Our Lord God and Savior Jesus Christ said, “I have come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly” (John 10:10). Indeed, our Lord said He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. The Holy Prophet Moses, to whom Christ had revealed the Ten Commandments and His name “He Who is” and much else, had written much earlier, as recorded in Deuteronomy 30:15-16: “Behold, I have set before thee this day life and death, good and evil. If thou wilt hearken to the commands of the Lord thy God, which I command thee this day, to love the Lord thy God, to walk in all his ways, and to keep his ordinances, and his judgments; then ye shall live, and shall be many in number, and the Lord thy God shall bless thee in all the land into which thou goest to inherit it.”

Today our country struggles with global plague, civil unrest, paralyzing social division, economic depression, forest fires, tropical storms–and now even the threat of a reported meteorite hit to earth this fall around the time of the presidential election!

But Christians receive the grace of finding identity in Him, the source of our personhood, not in an essentialized or objectified identity based on race, ethnicity, class, culture, or sex, essentializing our self-willed fallen human passions and will to power. For millennia this good news has been the source of true freedom, which as the Russian Orthodox Christian philosopher S.L. Frank notes, is voluntary service to universal truth, in the Person of Jesus Christ: Loving God with all our heart, soul, and mind, and our neighbor as ourself.

St. Jonah of Hankou, who trudged across the Gobi Desert fleeing the atheist Communist scourge, to be of service to those in need in China in the 1920s, and who reposed in Christ helping a sufferer from typhoid fever, only to give solace and healing in a vision that same night to a crippled boy, wrote: “Podvig [ascetic spiritual struggle for God] is living for others.”

But how often today we are caught up with death rather than living, with death in the world of materialism and objectifying self-will, with a will to power in the world of our passions, rather than death to that world.

The Soviet dissident and Orthodox Christian Igor Shafarevich wrote a classic book The Socialist Phenomenon, recently reprinted, which details throughout history the death-wish inherent in chiliasm, the heresy that Archbishop Averky also detailed in commentary on the Revelation of Jesus Christ to St. John the Theologian. Chiliasm is the heresy of utopianism, seeking that which is not sustainable for fallen human nature, a perfect objectified world. Instead, efforts to establish such a world destroy the very justice and peace that those working for it claim to seek. It ends in a power trip for a few controlling the many. In the twentieth century, it left tens of millions dead and many more lives maimed.

Such is the world into which we seem to be heading in a new form of technologically controlled culture based in consumerism, according to the new book Live not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents by Orthodox writer Rod Dreher, whose title draws on a famous phrase by Shafarevich’s friend and fellow dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The “soft totalitarianism” of cultural Marxism in Western consumer capitalism and intellectual ideologies today — Antiracism, Antifa, Green New Deal movements; sexual revolutions of polyparenting, polyamory, and the neocolonial hegemony of secular-Eurocentric sexual anthropology — would erase true personhood in Christ, in the name of self-will. (Cultural Marxism is a shorthand term, used by some of its advocates to detail socialism that engages with cultural struggle, rather than Classical Marxism’s focus on economic class struggle.) But in doing so it paradoxically erases individuality in nihilistic “group think,” as Shafarevich’s history details.

This extends to young people being isolated from faith, biblical tradition, family, and even physical reality in “virtual” lives, as in the case of the Orthodox Christian boy James Younger in Texas, whose fate is now being played out in secular judicial, educational, and medical-psychological bureaucracies, in an effort to turn him into a girl. Real cosmological difference in the dignity of each person (as detailed by the Russian Orthodox Church in her statements on human dignity and the basis of the social concept) disappears in the consumerist trend toward virtual lives, with burgeoning group-sex and other practices that remove true individual love and family ties, as the sexual revolution moves in tandem with movements to establish atheistic culture. Such virtual lives (disembodied by separating the soul and the body and treating the latter as an isolated object or tool) also are more easily controlled by the perfection of high-tech “surveillance capitalism” and the “surveillance state” in today’s West.

Velikoretsky Procession of the Cross in Russia, an annual tradition that draws thousands today, after decades of attempted Communist suppression.

