This weekend marks the commemoration in the Orthodox Church of the Holy Royal Martyrs of Russia. It is 104 years this Sunday since the Russian Tsar and his family and loyal retainers will killed by the godless Bolsheviks, ushering in the Red Terror and an era of totalitarian mass murder and cultural genocide. Memory eternal! And may the Lord Jesus Christ our God and Savior give us wisdom and strength today and ever-vigilance to remain faithful to His Church in these latter days.

Their deaths led to their glorification and their recognition around the world as Saints in an era that would see the rebirth of the Orthodox Church in Russia. Four years ago our mission parish in central Pennsylvania commemorated the centennial of their martyrdom with an Akathist service at Rooke Chapel at Bucknell University. Here are words from our mission’s patron, St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco, from 1957 of special relevance today.

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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 “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.

In raising up prayers for the repose of his soul, we pray also for Tsars Paul I and Alexander II, who were likewise slain in March. And we pray for the forgiveness of the Russian people of the grave sin of betrayal and regicide. Woe to those who call evil good and good evil. Before us, before the Russian people, lies the path of resurgence — which is the path of consciousness of sin and repentance.

For the rebirth of Russia, all political and other programs of unification are in vain: what Russia needs is the moral renewal of the Russian people.

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.

A few unworthy thoughts on the commemoration this Sunday (the Fourth after Pentecost, 6/28/7530 [7/10/2022 civil calendar]) of the Finding of the Relics of the Venerable Elder Ambrose of Optina in 1998.

There are many commemorations of blessed and holy saints each day on the Orthodox Church calendar. Today’s includes the relics of Elder Ambrose of Optina. He lived on this earth from 1812 to 1894, and became perhaps the best known of the hesychastic Elders of Optina (seen in the icon above, including Elder Ambrose), a monastery in western Russia in the region of Kaluga. The name Optina comes from a term meaning “living together” and reminds us of the Russian spiritual term sobornost or mystical unity and solidarity. Perhaps dating to the 15th century, the monastery played an important role in the spiritual history of the Russian Orthodox tradition and on Orthodoxy in America, even for our small mission in central Pennsylvania.

A Pravmir website article (source for much of the below along with some additional accounts) tells us that holy Fathers made the Optina Hermitage a focus for the powerful renewal movement that spread through the Church in Russia beginning early in the nineteenth century, and even into the atheist persecutions of the twentieth century. Saint Paisius Velichkovsky helped bring the almost-lost hesychastic tradition of Orthodox spirituality to Russia in the eighteenth century with the Slavonic Philokalia, and his labors found in Optina Monastery a ‘headquarters’ from which the practice spread throughout the Russian land. The Optina Elders were spiritual masters who became renowned throughout the Orthodox world for their holiness and spiritual gifts.

Of them Elder Ambrose later became as mentioned perhaps the best known historically. The sixth of eight children, the future Elder had a lively personable character which conflicted with his spiritual yearnings. A serious illness helped him to resolve his inner struggle. He arrived at Optina in 1839 when the monastery was spiritually in full bloom. Guided at first by Elder Leonid and then by Elder Makary who chose him as his cell-attendant, he made rapid spiritual progress. After only three years he was tonsured and in another three years he was ordained hieromonk. Illness forced him into semi-reclusion for several years, enabling him with great profit to concentrate on the Jesus Prayer and to experience the meaning of hesychia, the silence of the soul before God. Plagued by a weak constitution for the rest of his life, he continued nevertheless to expend every effort at first in assisting Elder Makary with the translation of the Holy Fathers, with his correspondence, and in conveying his counsel to pilgrims, and later as an elder in his own right.

For 30 years alter Elder Makary’s death, Elder Ambrose was Optina’s principal starets. Countless pilgrims streamed to his cell, and even when he was thoroughly exhausted and had to receive them lying in bed, he never turned away anyone in need of soul-profiting counsel. Men’s souls held no secrets from him; abundant testimony exists of his clairvoyance. He always adapted his advice to the individual and no one’s problem was considered too insignificant.

Dostoevsky found in Elder Ambrose a living example of the Christian ideal, while his younger colleague Elder Nektary called him “an earthly angel and a heavenly man.” Indeed, he was seen more than once surrounded by uncreated light, a sign of transfiguration and citizenship in paradise.his

Elder Ambrose was a model for Elder Zosimas in The Brothers Karamazov, a book that has helped bring many Americans to Orthodoxy, including in our mission. Here is an example of one of Elder Zosimas’ teachings from the novel:

Much on earth is concealed from us, but in place of it we have been granted a secret, mysterious sense of our living bond with the other world, with the higher heavenly world, and the roots of our thoughts and feelings are not here but in other worlds. That is why philosophers say it is impossible on earth to conceive the essence of things. God took seeds from other worlds and sowed them on this earth, and raised up his garden; and everything that could sprout sprouted, but it lives and grows only through its sense of being in touch with other mysterious worlds; if this sense is weakened or destroyed in you, that which has grown up in you dies.

The real-life Elder Ambrose gave many wise teachings, a number of which recorded in his Life in the Elders of Optina book series of St. Herman of Alaska Monastery Press in California. That Press and Monastery, co-founded by Father Seraphim Rose of blessed memory, were significantly inspired by the legacy of the Optina elders, which also had touched some spiritual supporters of the American mission. The work of Father Seraphim, originally blessed by our mission’s patron St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco, also has helped bring many Americans into Orthodoxy, including again some in our mission.

In Elder Ambrose’s Life are collected some of his words, includging:

Where it is simple, angels number a hundred and one; but where it is complicated there are none…. Where there is no simplicity, there is only emptiness.

To those who said they couldn’t do something, he told a story about a merchant who would always say can’t do it, can’t do it, I’m weak. Once the merchant had to travel in Siberia. The merchant rode wrapped in two fur coats in a sledge. He dozed off one night and opened his eyes and saw something glowing like twinkling stars. It was the eyes of wolves. He bounded from the sledge and up into a tree, forgetting the weight of his fur coats, an incredible feat.

“A requested cross is hard to carry,” Elder Ambrose said. “It is better to give yourself over to God’s will in simplicity.” He added, quoting the Apostle Paul: “Who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it.” (p. 247, Elder Ambrose of Optina, St. Herman of Alaska Press).

On this date in 1998 the relics of Elder Ambrose were recovered in the re-founded Monastery at Optina, which had been closed by the Communists who sought to erase its history and memory across generations. The finding of the relics remind us of the ever-resilient life of the Church of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the continuing spiritual power and impact of the Prayer of the Heart practiced by Elder Ambrose and others in the Optina tradition.

In ending, let us say in our hearts the Prayer of the Elders of Optina:

O Lord, give me strength to face with serenity everything that this day will bring. Grant me to entrust myself fully to Your holy will. Every hour of this day teach me and support me. Whatever news I may receive during the day, teach me to accept it with peace of mind and with firm conviction that everything is according to Your holy will.

