|
|
Excerpts from the
Epistle of the Second All-Diaspora Council [Sobor] of the
Russian Orthodox Church Abroad to the Russian People Suffering
in the Fatherland.
1938
“By the Providence of God, a heavy cross was laid
upon the shoulders of the Russian people, and not one of us
is preserved from temptations. If the lot is drawn for you to
suffer in the land of our fathers, then we are made to eat of
the bread of disease in foreign countries on the roads of our
exile. Great expanses separating us from our Homeland have not
taken her out of our hearts. Bound with the knots of indissoluble
brotherly love, as well as by the common sorrows and ailments
that have befallen us all, we always carry in our hearts our
crucified Mother Russia. Prostrating ourselves before her passion-bearing
labors, we kiss her wounds, knowing that she brings for all
of us a great sacrifice of atonement.
From her present humiliation we cannot but turn to our glorious
history; in comparing one and the other we see the burden of
God’s punishment upon us.
The Lord gave us a splendid land, He stretched it from sea to
sea, He multiplied and blessed our people, imparted us with
various talents—not least of which was kindness and a great
heart; at the very dawn of our consciousness He illuminated
us with holy baptism, crowned us with holy Orthodoxy as with
a diadem; under the latter our sovereign grew and strengthened,
the Russian people became one of the most glorious and powerful
in the world.
“Unto me men gave ear, and waited, and kept silence at
my counsel” (Job 29; 21-22). The Sovereign was directed
to be the chief defender of the Orthodox Faith in the entire
world, the protector of the weak and oppressed, the very establishment
of order, of peace and of truth in the world. But now, the All-powerful
has breathed His wrath upon him, casting him down from the heights
to the earth, and he lies now in dust, “sated,” like
Job, “with humility and sorrows.” In His wrath, the
Lord “deposed the king and priest,” and did not spare
“His own temples,” giving over our holy churches and
other relics to the enemies. Heathens came to inherit God’s
legacy, desecrated His holy temple, Jerusalem—turned it
into ruins, left the corpses of the servants of god to the birds
of prey and spilled their blood like water: “
"We are become a reproach to our neighbors, a scorn and
derision to them that are round about us" (Ps. 79:4). Our
enemies “they did tear me, and ceased not: they gnashed
upon me with their teeth…” (Ps. 35:16), they say:
“we have devoured him, we have awaited this day, and it
has arrived, we have seen it.”
An in light of all this, “His wrath has not turned from
us, and His hand is high.” For what has our land earned
such a terrible heavenly punishment?
“For lack of knowledge,” says the Old Testament prophet
(Hos. 4:6).
It is because we carelessly sowed the wind, forgetting that
out of it will arise a storm; because we ourselves shook the
house where we resided for a millennium, forgetting that it
could bury us in its rubble; because we “fell far down
and perverted ourselves,” forgetting the higher calling
from God, and did not stand fast in the truth of life, which
was shown to us more clearly than any other peoples in the world.
For this the Lord sent us "a strong delusion, that [we]
should believe a lie” (II Thes. 2:11), and the Russian
people truly believed it, tempted by the false dreams of an
earthly heaven promised to them by the communists.
After twenty years of rule by the bolsheviks, now the whole
world knows the false good of this heaven: it has become a parable
for the world. It is a heaven from whence we hear the ringing
of chains, where millions of people suffer in bondage, in dungeons,
in concentration camps, the great prisons filled with so many
people of different callings and ages, that they are uncountable;
a heaven where multitudes despair under burdens like those of
the pyramid-builders, cursing their forced labor, devoid of
joy and creativity; a heaven, where the blossoming land of milk
and honey has been turned into a desert, where cold and hunger
became constant companions; a heaven where innocent blood flows
freely, whence howls and moans and the gnashing of teeth is
heard; a heaven where all are leveled to the equality of poverty
and are devoid of rights and where, in place of brotherhood,
bestial anger and hatred reign; a heaven, in which no one trusts
his neighbor, not one person feels safe, either in the city
or in the countryside, and even within his own family, where
corrupted children often betray their own parents; a heaven,
where the achievements of technology only overshadow the inner
emptiness and insanity of daily life, where happiness has long
ago withered away, and holidays themselves have turned into
days of weeping and complaining; a heaven, where thought itself
is shackled, where the religious conscience is raped, every
holy thing is defiled and humiliated, and by this the last consolation
of man is removed; a heaven, where untended children are thrown
to walk the streets of big cities as in a desert, poisoned with
every vice and crime, tearing bread from the hands of others
only not to die of hunger; a heaven, where the spirit of atheism,
animosity, hatred, deceit and all sorts of spiritual corruption
spreads throughout the whole world; a heaven which the whole
world is afraid of contact with, seeing in it the source of
decaying moral infection; a heaven whose residents, like Job,
curse the day they were born and strive to flee at the first
opportunity as from a burning house or a prison; a heaven where
suicide cuts short many young, beautiful lives from inescapable
despair—this heaven is truly worthy of the name “hell,”
and it cannot be anything else, for it is created without God
and in fact against God. It is built on the bones of 30 million
of the best Russian people who formed the flower of our nation.
