Trump: Patriotism and Regime-Change in the West?

For seventy years, ever since 1945, the Western world has by terror been united, since all the once independent states of Western Europe have become feudal vassals of the USA. Cowed by US propaganda which asserted that they would be invaded by the Soviet Union without US ‘protection’, Western European countries dutifully did whatever their master in Washington told them to do, even uniting into an absurd US-concocted European Union.

The large countries of Western Europe (the small ones like Scandinavia, Ireland and Switzerland had no importance) fell one by one. France and the UK were warned off with the Suez Crisis of 1956. With Germany and Italy occupied since 1945, Spain and Portugal controlled by pro-US Fascist juntas, the last resistance in France was overcome with the CIA-orchestrated revolt of 1968 and the overthrow of the anti-American De Gaulle, and in the UK in 1973, as it meekly accepted US orders and joined the then Common Market.

With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 a generation ago, the need for ‘protection’ and vassal status has in fact disappeared. However, it has continued even more aggressively, with US violence colonizing Eastern Europe, most obviously in Yugoslavia, setting up puppet elites in every country, taking over Local Churches, bribing, threatening, overthrowing the legitimate government in the Ukraine and pushing its troops and tanks to the very borders of Russia, most visibly in Estonia and Norway.

Now, patriotism is beginning to resist. Since the catastrophic EU-organized destruction of Eastern European economies after 1989, since the genocidal US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the consequent and well-predicted anarchy created all through the Middle East and North Africa and its millions of victims, since the US-created financial crash of 2008, and now the rush of millions of immigrants, that may turn into tens of millions, into Europe, Europe has begun to wake up to US manipulations.

A wave of what worried Establishment elites call ‘National Populism’, that is, patriotism, has been spreading through the whole EU. There is now a clear understanding that the European wars of the 20th century were not about nationalism, but about imperialism. It was directed precisely against nation states, at the destruction of the nations, towards building international empires like the Third Reich, and that the EU is simply just another version of the same, a Fourth Reich. The patriots of Europe want the sovereignty of their countries, buried in 1914, back.

Whether the movement is left-wing or right-wing, or more often a combination of both, all EU countries have seen the rise of one form of patriotism or another. Whether it is the National Front in France, UKIP in the UK, Pegida in Germany, Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, Nationalists in Scotland and Catalonia, the sovereignist governments of the Vyshegrad group in Poland, the Czech Lands, Slovakia and Hungary, the desire to remain Christian of the Local Orthodox Churches in Greece, Cyprus, Bulgaria and Romania, resistance to NATO/EU bondage and bribed and blackmailed puppet elites in Non-EU Serbia, Montenegro and Moldova, the movement for national self-determination is the same. Many in Europe want their freedom back.

Now the patriotic movement has spread to the USA itself. Tired of the ever-growing mountain of nineteen trillion dollars of debt, mainly the result of futile and very costly foreign meddling, US voters are turning their backs on the Establishment. Put America first, they say: the richest country in the world, with a tiny elite that is ever richer, run as a police state, with tens of millions of desperately poor and without health care, whose people’s health has been undermined by food poisoned by the rights of lobbies to cause allergies, cancer, diabetes and obesity with their syrup, hormones and additives, is not the future.

Only this can explain the phenomenon of Trump, a billionaire businessman of dubious practices, with little understanding or knowledge outside his own narrow world, but who wants to heal America with some healthy isolationism before any more meddling abroad. Many Americans are tired of being impoverished and indebted, tired of being hated outside the US and seeing their flag burned, tired of seeing their jobs lost to ‘outsourcing’ abroad, tired of futile foreign adventures which bring only more debts, problems and hatred.

This movement is the same movement of patriotism as in Europe. The Western world, a purely artificial, post-1945 construct of the elites, is perhaps at last beginning to fall apart, even if a generation and more too late. People are tired of the totalitarian terrorism, hubris and corruption of their Establishments. Freedom is in the air. Regime-change in the West? All is possible.

A Parable: The Greatest River in the World

There is a great river, by far the greatest river in the world. It flows from a single Source, high, high in the snow-capped mountains, in the clouds near to heaven. No-one has ever seen this Source, but some brave souls have approached it and they all say that the water that flows from it in such incredible abundance is crystal clear, like a mirror. It is utterly pure, has a transfiguring power and a taste which they can only describe as ‘Divine’.

As this great stream descends from the mountains, it becomes ever broader, as it has many tributaries, great and small. Descending to the plain and the forests, there are many other tributaries, a few quite large, but many very small. Indeed, water seeps into the great river from all along the banks, on the left and the right. Some of this water brings mud into the river with it. Indeed, it is important not to go into the shallow water along the edges and fringes of the river, for there is much mud there. Much better is it to venture further out, into the mainstream, where the water is deep and pure and there is no sign of mud at all.

As the river is so powerful, sometimes it bursts its banks and overflows. Once it has gone down and returned to its bed, it leaves pools of water by the banks. Some of the water in these pools seeps back into the river and so into the mainstream, but some of it remains in the pools. Here it stagnates and smells, attracting mosquitoes, and eventually it becomes mud before it altogether dries up.

As for the greatest river in the world, a huge and unimaginably deep and broad stream of pure water, it ever powers on and on, majestically and irresistibly, towards its destiny, the Great Ocean, the Ocean that is called the Ocean of the Love of God. And the name of the river? It is called Holiness.

