St. John’s Russian Orthodox Mission Church is a modest country church amid the ridges and valleys of Northern Appalachia in central Pennsylvania. But we support a prison ministry.

Today I an unworthy sinner had a great blessing, to witness the first communion in many years for an inmate and fellow Orthodox Christian in the prison we serve.

St. Symeon the New Theologian used to require the monks in his community to shed tears when approaching the gifts in order to receive Communion. There was no need to speak such a rule this morning; the tears came spontaneously, with heartfelt repentance and gratitude.

As an unworthy witness offering the gifts, I could only marvel at the mystery and miracle of our Lord’s Body and Blood there with us and received.

We pray in Church for the captives and those imprisoned, as we all are by sin. He brings forgiveness and love in His offering of Himself, as we offer ourselves to Him.

Beyond words does the Word of God come to us in the Eucharist, of whose Body and Blood we partake. How meaningful it is, how not to be taken for granted. In witnessing this, I was convicted and challenged in my approach to the Chalice also, even as an unworthy Priest.

Glory to God for all things!

(Above, the medieval ruins of the old Kileavy churches, on the site of the older Orthodox convent founded by St. Monenna)

An homily for the seventh Sunday after Pentecost from St. John’s Russian Orthodox Christian Mission Church in Winfield, PA, by Priest Paul Siewers.

In early Orthodox Christian Ireland, archaelogists say there was a landscape of small country churches and then large monasteries with a cluster of laity living around them. Sound familiar? This is not unlike our own country Church in relation to the monastery at White Haven, which by the way is the largest Orthodox women’s monastery in the country according to one survey.

One especially beloved early Irish Orthodox saint was the Venerable Monenna, the Abbess of Killeavy, whom we commemorate today. Her life illustrates how we can think of Orthodoxy in its influence and presence as opening up a kind of spiritual landscape through communities that are “not of this world,” and that have both earthly and mystical layers to them.

Even here in our modest parish we have of course the Church where we worship, soon God willing to have an onion dome and Cross on the roof linking it symbolically on the exterior to the Russian Orthodox tradition. We have a cemetery, with an Orthodox graveyard inaugurated recently by our beloved departed brother John, with its connection to the afterlife, as well as a community cemetery. And the white Cross that was the first Orthodox structure placed on this land, in front of the Orthodox cemetery, is a link to an earlier history of Orthodox missionary work in the coal region, for it comes from the former St. John the Baptist Orthodox Church in Shepton, now no longer extant, where Patriarch Confessor Tikhon once served. And then we have our open fields where, God willing, in future we may build new structures and also garden and tend bees. Around us are farm fields and a quarry and ridges of this part of the Appalachian range, whose seasonal scenery is often reminiscent of the Blue Ridge Mountains, which end not too far south of us according to geologists (the origins of our river system in the central Susquehanna Valley have been placed by hydrologists at our Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville NY).

All this echoes on a small scale the spiritual network and landscape of the missionary work of the Venerable Monenna back in the 400s and early 500s in Ireland. She was born in County Down northern Ireland around 432 A.D. (This account follows that of Dmitry Lapa https://orthochristian.com/123323.html ) She was the daughter of a local king and of a local princess. The holy maiden founded and became the first abbess of Killeavy Convent in what is now County Armagh also in Northern Ireland. It became probably the largest monastery in early Christian Ireland. She is also known as St. Darerca.

At the start only eight maiden nuns and a widow with a baby were her companions, but by the end of her life she had gathered around 150 disciples. The nuns led an amazingly austere ascetic life, living in extreme poverty and at a bare subsistence level. They chose the Prophet Elias and St. John the Baptist as their heavenly patrons. St. Monenna lived mainly on a mountain and was nicknamed “Prophet Elias’ spiritual daughter.”

Once a wealthy man brought new clothing as a gift to the community because the old robes of the abbess and her nuns were tattered. But Monenna said that the Almighty provided them with all they needed. She sold the clothing and distributed the money to the poor. St. Monenna was renowned for her generosity and mercy; she cared for the poor, and illnesses were cured by her prayers. Once she healed a mute man. She brought up and educated the son of a widow and her fellow nun, who became a bishop named Luger.

Although the monastic community originally was in an area of pagans practicing cruel customs, little by little they embraced the gospel and came to the nuns for spiritual help. 

Traditions say St. Monnena personally knew well-known saints of Ireland from her time, such as Patrick and Brigit. St. Patrick may have baptized St. Monenna when she was an infant, and she may have lived with St. Brigid at her celebrated Kildare Monastery for some time. She and her community may have stayed at a monastic site near Begerin in County Wexford briefly and were trained by St. Ibar, which is in an area where my own ancestors lived. She and some of her nun-sisters also are said to have trained at St. Ninian’s monastery in Scotland. Toward the end of the saint’s life it is reported she was visited by angels. 

St. Monnena with God’s helped founded and shaped communities of believers, and with her holiness the uncreated light of God brightened and energized new landscapes of faith in early Ireland. These landscapes were networks of faithfulness, ascetisim, spiritual beauty, and mission work, much like the networks of Orthodoxy we see emerging here in Northern Appalachia. We may travel to Jordanville and to White Haven, we engage in confession, we connect with layers of history, and in our own lives and the lives of our families we practice an ascetic community that merges with our parish Church family. This is the spiritual ecology of Orthodoxy made manifest in our earthly lives. It helpssustain us with God’s grace. We see this in the life of St. Peter the Aleut that was highlighted in our parish film showing on Friday night, and how an ecology or landscape of Orthodoxy emerged in California in early times, out of Alaska. That legacy spread to our own mission’s neighborhood through the influence of St. John of San Francisco and his disciple the Blessed Seraphim of California.

Dear brothers and sisters, I would like to mention one more saint whom we commemorate today who contributes to this ecology or landscape of Orthodox faith. He is St. Andrei Rublev, the great iconographer, whom we commemorate today with the Synaxis of Saints of Radonezh, for he was part of the Orthodox network founded by St. Sergius of Radonezh long ago in a forest in Russia. In our modest country Church in Applaachia, here in Penns Woods, we have St. Andrei’s famous icon of the Holy Trinity depicted in our worship area, and also on the high place of our altar area. St. Andrei shaped landscapes of Orthodoxy in his iconography, in which we venerating the icons can enter wherever we are in place and time. His depiction of the mystery of the Trinity is symbolic and taken from the biblical account of the Hospitality of Abraham, where the Father of Nations gave hospitality to three men described as Angels, although one of them the Lord. This was a theophany of Christ and the Trinity to the Holy Father Abraham, around 2200 BC following Byzantine reckoning. In the icon we see the Oak of Mamre, where our Russian Church Abroad has to this day a Church and monastery in the Holy Land. A piece of the Oak of Mamre with a carving of this icon greets visitors to our monastery at Jordanville. It is a reminder of all the connections to the Holy Land spiritually in each Orthodox Church. Likewise the three figures represent to us the inter-relationality of the love of the Holy Trinity as a model for our Church and our lives in the world, on earth as it is in heaven. The Oak itself can be a symbol of the Tree of Life in Paradise, which St. John Damascene identified with Christ. The Mountain behind the figure associated with the Holy Spirit, representing Mount Moriah where Abraham brought Isaac for sacrifice, is also identified with the Temple Mount, so indicating the role of the Holy Spirit in the founding and sustaining of the Church.

We are so blessed, brothers and sisters, to live within the landscapes of Orthodox Christianity, within the ecosystem and ecology of our the Providence of our God, and Christ’s Body the Orthodox Church, which is the real biblical Israel. 

Let us find rest, support, and sustenance in this ecology and landscape of Orthodoxy, groundedness, balance, and connection, as did Saints Monnena and Andrei, asking for their prayers. Let us remember the response of St. Peter the Aleut in California repeatedly when being threatened to leave his faith for a heresy. He kept repeating simply “I am a Christian.” For Orthodoxy is the Church of Christ, and in Him as the Apostle Paul said, we live and move and have our being.

Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory Forever!

Eight years ago our mission marked the centennial of the killing of the Holy Royal Martyrs by the Christ-hating Communists in Russia. That service was held in Rooke Chapel at Bucknell. Today we have a Russian Orthodox Christian temple here, where year-round icons of the holy martyrs of Russia hang, including the royal martyrs, both in the worship area here, and in the altar area. Glory to God. Here is a revised version of the remarks I gave at the centennial at Bucknell in 2018, to which I have appended some remarks by our beloved patron St. John.

July 17 marks the centennial of the killing of the Russian royal family. On that day a hundred years ago, the last tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, his wife the Tsarina Alexandra, their five children, and four retainers were ushered into a basement in the city of Yekaterinburg in the early hours of the morning. Their execution would mark a turning point in history.

The family, by all accounts pious and loving and known for personal works of charity, had suffered months of humiliation at the hands of communists who had taken over the Russian government in the wake of the Tsar’s forced abdication in March 1917. Walls of their prison house, which they would have passed on the way to the room of their execution, were bedecked with obscenities, and guards had engaged in immoral acts in the basement where they were killed. Outside that night, trucks ran their engines to muffle the sound of gunshots. It took 20 minutes for the inept, alcohol-impaired shooters to kill the family, as the room filled with smoke from the guns and their cries of pain. The two youngest girls and the Tsarevich survived the fusillade — only to be brutally bayoneted. Meanwhile their maid, who was not initially hit, vainly tried to fight back.