The world has never seen such a tomb, elevated onto the altar
of an abstract, fanatical doctrine, blatantly showing its bankruptcy.
When the “Communist Manifesto” was published in 1847,
written by Marx and Engels and striving to become the new Gospel
for mankind, it drew behind it many enthusiasts believing in
the quick transformation of the world, in the advent of a true
“reign of freedom,” in which there would be no exploitation
and enslavement of poor workers by the cruel rich, where full
harmony of the individual and society would be manifested, where
in some way the renewal of the very emancipated person would
occur, who will not only be his own master, but also perfected,
where nations would beat their swords into plowshares and their
spears into sickles, in order to forever forget bloody wars,
where there would no longer be different social classes and
even government itself. The execution of these almost religious
prophecies is given to the proletariat, to whom Karl Marx imparts
the greatest importance. Romanticism, idealism and materialism,
intuition and fortune-telling, faith and scientific rationalism,
utopian revolution and adaptability to existing conditions of
political and social life with the goal of gradually improvement
through plain evolutionary processes, peace and goodwill among
men and class anger and hatred—all these strangely came
together in Marxism. Much time was required for these contradictions
to become apparent, and now, it is doubtless undergoing a profound
crisis. Voices from among the convinced and authoritative socialists
are heard condemning Marxism and its whole world view, founded
upon a purely materialistic basis and breathing hatred and destruction…The
bolsheviks themselves, having learned through bitter experience,
understood that the pathos of destructin is not the pathos of
creation. Confessing loyalty to the legacy of their teacher
Marx in theory, they constantly recede from him in practice,
forced to make concessions to the laws of nature, the requirements
of daily life and the eternal demands of the human spirit.
Meanwhile, the Gospel, the living Word of God, exists forever,
fearing not the test of time. Christ was in continues to be
the focal point of history, and at the same time the eternal
and Sole Guide for mankind.
Examining the course of history, we see that this great struggle
surrounds His Name and His teachings, expressing itself in bloody
wars, all sorts of crises and revolutionary movements. For some
He serves as the cornerstone of their lives, for others an obstacle
and a temptation. People sometimes stray from Him through their
weakness or carelessness, then again return with tears of repentance,
for they know that there is no name under the heavens that could
carry with it salvation and life to mankind. Christ even now
“conquers, reigns and commands,” as the ancient Christians
would say. Only in the light of His teachings can one find the
healthy resolution of such important and difficult social questions
as baffle contemporary society. Only Christianity can remove
the curse from labor, making it joyful and transforming it into
free creative effort for mankind. Only Christianity organizes
society, establishes peace, order and concord within mankind.
One cannot through rationalism alone balance the interests of
separate individuals and various classes of society, nor forge
the brotherhood of man through whips and scorpions, the normal
means resorted to by bolsheviks in their communist experiments.
Love is the cement that firmly bonds people with each other,
turning society into one orderly organism. The grace-filled
power of love was brought to earth by the Divine Savior, distributing
it to all mankind, near and far, good and evil, just and unjust.
He placed it as a valuable treasure into the grace-filled treasure-house
of the Church, from whence both individuals and all of mankind
can drink from its plentitude. This love creates for all true
equality and brotherhood in Christ. In their insane struggle
against Christ, communists “curse what they understand
not,” and consciously distort truth. They slander the Church,
saying that She protects the rich and remains indifferent to
the fate of the poor working classes. The Church cannot teach
anything but that which Her Own Divine Founder taught by word
and through His life…
In regards to the Russian Church, it has been from the very
first days of Christianity in Russia the Mother of the Russian
people, she gathered its statehood, gave life to and tempered
its legislation, gave fruit to its culture, grieved for all
the humiliated and needy, the nourisher of the hungry, protector
of widows and orphans, the sick and the weak for whom she built
hospitals, almshouses, orphanages and other charitable institutions,
in the days of great national catastrophes she became the chief
and sometimes only leader and savior of her people, from which
they drew the moral strength for their spiritual renewal and
strengthening of their statehood. All of our finest historians
pay due attention to the great achievements of the Church, given
to her Fatherland in its most difficult times.