In all my words and actions guide my thoughts and feelings. In all unexpected events, do not let me forget that everything is sent by You.

Teach me to deal sincerely and wisely with every member of my family, bringing confusion or sorrow to none.

O Lord, give me strength to bear the weariness of the coming day and all the events of this day. Guide my will and teach me to pray, to believe, to hope, to endure, to forgive and to love. Amen.

We chanted “Memory eternal” for our beloved Arch-Pastor Metropolitan Hilarion on the 40th day of his repose, the end of the formal period of prayers for the dead in the Orthodox Church, on Friday June 11 on the Church calendar (June 24 on the civil calendar). Vladyka Hilarion had blessed the start of our little mission in rural central Pennsylvania seven years before, and guided her growth. He was a true shepherd of our flock and of many others around the world, in his work as First Hierarch of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad (ROCOR). From the first, as newcomers to ROCOR from another Orthodox jurisdiction, which had balked at setting up a mission in our small town, we felt his kindness and prayerful care.

This same day for a “final farewell” for him, in terms of a Church service, was also the summer feast of the famous Kursk Root icon, a palladion of the Russian White Army in the civil war against the atheist Bolshevik oppressors of the Church, and chief icon of the Holy Synod that Metropolitan Hilarion headed, now based at the Manhattan home of the Synod where Vladyka lived in his last years and reposed. Throughout her history, the icon has symbolized the triumph of faith over worldly oppression, showing forth fulfillment of the long-prophesied “Sign” of the Lord that a Virgin would give birth to our Lord and Savior and God. Her summer feast on the ninth Friday after Pascha (the Orthodox Easter), coinciding this year with the 40-day prayers for Vladyka Hilarion, also fell on the date of the epic announcement of the historic overturning of the U.S. Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade.

Roe v. Wade‘s enshrinement in 1973 of an asserted “human right” to abortion in the Constitution of the modern world’s wealthiest nation encouraged a culture of disposable life, inimical to the ancient Christian message of respect for life embodied in the icon and Metropolitan Hilarion’s life in that tradition. Under the materialistic legal regime established by Roe v. Wade, millions of children were sacrificed in officially sanctioned slaughter, larger in scale than the sacrifices of children by the Molochites in the Old Testament. Great has been the suffering for many children, mothers, fathers, and families, with spiritual wounds and sins too often un-repented-of by society at large, Lord have mercy on all! Great remains the need now for caring for those in need and their children. May we as Orthodox Christians turn toward Our Lady the Most Holy Mother of God, asking her prayer and intercession with her Son for all in need, beginning with ourselves, and for our right response.

The three events on the same day were linked spiritually and in remembrance. The type of depiction of the Theotokos in the Kursk Root Icon is called “the Mother of the Sign” because it highlights fulfillment of the prophecy of the Holy Prophet Isaiah, of that Sign from the Lord that a Virgin would conceive the Christ, the Logos, in her womb. The embodied Sign, Logos, the child Jesus Christ, fully God and fully man, came forth from her bodily, in a fathomless and wonderful mystery of redemption and care.

The Kursk Root icon depicts the Theotokos with Him before her, the Lord of Hosts above, and around her nine prophets who wrote about the birth of Christ centuries before, namely (clockwise starting on the top right) King Solomon, Prophets Daniel, Jeremiah, Elijah, Habakkuk, Judge Gidon, Prophets Isaiah, Moses, and King David. How great a cloud of witnesses across many generations! They foresaw the coming of the Messiah even in distant and dark times. In that foundational reality of the Christian faith lay the ultimate underscoring of the holiness of birth and babies, both a divine guarantee and historical reminder of the dignity of each human being, despite human tragedies and sins.

The dark and troubled times of the Old Testament trajectory toward the birth of Christ, illustrated in the icon, finds its echo in the history of the icon as well. As the ROCOR Synod website’s history of the icon notes, the Tatars had ravaged Russian lands, reducing the region of Kursk to an overgrown area sought out by hunters of wild beasts. On 8 September, 1295, on the day of the Nativity of the Most-Holy Mother of God, a small force of hunters from Rylsk came to hunt at the Tuskora river, 27 versts from Kursk. One of the hunters, an honorable and pious man, seeking prey in the woods, found a small icon lying face down on the root of a tree. He had barely lifted it to inspect it when the spot upon which the icon lay burst out with a strong spring of pure water. The icon turned out to be of the type referred to as the “Sign” of the Mother of God. The hunter who found the icon knew that this was no ordinary occurrence. He called his companions and together they built a small wooden chapel, into which they placed this icon. The residents of Rylsk, hearing of the newly-appeared icon of the Mother of God, began to visit it for veneration, and many miracles began to appear from it.

in 1385 the Kursk region was swept again by the Tatars. They tried to burn down the chapel and its Icon, but the wooden structure would not burn. The priest who lived by the chapel, Fr. Bogolep, explained to them that the reason for this miracle was the Icon itself. The incensed Tatars hacked the Icon in half and tossed the pieces in different directions, then burned the chapel.

They took the priest prisoner and was forced to tend to Tatar flocks. Some time later he was ransomed by emissaries of the Muscovite Grand Duke who were on their way to the Golden Horde, and he returned to the place where the chapel had stood. After a long search, while praying and fasting, he found both halves of the holy Icon, placed them side by side, and they grew together seamlessly, exhibiting only something “like dew”.

The Kursk Root icon, and the help granted by the Mother of God, is linked with important events in Russian history, such as the war of liberation of the Russian nation during the Polish-Lithuanian incursion in 1612, and the 1812 Fatherland war. Several copies of the icon were made, which have also been associated with miracles.

In 1676 the holy Icon traveled to the Don River for blessing the Don Cossack troops. In 1684 Tsars Ivan and Petr Alekseevich sent a copy of this Icon with the order that it accompany Orthodox troops into battle. In 1687 the holy Icon was sent to the “Great Army.” In 1689 copies of the holy Icon were given to the armies in the Crimean campaign. In 1812 a copy of the holy Icon was sent to Prince Kutuzov and the battling troops. Before his icon St. Seraphim of Sarov prayed and was healed.

On the night of 7-8 March, 1898, conspirator revolutionaries-atheists tried to blow up the Miracle-working Icon with a hellish bomb, but the Lord Jesus Christ glorified His Most-Pure Mother yet more, for despite the terrifying destruction in the cathedral surrounding the Icon, it remained untouched.

On 12 April 1918, the holy Icon was stolen from the cathedral of the Monastery of the Sign of the Mother of God and stripped of its ornamentation, but on 2 May it was found and returned to its place.