When the children’s English tutor Charles Sydney Gibbes, who later became an Orthodox priest taking the name Nicholas after the Tzar, arrived soon after with White Army forces, he was told that the blood had to be swept away with brooms. A gruesomely torturous burial followed across two days, in which corpses were placed temporarily in a water-filled mineshaft, desecrated, and doused with acid and grenades. The bodies were scattered to hide the number in the group and prevent them from being recovered. Even a family dog was slain to stop its mournful barking. The killer displayed it on a bayonet outside after the murders. Historians recently concluded the killings of the family and their retainers occurred on direct orders from Lenin — the evil mastermind of modern totalitarianism, as has been documented by his biographer the historian Stéphane Courtois following the opening of the Soviet archives.

The carnage marked the end of centuries of Orthodox Christian imperial monarchy that traced its roots back to the Byzantine Empire, across some 1,500 years, and was the end of the last such major Christian monarchical empire in the world. In her introduction to her English translation of “The Romanovs Under House Arrest: From the 1917 Diary of a Palace Priest,” American historian Marilyn Pfeifer Swezy notes:

Nicholas’s own understanding of his role which was more religious than political. He understood that he had inherited a profound responsibility before God for the welfare of his people. In keeping with the concept of the Byzantine emperors and Old Testament kings inherited with Orthodoxy in the tenth century, the sovereign was more than a political ruler. He was the anointed of God. The power of the autocracy was defined as a “selfless burden of service” to the Russian people.

Many of the popular impressions of the Tsar and that regime in the West today remain heavily shaped by Marxist-Leninist propaganda that contributed to the revolution and subsequent historiography. At best, the autocratic Tsarist regime is often equated with communism, the latter being offered praise nonetheless for supposed high ideals of equity and social justice. Yet historical facts tell another story.

Tens of millions of people were killed under the communist regime, with a total of up to 100 million worldwide, including regimes inspired directly and helped by the Bolshevik regime that killed the tsar and his family, according to The Black Book of Communism, the work of a consortium of European scholars. As Nicholas Werth notes there, between 1825 and 1917, Tsarism carried out 6,321 political executions, most in the revolutionary period of 1905-1907. A good number of these were commuted to forced labor. By contrast, almost 20,000 government officials were assassinated by revolutionaries during the last 25 years of imperial rule in Russia alone; from the fall of 1905 to the fall of 1906, 3,611. In 1918, following the brutal execution of the Romanovs and an assassination attempt on Lenin from his “socialist right,” a surging campaign of Red Terror claimed 15,000 lives in two months alone.

Earlier, horrible anti-Semitic pogroms were used to justify hatred of the Tsarist regime, and such anti-Semitic violence was a major enduring sin of Russian culture. But Stanford historian Steven J. Zipperstein notes in his book Pogrom that the imperial government’s policy was to stop pogroms as endangering public order, not to engender them. Zipperstein notes that largest mass killings of Jews, an estimated 100,000 or more, came after the Bolshevik takeover and the breakdown of imperial order, during the Russian Civil War. The 1905-1906 revolutionary era’s peak pre-communist pogroms by contrast resulted in perhaps 800 deaths. Key pre-revolutionary Russian Church leaders in the early twentieth century, such as Father (later Saint) John of Kronstadt and Bishop Antony Khrapovitsky (later the leader of the anticommunist Russian Church in exile) did denounce the pogroms at the time, with even the Tsar discouraging circulation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, with its accusations of Jewish conspiracy. That is not to excuse the brutalities of Tsarist society, but it highlights the hugely greater evils unleashed under atheistic communism, which felt it had to strike first against the Christian emperor and his family.

Indeed, the communist gulag or system of labor camps became a model for Nazi concentration camps. By contrast, when Lenin was exiled to Siberia under the Tsarist regime, he was allowed a rifle for hunting and the companionship of his wife, could work on his writing, and enjoyed a daily allowance from the state equal to double the pay of the average peasant, from which he paid a housekeeper. Trotsky, even in the brutal anti-revolutionary crackdown of 1906, was allowed visits from his wife and wrote most of his history of the St. Petersburg Soviet while imprisoned.

Bard historian Sean McMeekin documents that the tsarist regime had not been the failure that it was portrayed in Marxist-Leninist propaganda, either: “Russia in the early twentieth century was a substantial net importer of both people and capital: a telling fact that, since the revolution, has never been true again.” His history, accessing old Soviet archives, notes that far more crucial to the Revolution were elite Russian conspiracies against the Tsar (including largely engineered scandal over Rasputin). To which other factors can be added, notably huge Russian casualties in World War I, German subsidies of Lenin’s party of more than $1 billion in today’s currency, and what Alexander Solzhenitsyn decried as a lack of decisive response to initial revolution. Nonetheless, McMeekin writes in his recent book The Russian Revolution that in 1917, “the tsar’s complacency … accorded better with Russia’s real military and strategic situation than did liberal and Allied hysteria. Morale in the Russian high command on the eve of spring campaigning was high, and for good reason.” S.S. Oldenburg, a respected Russian historian, who wrote an history of the last tsar’s reign in multi-volumes that appeared in the 1930s and 1940s from exile (The Last Tsar), also detailed the considerable successes and basic competence of the tsar’s regime.

But disloyal subversion in decadent high levels of Russian society leading to the tsar’s abdication, revolutionary networks feeding on legitimate grievances among sectors of the sprawling empire’s public, and ultimately a relatively small force of about 10,000 dedicated Red guards enabling the communist takeover of the capital Petrograd, all contributed to the collapse of the tsarist state across 1917. This resulted in the “red terror” of which the 1918 royal executions became the central historical marker.

 “Bloody Nicholas” (as the revolutionaries unjustly smeared Nicholas II), and his pious and loving family, later were declared “holy martyrs” and “passion-bearers” by Russian Orthodox Churches in exile and later in post-communist Russia, respectively, because of their own sacrifice of blood as martyrs. They became venerated for living their faith through suffering to death, as seen in the Tzar’s calls for forgiveness of their enemies amid those trials, and his expressed willingness to take on the sins of his country to his death. Our Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad first glorified them as holy martyrs, then later the Moscow Patriarchate as Holy Psssion Bearers. The latter means saints who met their deaths with outstanding faith. However ROCOR to this day fully recognizes them as martyrs for their lives of faith at large.

As Metropolitan Hilarion Kapral of blessed memory, the New York-based head of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad at the time of the centennial, wrote:  … the more the Church endured persecution, the brighter the lanterns of faith and piety shone in the Russian land. From the Tsar and the members of the Royal Family close to him in spirit, from archpastors and simple monastics, priests, and deacons to laypersons came forth a powerful spiritual army of the Church Militant … Thank God, today we see how the blood of many millions of the host of martyrs and confessors who turned the Russian land scarlet became the seeds of salvation for the spiritual rebirth of our people, in the Fatherland and in the Diaspora.

As churches and monasteries continue to reopen and sprout anew in a resurgent Christian culture in Russia, and Orthodox Christian missions open in the West,  including one in our small Pennsylvania town, candles glow in front of icons of the Holy Royal Martyrs this week at memorial services around the world. They are a reminder of the light of faith that the darkness of communism could not put out — and a warning to a West increasingly enamored with that darkness again today.

Let me end with our parish patron St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco’s words in 1957, before the collapse of the communist Soviet Union in Russia. He was especially instrumental in the ultimate glorification of the royal martyrs as saints in the Church Abraod. He wrote: 

Forty Years Ago, a single day saw the collapse of the greatness and glory of the Russian State, a bulwark of peace throughout the whole world. The signature of the Sovereign, the Emperor Nicholas II, on the act of abdication from the Throne, is a historical boundary separating Russia’s great and glorious past from her present dark and cruel circumstances.

The entire weight of the present regime’s evil and its reordering of life is aimed at honest, well-intentioned and devout people, and the whole nation lies in oppression and constant fear. People are afraid of their own thoughts, thoughts they have not expressed aloud; they are afraid that what they are thinking might be reflected in their facial expressions.

What happened that day, forty years ago?

Apostasy from God’s Anointed, apostasy from an authority submissive to God, apostasy from the oath of fidelity to the Anointed Sovereign, given before God, and the giving over of him to death.

He who had devoted all his strength in God’s name to the service of Russia was deprived of authority, and then also of freedom.

For decades the dark forces of evil carried on a struggle against God’s Anointed, against the ruling authority faithful to God. These same forces also killed the Emperor Alexander II, the Tsar-Liberator.

This crime sobered the people, it shook the entire country, and that moral upsurge gave Emperor Alexander III, the Peacemaker, the opportunity to rule Russia with a strong arm.

Russia enjoyed two decades of peaceful life and development. Then a new conspiracy arose for the overthrow of the Royal Throne.

It was a conspiracy of Russia’s enemies.

Within Russia itself there was a struggle against her very essence, and, having destroyed the Throne, Russia’s enemies even obliterated her name.

Now the whole world can see the close connection between the Royal authority, faithful to God, and Russia. When the Tsar ceased to be — Russia ceased to be.

The struggle against the Tsar and Russia was carried out by concealed godlessness, which later revealed itself openly.

Such was the essence of the struggle against the Tsar and Russia, against the foundation of her life and historical development.

Such are the meaning and aim of that struggle, which perhaps not everyone realized — those who were its accomplices.

Everything filthy and paltry and sinful which could be found in the human soul was summoned against the Tsar and Russia. All of this, with all its might, rose up in struggle against the Royal Crown, which was crowned by a cross, for Royal service is a bearing of the Cross.

People always rise up against the Cross by means of slander and falsehood, doing the devil’s work, for, according to the word of the Lord Jesus Christ, When he speaketh a He, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it (John 8:44).