The Present Crisis

Q: What has been happening since the meeting of Orthodox Primates at Chambesy five weeks ago?

A: Exactly as Metr Onufry of Kiev predicted, the Crete meeting (‘Pan-Orthodox Council’) is proving divisive, and even before it has begun. As we said at the time, documents issued, above all the document concerning relations with the Non-Orthodox has proved to be unacceptable. The Georgian Church has rejected it and now a petition in the Bulgarian Church is objecting to it, not to mention individual hierarchs in Greece and Cyprus who are also opposed – or that matter people in the parishes like ourselves. Apart from that there is the principle itself of holding a ‘Council’ to which only a few selected bishops are invited!

Q: Would you sign a petition against it?

A: Why should I? I find that idea almost amusing when I know that my bishop thinks the same as me – or rather I think the same as my bishop and, for that matter, all the other bishops in ROCOR. In any case, if you are concerned by a problem in the Church, you do not start a petition – that is a Protestant concept. What you do is talk about it with your bishop. Indeed, that is what I did last January and that is how I know that I think the same as my bishop.

Q: How do you see this problem developing?

A: I think the most interesting thing about this whole debate is how the two extremes have met. On the one hand, the sectarian-minded – there are very few of them, but they make a lot of noise – are refusing to commemorate their bishops. On the other hand, they are being egged on and provoked by the enemies of the Church, the ecumenist liberals – also few in number but noisy – who are doing all they can to create a schism, which would be their greatest joy. Unfortunately, the sectarian-minded are a little simple and do not see the trap that they are being led into. This is so sad.

Q: Has the crisis not been deepened by Patriarch Kyrill meeting the Pope in Cuba?

A: Yes, that meeting has reinforced the crisis.

Q: So are you saying that that meeting was a mistake?

A: No, because, apart from its positive aspects, that meeting has brought everything to a head, the abscess has burst, all is now in the open.

Q: What do you mean?

A: We now see exactly who are sectarian and who are ecumenist liberals. Those on the fringes have revealed themselves. The mainstream now has the task of reassuring the masses, but also challenging the fringes, saying to them, ‘This is the Church, do you agree with Her or not’?

Q: So do you think some will fall into schism?

A: I hope not, but if so, then very few. Moreover, I think that it will be the ecumenist liberals who will leave. Those on the other side are mostly good-hearted, just misguided.

Q: What about the charge that Patriarch Kyrill’s spiritual father was a known heretic, Metr Nikodim (Rotov)?

A: This is absolutely typical of the sectarian-minded. Patriarch Kyrill was 32 years old when Metr Nikodim died. Do these people really think that a young man, now a Patriarch, has not moved on since 1978? Do they really think that people are so stupid that they do not learn from the mistakes of their youth and inexperience? The only people who can think such things must themselves be very young! Unless of course, and that is far worse, the people who think such things have no concept that people change, that they can repent.

Do they not think that the Patriarch has changed in the last 38 years – in half a lifetime? Moreover, he has in that time received grace. I am myself a witness to that – how he has changed since he has become Patriarch. When you are ordained or consecrated, you receive grace, just as you receive grace from any sacrament. Some of these sectarians seem to be deniers of grace, deniers of the action of the Holy Spirit.

Q: Surely you are being idealistic. Yes, there is grace, but there is also temptation and sin. In history there are patriarchs who have behaved as judases, usually from political pressure.

A: Of course there have been those. But they are by far not the majority. The judases were the exceptions which prove the rule. Again there is a defect in the psychology of the sectarian-minded – they are always shocked by the exceptions and make them into the rule. For example, they will say that someone, for the sake of argument, say in the Bulgarian Church, is a heretic and then they conclude that they cannot concelebrate with anyone in the Bulgarian Church, and then, even more ridiculously, they refuse to concelebrate with anyone who concelebrates with the Bulgarian Church. And that is how they end up in a sect, outside the Church.

Q: Why do their minds work like that?

A: Because they are proud puritans. The slightest ‘impurity’, and in their case that means others disagreeing with them, and they are out. They are guilty of premature judgement, they want a pure Church now, which is called Donatism. That is simply not going to happen. The wheat and the tares grow together in this world because the wheat grows stronger on account of the tares and the tares can turn into wheat through the example of the wheat. God is patient with us sinners – so we must be patient with other sinners. We must all wait until the Last Judgement – unless of course people judge themselves by leaving the Church and entering a sect.

Q; You speak of a psychological defect in the minds of the sectarian-minded, but what about the minds of the modernists, the ecumenist liberals?

A: Regardless of which of the two extremes we are talking about, we are not talking about theology, but about psychology and a spiritually unhealthy psychology. For example, the ecumenist liberals will tell you that we must do like the heterodox, introduce organs, shorten our services, reduce fasting etc etc. Why? Because these people have either lost the Tradition or else have never been in the Tradition and therefore they want to do what those outside the Tradition, the heterodox, do. They are so secular-minded that they conform themselves to secularism, to the world, rather than to the Church. Basically, their problem is that they lack the Orthodox Faith.

Q: Is this a serious crisis?

A: For the moment, no, because only a very few people are directly concerned, though all of us know about it and so are indirectly concerned.

Q: So what is the solution?

A: To communicate our concerns to our bishops and to follow the mainstream, avoiding the errors of both the sectarian-minded and the secular-minded.

