Christ, it is experiencing the Resurrected Christ. As a result of that I started studying what was communicated by the progeny of Watchman Nee with respect to theosis and that drove me back to the early Christian Church.
And I suppose over that period of time I have fallen ever more in love with my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. It’s sort of like my wife—I have never been more in love with my wife than I am today, and I’ve never been more in love with my Lord Jesus Christ than I am today. I’ve been impacted by the whole idea of knowing Jesus Christ, experiencing Jesus Christ, and partaking of the graces of Jesus Christ through the Eucharist or the Lord’s Table. And that has become so central in my life, but as far as the statement that you mentioned, that I’ve left the Christian faith—nothing could be farther from the truth. In fact I believe what I have always believed, as codified in the Nicene Creed, and as championed by mere Christianity».
After reciting the entire Nicene Creed, he concluded, “In other words, I am as deeply committed to championing mere Christianity and the essentials of the historic Christian faith as I have ever been.”
Hank Hanegraaff has served as the president and chairman of the board of the North Carolina-based Christian Research Institute (CRI) since 1989, when he also took over previous-president’s radio talk-show “The Bible Answer Man.” The show includes answering questions about matters of Christian doctrine and history and Biblical interpretation, and denominational particularities. He has been an outspoken critic of non-Christian religions, new religious movements and cults, and heresies within conservative Christianity. He is also the author of over twenty books. His The Complete Bible Answer Book—Collector’s Edition is a compendium of the most common, and the most difficult, questions regarding Christianity, culture, and cults that Hank has received over the past three decades.
It has been noted that Hank has been speaking about the Orthodox Church more on his show lately, referring to it as “fantastic,” and “the early Church.” In 2016, Hank interviewed Fr. Themistoclis (Adamopoulos), a Greek Orthodox priest, to discuss his journey from Marxist rock star to Orthodox monk. Fr. Themi works tirelessly with the poor and suffering in Sierra Leone, where people are still suffering from the effects of a recent Ebola epidemic. The interview can be listened to here.
In March, Mr. Hanegraaff answered a caller’s question about the Orthodox teaching of theosis, ably explaining the doctrine of man’s sanctification on both a Biblical and Patristic basis. “We become Christ-bearers since His Body and Blood are distributed throughout our limbs, as Cyril of Jerusalem said… The whole idea being that we become by grace what God is by nature… We become, as Peter put it, partakers in the divine nature,” the Bible Answer Man explained. A full video of the call can be seen below:
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The miraculous conversion of three atheists to Orthodoxy by Saint John of Kronstadt, Russia (+1908)
There are, however, as a counterbalance, completely opposite cases, such as that of three non-believing youths who wanted to mock the miraculous power of Saint John of Kronstadt of Russia (+1908):
Two students asked him to pray for the healing of a friend of theirs who lay down and pretended to be ill. However, after the visit and his prayer, they found that the supposedly sick man could not get out of bed. He was completely paralyzed! He finally got well and got up, but only when all three of them sincerely repented.
ΥΤ. INS.
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Ancient Rhythm
By Robin Galiano Russell, USA
Converts to Orthodoxy are drawn by its unchanging nature, aesthetic beauty and spiritual mystery
Orthodox churchgoers line up at the end of service to kiss the cross being held by Father David Hovik in Arlington, Wash. After six months of catechism studies, Hovik and 104 members of the independent Grace Community Church converted to Eastern Orthodoxy and became the St. Andrew Antiochian Orthodox Church. Meg Robinson lights a candle for her uncle and grandparents before service at St. Andrews Church in Arlington, Wash.
The Eastern Orthodox Church, as far removed from a nondenominational or evangelical congregation as you can get, is attracting a growing number of converts who are drawn by the tug of an ancient faith.
Converts are trading in their PowerPoint sermons and praise bands for the ancient rhythms of a liturgy that hasn’t changed in thousands of years – a pendulum swing from the casual, seeker-friendly services that have dominated contemporary evangelicalism.
Their numbers are still small compared to megachurch growth patterns, with 1.2 million Eastern Orthodox Christians in the United States. But adherents say there has been a surge in people drawn to the faith.
The Antiochian Orthodox Church, the most evangelistic of the American Orthodox churches, has tracked conversions for several decades. The number of its churches in the United States has doubled in 20 years to more than 250 parishes and missions. About 80 percent of its converts come from evangelical and charismatic backgrounds, 20 percent from mainline denominations.
Those who convert say they are drawn to an aesthetic beauty and spiritual mystery in Orthodox worship that are often lacking in their own Protestant services. It’s like entering a time machine that allows congregants to worship as the early Christians did.
Not that it doesn’t take some getting used to. Orthodox services are based on the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, which can last two hours or more. Congregants stand much of the time, while priests in vestments offer incense and chant the Psalms.
‘Startlingly different’: Frederica Mathewes-Green, a former Episcopalian and author of Facing East: A Pilgrim’s Journey Into the Mysteries of Orthodoxy, said the experience of Orthodoxy was ”startlingly different” from anything she had known in Western churches. But it clicked when she saw it was directed toward God rather than her own emotional needs.
”It called us to fall on our faces before God in worship and to be filled with awe at his glory. I could never go back. I now find Western worship tedious and sentimental. To me, the contrast is jolting.”
Mathewes-Green also prefers the Orthodox view of the Christian life as a healing process and a journey, rather than a one-time ”sinner’s prayer.” She and her husband converted from a liberal Episcopal Church in 1993 and helped found an Orthodox church made up mostly of American converts.
”It’s not about getting the sin-debt paid, the ticket punched and now you wait around to die and go to heaven. Orthodoxy is a transforming journey where every day the Christian is being enabled to bear more of God’s light. That’s exciting,” she said.
Stan Shinn, who was raised in the Assemblies of God denomination, recalls feeling nearly overwhelmed when he stepped inside Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church in North Dallas for the first time. What looked good on paper – definitive answers to his search for early Christian worship and doctrine – had taken him to a ”very bizarre and strange” church with icon-filled walls, heavy incense and Byzantine chanting.
”I felt like there was a gauntlet thrown down in front of me,” he said.
He and his wife, Janine, and their three children converted in 2002 from their nondenominational church to the Eastern Orthodox Church.
Like the Shinns, those who convert are joining 350 million Orthodox Christians around the world.
First-century church: “Orthodox” means ”right belief.” The Orthodox Church traces its origins back to Jesus’ apostles and first-century practice. The Roman Catholic Church makes that same claim, but the two branches of ancient Christianity differ in ecclesiastical hierarchy and a few doctrinal points.
Catholics believe the pope has ultimate authority, while Orthodox Christians say their council of bishops is more in line with Scripture and church tradition. Orthodox Christians also disagree with the Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, which states that Jesus’ mother was born without sin herself. The two branches of ancient Christianity split in 1054.
Today, the Orthodox community is led by patriarchs and a hierarchy of bishops who must be celibate. Unlike Catholic clergy, Orthodox priests can marry before ordination.
Archbishop Dmitri, 81, leads the Archdiocese of Dallas and the South for the Orthodox Church in America. He grew up as Robert Royster in a Southern Baptist family in Teague, Texas, but converted to Orthodoxy as a teen because he wanted more out of faith.
”Everything was true, but it was not complete. It wasn’t that I needed to repudiate it. I just went on to find the rest of it,” he said.
The Orthodox consider themselves to have a bond with other Christians but believe they have a more accurate understanding of the faith. At a recent daylong festival in Dallas about Orthodox Christianity, Dmitri encouraged people in other denominations to cling to the elements of the historic faith that their churches uphold, but added an invitation:
“‘If you find there are holes at the bottom and you have to abandon ship, then head for one that’s still afloat,” he said.
In search of history: Conversion to Orthodoxy often begins with an intellectual quest, Shinn said. He began searching when he saw modern churches abandoning historic Christian tenets, such as the Nicene Creed, and stripping their sanctuaries of any religious symbolism to be more seeker-friendly.
”The elements of Christianity were disappearing before me like the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland. What kind of Christianity would my grandchildren inherit, and would the Gospel even be recognizable?” he said.
The ancient liturgies, chants, incense and sacraments used in Orthodox services, he discovered, were not taken from medieval Catholicism – as his Protestant upbringing taught him – but from early church worship.
”It all caused me to re-evaluate my core assumptions. Instead of me judging history, I decided I wanted history to judge me and tell me what should I practice,” Shinn said.
The unchanging nature of the Orthodox Church is a strong draw for ”serious Christians” who are tired of Protestant individualism yet disagree with the Catholic Church’s teachings, said the Rev. Peter Gillquist, chairman of missions and evangelism for the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America.
Minority faith: Converts become more familiar with the church through catechism classes and the guidance of spiritual godparents (individuals and couples in the congregation who mentor new converts). If they’ve already been baptized in another church, they also must be chrismated, or anointed, to be received in the Orthodox Church.
Americans who convert to Orthodoxy know they will be part of a minority faith. That doesn’t bother the Rev. Anthony Savas, of Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church in Dallas, who grew up Orthodox among Mormons in Salt Lake City.
”It’s wonderful to practice the ancient Christian faith in an environment that doesn’t know what to do with it. A minority can be a beacon of light, like the apostles, who took it beyond their own country,” he said.
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Holy Virgin Mary, AIDS and Billy Bo (Vassilis Kourkoumelis) - How the most famous Greek homosexual of the 1980s was saved
Maybe some of you older ones will remember a face, a nice lad. He was gay, fashion designer, the famous once Billy Bo (Vassilis Kourkoumelis). We happened to hear from the lips of his spiritual father what his course was, which not many people tell, nor was it written specifically in the books published about him. Everyone wrote about the trips he took in Mykonos with celebrities, the adventures he had as a person. Thirst for life, thirst for love. But he didn't know where to find her and was looking for her on the wrong paths.
At some point the disease visited him. (Billy Bo was the first famous victim of AIDS in Greece.) "The disease is a bad thing," most people say. But sometimes it's for the best... And when the disease came and rang a spiritual bell, he heard the bell. Others just don't hear it at all and they die with the disease, whatever disease and they have not received spiritual notice of anything. He heard the bell, which means he had good evidence inside.
And the cleric narrates: "I see a child, a boy, like an angel he was, with the nice leather clothes all over. He walks into the church and says "Father, I want to confess." And took a look to see if it was a boy or a girl. He was tall, but he also had another beauty that looked like a woman's..."
So he started and confessed with remorse. He started to come, after a rule set by the clergyman, to socialize, to church, to pray, until he slowly collapsed and the priest was forced to go and confess him and to commune him at his home, in Kolonaki.
When the priest first entered the house, he thought he had entered some museum! It was a space decorated only with models, with photos of fashion shows etc., etc. Every time he would come after, a photo would leave and put an image (icon) in their place... In the end you thought you were entering a monastery.
When he left for America to look for treatments, he ordered an iron cross, big, breakable to fit in the suitcase, to put behind the door of his hospital room, to see the Cross of Christ and to pray.
The treatments didn't work, he came back, and the great downhill, the ruin, the road to death began. The blessed death, we would say. Because if we didn't die, guys, we would suffer for many years! So what about ?
And the cleric recounts: "At some point, I went on Saturday morning and communicated with him. The time comes when it's time for me to leave and Vassilakis says to me: 'Father, do me a favor, come after midnight today to commune me. Because I will leave before dawn, Virgin Mary warned me!' I said should I believe him, not believe him? Let me do him a favor, since the man asks for communion."
So, the priest went around 1-2 in the dark night and befriended Basil. And indeed God took him before dawn, at dawn on Sunday, as Virgin Mary had informed him! The priest was telling us these things and says: "Wish, my children, that I have Vasilakis' fees."
That's who Jesus is! That's what the church is, that doesn't confuse people. He doesn't tell them "bye bye" as they go off a cliff. This should not be happening. But on the other hand the Church doesn't let anyone down either. And it shows before people the way to theology.
So did Billy Bo. He didn't just get saved, but for the Virgin Mary to go and say "Get ready, you're coming," that means Vasilis went in a good position too! And we have countless such examples, from the ancient Christian years to this day...
SOURCE Unmuted excerpt from a speech by the priest Georgios Schinas
Homosexuality - Orthodox Blog
Translated from Greek
✚ Eternal Memory ✚
Vassilis Kourkoumelis
"Billy Bo"
(1954-1987)
Ask About The Orthodox Faith
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Arizona: Prayer for an Orthodox Christian Convert on Death Row Soon to be Executed
Frank Atwood, who is convicted of kidnapping and killing an 8-year-old girl named Vicki Lynn Hoskinson in September 1984, has always claimed to have been innocent of the crime. While in maximum security prison, he converted to Orthodoxy and was baptized with the name Anthony through Saint Anthony's Monastery in Arizona. He has studied and prayed and been in correspondence with well-known Orthodox figures in Greece, such as Metropolitan Athanasios of Limassol, who visited him in prison a few years ago but was not allowed to see him, as well as Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos, who wrote the piece below. Frank has recently issued the following statement prior to his upcoming execution by lethal injection. Let us all pray for him, at his request, and the request of the Metropolitans.
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My name is Frank Atwood, and I am scheduled to be executed by the State of Arizona at 10:00am, on June 8, 2022. I am sentenced to die for a crime I did not commit, but I will let the evidence, supported by experts, and arguments advanced by my attorneys speak to my innocence.
I will at long last experience freedom from the earthly bonds that have crippled my body and caused me excruciating pain. And I will no longer live in a world in which others are caused pain by my very existence.
To the family of Vicki Lynn Hoskinson, I can honestly say that while I know you will never believe that I did not take her ... I did not! That, however, does not change the fact that your pain is as real as anything possible in this lifetime can possibly be, and my profound prayer is that my death will give you and yours some form of relief and closure from your unending misery and torment.