Basing identity in disembodied individual autonomy and self-will, essentializing the passions of fallen human nature outside a reasoned groundedness in larger realities, involves ultimately the erasure of traditions of faith and family and community. Such erasure is all in accord with cultural Marxism. The latter seeks to overturn hierarchy and patriarchy and authority. But in the process it erases the mystery taught in Orthodox Christianity of sobornost. The latter, meaning spiritual unity, involves living at the intersection of mystical hierarchy and conciliarity, which shapes authentic human personhood in Christ. Sobornost in Christ heals the deepest epidemic we face, of loneliness and isolation, which the philosopher Hannah Arendt correctly identified — together with the social, cultural, and physical terror accelerating in the world today — as foundational to totalitarianism. The sexual and cultural and economic anarchy at the heart of “woke consumerism” is only the stepping stone to attempted total oppression and conditioning of humanity. Paradoxically this movement operates in the name of the sovereign individual but ends in enforced homogeneous ideology, as the Old Anglican scholar C.S. Lewis foresaw in his classic 1943 book The Abolition of Man. Lord have mercy.

Homily on the first Sunday of the Dormition Fast, 3 August 7528 (civil calendar Aug. 16 2020)

Greetings in the Lord.

We stand in the beginning days of our summer Lent and Pascha, in which we remember the falling asleep of the Mother of our God, our Mother in the Church, our Most Holy Lady Theotokos.

The Holy Forefather and Prophet Solomon wrote that, “He who gathers crops in summer is a prudent son, but he who sleeps during harvest is a disgraceful son.”

Indeed, during this fast we soon also will celebrate the Feast of the Transfiguration of our Lord, bringing first fruits of the harvest to the temple for a blessing.

Summer at Tall Timbers, a local old-growth forest and nature preserve, where one can find shelter from the heat in cool dells, and where our mission has gathered for parish picnics in the past.

Let us in these challenging yet joyful times of summer harvest be faithful sons and daughters of our Mother, also called the Bride of God, a title that she shares with the Church that she helped nurture during the time after the Ascension of her son, our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ, when Pentecost brought the uncreated energies of God, His grace and favor, into our innermost souls in the Body of Christ His Church.

All this was made possible too by her mothering of our Lord, about which the Paraklesis service often sung during this Dormition season says, “You are a gold-entwined tower and a twelvewall encircled city, a shining throne touched by the sun, a royal chair of the King, O unexplainable wonder! You that milk-feed the Master.”

The greatest ancient pagan sages Plato and Aristotle wondered at whether truth was transcendent and to be known through deduction from universal principles, as said Plato, or through induction from physical experience, as said Aristotle. Yet the birth of Christ to the Virgin, and the Cross, brought together the transcendent and the physical in the person of our Lord.

This ushered in the Holy Wisdom of Christ as experiential knowing, that mix of induction and deduction in the intuitive and embodied faith of the saints, the greatest of whom is Our Lady.

The summer season of fasting for her great feast begins with the Procession of the Cross on August 1 of the Julian Calendar, a time of looking to the Cross for healing, and traditionally continues with regular celebration of the Paraklesis service asking her intercession for us as our Mother and the greatest of saints, for just as our mothers would most fervently pray for us, so she does to the utmost when we ask her help.

The start of the Dormition Fast also marks the anniversary of the Baptism of Rus’ under St. Prince Vladimir the Great, the beginning of the summertime of the Church as what is called the Third Rome became established as the last great Christian Empire, the heir to the Christian Roman Empire of Byzantium in Russia. To Russia we owe the transmission of Orthodox Christianity to us in North America first through the Alaska mission and then through saints of the diaspora here, most notably our patron St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco and his disciple Blessed Seraphim of Platina, among many others of different ethnic and national backgrounds who have helped to evangelize North America.

Our mission is part of that story, and as we live in the autumn of the latter days, after the fall of the last great Orthodox empire a little more than a century ago to the spirit of anti-Christ expressed in atheistic communist totalitarianism, we must seek the prayerful intercession of our mother, our Lady the most Holy Theotokos, in whole-hearted devotion to the cause of evangelism through our mission.

