Daily Archives: July 27, 2019

Verses of Vision

Verses inspired by the poetry of John Masefield

One

Though in sorrow and joy our lives end and start,

Truth and Freedom are the dear songs of my heart:

That God may make of my soul a gleaming rift,

Through which meaning may come to seekers as a gift.

The haunts where Beauty dwells, unknown to the blind,

Are what God made it my destiny to find,

For though my life has been like a desert parched,

God is the Star by Whom I have ever marched.

For beyond the pain, beyond the yearning clay,

Beyond the gleams of Beauty glimpsed every day,

Lies a glimmering land, won by all who pray.

Its Beauty is grace, the spring, the wine, the bread,

The life, the dawn, the wakening from the dead,

The Eternal April of words Heaven said.

 

Two

An unknown voice is beckoning me, calling me

And telling me to fulfil my destiny:

You are seeking and you shall find

Wisdom and Beauty in the Eternal Mind.

My vision is Wisdom, the World as it is,

The unearthly, undying Beauty that lives.

To help and bring Beauty from beyond the stars;

To see and sing of Paradise is my task.

I wait in hope for the turning of the wheel,

The hope that only we the abandoned feel.

Though the devil ever keeps the laws in hell,

Above in Heaven, as I have long heard tell,

The law of love rings the Saviour’s victory bell,

Proclaiming Resurrection and how death fell.

 

Three

By loving mercy, confession, martyrdom

And sufferings, our God leads us to Wisdom.

For only the Mind of Wisdom can declare

All the meaning and the purpose everywhere.

I seek for Truth in all places and all things.

Beyond the gold and glitter, beyond the kings,

Beyond the veil, I can see the angels gleam,

I must find all that is beyond what may seem.

Suddenly the darkness of the Night has ceased

And, bearing hope and glory, a bright-robed priest,

Alive out of the East, all in light gleaming,

Brings the living, shining love of Christ streaming.

For now and ever, Life’s everlasting Spring

Has despoiled all hell and robbed Death of his sting.

 

Four

Thoughts are many, but Holy Wisdom is One,

Though boughs are bare for now, God’s April will come.

For by ways as yet unseen and still unknown,

Glory awaits the low and meek to enthrone.

This world is but the shadow of the Other,

Of the Light of God and His Holy Mother.

For if from Divine Glory we cannot learn

We will not defend us from hell and will burn.

For often only a visit to Death’s doors

Can soften the proud heart and teach us God’s laws.

The souls that are unlit and unhelped grow ill

But His Kingdom’s words give life and never kill.

No Death reigns there, all is Beauty and Wisdom,

For all ways are ways of Light in the Kingdom.

 

Five

So asses rule and he who brays the loudest

Is the one of whom this world is much the proudest.

Death is life’s enemy and they walk his way,

‘Hate God and hate your neighbour as yourself’, they say.

But my King and Queen give me fair words to write:

Beauty is my daily bread and soul’s delight.

Though squalid blackness and devilry destroy,

Our winter sorrows still bring Aprils of joy.

This present world has been long in a Dark Age,

But a New Birth will yet turn another page:

For Beauty hallowed the deaths the martyrs had

And changed into light and good the dark and bad.

To live without God’s life is hell’s path taken,

But when the King comes, the dead will awaken!

 

Six

The world’s Unwisdom brought Death, the knell that tolls,

But there is the lighted way of lonely souls,

Who suffer torments and trodden pathways flee,

But eternities in every instant see.

Their nights are long, but their days break fair in dawn,

They teach Beauty, for it outlives Death forlorn:

Shine in your heart, open doors of glory now,

The light in your very soul will tell you how,

Bring the news from Paradise by starry night,

Somewhere in every heart it’s still April bright.

In eternity the bells are ringing out

For angels and men to join for hell’s great rout.

Men take strength and women noble hearts hold high,

To give this poor Earth the glory of the sky.

 

 

 

 

 

A Vision for the Post-2020 World

Introduction: The Realignments of the New Century

Just as the nineteenth century began not in 1801, but in 1815 in London after the defeat of the French Napoleon, so the twentieth century began not in 1901, but in 1919 in Versailles, the terms of which treaty largely dictated by the USA, after the defeat of the German Kaiser. So too the twenty-first century began not in 2001, but will begin in 2020. For this date will mark the passing of seventy-five years since 1945, the end of the Second World War, made inevitable by the foolishness of Versailles, the second US world victory, and also the end of the failed US attempt at world domination through its so costly anti-Russian and then anti-Muslim Cold Wars, both of which it lost through its hubris. Tragically, it never learned from its loss in Vietnam that trillions of dollars spent on military technology does not win wars.

