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 250th 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.