Last night we did so as we often did before her icon of Port Arthur, an icon which is known both as the Icon of Unachieved Victory and the Icon of the Triumph of the Theotokos. Through her intercession, defeat is turned into victory, and the retreat from Russia before the Communists has been turned into a spiritual victory as Orthodox Christianity has spread around the world and now renews herself in Russia as well.

St. Luke the Surgeon of Crimea, whose intercession we ask in this time of pestilence and upheaval, witnessed against the spirit of anti-Christ in his time as both Bishop and surgeon under the Soviets, and when the time came for his repose, all efforts by the atheist authorities to suppress his funeral failed, as the outpouring of the people turned into a massive procession through the streets that the Bolsheviks could not stop.

In a sermon on the Dormition, St. Luke recalled the words of our Savior,

“Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears My word and believes Him who sent Me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life” (John 5:24). That is the hope and example and help given us by our Mother in Christ the Theotokos.

The beginning of the Dormition feast, in addition to the traditional procession of the Cross, the remembering of our Lady, and the anniversary of the Baptism of Rus’, is also in Russia a festival of honey, the first fruits of the harvest. Let us remember too that we live in sweet harvest time despite the trials of these latter days. One of the phrases used to describe the Theotokos is the spiritual Paradise, and she is depicted in the icon of the Joy of those who Sorrow beloved by St. John as in a spiritual garden, with Mount Athos often described as her garden. Let our mission be her garden too, and let us as followers of her son delight in our role as humble gardeners within the field of harvest of the Church of her Son.

The icon of the Joy of All Who Sorrow

Just as human parents and godparents and our spiritual fathers and mothers in the Church may protect us through prayer and other help in ways that we do not fully realize growing up, so too does Our Lady when we ask her intercession before her Son. The Joy of All Who Sorrow icon at our home chapel is charred by fire around the edges. It was with me when, just three years after my baptism into the Orthodox Church, I was returning from a long-distance trip to a job interview, and my car caught fire on the highway. The car was a wreck, books and files in it burned, but the icon was saved, and I was saved, through the prayers of the Theotokos on my behalf, also amid generally difficult and challenging times at that point, and in spite of my many sins. Through God’s grace I was given the job, and at the other end of the road on that trip waiting for me was my own beloved, whom I soon married, and we moved here, where our sons were born, and through God’s grace and the prayers of Our Lady we joined in this community all of us together, this Church family. Not coincidentally, our first name for our mission was Holy Protection, for her protection, taken from the monastery near here that commemorates her. And now we are blessed with the name of St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco, who had such special reverence for her, that he wrote a classic little book that we should all study about the Mother of God in Christian teaching and history and experience, and reposed beneath the Kursk Root icon of the Mother of God, as he prayed for the evangelizing of North America. Now more than ever is the time for that evangelism, it is so needed. We seek the intercession of the Mother of God in our fervent efforts to bring our friends and family into the ark of the Church in these difficult times.

St. John Damascene wrote centuries ago of the Dormition Feast:

“Come, let us depart with her. Come, let us descend to that tomb with all our heart’s desire. Let us draw round that most sacred bed and sing the sweet words, “Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Hail, predestined Mother of God. Hail, thou chosen one in the design of God from all eternity, most sacred hope of earth, resting-place of divine fire, holiest delight of the Spirit, fountain of living water, paradise of the tree of life, divine vine-branch, bringing forth soul-sustaining nectar and ambrosia. Full river of spiritual graces, fertile land of the [210] divine pastures, rose of purity, with the sweet fragrance of grace, lily of the royal robe, pure Mother of the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, token of our redemption, handmaid and Mother, surpassing angelic powers.” Come, let us stand round that pure tomb and draw grace to our hearts. Let us raise the ever-virginal body with spiritual arms, and go with her into the grave to die with her. Let us renounce our passions, and live with her in purity, listening to the divine canticles of angels in the heavenly courts. Let us go in adoring, and learn the wondrous mystery by which she is assumed to heaven, to be with her Son, higher than all the angelic choirs. No one stands between Son and Mother. This, O Mother of God, is my third sermon on thy departure, in lowly reverence to the Holy Trinity to whom thou didst minister, the goodness of the Father, the power of the Spirit, receiving the Uncreated Word, the Almighty Wisdom and Power of God. Accept, then, my good-will, which is greater than my capacity, and give us salvation. Heal our passions, cure our diseases, help us out of our difficulties, make our lives peaceful, send [211] us the illumination of the Spirit. Inflame us with the desire of thy son. Render us pleasing to Him, so that we may enjoy happiness with Him, seeing thee resplendent with thy Son’s glory, rejoicing for ever, keeping feast in the Church with those who worthily celebrate Him who worked our salvation through thee, Christ the Son of God, and our God. To Him be glory and majesty, with the uncreated Father and the all-holy and life-giving Spirit, now and for ever, through the endless ages of eternity. Amen.”