The fruitful moral influence of the Church on our society and
state and Russian existence itself continued unchanged until
the most recent times of the existence of national Russia, though
we did not notice it, as we did not notice the air we breathe.
During war, represented by her clergy who blessed warriors before
battle, often sharing with them the hardships of the battlefield,
bringing grace-filled consolation to the wounded, ministering
to the dying, whe showed not only love for mankind but great
bravery as well. She did not reject, finally, her suffering
people even after the recent catastrophes, when, perverted with
the anti-ecclesiastical propaganda of the bolsheviks, many of
them turned away from the Church, subjecting her to vile mockery
and persecution.
We do not know what would happen to the Russian land if in the
twilight of life there now the light of Christ, emanating from
the Church, would be extinguished. It would turn into a Sodom
and Gomorrah, and the Russian nation could disappear from the
face of the earth. But by God’s mercy it still exists,
showing before the world the strength of its faith and Christian
patience.
No matter how much the communist apparition of a heaven on earth
is tempting, the Russian nation eluded this temptaion with a
healthy mind and the dictates of its Orthodox conscience.
It understood that socialism dehumanizes the person and in the
name of a false equality, which does not exist in nature, it
destroys reigning human freedom, without which there is no creativity,
no moral life and no humanity itself. Being of the earth and
for the earth, socialism is incompatable with the Christian
world view and is especially foreign to the Russian soul, to
which God gave wings to strive from the earth to the heavens.
The Russian man would sooner die that sacrifice his immortal
soul and turn into an animal, as the godless Soviet powers would
have it. The resistance to the lethal teachings and equally
murderous state leads inexorably to martyrdom, and every day
we see new passion-bearers and witnesses in the Russian land.
Hearing of the “patience of saints,” keeping the commandments
of God and the faith of Jesus (Rev. 14:12), we ceaselessly thank
God for you, who amidst brutal persecution until this day preserved
whole the treasure received from the great illuminator, St.
Vladimir Equal-to-the-Apostles, 950 years ago.
May your Christian bravery be blessed, with which you witnessed
your good Orthodox testimony before many and before the very
enemies of Christ, emulating Christ himself in the words of
Apostle Paul, “who before Pontius Pilate witnessed a good
confession” (I Tim. 6:13)
For twenty years now, the Russian land has been submerged in
bloody darkness. At times there are flashes of hope, and then
gloom returns, throwing many weak-hearted ones into despair.
Suffering for so long in this fire of tribulation and losing
courage in the expectation of our deliverance, you sometimes
ask the Master of the world: “How much longer, Lord?”
Your spirit stumbles upon seeing that evil remains unpunished,
and the wicked blasphemers and strugglers against God continue
to brashly challenge the faithful, asking: “Where is your
God?”
Be consoled, dear brethren, God is now closer to all of us than
during our previous well-being, for in our sorrows we unwillingly
sought His Countenance, and He Himself gained our souls in humility
and meekness. “For peace I had great bitterness,”
as Hezekiah said (Is. 38:17). On the other hand, “There
is a sinner that hath good success in evil things; and there
is a gain that turneth to loss.” (___. 20:9). No matter
how much stronger and bolder “the scoffers, walking after
their own lusts” “whose judgment now of a long time
lingereth not, and their damnation slumbereth not” (II
Peter 3:3, 2:3) “The Lord knoweth,” teached St. Peter
the Apostle, “how to deliver the godly out of temptation,
and to reserve the unjust unto the day of judgment to be punished:
but chiefly them that walk after the flesh in the lust of uncleanness,
and despise government. Presumptuous are they, self-willed,
they are not afraid to speak evil of dignities (II Peter, 2:9-10).
If the Almighty is slow to thunder over their heads, then it
because for a time He spares even His enemies, giving them time
for repentance. He desires for us, too, who are tried by the
flames of heavy temptations, “would stand before Him undefiled
and pure in the world, like gold purified by fire and so that
those who, in their depravity, dares to fight Him, would humble
themselves before His omnipotence and came to the knowledge
of Truth.”
But Divine Providence gives everything its own times and terms.