This new epoch has already been presaged in the USA by the election of an anti-elitist outsider and in the UK by the selection of a new Prime Minister. A former American citizen born in New York, he has promised to free the UK from the alien EU straitjacket and bring it even closer to its blood-relation, the USA. After a series of Prime Ministers who were weak nonentities and self-deluded narcissists, the UK at last has one who has taken up the inevitable challenge of the changing tide of history, set by people power. For good or for ill, he is the English Trump, just as unpredictable, with the same human weaknesses, and even physically resembling his American cousin, but chosen, as the others proved to be incompetent.

The Two Spheres: Earth and Ocean, The Old World and the New World, ‘Eurasica’ and ‘The Atlanto-Pacific’.

2020 will mark the division of the world into two spheres.

The first sphere of Eurasia-Africa, to be called ‘Eurasica’, the EAA, or some similar name, is composed of the two interconnected landmasses of Africa and Eurasia, with three-fifths of the world’s land surface, well over four-fifths of its population and most of its poverty. It includes Asia, which is the source of all developed religious beliefs, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam (all now largely degenerated into nationalism) and Orthodox Christianity (in some places also degenerated into nationalism). These landmasses will be dominated spiritually by the renewed Orthodox Christian Civilization of Russia and economically by China (with at last reunited Taiwan) and India.

The six billion plus of these continental landmasses will reassert their independence after the doomed attempts to tyrannize and exploit them over the last 1,000 years by the countries at the western tip of Eurasia and then by their colony in the USA. A millennium ago it was this Western Europe which separated from the rest of Eurasia and invented its own self-justifying religion of imagined ethnic superiority and armed violence. The evils resulting from this millennium of the attempted Western colonialization and ideologization of Asia, Russia and Africa will be condemned and many injustices may at long last be righted. History may yet be rewritten truthfully.

The post-1945 cruelties and genocides of the USA, like those of the UK, France and others in their colonies in ‘Eurasica’, both before and even after 1945, in Palestine, Korea, Iran, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, the Ukraine and Turkey will all be admitted as such. Therefore, the USA, now in the financially straitened circumstances of its unpayable 23 trillion dollars of debt, almost all of it amassed in its megalomania of the last 30 years, not least in its many recent invasions of Eurasia, will at last withdraw from the Eurasian landmass. It will at last recognize that it never even understood, let alone controlled, Asia, Africa and Europe (who can forget the foul-mouthed opinion of Victoria Nuland about Europe?). Its aim of world domination was in fact only an arrogant megalomaniac delusion which went to its head in 1945.

The second sphere of the Atlantic-Pacific, to be called the ‘Atlanto-Pacific’, the AP, or some similar name, has well under one fifth of the world population (a decreasing 15%), but some two-fifths of the land surface and even more of its wealth. It may at first be led by a humbled USA, but it will include all of Latin America, the Caribbean, Canada, the Atlantic Islands of Greenland, Iceland, the British Isles and Ireland (the latter two to be united in an Economic Confederation, perhaps called the Confederation of IONA – the Isles of the North Atlantic) and Oceania (Australia, New Zealand and the small Pacific islands). The British Isles and at last reunited Ireland will have a special role here, as the spiritual and cultural Anglo-Celtic womb from which the present Anglosphere was born and from which a new, repentant and humbled Anglosphere can be reborn.

The Transformation or Fall of Post-1945 Institutions

In the new century the pseudo-international Institutions, set up as a result of the US victory in 1945, will be transformed or else disappear one by one.

The Security Council of the UN, largely US-controlled and so toothless, with at present only five members, will be increased to twelve members. The USA (to represent Canada, the British Isles and Ireland), Russia (to represent the Orthodox world and by far the largest country in the world) and China (till the most populous country) will continue as members. However, the UK and France will lose their seats, which they do not deserve, if they ever did. The French seat will be replaced by a future Confederation of Western Europe seat, which will represent most of what is the so-called EU, which still has three of the ten largest economies in the world. Thus, though long overdue, the UN Security Council will at last be reformed and internationalized with eight new members. They will have the huge responsibility of representing all the continents, religions and peoples of the world and relieve the world of the permanent conflicts and tensions created by the rapacious Western world.

These eight new members will be: Brazil (to represent all Latin America), South Africa (to represent all Black Africa), Australia (to represent all Oceania), Egypt (to represent the Muslim world in Africa and the Middle East), Pakistan (to represent the rest of Muslim Asia), Indonesia (to represent South-East Asia), India (to represent one seventh of the planet’s population, Hinduism and other Indian religions like Sikhism and Jainism) and Japan (to represent its unique civilization and powerful economy). They will all become members of the Council, nine of them in Eurasica and three in the Atlanto-Pacific, representing far more fairly than ever before the populations of the Earth.