Today we hear much about what is wrong with American academia.

But three American lives tell us much of what is right about its heritage.

I was reflecting on them as I returned from a three-week stay at Holy Trinity Russian Orthodox Monastery and Seminary in Jordanville, NY, near Cooperstown. There I woke up most days to start at 4 a.m. helping the serving Priest (Fr. Anatoly, Fr. Cyprian, Fr. Seraphim, or Fr. Theophylact) prepare for the early morning Divine Liturgy, beginning our entrance prayers together by candlelight in the darkness of the beautiful and historic Cathedral. The saints surrounded us in iconography, and the dedicated figures of the priest-monks spoke to the centrality of the daily liturgical cycle. It is hard there not to feel at moments the presence of angels during the services.

Returning to a different temporality at the start of my university’s semester, I reflected on a different kind of educational dedication, evidenced in a pluralistic secular world of modern American education, with its roots in Christian faith. Three graduates of our university illustrated in their lives that dedication to the best of the liberal arts in the modern world, springing from the seven liberal arts developed in Late Antique Christian culture of the “Hellenic-Christian synthesis” at Constantinople and elsewhere, whose ripple effects long after reached places like our campus in northern Appalachia, which was originally a Baptist college when founded in 1846.

Here are the three examples, very briefly presented:

—Andrew Gregg Tucker, Class of 1862, whose grave near campus is pictured below, gave his life at the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863 supporting the American Republic’s ideals of liberty and justice in what Abraham Lincoln at the battlefield a few months later called “this nation under God.”

—The Rev. Edward McKnight Brawley, Class of 1875 (M.A. 1878), founded  institutions of higher learning exemplifying a positive relation between faith and liberal arts education, as a pioneering African-American educator and Baptist clergyman in the era after the Civil War.

—George Henry Ramer, Class of 1950, who as a U.S. Marine gave his life in the Korean War resisting Communist totalitarian oppression, and received posthumously the Congressional Medal of Honor. He died helping his unit members survive in the middle of combat.

There are many problems and flaws with the history of American higher education — notably in recent times the large-scale adoption nationally of forms of cultural Marxism by many American academics as their educational compass, ideologies seeking to erase the cultural Christianity that nurtured the liberal arts while promoting systems that ultimate in a materialistic will-to-power obscuring the tradition. But the lives of the three figures above should inspire us to remember the greatness of the legacy of the liberal arts even in modern America, and to recommit ourselves to the difficult task of preserving, renewing, and handing on that tradition, amid all our current challenges in the mid-twenty-first century.

Recently my hometown of Chicago, where my great-grandfather was in the Wigwam at the floor-stomping nomination of Abraham Lincoln as Republican candidate for President in 1860 at Lake at Wacker, raised its iconic river bridges to head off looter-rioters in a milestone of America’s current civil unrest.

To borrow the language of the cultural revolutionaries, we are in a crisis of secularness that requires antisecularism. Those pretending neutrality are guilty of secular nationalism. There must be discrimination against secularness and a confession of its guilt.

These are the flipped lessons, as authority collapses and cultural revolution comes to the republic, of the woke ideology of antiracism and its twins Antifa and the Green New Deal, all covers for the current ascendance of cultural Marxism. For those causes currently, voices like Ibram X Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, Mark Bray, and the Sunrise Movement, in shallow textbooks masking partisan ideology, provide the socially acceptable and elite-endorsed manifestos for the destruction of America as an historic constitutional republic “under God,” as Abraham Lincoln summed it up.