If He sees that an evildoer continues to persist in his struggles,
abusing His mercy, He lays him low and destroys him with His
omnipotence, and there is not one person in the world who could
save the wicked from His vengeful hand.
“Behold,” says St. John Chrysostom,” what great
longsuffering God had for the pharaoh, and finally what punishment
he endured for his evil deeds. How many misdeeds were committed
by Nebuchadnezzer before he was punished for all.” “Divine
Power can not only openly defeat enemies, but can easily lead
them to error.” And we see how they fall yet further into
the depths of error and seem to slide into the abyss, having
no strength to stop from falling to their doom. Once more the
words of the Wise One are confirmed: “Righteousness leads
to life, and those who seek evil strive for their death.”
Those who can discern the signs of the times cannot but see
that the day of triumph of eternal truth is drawing near. Babylon
falls, the great prostitute, sated with the blood of the saints
and the raging wine of her perversion making the peoples of
the world drunk, and all those whoremongering with her will
weep and cry out over her, but the righteous one will be elated,
seeing the revenge, when will come "in one day, death,
and mourning, and famine…for strong is the Lord God who
judgeth her” (Rev. 18:8).
In expectation of the terrible heavenly sentence upon the sons
of lawlessness we must be courageous and firm, like an anvil,
placing our hope not on the princes and the sons of man, but
first and foremost upon the One King of ages, in Whose hands
is authority over the whole world.
We do not know how many days are fated for us to pass through
this tribulatin, but we must not envy the fortunate, reveling
without a care in their worldly feast in the days of our misfortune,
for we do not know to whom tomorrow belongs, and who will be
joyous in the end. It is better to be in the house of sorrows
than in the house of revelry, for in the mysterious depths of
suffering, like the child from the womb of an ailing mother,
new life will spring forth, for in the depths of sorrow one
can see heaven.
Let us not falter in our tense struggle and let us bring it
to its conclusion, for only he who endures until the end is
awarded victory. Who knows that ways of the Lord? It may be
that we, tried in so many ways, will be given to inspire today’s
culture, season it with the salt of the Gospel and show the
world the desired kingdom of peace, love and truth on earth,
for which Russia had pined and prayed, and which all of mankind
today desires.
It is not for naught that we all await the resurrectin of Russia:
her place will remain empty in the family of peoples, who feel
her absence, which upsets not only the political but the moral
balance in the whole world. This must give us greater courage
in our struggle for the speedy recovery of our Homeland; our
battle, yet, it a battle in flesh and blood: it is the struggle
in the bowels of the people’s spirit, where every revolution
begins and ends—the struggle for the Russian Orthodox soul,
which bears a special divine mark: it is this mark that the
godless bolsheviks are trying to erase in order to stamp upon
the Russian person their own image and likeness, so alien to
our age-old Orthodox-national character.
There can be no battle without sacrifice: blood must be shed
to gain spirit. But we will not be alone in this struggle: we
are joined with the ancient leaders and builders of the Russian
land, and especially by the “firm zealot and unshakable
pillar,” St. Germogen and his righteous companions, standing
firmly for the Faith and the house of the Most-Pure Mother of
God during the first time of troubles. That it is specifically
the Orthodox Faith that is the genuine soul of the Russian people
did not elude their piercing gaze, that it is the source of
their life force and strength; if the Russian person loses this
treasure, he loses everything, and if he keeps it, then he will
receive both the kingdom of this world and all that is needed
for his temporal well-being…
What zeal would enflame these staid defenders of Holy Russian
now, in view of the new terrible destruction of the Fatherland?
If they saw ruined churches all around, desecration, the multitude
of bishops, priests, monastics and Christian souls dying horrible
deaths, the abomination of neglect seizing the throne in the
sanctified Kremlin itself, where there is no longer Latin singing
but the preaching of atheism disseminated throughout the entire
world—they would rend their garments, pour ashes upon their
heads, and, turning to us, would ask in a thunderous voice,
as they asked their contemporaris: “Does all this, Orthodox
Christians, mean nothing to you?”
Even louder would cry out to us the blood of our martyrs, headed
by the Tsar-Passion-bearer and the hierarch-martyrs, among whom
are the blessed-in-memory Metropolitans Vladimir, Benjamin and
other archpastors, showing themselves to be true witnesses of
Christ.