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Prayer for a Man on Death Row
By Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos and Agiou Vlasiou
A few years ago I started a correspondence with a death row inmate in America, Anthony, who was accused of a very serious offense, which he denies he did, and it seems that he is right, and he was sentenced to death. He himself made several appeals to the American Justice System and remained in a maximum security prison for many years until the final decision was finalized.
The occasion of our correspondence was the study of my book Orthodox Psychotherapy and other related books, which were published in English and they impressed him.
He sent me the first letter, I answered him and his other letters and answers followed, which now that I have collected them, extend to about 100 pages typed in large size.
Because he was waiting for the final decision to determine the day of his execution, he was preoccupied with various spiritual issues.
He was baptized Orthodox in prison, he was living in repentance, prayer, he did vigils and the prayer rope, but mainly he was interested in how to acquire noetic prayer of the heart, so that when he was executed he would pass through the "tollhouses", as he wrote me, and meet Christ in Paradise.
With the answers I sent him I tried to guide him in the spiritual life in this difficult period, to empower him to face death bravely. It was a surprise for me and something moving to correspond with a death row inmate and prepare him for death!! Such an event has never occurred to me in my life, while practicing the ministry of spiritual fatherhood for 50 years, to prepare with the appropriate sensitivity someone for his execution, in such a long time of ministry. As it is known in Greece, the death penalty has been abolished, which is why we do not have such experiences. Someday this correspondence will be published and one will see the way this blessed man thought and how he accepted my guidance.
A few days ago he sent me a letter and informed me that his execution was finally scheduled to take place at the beginning of June, that is, in a few days. He wrote to me that now the security measures are stronger.
In his letter he has three requests. With one he asks me to pray that something be done so that he does not drink from "the cup of execution".
The second request is: "If God, in His infinite love and wisdom, knows that it is best for me to be executed in order to pass through the tollhouses and enter Paradise, I beseech you to pray that I have strength to the end, to be brave and to have trust in God!"
The third request is to give him "final advice". He writes: "I would also very much like to hear any final advice you can give me. Please! The time is short, so please email me as soon as possible. I will continue to remember you and Nafpaktos in my daily prayers!"
I did my cross and answered appropriately.
The reason for publicizing this fact is that I very much ask those who read this text to pray for my friend Anthony, whether to suspend his execution, if possible, or to proceed with bravery and trust in God and, of course, to his meeting with Christ, who loved Him through the prison of the highest security.
Let us pray: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on Your servant Anthony."
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ARIZONA: A FINAL CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN ANTHONY (FRANK) ATWOOD AND METROPOLITAN HIEROTHEOS OF NAFPAKTOS BEFORE HIS EXECUTION
Frank Atwood, named Anthony in Baptism, has now been tonsured as a schema monk with the name Fr. Ephraim. He is scheduled to be executed at 10 AM local time today in Arizona. Good Paradise!—OC.
My dear Theological Master
Metropolitan (Elder) Hierotheos,
Good Paradise!!!
About the court. We had the hearing to ask for the pardon (requesting life imprisonment) on May 24th. With optimism, I thought that the probability of success was 1%! Of course, they refused this mercy. In regards to this, the glory of God is victorious!!! Beloved Elder Paisios brought about two dozen monks and nuns, along with over 150 believers who live around the Monastery. Some monks testified to the great inner transfiguration that God has done in me, so the more the "mercy council" and the government tried to make me look bad, the greater my miraculous transfiguration seemed! God has decisively been victorious! ...
Metropolitan Athanasios told me that if God permits my execution, He has accepted my repentance, and I am ready to leave for Paradise. Sarah and I rely on this wise word. For me, I am saddened by my negligence in prayer, and, of course, for Sarah it would be shocking to be alone without me. Please pray for our strength in Christ.
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The Lure of the Mystical Path
By Alice Tallmadge, Correspondent
Originally published in The Oregonian, Sunday, April 9, 2000
From Ashland to Portland, the Orthodox tradition is drawing Oregonians to its ancient depths
EUGENE — The Saturday night buzz is revving outside the doors of St. Eugene Orthodox Church in the Whiteaker neighborhood. Motors race. Doors slam. Nearby taverns begin to fill with eager revelers. But inside the walls of the humble, dome-topped church, an otherworldly peace reigns. Pungent incense hangs in the air. Gold-flecked icons, lit by flickering tapers, line the dark red walls. Women, their long hair covered with scarves, stand on one side of the small nave, men on the other.
They take turns filling the room with plaintive, old-world chants. Other worshippers stand quietly, hands to their sides, heads bowed.
“This is how we worship, to stay concentrated in prayer,”
said St. Eugene member Sarah Cowie.
“We believe that, during the service, God pours himself out. If you get quiet enough in your mind, you can feel, palpably, his presence.”
The 70 or so members of St. Eugene aren’t immigrants from Russia, Eastern Europe or Greece. They are Eugene-area residents, most of them converts from Protestant sects, who have found solace and sustenance in a tradition that dates back 2,000 years to the early Christian church. Cowie and other St. Eugene members are among the growing numbers of Oregonians who are converting to Orthodoxy.
For years, St. Nicholas Orthodox Church in Portland, established in 1895, was one of few Orthodox churches in the state. In the past 15 years, churches or missions have sprung up in Albany, Ashland, Milwaukie, Oregon City, Eugene and in several Portland neighborhoods. According to the Orthodox Church of America, an umbrella organization for certain Orthodox jurisdictions, at least 150 new parishes in the United States have sprung up in the past 20 years. Nationally, they estimate there are now 2 million to 3 million Orthodox believers.
Faith trumps understanding in the ancient, mystical tradition, which is steeped in rituals such as a sung liturgy, reverence for icons, fasting, sacraments and daily dedication to the spiritual life.
Something more real
One of the tradition’s most powerful attractions to Westerners is its rejection of immediate gratification and living only for the self, said Cowie. She converted 14 years ago after spending years seeking a tradition that would satisfy a spiritual longing she herself could not describe. Orthodoxy offered something different, she said. Something bigger. Something more real.
“It’s very, very deep,” she said. “The people who are attracted to Orthodoxy are people… who are looking for something more, who see the shallowness of our materialistic society.”
Orthodoxy doesn’t ignore the mind and the intellect, Cowie said, but sees the intellect as being seated in the heart.
“There is a mystical presence that actually draws us on.”
A hunger for meaning
Youths seem to be drawn to the ancient tradition. When Cowie’s daughter was a teen-ager, Cowie gave her free rein to decide for herself which religious tradition spoke to her. Her daughter, now 21, is an Orthodox nun in a California monastery.
“Our children are staying with the church,”
said Cowie, who teaches parenting classes at a Eugene nonprofit agency.
The Rev. Michael Boyle, a priest at St. Eugene, said that for some youths the church fills a void that entertainment and other social institutions do not.
“Younger people are hungry for authentic Christianity. They are dying inside for something that is real, authentic and that challenges them to have a spiritual life as a Christian,” he said. “Orthodoxy has not lost the mystery. It does not try to answer every question that comes up. It’s real. People feel God.”
The tradition’s emphasis on ritual, prayer and self-examination spoke to an unmet spiritual hunger Rebecca Jaquette and her husband had both felt for years. Like Cowie, Jaquette had experimented with different Christian approaches to worship before she found Orthodoxy. Brought up Presbyterian,
“I felt like I didn’t have any tradition,” Jacquette said. “My husband and I knew how to speak ‘Christian-ese,’ but inwardly we felt we were just going through the motions. We didn’t know what we were really doing with our lives.”
From the moment they began attending Orthodox services in Portland, something felt right, Jaquette said.
“And as we continued in it, we felt we were worshipping more fully, that we found a place where there was a rhythm to life that was really important.”
Now members of St. Eugene, the couple is happy to have rituals and traditions to pass on to their two children, ages 5 and 6 months.
“This is what they will know,” Jaquette said.
A split at the beginning
The Eastern and Western Christian traditions split apart in what is known as the Great Schism of 1054. The two branches took very different routes. Whereas the Roman Catholic tradition adhered to a strict hierarchy headed by the pope, the Orthodox Church stayed away from placing one individual at its head. Over the centuries, a host of Orthodox jurisdictions developed. Different ethnic groups, including Greeks, Serbians, Albanians and Russians, added their own customs to the traditional rituals. Still, at the core,
“we are all of the same faith,” Evangelatos said.
Michael Spezio, a UO graduate student and a Presbyterian minister, has studied Orthodoxy and has traveled to Mount Athos, a Greek peninsula populated only by monks living in centuries-old monasteries. Spezio said he has come to understand what Orthodoxy contributes to the broad spectrum of Christianity.
“I have an appreciation for the mystery that moves through the tradition,” he said. “They don’t seek to intellectualize every last thing. The seek to experience, but not to dissect that experience.
Incorporating the senses
Despite its focus on spirituality, Orthodoxy doesn’t reject the physical realm, said St. Eugene member Catherine Larson. During services the five senses are nourished and purified: candles for sight, incense for smell, bread and wine for taste, kissing of icons for touch, chanting for sound. Church members often fast, but they also join for feasts and communal meals.
“The beauty and theology of Orthodoxy seems more elemental, more practical,”
she said. Unlike Catholicism, Orthodox priests who intend to serve parishes must be married before they are ordained.
St. Eugene, said the head priest, the Rev. David Lubliner, is named after a 4th-century Egyptian saint who is celebrated for his selfless hospitality and kindness.
“Emperor Constantine called him one of the three great lights of the world,”
he said. The church, which also houses a small bookstore, plans to continue its patron saint’s hospitality. It will open a drop-in tea house and plans to help cook for the group Food Not Bombs, which prepares meals for the homeless several times a week.
Coincidentally, the church is situated at the site of another establishment that served wayward pilgrims on the path of life. The former Icky’s Teahouse welcomed social outcasts, runaway youth, substance abusers and anarchists, once even holding a benefit concert for Unabomber Ted Kaczynski.
Today the just-completed stucco church, which took church members two years and hundreds of hours of mostly volunteer labor to build, nuzzles up close to Whiteaker’s social diversity. To the south is an AA social club. To the north a dance studio thuds with flamenco initiates. Nearby is a row of artists’ studios, a Mission homeless shelter, local railroad yards and a notorious drug and skin market strip. St. Eugene will be a place of peace in the center of that swirl, Boyle said, both for its members and anyone on the street looking for a place of rest.
“I know that, through prayer, grace is sent, and that grace resides in the physical building itself,”
he said.
“As people enter from the street, they sense it. They sense holiness, something different than anything they’ve sensed before. And that is part of our purpose, to bring down that grace from heaven.”
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1996: Dr. Pelikan, USA - Lutheran Scholar Converts To Orthodoxy
I first met Dr. Pelikan at, of all places, an All American Council. I had just come down from Alaska, and stood a lonely outpost in front of the diocese of Alaska table, waiting for some of my brethren from the 49th state to arrive. There I was, a newly ordained priest in the Orthodox Church in America, standing in a sea of cassocks, and knowing absolutely no one. As I stood there, examining the display, a voice says to me, “Hello!” I turned and saw Dr. Pelikan smiling at me. As a former Lutheran, I knew him and his writings very well. The next 20-30 minutes were alive with bright and happy conversation as we exchanged brief anecdotes about mission, Alaska, seminary, Orthodoxy, and who knows what else. That kindness so warmed my heart that the rest of the AAC was a joy. He took me from feeling exceptionally alone, to exceptionally ‘included.’ Memory eternal, Dr. Pelikan. – Fr. John A. Peck
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Most stunning perhaps was, in 1996, the conversion of Jaroslav Pelikan, Yale University’s celebrated church historian and Luther scholar. Here is a man who has co-edited 22 of the 55 volumes of Luther’s Works in English, and then late in life he “moved East,” as some theologians like to say.
“I was the Lutheran with the greatest knowledge of the Orthodox Church,” Pelikan reportedly quipped, “and now I am the Orthodox with the greatest knowledge of Luther.”
He is has also been quoted as saying,
“When the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod became Baptist, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America became Methodist, I became Orthodox.”
Presumably, his implication was that the former two denominations were on the verge of losing their doctrinal clarity.
But he does not talk to the media about this move that exemplifies a trend of sorts among some Protestants and Roman Catholics.
“I have received hundreds of requests for interviews and decided not to respond to any of them,” he told UPI Tuesday.
Some former associates say that he simply does not wish to hurt his former Lutheran coreligionists. But a ranking OCA cleric gave a clue:
“Pelikan said he joined us after he had read a work on the Cappadocian Fathers for a fifth time in the original Greek.”
INS.
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Athanasius Yoo, M.D., B.D., Korea: Why I Became An Orthodox Christian
My long pilgrimage to the Mother Church has been completed. As I think back over the long road of this pilgrimage, I become filled with deep emotion. For by the grace of God, I, a stray sheep, have found the lovely bosom of the Good Shepherd, the true body of Christ, – the One, Holy Catholic, and Apostolic Church. Therefore, it is my conviction that my humble retrospections should in nowise come to naught to those who are outside of the true Church of Christ.
I am a Korean and a medical doctor by profession. My father was an Elder of the Presbyterian Church in Korea and my mother a very devout deaconess of same. Consequently I was brought up in an unusually religious atmosphere.
My mother hoped that I would become a minister of the Presbyterian Church. But I had no interest in that profession because the example of the Protestant ministers at that time was much too superficial and did not impress me as being Christian at all. And so I entered medicine instead, finished medical school and began practicing in Seoul, Korea. I continued my medical practice until the unconditional surrender of the Japanese Empire. The fall of Japanese imperialism, and the subsequent independence of Korea, impressed me greatly with the frailty of life and of the world.