But what is needed instead is the harder recognition from self-reflection and individual sacrifice that, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn noted of Russia’s calamity in the last century leading to totalitarianism and cultural genocide, it is the forgetting of God that led us into the current crisis. With each person acting as their own god or idol, and raising their own idols of race or sex or ideology or a combination, comes the atomization that the Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt noted leads to totalitarianism — accompanied by the terror of meaninglessness and unfettered self-assertion. In the American case, we want it all and revolution too, as consumerist-radicals.

The result, Solzhenitsyn concluded, is the ethos of “survive at any price” and “only results matter,” which leads to the “permanent lie” of Arendt’s “banality of evil”–a virtual reality that becomes accepted as the only idolatrous (and false) truth. That “permanent lie” ends in the “egotocracy” that Solzhenitsyn saw as the self-destructive finale of nihilistic-scientistic socialism: Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, etc.

From the 1929 book Tintin in the Land of the Soviets (English edition), the classic first adventure of Tintin, by Hergé

The “soft” or “cultural” totalitarianism America faces thankfully hasn’t involved much physical violence, at least yet, but has involved the capitalistic American equivalent of professional, social, media, and economic force. One collateral target recently was my friend and fellow Orthodox Christian John Kass, lead columnist at the Chicago Tribune for more than two decades. He wrote a column criticizing truthfully the lenient law-enforcement officials, the elected prosecutors, who have been contributing to the anarchistic climate in Chicago and elsewhere. The most prominent have received campaign contributions from billionaire provocateur George Soros, in an effort whose effect has been to weaken the authority of the criminal justice system and open the door to anarchy. A group of “woke” reporters at the Tribune issued a statement accusing Kass of anti-Semitism, of which there was absolutely no evidence, but based on the canard that Soros is of Jewish background. Kass’ column was removed from page 3 into the back of the newspaper, based on an obvious pretext to obscure a “non-woke” traditional voice before the presidential election. But he stands unbowed before the mob.

Kass’ voice is of national stature and the last remnant of the tradition of the Chicago Tribune as a conservative newspaper, going back to the days of Col. McCormick, who built Tribune Tower as a monument to American freedom and faith, including freedom of the press, featuring a statue of Nathan Hale. Tribune Tower recently was sold by its conglomerate media owner and the newsroom moved, so as not to have witnessed the disgrace of the mistreatment of Kass’ voice of freedom.

The Chicago Tribune’s outstanding (and Orthodox) columnist John Kass, preparing for the Orthodox Pascha feast in a past year. Below him, Nathan Hale at Tribune Tower.

In related news, this week Kamala Harris was made the stalking horse for the US presidency as vice presidential running mate of soon-to-be-octogenarian Joe Biden. A junior senator of a few years she questioned the association of a Catholic judicial nominee with the Knights of Columbus, among other negative stances on religious freedom. Harris joins a presidential candidate who considers transgenderism to be the civil rights issue of our day. Both stands indicate the increasingly immersive nature of secularness in our culture, and how hostility to traditional Christian faith undergirds the current revolutionary anarchism of our cultural moment, as Chicago put up the bridges and John Kass’ column went into internal exile.

Chicago has a complex history that I have experienced in various decades and different neighborhoods, as urban affairs writer for the Chicago Sun-Times and as a child attending Black churches around the West Side on Sundays with my school principal father. The 1995 book The Lost City, by the journalist Alan Ehrenhalt, illustrates the virtues of strong communities in 1950s Chicago, in that era of the Greatest and Quiet Generations, despite grievous sins of racial segregation, corruption, and materialism.

That complexity of Chicago history is part of the history of human community, in a realm of fallen human nature in the struggle for virtue through faith.

“There is no easy way to have an orderly world without somebody making the rules by which order is preserved,” writes Ehrenhalt. “Every dream we have about re-creating community in the absence of authority will turn out to be a dream in the end….”