Everything was roused up against the most meek, pure and abundantly-loving Tsar, so that at the terrible hour of the struggle against him he would remain alone. Filthy slanders were spread beforehand against the Tsar and his family, so that the people would grow cool towards him.

Faithless allies took part in the conspiracy. When the Sovereign was in need of moral support, his closest associates did not provide it and violated their oath. Some took part in the conspiracy; others, out of weakness, counseled abdication. The Tsar remained completely alone, surrounded by [what he called in his journal] “treachery, baseness and cowardice.”

From the day of the abdication, everything began to collapse. It could not have been otherwise. The one who united everything, who stood guard for the Truth, was overthrown. A sin was committed, and now sin had easy access. In vain do some wish to separate February from October; the one was a direct consequence of the other.

In those March days, Pskov became the Tsar’s Gethsemane, and Ekaterinburg — his Golgotha.

Tsar Nicholas died as a martyr, with unshakable faith and patience, having drunk the cup of suffering to the dregs.

The sin against him and against Russia was perpetrated by all who in one way or another acted against him, who did not oppose, or who merely by sympathizing participated in those events which took place forty years ago. That sin lies upon everyone until it is washed away by sincere repentance….

We must pray for the forgiveness of our sins and for mercy on our homeland, just as the Lord God freed Israel from the Babylonian captivity and restored the ruined city of Jerusalem.

Brothers and sisters, following our patron St. John’s example, let us remember the Holy Royal Martyrs. Let us take their faith, courage, and love as our model. Let us take their earthly destiny as a warning for what can happen in our own American land when the forces of anti-Christian atheism are unleashed.  And let us ask for their intercession for our lives and work as missionaries in America today. Holy Royal Martyrs pray to God for us!

Dearest to Christ,

The month of July is for us (beginning as it does on July 14 of the civil calendar) an interlude between the Apostles Fast and the Dormition Fast, yet like all relative “quiet times” in the Orthodox Church a time for deeper prayer and reflection and dedication to our faith and missionary work here in our country parish in Northern Appalachian America.

The beginning of the Church calendar in July includes the feast of the Holy Royal Martyrs of Russia on July 4/17, appropriately reminding us on our ancient calendar of “the Fourth” as a time for dedication to freedom in the deepest spiritual sense, of life in our Lord Jesus Christ, in this 250^th year of our country. Indeed our Fourth and the Feast of the Royal Martyrs coincide also with the feast of St. Andrew of Crete, the renowned author of our best known penitential canon, spanning as it does all Scripture. We will celebrate a special Akathist and Supplicatory Canon for the Holy Royal Martyrs on the eve of the feast, July 3/16 (details below).

Other special highlights for our parish this month will include the baptism of Baby Richard Sunday July 20/Aug. 2, and the planned installation finally of the “Onion Dome” Cupola and Cross on the roof of our temple, work for which is scheduled July 19/Aug. 1 and July 21/Aug. 3. The blessing of cars will also occur on that Sunday of the Holy Prophet Elias (July 20/August 2).

In addition, during this summer month we will hold the first free showing in our new Central Susquehanna Valley Orthodox Christian Film Series, on July 4/17 outdoors on the Church property, of “American Orthodox,” a 50-minute documentary on St. Peter the Aleut, the early Native Alaskan martyr. Four more film showings through November are planned in the community.

Of course the real highlight of all worship and activities in the Church is the Holy Eucharist. Details on services, regular programming, ministries (including our prison, university, and shut-in ministries), and other activities follow below.

Please remember that in accord with our Lord’s “Great Commission” to His Church, and with the urgency of the need of the evangelization of America, to invite neighbors, family members, friends, co-workers, and inquirers to services and events. Heartfelt thanks to all who contribute prayer, time, energy and resources to our Church in so many ways, including just with your presence at worship and at outreach activities.

Also, please keep Innocent in your prayers this Friday (July 4/17) as he has surgery, and also the friend of our mission Archpriest Mark of Holy Protection Monastery, who has surgery the same day. Also please keep Helen (Brook) in your prayers as she is scheduled for surgery on July 17/July 30.

May the Holy Royal Martyrs, the Holy Martyr Peter the Aleut, and our patron St. John and all the saints pray to God for our mission work and that of the Orthodox mission to America at large.

Glory to God for all things!

+++

Regular Services and Programs

Saturday Vigil, 4:30; Sunday Divine Liturgy 10 a.m. (Hours 9:30)
Weekly Akathist of Holy Protection 7 p.m. Wednesday
Orthodoxy Online Class, 10 to 11 a.m. Saturdays (contact Fr Paul for link)

Special Scheduling Notes

There will be no weekly Akathist on Wednesday July 29 due to vacation.
Vigil on Saturday Aug. 1 will be at another location, to be announced, due to work on the dome installation.

Calendar (dates are listed on the Church calendar/Civil calendar)

July 2/15  Akathist of Holy Protection, 7 p.m. (on the Feast of the Placing of the Robe of the Theotokos)

July 3/16 Akathist and Canon of Supplication for the Holy Royal Martyrs of Russia, 6 p.m.

July 4/17 Film showing, “American Orthodox,” 9 p.m. outdoors at St. John’s.

July 6/19 Seventh Sunday after Pentecost, Feast of St. Sisoes

Other services as usual (check Church wall calendar and online calendar, and notes at the start above).

July 20/August 2 Baptism of Baby Richard Lenig

Brotherhood of St. Alfred the Great. The Brotherhood will be planning, God willing, some more presence for our mission at downtown street fairs as we move into the fall, and hopefully a monastery field trip.

Sisterhood of St. Olga of Alaska. The Sisterhood will be planning, God willing, some gardening/beautification at the front of the Church once the Dome is installed, and perhaps a field trip to the woman’s monastery in White Haven.

Prison Ministry. To volunteer, please contact Fr. Paul. We have regular visits to inmates at Muncy SCI Women’s Prison.

Ministry for the Sick and those in Nursing Home. To volunteer, please contact Fr. Paul. We have regular visits to members who are in nursing home or mainly confined to their homes for medical reasons. They always appreciate visitors and they pray for us as we should for them.

University Ministry. We have students from Bucknell and Susquehanna visiting our services during the academic year, and plan events and contacts with them on campus. Please contact Fr. Paul to get involved.

Beautification projects. As we hopefully wrap up the Dome and Cross installation finally, we will turn next God willing to plans for the new Iconostasis, as well as gardening around the front of the Church. Please keep our efforts in prayer. Many thanks also to Longinus for his landscaping work, and also to John for his help!

Please Pray for our Brothers and Sisters in Nursing Homes or Shut-In for Medical Reasons: Mary, Innocent, Nicholas

Please Pray for our Brothers and Sisters in Prison, including Tanya, Catechumen Rachel, Connie

Please Pray for Catechumens Laura, Charles, Corey, James, Ty, Wyatt, Aaron

Please Pray for our Parish University Students including Eleni, Maia, Kevin, Lizzie. For a more complete list, contact Fr Paul.

Reminders

—Five Things to Keep in Mind in Preparing for Communion. In the Orthodox Church, Communion is a joyous culmination of our faith, partaking of the Body and Blood of Christ. Proper preparation is part of the “joyful sorrow” of our struggle with God’s grace, as Christians to “take up the Cross” as our Lord calls us to do, in the spirit also of His Resurrection. Proper preparation also helps to ensure that we receive the most benefit spiritually from Communion, and that it is not to our detriment because of lack of proper respect, love, and preparation. Items to remember:

1. Please remember to read the preparation prayers linked to the services page of our website or from the blue Jordanville booklet (the section with the Canon for Preparation followed by Preparation for Communion) or Jordanville Prayer Book.

2. Please attend Vigil the night before, or read or listen to a Vesper service at home (a Reader Vespers text is available at https://www.saintjonah.org/services/vespers.htm). If unable to attend Vigil, plan to come a little early to Liturgy to receive a blessing from Father Paul to receive.

3. Please if planning to receive, prepare also by fasting the evening before from all food and drink from midnight onward (unless you have a medical need, in which case please contact Fr. Paul), and from marital intimacy that day before.

4. Follow regular fasting rules (check Church calendar) during the week.

5.  Have a recent confession or schedule a confession with Fr Paul, either by appointment, or during Vigil, or early before Communion. By tradition, confession should be made at least once in each of the four major fasting seasons during the year (Great Lent, Apostles Fast, Dormition Fast, Nativity Fast), but also more as needed, especially if any sin or concern would be an obstruction to communing in good spiritual health. Please consult with Fr Paul if you have any questions. Confession is one of the mysteries of the Church and a joyous spiritual “reset.”

—Appropriate Attire and Respectful Presence

Men should wear long pants and long-sleeved shirts or jackets. Women should wear long dresses or skirts with shoulders covered, and head coverings especially when coming up for Communion.

Please keep cell phones turned off inside the Church and do not text or check phones during worship and prayers.

Please do not talk during Post-Communion Prayers, especially if you have received, or during services, apart from responses or any necessary short low-voiced communication.

If you are a member at St. John’s and visiting another parish and plan to receive Communion there, please email or talk with Fr. Paul for a blessing, so you can communicate to the Priest at the parish you are visiting that you have a blessing from your home Priest and that you are prepared. Please also remember to emai or call the Priest at the parish where you are visiting in advance about receiving, or talk with him the evening before at Vigil.

Please keep in prayer for our parish community and our mission work, and remember when you can to donate prayers, time, help, and resources as possible.

Glory to God for all things!

(Thank you to Reader Nicholas for our newsletter “banner”!)