After a period of sincere prayer and meditation, I decided to dedicate myself to the ministry. I entered the Presbyterian Theological School in Seoul, Korea … with deep conviction and fervent faith for my newly chosen profession. Soon after, however, I was confronted with the malignant teaching of higher biblical criticism and of rationalistic modernistic doctrine. The evil shadow of Harnack and Deissmann, the poisonous sabotage of the Tubingen School, the narcotic abomination of Schleichermacher and Rutschul dominated the School. The revival of twentieth century Arianism and Nestorianism was promoted and the so-called “social Gospel” emphasized. Moreover, the Second Coming of Christ and the doctrine of everlasting life were counted as convictions of the ignorant. Had I not entered this Theological School, I probably would have kept my peace of mind. But once I had learned the false theology of this school, I lost my peace of mind. Indeed, I found it impossible to accept these heretical Protestant teachings without going against my conscience and good faith.
As a result, I began to look for more conservative Protestant teachings in order to find consolation . . . but I could not find any. With deep unrest and despair, I began reading some Roman Catholic theological books and my interest in the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church concerning the Virginity of the Virgin Mary, the Apostolic Succession, and Transubstantiation, was greatly aroused. However, because of the lack of books, my reading in Roman Catholic doctrine was limited. In the meantime, I continued my theological studies at the Presbyterian seminary and after my graduation from there was advised to be ordained. But I refused ordination because I now felt that the ministry of the Protestant Church lacked Apostolic Succession and was therefore null and void.
After much thought and hesitation, I finally became a Roman Catholic in 1950. Up until this time I had no contact whatsoever with the Orthodox Church.
Upon studying Roman Catholic doctrine, however, I found many false teachings in it also. Those that bothered me especially were the following:
1. The withdrawal of the cup from the laity during Communion.
2. The Doctrine of the Infallibility of the Pope.
3. The Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.
4. The Doctrine of Purgatory.
5. The Doctrine of Indulgences.
6. The universal jurisdiction of the Bishop of Rome.
7. The exclusive Latinity in the Mass and in other services.
If I refused to accept the above doctrines, I would be under anathema. And so I remained in a state of confusion. In order to resolve the problems I had about the Roman doctrine, I began studying the writings of the Church Fathers. These along with scholastic theology, I read for a long time. My conclusion from all these studies was that the Roman Catholic Church, too, had gone astray as had the Protestant. In doubt, despair, and agony, I decided to go to the United States in order to escape my doctrinal troubles. I arrived in the United States in 1955.
In the United States, I studied advanced medical science and also continued my theological studies. For the first time I was given the opportunity to read into Eastern Orthodox theology. Up until this time I had had no contact with Orthodox Christians or with any Orthodox Church. Thanks be to God, however, for He led me by His Holy Spirit to the primitive, conservative, and most pure and virgin faith of Christianity! For I discovered that in the Orthodox Church, Christianity with all its richness and essence was to be found. In the bosom of the Orthodox Church, my despaired soul found a resting place, a heavenly harbor! With great joy and hope, I decided to become an Orthodox Christian about a year ago. At first I hesitated to make a hasty decision for fear of disgracing myself by frequent changes of denominations. But gradually I became convinced of the validity of Orthodoxy.
By the Grace of God, I was convinced that I must serve Him through the priesthood of the Orthodox Church. And so I began following the way of the Cross, willing to sacrifice anything. Through the kindness of His Eminence, Archbishop Michael and His Grace, Bishop Athenagoras of Elaia, I was given permission to study Orthodox theology at the Holy Cross Orthodox Theological School in Brookline, Massachusetts, in preparation for the priesthood. My desire is to return to Korea as a medical-priest missionary after my ordination into the Orthodox Church, and join the Orthodox mission which already exists in Seoul, Korea.
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2011: Number of Orthodox Christians in Ireland doubled over five years
According to the latest 2011 census there are over 45 thousand Orthodox Christians in Ireland, reports Interfax-Religion.
This figure is two times larger than it was in 2006 and four times larger than in 2002. Thus according to the official data Orthodoxy is the fastest growing religion in Ireland, says the website Russianireland.com.
The largest center of Orthodoxy in the country is Swords, the county town of Fingal, where 1168 Orthodox Christians reside according to the 2011 census data.
The census also showed that the majority of the Orthodox Christians in Ireland are Romanians (26%), followed by Irish (20%) and Latvians (12.5%).
“Orthodoxy is not something new or strange In Ireland; it has always existed here. It is well-known that Irish Christianity before the 11th century was very similar to ours. But after Ireland was conquered by the British this denomination had been intentionally removed by the Pope. That is probably why many Irish perceive Orthodoxy as something special and dear”, said the Rector of the Patriarchal representation of the Russian Orthodox Church in Dublin, priest Michael Nasonov.
According to him, there are seven parishes of the Moscow Patriarchate in Ireland already.
The most common religion in Ireland is Roman Catholicism (3.86 million people, 84.2% of the population), followed by Protestantism (over 134 thousand people) and Islam (over 49 thousand people).
http://orthochristian.com/57148.html
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Saint Paisios of Holy Mount Athos, Greece (+1994) and the Tibetan Buddhism young George from the Far East
George, a young man of sixteen or seventeen, came to Mount Athos to go from one monastery to another. Though Greek by blood, he had been raised abroad from early childhood among Tibetan Buddhist monks in their monastery. He had made a great deal of progress in meditation, and he had become an accomplished sorcerer, able to summon any demon he wanted. He was also an expert in the martial arts. Using the power of Satan, he made impressive displays of his abilities: he broke hazelnuts in his palm, and tossed away the shells while the nuts remained attached to his hand. He could read closed books. He struck large rocks with his bare hand, and they shattered like walnuts.
Some monks brought George to the Elder Pasios (Saint Paisios) so that he could help him. George asked the Elder what powers he had, what he could do, and the Elder answered that he himself didn’t have any power, and that all power is from God.
George, wanting to demonstrate his power, concentrated his gaze on a large rock in the distance, and it shattered. Then the Elder took a small rock and made the sign of the Cross over it, and told him to destroy it too. He concentrated and performed his magic, but he couldn’t shatter it. Then he started trembling, and the satanic powers―which he thought he controlled―since they weren’t able to break the rock, turned against him and hurled him to the opposite bank of the river. The Elder picked him up in a miserable condition.
“Another time,” recounted the Elder, “while we were talking, he suddenly stood up, grabbed me by the arms and spun me around backward. ‘Let’s see Hadjiefendis get you lose, if he can,’ he said. I felt it was like blasphemy to say that. I moved my hands a little, like this, and he was jerked away. He jumped up in the air and tried to kick me, but his foot stopped near my face, like it had hit an invisible wall! God protected me.
Elder Paisios and the young George from the Far East“At night, I kept him there, and he slept in my cell. The demons dragged him down into the pit and thrashed him for failing. In the morning he was in a bad state, injured and covered in thorns and dirt. He confessed, ‘Satan beat me up because I couldn’t defeat you.’”
The Elder convinced George to bring him his magical texts, and he burned them. “When he came here,” the Elder recalled, “he had some sort of charm or amulet with him. I went to take it, but he wouldn’t give it to me. I took a candle and said, “Lift the leg of your pants up a little.” Then I put the lit candle against his leg―he yelled and jumped up. “Well,” I said, “if the flame from a little candle is for you, how are you going to endure the fire of hell that you’re going to end up in because of what you’re doing?”
The Elder kept the young man close to him for a little while and helped him, so long as he was willing to be obedient.Elder Paisios and the young George from the Far East He felt such compassion for him that he said, “I would leave the desert and go out into the world to help this boy.” He made an effort to learn if he had been baptized and even found out the name of the church where his baptism had taken place. Shaken by the power and the grace of the Elder, George wanted to become a monk, but he wasn’t able to.
The Elder would refer to George’s case to show what a delusion it is to think that all religions are the same, that everyone believes in the same God, and that there’s no difference between Tibetan Buddhist and Orthodox monks.
The place of magic in Buddhism is unknown to many Westerners, who for the most part have been introduced only to a modernist Buddhism that excludes such content. A useful corrective is provided by the scholar Georges Dreyfus, the first Westerner to receive the Geshe degree of the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism.
“Unlike modern intellectuals, Tibetan scholars are never tempted to reject magical elements and often engage in these practices, though they may view them as limited in their effects and not relevant to the soteriological goals of the tradition. In this regard they are also unlike modern Buddhists, who are profoundly uncomfortable with the magical practices that exist in Asian Buddhist traditions” (pp 303–304). George Dreyfus, Sounds of two hands clapping. The education of a Tibetan Monk Dreyfus discusses at length the Tibetan Buddhist practice of propitiating the “mundane” “dharma protectors”. “These violent spirits have taken an oath … to protect the Buddhist teaching. Despite this commitment, they are not completely tamed and are prone to quasi-human emotions such as anger, jealousy, and so forth. Hence, they are partial and can be enlisted in morally unseemly actions such as helping practitioners to secure worldly advantages or even kill an adversary” (p. 299). In fulfillment of their oath, meanwhile, the spirits “protect the person or the group, often by violent means,” from“‘ enemies of Buddhism’ (bstan dgra)“ (p. 300). Although “many Tibetans feel the tension between the reliance on these deities and the normative ideals of the tradition,” they “figure prominently in the ritual life of Tibetan monasteries…. But most of the rituals devoted to these deities are not performed in public but in the House of the Protectors (dgon khang), a separate temple devoted to them” (p. 300). Indeed, “Tibetans are often unwilling to introduce outsiders to [the practice’s] secrets. Temples are always open to anybody, but the House of Protectors is often less accessible and can even at times be closed to non-Tibetans” (p. 302).―eds.
From the Book: Elder Paisios of Mount Athos
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Blessed French Mother Nun Mary Magdalene Le Beller, hermitess of cave of St. John Climacus of Tholas (Wadi Et-Tlah), Sinai (+2013)
"A saint does not shine outwardly. All of his riches are within, in his soul."
Blessed Mother Nun Mary Magdalene Le Beller of cave of St. John Climacus of Tholas (Wadi Et-Tlah) was born in France.
Mother Mary Magdalene met the elder Elder Sophronius and Saint Porphyrius and matouska Lubuska of St. Petersburg where blessed her to live in the Sinai desert.
She visited the Holy Land and stayed for a little while where she is orthodox baptized on the River Jordan. Then she prayed to St. John of Scale, to show her the way of her salvation and the place for her lonely life. And she led her steps in the Sinai desert. She lived near the cave of St. John Climacus of Tholas (Wadi Et-Tlah). When St. Paisios the Athonite last visited Sinai, he gave her the blessing to live in the desert after having examined it and bless the typical prayer. She lived great rejection, many considered it crazy and fallacious.
The cave of St. John Climacus is about a one hour hike from the village of St. Katherine and probably 1.5-2 hours hike from the monastery. The trail is adventuresome amongst large boulders the size of small houses.
After suffering from a painful disease, she reposed in the Lord in her cell at the age of 67-68 on Thursday December 12, 2013, the feast of Saint Spyridon the Wonderworker and Bishop of Tremithus, at 13:00 pm.
Her relics repose in the cemetery of the monastery of the Prophet Moses of Pharan. She was humility and love incarnate.
INS.
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The most-venerable Eldress Mary Magdalene, known in the world as Marie Madeleine Le Beller, was from Paris and went to the Holy Land on a pilgrimage and was baptized an Orthodox Christian when she was forty years old at the Jordan River in 1986. There she prayed to St. John of Climacus, to show her the way of her salvation and the place for her solitary life of total dedication to God. She went to the Sinai desert, and lived near the cave of St. John of Climacus in the Valley of Tholas approximately 8km from st. Katherne’s monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai.
For the first six months at Sinai, Mary Magdalene slept outside among the boulders and rocks, having only a sleeping bag, with scorpions and poisonous snakes as her only companions. Many considered her to be a crazy and delusional woman. She had sold her home in Paris and bought a piece of land from a Bedouin just below the cave of St. John of Climacus. There was already a carob tree and a well. She built five cells , a small chapel on top of rock, planted olive trees and a few apple trees, a vine, a garden, and built a small cistern. She also built a wall all around it.
In this place Mary Magdalene lived a simple life, tending to her garden, making prayer ropes, and later in life she occupied herself with woodcarving which she used to decorate her chapel with icons.
Initially she would go to the monastery every Sunday, but later on she would go every fifteen and on great feast days in order to receive Holy Communion.
Some fathers from the monastery of saint Katherine took pity on her and protected her, but many rejected her and made her life difficult. Once they forbade fr. Paule to accept her confession and did not allow her free hospitality at the hostel for women. She had strong faith and recalled the blessing the she had received from elder Sophrony, st. Porphyrios and matushka Lubuska the fool for Christ of st. Petersburg to be there. It seems that those fathers who did not like her thought that she should not live alone in the desert, and should have stayed at the female monastery in Faran, where she should first have lived at least for a year and a half in obedience. However, st. Paisios the Athonite, on his last visit to Sinai , when he visited the monastery in Faran, gave the nun Mary Magdalene his blessing to live in the desert after examining her and blessing her rule of prayer.
She would go to Jerusalem every Holy Week and Bright Week, then return to her cell at Sinai. After the Pascha of 2009, she no longer went to Jerusalem.
On the 18th November in 2012, a Sunday, she went to Crete to be examined at the Venizelio Hospital, and was diagnosed with advanced bowel cancer.
From there she went to Moscow where she knew the bishop who oversaw the hospital of the Russian Church. There they did prolonged medical examinations and asked her to undergo surgery and chemotherapy at the largest medical center against cancer in Russia. But she did not accept, desiring to die at her beloved skete. She went to saint Seraphim of Sarov’s Hermitage, washed herself in his spring, and took great courage.