Finally, in 1919, while accompanying Bishop Feofan of Kursk and Oboyan’ and some monks of the Monastery of the Sign, the holy Icon crossed the border to the neighborly Serbia. In 1920 it again, at the behest of General Wrangel, visited Russia at the Crimea and remained there until the final evacuation of the Russian Army in the first days of November, 1920. The holy Icon returned to Serbia, where it remained until 1944, when, together with the Synod of Bishops, it went abroad, to Munich (Bavaria) with Metropolitan Anastassy. In 1951 Metropolitan Anastassy moved from Munich to America. Since 1957 the Icon had resided in the main cathedral dedicated to it in the Synod of Bishops in New York. The holy Icon regularly travels to all the dioceses of the Russian diaspora

In early times when the icon was discovered, and after an old chapel nearby had been rebuilt to house it, it was moved to Rylsk to a new Church there. But the icon mysteriously disappeared and returned to the place of its appearance, and kept returning there, to the country place of what is now the Kursk Root Hermitage. The summer feast honors the time each year when the icon subsequently would be returned for the summer in a procession to that country site, on the ninth Friday after Pascha. It offers a gentle and usually unheralded reminder of the icon’s miraculous origins and history in the bosom of the Russian countryside, despite all manner of tragedy and upheaval.

Indeed, the icon has witnessed the renewal of the Orthodox faith worldwide in the global Russian diaspora during the time of the Bolshevik yoke, which had prompted the greatest loss of life and persecution of the Christian Church in history worldwide, and in travels since has witnessed the renewal of the faith in Russia after the fall of communism as well. Today, remembering the 40th day of the repose of our beloved Metropolitan Hilarion, whose life spanned that era, and also the Holy Kursk Root icon, we welcome in the United States the end of the nationally sanctioned oppression of millions of unborn babies, sacrifices to the materialistic yoke of Western consumerism and technocracy.

Heading into the future, a visible reminder of the spiritual wound of Roe v. Wade and its culture of officially promoted abortion will remain in the public art of the university campus where I work, in a sculpture of the Native American concept of the Seventh Generation. The sculpture represents the Iroquois or Haudenosaunee ethos that people should live and make choices that take into consideration our influence for good or bad on the seventh generation to come after us. The viewer of the sculpture can look through figures representing those coming generations. But, in the 1990s, pro-abortionist faculty twice vandalized the sculpture by removing a fetus featured as the “seventh generation” on it. Finally it was not replaced. Thus only six generations of the seven remain featured in the sculpture today. Yet the strange status of the seventh figure, like the biblical “fourth man” in the fire, may remind an Orthodox Christian considering the sculpture’s symbolism of the hidden presence of our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ, in Whose rule the world ultimately rests. He remains the Sign fulfilled, in the Logos made flesh, a little baby born in a cave in Bethlehem Who, as the Creed teaches us, shall come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, Whose kingdom shall have no end.

The Orthodox Christian cry of “memory eternal!” in prayers for the dead, heard on behalf of Metropolitan Hilarion at the gathering to mark the 40th day of his repose, echoes in the ending of a book often recognized as one of the world’s greatest works of literature, The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. There the exclamation is a call for the resistance to modernity’s self-assertion (illustrated in the idea of a Constitutional “natural right” to abortion enforced nationally) by the Orthodox Christian ethos of self-emptying, identified in the book with care of children and the influence of love across generations.

Even so today, as Holy Scripture instructs us, we must not put our trust in princes and the sons of men, or take pride in the vagaries of legal and political change in the secular world, but in our Lord Jesus Christ and in His Church, our mother. The Kursk Root icon exemplifies the intercessory care for His Church by His Mother, the Most Holy Theotokos, and her example of love. Metropolitan Hilarion laid down his life for us to show us this. May his example and prayers help sustain us through uncertainties ahead, and may his memory be eternal!

Most Holy Theotokos save us! Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on us!

The Apodosis of Pascha today comes between the end of Divine Liturgy and the start of the Ninth Hour when the Paschal Tropar and official “Christ is Risen!” greeting ends. Some saints, notably St. Seraphim of Sarov, reportedly used the Paschal greeting throughout the year. But liturgically we are left with a transition or time-between Pascha and tomorrow’s Feast of the Ascension, and from there ten days to Pentecost. It is partly an edgy time and partly a continuum. In the Church we are left to marvel and rejoice with the Apostles seeing our Lord and God and Savior ascend in bodily form into heaven to be on the right hand of the Father in human incarnation, wholly God and wholly man, two natures unconfused and undivided, of one essence with the Father and the Holy Spirit.

What a wondrous mystery! Yet also there is a joyful sorrow again of the passing of the Pascha season. We await the return of the Lord promised by the angels at the Ascension, His return from the clouds, when we pray to meet Him amid them, the clouds that embody the mystery of God, He Who Is, which is the Orthodox translation in English of the Tetragrammeton generally rended Kyrios in the Greek Septuagint and in Orthodox iconography by the Greek letters Ὁ ὬΝ. The Apostle Paul wrote famously that five heartfelt words in prayer were better than a multitude, and so too may the Jesus Prayer (five words in effect in Greek and Slavonic in the form “Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me”) remain the constant meditation in our hearts between the Ascension Pentecost and beyond, so that we may keep Him in our hearts.

This transition highlights how the grace of the uncreated energies of God permeates all Creation in the Body of Christ, the Church, throughout and beyond time. Time and non-time in Orthodoxy include the pre-eternal or beyond-eternal of the divine and God’s uncreated energies, and the eternal of angels and demons and the human soul, and the human-social time now framing us in the digital world, and the natural time of the cycle of seasons, of animals and plants. God sees and knows all beyond time, and His Providence guides, directs, supports, and fashions all within time, although in a synergy of free service to Him with that grace.

Today is also this year (May 18, 7530, on the Church calendar, and June 1, 2022, on the civil calendar) the Feast of St. Dimitri Donskoi )”Dimitri of the Don.”  Born in 1350 to the Grand Prince of Vladimir and Moscow, the Synaxarion tells of how he grew up in great piety. The Holy Metropolitan Alexis became regent when Dimitri’s father died I n1359, and “he learned to carry out the duties of his state in conformity with evangelical principles, and to seek in all things the glory of God.” As ruler he would take up the task of rebuilding Russia after the long Tatar/Mongol domination, while “Saint Sergius of Radonezh and his disciplines presented the monastic life to the people as a model of Christian perfection.” Under the direction of Sts. Alexis, Sergius, and Archbishop Theodore of Rostov, and with the blessed influence of his wife St. Eudocia, the Grand Prince understood the unification of the various Russian principalities and assured the Church’s independence. He faced enemies among the Tatars and Lithuanians and jealous princes. But “the goal of his policy was to create a unified State through the principalities’ free submission to the Grand Prince of Moscow, following the model of the mutual love of the Persons of the Holy Trinity,” memorably symbolized in the icon of the Trinity by St. Alexander Rublev, a younger contemporary of St. Sergius. The Prince often visited St. Sergius’ monastery and founded many monasteries headed by the Saint’s disciples. In 1380, Khan Mamai entered Russia with almost 400,000 men to overwhelm the Prince’s successes against the Tatars. Following the Synaxarion by Hieromonk Makarius (vol. 5, p. 211):

“Realizing that the decisive moment which Providence had been preparing since his childhood had arrived, the Grand Prince, harvesting the fruits of his patient policy of the reuniting of the Russian principalities, assembled a powerful army near Moscow under the slogan ‘God is our refuge and our strength!’ After the Feast of the Dormition, he went to the Monastery of the Holy Trinity, and Saint Sergius gave him his blessing to engage in battle against the ‘godless,’ foretelling victor for him.

