When we look ahead from our nation’s 250th 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.