She returned to Sinai via Italy, where she visited the Church of saint Nicholas in Bari, and there she met a Russian woman named Euphrosyne, whom she asked to attend to her at Sinai. Euphrosyne responded positively and accompaniedher to Sinai, where she attended to the eldress till the end, without any material benefit. Euphrosyne was a gift of God because she spoke only Russian, which Mary barely spoke and understood. But they had excellent co-operation and was a good caretaker to her (for about ten months ), winning over the love and the respect of the fathers.
After Pascha of 2013 Mary could barely move anymore, let alone go to the monastery, but she bore the cross of her painful disease with great courage patience, without medical assistance and hospital care.
On the 12th of December in 2013, a Thursday, at 1:00 PM, eldress Mary reposed in the Lord in her cell, next to the cave of St. John of Climacus. Fr. Paule of Sinai rushed to her and had served a Divine Liturgy in her skete to commune her before her blessed repose.
The next day, after Fr Paule served another Divine Liturgy, they had her body brought to the local hospital to confirm her death. There she was kept frozen until the issue of a burial permit from the French Consulate. Then a strange thing occurred that brought admiration from those there. A snowstorm took place covering the area in white snow. The monastery therefore sent fourteen workers, all Christin Copts, to carry her body along the rugged terrain in the middle of a blizzard to her skete. Although it would take two hours to reach her skete from the motorway (which under normal conditions would take an hour), when they raised up her sacred relic it took them just 45 minutes later the snowstorm began again.
The permission to bury her was given on the night of December 17, 2013. She was buried the next day, a Wednesday, at the cemetery of the female monastery of the Prothet Moses in Faran according to the wishes of the fathers of the monastery of saint Katherine, even though it was her wish to be buried at her skete. No one who was near and dear to her attended her burial except Euphrosyne , who had served her with great self-denial. A German obstetrician who was known to her changed her garments for the burial, and stayed up all night beforehand to read the psalter over her body, but she had left for Jerusalem before the funeral.
Archbishop Damianos of Sinai and hieromonks Michael and Eugenios did the funeral, with four nuns of the monastery in Faran.
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Miracles of the Archangel Michael the Taxiarch to Mother Stavritsa the Missionary (+2000)
My name is Stavritsa Zachariou, and I am a Greek American. In 1969 I went to Africa as a missionary. I am 75 years old, and 15 years I spent in Africa, near our suffering brothers, sowing the seed of the Gospel. I stay by myself in Nairobi, Kenya, and from there I go to Kampala, Cameroon, and other places, where the seed of the Gospel of Christ needs to be sowed.
I am a missionary of the Archdiocese of America. With the help of God and of benefactors, we built 12 holy Churches in [Africa]. We built the 10th holy church in honor of the Archangel Michael, and I wanted to paint his icon from the prototype from the north gate of the Patriarchate. As I was finishing the icon, when I went to the post office, I received a letter from Fr. Soterios Trampa. I know Archimandrite Fr. Soterios, who was a missionary for many years in Korea, and who also served as a preacher of your Metropolis, along with Chancellor of the Archdiocese of Athens from 1968-1973. In his letter was a small booklet on the Taxiarch of Mantamados. Then I learned about Mantamados, and the bas-relief icon of the Archangel Michael. Fr. Soterios wrote: “I am sending you the information on the Taxiarch of Mantamados, that you might come to know his wondrous icon. Within this you will see one of his many miracles, which occur daily to the glory of God. I served there in the past, and I especially honor him...”
I began to read the booklet on the Taxiarch, including the miracle of the sword. As I continued reading, I reached the place regarding the passing of the sword from some unknown person to Mr. Diamante, when there was as if some marked commotion in the icon [that she had painted]. I turned around to see what was happening then and, O my God!!!! The Archangel of the icon began to come to life, to take on flesh and bones! I was astonished! I knelt before it and began to pray with tears and to ask for his help and his protection. After a short while, slowly the icon began to return to its natural state.
I was supposed to go for a trip to Kampala. I always thought that when I would go on some trip, that I should take with me the icon of some Saint from my icon corner. That time, I took with me the little icon of the Taxiarch of Mantamados.
We reached the border of Kampala and Kenya, and Kampala at that time (1988) had a military regime. When we speak about a military regime in the center of Africa, it means that human life is cheaper than the life of a blackbird!
As we were passing through, my driver (a Kenyan and my Koumbaro) did not notice that at one place there was a stop sign and he kept going. Five wild motorcyclists surrounded us. They got off their motorcycles, drew their weapons, and knelt, preparing to fire at us and to take our car and our possessions as spoil. That is what usually occurred there...
Then, I don't know what strength was within me, but I opened the door of the car..I exited with the icon of the Taxiarch in my hands, and approached them, crying out:
“For God's sake, stop! I have with me the Taxiarch of God, who is dark-colored like you, come see him!!!”
Automatically, it was as if someone grabbed them by the hands. They calmed down, left their weapons in the grass, and ran up to me, took the icon, like something holy and venerable, and began to examine it carefully and to shout. They bowed their faces to the ground and holding my hands, they asked for forgiveness. Then I saw that one of them was injured badly in the hand by a knife. I took my first aid kit from the car, nursed the wound and dressed it. We became friends! The most impressive thing is that, there was sown the word of God, and the five of them received Christ, and became Christians!
After all of this, I promised to the Archangel to come to Greece, to Mantamados, to thank him. And today, I feel very blessed that the Lord made me worthy to fulfill my promise. I thank Him from all my heart!
(Amateur translation of text, from Protopresbyter Eustratios Dessou, “The History and Miracles of the Taxiarch of Mantamados,” Volume II, pg. 158.)
Source:
https://full-of-grace-and-truth.blogspot.com/2014/05/miracles-of-archangel-michael-taxiarch.html
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AN INTERVIEW WITH FR. JOHN MUSTHER OF CUMBRIA, ENGLAND
“Christ Won the Battle and Made my Heart Orthodox!”
Father John Musther, an Orthodox Englishman, serves in the Orthodox missionary parish of Sts. Bega, Mungo and Herbert in Keswick, Cumbria, North West England. His community, which is under the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, is part of the ancient tradition of the Orthodox Church. The congregation is a living witness of the truth of Holy Orthodoxy to the people living nearby.
In the first millennium, before the Norman Conquest, Church in Britain and in Ireland was in full communion with the universal Orthodox Church, both East and West. Then the differences between Eastern and Western Church were relatively minor, most of them limited to local traditions. Yet striving for holiness was the same.
During that time the peoples of Britain and Ireland gave the world thousands of saints, men and women, kings and queens, martyrs, bishops and abbots, hermits and missionaries. The whole land of Britain retains the memory of the ancient saints of these islands. A great number of early shrines and holy sites are scattered all over Britain and Ireland.
Cumbria, where Fr. John lives, is one of the largest and least densely populated counties in England. The Lake District, part of Cumbria, is one of the most picturesque regions in England, with breath-taking views from the hills. The Lake District is justly famous for many beautiful lakes, hills and forests, and for centuries was inspiring poets and writers, musicians and painters.
In the first millennium Cumbria developed rather separately from the rest of England, and had more links with Wales than with the seven historic Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Christian life of its inhabitants had been influenced by many traditions - Roman, Celtic (Welsh, Irish and Scottish), Saxon and even Norse. Material traces of all of these can be found today.
The Church tradition holds that St. Patrick, Apostle of the Irish, was born here. This region draws people by its magic beauty and tranquillity—and by its very rich early Christian heritage. Thanks be to God, that the revival of Orthodox Faith and rediscovering of nearly forgotten local saints and shrines is becoming a reality because of people like Fr. John Musther.
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—Fr. John, how did you become Orthodox?
—I met Fr. Sophrony (Sakharov). I was a student at University College London reading for a law degree. It was early 1961 if I remember correctly. At any rate Fr. Sophrony had only recently arrived at the Old Rectory at Tolleshunt Knights, Essex. I knew just a little about Christianity through the Church of England but nothing about Orthodoxy. On Sunday afternoon after the Ninth Hour he invited me into his study while the tea was being made and asked me: what was the purpose of the Christian life? He spoke so gently and when I said that I didn't know, he simply said, 'the purpose of the Christian life is to ask the Lord Jesus to send the Holy Spirit into our hearts that he may cleanse us and make us more like Christ'.
I sat there dumbfounded. My hair stood on end. I had never heard of such a thing. I had no questions. I knew that what he had told me was the truth of his own heart. The only response was to be still and receive the precious gift he was giving me.
His statement was a complete summary of the Scriptures. It was the Word of God to me. It changed the direction of my life. The power of that word still urges me on.
He told me to read, “The Undistorted Image.” Again I felt completely poleaxed. It was like death. How could a man live like this?
I struggled with the Greek culture of the churches at that time. It was also many years before I could overcome the Protestant spirit that I found in me. Then one day I woke up and felt all my objections had fallen away. Christ had won the battle and had made my heart Orthodox. I discovered I was living near the late Fr. Sergei Hackel's parish in Lewes in Sussex. He prepared myself and my wife Jenny for Chrismation in 2003.
—Please, tell us about your parish.
—The two of us moved to Cumbria in 2007 but not before I had been made a deacon with the mandate to see if there were any Orthodox in the area. We had bought a small cottage in Keswick which needed a lot of refurbishment. As the daily offices had already become part of our life we had the attic made into a chapel frescoed from top to bottom by (prominent English Orthodox icon painter) Aidan Hart. The painting was finished before we could move in: it was as though the Saints had moved in before us. (www.orthodoxcumbria.org/ the One Way of Holiness in Christ/ The Living Tradition in the British Isles)
We hadn't far to go before we met our first Orthodox, just 80 yards to the nearest chip shop. We discovered that Orthodox families ran fish and chip shops throughout the top of the county. We had an instant congregation. But the chapel was no longer big enough. Happily for us the local Methodist church had just closed their chapel in the village Braithwaite just two miles down the road. It was perfect for our needs. We were allowed to make it into an Orthodox church for Sunday liturgies while still using the first chapel for Vespers and Matins.
The Orthodox who first came to us were from Cyprus but soon we had English people also asking to be Chrismated. From the very beginning there was a demand to have a liturgy every Sunday celebrated in English. We have a good number of visitors from round the county but a good number more from those who come on holiday to this very popular location. The buildings include a social and kitchen area so after the liturgy we can all sit down and eat and talk. People are often reluctant to leave!
We are very fortunate in having people who are willing to do things. The ladies took in hand the refurbishing the bedrooms from what had been a youth center. So now we can have people to stay. We have been blessed by having a number of families and their children. It is so wonderful that they ask for baptism. Our numbers are 30-50 most of the year round.
The Chapel is on the village green and in summer people sit out in the open air; the children run around and enjoy the village swing. Just higher up is a splendid mountain pool. The water is cold and at Theophany there are only a few who jump in. But in summer it is a glorious spot for adult baptisms.
—You wrote a unique book: The Living Tradition of the Saints and Significance of their Teaching for Us. It contains over 350 pages that reflect the wisdom of saints who lived in the Orthodox East as well as in the Orthodox West in the first centuries of Christianity. This is a fruit of labours, prayers and research of some forty-five years. Could you please tell us how this book was created?
—Fr. Sophrony gave me a letter of Introduction to visit Mount Athos. I stayed eleven days, which was no mean feat when the monastic life was at such a low ebb in 1963. But I had a big gap in my knowledge of what I call the Living Tradition. I had grasped that the Desert Fathers were the bedrock of this tradition. I knew two people like them, St. Silouan and Father Sophrony. But what about the 1500 years in between? In those days (1962) there was virtually nothing in print in English about Orthodoxy. But I had regular access to the great library of Chevetogne and read everything I could, often in French. I started filling the gap. It took something like forty years to complete.
When people found out about what I was doing they were keen to hear, especially about what the Fathers taught about prayer. Then they asked me to write things down. This is how the book came about. It has proved very helpful for people to get an overview of the one way of holiness in Christ. It has to be read again and again. It has never been advertised. I prefer it that way. It is also the story of our conversion to Orthodoxy.
—You have also initiated two very important projects online. One is a British Saints Synaxarion, for which you selected various kinds of information on great many saints of Britain and Ireland: lives of saints, holy sites associated with them, iconography, hymnography, with many photographs and illustrations. One can search the Synaxarion website (www.synaxarion.org.uk) using different criteria: rank, feast-day, icons, troparia and kontakia, holy places, miracles, pilgrimage sites. It is an enormous piece of work. The second project is Early Christian Ireland: here you provide information and photographs of all early Christian sites in Ireland up to 1100, including holy wells, trees and mountains linked to the memory of a saint, Celtic high crosses, round towers, tombs etc. How have you been collecting information on the saints of the British Isles?
—One year we found ourselves in Ireland. We visited some of the holy sites there. I was astounded how many and how rich these places are. But it had been difficult to get information about many of them. So I started making a database so others could find their way also. (www.earlychristianireland.org). People have been very appreciative. Sometimes people ask me to plot for them a two week visitation of holy sites for their vacation!
We have been round Ireland ourselves twice—but there are still gaps in our knowledge. But by now we had became fervent hunters of remote islands, beehive huts and the tombs of the saints. I cannot tell you how excited we got. How close we seemed to these Desert Fathers.
People asked us to “do” Wales, Cornwall, Scotland and the rest of England. But I wouldn't have missed the experience for anything. We feel we have so many friends who surround us, pray for us and encourage us every day.
When we had our chapel frescoed we had our local Cumbrian saints in large size under the central deisis, namely St. Mungo, St. Cuthbert, St. Bega and St. Herbert. We dedicated our Community to Saints Bega, Mungo and Herbert. Around the other three sides of the walls we have St. Anthony, St. Poemen, St. Macarius, St. Barsanuphius, St. John Climacus, St. Isaac the Syrian; St. Maximus, St. Hesychius, St. Gregory of Sinai, St. Simeon the New Theologian, St. Gregory Palamas and St. Silouan.