“On the eve of the Nativity of the Mother of God, the troops at the end of which the Prince, like a second Constantine, had placed the life-giving Cross, crossed the Don and arrived on the plain of Kulikovo. The time for battle having come, Saint Dimitri addressed his men, saying:

“‘My dear brothers, let us fight for God, for the holy Churches and for the Christian faith. If we must die, this death is not death but life eternal. Do not think of any earthly thing, my brothers. Let us not abandon the battle, and we shall then be victoriously crowned by Christ our God and the Saviour of our souls.”

A novice from St. Sergius’ monastery first launched himself into battle and was the first victim, in the greatest battle Russia had seen. St. Sergius was able to see in spirit the battle and commemorate those killed. “The Battle of Kulikovo became the symbol of the spiritual and national awakening of the Russian people and the victory of the light of Christ over the darkness of paganism.”

St. Dimitri’s ideal of Christian country relates to the troparion “by the virtue of Thy Cross preserve Thy commonwealth.” May that spirit and prayer inform an end to the tragic current fratricidal struggle in the Ukraine, which involves an aspect of confrontation between the mechanistic spirit of the age and ancient spiritual realms of Orthodoxy in the extended Byzantine civilizational zone.

The weapons in that battle ultimately must be spiritual and not carnal, for the pulling down of strongholds of the spirit of Anti-Christ, which sets the faithful against one another in a world that seeks to deny through materialistic technocracy the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ. As a sign of victory He sent the Holy Spirit at Pentecost to fully found the Church that is His Body and is still us still on earth.

Tomorrow we will exclaim, “Christ is ascended! From earth to Heaven!” as we look forward to the assurance of Pentecost.

From a homily on the eve of Mid-Pentecost, Tuesday May 4/17, 7530/2022, at St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco Russian Orthodox Mission Church
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We gather this evening of the Mid-Pentecost Feast for Vespers and for memorial prayers for the blessed repose of our ever-memorable Arch-Pastor, Metropolitan Hilarion. The Feast of Mid-Pentecost is in one sense a commemoration of joyful sorrow, because it reminds us of the movement toward the end of the Paschal season, being the halfway mark between the Resurrection and Pentecost. But it is likewise joy-filled because of that passage. The Church at this feast reminds us of our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ as Teacher. The Church’s Gospel reading for Mid-Pentecost refers to our Lord teaching in the middle of the Old Testament Feast of the Tabernacles, teaching about Himself being sent from God, and also about the living waters of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. The feast thus also prefigures Pentecost, including the tradition of the blessing of water on Mid-Pentecost, while pointing to the upcoming Sunday of the Samaritan Woman’s encounter with our Lord at Jacob’s Well and His telling her there of the living water that He gave. This spring-time festival further pointed to the full establishment of the Church at Pentecost by marking the altar feast of the great Hagia Sophia Church in Constantinople. Another icon for this feast reminds us of the account of an incident from our Lord’s youth, when He taught amazed elders in the Temple. The emphasis on teaching in both icon types for Mid-Pentecost parallels His own wondrous teaching between the Resurrection and Ascension to His followers, in their encounter with Him resurrected, as well as in His precious words and farewell. Mid-Pentecost thus is a reminder of the transition from His grounding of the Church in His Resurrection, through His ultimate teaching, toward Pentecost. Then, the inspiration of the Holy Spirit fulfilled the Resurrection’s universal promise by overcoming the divisions of mankind and fully founding the Orthodox Church, against whom the gates of hell cannot prevail. For the same Holy Spirit reaches out to each of us in community in the Body of Christ at Baptism, Chrismation, and each Eucharistic Communion.

Icons of Mid-Pentecost (above) of Jesus Christ teaching the elders as a youth, and (below) of Him later teaching mid-feast (the Gospel reading for Mid-Pentecost).

Tonight as we begin Mid-Pentecost we bittersweetly commemorate the start of the third day of the repose of our beloved Arch-Pastor Metropolitan Hilarion. His holy life and his falling asleep in the Paschal season looks toward Paradise with our Lord Jesus Christ. Coming from a rural Ukrainian immigrant farming community in western Canada, he became first seminarian and then monk at Holy Trinity Monastery and Seminary in Jordanville (where he was cell attendant for Archbishop Averky), and then beloved for his pastoral gifts as a hierarch in eastern America and Australia, overseeing the growth of parishes within the Russian Church Abroad. From the time he was a young seminarian and novice and bookstore worker at Jordanville he was remarkable for his kindness and calm discernment. He went on through God’s grace to become First Hierarch of the worldwide Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia.

Some here remember so well in 2015 traveling to St. John the Baptist Cathedral in Mayfield to receive his blessing to start our mission, in a region of central Pennsylvania where there was no Orthodox parish, and across a wider area no Russian Orthodox parish. He was such a kind and grace-filled pastor and teacher. He joins a line of unforgettable reposed arch-pastors of the Russian Church Abroad, including Metropolitan Anthony of blessed memory, who led our Synod out of the Bolshevik Holocaust into the West, where he also taught the importance for our redemption of our Lord Jesus Christ sweating blood in the Garden of Gethsemane, our Lord’s human nature vowing “not my will but Thine be done.” His ever-memorable predecessors also included the holy Metropolitan Philaret of blessed memory, who suffered torture as a prisoner of the Chinese communists, among other holy teachers and arch-pastors. Metropolitan Hilarion became the first leader of ROCOR born in North America, for his predecessors had originally come from what Americans called “the old world.” He is universally mourned for his loving compassion, and is taken from us at a time of great challenge for the Russian Orthodox Church and the world at large in these latter days. But the Paschal season reminds us of our Lord’s words, “be of good cheer, for I have overcome the world.” Even so, come quickly, Lord Jesus.