An Homily from St. John’s Russian Orthodox Mission Church in Winfield, PA, by Priest Paul Siewers, for the Feast of the Apostles Peter and Paul, 7534/2026. Glory to God!

Today we honor the Light of the world, Jesus Christ, Who shone from Pentecost and by closeness to Him through Peter and Paul, the leaders of the Apostles, into our Church. Truly the Apostles’ feast, marking their deaths in the capital of the pagan Roman Empire, marks also a triumph. It is a reminder of how too we face the call to be witnesses to our faith in this era of the global spirit of Anti-Christ, if not to death, at least in the devotion of our lives to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and His Church, as missionaries to America.

St. Gregory Palamas wrote that:

Anyone who looks at [the Gospel account of the Apostle] Peter will see that through repentance and painful grief he not only adequately healed the denial into which he had been drawn, but he also completely rooted out of his soul that passion which had made him fall behind the others. Wishing to demonstrate this to everyone, the Lord, after His Passion in the flesh for our sake and His rising on the third day, used those words to Peter asking him, Simon, son of Jonah, lovest thou me more than these (John 21:15), meaning, “more than these disciples of mine”. But see how much humbler he has become. Whereas before, even without being asked, he set himself above the rest and said that even if all forsook the Lord, he would not; now, on being asked whether he loves Him more than the others do, he affirms that he loves Him, but leaves out the word “more”, saying Yea, Lord; thou knowest that I love thee (John 21:15, 16, cf. 17).

What does the Lord do? Since Peter has shown that he has not lost his love for Him and has now acquired humility as well, He openly fulfils the promise made long before and tells him, Feed my lambs (John 21:15). When He was referring to the company of believers as a building, He promised to make Peter the foundation stone, saying, Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church (Matt. 16:18). On the other hand, when He was talking in terms of fishing, He made him a fisher of men with the words, From henceforth thou shalt catch men (Luke 5:10). But when He speaks of His disciples as sheep, He sets Peter over them as a shepherd, saying, Feed my lambs, feed my sheep (John 21:15-17). It is clear from this that the Lord’s desire for us to be saved is so great, that He asks of those who love Him only one thing: to lead us to the pasture and fold of salvation.

….Knowing that he loved Christ, aware that his questioner knew him better than he knew himself, and feeling under pressure, Peter not only confessed that he loved Him, but also proclaimed that the Lord he loved was God over all (Rom. 9:5), by saying, Lord, thou knowest all things; thou knowest that I love thee, because only God Who is over all is all-knowing.

Once Peter had made this heartfelt confession, the Lord ordained him Shepherd and Chief Pastor of His whole Church, and also promised to encompass him with such strength, that he who previously was unable even to stand being spoken to and questioned by a young girl (John 18:17), would endure unto death, even death on a cross. Verily, verily, I say unto thee, When thou wast younger, both physically and spiritually, thou girdest thyself, meaning, you used your own strength, and walkest whither thou wouldest, doing what you liked and living according to your natural inclinations. But when thou shalt be old, having reached the peak of your physical and spiritual age, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands. With these words, Christ indicates that Peter will die on a cross, and bears witness that his crucifixion will not be involuntary. Thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, meaning strengthen, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not, that is to say, out of this life (cf. John 21:18). Our nature is unwilling to be dissolved in death, and Peter’s superhuman martyrdom also demonstrates our attitude as human beings to life. “Strengthened by Me”, Christ tells him, “you will willingly endure all these things for my sake and bear witness to me; for the desire to do so is not natural but supernatural to human nature.”

….Given that Paul made the same confession of faith as Peter, and had the same zeal, humility and love, surely they received the same rewards from Him Who measures everything with completely just scales, yardstick and plumbline…. That is why the Lord told Peter, Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build my church (Matt. 16:18), whereas He said to Ananias of Paul, He is a chosen vessel unto me, to bear my name before the Gentiles and kings (Acts 9:15). Which name? Clearly the name we have been given, the name of Christ’s Church, which rests on the foundation stone of Peter. Notice that Peter and Paul are equal in prominence and glory, and both hold up the Church. Consequently the Church now bestows one and the same honour on both, and celebrates them together with equal esteem. As we consider the outcome of their lives, let us imitate how they lived, or at least how they were restored through humility and repentance, even if we cannot attain to their other great and exalted achievements 

….When Peter resorted to repentance, he not only recovered from his fall and obtained forgiveness, but was also appointed to protect Christ’s Church. As you see, Paul too was rewarded with this role after his conversion, once he had made progress and become more closely God’s own than the others. Repentance which is true and truly from the heart persuades the penitent not to sin any more, not to mix with corrupt people, and not to gape in curiosity at evil pleasures, but to despise things present, cling to things to come, struggle against passions, seek after virtues, be self- controlled in every respect, keep vigil with prayers to God, and shun dishonest gain. It convinces him to be merciful to those who wrong him, gracious to those who ask something of him, ready with all his heart to bend down and help in any way he can, whether by words, actions or money, all who seek his assistance, that through kindness to his fellow-man he might gain God’s love in return for loving his neighbour, draw the divine favour to himself, and attain to eternal mercy and God’s everlasting blessing and grace. (https://orthochristian.com/80482.html)

This, brothers and sisters, is the essence of our life in Christ’s Church, humble repentance and service in Christ.  Together these two, the Apostle to the Jews and the Apostle to the Gentiles, found their mission and their martyric deaths in their travels, ending up in Rome, the capital of their known world. Their lives of witness against the pagan Roman Empire, while working to convert and baptize it, should be a model for us in our witness against the global spirit of Anti-Christ today, and the need to save ourselves and our neighbors. The Apostle John said the spirit of Anti-Christ is the denial that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh. We see great global systems and forces in the spiritual realm engaged in this on a large scale today. One important antidote is rooting our mission to America in our community right here in our daily life, relationships, and in-person worship and community life in Appalachia.

Priest Roman Braga of blessed memory, who suffered great psychological torture in a Romanian Communist facility designed to erase and remold the human personality away from Christianity, survived and came to America, where he said:

“You have a place in which God wanted you to be born, and that nation, that country in which you were born,  has a history. You have to come into Orhtodoxy with the whole destiny of the American people because they have to find Christ Jesus, to be saved…. You come with the destiny of your people in Orthodoxy.

Father Roman also said, “I pray for America. It’s a great country and God loves this country so much. I think [American Orthodox Christians] have a special mission, to bring [the Orthodox Faith] to the world, not globalism. Even if economically the boundaries disappear, the individuality and the personality of each culture should be kept. It is not about nationalism, it is about identity, and we have to keep our identity. God made us an individual, an individual grows in a family, each family has a specific family in the ethnical [cultural] realm and the ethnical realm is brought into the Church. I always say to Americans, ‘If you become Orthodox, don’t be Russian or Greek, come completely American, with all your history behind you. Be yourself. This is very important for salvation.'” https://www.orthodoxwitness.org/interview-with-blessed-fr-roman-braga/

Hieromartyr Daniel Sysoev said: “And so, when the Gospel has been fully preached, then will come the end of the world. How will it occur? On the one hand, as I said, the Church will grow, uniting all those who desire holiness. On the other hand, evil will increase, and it too will reach its utmost limits. And the greatest enemy of all men will come to power. Not the devil himself, but a man of his choosing, called the Antichrist. This will happen when the last remnants of the Roman Empire collapse. To this day we are living amid the remnants of the Roman Empire; we are living by the laws of Roman jurisprudence. It could be said that both Russia and America are a continuation of the Roman Empire; even the state symbols have stayed the same. When the last remnants of the universal Roman Empire collapse, the last of the four empires that the prophet Daniel saw, when the world plunges into chaos, out of that chaos will emerge the greatest enemy — the Antichrist, who will come at first covertly, deceiving by means of sorcery and false miracles, and appearing to be good.” (Hieromartyr Daniel Sysoev, Catechetical Talks, pp. 184-185)

Metropolitan Anthony Bashir of the Antiochian Archdiocese of America said, “If the best of Byzantium has survived, it is in the United States, and if there is an Orthodox political ideal, it is enshrined in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.“

Even more so, true Christianity survives right here in the Orthodox Church, of which our little country Church is but a fractal, including all nations and peoples in the fulfillment of the biblical Israel.

Brothers and sisters, remember the Apostle Paul said I am all things to all people, in Christ. He went from a tentmaker in Tarsus to a Christian leader in the world’s largest city Rome, as Peter went from Galileean fisherman to the imperial capital as well. In this 250^th year of America, let us humbly in the same apostolic spirit be Orthodox Christians and Americans, Orthodox Christians and Appalachians, Orthodox Christians and Pennsylvanians, as we witness to our world. Let us plant the roots of our country mission so deep in Christ that our Lord may prosper the growth of His branches and fruits here and throughout our country in her 250^th year. And let us remember the words of the Apostle when he spoke to the Greek philosophers in Athens and quoted their own poetry to them: “In Him [God, our Lord], we live and move and have our being.”

The Reading from the Holy Gospel according to Matthew,

§29 [9:1-8]

At that time, Jesus entered into a boat, and passed over and came into His own city. And behold, they brought to Him a man sick with the palsy, lying on a bed. And Jesus, seeing their faith, said unto the one sick with the palsy, ‘Son, be of good cheer; thy sins be forgiven thee.’ And behold, certain of the scribes said within themselves, ‘This man blasphemeth.’ And Jesus, knowing their thoughts, said, ‘Why think ye evil in your hearts? For which is easier: to say, ‘Thy sins be forgiven thee,’ or to say, ‘Arise and walk’? But that ye may know that the Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive sins,’– (then said He to the one sick with palsy) ‘Arise, take up thy bed and go unto thine house.’ And he arose and departed to his house. But when the multitudes saw it, they marvelled and glorified God, who had given such power unto men. 