These are our “clouds of witnesses.” We sing Vespers and Matins every day. We are so happy tacked on to the “end.” Knowing where we are, we know we are truly being saved every day.
—In the illustrated articles on these saints and shrines that you put on the parish website (http://www.orthodoxcumbria.org/) you mention that you and your matushka did visit most of these places yourselves. It must have brought great inspiration and comfort to your soul. Looking at these photographs alone, one can say these are truly “holy landscapes” which transform the soul of nearly each traveller… Who are your favourite saints? What are your favourite holy places?
—We have already mentioned the Saints. Choosing favourite places is hard but some things stand out: the cave of St. Colman Mac Duach (Colman of Kilmacduagh) on the Burren Co Clare, the cave of St. Ninian in Galloway, and the cave of St. Columba at Ellary in Argyll; the island of Illauntannig off the north side of the Dingle Peninsula (county Kerry), the monastic island of Illaunlochan in Portmagee (Co Kerry), Church Island off Waterville (Co Kerry), St. Macdara's Island off Galway; the seastacks of the Orkneys, the shrine of St. Issui in the Black mountains (near Abergavenny, Wales), St. Moluag's church in remote Eynort on the Isle of Skye, St. Triduana's chapel on Papa Westray, Orkneys. All these are an unsurpassable testimony to serious solitude and prayer. We have made 17 booklets of 40 or so pages covering the entire British Isles detailing holy sites wherever we went.
What was then needed was a Synaxarion of saints in the British Isles so that many of them could return to liturgical remembrance in our services. Of course there was already in existence the extremely important Calendar of Saints published by the Fellowship of St. John the Baptist. But the names need to be backed up by information about the saints in easy accessible form. What better to have it all together on a website devoted to this purpose. So we selected all the saints who played an important part in the history of the church in each area. The saints instead of just appearing on a list are placed in a proper historical and geographical context. Indeed by having a “next” button the whole Synaxarion can be read from beginning to end in this way. This makes not only for a beautiful read but supplies abundant information. The final coup has been to include on each entry of the saint not only an icon where available but photographs of all holy sites relevant to each saint. This in turn will stimulate more visits to more holy sites and more pilgrimages. People can download what they want or be sent a printable version of the Calendar. We realize this is not quite the same as the older Synaxarion but technology has made it possible to do something which fits the bill getting to know and appreciate saints in a way we could never do before.
—Could you please talk a little about Cumbria, and offer a brief outline of the history of Orthodoxy in the county? Would you suggest pilgrimage sites the Orthodox faithful would benefit from visiting?
—The church came to Cumbria early. At least two chapels have been found on Hadrian's Wall, Vindolanda and Birdoswald, and Vindolanda may date even back into the fourth century. Just round the corner is Ardwall Island in Galloway where early Irish monks settled in the fifth century. St. Ninian worked out of Carlisle and could have founded the hermit caves of Ninekirks. St. Kentigern (St. Mungo) is said to have preached at Crosthwaite in Keswick. St. Cuthbert was a regular visitor to these western parts. St. Herbert his friend lived on his island in Derwentwater (situated on the territory of Keswick). St. Bega made her cell on the shores of Lake Bassenthwaite very near to Keswick. This is rich stuff for such a small area as Cumbria; and Keswick shows itself to have four saints! What more could we want?
—Is there a growing awareness of the ancient saints and shrines of these isles among the native residents of Cumbria and all Britain? What is your heroic parish currently undertaking in order to contribute to the restoration of the rich Orthodox heritage of your country?
—In 2007 we did an eight-day pilgrimage to the holy sites of Cumbria using the accommodation at Braithwaite. We hunted down holy wells and to our astonishment found seventy—a figure far higher than previous estimates though some are now lost. Astonishingly such density of wells in the northern area of Cumbria is a new revelation and makes it not far off the density of Wales or Cornwall. In 2014, we began a work of restoration and blessing of the wells. We hope to continue this in 2015 and beyond. At the moment we are writing up what is turning out be a lovely book on all the wells.
In the background here is a deeper question: if Orthodoxy is recently returning to this ancient area of Britain and reclaiming its saints and holy places, how can it be meaningful to reclaim the wells also? People can connect with saints, with (British) monastic sites (of which there are several in Cumbria), and with the great crosses (such as Bewcastle and Gosforth) But with wells? Are they not a cultural embarrassment? We have to answer that. Otherwise we are just making a romantic selection of the past which has little to do with reality. Cultural heritage in Cumbria is the county’s only remaining economic asset and here the Orthodox Church is seen to be preserving a very overlooked part of that heritage. We believe that awareness of the spiritual landscape of Cumbria will dramatically increase through pilgrimages, annual blessings of the wells, and of course through what we publish.
—How do you see the future of Orthodoxy here? Do the various Orthodox jurisdictions (Greek, Russian, Romanian, Antiochian and others) work together in this country?
—Did you know Cumbria was not part of England to the tenth and eleventh centuries? It was then swallowed up by the Western church just like the rest of the country. The voice of Orthodoxy has been submerged that long. People are deeply ignorant of it because they have no experience of it. It comes as something of a real shock when we came here.
The first thing has been to establish the liturgy every Sunday; the second thing is to have it in English. We must speak about our Fathers: the Greek speakers that we have saints they know nothing about; the English that they have saints they have all but forgotten about. The kingdom “works” through the prayers of the saints, the Gospel is liveable, and sanctity is possible. This is the core of Orthodoxy and it cannot ever change.
But the religious culture of England (and elsewhere) was turned away from the Mother of God, and all the Saints and the Angels. The communion of earth with heaven was met with denial as was the liturgy as a transforming reality. It lost the one way of holiness at the heart of the Living Tradition. People do not know what they have lost.
Orthodoxy must not add to this tragedy. Generations of young Orthodox have already been lost by lack of vision. Multiple jurisdictions wreak havoc with our witness. Where will we be in fifteen or twenty years time? Perhaps even slimmer than we are now, but hopefully more wise and aware.
Pray for us.
—It was a real pleasure to talk to you, Fr. John! Thank you for the wonderful interview! We wish you abundant blessings from God in all your labors! May He grant you strength for many years!
Dmitry Lapa
3/12/2015
https://orthochristian.com/77852.html
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The Australian Themi Adams of The Flies Band became Orthodox Priest Missionary in Africa
Fr. Dr Themi Adams considers himself wilder and braver than his rock star contemporaries. Not because he bites off bat heads or taunts the media with a bad boy image—but because he delivers aid to some of Africa’s most dangerous communities.
Born to Egyptian and Greek parents, Fr. Dr Themi Adams was born as Themi Adamopulous and raised in Australia. Growing up as a staunch Marxist and atheist, Adams turned away from God and picked up a bass guitar in the 1960s. He soon started a band called The Flies.
The Flies went on to become one of the more memorable indie bands of the era. The group toured with The Beatles and gained a global following. Adams eventually found himself in the United States at Princeton and Harvard University.
“It was at this time that I suddenly became moved by the overwhelming needs of the oppressed and disadvantaged people in the Third World” says Adams, who is now a devout and radical Orthodox missionary. Adams has dedicated his life to helping the poor.
“I decided that something needed to be done—and that my current lifestyle was not the most productive in the eyes of God,” Adams continues. He spent the next decade living in the outer slum areas of Nairobi, fulfilling his calling as a devoted missionary.
After 10 years of missionary work, he felt called to address a greater need in Freetown, Sierra Leone.
“The entire world had turned its back on the country, and they were in great need of help,” Adams says. “So, I fought the impossible odds and went into the country, alone, to set up a mission and controversially deliver aid to all who needed it.”
Media around the world have been captivated by Adams’ ability to get things done in hard territories where others have failed. In fact, his authority-defying attitude has earned him many notable relationships with government officials in African countries.
Adams, for example, is a close advisor and personal friend of Ernest Bai Koroma, the fourth president of Sierra Leone. This close-knit relationship led to the formation of Paradise Kids for Africa (PK4A), an organization with a mandate to help some of the world’s poorest people.
“The secret of the mission is to respect the Africans and to understand them,” Adams says. “The war has left so many people disabled, and because of the war there was no vaccinations in the 80s, the polio cases had reached catastrophic proportions. That has contributed to the high number of disabled in the country.”
INS.
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Paris, France: The conversion of a Roman Catholic French man to Orthodoxy
A miracle of Saint Xenia of St. Petersburg, Russia
Saint Xenia of St. Petersburg, Russia, the Fool-for-Christ and Wonderworker…
We follow with an account by a resident of France, who was benefited by the Saint in our days.
A French dentist with a private clinic in Paris was injured in a car accident and had to stay in hospital for a few days.
Roman Catholic by creed, but indifferent to the faith, he watched as the patient next to him, a Russian émigré, would pray in the evenings in the ward, and would laugh behind his back.
Since the Russian’s lengthy prayers were repeated for as many days as he remained there, the dentist saw fit to make fun of the praying man, and he joked around with those from the other rooms.
After that first evening of making fun with the others, it was impossible for him to fall sleep.
Suddenly, the door to the ward opened and a woman appeared, wearing men’s clothing and holding a cane in her hand.
She was heading towards his bed. He was startled. Unknown facial features. A sweet, strange face.
“What do you want, lady? I don’t have any change. Who let you in here?”
“I came to tell you,” she said to him, as she lifted her cane, “to stop ridiculing Yuri, who is praying, because you will remain here a long time yet, and will seek his prayers….”
And indeed. Over the following days, he was diagnosed with serious cardiac insufficiency and remained three months in the hospital.
Yuri visited him at one point, and when the Frenchman revealed his vision to him, he began to tell him about St. Xenia and Orthodoxy.
Today, the Frenchman is an active member of the French Orthodox community and Baptized his newborn baby girl with the name Xenia last December, in honor of the Saint and in memory of his miraculous conversion.
http://www.holytrinityrandolph.com/saint-xenia.htm
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New Zealand’s Maori Convert To Orthodoxy
The indigenous Maori people in New Zealand are converting to Orthodoxy under the influence of Russian immigrants, the diocese in Russia’s Urals said on Monday, citing a Russian emigre.
According to a letter sent to relatives in the Urals by a Russian woman who married a student from New Zealand, Russian immigrants “maintain Russian traditions in every house.”
“Seeing the example of Russian immigrants, many indigenous New Zealanders convert to Orthodoxy,”
the woman wrote, as quoted by the diocese of Yekaterinburg.
“They baptize their children and give them Russian (Orthodox) names.”
The number of Russian immigrants to New Zealand increased after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. According to the most recent official nationwide census, carried out in 2006, a total of 4,581 residents said they were born in Russia. Unofficial figures estimate the Russian population in New Zealand has since grown to about 6,500, including first-generation children of Russian parents.
https://journeytoorthodoxy.com/2010/05/new-zealands-maori-convert-to-orthodoxy/
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Native American Orthodox Christian Fellowship (NAOCF)
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Native-American-Orthodox-Christian-Fellowship-NAOCF/160917590660985
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Fr. Athanasius Henein, Egypt: A Copt-Monophysite Priest’s Conversion to Orthodoxy in Athens, Greece on 2011
Below is a translation I have done introducing the works and person of Fr. Athanasios Henein, a convert from Monophysitism. Although he spent many years in “captivity”, as he himself says, he responded to Christ when He called to him to enter into Life, Orthodoxy; he diligently sought Christ and found Him. For my part I was so impressed by his words that I had to share such a wonderful, if small, taste of his conversion story. I would translate more if I could find the whole account. Enjoy!
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An Introduction to the Works and Person of Fr. Athanasios Henein:
Given such a miraculous event, instead of writing a preface ourselves, it is better for Fr. Athanasios to speak for himself, in his own words, about his blessed conversion into Life, the Truth – which exists only in the One Catholic and Apostolic Church, our Orthodox Church.
We praise God for his wonderful work and wish Fr Athanasios, through the intercessions of the Theotokos and of all the saints, the blessing and mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ and His support for him and his family. We also thank him for his confidence and the texts he sends us. Eventually we will post both the Greek and Arabic versions to benefit souls and glorify the Lord.
Fr. Athanasios in his own words:
Many speak of heresy, many write about the condition, but few are those who have tasted the bitterness of heresy, and fewer still those who have lived and shed blood to free themselves from its captivity.
Heresy is a way of life, it is a great prison, it is a mental, as well as physical, illness. I, Athanasios Henein, lived these tragic events as the head of the Coptic community in Athens for fifteen years. Copts divide the person of Christ and abolish His inter-human reality and His realistic presence in the world and in the Church.
But the miracle of my healing and conversion to our Mother, the Orthodox Church, was by the grace of the Triune God and the practical love of His Eminence Metropolitan Seraphim of Piraeus, the Cretan Elder Methodius, and the fathers of the Holy Monastery of the Resurrection.
The words you will read, dear readers, are a confession of faith, and gratitude. But they are also an appeal for us to work together to help ordinary Copts (of which 15 thousand live in Athens) to experience the beauty of Orthodoxy.
(To read Fr. Athanasios’ articles in English, French, Arabic or Greek see HERE.)
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Converting to Orthodoxy in Norway
(It’s Been Done)
A Romanian writer, Tudor is a graduate of the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Bucharest, Romania. He has published a number of articles related to philosophy and theology in different cultural and academic journals. His work focuses on the evolution of Orthodox spirituality in Western societies as well and he is going to publish a book of interviews with Westerners converted to Orthodoxy. In this article, he interviews Father Johannes Johansen, an Orthodox priest in Norway.