When at the end of his last book The Brothers Karamazov the Orthodox writer Fyodor Dostoevsky describes a funeral, he focuses on the same familiar prayer we sang tonight for Metropolitan Hilarion’s blessed repose: “Memory eternal!” This is a plea to God to remember the reposed, as well as for us to remember the reposed, and in effect also for all of us to remember God. It bespeaks the synergy of ascetic prayer with God’s grace emphasized in Orthodoxy. That discussion of death and after-life in the book’s ending features the words of the young man Alyosha, drawn to monasticism and mourning also the recent death of his spiritual father, Elder Zosima. (Some even speculate that Alyosha was based on a young Metropolitan Anthony who met Dostoevsky as a youth when named Alexei or Alyosha, as his elder was based in part on St. Ambrose of Optina Monastery.) IAlyosha tells a group of mourning children at the funeral about the importance of good memories:

“…there is nothing higher or stronger, or sounder, or more useful afterwards in life, than some good memory, especially a memory from childhood, from the parental home. You hear a lot said about education, yet some such beautiful, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man stores up many such memories to take into life, then he is saved for his whole life. And even if only one good memory remains with us in our hearts, that alone may serve some day for our salvation. Perhaps we will even become wicked later on, will even be unable to resist a bad action, will laugh at people’s tears and at those who say, as Kolya exclaimed today, “I want to suffer for all people”—perhaps we will scoff wickedly at such people. And yet, no matter how wicked we may be—and God preserve us from it—as soon as we remember how we buried [him], how we loved him in his last days, and how we’ve been talking just now, so much as friends, so together … the most cruel and jeering man among us, if we should become so, will still not dare laugh within himself at how kind and good he was at this present moment! Moreover, perhaps just this memory alone will keep him from great evil, and he will think better of it and say: “Yes, I was kind, brave, and honest then.” Let him laugh to himself, it’s no matter, a man often laughs at what is kind and good, it just comes from thoughtlessness; but I assure you, gentlemen, that as soon as he laughs, he will say at once in his heart: “No, it’s a bad thing for me to laugh, because one should not laugh at that!”

            “’I am speaking about the worst case, if we become bad,’” Alyosha went on, ‘but why should we become bad, gentlemen, isn’t that true? Let us first of all and before all be kind, then honest, and then—let us never forget one another….

            “You are all dear to me, gentlemen, from now on I shall keep you all in my heart, and I ask you to keep me in your hearts, too! Well, and who has united us in this good, kind feeling, which we will remember and intend to remember always, all our lives, who if not [him whom we remember today]. Let us never forget him, and may his memory be eternal and good in our hearts now and unto ages of ages!”….

            “’Memory eternal!’” the boys again joined in.

            “Karamazov!” cried Kolya, “can it really be true as religion says, that we shall all rise from the dead, and come to life, and see one another again, and everyone, and him [who has passed]?’”

            “’Certainly we shall rise, certainly we shall see and gladly, joyfully tell one another all that has been,’” Alyosha replied, half laughing, half in ecstasy.

(Pevear and Volokhonsky translation)

The novel is in many ways, as the Orthodox professor Donald Sheehan noted, about self-emptying in faith versus modern emphasis on self-assertion. In that, the love from the Elder Zosima is transmitted to Alyosha, and from him to the boys he addresses after the funeral.

Elder Zosima’s repose; an illustration by Alice Neel from The Brothers Karamazov
—

Such a life-changing memory of the funeral gathering is personal as Dostoevsky portrays it, ultimately leading to the real source of our personhood in the God-man Jesus Christ. Persons of holiness implant such memories in us, to the glory of God, as icons of Christ for us in our lives. So, from our childhoods in Orthodoxy, and the childhood of our mission, we honor the memory of our Church’s father Metropolitan Hilarion. He helped guide the birth of this mission and of our lives in the Body of Christ here. We take a memory together today from his kindness in offering us a nurturing shelter as exiles from the world and from turmoil even within the larger Orthodox Church. We take that memory to apply now in our lives and pass forward to others, too, as we grow in Orthodoxy and as we unworthily become, God willing, influencers for good to others also young in Orthodoxy. Dear brothers and sisters, our best remembering of Vladyka is to live those qualities of Jesus Christ we venerate in his life, that his memory may be eternal and shine brightly between God and us, from this time in the joyous Resurrection season, on now to the path toward Pentecost, and unto the Ages of Ages, Amen. For Christ is Risen! Indeed He is Risen!

Dr. Jean-Claude Larchet gave an excellent talk today at Holy Trinity Seminary in Jordanville, hosted also by Holy Trinity Publications, on “Divinization as the Christian Project and Model of True Transhumanism.” So many of the attacks on Christian anthropology and faith today emanate from a false technocratic secular transhumanism, which shapes systemic secularism that seeks to bury traditional Christian culture. Orthodox Christianity provides an answer as outlined by Dr. Larchet’s talk.

Indeed He is Risen!

(Given at the Ninth Annual Bucknell Sustainability Symposium on Radical Hope, April 23, 2022

Thank you for this opportunity to offer thoughts at this ninth sustainability symposium. Thanks also to my student Pierce Hoffer for reading this paper for me today. It relates to his study of dystopia and existentialism in story, especially to the author Paul Kingsnorth’s work. Needless to say, Pierce is not responsible for the contents of this paper, so please do not kill the messenger. Sadly I would wish to be with you, but happily in another sense, I am currently helping to lead services for the Eastern Orthodox Pascha, our holiest observances of the year, so please understand my absence in that context.

“Radical Hope,” the title of this symposium, echoes the title of a book by Jonathan Lear. Lear is an Anglo author who sought to take certain tales and words of the Crow Indian people in America and highlight that concept in a book. But I’d like to suggest that “radical hopelessness” is a better verbal banner for us in mainstream Western secular culture. The award-winning novelist Paul Kingsnorth in his writing deals with the grey area between radical hope and radical hopelessness He abandoned radical environmental activism and various forms of modern spirituality for intentional rural living with his family in an ancient spiritual tradition. He transitioned from activism to what he called Dark Ecology to writing of resistance against what he calls the global Machine. In his blog during Covid shutdowns in rural Ireland where he lives near Galway, he compared the current  global drive for techno-power to magic. He quotes Francis Bacon’s definition of science:.

The knowledge of causes and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.

Then he compares that foundational quote to the occultist Aleister Crowley’s modern definition of magic: The science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with the will.

Kingsnorth concludes: “These [definitions] could be swapped around without anybody really noticing. The thread that links them together is control. Both the scientific enterprise, and the magical quest which it was [originally] part of, spring from the same desire: to know the world, and to bend it to our will.”

(You can find, and should subscribe, to Paul Kingsnorth’s writings online at his substack, The Abbey of Misrule, https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/do-what-thou-wilt?s=r)

In the same series of essays last fall, entitled “Divining the Machine, “ Kingsnorth also writes:

“The powers of the world are merging: corporate power, state power, institutional power, ideological power, the power of the oligarchs who built and control the Internet, the power of the network itself. Call it the Great Acceleration, the Great Reset, the coming of Technocracy: whatever you call it, it has been long planned and long feared, and now it is upon us….

