Category Archives: Britain and Ireland

Retribution

But as the days of Noe were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be (Matt. 24, 37)

I tell you, Nay; but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish (Lk. 13, 5)

A local politician in the UK has suggested that the current incessant heavy rain and flooding, very severe in some southern parts of England, Cornwall and Wales, is happening because of the Prime Minister’s and Parliament’s favouring of homosexual ‘marriage’.

On the one hand, such an Old Testament view of God as a punisher and avenger, especially for sexual transgressions, typical of Calvinistic Protestantism (not to mention the kindred Old Testament religions of Judaism and Islam), reminds us that many have not yet received the New Testament revelation that God is Love. On the other hand, such a view does contain truth. The fact is that we have to pay for what we do, we are responsible for our actions. Our God is Merciful, but He is also the only Just Judge. In other words, there is such a thing as retribution. If we are, as Mr Cameron and those with him appear to be, without principles, reality will one day catch up on us. God does not punish us; we punish ourselves.

If we distance ourselves from the Creator, then we distance ourselves from the grace of God and the protection of the Holy Spirit. God does not leave us, but we leave Him. To abandon God is to be like a soldier who goes into battle without any body armour; it means inviting mortal wounds. To live our lives without God in them is to subject them to the ‘elemental’ forces of the fallen Cosmos, to the ‘elemental’ forces of fallen Nature, to the ‘elemental’ forces of fallen mankind. And what are ‘elemental’ forces? They are simply demonic forces. All ‘natural’ and ‘manmade’ catastrophes, so-called ‘acts of God’ come from this. The demons want only one thing – our suffering, for they are the source of all suffering, whether through corruption, crime, war, disease, hurricane, earthquake or flooding.

Water is for baptism and blessing; but a deluge comes from unrighteousnesss. Over 150 years ago the Russian Orthodox theologian, A.S. Khomyakov, who knew England very well, warned in his poem ‘The Island’ that for considering worldly glory higher than the courts of God the day would come when in England ‘the grace of clear thought will leave your sons’.

It has now come.

Cromwell and Stalin

I have always detested the statue of Cromwell erected in 1899 outside the Houses of Parliament in London. I have always said that if it were legal to destroy it, I would take great pleasure in doing so.

Let us recall that this regicide Cromwell was the monster responsible for the deaths of roughly 190,000 English people out of a total population of about five million, some 60,000 Scottish people from a population of about one million and some 616,000 Irish people from a population of about one and a half million. These estimates indicate that England suffered a 3.7% loss of population, Scotland a loss of 6%, while Ireland suffered a loss of 41% of its population.

Thus, today’s statement by President Putin that Cromwell and Stalin are indistinguishable as ‘bloody dictators’ makes sense. (I have always considered that Lenin was a parallel to the mass murderer and destroyer of monasteries Henry VIII, also for some strange reason widely ‘celebrated’ by the heritage industry in England). Indeed, statistically Cromwell was far worse than Stalin.

Thus, it does indeed make Western leaders and media representatives look utterly hypocritical when they, with their statues, ‘relics’ and tourist souvenirs of Henry VIII and Cromwell, Napoleon and Disraeli, Leopold of the Belgians and Churchill, complain that in Russia there are still statues of Lenin and Stalin. However, the hypocritical celebration of evil in the West still does not excuse the celebration of evil in today’s still impure, post-Soviet Russian Federation.

Sir John Tavener

The death of Sir John Kenneth Tavener (28 January 1944 – 12 November 2013) has just come to our attention. Sir John was a composer, known for his religious works which were influenced by Russian Orthodox music and themes. Said to be ‘among the very best creative talents of his generation’, he became one of the best known composers of his age and was knighted in 2000 for his services to music. He was one of the very few Orthodox in this country to have a title.

Born in London in 1944, John was something of a musical prodigy and in 1961 he became organist and choirmaster at St John’s Presbyterian Church, Kensington, a post he held for 14 years. He first came to prominence as a composer in 1968 and fame followed. He was deeply affected by his brief 1974 marriage to a Greek dancer and then was influenced by the playwright Gerald McLarnon, who was a convert to the Orthodox Church. He himself converted to the Orthodoxy of Metropolitan Antony Bloom in 1977, soon after which we met him and formed an opinion. Thereafter he was much influenced by the philosophy of a rather tragic figure, the late Greek Orthodox Mother Thekla, who lived near Whitby in Yorkshire.

From this point on the customs of the Orthodox Church affected his work until in the early 2000s he became interested in a more universalist philosophy and sought inspiration elsewhere. Thus, in 2007 he composed ‘The Beautiful Names’, a setting of the 99 names of God in the Muslim tradition, sung in Arabic. He also explored a number of other different religious traditions, including Hinduism, and became a follower of the philosopher Frithjof Schuon. However, he did remain a Christian and was still very interested in Orthodoxy.

Called by one newspaper ‘the mystic who drives a Rolls-Royce’, Sir John’s interest in Orthodoxy was similar to that of many who remained firmly in the British Establishment and yet liked the form of Orthodoxy that was promoted among mainly wealthy Anglicans and others between the 1960s and the 1990s by various figures in certain Orthodox groups (though not in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia), both in Western Europe and North America. Thus, Sir John recognised the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, also a convert to a certain form of Orthodoxy, as ‘a kindred spirit’ and shared his philosophical and religious views.

We remember talking to Sir John on the telephone in the early 2000s about education. This made clear where he belonged in the Establishment. His generation of converts and sympathisers with Orthodoxy, like his friend Prince Charles, were bridge-figures. They did not integrate the Orthodox Church, but belonged to their own groups on the fringes of the Church and are now mostly in their 60s and 70s. Several have died in recent years and Orthodoxy in this country is now moving on, giving freedom to the next generation, after decades of blockage.