Our Hope for a Russian Orthodox Church in Norwich (Update 10)

The Update

As of 1 March 2016 we are still, after over five months!, waiting for legal documents to be exchanged for the premises we are buying in Norwich. After a three and a half month wait to receive planning permission from Norwich City Council, we have now had to wait an additional five months for exactly the same organization to send our solicitor the lease. This means that the entire process has been delayed by six months. Once we have signed for the premises and bought them, we can finally start building work to transform them into an Orthodox church. At last a permanent home for Russian Orthodoxy in Norwich after over thirty years of struggles. Thank you!

History

In the East of England there is at present only one multinational and multilingual church faithful to Russian Orthodoxy with its own urban premises. This is St John’s Church in Colchester. God willing and with your support, we have now been able to buy a second one, in Norwich, exactly 60 miles, 100 kilometres, to the north of Colchester.

Why Norwich? For the last four years I have been visiting Norwich and some of the 200 Russian Orthodox there, mainly recent immigrants from the Baltic States, especially from Estonia. I have baptized several in their homes, married couples in Colchester, buried, blessed houses, listened to confessions, visiting every few weeks, sometimes twice a month and am Orthodox chaplain at Norwich Prison.

We thought of dedicating our community to St Alexander Nevsky. We attempted to begin liturgies using the Greek Orthodox church building in Norwich, but were impeded. How are our people and English people and others interested in the witness of the Russian Orthodox Church, to be cared for pastorally? Only from a church building. And such life is required not only by Russian speakers, but also by Romanian, Bulgarian and English Orthodox. Most of our regular parishioners, only one of whom has a car, live within easy walking distance of this building.

On Friday 8 May, Fr Andrew saw a leasehold property for sale on the rightmove website for £50,000 at 134, Oak Street, Norwich. It measures 88 square metres externally and is at present used as offices and rooms for a cultural centre. It has electricity, heating and water and is in very good condition. It is so cheap because it is leasehold, in other words, you have to pay £100 rent per month for the ground it is built on. This amount is fixed until 2032. The lease itself is even longer – it lasts until 2047.

On Wednesday 13 May we organized a visit to these premises, attended by 9 local Russian Orthodox.

By Friday 15 May, Orthodox in Norwich had generously promised to donate £5,250.

On Monday 18 May Fr Andrew received Archbishop Mark’s blessing to buy the building if possible, meaning we could start obtaining pledges to donate.

On Thursday 21 May we heard from the surveyor that it would cost £3,000-£5,000 to knock down the internal walls and make good the floor and ceiling, so we could use this building as a church. This was lower than Fr Andrew had estimated.

On Wednesday 27 May we heard that our offer of £42,500 had been accepted. However, since conversion and furnishing costs will come to £12,500, this meant that we would need £55,000 in all.

On Friday 29 May we submitted the planning application for change of use from offices to a place of worship. This, we were told then, would take at least 6-8 weeks but should result in a positive answer.

On Wednesday 3 June we launched an internet appeal for £55,000 in order to set up our own church in Norwich.

By Wednesday 29 July, eight weeks after the appeal launch, total gifts and pledges had reached £55,000.

On Tuesday 29 September, after over three and a half months!, we finally received planning permission to convert the building into an Orthodox church.

God is Love: The Sin of Phariseeism and the Contemporary World

The Revelation of the Incarnate God and so of His Church, is that ‘God is Love’. This is why Christianity preaches love of our neighbours and forgiveness, not hatred, violence, aggression and vengefulness. This is also why the Easter Resurrection lies at the heart of the Church Year because that was when Christ God, having first preached Love on earth, thanks to His death by Crucifixion went down to hades and also preached Love to the majority of humanity imprisoned there, releasing from captivity all those, from Adam and Eve on, who accepted His words. This event proved for all time that Love is stronger than death.

Love is the meaning of the word salvation. When we ask to be saved, we ask to be saved from all that is not Love – from hatred, violence, aggression and vengefulness. Why? Because we must all prepare for the one thing inevitable – our meeting with God. When we meet Him, at the Last Judgement to spend eternity with Him, we will stand in front of Love. If our hearts have Love, this experience will be one of recognition of the Source of all that we have held dear, of warmth, comfort and joy, what we call heaven. If, on the other hand, our hearts are full of hatred, violence, aggression and vengefulness, this experience will be one of burning fire, what we call hell.

This Revelation that God is Love is quite distinctive from the manmade religion of the pharisees, who knew only the primitive teaching ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’ and which had martyred the Jewish prophets and then also the Son of God. That hatred, violence, aggression and vengefulness, the spirit of ‘God will punish you’, meaning ‘I will punish you’, but ‘I am justifying my evil with God’s name’, was also adopted by Islam, mixed together with heresies and the pagan customs of Arab nomads. As regards Hinduism, with its host of warring gods and goddesses, it lacks the revelation of monotheism, and as for God-less Buddhism, it is not a religion, but a philosophy of psychic self-improvement.

Some, perhaps especially Muslims and Jews, will object to this and say, but look at Christians who are supposed to preach Love: they invaded Iraq because ‘God told me to’ (George Bush), slaughtering a million; they dropped atomic bombs on civilians, created the holocaust of thirty million Slavs and five million Jews in the 1940s and the Pope said nothing; British ‘Christians’ invaded North America and Spanish ‘Christians’ invaded Latin America with the zealous encouragement of their religious authorities, slaughtering perhaps a hundred million between them; then there were witch hunts and before them the Inquisition, not to mention the Crusades. Christians!