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TP: First of all, please do tell us how you discovered Orthodoxy and why have you chosen the conversion to the Orthodox Church.
Fr. Johannes Johansen: By studying the Holy Bible. The Orthodox Church is the direct contuation of the Church that Christ himself founded on his holy apostles – the only possible Christian Church.
TP: What should we know about the Orthodox heritage of Norway, about the origins of Orthodoxy in Norway? When did actually appear the first Orthodox church in Norway?
Fr. Johannes Johansen: Everybody thinks that Norway was Roman Catholic the first 500 years and then Lutheran/protestant. BUT this is a truth which has to be corrected. The Christianity started to influence “Norway” already in the 8th century, and in the 1000-c. We have the history with St. Sunniva of Selja (described in The Saga about King Olav Tryggvason) and then we have St. Olav Haraldson who eventually Christianized Norway (Stiklestad 1030), and a little later st. Hallvard in Oslo-aerea) – all of it BEFORE the schism between Rome and the other Orthodox Churches. That means the Church/Christianity in Norway in that first period was Orthodox Church/Christianity (not “roman-catholic”).
The second point is in the far north-east: In 16. century the holy missionary Trifon came from Novgorod and Christianized all the eastern “skolt” laps (saami) people. He built the chapel in Neiden in 1565 – still existing, and the tribe he Christianized are still Orthodox people and belonging to our parish.
The third point is 1920 – when a group of ablout 1000 Russian refugee came from Archangelsk/Murmansk to Norway and founded “The Orthodox Church (St. Nicholas Parish) in Norway”, still existing, my parish. The parish has after that expanded much.
TP: Can you please talk about the fullness of the Norwegian Orthodox tradition among the other orthodox traditions in Eastern and Central Europe? I don’t know if this is a right question, but I am thinking about the fact that there should be a some kind of fullness as I have mentioned above.
Fr. Johannes Johansen: In fact, we can not yet talk about a Norwegian Orthodox cultural tradition, but we can say that it is in the process of being formed. First of all the language: we are using more and more norwegian (in stead of church-slavonic) because of the international composition of members in the parishes. We are also combining Russian/slavonic music with the byzantine. We have published a great range of books, and translated most of the liturgical texts.
TP: Who are the most important saints celebrated in the Norwegian Orthodox Church?
Fr. Johannes Johansen: We do not say “The Norwegian Orthodox Church” but “The Orthodox Church in Norway” (an important difference). The most important saints for Orthodoxy in Norway are: St. Sunniva, St. Olav, St. Hallvard and St. Trifon, the apostles Peter and Paul. St. Seraphim of Sarov and St. Nicholas.
TP: What can you say about the dialogue between the Norwegian Orthodox Church and the other local and traditional orthodox churches such as the Russian, the Greek or the Serbian one?
Fr. Johannes Johansen: We try to have good and friendly relations to them. But a great difference between them and us, is that they are very nationalistic, while we welcome people of all nationalities, for us the Orthodox faith and Tradition is the only thing that matters.
TP: Which are the most important Orthodox churches and monasteries in Norway?
St Nicholas Church in Oslo. St. Georges chapel in Neiden. St. Trifon monastery in Hurdal.
TP: I also wish to find out more information about the written books concerning the Orthodoxy in Norway. So, what books should we read so that we can better discover the Orthodox Church in Norway?
Fr. Johannes Johansen: In 2003 we published a book of the history of the parish of St Nicholas (the first and oldest parish in Norway) in Oslo. Now we are ready to publish a book about the monastery of St. Trifon also.
TP: Which is the main role and importance of the Orthodox Church in the Norwegian society at this moment?
Fr. Johannes Johansen: We try to defend traditional Christian dogma and moral standards againt modernism and secularisation. We are active in oecumenical movement to witness about Orthodoxy.
This interview is one of many that will be published in the book “The rediscovery of Orthodox heritage of the West” by Tudor Petcu, containing interviews with different Westerners converted to Orthodoxy. It will be published in two volumes and the first one will appear by the end of this year.
https://journeytoorthodoxy.com/2016/07/converting-to-orthodoxy-in-norway-its-been-done/
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The Journey To Antioch: Part One
by Clifton D. Healy
My Discoveries in the Orthodox Church: Introduction
I grew up in and trained for ministry among the Restoration Movement churches. Toward the end of that training, while still at college, I began to investigate the Anglican tradition. And though for a time these two faith traditions overlapped, still the pathways are fairly clear.
The road markers for my journey to Antioch, my inquiry into the Orthodox Church, however, are much more muddled, scattered here and there along previous roadways, seen now as portents of things to come, but known then as only so much new experience, as simple signposts which I was then unable to read.
The relating of my investigations into Orthodoxy, then, runs scattershot at first through the stages of my experience in the Stone-Campbell/Restoration Movement churches just prior to becoming acquainted with Anglicanism, then through my initial searching in the Anglican tradition, and finally to the culmination of my experience in that tradition as I turned away from the Episcopal Church to finally look with focused attention at the Orthodox Church.
My experience of Orthodoxy can therefore be roughly charted along five time markers: the years prior to the summer of 2000, the months from June 2000 to January 2002, from June 2002 to September 2003 (the “gap” from January to June 2002 will be addressed in due course), from September 2003 to the Sunday of Orthodoxy and our entry into the Cathecumenate, the Catechumenate from the Sunday of Orthodoxy to Pentecost, and our entry into the Church on Pentecost.
1. Encounters with Orthodoxy prior to June 2000
As has been told elsewhere, by the summer of 2000 I had looked outside my own heritage churches to find that longed-for connection to the historic Church and had made my way to Anglicanism in the belief that I had found it there.
But the search had antecedents that predated my Anglican investigations. The first event in which I can recall this longing began to manifest itself with the purchase, in January 1987 between semesters of my freshman at Ozark Christian College, at the college bookstore of the Lightfoot and Harmer Greek and English single volume edition of The Apostolic Fathers. Here was my first attempt to find out what the early Church taught and believed.
A seed had been planted as I spent the next semester reading through the Apostolic Fathers. I had no real understanding of what I was reading, but it both satisfied and intensified my longing for a connection to the New Testament Church.
The next event occurred about four years later. In the spring of 1991, just prior to my graduation from college, I prepared for a conditional baptism. I was seeking some certainty and authenticity about my baptism at age seven, especially in light of the fact that my life as an adolescent was godless and immoral. The preparation brought to my attention, for the first time, the Jesus Prayer, and aside from the Lord’s Prayer, was my first experience with an ancient prayer of the Church. All my experience to this point had been oriented solely around extemporaneous praying.
In the summer of that year (1991) I read the first edition of Peter Gilquist’s Becoming Orthodox. This was my first real and formal introduction to the Orthodox Church. During this time I had been investigating Anglicanism (and later that autumn, I would seriously consider, if only briefly, the Roman Catholic Church), so I cannot say how or why I chose to buy the book.
Perhaps it was knowing that one of the persons noted in the book, now Fr. Gregory Rogers, was an alumnus of Lincoln Christian Seminary, where I later earned my M. A. in contemporary theology and philosophy. In any case, though it did allay my concerns related to Mary and the Tradition, it still seemed to me that Orthodoxy was too foreign, too ethnic for me. Which is ironic, considering that Gilquist’s book recounts the journey of a couple of thousand of evangelicals to Orthodoxy.
But there you have it. To me Orthodoxy was foreign.
A few months later, in the autumn, I read The Way of a Pilgrim and was reintroduced to the Jesus Prayer. But by this time I was more intent on assimilating ancient Christian spiritual disciplines in my life than in understanding Orthodoxy any further.
After that, my encounters with Orthodoxy were infrequent, though they continued to be bookish. I read Timothy Ware’s The Orthodoxy Church in the autumn of 1992 and his The Orthodoxy Way in the summer of 1996. Daniel Clendenin’s two books, from an evangelical Protestant perspective, helped to further clarify some points of concern in the spring of 1995.
But although in the spring of 1993 I did purchase a few Orthodox prayer books and a small laminated icon, I was still very much the intellectual tourist. And these items were being used to deepen my exploration and experience of, ironically enough, Anglicanism.
I made no real use of these things, at least not on their own terms. I merely knew about them.
2. Orthodox Encounters June 2000 through January 2002
From my last couple of years Ozark Christian College (1990-1991) till my decision to leave the priestly vocation discernment process in ECUSA in January 2002, I was moving into, then back out of, Anglicanism. Although in those years
I acquired icons and prayer ropes, there was no real assimilation of Orthodox worship and prayer, and only infrequent reading of Orthodox books. Indeed, my first visit to the Divine Liturgy took place in October 1998, at St. Mary’s in Omaha, Nebraska, during a three-week stay while I was training with a company for which I had just been hired. I had already been an Episcopalian for two years, and so I went mostly out of curiosity. It was a beautiful and moving experience, but it still felt too foreign to me, especially now with my developing Anglo-Catholic ethos. I would not visit another Divine Liturgy until July 2000.
In the spring of 2000, I had begun attending an Episcopal seminary as part of a discernment process for a priestly vocation in the Episcopal Church. After a scant three months, I was shocked and angered. I had seen the Gospel mocked, godly Christian men and women ridiculed, and the Scriptures dismissed with a wave of the hand–all because these things spoke against, or these persons by their lives revealed the futility of, the majority’s political agenda.
I very nearly decided not to go back once the term ended. And in time I would come to the conclusion that the forms and structures of the national Episcopal Church, as well as a plurality of dioceses, had been so corrupted by heresy and the grab for power, had been so wed to a singular political agenda, that no reform was forthcoming. I would risk the spiritual well-being of my family to have stayed. And in my mind I was called first to be a priest in my family, not to the institution that is the Episcopal Church.
But as it turned out, at the end of that first term, a serendipitous receipt of a postcard from Frank Schaeffer’s Regina Orthodox Press, advertising a videotape of an interview on the program “Calvin Forum” (hosted by Bob Meyering) with Frank Schaeffer, son of the famous Presbyterian theologian Francis Schaeffer, led to what became a six-year inquiry into Orthodoxy.
I purchased and watched the video. I recalled the Gilquist book I had read some nine years ago. And that old longing for the historic Church and its real presence was reawakened after the disillusionment I had recently experienced.
After watching the video, a chain of connections unrolled in the space of about a month which would put in place two very important factors: a disciplined study of Orthodoxy and a parish in which to experience the Orthodox faith and life. It was that latter reality that has made all the difference.
Having watched the Schaeffer video, I did some searching and found his book Dancing Alone at a local library, and checked it out and read it. More research led to two of Frederica Mathewes-Green’s books, Facing East and At the Corner of East and Now. A few weeks later, on a trip home to Wichita, Kansas, over the Fourth of July, I visited my favorite bookstore, Eighth Day Books, and purchased the revised edition of Peter Gilquist’s Becoming Orthodox as well as the book he edited, Coming Home of personal accounts of how men from various Protestant backgrounds had become Orthodox priests. There would be many more like this.
This initial interest and burst of reading generated many sessions of surfing the web, looking for information on the Orthodox Church. From the books that I’d read, as well as many web links, I found the website of the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese of America, and through it’s parish directory search got the information for All Saints Orthodox Church. I contacted the parish pastor, Archpriest Patrick Reardon, and was warmly invited to come worship at the Divine Liturgy.
At this point I had almost decided not to return to seminary, and, in fact, to leave the Episcopal Church altogether. I had discovered Orthodoxy, and in the space of about a month and a half had been so drawn to what I had learned of the Orthodox Church that I was now wondering if I shouldn’t continue my Christian pilgrimage, leave Canterbury, as it were, and continue on to Antioch. In fact, I made a list of resolutions in which I began to attempt to appropriate the life of the faith of the Ancient Church. As far as I could then tell, it wasn’t Anglicanism that had that life, but Orthodoxy. And so the last resolution was that if I ever left ECUSA, I would become Orthodox.
Of course, the question is properly raised: How could I so suddenly, having just started at seminary to discern a vocation to the priesthood in the Episcopal Church–and having uprooted my family and limited our employment and educational choices–even think of abandoning the Episcopal Church?
Hadn’t I spent about five years investigating Anglicanism before my confirmation? Hadn’t I spent four years trying to further assimilate Anglo-Catholic traditions into my faith practice? Hadn’t Anna and I worked hard to come to some compromise about the Episcopal Church, my confirmation being something she had been opposed to? Was I ready to throw all that away?
Not yet. My journal entries at the time were full of ambivalence. My initial picture of the Episcopal Church had been fueled and fed by Robert Webber’s, Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail. But the picture that book had presented was now a decade and more out of date. In fact, one may well question whether Webber’s optimism of the place of evangelicals in ECUSA was either unfounded or misplaced. I now had a more realistic understanding of where the national church was and where it was headed. My questions now had less to do with whether or not I was called to the priesthood, but whether, if so called, I could serve without compromising my faith or putting my family at spiritual risk. Still, my parish priest was a significant influence through his friendship and pastoral mentoring.
And my bishop was an example of godly leadership against the tide of rejection of biblical and traditional norms of faith and life.
And, given my experience of judging a church on the basis of reading alone, I was much less sanguine that reading a handful of books and surfing the internet was a solid basis for making a change that would involve scrapping the hard work and planning that had brought us to Chicago in the first place.
Still and all, Orthodoxy beckoned, so on 23 July 2000, I worshipped for the second time at an Orthodox Church. I went to the Divine Liturgy at All Saints.
I was absolutely blown away. Since Fr. Patrick was out of town that weekend, a deacon from another parish served the typika liturgy. The service was still foreign to me. And the differences in pious practices was evident. I genuflected whereas everyone else bowed. I crossed myself backwards (or was it the parishioners who were crossing themselves the “wrong” way?).