Holy Gospel according to Matthew, 

§ 67 [16:13-19]

At that time, when Jesus came into the region of Caesarea Philippi, He asked His disciples, saying, ‘Who do men say that I, the Son of Man, am?’ And they said, ‘Some say that Thou art John the Baptist, some Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.’ He said unto them, ‘But who say ye that I am?’ And Simon Peter answered and said, ‘Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.’ And Jesus answered and said unto him, ‘Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jonah, for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but My Father who is in Heaven. And I say also unto thee, that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven. And whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in Heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in Heaven.’ 

Today the Church commemorates the Protomartyr Alban of Britain, the earliest martyr of Britain together with two others, Julian and Aaron, about whom less is known. 

Alban was described as a martyr from Verulamium, a now long-lost Roman town in Britain. St. Alban is said around the year 300 AD or even earlier to have hidden an Orthodox Christian priest from pagan Roman persecutors, by disguising himself as the priest to allow him to escape. 

His courageous faith and miracles associated with his persecution and death resulted in the conversion of others. Long after the Roman town fell into ruins, the saint’s name survived in the new town nearby called St. Albans, and its cathedral namesake. Historically, his name became so revered by Anglo-Americans that St. Albans became the name in America of the Anglican Protestant parish that formed the basis for the current so-called National Episcopalian Cathedral in DC, and of the elite St. Albans school associated with it, which many members of America’s power elite have attended. Yet few of the so-called White Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite in America in earlier days ever understood that St. Alban was and is an Orthodox Christian saint. 

You see, the martyrdom or witness to death of St. Alban helped form the basis of Christianity in Britain. But the living connection of those early British connections to Orthodox Christianity was largely lost, and likewise not understood in the roots of American culture, which had lost connection with the historic apostolic Church.  In this 250^th anniversary weekend of America, most Americans not only don’t know who St. Alban is, but they also have lost their connection with the living tradition behind the Christian legacy that gave us the words: “…all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator…”

Spiritually apart from the living spiritual life of the Orthodox Church  the so-called National Cathedral on the site of the American Protestant St. Albans parish became a beautiful religious building too often sadly celebrating raw political and economic power alongside heresy, immorality, and secular ecumenism. All these contribute to poor mental health in our body politic, family culture, and often personal lives of Americans.

In fact, in England, the Anglican denomination that maintains the old cathedral at St Albans, today not only suffers the same spiritually fatal errors as the so-called American Episcopalian National Cathedral of the old St Albans parish in DC,. but is now governed by a King (not the George III of the American Revolution though!) who, like many Western elites, willfully will not embrace the roots of Christianity in Orthodoxy.

King Charles III recently changed his title as king from Defender of the Faith to Defender of Faith generically. While he has close ancestry and direct experience of Orthodox Christianity, he does not enter it, instead engaging with Islam and other world religions as well. This is the dilemma of many today who lack the faith to join fullywith our Lord’s Church and witness to it out of love for others.

Like many global Western elites, today’s English king seems to relativize faith intellectually, ignoring the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of Orthodoxy, in favor of an unholy amalgam of paganism, the occult, and superficial Christianity. Lord have mercy! Let us keep him and other similar Western cultural leaders in our prayers and not judge them without remembering our own sins and need of better aligning our lives to our Lord’s Church.

For without Orthodoxy, there is no way to make America or any other country great again or renewed today, for there will be no living spiritual meaning to life unless based on the foundation of Jesus Christ and His Body the Church. We see the corruption of the shifting sands of secularism or heterodox Christianity in which every individual claims to be a pope or all are told wrongly to follow the false pope of Rome. Again, many of these folks are kind people, but they are deluded to abandon the living tradition of the Body of Christ, the Church He established at Pentecost, the Church of St. Alban and of so many martyrs and holy people throughout the millennia of human history who form the Orthodox Church today spiritually. The fact that so many people don’t know about Orthodoxy is in fact our sin.

But our modest mission in a small way is involved in re-connecting the spiritual dots, so to speak, for the whole resurgent Orthodox mission to America, Britain, and many other countries around the world. You see, the open and brutal and massive persecution of Communism against Russian Orthodoxy in the past century created many martyrs and many exiles, such as our mission’s patron, St. John, whose repose in 1966 we commemorated yesterday. He actively worked as a Bishop after World War II to revive the Western consciousness of foundational saints like Alban of Britain as who they really were, Orthodox Christian saints, connecting converts and faithful to the Orthodox Church today as a living yet ancient tradition. He did so amid all the provocative cultural disruptions leading into the 1960s.

St. Alban like other global saints of Orthodoxy, like our St., John, is one of our spiritual forefathers and is part of our Church family, here in Appalachia as well as with my friends in the ROCOR convent of Gethsemane in Israel, or at the Romanian parish in Galway Ireland, or among the Orthodox in Kenya whom our mission has helped support.

But without understanding the real Orthodox tradition of saints such as St. Alban, one cannot fully access and heal the American tradition of “all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator.” The meaning is lost, or at best imperfect and flawed, outside the Church that Jesus Christ established to unit us in spiritual solidarity with one another. To raise ourselves and our young people in the safest possible spiritual environment, it must be in what the Bible calls the race or nation of Christians that is our Lord’s Body, His Church, Israel today. Once we recognize that, we can be more helpful in our faith and love for our neighbor at a deep level in our country, America, as well.

St. Nikolai Velimirovich of Serbia and Pennsylvania wrote,  “Remember that our greatest contribution to America is of a spiritual and moral nature. And that is precisely what America needs today. That is what every Christian country today needs most of all—in boundless measure. For all nations, especially the Christians nowadays traveling as if in a wilderness of confusion created by senseless materialism and its blind daughter atheism…. We live in very tragic times, which are made more tragic by easy-going and self-indulgent people who have never read the story of Sodom, of Laish, or of Capernaum.

“If I am correct in my observations, the greatest struggle of America these days is the struggle for the priority and superiority of spiritual and moral values over techniques and technological lordship: in other words, for predominance of the spiritual over the material, of goodness over cleverness. The Serbs often say of a clever man: ‘He is clever as the devil.’ They never say: ‘He is good as the devil.’

“America is constantly sounding the sympathetic watchwords: ‘dignity of man’ and ‘liberty of men and nations.’ But the deepest meaning of these watchwords can be found in the sacred teaching of Him without Whom we can do nothing. That meaning is found most explicitly in the threefold program of our Orthodox Church: spiritual vision, moral discipline, and competition in doing good.

“For the dignity of man—in other words, the superior value of man—has real and eternal meaning only if you know and acknowledge the Kingdom of Heaven as the true fatherland of all men, from which we originated and to which we are returning as children of one common Father, Who is in heaven. And freedom is most useful, joyful, and sacred if you exercise moral discipline over yourself and practice competition in doing good.

“These are the fundamentals upon which you can build your individual and communal happiness. And you have received these fundamentals as a glorious heritage, never to part with. By practicing this spiritual heritage in your daily life, you will become an adornment to America. And through you all Americans will come to know and appreciate our ancient Church of the East and her spiritual heroes, whom we are praising today.”

In today’s Gospel, the account of the demons running into the swine was used as a metaphor by the Russian Orthodox writer Dostoevsky for the nihilistic state of modern society, lacking a solid basis in faith and the Church. How to build a rooted Orthodox society by contrast requires both zeal in faith and humility in Christ, and not any utopian heresy, capitalist or communist.  We most empty ourselves in Christ and not assert ourselves with a false sense of rights. Then we will find true freedom in voluntary service to Him as the personal universal truth. Then we will learn the full joyful sorrow of loving our neighbor more than ourselves, and how transformative that is as the basis for the Church.

Brothers and sisters, let us remember that the Fourth of July on the Julian calendar is July 17 on the civil calendar, and that is the date, on the old Fourth, of the martyrdom of the Holy Royal Martyrs of Russia. Sacrificed to the nihilism of this age and the last of the major Orthodox royals, they exemplified a faith and love and forgiveness in meeting death that should be examples for us all. And they did so, yes, on the Fourth of July, pointing us, as did St. Alban in England so long ago, to a fuller and deeper sense of American freedom, and our unalienables rights from God to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, in the Orthodox Church.

When we look ahead from our nation’s 250^th anniversary today we may inevitably feel our thoughts turned to our children, biological or spiritual, the children of our parish, of our country, of the world. The children whom our Lord urged us to be like and to care for, lest a spiritual millstone be hung around our neck.

St. John, whom we commemorate today, cared for the children.

And in doing so, he really also cared for all of us. For wherever we are in life’s journey, young or old, we were children once, we pass the baton of life and faith to new generations until our Lord’s coming again. And we are all children of our God, who, even in terms of creation, know so little of the mysteries of God, while He as the Way, the Truth, and the Life beckons us to join Him, to partake of His Body and Blood in the mysteries of His Church, and to know Him more in both each day of this life and in the life to come.

Dear friends, St. John’s life, the life of our patron to whom we ask for prayers for our work and community and our families within our larger Church family here at St. John’s, and for our mission work, answered in hisfaith and holiness, in his example to us within the life of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and His Church, one of the great secular questions offered by modern atheists: Why do children suffer? Why does God allow this?

St. John was always so caring and attentive to children. This was one of the reasons he was regarded, sometimes critically, as a holy fool. He would attend to them in Church, he would seek them out in the streets of Shanghai where orphaned by war and subject to predators, on the streets at night he would gather them up to bring to his orphanage. He brought them out of war and communist hell in China to safety in the United States .He left indelible memories in the lives of so many children who became the hope of the Orthodox mission to America in generations gone by. He still sustains such hope.