“The Machine makes us – is designed to make us – homeless. It rips up our roots in nature, in real cultures connected to time and place, in our connection to the divine centre. In their stead we are offered an anti-culture, an endless consumer present: planned, monitored, controlled, Smart, borderless, profitable and soul-dead, increasingly detached from messy reality, directed by who-even-knows, mediated through monitored screens.

“I am trying to say two things here. Firstly, that an unprecedented technological network of power and control is being constructed worldwide, which is walking us into a tightly-controlled future in which both humans and the wider natural world will be bent to this network’s needs. Secondly, that in this bending, we are losing the essence of what it means to be human.

To which he added a third thing: “…rebellion is necessary, if we are to remain human at all.”

“But why a machine?” he asks.

“Why choose this particular image to try and pin down this thing that is enveloping us? Well, partly because it is a term that has been used many times before, by better writers and thinkers than me, and I think it has still has protein on its bones. I’m working, in that sense, within a tradition. But also because, as an image, it sums up everything that I can feel rising around me: an emotionless, inorganic system; something not of the ground but of the abstract, questing mind; something that does not meet human needs but which works to replace them or create them anew; something which is pitiless and determined, and which has some task to fulfill.

“Above all, a machine is something that is unnatural: something constructed. Specifically, it is constructed of separate parts, all of which, when taken together, perform the wider function for which the machine is designed. If today, then, we live under the reign of the Machine – a global network of communication and control which is much bigger than any of us, and which bends us to its will – what is this machine made of? What are its parts, and how do they operate? The simple answer is: technologies, and especially digital technologies. We live now in a tech-saturated world; one that has crept up on us rapidly within my lifetime and yours. In the [so-called] ‘developed’ world today, it is virtually impossible to live outside this system…”

(The above paragraphs are from https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/you-are-harvest?s=r)

Kingsnorth titled the last essay in his series chillingly “You are the Harvest,” a phrase that also parallels the work of Shoshana Zuboff on the American left in her tome The Era of Surveillance Capitalism.

In such a situation as we are now trapped in, radical hope disconnected from deeper contexts of the heart can just feed the human isolation nourished by the global Machine described by Kingsnorth, by making us more cheerfully burning members of its machinations. Returning to the Crow worldview and the stories that Lear packaged into his book Radical Hope, we find their cultural roots involve a level of spiritual tradition with which we generally do not approach sustainability. It seems outside the visual field of twenty-first century politics. From the globalization of neoliberalism all the way even to the Green New Deal, any packaged culture of secular sustainability ultimately runs the risk of co-option by the Machine.

When a group of Bucknell students and faculty led by former lacrosse coach Sid Jamieson came to visit the longhouse of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy in upstate New York, we met Tadodaho Sid Hill, spiritual leader of the Iroquois. I asked him what in his view is the greatest problem the U.S. has with the environment. He replied “separation of church and state.”

That surprised our group. But by this he meant that, the tendency to separate spiritual tradition from American daily lives, including our approach to the environment, hurts sustainability in our culture. It deprives us of humility. It leads us to over-value self-assertion and consumption, and to what Dostoevsky suggested were the demonic aspects of the Machine, while neglecting the face-to-face relational identities that include the spiritual.

The latter were important to Dostoevsky’s existentialism of faith and love alongside hope, but he felt they were being erased by Western culture. That process leads us to forget about the values embodied in the great Haudenosaunee concept of the Seventh Generation: To think about the seventh generation to come in making decisions today. This is a recognition of the mystical spiritual unity between people in the past, present, and future, and indeed with all creatures in the network of life that includes each of us.

The Seventh Generation is an antidote to what the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn called two leading principles of destructiveness and oppression in mechanistic totalitairanisms of the modern world, namely “survive at any cost” and “only material results matter.” Solzhenistsyn warned those destructive principles can inhabit in different ways both prison camps of revolutionary regimes and canyons of Wall Street.

When I first came to Bucknell, my faculty mentor was an adopted member of the Crow nation that Lear studied. Prof. John Grimm is a Religion scholar now based at Yale. John liked to tell me and others about the Seventh Generation sculpture at Bucknell. The sculpture had been dedicated by Chief Oren Lyon of the Haudenosaunee peoples, as the indigenous confederacy that had once governed this region. But the hostility engendered by that sculpture, despite its beautiful meaning for sustainability, shows how our politics even when in resistance to the Machine often still partakes of it. That sculpture was vandalized twice by faculty who considered its seventh figure, in the shape of a fetus, to be an anti-abortion statement. To this day it only has six figures left representing the seven generations. Recently some campus administrators have made statements to the effect that the sculpture is not authentically Native American. However, members of the working group of Native Americans at Bucknell this year re-affirmed their commitment to the Seventh-Generation outlook as authentically Native, and their rejection of any erasure of it due to Anglo-American politics, and their support of the iconic but neglected sculpture on campus.

There are many examples at American educational, corporate, and media institutions of rejection of spiritual traditions, including those of minority religious and cultural traditions such as my own, which I also have experienced firsthand from some but not all colleagues in higher education. Such aggressive rejection of spiritual tradition is typical of techno-perspectives that reduce sustainability to a materialistic matrix alone, to neocolonialist Western scientific secular terms. Doing so impoverishes sustainability by removing truly diverse elements such as the Seventh Generation tradition.

Even when we think we are resisting environmentally destructive activities in the name of sustainability, we are still immersed in the Machine, like fish turning in water, or characters in the Matrix movie. In the final novel of his Buckmaster Trilogy, Kingsnorth describes how a technological elite identified with the Machine melds aspects of Artificial Intelligence and the Singularity to seek technological immortality on a destroyed earth. In the words of the free peoples still living apart from the Machine in the woods, they suck the body and soul out of people into a Metaverse.

In biblical terms, we are told that the first progeny of technological culture came from the offspring of Cain, the proto-murderer and liar. Thus Solzhenitsyn wrote of the “permanent lie” in modern technocracy as propagating a virtual reality that kills. Even we who value sustainability and subscribe to radical movements for it, how much time do we spend in cyberspace each day, how much do we value travel to faraway places to try to find ourselves, and an uprooting and re-making of our lives into a new virtual reality? We do carbon offsetting that like some kind of distant landfill is out of sight and out of mind and of questionable effect, to ease our consciences. We do not sacrifice professional careers that place us in the dominant top few percentages of people on earth in terms of consumption of resources. We do not form close friendships with people outside and beneath our technocratic standing and class.