Those of my generation and younger tend to have come from no religious background and have little attachment to the dying Establishment. The future of English-language Orthodoxy in this country is not with converts from the heterodox world, who often confuse and merge Heterodoxy with Orthodoxy. It is with the younger and more culturally open, who have Orthodox roots but use English as their first language, or else with the 95% of the local population who come from no religious background at all and are free of cultural baggage.

To the servant of God John, Eternal Memory!

Dr Carey and the Church of England

Today’s reports in various tabloid and semi-tabloid British newspapers that the Church of England is just ‘one generation away from extinction’, in yesterday’s words of the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, do not make news. We have known this for some time. Nor is the agreement with him of the Archbishop of York, who has told the Church of England General Synod that compared to the need to attract new worshippers, ‘everything else is like re-arranging furniture when the house is on fire’. However, the later was correct in stating that the Synod spent too long ‘arguing over words and phrases, while the people of England are left floundering amid meaninglessness, anxiety and despair’.

The Church of England was only ever a sixteenth-century Establishment fix, invented to prevent civil war between Catholics and Protestants, to keep ‘the plebs’ in order. The fact that it has survived into the twenty-first century was surely never meant to be; it is a historic anachronism. Its only hope of survival is if parts of it display real faith in historical, and not ‘make it up as you go’, Christianity. It is commonly said that 40% of Church of England clergy, including bishops, do not believe in God, let alone in the Holy Trinity, the Divinity and Incarnation of Christ, the Resurrection, the Virgin-Birth, the Communion of Saints or the devil.

If that is the case, it would perhaps be more honest if the Church of England closed itself down and handed over its vast fortune to believing Christians, whether Protestant, Roman Catholic or Orthodox. Unlike the tabloid reports, the former Archbishop never said that Christianity faces extinction – it is only the Church of England – and that is a very different thing from the Church in England.

St Edwin

In recent years, God has revealed to us more about several saints of these Isles, most notably St Edward the Martyr, but there have been other miracles too, concerning St Alfred, St Edmund, St John of Beverley, St Botolph and St Birinus, for example. The Lord seems to be speaking through the local saints of old to a modern society that has utterly lost its way in unsaintliness. The latest in this series of revelations may concern St Edwin (584-633), whose feast day it is today according to the Orthodox calendar (12/25 October).

With the help of a professional archaeologist, a group from a village called Cuckney near Mansfield in Nottinghamshire may be about to find the true site of the martyrdom of England’s first Christian king. Cuckney could soon have a place in St Edwin’s story, with the possibility that this village, and not the town of Hatfield, located to the north east of Doncaster some 40 miles away, is the actual site of the Battle of Hatfield of 633. There have been clues before – at the time of the battle, the Cuckney area was known as Hatfield, while nearby Edwinstowe mean’s ‘Edwin’s shrine’. Then there is St Edwin’s Cross, which marks the site of a chapel erected in 1201, where a hermit prayed to Edwin, who had been proclaimed a saint by the people in the years after his death.

Tradition has it that St Edwin’s relics were taken from the battlefield by his own men and secretly buried to protect his remains from his pagan conquerors. But it was a discovery by a group of workmen at St Mary’s Church in Cuckney in 1951 that interested historians. As they dug down through the floor of the church to support the Norman structure against recent mining activity, they discovered skeletons. Not one or two, but hundreds – maybe up to 200, all laid out in rows, all with their feet facing east. Villagers who remember the discovery have described skulls being piled up in the corner of the church for weeks before their reburial.

This is the first problem for archaeologists and the Battle of Hatfield Investigation Society, who have joined up to try and prove that St Edwin was martyred in Cuckney and not in Yorkshire, as official history tells us. Andrew Gaunt, the director of Mercian Archaeology, who is working with the group, believes that the bodies represent the site of a massacre. He also believes that the most likely explanation for their current whereabouts is that they were simply put back where they were found. He said: ‘Often churches were built on the sites of burial mounds and it is reasonable to assume at this stage that the bodies pre-date the church. Where you get a lot of bodies buried together, it can suggest that they’ve been caught in a bottle neck during a battle, as people were typically buried close to where they fell’.

St Mary’s Church sits at the foot of a gentle valley, quite close to the river, and Mr Gaunt believes that the men were possibly driven down the hill in the battle and slaughtered, trapped between the invading force, steep hills and the river. A church at the site is mentioned in the Domesday Book in 1086, but the present building dates from the twelfth century. Joseph Waterfall, from the Battle of Hatfield Investigation Society, said: ‘We believe King Edwin was slain in the fields near Cuckney, hence the reason for the 200 or so skeletons. But the history books state that he was slain north-east of Doncaster, but no evidence was ever produced to support this claim’.

With modern carbon dating technology, access to the skeletons would allow archaeologists to date them to a specific period – perhaps dating the remains to the approximate time of King Edwin’s death. And more importantly, along with the other evidence from the local area, it may pinpoint the site of the death of England’s first Christian king to Nottinghamshire. ‘Edwin is England’s first Christian king and he was killed by pagans, so historically that makes him hugely significant’, said Andrew Gaunt. ‘We know from the records that bodies were discovered from about 18 inches down and they may have gone down to about seven feet deep. If we can gain access to the bodies and date those bodies to the time of Edwin’s death, then with all the other evidence around us, we can reasonably conclude that Cuckney is the actual site of the Battle of Hatfield’.