When the atheist Ivan Karamazov asks his younger brother Alexei the monastic novice why God allows suffering, in Dostoevsky’s great Orthodox book The Brothers Karamazov, Alexei does not and cannot reply in a merely intellectual way.

The answer is in Alexei’s life of compassion for children, his help to them, listening to them, and his spreading to them of the gospel of love given to us by Jesus. This is the great and unassailable answer that St. John gave. For it is as we express Jesus’ New Commandment, to love one another more than ourselves, and apply it to children, that we build the Church of Christ, the Orthodox mission to America, generation by generation. Thus we see how we empty ourselves in Christ to find ourselves, and that the Church we build, so to speak, is really the uncovering of the Body of Christ in Whom we live and move and have our being, and our reaching out to children and the next generation to join us, the pouring out of ourselves in Him for one another, as He did for us, that we may all be one.

Meeting St. John as a refugee girl in San Francisco, Vera Sokolic said she knew right away he was a saint even as a child. “I suppose it was his warmth, his love. When he looked at you, his eyes would just shine. And you would never ever hear him say a harsh word about anyone…. The Bishop was always lovely with children, sometimes he’d just tap their heads with his staff and say: ‘Be obedient, be good,’ or ‘Don’t do that!.”

Likewise she recalled him coning to her family apartment for the yearly home blessing, bearing with him the world-famed wonderworking Kursk Root Icon, beneath which he died.

On that icon, which is on the high space of our altar area, and also represented in the icon of St. John before us, we see the Theotokos, the Mother of God, 14 years old according to Church Tradition, bearing the Christ child in her womb, surrounded by the prophets of old. Those holy prophets cared so for the coming generations by bearing and reporting prophecies given them, amid sore trials, of the birth of the baby Jesus to come.

Yet St. John with all his loving care could also be sober and even severe to his adult flock. Those who knew him recalled how seriously he took proper order in the altar. When the Russian community of San Francisco held a costume charity ball at Halloween, instead of attending Vigil, he showed up and silently walked around the party hall with his staff, looking at each. 

The next day in church we are told he preached with “holy indignation” and “flaming zeal” calling the faithful to a devout Christian life and denouncing the celebration as a “diabolic mockery.” They had missed a special service, the Vigil for the glorification of St. John of Kronstadt, a great modern Russian saint. They were in danger of losing their memory of the Orthodox tradition in worldliness in America. He was a stern father and also a loving barefoot sometimes seemingly disheveled stuttering holy man who never slept in a bed, who hardly slept in his asceticism, and who also loved children.

Vera recalled pushing through a crowd at a feast day and not being able to reach a place to partake in the banquet afterward, and how St. John noticed her on the edges far away and called her up to sit near the clergy.

During his time in Western Europe, hospitals knew about this bishop who could pray for the dying all night, who would pray at the bedside of a seriously ill person regardless of religious faith. In a Paris hospital, the servant of God Alexandra was lying sick, and the bishop was told about her.  He sent word that he would bring her communion. Lying in a room with 40 to 50 French people she was embarrassed as a Russian refugee to be visited by a ragged barefoot Russian Orthodox bishop. But the French lady on the nearest bed told her,  “How lucky you are to have such a priest. My sister lives in Versailles and when her children get sick, she chases them out on the street where Bishop John usually walks and asks him to bless them. After receiving the blessing, children get better immediately. We call him holy.”

At one of the Catholic congregations in Paris, a local priest told youths: “You demand evidence, you say that there are no miracles, no saints now. Why should I give you theoretical evidence when St. John Barefoot is walking on the streets of Paris today.”

Children, despite the saint’s usual strictness, were devoted to him, and any time of the day or night he could show up to comfort and heal them. Many times he showed up for those in distress even when his arrival and access was a surprise and seemed impossible.

Yet Vera also recalled how he would not tolerate popular American neckties among altar servers. It seems that they reminded him of nooses and of the many martyrs to the communist yoke. For as an exile first form Russia to China, and then from China ultimately to America, working with many refugee communities, he understood the seriousness of what is at stake in our faith for the children here and yet to come, for our own spiritual lives as children of God. It is a life and death seriousness, though one he approached with humility and love along with sobriety and urgency and strictness about salvation.

Brothers and sisters, our father among the saints St. John, may he be an example to us, in how to build and renew a country through our Orthodox mission. He was humble, loving, and utterly devoted to Christ and his neighbor, and lived in the world, not a monastery, but was a monastic. He lived among us. And he told his spiritual children to remember that even after his repose “I am alive,” that through asking for his prayers he will help us. How much more so we dedicated to his memory in this community should offer our lives and mission work to him and to the children, the children today and tomorrow in America. Let us also remember his sober strictness in the world about services and the importance of attending them for the sake of our children and all the next generation of the world, and ourselves as still God’s children. For the Church is a necessity for spiritual life and health and salvation. She is the hospital for our souls and those of our children. Let us not deny this care to the little ones, to ourselves, or to the many who still need to know the care of their mother the Church, the body of our Lord.

The Iroquois have a saying, to do all with the thought of the seventh generation to come. Let us even more as Orthodox Christians, with the gift given to us by God greater than all the world, keep in mind in all we do eternity, for ourselves, and for our children. Let us remember that each person we meet is made according to the image of God and is no mere mortal, but a child loved by our Lord. Then we shall build a great Orthodox mission to America, and with it a truly great nation, based on repentance and faith on the rock of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Happy Vidovan to our Serbian Orthodox brothers and sisters. That’s the day of remembrance today in the Serbian Orthodox Church for Saint Tsar Lazar the Great Martyr and the Serbian holy martyrs who fell during the Battle of Kosovo against the Ottoman Empire in 1389 (on St. Vitus’ Day, which is the source of the name Vidovan). Kosovo was the greatest battle of the late Middle Ages in all Europe, and marked the fighting to mutual destruction of two great armies, of the Orthodox Christian Serbs and the Muslim Ottoman Empire, during the twilight of the Byzantine Empire.

Known as a pious and virtuous noble youth, Lazar rose to prominence as the kingdom of Serbia seemed to collapse in the face of pressure from the Ottomans and internal fragmentation. He became Tsar of Serbia, and was known to be a leader who brought people together by his Christian qualities, including becoming a patron of many churches and new monasteries, hostels, hospitals, and Orthodox schools. His royal court was known as a refuge for scholars, iconographers, and craftspeople fleeing Ottoman oppression in the south. (This account of his reign here draws on that of St. Elisabeth Convent, Minsk: https://obitel-minsk.org/en/kosovos-hero-tsar-lazar-choosing-faith-over-throne.)

In the lands of Greece and southern Serbia, cities were burned, monasteries and churches destroyed, and rivers described as flowing with blood, in a holocaust of the faithful. St. Justin Popovich wrote that the invaders “were no longer satisfied with the payment of tribute and taxes by the Christians, but sought to completely subjugate and enslave all Christian peoples.” But fallen human nature and demonic spiritual warfare against the land of Serbia as a bastian of Orthodoxy kept bringing internal strife and betrayal to Tsar Lazar. A gold cross he wore prevented a stabbing by an assassin. An historical account tells of how Lazar’s own people continued “sinning and not turning to the One who changes all things.”

Meanwhile the Ottomans gathered a decisive force to overwhelm the remaining independent Christian lands. Lazar in response uttered a stirring proclamation: “Whoever is a Serb and of Serb birth, And of Serb blood and heritage, And comes not to the Battle of Kosovo, May he never have the progeny his heart desires, And let him be cursed from all ages to all ages!” But not all responded, partly out of fear and factions. Western Christians did not respond either, although Lazar was fighting to stem the tide of a Muslim invasion of Europe. As a history by St. Elisabeth’s Convent puts it drawing on traditional accounts, “Prophet Elijah visited Lazarus as a grey falcon on the eve of the final battle, offering him a choice between an earthly or heavenly kingdom: keeping his throne by surrendering to the Ottomans or suffering a bloody defeat on the battlefield. Lazar chose the eternal, declaring to his soldiers, ‘We die with Christ, to live forever.’”

His final battle broke out this day in 1389. A Serbian commander stole into the Turkish Sultan’s tent, killing him and causing chaos in the Turkish ranks. This was the first time a Turkish commander had been slain in a battle against Christians. The Tsar Lazar fought courageously, “bear[ing] sixteen wounds when he mounted his third horse, as the first two had been slain beneath him,” according to one chronicler. Yet the Turkish leader Bayazid, taking command from his slain father, captured and beheaded the Tsar and many Serbian commanders. Monks in the Church of the Ascension in Priština buried the fallen hero. Nearly a year later, his sons Stefan and Vuk, along with the clergy and the people, found his body incorrupt and emitting a beautiful fragrance. This was proof of his martyrdom for Christ, his godly life, and his sanctity. He was a ruler who in his philanthropy, unselfed leadership for his Christian people, and martyric death, indeed put aside all earthly care, as the Cherubic hymn urges us during Liturgy. His life reminds us of our Lord’s injunction to “Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you,” meaning all things needed for our salvation and sanctification. (Matthew 6:31).