I bowed at the Gloria Patri, whereas everyone else crossed themselves (though many also bowed). The singing was a capella, which would have called to mind some worship experiences in some of my heritage churches, except that the hymns sung were all unfamiliar to me. I recognized, of course, the Pater Noster, the Sursum Corda, the Nicene Creed (sans filioque) and a few other pieces of the Liturgy, but the rest of it was a jumble, despite the copies of the Liturgy (with explanation) in the pew.
But what wasn’t foreign to me was the content of what I was hearing. At the seminary I had already been subjected to liturgies that eliminated the Fatherhood of God, that struck out the human maleness of Jesus, that replaced robust Trinitarianism with bland Sabellianist notions of a monochrome God, that nixed confession of my personal acts of sin, and that offered a running critique of the Tradition as patriarchal, oppressive, and, well, outdated.
Here, however, all of that which had been denied me at the seminary liturgies was present in all its fullness. Here the Trinity was confessed in full, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Here Jesus’ two natures, united in one Person, was confessed and expressly linked to the cause of our salvation. Here God was Father, fully and completely. Here our sins were confessed in a variety of ways. Here the Tradition was alive, fully vibrant, and salvific.
If I could have, I would have become Orthodox right then.
But, in God’s wisdom, he has blessed me with a wife that frequently intervenes to bring me to a more level-headed and realistic path of action. Some time after worshipping at All Saints, I was still enthusiastic about the Orthodox Church, and in a conversation my wife and I were having, that intensity shone through. But she bluntly and firmly drew the conversation to a close by saying,
“We’re not changing churches again.”
That accomplished God’s purpose, which was to give me pause and to deeply consider the claims of Orthodoxy. It is not a coincidence, then, that I did not return to worship at All Saints for some six months. Nor is it a coincidence that I decided to return, after all, to seminary. I determined that I should try to enter more deeply into the Anglo-Catholic traditions I had known as a way of surviving the seminary experience.
But I did not stop my pursuit of and inquiry into the Orthodox Church.
After a couple of months actively engaging with Orthodoxy, I returned to my Anglican ethos and tried to find within it resources to overcome what I took to be its weaknesses and failure. I sought this mainly in traditional liturgical forms and pieties. I tried to use the 1928 prayer book and the Anglican Service Book. I read some of the Carolinian divines. But I found that this retreat into the Anglican past, good and holy though it was, did little more than emphasize that the Episcopal Church was, in my view, going further and further down a road I not only did not want to go, but one I was certain would end in destruction.
In January 2001 I began more fully to realize these things, so I took a very conscious step back toward Orthodoxy by purchasing an Orthodox prayer book and a translation of the Septuagint psalter. These soon became my sole means of personal prayer. I gave up the Anglican prayer book for good. Also that month, I again visited All Saints Orthodox Church.
During the next few months, my life was incarnate ambivalence. I had one foot pointing to the world of Orthodoxy, and one toward the Episcopal Church. I had grown increasingly unclear as to my diocesan status as an aspirant, and was coming to the conclusion that my search for holy orders was effectively over. I talked with my parish priest and he contacted the bishop. The three of us arranged a lunch meeting in May. That meeting even more firmly solidified the backing of my bishop, especially given we were of like mind on many current matters in ECUSA.
Still, despite being in limbo for some months, yet now having a clear green light, I was disappointed. Had the bishop cut me loose, my decision would have been clear and relatively easy. Now I was forced to do ever more thinking. ECUSA or Orthodoxy?
For Mother’s Day, May 2001, and again in June, my wife graciously accompanied me to two Orthodox Liturgies. The first was at Sts Peter and Paul Orthodox Church in Glenview, the second was her first visit to All Saints. She was curious and asked some questions, but ultimately unimpressed. Eventually, she would become deeply resistant to our being received into the Orthodox Church.
In the autumn of that year, I began my doctoral program in philosophy at Loyola University in Chicago. During that semester my own sense of vocation and the status of the Episcopal Church became clear to me. On Christmas Eve, I prayed and wrote a list of issues I had with the Episcopal Church. After two weeks of reflection and further prayer, I decided to stop the process of discernment to a vocation to the priesthood. On the Feast of Epiphany 2002, I emailed my priest, and later contacted the bishop and my parish discernment committee. When I told Anna, there was visible and verbal relief. She summed it up in her response to me:
“Good.”
A week later I returned again to All Saints. I had lunch with Fr. Patrick and Khouria Denise. He answered a lot of my questions and gave me a prayer rule. I continued to study further about Orthodoxy. But the toll of the previous year and a half worked itself out in me. I soon went into a state of numbness and apathy. I stopped attending worship altogether. I rarely prayed. I felt stuck between.
I had given up on the Episcopal Church and Anglicanism.
There was no evangelical church that appealed to me. And with Anna’s growing resistance to a new church journey, let alone the strange world of Orthodoxy. So for six months, from January to June 2002, I was nowhere in terms of a church home. Orthodoxy still beckoned, and I knew my heart lay there. But I was out in the wilderness. Something eventually would have to give way.
And as you may suppose, it started with repentance.
3. Orthodox Encounters June 2002 to September 2003
On 9 June 2002, I returned to All Saints Orthodox Church after a six-month absence.
The week before, through a serendipitous reference in my reading to the passage in Ephesians 5 on the relations of husbands and wives, I contemplated my responsibilities as a husband. According to the Scriptures, and my own conscience, I came up far short. Especially in the critical role of my obligations of leadership in my home in matters of faith.
As I’ve described, my first reactions to the new realities confronting me in the Episcopal Church and in seminary, as the 90s drew to a close and the new century and millennium began, were largely ones of anger and repulsion.
I was angry that the church I thought I had joined had, in effect, ceased to exist more than two and a half decades before. I was angry that I had not seen the truth when I was being confirmed, and angry at those changes which had manifested themselves after my confirmation. I was also repulsed by the approval of immoral behavior and the ever-growing influence of heresy in the communications of the church, heresy which was never seriously or prominently addressed, let alone disciplined. No bishops or priests were brought up on presentments for preaching that which contradicted the explicit Faith of the historic Church.
It seemed it was more important to uphold institutional unity, to hold on to property and endowments, to earn the esteem and approval of those outside the Church, than it was to stand firm in the Faith once for all delivered to the saints.
Clearly, then, my turn to Orthodoxy at first was more about greener pastures than about embracing Orthodoxy for what it was. But from the time I acquired an Orthodox prayerbook and the Septuagint psalter in January 2001, I began to relate to Orthodoxy on a deeper, more serious level. My exploration of the life and doctrine of the Church began to lay a solid foundation for change, so that by the time June 2002 came ‘round, I was in a state in which I no longer evaluated the Orthodox Church on my terms and preferences. I was now prepared to listen to the Orthodox Church and, importantly, to begin to allow Orthodoxy to evaluate me.
It was fitting, then, that the Sunday of my return, 9 June, was the Sunday of the Blind Man (the Gospel reading being John 9:1-38), and that Epistle reading was Acts 16:16-34, and the conversion of the Philippian jailer.
This was my first of a handful of “St. Anthony moments.” As you remember, St. Anthony had gone to worship, heard the Gospel text to sell all he had and give it to the poor, and soon went into the desert to pray and wage spiritual warfare. Though certainly with more humble implications, nonetheless, the significance of these passages were not lost on me. Clearly I was blind, and in need of the illumination of God’s Spirit. But I took the promise of St. Paul to the Philippian jailer as my own:
“Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house.”
As completely unrealizable as it seemed, I began to hope that one day I and my entire household would be Orthodox.
For I had come to believe, though I did not yet understand, that the Orthodox Church is the Church of the New Testament. If this were true, then not only by virtue of my growing up in the Stone-Campbell/Restoration Movement churches, but also on its own terms, I needed to lead my family into that Church, and to do so by way of example.
Immediately, that implication, and my new resolve to accomplish it, faced a strong and serious challenge: my wife was completely opposed to any such move. Although she refrained from any critical remarks about my worshipping at the Orthodox Church for nearly a month, by the first of July 2002 Anna vigorously voiced her frustration and opposition. My continuing to worship at a Church she could not see fit to worship at was just like if I were taking a knife right through the midst of our family and dividing it in half. I had two weeks to decide what I was to do: continue to go to the Orthodox Church and wreak havoc on our home; or find a parish where we both could worship together as a family.
Needless to say, I was sat back hard on my heels. Anna had clearly, honestly, and tearfully expressed her deep felt belief that my worshipping in an Orthodox Church was spiritually divisive, that it deeply wounded her that I would seem so callously to set aside her particular worship and church life needs, and that I should seriously consider what it was I was doing.
These deep feelings and hurt had been growing in Anna for some time. She could hardly be blamed. I had been adamant in my desire to be confirmed in the Episcopal Church some six years before. She had been against it, citing all the reasons of heresy and immorality for which I would eventually leave the Episcopal Church (though of course neither of us could have foreseen some of the particulars).
I at that time had defended my stance, saying that God would bless my decision to be confirmed, that I was doing it for our family, and so forth. Though we reconciled enough that she gave her blessing four years later for me to seek ordination, she had sacrificed potential career opportunities in the narrowing of her employment choices so that I could go to seminary. Now here I was, having left the church I was so certain was going to be good for our family, having left the ordination process I was so certain God had called me to explore, and now I wanted to jump the fence and explore yet another greener ecclesiastical pasture.
No, clearly Anna had strong and legitimate reasons to be upset and resistant to my journey into Orthodoxy.
At first, her reaction both scared and angered me. I was concerned that perhaps this issue would test our marriage beyond the breaking point, and that I would do some boneheaded thing to put the finishing touches on nearly a decade of matrimony. And I was angry that my intent to investigate Orthodoxy as a specific fulfillment of the Holy Spirit’s convicting me of my failure to be the husband I was called by God to be was being criticized in a way contrary to my intentions.
But I also had a sense that the either/or condition with which I had been presented was a false choice because it was no real choice. It pretty much came down to: choose Orthodoxy and my lifelong pursuit of the New Testament Church or choose my wife and our marriage. But after two weeks of prayerful reflection I finally decided to offer a different set of choices: we would together worship at a church with which she was comfortable, and I would from time to time (say once or twice a month) go to the Orthodox Church.
I knew that neither of us considered this compromise as ideal, still it served to reduce the tension and provide some breathing space. We ended up going to a Disciples of Christ congregation that had the sort of contemporary style of worship my wife enjoyed and felt best enabled her to worship in spirit and truth. Though I wanted her also to go to All Saints with me, she chose not to and so on those Sundays I went to Divine Liturgy, she stayed home.
Such a stopgap state of affairs could not go on indefinitely. I knew that if I were to have any hope of seeing the fulfillment of the promise I sensed I had been given, I would have to found my convictions about Orthodoxy on something other than my experience and purported preferences, on something other than reliance on “authorities” in books, and on something other than my reaction to the Episcopal Church.
It was my own heritage that pointed toward the beginning of a way forward. I would go back to the New Testament to find there the foundation of my transfigured belief and would support that biblical interpretation by the testimony of the early Christian witnesses, the Apostolic Fathers and their successors.
In July 2002, I began six months of reading and study, reflection and writing on the key questions to which I needed answers. Answers that would address not merely intellectual matters, but the issues of the life of faith. This project, though it did not begin quite so large as it ended, was much less about an academic study of, say, whether or not the Church had always believed that the elements of bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ in the Eucharist, but rather, if this is indeed the case, what am I then to do about it?
So, what began as an anticipated handful of questions I might answer in a paper grew to eight related essays (three on the nature of the Church alone), totaling some ninety-two typescript pages and more than thirty thousand nine hundred words. I started the first essay on 31 July, and began the last essay on Christmas Eve (finishing it the day after New Year’s Day).
The first two essays were intended to clear the ground and note the boundaries. In the first I noted that the competing and contradictory beliefs of the various Protestant bodies pointed out both the weaknesses of the Protestant paradigm and that the Truth had to be there amidst all the antagonistic notions. In the second essay I established the Protestant problem: that the New Testament clearly points to the visible unity of the Church, and that Protestantism has not only created more than twenty thousand schisms, but continues to add to them each week.
From there I could only resort to one sure thing: the Tradition of the Church, so the third essay highlighted how it is that the Tradition is essential to Christian belief. It is that Tradition which reveals both the antiquity of the office of the Bishop, but also underscores the New Testament teaching that the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper become the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ in the Church’s Eucharist. The last three essays deal with the reality of the unity of the Church, that the Church is both the Body of Christ and by that, then, is the locus of our salvation, and finally that the criteria of the true Church would have to be both historical and doctrinal continuity with the Church of the New Testament.
But the months from July to the Christmas season were not merely about study, however, “real life” that study was. In mid-July, Anna and I worshipped for the first time at Northside Christian Church.
This was a Disciples of Christ congregation just about a mile from our home. The Disciples churches had the same historical pedigree of the churches of which Anna and I had been members (and had served as ministers early on in our marriage), so there was some familiar ground. Plus Northside had one of the most well-done contemporary praise-band worship services I’d ever seen done, which was a key factor for my wife.
Anna and I worshipped there a few times a month for a couple of months. Both of us met with the husband-wife ministry team, and I myself met with the pastor a couple of times. But though one would think we had found our “compromise parish,” early on even Anna had misgivings. In our first meeting with the pastors over lunch, we asked some direct questions about doctrine, morality and church discipline. We did not receive direct answers. And the answers that were finally forthcoming seemed to us to display a willingness to dilute the tougher teachings of the Church for the sake of something like “church growth.”
By the first of October, the congregation had relocated to a rented movie theater in Bucktown and changed its name. We went once after the move, but the atmosphere felt to us less like worship and more like the sort of spectating one does in a theater, complete with snacks, soda and cupholders in the arms of the theater seats. We did not return. I took the move as a sign from God that this was not what he wanted for us.