The sacrifice brought by them would be for naught if we did
not continue their great struggle for our Homeland. Nothing
hurts us more on this path than lethal passions for conflict
and division: this is our great national fault, in which, yet,
we cannot blame anyone but ourselves…The time has come
to conquer this ailment, to waken from our slumber, and, making
the sign of the Cross, begin the great and holy task of recreating
our destroyed Fatherland through the reestablishment of close
spiritual ties amongst ourselves…The Church must be the
ancient Gatherer of the Russian land and of the Russian national
spirit. She remains so even today. Our Council [Sobor], consisting
of bishops, clergy and laity, gathering together, notwithstanding
all the difficulties of travel for Russian exiles, indeed, from
all ends of the world, is a victory of the ecclesio-social unity
around its eternal symbol—the Holy Cross.
The Lord blessed our Conciliar work, crowning it with utter
peace and unity of mind, and granting us the lofty consolation
of feeling as one in spirit and flesh, for we are called in
the unity of the hope of our calling.
Carefully preserving in our souls this aromatic spirit of conciliarity,
which more than once saved Russia in past centuries, we wish
naturally to distribute it yet further, we hope that it breathes
also in the very masses of people in the Russian land. This
spurs us to turn to you, dear brethren, carrying your heavy
cross within the borders of our Fatherland, to “counsel”
you in the common goal of the salvation of the Homeland, as
the Russian people of yore did in difficult periods of its history
and to tell you from our hearts: we are one with you. We are
the children of one and the same Mother—the Russian Orthodox
Church, the offspring of one and the same great Russian people.
Our heart suffers together with you over the destruction of
the Russian land, becoming once again “stateless,”
as it was three hundred years ago; over the eclipsing of the
people’s reason, over the darkening of the people’s
conscience, over the teetering of minds and the pathetic divisions
the bore within the Russian people, over the fact that many
of the “weak-willed,” under the influence of powerlessness,
the general collapse of morality and over the destruction of
the Russian Orthodox way of life. For twenty years now Russia
has these troubles; a whole generation has been born and reared
in the storm of revolution, surrounded by its corrupting and
poisoning breath, and they no longer have a sense of the living
history of their people, they do not feel its former greatness
and beauty; they do not value their holy legacies and traditions,
which gave life to our Homeland over the passing centuries.
Time carries away the last statesmen and witnesses of our glorious
past, the carriers of the historical Russian national soul.
It is to our grief if the last threads snap that bind us to
the ancient Russian of St. Vladimir. Who will be able to resurrect
it then? A new people will arise, separated from its historical
roots. It will not survive life’s battles without the firm,
inherited foundations, sanctified by the centuries, and will
be crushed by the first gusts of a storm, like a house built
on sand.
If we genuinely desire good for our Homeland—that it will
be saved and we along with it, if we do not wish for our people,
with their thousand-year history and still youthful sould and
body, would die a second, spiritual death, then we must arise
from our moral infirmitude, defeat the spirit of despair within
ourselves, our ambitions and idle talk, and, gathering as one
our thoughts, feelings and desires, we must stand bravely and
firmly in defense not so much of the external, but of the internal
spiritual legacy of Russia.
We truly grieve over this fiery time, when good and evil, when
the spirit of truth and that of delusion, when the Kingdom of
Christ and the reign of the prince of this world, have engaged
in a terrible, uncompromising battle, requiring of all of us
clear and firm Orthodox-national self-determination, not allowing
doubt nor wavering into other directions, for “A double-minded
man is unstable in all his ways (Jam. 1:8).
“I am come to send fire on the earth;” said Christ
our Lord, “and what will I, if it be already kindled?”
(Luk. 12:49). O, if only this holy fire, the fire of Christian
zeal, faith, love and patriotic sacrifice, would truly be kindled
in our hearts: it would burn away the brambles of fuss and division
that weaken us so, it would clarify our minds, would purify
our hearts, would forge and strengthen our will and would meld
us into one powerful organism before which no enemies could
prevail.
And it is kindled even now, by the mercy of God, in Russia as
well as in the countries of our exile. Let us not dampen it,
but, filling ourselves with spirit and strength, let us unify
in the struggle to defend our Mother Church and the salvation
of the Fatherland in unified prayer to Him, Who alone has the
power to bless our national holy battle to complete victory.
God! Save Russia. God! Save and strengthen her suffering sons,
who in the strength of their faith and patience, carry Your
witness to the world. God, gather us all in the bosom of our
Mother Church in our Holy Russian Motherland, and restore her,
intervene, preserve and have mercy with Your grace. |
|
|