Of course, all this is so, but none of this was done by Christians: it was done by people who called themselves Protestants and Catholics.

Some may be shocked by this statement, but they should reflect: real Christians do not carry out genocides and the vast majority of today’s Protestants and Catholics would agree with this. Let us recall the reactions of the Orthodox Christians of New Rome when at the end of the eleventh century they saw with shock the crusaders coming: they saw not other Christians, but evil barbarians. Ask any Ukrainian or Serb or Iraqi or Afghan what he thinks of ‘Christian’ NATO troops; consult any history of the colonization of Africa, Australia, New Zealand and the Americas, and universally the reaction of the native peoples was that they had been invaded not by men or even barbarians, but by demons.

Having admitted this, some will say: yes, but look at Orthodox Christians, go to any Orthodox country and you will find prisons with Orthodox murderers, Orthodox thieves, Orthodox rapists…Why do you consider Orthodox above others?

We do not consider ourselves above others. That was and is precisely the problem of the Pharisees (or, in today’s language, Zionists) – they did and do consider themselves above others. And this is precisely the problem of all, regardless of race and nominal religion, including therefore nominal Orthodox, who fall back into the Pharisees’ religion. And this is precisely what the Protestant-Catholic world has institutionally done – though not at all necessarily individually, for many Protestants and Catholics totally reject how their institutional religions have betrayed them and Christ, when they finally see through their brainwashing.

Those who like the Pharisees/Zionists consider themselves better than others, superior to them, are precisely those who have fallen back into the Pharisees’ Old Testament and not into the Old Testament of the Patriarchs, of Moses and Noah, of David and Solomon and of all the holy prophets, who so ardently awaited Christ. Pharisees/Zionists, of whatever race, religion and age, are possessed by the concept that they are a chosen people, superior beings, ‘an exception’, a master race, an elite, who have the right to control the world thanks to an imagined Divine sanction. This makes them totally arrogant, in the words of one such racist British ‘Zionist’, there is only ‘the West and the Rest’ and ‘West is best’ (1). He may not say it openly, but he does consider all others to be ‘Untermenschen’ – subhumans.

A temptation for all Christians has always been to fall away from the Church back into Phariseeism and so cease to be Christians. Anyone can fall individually into this temptation, the real problem comes when the temptation is instituted systematically into an ideology. Then whole nations and continents can fall and this has been the history of Western ‘Civilization’, which in order to ‘civilize’ has always exterminated, which brings democracy by bombing back into the Stone Age. As the notorious US General Curtis LeMay said fifty years ago: ‘My solution to the problem would be to tell (the North Vietnamese) frankly that they’ve got to…stop their aggression (in their own country!) or we’re going to bomb them into the Stone Age’.

The institutional and ideological attack of Phariseeism/Zionism has taken place three times in post New Testament history. It happened when nearly 1,000 years ago the Papacy claimed to be the master of humanity (2) and all who rejected it had to be killed. As Abbot Amalric, a Catholic inquisitor at the slaughter of 20,000 men, women and children in 1209 put it: ‘Kill them all, God will recognize his own’ (3). This was justified by the scholastic Aquinas and the racism of the pagan Aristotle: they are not of us, therefore they can be killed, a mentality first instituted into Britain by the Normans, whose genocidal invasion and power grab was ‘blessed’ by the Papacy.

It happened again with the racist Luther and Protestantism, which inherited the same mentality and divided humanity into ‘the saved’ (themselves) and the non-saved. The non-saved could be ‘disposed of’. As another US Nobel Peace Prize winner, ‘one of the greatest US presidents’, ‘a national hero’ and regular churchgoer, President Theodore Roosevelt, said: ‘I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth’ (4).

The underlying mentality, that anyone who is Western and/or has adopted the post-1054 Western mentality, has a Divine right to invade, slaughter, destroy, occupy and dominate, has not changed in nearly a 1,000 years. After all, did not the Western man Darwin proclaim that Western man (‘the fittest’) must survive, as Hitler implemented. In today’s post-Protestant totalitarian society, the Pharisees’ idol of mammon has now been openly revealed as the only form of salvation and therefore for humanity: ‘God is dead’, said the madman Nietzsche, but Gold is living.

In other words, the world is divided into two groups. There are those who consciously or unconsciously believe that God is Love and try, however weakly, to live this, which belief is the essence of the Church and Her teaching; and those who institutionally, systematically and ideologically not only do not believe this but reject this, as they are already hypocritically ‘righteous’, that is, self-righteous, as we saw with the notorious case of Blair. Here is the danger: such people with their ‘New World Order’justify everything, since for them the end justifies the means, their ideology justifies genocide for those who resist and enslavement for those who survive.

Notes:

1. See the notorious 2011 work on Western Anti-Civilization and using that title, written by the neocon ideologist Niall Ferguson.