As we approach our own Feast Day for Saint John this coming weekend, and America’s 250th birthday, this milestone in the Orthodox Church worldwide has important lessons for us here today in our country mission in Appalachian America.
First, our Serbian brothers and sisters have a special love for the Russian Orthodox spiritual tradition and for our Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, and we for them. The Serbian Church hosted ROCOR from the 1920s through the 1940s when it needed a home. I have experienced such warm friendship unearned from a Serbian priest in Pennsylvania, for example. Our ROCOR knew the joyful sorrow of worldly defeat and resurrection, like the Serbian Orthodox, in the Russian civil war and in exile and revival of Russian Orthodoxy in the diaspora and then after generations at home.

The Battle of Kosova is also a reminder to us that in Orthodoxy there is no offensive idealistic just war or Crusades as in the heterodox West, but that sometimes there are necessary defensive3 wars that must be prayerfully discerned to help the vulnerable and the faith, and pursued in repentance and piety. But it is a reminder too that there is always spiritual warfare for us as Orthodox Christians, in which we must be willing to empty ourselves into our Lord Jesus Christ, not to try to assert ourselves, for that is what our true enemy the Devil would wish. Putting our battles on a spiritual level transforms them with God’s help. Father Michael Pomazansky of blessed memory, a great teacher from the founding era of our seminary at Jordanville, wrote of how the historical books of the Old Testament feature much violence and warfare. Yet he said the Christian New Testament, the message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, transforms that Old Testament warfare by placing it on a spiritual level. It needs to be read first and foremost spiritually by us as Orthodox Christians today, just as we understand the fulfillment of biblical Israel to be the Orthodox Church, the Body of Christ, one holy apostolic and communal Church for all peoples, of which our humble country mission offers one fractal gateway.

The Southern Orthodox writer Walt Garlington has even made a comparison between the Battle of Kosovo and the Battle of Chancellorsville in relation to the fate of the American South during the Civil War. The Serbian Orthodox chose the heavenly kingdom, in his view, and the Southern Americans ultimately the earthly kingdom, and so in his view the death of Stonewall Jackson under friendly fire at Chancellorsville was a kind of providential sign of a secular destiny of defeat. https://confiterijournal.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-battles-of-kosovo-and.html

The Battle of Kosovo was also a foreshadowing of the passing of the baton of the civilizational nurturing of the Orthodox faith from Byzantium to the Slavic peoples. Less than a century later, Constantinople would fall. Soon Moscow would become known as “the third Rome” in her place. Today the Orthodox Church also commemorates Metropolitan Jonah of Moscow, who served in that position from 1438 to 1461. Metropolitan Jonah stood for the truth of our Lord’s Church against a false unity with Rome that led to the downfall of Constantinople to the Turks. In turn, he was elected as the first autonomous Metropolitan of Moscow, without approval from the Ecumenical Patriarchate, although the place of what became the Moscow Patriarchate was later recognized by all Orthodox churches. His role marked the start of the Russian Orthodox Church as a distinct local Church in world Orthodoxy, which today is the largest Orthodox Church in the world.

Let us consider lessons from Kosovo in our own personal spiritual lives. Reading the signs of the times is something our Savior enjoined upon us, and as Orthodox Christians this means especially the signs of our own lives, praying for self-discernment in humility, for wisdom, understanding, and counsel are all biblical virtues of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. A secular analogy lies in n the movie Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone, originally Godfather III, a classic American film. The title character, heir to a gangster family, has reached what he felt was the apogee of success in the elite worlds of business and heterodox Western religion. Yet he faces repeated efforts to destroy his struggle to become respectable, which come from layers of conspiring forces. At one point he says, “Our true enemy has not yet shown his face.”

This is something to remember in our Orthodox Christian life. When we face a personal or family or career battle, or even some challenge we feel in our relation to Church, stop in prayer and remember, “Our true enemy has not yet shown his face.” Whatever the situation that presents itself to us, the actual enemy ultimately is the devil and our own sin. The devil may be too busy to attend to us, but our own sin will. Thus even the Battle of Kosovo was not so much marked by the enemy the Turks as by a spiritual attack on the heart of Orthodoxy.

In Orthodoxy we are all at least partly responsible for each other’s sins. What we see in our friend or our seeming enemy, whether a family member, work colleague, community member, or even someone from Church, is really spiritually related to our own sin. That is the self-sacrificial spirit, the spiritual meaning, of the Battle of Serbia and the martyrdom or witness to the faith of Great Martyr Lazar and the holy martyrs of the Battle of Kosovo so long ago. Their self-sacrifice was the ultimate, for their country, for one another, and most of all for their faith, and in it their witness lay down a spiritual foundation in Christ for the resurrection of their country in Christian terms.

Let us consider as we approach the 250th Fourth of July and the celebration on the same day of our patron St. John, missionary to America, and renewer of Western saints, the true nature of freedom as the self-sacrifice in Christ evidenced by Great-Martyr Lazar. Our Lord taught us to love our enemies, because they bless us with our struggles, and because they as human beings are made also according to the image of God, Christ, and even the demons, while we fight to be free of their foul wiles, they are blessings in disguise. Like holy Prince Lazar and his army of Orthodox faithful warriors, let us daily go down in defeat with the Cross to the world, brothers and sisters, so that we may rise again in the Kingdom of God in the world to come and in the eighth day of God’s resurrection each day now and ever and unto the ages of ages Amen.

A sermon for the Sunday of All Saints of America, 7534/2026, from St. John’s Russian Orthodox Mission Church in Winfield, PA, by Priest Paul Siewers.

Not too far south of here in the Susquehanna Valley in Pennsylvania, an American president 160-plus years ago began his famous speech about the bloodiest battle in the history of the Western Hemisphere in this way:

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Today, we commemorate the fathers and mothers of the Orthodox Church, the pioneers who are helping to bring forth a deeper sense of America conceived in Liberty from the biblical principle that God created us according to His image, Jesus Christ.

Those spiritual forefathers and foremothers are All the Saints of America we commemorate today. Appropriately enough for this remembrance, it is Fathers Day also, and the start of the week in which our Church will be joining in the regional parade celebrating the 250^th anniversary of that secular founding commemorated so famously by President Lincoln at Gettysburg. His original words according to historians included the prayer “that this nation shall, under God, have a new birth of freedom.”

That new birth, brothers and sisters, by the prayers of the saints, has come most fully in the Orthodox Christian mission to America of which we are a part. For the most important celebration of freedom of all time is happening right here and now today, and every Divine Liturgy, in the Eucharist, in which we give thanks and offer the gifts and ourselves to God, Who offers Himself to us. 

Free today often has the commercial meaning of coming at no cost. But the real meaning behind that is that of a generous gift, a gift from God. God gives us the spiritual riches that underlie our blessings on earth. Chief among those blessings, exemplified by American saints from our St. John to St. Olga of Alaska, are the biblical virtues.

Those go by different names but most commonly the seven biblical virtues can be listed as wisdom, understanding, counsel, might, knowledge, piety, and fear of God.

They are gifts from God that we can freely receive and freely give, in the essence of what it means to be free. For these seven virtues are also the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit described in Scripture. The last three from the Old Testament, knowledge, piety, and fear of God, take on the more familiar names in the New Testament of faith, hope, and love.

Part of the freedom God gives is the free will he gives us to open our hearts to these virtues, which as gifts of the Holy Spirit really are grace, the uncreated activity of God, in our hearts.

Every day we can make right choices, which in biblical terms are just choices, to find true freedom in our lives and for our country. This is freedom from sin, and freedom to make the voluntary choice to serve Truth, Who is Jesus Christ. And we and our families through those choices can be pioneers of Orthodoxy in America, through the prayers of the saints. This is not a game but a serious challenge, a joyful sorrow. Ultimately it is a life and death choice. And that is why we want to help bring our families and friends to Christ in the Orthodox Church.

About three decades ago a small group of nuns arrived from Greece amid winter snows in the western Poconos about an hour east of us. They began a small monastery in a farmstead, holding services in a house. Today their community has grown to be the largest Orthodox women’s monastery in North America. It draws pilgrims in large numbers from New York City and elsewhere regularly. Many of us have visited there, Holy Protection Monastery, whose name for the Mother of God indicates also how she, the greatest of saints, has become also rooted and planted in America, so to speak.

Those sisters, some still living and known to us, are pioneers of the new American freedom in Orthodoxy, and they were guided by their spiritual father, Elder Ephraim, a saintly monastic from Greece who ended up in America, where he founded 17 monasteries. Holy Protection even gave its name originally to our little mission. Later as we established the site of our temple we took St. John as our patron. He is a Russian saint who became an American saint in the same effort to found a new birth of freedom in America. St. John’s influence extends to many of our lives, including his mentorship of Blessed Seraphim Rose, an American priest-monk whose writings and translations of Orthodox works in English influenced many of us converts. This is all pioneer work in that new birth.

In Orthodoxy we find salvation in community, as a Church family, in the Body of Christ. Yet always there is the gift of God’s freedom.

The early Vikings and Anglo-Saxons adapted a pre-Christian term for this freedom, called wyrd, which is where we get our modern word weird from. It means the supernatural that is natural that is the source of our freedom, which is also kind of what even the secular Declaration of Independence means when it bases freedom in our Creation and gifts from God. Wyrd meant how each of us can exercise freedom in larger networks of spiritual life and salvation. An analogy for wyrd would be riding a surfboard. The wave carries us on, which can represent our right choices and the virtues of our forebears and community, but also in the Church all the pioneer work of the saints that backs up our life as an Orthodox Christian. We ride that wave. But we also can turn our surfboard to steer a bit on it. With God’s help, He guides us to turn wisely. When we fall, we fall into His arms.