He added:

There is no point in pretending that the 1950s were a happy time for everyone in America. For many, the price of the limited life was impossibly high. To have been an independent-minded alderman in the Daley machine, a professional baseball player treated unfairly by his team, a suburban housewife who yearned for a professional career, a black high school student dreaming of possibilities that were closed to him, a gay man or woman forced to conduct a charade in public — to have been any of these things in the 1950s was to live a life that was difficult at best, and tragic at worst. That is why so many of us still respond to the memory of those indignities by saying that nothing in the world could justify them.

It is a powerful indictment, but it is also a selective one … Our collective indignation makes little room for the millions of people who took the rules seriously and tried to live up to them, within the profound limits of human weakness. They are still around, the true believers of the 1950s, in small towns and suburbs and big-city neighborhoods all over the country, reading the papers, watching television, and wondering in old age what has happened to America in the last thirty years. If you visit middle-class American suburbs today, and talk to the elderly women who have lived out their adult years in these places, they do not tell you how constricted and demeaning their lives in the 1950s were. They tell you those were the best years they can remember. And if you visit a working-class Catholic parish in a big city, and ask the older parishioners what they think of the church in the days before Vatican II, they don’t tell you that it was tyrannical or that it destroyed their individuality. They tell you they wish they could have it back. For them, the erosion of both community and authority in the last generation is not a matter of intellectual debate. It is something they can feel in their bones, and the feeling makes them shiver.

Another Orthodox Christian commentator, Rod Dreher, cited the above passages from Ehrenhalt’s book recently in discussing islands of conservative Christian culture under siege today in places like Iowa, often unaware of their impending collision with cultural revolution.

In the end the degradation of culture by consumerism and modernism, materialistic careerism, technocracy, the sexual revolution, the revolt of the elites and their attraction to atheistic cultural Marxism and scientism, and the corruption in the welfare machine of nationalized big-city politics, proved more decisive than the elements of community that Ehrenhalt saw in old Chicago. I experienced those elements in part growing up with their mixture of deep sins and virtues. I knew them in my grandparents, including my grandfather the carpenter and building-contractor who had grown up on a truck farm in the city the son of immigrants. My parents grew up amid that community as children of the Depression who commuted to Chicago Teachers College and served in inner-city public schools, as did also-hardworking African-American colleagues of theirs whose families I knew growing up. It was the setting of the work of one of the most prominent progenitors of modern American conservatism, Richard M. Weaver, who while an acolyte of the Southern agrarians authored his most famous writings, such as his critique of materialistic modern American culture in Ideas Have Consequences, in post-World War II Chicago. Today I recognize the echoes of Ehrenhalt’s “lost city” still in the journalism of John Kass, who grew up at the butcher store of his immigrant family on Chicago’s South Side: Greek-Americans who had fled Turkish and Communist persecutions.

One thing is certain of our current American crisis, as Solzhenitsyn noted: All these things now happen because we have forgotten about God.

In Soviet Russia and Communist China and elsewhere, it led to tens of millions of deaths., Where will it lead today?

Without the spiritual traditions that underlay the founding of the American republic, the republic cannot survive, and her deep roots of authentic community among families and neighbors cannot thrive to support her.

So the bridges go up, the anarchy will spread, and in the end the cultural totalitarianism now enveloping us will seem as a permanent reality.

But, Lord have mercy, it still will not be the truth.

For as Solzhenitsyn’s life and work showed, at great cost, this too shall pass.

Until the Lord comes.

P.S. As a postscript to this reflection, a friend reminded me afterward that it was written and posted on the day on which the Church commemorates Benjamin, Metropolitan of Petrograd, who in 1922 became a martyr of Christ to Communist terror. This iconic photo depicts his steadfast faith in the face of totalitarian-atheistic cultural revolution.

The holy hierarch-martyr said at the trial: “I do not know what sentence you will pass upon me—life or death—yet whatever your pronouncement, I will raise my eyes upward with the same reverence, make the sign of the Cross (here he crossed himself broadly) and say, “Glory to Thee, O Lord God, for all things!”

Then he was shot.