2. See the precepts of the 11th century ‘Dictatus Pape’:
1. That the Roman church was founded by God alone.
2. That the Roman pontiff alone can with right be called universal.
3. That he alone can depose or reinstate bishops.
4. That, in a council his legate, even if a lower grade, is above all bishops, and can pass sentence of deposition against them.
5. That the pope may depose the absent.
6. That, among other things, we ought not to remain in the same house with those excommunicated by him.
7. That for him alone is it lawful, according to the needs of the time, to make new laws, to assemble together new congregations, to make an abbey of a canonry; and, on the other hand, to divide a rich bishopric and unite the poor ones.
8. That he alone may use the imperial insignia.
9. That of the pope alone all princes shall kiss the feet.
10. That his name alone shall be spoken in the churches.
11. That this title [Pope] is unique in the world.
12. That it may be permitted to him to depose emperors.
13. That he may be permitted to transfer bishops if need be.
14. That he has power to ordain a clerk of any church he may wish.
15. That he who is ordained by him may preside over another church, but may not hold a subordinate position; and that such a one may not receive a higher grade from any bishop.
16. That no synod shall be called a general one without his order.
17. That no chapter and no book shall be considered canonical without his authority.
18. That a sentence passed by him may be retracted by no one; and that he himself, alone of all, may retract it.
19. That he himself may be judged by no one.
20. That no one shall dare to condemn one who appeals to the apostolic chair.
21. That to the latter should be referred the more important cases of every church.
22. That the Roman church has never erred; nor will it err to all eternity, the Scripture bearing witness.
23. That the Roman pontiff, if he have been canonically ordained, is undoubtedly made holy by the merits of St. Peter; St. Ennodius, bishop of Pavia, bearing witness, and many holy fathers agreeing with him. As is contained in the decrees of St. Symmachus the pope.
24. That, by his command and consent, it may be lawful for subordinates to bring accusations.
25. That he may depose and reinstate bishops without assembling a synod.
26. That he who is not at peace with the Roman church shall not be considered catholic.
27. That he may absolve subjects from their fealty to wicked men.

3. The phrase has been adopted by members of the US military in various conflicts, such as the Vietnam War, and is used as an unofficial slogan by certain units. In parts of the War on Terror, the variant “Kill them all. Let Allah sort them out,” has been used. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caedite_eos._Novit_enim_Dominus_qui_sunt_eius).

4. Quoted in Thomas G. Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race, 1980, Pp. 159-164). So much for the value of the Nobel Peace prize, as we have seen with that ‘won’ by Obama. Yet another US President, Andrew Jackson, urged US troops to root out ‘Indians’ from their ‘dens’ and kill ‘Indian’ women and their ‘whelps’, as ‘true philanthropy reconciles the mind to these vicissitudes as it does to the extinction of one generation to make room for another’.

What is Art?

We can define art in its broadest sense by its etymology: art means something artificial, that is, manmade. However, anyone can see that there are great differences between manmade things, manmade things fit into different levels. Thus, there is a great difference between a spade and an antique vase, or a 1960s block of flats and a palace, a Picasso and a Rembrandt, or heavy rock music and a Strauss waltz. All are manmade, but the former examples reflect a lack of inspiration as compared to the latter. What then is inspiration?

Inspiration is the reflection of the soul. Hence the attraction of art made by more refined souls, who have put thought and effort, technique and skill into art. The nobler and finer the soul, the nobler and finer the art. Here then we have the fundamental difference between two different levels of art – what can be called low art and high art. Indeed, so low are mass-produced manmade items, for instance, consumer goods, that some would say that they are not worthy even of the name ‘low art’. After all, they are not manmade, but machine made. On the other hand, there is art that clearly belong to the world of ‘high art’, art that can move the soul by its beauty. However, there is also a world of art higher than ‘high art’.

Here we are talking not just about art inspired by noble and fine souls, but about art inspired by the Divine Spirit. Here we are in the world of Orthodox Christian art. What is the difference between Orthodox Christian art and all other art, low or high? We have spoken already of low and high art, for example a piece of modern art and a Rembrandt painting. But higher than this there is the icon. What is an icon? It is a painting in front of which we want to pray. I have not yet heard of anyone wanting to pray in front of a painting by Picasso, or a painting by Rembrandt, even if its subject was religious. But people want to pray in front of icons. Why?

This is because an icon represents a Divino-human reality and it is painted not just through inspiration of the soul, but through Divine inspiration acting on the spirit. The same is true of Church music, Church architecture and Church artefacts. They all inspire prayer. However beautiful or interesting high art, a piece of classical music, a palace or an antique vase, it does not make us pray. We admire it or are even moved by it, but no more. We cannot forget the stories of SS officers who listened to Mozart before they went off to slaughter some more concentration camp prisoners. Here is the difference between high art and Orthodox Christian art, much greater than the difference even between low art and high art.
We can conclude that there are three levels of art: low art, high art and Orthodox Christian art.

Low art includes everyday manmade or artificial objects, like spades, mugs, cars, flatpack furniture, blocks of flats. This art is so low that only the broadest possible sense of the word art can include them. Low art contains very little inspiration, very little ‘soul’, rather it reflects the fallenness of humanity.

High art is inspired, it is handmade, it contains thought and soul, effort and skill, it reflects the values, nobility and finesse of the soul of its author and can even move by its beauty – but no more.

Finally, there is Orthodox Christian art. This is the art that can bring us to prayer and repentance. It reflects Divine inspiration, the Spirit of God that has inspired the soul and mind and hand of man. In this respect it approaches the beauty of the Unfallen Creation, of Paradise, which can sometimes be picked up by the soul as it looks at what remains of God’s Creation in even this fallen world, the Divine Inspiration behind the forests and the oceans, the mountains and the stars, for these too can bring us to prayer and repentance.