Paul Kingsnorth suggests in his writings that it is separation of the mind from the heart that underlies our civilization’s crisis. In moving from radical activism to Dark Ecology and through various modern spiritual practices, he now helps tend a small family farm in rural west Ireland, cutting hay with a scythe. He was baptized last year in the River Shannon into the ancient traditions of a neighborhood Romanian Orthodox Christian community.  Significantly, the last book of his Bucknmaster trilogy, Alexandria, ends with the environmental destruction of both the communities of the neopagan resistance to the Machine and the Machine’s avatars. Exiled members of the resistance join with the former technologically post-human character known as K, seeking to survive in a diluvian catastrophe, which symbolically joins them all with the sea. The ending of the novel significantly centers amid this catastrophe on Glastonbury Tor as the refuge of the survivors, a landscape of great mythic significance in Britain, according to legend the repository of the Holy Grail and a center of Arthurian legend and early Christianity. It is a reminder of how the spiritual side of landscape is a refuge from the Machine for us as we seek sustainable hope today. My academic work on the early origin legends and archaeology of Glastonbury, together with my environmental journalism on landscape restoration, led me at Bucknel to my interests in sustainable landscape in the Susquehanna Valley, alongside my studies of otherworldly landscapes in literature.

Russian Christian philosophers in exile or under persecution from Communism called the  mystical spiritual unity exemplified at Glastonbury at the end of Kingsnorth’s trilogy sobornost. How do we achieve it today? The Apostle Paul famously spoke of three abiding entwined aspects of life, the source of dwelling, as hope, faith, and love. Dostoevsky’s Christian existentialism and his storytelling resistance to the Machine celebrate that type of spiritual dwelling in those otherworldly grounded virtues as well. “Faith is the substance of things hoped for,” Paul also wrote. But he says of the three groundings of dwelling that abide, of faith, hope, and love, the greatest is love.

Without faith and love, hope by itself also can be but a clanging cymbal, devoid of real meaning, disembodied and superficial, a pep rally for the Machine consuming us and the earth. So much of American life in our unsustainable culture is based manically on radical disconnected hope, like a Hollywood theme just telling us to follow our dream. Trying to solve the world’s sustainability problems with hope disconnected from the spiritual traditions represented by faith and love, or the Seventh Generation sculpture, is like trying to just whistle past the graveyard of eco-catastrophe. Technology itself will fail to answer crises of climate change and environmental despoilation if solutions are rooted in the same technological mindset in which we are becoming the Machine, Kingsnorth argues. Better in such a case to adopt hopelessness than a false-flag technocratic operation of hope, which just further immerses us in a soulless Metaverse of digital determinism.

One way to find authentic hope, with faith and love, is in spiritual traditions. Bucknell does have such traditions, but they need to be excavated and highlighted and renewed in fragmented form. They are a way to build radical hope that is also connected to faith and love. In the President’s Sustainability Council’s Campus Trail project, to encourage fitness and foot and bike commuting and meditative experience outdoors in natural settings, we have also, in collaboration with Shaunna Barnhart’s Sustainability Path effort, formed a Story and Art Trail working group. Its goals include a public art project for the Campus Path connecting the trail also to a journey evoking spiritual traditions of the Bucknell landscape.

First, a committee of Bucknell Native Americans has formed, to sponsor the new Sid Jamieson Fellowship. This will include work honoring Native American stories of the landscape, including perhaps a sculpture representing early students and staff of Native background at Bucknell, and/or early Native leaders of this region. That public art work may deservedly include an honoring of Sid Jamieson himself, as a wise elder in our midst. In addition, the plan includes highlightng and perhaps re-locating the Seventh Generation sculpture to a more prominent place.

Second, a group of Bucknell students is developing the Bucknell in the Civil War and the Underground Railroad project, in collaboration with WVIA and Stories of the Susquehanna Valley. They look to tell the story of why Bucknell students and faculty chose to fight for the Union and against slavery at Gettysburg and elsewhere, and of Charles Bell who found freedom on the Underground Railroad and reunited with his family in Lewisburg, working at Bucknell.

Finally, we’re working also with local Baptist historical networks to tell the story of the founders of Bucknell as the University at Lewisburg and its Female Institute, a pioneering effort to include women in higher education, which also hopefully will be featured in trail art.

These are small symbolic efforts that we hope to see embodied in the new Campus Trail– to help connect people with spiritual traditions of landscape that can help sustain us in humbler and more mystically connective ways, even if on a small level, encouraging renewal of a more intentional community in the spirit of the Seventh Generation sculpture. From such linking of hope to faith and love we may hope to grow modestly beyond either an isolated radical hope or hopelessness, to a sustainability infused with faith, hope, and love, in spiritual solidarity against the Machine, realizing deeper sustainability of the heart.

Pascha means Passover in Greek and is the Orthodox Christian name for Easter, which is coming up on April 24. We will celebrate its arrival at midnight Saturday night with calls of “Christ is Risen!” Come and see!

The article appended below appeared recently on the Princetonians for Free Speech website. It is an account of a situation at a secular (formerly Baptist) American university that reflects trends and situations around American education currently. While freedom of speech is not an article of Christian faith per se, it is a reflection of Christian cultural backgrounds of the United States, in the link between the Declaration of Independence’s assertion that “all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” and the U.S. Constitution and original Bill of Rights. Eric Nelson has cited cultural underpinnings of foundational American constitutionalism in neo-Stuart Jacobitism (as opposed to revolutionary Jacobinism), rooted in Christian ideas of monarchy and spiritual unity, and each person as made according to the image of God, “under God.” For Orthodox Christians in America, an element of concern with current negativity about freedom of speech on campuses is that it often links with hostility toward traditional Christianity and bias against Orthodox Christians, including especially Russian Orthodox tradition.

From an Orthodox theological perspective, as the late poet and Dartmouth professor Donald Sheehan noted, rights (including free speech) are not about self-assertion but self-emptying. Symphonia between Church and State in historical Orthodox tradition (symbolized by the double-headed eagle) is typed in part by the U.S. First Amendment’s synergy of freedom of religious expression with not establishing religion (not identifying it as the State in effect)–in a Constitution that nonetheless cites “the year of our Lord” with its signatures. The synergy between sobornost (conciliarity) and govenie (ascetic discipline and obedience to hierarchy) in the Orthodox Church illumines her approach to freedom. It should be freedom not to destroy others through objectifying pornography and hate, for example, but freedom for humility in a “nation under God,” as Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address put it by linking statements about God in the Declaration to the Constitution. The Russian Orthodox Christian philosopher S.L. Frank (who himself experienced persecution both under Communism and under Nazism as a dissident of Jewish background) in exile defined freedom as “voluntary service to universal truth,” in the person of our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ, who tells us “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

*** *** ***

[From Princetonians for Free Speech]

Bucknell University’s faculty recently voted down a free-speech motion. It was a ritual slaying.

By anonymous vote, professors opted 191 to 31 to prevent any discussion of the motion, and to require a super-majority to resurrect it in future, by postponing it indefinitely.

In doing so, faculty at the highly ranked liberal-arts university in central Pennsylvania sought to put a stake in the heart of what are known as the University of Chicago Principles, which call for universities to allow free speech of all kinds except such “unprotected speech” as threats, harassment, and libel.

