When in December 1898 the future Patriarch and Saint, Bp Tikhon (Bellavin) (1865-1925), arrived in the USA via Berlin, Paris, Le Havre and New York, he was destined to take charge of a multinational Orthodox diocese: Inuits in Alaska, former Uniat Carpatho-Russian refugees from Hungarian religious and economic oppression in Pennsylvania, and Syrians in New York. Three main groups, not to mention small numbers of Greeks, Serbs and others. And Bishop Tikhon united them, moving his headquarters from Alaska to San Francisco and then to New York.

My memories of Fr Alexander Schmemann (1922-1982) are linked with this past. I knew many who had known him in Paris before and during World War II. I knew how, with the highly intellectual Fr George Florovsky moved, Fr Alexander had, miraculously, obtained Autocephaly from the then enslaved Moscow Patriarchate for the canonically disputed ‘Metropolia’, as it was then called, and from it manufactured the OCA – the Orthodox Church in America.

I had read all of Fr Alexander’s books in the 70s and had found much obvious common sense in them. I had understood that his seeming modernism and Parisian anti-monasticism were psychological reactions to the compromised and ritualistic aristocratic Orthodoxy brought to Paris, where he had grown up. Fr Alexander had done much to overcome that ritualism and point out that communion was not a once a year event, but should be at every eucharist. This came out very clearly in his Diaries, published in Russia, rather sadly ‘redacted’ in their English translation.

I met Fr Alexander in Paris in May 1980, and he invited me to St Vladimir’s, Knowing that I would be out of place there, I turned down his offer, not least since I had been offered more in London, an offer which then did not materialise. Looking back, perhaps I would have made a home at St Tikhons, of which at that time I had not even heard. I would have been closer to St Tikhon through St Tikhon’s, closer to the way.

If I had time and the means, I would love to compile a biography of St Tikhon in several volumes. This is because I believe that the future of Orthodoxy in Northern America is in St Tikhon. Unity there is surely in the return to the pre-Revolutionary piety and lack of nationalism of St Tikhon. Before us there still gleams the great prize of Orthodox unity and an authentic united Northern American Orthodox Church (NAOC). St Tikhon is the past, the present and the future in this matter, together with others who will reap the harvest.