The first Sunday in October, as it would turn out, was my last visit to the Divine Liturgy at All Saints until December. The following weekend I went to the Benedictine monastery of St. Gregory’s Abbey, in Three Rivers, Michigan. It was to be, in a most significant way, an unlooked-for transformation.
I arrived a few minutes late for dinner at St. Gregory’s Abbey on that October Friday, the eleventh. Arriving late is not a good thing at a monastery, but being Benedictines they were unfailingly gracious and served me a heaping plate of food nonetheless. St. Gregory’s observes the canonical offices of Matins (4:00 am), Lauds, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers and Compline. So after a brief opportunity to unload the car and unpack, it was time to head to the abbey church for Compline. I wandered around a bit in the monastery library, then headed back to the guest house, did some journaling and headed to bed.
The weekend was the wonderful Benedictine dance between work, study and prayer, though as a guest I was left to my own devices during the community work hours. I did some reading and journaling between offices. I ate with the brothers and other guests. I rested.
I came to the abbey with no real agenda, other than knowing I needed to go there. I’d been to the abbey on a couple of other occasions (though the last visit had been four years before), each visit of which was an intense time of prayerful consideration of a vocation and the seeking of some confirmation of its certainty. On the drive over to the abbey this time, however, I simply told God I had no agenda other than the one he had for me.
If “nothing happened” that would be fine. I would just trust in him.
But as it turned out, one of the books I’d checked out was a service of the Akathist Hymn to the Theotokos. I had not developed any sort of “devotion to the Virgin,” and, indeed, other than the prescribed instances in the Divine Liturgy and the service of Morning Prayers, I’d never really sought her intercessions. But I remembered that in the West, Saturdays were uniquely devoted to the Blessed Virgin, so, on Saturday afternoon, I developed the idea that in the meditation time after Compline, I would pray the Akathist hymn in one of the chapels running along the side of the monastery church.
It was an experience of prayer that was more about the distraction of standing and attending to only about ten percent of the words than about anything else. From the paradigm of spiritual experience I’d gained from my heritage churches, the prayer was a “non-experience.” No feelings of piety. No mystical flights of fancy. But, strangely enough, it was a prayer about which I suddenly wanted to develop a routine of praying.
The weekend ended Sunday after lunch. I headed back to the abbey church to spend a few moments in prayer in one of the side chapels. I prayed, as I’d done from several months, for the unity of our family and home in spiritual matters. I began to pray for Anna.
Then, quite unexpectedly, I was overcome with sobbing. I had a glimpse of my own unworthiness before God, of my sinfulness. In the prayers that came forth, I asked the intercessions of the Theotokos with regard to our family and the Orthodox Church.
As quickly as it came on me, the crying left. I prayed a bit longer and then left. Soon I headed home.
Through the next month at home life was just as it had always been. I was doing more serious reading in Orthodoxy, particularly Panayiotis Nellas’ Deification in Christ. In my daily prayers, however, I soon took on the practice of asking the intercessions of the Theotokos for me and my household. I began specifically to ask the prayers of our Lady for my wife.
On Monday, 2 December, my wife went to the doctor. She’d been feeling ill for a week and just wasn’t shaking it. I touched base briefly with Anna prior to my evening class. Then, class over, I headed home in a Chicago snowfall. But oddly enough, for me, my thoughts were not on class or some theological idea, which was usually the case. I often reflected on such things on the walk home. No, this night, my thoughts were daydreams about the future, and the children we hoped to have and raise.
Which was interesting, because I’m not, by any stretch of the imagination, an “intuitive” person. But when I walked in the door, Anna had news for me.
Anna was pregnant. This was joyous news. Though at first, the transition in our lives from ten years of family as couple to family as mommy, daddy and child, was emotionally tough, especially for Anna. She was smack-dab in the midst of rapid career development, and looking forward to continuing her education either in writing or in studying children’s literature. Now she was a momma. For my part, all I could see at first was the economic need to suspend, if not cancel altogether, the doctoral program I was so close to finishing.
As it turned out, those first misgivings, natural as they were, soon gave way to undiluted joy, acceptance and anticipation. Sofie took us out of ourselves and gave us a greater love to share.
I got the news on Monday, 2 December. The next Sunday I was back at All Saints to offer my thanksgiving to God, and to seek his strength. It was clear to me, almost from the beginning, that Sofie’s advent was in part, an answer to the prayers of the Theotokos for us which I’d been praying now for a couple of months. At first I had to take this somewhat on faith, though the conviction was strong. But as the months have unfolded since then, events have seemed to bear this out.
By the end of the month, I was finalizing the several essays I’d been working on about Orthodoxy. I also read Metropolitan John Zizioulas’ Being as Communion. This, in conjunction with Nellas’ Deification in Christ, served to further fundamentally shape my understanding of the Church, the Trinity and salvation. These books drove me back to the New Testament to confirm and reason out what it was they were saying. I began to understand that the individualistic faith I’d been reared with and trained in as an adult was antithetical to the prima facie text of the New Testament. If I gained nothing else, I learned that almost always, when Paul uses “you” in his letters to the churches, it is collective. We are saved together. And that has far-reaching implications.
While all this was going on, about the middle of the month, I had my second “St. Anthony moment.” That is to say, while worshipping and hearing the lections for the day, the word of God hit me right between the eyes. In June I was the blind man whose sight had been restored and the jailer who had received the promise of the salvation of his entire household. This time, God was much more direct. The Gospel reading was from Luke 14:16-24, the parable of the wedding supper and those who refuse to come. One reason given by one of the invitees: I’ve just gotten married. I was hardly a newlywed, at (then) nine years of marriage. But I had to ask myself: was my marriage more important to me than the truth of God’s Church?
As I hope has been evident, I had, for some seven months by this time, done the best I could to balance both my pursuit of the truth about the Orthodox Church and the needs and demands of my marriage. In an ideal world, these would not have conflicted. But as has been told, I am not an ideal husband, even if this were an ideal world. By the same token, I had to legitimately ask myself, was I more concerned about avoiding Anna’s anger or more concerned about living the truth in love, even when this truth did not coincide with Anna’s beliefs?
One thing of which I was certain: if I were ever to become Orthodox, I wanted to do it as a family. And I was growing in my certainty that I was not alone in this desire. It seemed that God and the saints interceding for us wanted that as well.
Advent that year was extremely meaningful. I came to sense more deeply what it meant for the Lord to take on Mary’s humanity, to become a man and live as one of us. I was joyous at the thought of becoming a new father. Anna was much more ambivalent, and this, augmented by the newly surging hormones of pregnancy, made for an emotional time as she worked through her anxieties and embraced her joys.
In light of my own struggle to balance my Orthodox inquiries and Anna’s needs, I did not return to All Saints till the following February. I have, to this point, lingered quite a bit over the half-year period from June to December 2002.
This has mainly been because this was perhaps the most important several months yet in my inquiry about Orthodoxy. During this time I had settled important questions in my mind regarding the biblical nature of the place of Tradition, of bishops, of the transformation of the Eucharistic elements, and of the implications in terms of salvation and sanctification, of visible unity and historic continuity, resulting from the Church’s being the Body of Christ. I had “discovered” the reality and aid of the intercessions of the saints on our behalf, particularly of the Theotokos. And I had become a father. Mind, worship, heart and family had been radically re-formed in just over two hundred days.
The living into that reality, however, even now has only barely just begun.
© 2004, 2007 Clifton D. Healy
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The Fire Fails
Fr. Barnabas Powell, USA
In this, the fourth of a series of articles on Pentecostalism and his journey to the Orthodox faith, Fr. Barnabas sets the stage for his own spiritual odyssey.
THE FIRE FAILS
As I have said previously, I am convinced the modern Pentecostal movement offers the Christian Church a wonderful opportunity to reconnect with the timeless faith of the Apostles and the balance of mystery and rationalism that has all but been lost in the Christian West.
However, I also believe that Pentecostalism is a system of theology that cannot and will not bring anyone to the fullness of the faith
“once for all delivered to the saints.”
This is not because Pentecostal people are “bad.” It isn’t because Pentecostal or Charismatic theology is “wrong” or “evil.” It is because the underlying theological foundation for Pentecostal and Charismatic theology is poverty stricken. It is simply too weak to bear the weight of the fullness of the Apostolic faith.
Coming as I do from a Pentecostal background, that word “Apostolic” holds a particularly pregnant meaning. Unfortunately, my understanding of “apostolic” was quite deficient during my days as a Pentecostal.
In fact, the very tendency in the West to break off into “factions” and “denominations” is particularly strong among Pentecostals. This revealed itself early on in the movement over the issue of water baptism. Being cut off from the wisdom of the Church these sincere believers embodied all that was wrong about the Protestant innovation of “Sola Scriptura.” They did not have access to the wise understanding of the Trinity preserved in the Church so they mistook the trinitarian teaching for tri-theism and reacted against what they perceived as a heresy.
But this so-called “new issue” demonstrates the first theological poverty of Pentecostalism: A poverty of communion with the saints.
Since Protestantism tends to reduce the Christian faith to certain theological propositions, the Pentecostals allowed this reduction full flower in their attempts to “recapture” the power of the first century Church. Feeling no sense of connection with their fellow Christians throughout the ages, the Pentecostals only care for those first century believers that they see as their true heritage. They are also willing to adopt other heretical groups through the centuries that seemed to bolster their notions of ecstatic experiences as THE theological stamp of approval.
This lack of connection with the Church through the centuries meant that the Pentecostals were left to their own devices and fell into many, if not most, of the heresies of the past.
The second poverty of Pentecostalism is the rank individualism that permeates the entire movement. this again is a flowering in the Pentecostal movement of the general poverty of Western Christianity. Individualism reduces faith to “me and Jesus got our own thing going” and reduces Church to either a religious pep rally or, worse yet, a Christian self-help group. Worship is measured by how it made me “feel” rather than what it reveals about the Uncreated God. Hence Pentecostals and Charismatics tend to measure their spiritual growth by their experience of “victory” in their personal lives. But the narcissistic weakness of this religious poverty guarantees a perpetual spiritual “kindergarten” for these believers.
One of the unintended consequences” of this gross individualism is the “cult of personality” that naturally arises when a dependence on individual abilities is emphasized. Pentecostal groups are usually founded on some strong personality who has the gift of gab and a flare for the theatrical.
Unfortunately, “the arm of flesh will fail you” and the cultural landscape is littered with the sad lives of men (and some women) who simply could not maintain the fevered pitch expected of them from their loyal following. The stories of emotional, psychological, and event physical manipulation, all for “God’s glory,” are simply too numerous to mention.
Another poverty that I see in Pentecostalism is the weak theological dependence on ecstatic religious experiences. This true hunger in the soul of a person for an authentic and intimate experience of the presence of God cannot be truly satisfied with self-centered religious phenomena. In fact, much like sweets ruins your appetite, so the spiritual “cotton candy” of shallow ecstatic religious experiences, brought on as much by psychological peer pressure as by anything divine, deaden this good hunger and eventually creates an almost narcotic dependence on these less than satisfying religious events.
Interestingly enough this emphasis of emotional experiences not only leads to a kind of religious addiction, but also feeds other physical desires as well. Most Pentecostals do not like to talk about the strong minority of sexual weaknesses that tend to dominate many Pentecostal and Charismatic sub cultures. This emphasis on keeping the emotions heightened at all times, or reducing worship to experiencing a religious “high” tends to reinforce a lack of physical discipline. Recent events are the exceptions that many times prove the rule.
Finally, the greatest poverty I see in Pentecostalism is theological. While this is changing, Pentecostalism has traditionally been suspicious of theological training. Seminary instruction was considered suspect, and a reliance on the education of the “Spirit” was more valued. But beyond that there is a real and debilitating “historical amnesia” among Pentecostals that impoverishes their religious education.
There is so much wisdom preserved in the Church that is simply unknown to most Christians nowadays and that ignorance is dangerous. It means there are generations of believers who will have to learn all over again lessons already learned by their brothers and sisters of the past.
What you don’t know CAN hurt you.
There are hopeful signs. A recent Pew Poll found that speaking in tongues, a strong distinctive of Pentecostalism, is waning. Post-graduate work is becoming not only acceptable among Pentecostals but expected. And whole new denominations have formed by Pentecostals and Charismatics wanting to overcome the inherent weaknesses of their own shallow religious traditions by discovering the wisdom of ages past.
For me, however, the natural home for Pentecostals and Charismatic Christians is the Orthodox Christian Church. Here there is a trustworthy “fireplace” for the Pentecostal “fire.” Many are surprised to hear me say that it was my Pentecostalism that prepared me for my journey to Orthodoxy.
In Eastern Orthodoxy there is a comfort level theologically for paradox and mystery. As opposed to the West where rationalism has been allowed free reign, Orthodoxy’s emphasis on the present work of the Holy Spirit provides a theological balance for a sterile theological rationalism that may excite the mind but leaves the soul cold. Pentecostals and Charismatics will discover in Orthodoxy the wisdom necessary to avoid all the pitfalls so often present in the world of Pentecostalism.
There are theological remedies for and spiritual medicine that provide authentic healing and spiritual health for those weary of the eternal search for the everlasting “goose bump.”
Pentecostalism reveals the primary spiritual poverty of the West. This is its greatest gift to the Christian world. But we cannot remain ignorant of the fatal weaknesses of Pentecostalism without condemning generations of sincere believers to a life of a perpetual “spiritual kindergarten.”
So, to all my precious Pentecostal and Charismatic friends, I say to you what Philip said to Nathanael:
“Come and see!”
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From Baptist To Boznia To Byzantium
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