The Gospel readings for today remind us not to be stressed, but to trust in God’s providence, to take each day step by step, little by little, to go with His flow. Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness or justice, and all needful things will be given unto us, our Lord reminds us. Worry not about our daily needs. Give us this day our daily bread, as our Lord’s prayer reminds us. That can be translated from Greek give us this day our essential bread, what we really need.

The saints of America remind us of this. Whether in frozen Alaskan landscapes or in the coal region of Pennsylvania, in often stark physical conditions and sometimes hostile martyrdom, they found their needs met in the freedom given by God through His graceful virtues. Those saintly virtues of uncreated energy buoy us up, they in effect float us through the trials and limits of our struggles. Like stars at night that sparkle also in our heart, let us nurture those virtues as the free gifts of God, follow them, and make them the guidestars of our choices, so that even if we fall or make a mistake, we can recalibrate our life with them again and go further, with God’s help.

Today the Gettysburg Address is less known than it once was, as times change.

But it still is more famous in the secular world than the nuns of Holy Protection or the Orthodox saints of America, such as St. Alexis Toth of Wilkes-Barre, Saint Olga of Alaska, and our Saint John.

Still, crowns and thrones perish, kingdoms rise and wine. The hidden history of the leaven of our Orthodox faith is the most important history at work in our land, and over time of the ages and ages it will endure and be the history fully revealed and made known at the Second Coming of our Lord. Brothers and sisters, this also is our true story, yours and mineOne of the meanings of Logos, the Greek name for Christ, is Story. In the beginning is the Story, and the Story was God… and the Story became flesh and dwelt among us, and we behld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.

We live today in the Story Who is Jesus Christ with the saints of America. He is the true Story of our country and of every country on earth. May He give each day of our lives meaning and good energy in His uncreated grace, with the prayers of our fathers and mothers the Saints.

All Saints of America pray to God for us!

The Reading from the 

Holy Gospel according to Matthew,

§18 [6:22-33]

The Lord said: ‘The light of the body is the eye. If therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness! No man can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will hold to the one and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon. Therefore I say unto you, take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment? Behold the fowls of the air, for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature? And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They toil not, neither do they spin, and yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Therefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall He not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith? Therefore take no thought, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘Wherewith shall we be clothed?’ (For after all these things do the Gentiles seek.) For your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. But seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.’ 

Holy Gospel according to Matthew,

§ 10 [4:25-5:12]

At that time, there followed Jesus great multitudes of people from Galilee and from Decapolis, and from Jerusalem and from Judea, and from beyond the Jordan. And seeing the multitudes, He went up onto a mountain; and when He was set, His disciples came unto Him. And He opened His mouth and taught them, saying, ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. Blessed are they that are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. Blessed are ye when men shall revile you and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely for My sake. Rejoice and be exceeding glad, for great is your reward in Heaven; for so persecuted they the prophets who were before you.’ 

(Above) Illustration of Alexei Karamazov’s “Speech at the Stone” at the end of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, by Fritz Eichenberg. The “one good memory” he mentions as potentially salvific in life bears relation to the Symbol of Faith in the spiritual life of the Orthodox Christian.

In Orthodox Christianity, tradition is experiential, and is the believer’s communal way of knowing in our Lord Jesus Christ in His Church, His Body.

Our goal, as the Orthodox poet Donald Sheehan put it, commenting on the works of Dostoevsky as based in Orthodox tradition, is to empty ourselves in Christ, not to assert ourselves. A term in Slavic tradition for the communal nature of this tradition is sobornost, which means spiritual unity. The root of the word is a Slavonic gloss on the term catholic in the Greek Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. But in Orthodox fashion it indicates more the communal solidarity, the hidden spiritual unity, of catholicity, than the way the term catholic developed in the Latin West to mean universal spatiality. That fed global claims by sectarian schismatic and heterodox movements with emphasis on individualism, organizational centralization, and rationalism, a combination that paradoxically encouraged the global technocratic and consumerist secularism we face today.

But the way of knowing truth in the Orthodox Church always grows from and focuses on Jesus Christ as the Way, the Truth, and the Life, in His Body. For example, in the Church, there are only three men in history given the title Theologian (the Apostle John the Evangelist, and Saints Gregory the Theologian, and Symeon the New Theologian), and they all were given this for their holy experiential knowing and service in the Church, not academic degrees or knowledge divorced from the Divine Wisdom, Christ. The limited number thus granted that title is a reminder of this!

Both the Creed and the Russian-style Orthodox Prayer Rope known as the Lestovka serve, in different ways, to express this experiential way of knowing in Orthodox Christianity, as briefly outlined below.

(Above) Painting by Mikhail Nesterov “The Vision to the Youth Bartholomew”

The Symbol of Faith

The Orthodox Church’s main source of memory of Tradition, including Holy Scripture, arguably is found in the Symbol of Faith (the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed) repeated at every Divine Liturgy (usually sung, often with a bell ringing), and at Small Compline and other services. The Liturgical Tradition of the Church as a whole, such as the Odes at Matins, form an entire constellation of experiential memory of the Christian Tradition including Scripture. However, the Creed can be considered a condensed version, shaped by Ecumenical Church Councils, and providing a framework for Church Fathers and Elders as well as young children taught to memorize its 12 articles.

This can be seen in how a major Catechism of the Orthodox Church, St. Philaret of Moscow’s 19th-century text, focuses on unpacking for the catechumen each of the 12 articles of the Creed, and in how a major source of the heretical schism of Roman Catholicism from the Orthodox Church in the Middle Ages was the altering of the Creed in Catholicism to include the Filioque.

Alexei Karamazov in Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, which includes many themes of the Orthodox Christian faith in storytelling form, states that even one good memory may be enough to save a man. The Symbol of Faith, experientially used in Liturgy and often in private prayers such as Small Compline as a traditional evening prayer, or just in a prayerful repetition, is a pre-eminent example of that type of memory in the real life of the Orthodox Christian. In a non-Orthodox example from secular literature, the Anglican writer CS Lewis (who had an attraction to Orthodoxy late in life) wrote in his fictional The Silver Chair of children who are given a formula of simple directions to remember for their salvation in the story. Without the living Tradition of the Church, they mix up and forget those directions, until providentially reminded of them. So is the Creed to the believer.

(Above) A Lestovka or Prayer Rope made by the monks of St. Dionysius Monastery in Virginia, USA.

The Lestovka (Prayer Rope)

The Jesus Prayer, in short form “Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me,” is a preeminent way of remembering God and the faith in Orthodox Christianity, reflecting the experiential knowing of holiness, aspiring toward thesis, in our faith’s emphasis on ascetic struggle in synergy with the uncreated light of divine grace. It has been pointed out that the short prayer evokes the Holy Trinity, for in calling Jesus Lord it follows the leading of the Holy Spirit, and in referencing Christ, the Father’s anointing of the Incarnate Son one ffect, and in the name Jesus the Son Himself. In addition, the five words of the short prayer in Greek and Slavonic, or the shorter “Lord Jesus Christ mercy me” in colloquial English, remind us of the Apostle Paul’s comment that five words spoken in truth are better than long wordy prayers. The Jesus Prayer has long been a source of “getting the mind into the heart” and engaging in “prayer without ceasing” in Orthodoxy, as exemplified in the writings of the Church Fathers known as the Philokalia, the five-volume collection edited in Russian by St. Theophan the Recluse from the Slavonic version compiled by St. Paisius Velichovsky from Greek texts. Their work and the tradition of the Jesus Prayer helped shape the holiness of the Saint-Elders of Optina Monastery in Russia during the 19th and early 20th centuries, whose legacy still bears fruit and shines through the intervening history of huge persecutions and glorious martyrdoms during the Bolshevik Yoke.

In Russian tradition, a form of prayer rope developed by the faithful especially in the Old Believer tradition but now also increasingly popular among Orthodox Christians at large, is the Lestovka or Ladder. Like the Creed, but in a different way, it exemplifies experiential memory of the Tradition including Scripture. This involves personal use of the Prayer Rope in the left hand, focusing prayers through the “steps” of the leather circle of the Ladder, sometimes while Crossing one’s self with the right hand and also prostrations or bows. Such uses of the Prayer Rope may follow the “Optina 500” prayers or adapted versions, under the guidance of an experienced spiritual father.

A common version of the Lestovka includes preliminary steps involving Alleluia prayers and expressions of “Lord have mercy” related to smooth sections at the start and end indicative of our shared earthly experience. Then the actual loop of steps includes 12 for the Apostles, 38 for the weeks of gestation of our Lord in His Mother’s womb, then 33 for His years on earth, and 17 for the Holy Prophets (including the Forerunner John) who pointed to Christ’s coming. Each step encloses a tiny text of the Jesus Prayer. The whole loop of 100 is augmented by the preliminary steps and a step between each of the above sections, totaling 9 additional prayers, symbolizing the nine ranks of Angels in Church Tradition. Flaps indicate the Four Gospels and enclose reminders of the seven mysteries of the Church. Taken all together, the Lestovka as a focus for prayer serves as a reminder experientially of central aspects of Church Tradition including Scripture.

Developed of course in days before smart phones and wireless devices and AI, the Lestovka is a different and experiential sense of “wireless” knowing, distinct from increasingly oppressive secular technocracy and academic knowledge alike, which today seek to overwhelm us with denial of the Incarnation of Christ in what the Evangelist John called the spirit of Anti-Christ. That the gates of hell cannot prevail against our Lord’s Church, His Body, inheres in the Symbol of the Faith and the Prayer Rope as, again in different dimensions, reminders of the experiential and embodied epistemology of Orthodox Christianity. Among the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit developed in Holy Scripture, knowledge is identified with faith. May the Lord give us good strength and wisdom!