The arrogant, post-Catholic EU (European Union), stuck in the past of its top-down, anti-people, elitist gerontocrats, whose only desire is to continue to fill their pockets and flatter their secularist hubris, will dissolve. The purely artificial construct-continent of Western Europe will merge back into the common values of Northern Eurasia, largely preserved in Eastern Europe and European Russia, and give up its present secularist depravities. Its cultural renewal and salvation can now only come from Russia, which has providentially preserved uncompromised the first millennium roots of Western Europe in Orthodox Christianity. Gradually, old ‘Protestantism’ and ‘Catholicism’ will die out, surviving only in museums. They will be seen as what they always have been, as the ethnic aberrations of second millennium Western Europe, quite unsuited for the global third millennium.

The anachronism of NATO will at long last disappear, a generation after it should have done, and its gerontocrat warmongers with their absurd and aggressive propaganda, which turns reality upside down and which nobody believes, will die out. The IMF (International Monetary Fund) and the World Bank will cease being US-manipulated financial organizations. The long-discredited Nobel Prize system will cease being funded by the CIA as an organization for Western cultural propaganda and political brainwashing.

The Reconfiguration of the Orthodox Church

What will happen to the Church? Nearly thirty years after the collapse of the failed Western import of irrationalist, atheist Marxism into Russia, it is already clear that the Russian Orthodox Church, renewed by the greatest persecution in world history, is the leader of World Orthodoxy. Now that the gerontocrats of the once respected Patriarchate of Constantinople, in the grip of the blinding passions of love of power and love of gold, have finally fallen away and become spiritually irrelevant, Russian Orthodox leadership will become visible to all, except to the provincial or the obtuse.

The AEA, Eurasia (its Arabic part mainly in the jurisdiction of the Arab Patriarchate of Antioch) and Africa (the latter only formally in the jurisdiction of the still un-Africanized Patriarchate of Alexandria) will be guided by the alms of Russian Orthodoxy. The other ten small, national Local Churches (the five Balkan ones of Romania, Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria and Albania and the other five of Georgia, Poland, Cyprus, Czechoslovakia and Jerusalem) will continue to look after their small ethnic groups.

Indeed, these national Local Churches may very well either return to their Mother Churches (Poland and Czechoslovakia to the Russian Church) or else merge with one another (the Balkan Five into a renewed Patriarchate of Constantinople centred in Thessaloniki near Mt Athos? Georgia and Cyprus into a renewed Patriarchate of Jerusalem?), abandoning their nationalistic and political autocephalies, most of them of recent times. This amalgamation would recreate Five Local Churches: The Patriarchate of Rus (for now, 75% of the whole); the Patriarchate of Constantinople (the Balkan Five renamed as such, for now 20% of the whole); the for now still tiny Patriarchate of Alexandria (All Africa); the for now still tiny Patriarchate of Antioch (the yet to be reconstructed Arab world); and the tiny Patriarchate of Jerusalem (Palestine, the Jordan, Georgia and Cyprus) (all three for now, only 5% of the whole). This would recreate the Pentarchy of the first millennium, with great potential for the future.

Conclusion: The Orthodox Church Outside its Homelands

Orthodox will inevitably be cared for by the infrastructure and influence of the Russian Orthodox Church, with its two Exarchates in Eurasia and its Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) in the Atlanto-Pacific. On the margins there will still be small ethnic groups, unable to provide any overall leadership, like the Romanians, the Serbs, the Bulgarians, the Albanians and the Greeks (perhaps in the future together renamed the Patriarchate of Constantinople, as we have suggested above) and the Church of Antioch, for now a mixture of Lebanese and Syrians with some conservative Evangelical and Anglican converts. Once nationalism has been put aside, these groups could all eventually merge into regional Russian-led Continental Orthodox Metropolias, with separate and independent administrations for each language group within them, the foundations of new Local Churches.

In the USA, the small OCA grouping will divide into its constituent parts; perhaps two-thirds of the people, including all Orthodox in Alaska, rejoining the new ROCOR (the Church Outside Russia, perhaps renamed ROCAP – the Russian Orthodox Church in the Atlanto-Pacific?), one sixth (the liberal wing) lapsing into schism and one sixth (the conservative Evangelical wing) joining Antioch. This is much as is now happening with the old Rue Daru jurisdiction in Paris, which is falling apart into these three basic parts in lamentable acrimony. Its mythomania, artificially prolonged long after its sell-by date had expired, has collapsed like a house built on sand.

The Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) may yet see its best years, though perhaps, as we have suggested, under another name. Having shorn itself of its secular side which compromised it for so long, that is, the old racist nationalism, Cold War politics and narrow and sectarian bigotry, it has yet to assume its full destiny. This could be to care for all those of the authentic Orthodox Tradition of all nations and languages in the Atlanto-Pacific, the AP. Its future may then be to become ever more missionary, multilingual and multi-Metropolia-ed, to be tri-Continental, covering both the Americas and Oceania, the Atlantic and Pacific Continents and Islands. The billion people of the Americas and the Caribbean, those of Oceania and the Pacific Islands, large and small, as well as the Atlantic Islands with Great Britain and Ireland await missionary leadership. The challenge is immense, but all is still possible. May Thy will be done, O Lord.