On Local Episcopal Assemblies, A Fixed Common Easter, Churchgoing in the Russian Church and Orthodox Magazines

Q: Do you think that the local Episcopal committees under the chairmanship of the local Constantinople bishop that began around the world a few years ago will lead to the birth of new Local Churches?

J.T., Chicago

A: There is a big difference between an episcopal committee or assembly and a Local Church. As the old saying goes: God so loved the world that He did not send a committee. In other words, the danger has always been of the committees developing into mere talking shops. Some of these committees meet regularly, especially in the USA, others infrequently. That in the British Isles and Ireland seems to have been suspended for the moment because ‘there is nothing more to talk about’.

While the Russian Church was captive in the Soviet Union (and other Eastern European Local Churches captive to atheist regimes as well), the hierarchy in Constantinople had a wonderful opportunity to begin to set up Local Churches in the Diaspora and carry out missionary activity. Sadly, enslaved to phyletism (the word for Greek racism), it utterly failed to do this and instead engaged in aggressive and appalling hellenization and unprincipled modernism and ecumenism at the behest of those who were paying it in dollars. This politicized lack of faithfulness to the Tradition put most Orthodox off Constantinople for good. Since the Russian Church and others have been free, it has become ever clearer that Constantinople missed the boat, throwing away the opportunity given it.

In reality, virtually all missionary activity in the Diaspora has not been carried out by the Patriarchate of Constantinople, or the Romanian, Serbian, Bulgarian and Georgian Churches (which are the only Local Churches with diasporas), but either by one part or another of the Russian Church or else by the Antiochian Church. The former has not always been up to the task by any means, but on the other hand, it has generally, though with some hugely lamentable exceptions, adhered more to the Tradition and the canonical and liturgical Tradition and disciplines of the Church. On the other hand, the latter has displayed an admirable openness and missionary ‘outreach’ (to use a Protestant term), but on the other hand it has been prone to modernism and a disastrous lack of canonical discipline. As one of our parishioners said to me, ‘they have the right spirit and are completely sincere, but unfortunately they know nothing, so tend to make it up as they go along’.

Of course these are generalizations, and I am sure that you can think of exceptions. There are in the Patriarchate of Constantinople as in the Patriarchate of Antioch, as in both parts of the Russian Church, some excellent pastors and missionaries as well as lamentable and scandalous failures. As they say, there are good and bad everywhere.

When will there be new Local Churches? When it is God’s will. And that means when we are worthy of them and when there are enough Orthodox in the Diaspora who think of themselves as indigenous and not attached to a Church based elsewhere, and so want new Local Churches. Very simply, as long as the overwhelming majority of Orthodox in the Diaspora do not want new Local Churches, we will not have them.

Q: What do you think of the Archbishops of Canterbury’s idea of a fixed common Easter?

C.W. London

A: Perhaps I am getting old, but this really is ‘an old chestnut’. I can remember exactly the same proposal in 1975 (or 76) and it was dismissed then by Patriarch Dimitrios as the wishful thinking of travel agents. This time too it is merely the private fantasy of the latest secular-minded Archbishop of Canterbury.

In the Orthodox Church we cannot go against the decisions of the Universal Councils: Easter falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring equinox, and if that should fall at the same time as or within the days of the Jewish Passover period, then Easter will follow on the next Sunday. And by the way, the Spring equinox is a date fixed not by astronomers (we are not pagans who worship the sun and the moon – the sun and the moon worship the Creator), but by the Church, and that currently falls 13 days after the astronomical Spring equinox.

If secular-minded Protestants (and the Roman Catholics with them) want to alter the date of their Easter yet again, then let them, we Orthodox shall carry on in obedience to God and His Church.

Similarly, if secular states want to abolish Easter and create some sort of ‘Spring Feast’ for the chocolate, greetings card, stuffed toy and travel industries, then that is their affair too. In France in the 1970s the masonic government of Giscard D’Estaing abolished Easter holidays in schools and established fixed ‘Spring holidays’. The same can be done by secularists here. It makes little difference to Orthodox.

Q: In the secular West very few people go to Church, less than 5% in most countries. But it is the same in Russia. So why should the Russian Church be listened to?

M. S., London

A: What you say is factually true and the revival in the Russian Church has very, very far to go. However, all this needs to be put into context.

In the West churches are closing down very rapidly, being turned into shops, clubs, stores, halls – just like they did with churches in the Soviet Union in the 20s and 30s. And this in churches where services are short, where you sit down for them and practices like confession, preparation before communion and fasting are virtually unknown. Most churchgoers in the West are aged 70 and over. Very serious voices are suggesting that the Church of England, for example, will have disappeared by 2050. Finally, Western culture is no longer being influenced by the Church and Christian values. In fact, quite the opposite and very rapidly.

In the jurisdiction of the Russian Church 30,000 churches have been built or restored in the last 25 years and the number of clergy ahs increased eightfold. Moreover, this process is continuing. Over the last 25 years well over 120 million people have been baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church. In Russia most churchgoers are under 50 – it is the old people who do not go to church. Very serious people are suggesting that the number of churches could easily double again in the next 25 years. Finally, Russian and East Slav culture is more and more being influenced by the Church and Christian values as Christianity is incarnated into life.

