1956 to 1974: The Last of Old England

I was born into the rolling countryside of the Essex-Suffolk border, amid the green fields, whispering woods, gentle hills, cold springs and clear streams of water. And then it still was the country, still England, far from the smoke of alien British London, with its tiring bustle and very sinister finance. I grew up with people born in the nineteenth century, or at least those born before 1914 and saw the last horses and milkmaids. I was brought up with the clear knowledge that there had once long before been saints here, where I lived. This was Paradise, the summer sunshine of my life, but it was also the end of Paradise.

1974 to 1997: The End of an Era

In this world of England, we had met a Russian exile family, the Benkendorffs, who lived outside Ipswich. Both my father, for his roses and sweet peas, and my aunt, for her ladies’ clothes, had dealings with them. I learned this in the revelation of 2019, a few days before my aunt passed. Everything made sense at last. Great-great uncle Pavel Benkendorff had been faithful to the Tsar and we are proud of him. His book about the Last Days is a favourite. Like them, the last living Russian emigres who had been adults before the Revolution, were by now all aged over 70. Now, in this ending era, I met a whole gallery of such as they.

Like the Benkendorffs, they too came from the old aristocratic families, representatives of the Golitsyns, the Obolenskys, the Lopukhins, the Kutaisovs, the Zernovs, the Gorodetskys, the Dolgorukys, the Rehbinders, the Bobrinskys, the Tiesenhausens, the Ossorgins, the Shidlovskys, the Breverns, and of very many other distinguished families from Russian history. Most such emigres were constitutional monarchists. In the UK they voted Conservative, in the US Republican and in France for the conservative RPR. They were not Republicans, but neither were they for the Tsar, whom they blamed for their loss and exile.

That they were not at all mystically-minded was the result of their spiritual impurity. And after the 1990s young Orthodox, newly arrived out of the hellfires of the Soviet collapse, among them cousins of the Benkendorffs and venerating the Tsar, were shocked by the compromised, Westernised and sometimes downright treasonous values of the old aristocrats. The newly come were true nobles and mystics. We were on the same wavelength. No surprise here. We had long thought exactly the same as them. So all turned full circle. From Benkendorff to Benkendorff. Providence always gives poetic justice.

1997 to 2022: The Inbetween Time – Caught Between Too Late and Too Early

By 1997 it was too late to build the Local Church with the Russian emigres, as the last of those who had been adults before 1917 were buried – as a priest in Paris I had helped bury them. In Europe they had transmitted the Faith to only a handful of their children and grandchildren because they had wanted not to transmit the Faith, but a political and nationalist ideology. That was meaningless to those born in the Western world. In 2007 I helped create unity between the remaining not yet Americanised emigres and Moscow – the last chance for the Russian Church in the emigration, if were not to collapse into sectarianism.

It was the last drop of our blood to be sacrificed, for a few years later we were to be met with bullying and betrayal for helping to create that unity. True, we had only put off the schism of the now decadent émigré Church for a decade, for in 2016 persecution by the new schismatics began. This was pathological and political and we realised that there was no future in the face of this spiritual disease. That spiritual disease could only attract the pathological, who, ex-Protestant by mentality, wanted self-justification, ‘justification’ being the Protestant sickness. The Russian Church of the emigration was going nowhere.

It had been taken over. The schismatics and sectarians were turning it into a ghetto of decadence. Already in 2016 the dry as dust, bad-tempered, pharisaical, ritualistic ‘Feraponts’ of Unholy Protocol were taking over the Russian Church in the emigration from the fresh, loving, spiritual, charismatic ‘Zosimas’ of Holy Optina. These two trends had already been portrayed penetratingly in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.  So the Russian Church in the emigration made itself spiritually irrelevant to the great task of converting to real Orthodox Christianity those of goodwill in Europe, who sincerely sought for Christ.

Shamefully, they had deserted the reality of the mission of St John of Shanghai in favour of sectarian ideology, of might and mammon. In early February 2022 a Metropolitan of the Russian Church whom we had known for 43 years, advised us, with regret, but also with envy, to turn to the Romanian Church for the future, after our 47 years of faithfulness to the Russian Church. Facing the betrayal by internal enemies we had met with, it was the only logical, though radical, thing to do. It was the turning point in the history of the Russian Diaspora and mission. A plague on both your houses of nationalist politics, of Russians and Greeks alike.

But this period was also too early to build the Local Church, as Western people were still not ready to receive the Light from the East, brought back to us from Russia, and so to return to their roots. Our words fell on deaf ears amid the deafening roar of the secularist, manipulating propaganda of the media of the Western elite, which stridently proclaimed atheism instead of Christ. Having sacrificed tens of millions of ordinary people in their absurd European Wars, which they even made into ‘World Wars’, they wanted blood as tribute to the satan they idolised, for satan hates Christ and slanders Him, ‘diabolising’ Him.

As for pathological Westerners, who sought self-justification in the Church of God, they were certainly not able to hear those words either, as pathology is by definition deaf to reality. The new world was not yet ready to be born. As the Italian philosopher Gramsci famously wrote in his Prison Notebooks: ‘The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: Now is the time of monsters’. This was indeed the inbetween time and the time of egomaniac monsters, who still clung to the dead conservative past and refused the Holy Spirit, Who in streams of living water was leading us into the Kingdom to come.

2022 to R.O.M.E., the Romanian Orthodox Metropolia of Europe

Providentially, eight days before the NATO war against Russia in the Ukraine, initiated in 2014, turned even more violent on 24 February 2022, with NATO plans for a full-scale genocide of eastern Ukrainians and the resulting Russian pre-emptive incursion, twelve of us clergy transferred to the Romanian Church. For over two-thirds of our thousands of parishioners were by then Romanians and Moldovans and one of them had already become a deacon and another a priest. The Romanian Orthodox Church provided the essential balance between the purely political and nationalist narratives of both Greeks and Russians.

We rejected their absurd and quite unChristian politics, masquerading as Orthodoxy beneath the camouflage of their mutual nationalist ideologies, called ‘Hellenism’ and ‘the Russian World’. We were merely the first of many to go to the Romanian Church and for the same reasons. After persecution from the schismatics and after the slander from those newcomers who were contorted by jealousy and who did not want to be set free by the Truth of Christ, but wanted convert ideology, we stood on the moral high ground. For as Orthodox Christians, we confess the Four Signs of the Church: One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic:

One: We confess what the Church is. The Church is One, living in spiritual unity in Heaven and on Earth, in Oneness, not in nationalism, not in political and racial arguments, in proud schisms and cultish sects, which refuse to tolerate others with generosity of heart and concelebration in love.

Holy: We confess where the Oneness comes from. It comes from the Saints, from Holiness, from the ever-fresh breathing of the Holy Spirit, Who is now so very close in these pre-apocalyptic times, and not from some ‘jurisdictional’ protocols and bureaucratic legalism, which will cause them to lose their souls.

Catholic: We confess how this Oneness is expressed. Oneness is expressed in Councils, for the Church is Conciliar/Catholic, expressing its Oneness in all places and at all times. Individuals may express these truths, but they must be confirmed by the common mind of the Church, inspired by the Holy Spirit.

Apostolic: We confess when the Church is. It is in the ‘Tradition’, that is, the continuous succession and legacy of identity, from the times of the apostles until our very own apostolic days, as we too await the Coming of Christ. For the Tradition contains the whole inspiration of the Holy Spirit to all humanity.

Glory to God for all things!