In other words, what you have to look at is not the numbers who go to church in the West and in the Russian Lands today, but the direction that the West and the Russian Lands are travelling in: they are diametrically opposed. We are express trains travelling in opposite directions. And that is why you should listen to the Russian Church.

Q: What advice would you give someone who wanted to launch an Orthodox magazine?

L.O., Manchester

A: Firstly, some practical advice:

The best bit of advice I was given exactly 20 years ago was to have ready enough material for the first ten issues. If you do not, you will simply run out of impetus and you will close down after two or three years. It has happened.

Next: in the last ten to fifteen years the Internet has killed off small-circulation postal subscription magazines. Do not dwell in the past, what was true thirty or forty years ago is no longer true. You should think about going electronic. On line you can have colour pictures for nothing and any format, font and size of font that you want. It is what we did nine years ago.

Next: do not include news in your magazine because inevitably it will be out of date. You can go online and read news immediately, nobody wants old news.

Next: think about how often you would produce such a magazine. As a result of the internet, postal charges (especially going abroad) have quadrupled in about ten years. Three or four times a year could be ideal. But again, you should think about going electronic from the start: no postal charges.

Secondly, some advice on content:

Aim at producing something to be kept and to be referred to, not to be thrown away twenty minutes after it has been opened. Aim therefore at producing quality, something unique, something which teaches and is edifying. Nobody wants to read something that they already know or brings no spiritual benefit. That, sadly, already exists.

Next: avoid a sectarian new/old calendarist spirit. It is not edifying and at once you will lose most of your readership. And if you are not on-line, your readership numbers are important because you will start losing money. That has happened too.

Next: avoid stories of only local interest. You are not producing a parish bulletin. Details of local, insular news are not of interest to others. We belong to something greater, not to something insular. Look at the big picture, the wider church in space and time and beyond space and time. Give people something to think about.

Next: avoid an unhealthy and superficial fascination with ‘Byzantinism’, ‘personalities’ and recipes, beloved of the narrow interests of Anglican converts. Remember that most Orthodox are not Anglican converts and have a completely different perspective!
Finally, as far as possible, avoid factual inaccuracies, something that all journalists must struggle against.

An Old Man Remembers

The Englander, 31 January 2100

In this, the last week of the 21st century, we continue our series in which centenarians sum up for us their most vivid memories of turning points in the past century. Today, we hear from Tim Smith, aged 103, who recalls the events of 24 June 2016.

‘Even at my age I remember it well, though I was only a youngster then. The greatest turning-point of this ending century came for our country on 24 June 2016. There were masses of people celebrating in London, well over a million, they say, and of course millions of others in every town, city and village across the country. Everywhere we had Freedom parades and Victory meals – that’s what they were called. I was with the group on Freedom Square (in those days it was called Trafalgar Square), which we filled as well as all the streets around it.

One group there had a whole lot of European Union flags, some said they had been stolen from the offices of the Mayor of London, others said that the Mayor had personally donated them, and these were being burned. Huge cheers went up, as each one was burned. Then they burned effigies of various politicians, one of the old Prime Minister – sorry I’ve forgotten his name but I know it was Scottish – another of the German leader, a woman, though I can’t remember her name now either. It was all filmed, some of the footage must have survived. We were chanting ‘Freedom, Freedom’ and ‘Down with Tyranny’, until we were hoarse. That’s how 24 June came to be a national holiday in England.

Of course, lots of political changes followed, a new Prime Minister, a new political system, new alliances. I mean, think about it: the European Union, as it was called then, collapsed a few years afterwards. Now some say it would have happened anyway, but even if that’s true, the decision of what was then called the ‘United Kingdom’ – doesn’t that sound so old-fashioned! – to leave certainly hastened the end. Then Scotland became independent, a few years after that Ireland was reunited and Wales left in the 2030s. That’s how England got her independence back. But there were lots of other changes, I mean who could have predicted the break-up of what was then still called the United States of America?

The arguments that won? Well, of course there were some nationalists who said ‘we want our country back’. They were mainly poorer people, not very well-educated, unemployed and so on. Then there were the people who had principles, who just wanted freedom from Establishment tyranny – they were calling on Alfred the Great and other figures from history. They were called the ‘Anti-Normans’. Then there were right-wingers called ‘sovereignists’ and left-wingers called ‘anti-globalists’, but they were a mixture of left and right, as it used to be called. But that was far from the majority. Most people who voted for freedom said that we should continue as a global country and not be locked into a customs union in a little corner of Europe. They were internationalists – I was one of them – we wanted more trade with China, India, Russia and so on. They said staying in the Union would mean suffocation.

The people who did not want to leave were generally rich, in those days, they were what was known as ‘Establishment people’, people in Big Business and organizations that have long since disappeared like ‘The Church of England’ and the ‘BBC’, if you’ve heard of them – they were people who had second homes in Italy and France, that type. They used scare tactics, told everyone we would be dirt poor if we voted for freedom and left.

Then there were the Americans; in those days they controlled everything. They were furious with the vote for freedom and tried to make out the vote had been corrupted. They had various organizations under their colonial control, one was called NATO, another one called the IMF and another one called the World Bank. They’re all dead and buried now. Anyway, from that day on, 24th June, everything changed. I’ve told my great-great grandchildren about it – of course they can’t believe it!

The main thing is in those days a lot of people were very pessimistic, they used to say, if we go on like this, the world will end soon. Well, I’m going to be 104 next year and the world is still here and so am I!’

On the Foolishness of Schism

There is now almost hysteria among a few, as we predicted in our article after the release of the draft documents for the Crete meeting, as regards relations between the Church and the heterodox world. This hysteria began when those draft documents were released, but since then there has also been the meeting between Patriarch Kyrill and Pope Francis and its joint statement. What we have seen so far is that a few simple and little-educated, seeing everything in terms of black and white, sometimes out of insecurity in the faith, sometimes out of an incredible lack of faith and loyalty, have been very upset by the vagueness of expressions used in documents issued at both events. We agree that vagueness of terminology is to be avoided, but we would never agree with making schism out of vagueness.

The Gospel of St Matthew tells us that we are to be ‘as wise as serpents and as gentle as doves’. On the left side there are those who are only doves and on the right side there are those who are only serpents. We are told to love the sinner but hate the sin. On the left side there are those who love the sinner but also love the sin. On the right side there are those who hate the sin but also hate the sinner. In other words those who have created schisms from vagueness of words, lack subtlety and have over-reacted – just as the enemy wanted. They have fallen into the hands of the enemy! What is the real problem?

The real problem is very simple: the Patriarchate of Constantinople had throughout the nineteenth century been a plaything of the British and French ambassadors in Istanbul and their rivalry to control was exploited by the Ottomans. In the early 1920s the Anglicans actually handed over £100,000 to get the British freemason Meletios Metaksakis elected as Patriarch. He then pushed through various modernist and anti-Orthodox changes, for which he was chased out of the City by the enraged faithful, though too late. However, in 1948, with Britain bankrupt, the US took control of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. The late Greek Bishop of Birmingham in England was the Patriarch’s deacon at the time and as an eyewitness told us the story.

Flying in on the personal aeroplane of President Truman (he who had massacred almost 250,000 Japanese civilians with just two bombs in three days), a group of CIA gangsters (there is no other word for them) told Patriarch Maximos that he had to leave for Switzerland and that if he resisted he would be tortured and killed. He left, saying the words, ‘The City (= Constantinople) is lost’. On the aeroplane that had flown in sat the next Patriarch, the freemason from the US Greek Archdiocese, the notorious modernist Archbishop Athenagoras. Since then the City has indeed been lost.

The US elite wants to finish off the Orthodox Church, just as it did Roman Catholicism 50 years ago, reducing most of it to the malleable, spiritually empty Judeo-Protestant culture of the West. This takeover of all ‘organized religion’ is merely an excuse for the longer-term plan, already obvious in the 1960s, to promote secularism and through it anti-Christianity. In order to finish off the Orthodox Church, the US elite is using the ‘weak underbelly’ of the Church, that which has been weak ever since the fifteenth-century treachery at the ‘Council’ of Florence, elements in the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and also elsewhere by interfering in Patriarchal elections.

Sadly for the US elite, the plan is doomed to failure (although it can create a lot of chaos and division on the way). This is because the Orthodox Church is the Church, not an ‘organized religion’, that is, not a top-down clericalist club, like the Protestant denominations or Catholicism. With them, all they had to do was infiltrate the leaders and future leaders, the episcopate or the Vatican, spread some money around, blackmail the corrupted, and they had complete control. In the Orthodox Church, on the other hand, the episcopate is only a very small part of the Church. We can already see how the US plan is failing:

Firstly, the Russian Church insisted that no document could be accepted by any future ‘Council’ without unanimity. Individuals in the Patriarchate of Constantinople, urged on by Biden, launched a propaganda campaign using Greek clerics in the USA and the compliant, State-controlled US media, to cast the Russian Church as the villain that would sabotage ‘the Council’, because it does not want to be friendly to Non-Orthodox and in any case, is ‘only a tool of the Russian State’. To that last September the Russian Church replied by organizing the February meeting between Patriarch Kyrill and the Bishop of Rome.

Secondly, the Russian Church and others threw out the pro-gay agenda that Obama and Kerry tried to impose on the future ‘Council’. This was a defeat for those who were trying to promote it for personal reasons.

Thirdly, the Russian Church has forced individuals in the Patriarchate of Constantinople in a humiliating climbdown to accept Metr Rostislav as leader of the Church of the Czechs and Slovaks.

Fourthly, the Russian Church has obliged the Patriarchate of Constantinople to promise never to interfere in the Ukraine, as the US State Department was urging it to do.

Fifthly, the Russian Church has forced the venue for the meeting to be moved from premises in NATO Istanbul, filled with CIA bugs, to Crete. Here the premises can be swept for bugs by Russian security men.

Sixthly, the Patriarch of Constantinople has now stated that not all the Local Churches have to be represented for there to be a Council. The Russian Church and others are resisting this by refusing any change to the original agreement.

On each occasion the Russian Church has replied to the attempts to weaken Orthodoxy and has won the day.

Those hotheads who are too simple to see this and are entering or are promoting schism are not strategically-minded, but literally-minded. Their danger is that of phariseeism – an enemy of the Church. For phariseeism always divides, which is exactly what the devil wants because it weakens the Church. Today the draft documents for the Crete meeting are being torn apart by the Churches of Georgia and Antioch, not to mention the severe criticism they are undergoing throughout the Orthodox world, not least in Greece and Cyprus. For the moment at least the Russian Church can leave protests at the draft documents for Crete to others.

Former Czech President: “US/EU Propaganda Against Russia Ridiculous”

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