Despite 80-plus other institutions having adopted the Chicago Principles and leading Bucknell alumni supporting the measure, Bucknell faculty members made themselves outliers from their own university’s values, given that its mission statement calls for support of “different cultures and diverse perspectives.”

But the Bucknell professors also provided an extreme caricature of what faculty culture in America has become today in the eyes of many: Narrowly ideological, intellectually xenophobic, and passively-aggressively policing others’ views.

More and more Americans view such privileged U.S. educators as willing to destroy the liberal-arts tradition and American civil culture for the sake of ideological dogmas and their own status.

The Bucknell proposal was brought up to the faculty once before, in 2017, by faculty sponsors of varied political views. At that time it was tabled indefinitely, purportedly to avoid “negative publicity” from a direct “No” vote, after the university counsel had intervened to call it unnecessary. But a parliamentary flaw in that tabling allowed it to be brought back in 2022 after a delay during the Covid era.

Just how needed the motion remains was seen last fall, when University of Toronto psychologist and bestselling writer Jordan Peterson visited Bucknell, his first public appearance anywhere in more than two years. A newsworthy if controversial event, Peterson’s talk was preceded by custodians prying the Bucknell seal off the podium, and an information blackout from university public relations staff.

On the night of Peterson’s talk, many students were reportedly prevented from getting seats in the auditorium by activist faculty who urged their own students to reserve tickets online and then not show up, leaving empty seats. An estimated 250 of 600 available reserved seats were kept empty while a long line of students and community members waited outside.

University police responded by opening balconies closed due to campus Covid restrictions, to allow entry to those who were waiting. But some had already gone to a remote overflow location or returned to their dorms.

While this was reported at the opening of the program, and circulated later on a video of the event, there were no challenges or denials to the report, and no statement or inquiry apparently by the institution.

In this new kind of higher-ed “social credit” system, the faculty are would-be enforcers of politicized morals, and students are the main losers.

The Chicago Principles vote last month was preceded by broadcast and circulation of a 90-minute webinar explaining the need to highlight free speech on campus. It included educational and developmental reasons for allowing college-age students to engage with different views, and how that fits Bucknell’s mission statement to make students and faculty of different backgrounds and viewpoints feel welcome. The last half of the webinar featured appearances by free-speech advocates Profs. Robert George of Princeton and Cornel West of Union Theological Seminary, addressing the integral relation of free speech and the liberal arts, and to a spiritual culture of humility needed at universities.  Cultural humility is not the virtue that comes to mind to describe privileged American academics, however.

At Bucknell, the last two known surveys of faculty politics tell part of the story. In 2014, a university survey of Bucknell faculty indicated that 70 percent identified as liberal or far left politically, and only 9% as conservative and far right. In 2015, a student journalism-class investigation of county records showed that 74% of Bucknell faculty in Bucknell’s county were registered as Democrats, 6% as Republicans.

Those percentages have undoubtedly grown more lopsided since. While the data are political indicators, they suggest inhospitableness toward those whose religious and ethnic cultures don’t share progressive American political values.

Examples abound. When Prof. Shelby Steele of Stanford’s Hoover Institution debated Prof. John Fountain of Roosevelt University in Chicago in 2020 in a webinar for the Bucknell campus, as two African-American scholars debating the utility and truth of the concept of systemic racism, faculty critics commandeered the university’s online announcement center to denounce the event and me personally as racist. To even apply critical thinking to the model of systemic racism was racist, they argued. The university apparently took no action against them, beyond instituting a stronger screening system for announcements.

In 2019, conservative scholar Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute had appeared on campus. Some faculty and administrators helped organize meetings, a protest, and a counter-event, apparently so that students wouldn’t be tempted to hear her. Students with encouragement of administrative staff spoke of the need to ostracize peers involved in the event, and publicly called for firing the faculty involved. The administrator in charge of diversity policy (which is supposed to include counteracting religious bias) reportedly told the counter-event protesters that “Christian values” are “originators” of white supremacy.

Because the administrator was speaking with the title of diversity administrator charged with adjudicating issues of religious bias, a Catholic student at the historically liberal Anglo-Protestant and now secular campus filed a bias complaint as part of a university reporting system. He reports that he has not even received an acknowledgement.

I was approached by a distressed first-year student this fall, a conservative Catholic, who since dropped out due to the ideology of the faculty and its shadow over campus. A Black student from Africa told me he withdrew from Bucknell for similar reasons while fighting related depression. A second African student told me of how uncomfortable and alien he was made to feel by efforts to assimilate international students of color into the Bucknell faculty-staff ideology, regardless of different individual views and cultural traditions.

This is not to mention how professors have felt ostracized and even pushed out of the university because of faculty-staff group-think. The latter intrudes into the business of the university by ostracizing those with different views and gifts to offer in serving students.

Bucknell’s majority white-American faculty seem uninterested in any real response to such different voices. The cynical might say many are “virtue signaling.” The blocking of debate on the Chicago Principles was led by a white professor whose department recently had protested losing a position to diversity hires and was trying hard to show its commitment to diversity. But arguments that the Chicago Principles are racist were belied by the presence of prominent African-American activist and scholar Cornel West on the video webinar produced by supporters, extolling free-speech efforts at Bucknell, and by the text of the motion itself.

Other arguments that the motion was unnecessary are belied by the Peterson incident and others like it, the experience of non-conforming students and faculty, and the fact that existing language in the university’s Faculty Handbook is not as embracing of community free speech as the Chicago Principles, despite claims to the contrary by some faculty in trying to justify their opposition to the motion.

While many new texts produced by the university continually re-state and expand on older texts supporting diversity, the adding of one additional text highlighting free speech was labeled in effect pathologically obsessive and unnecessary by opponents in preventing debate.

Leading university donors, at a time when Bucknell is entering a major fundraising cycle, formed a non-profit entity, the Open Discourse Coalition (ODC), as a way to support the faculty free-speech movement organized as the Bucknell Program for American Leadership. But these efforts have met with opposition.

Last summer, activists posted a sign on the new ODC building near campus that read “Center for White Victimhood” and sent an anonymous hate letter to a faculty mailbox with the logo of the banner attached. Such acts are labeled humorous satire. That was also the “explanation” for labeling me (a Russian Orthodox clergyman) “Rasputin”—something done on social media with the support of three of my Bucknell faculty colleagues. The malicious context implied that like Rasputin I deserved to be erased, due to my cultural difference from faculty ideology, at a time of US-Russian hostility.  It was a little like calling a Muslim faculty member Osama bin Laden after 9-11.

In the past few years I also have had my personal office belongings “accidentally” removed from Bucknell’s campus and put on the street, with a threat that they would be trashed by a colleague who earlier had said he blamed his divorce on his ex-wife’s interest in Orthodox Christianity. I was forced out of a department affiliation on campus after being singled out for unfair investigation of my free-speech activities as allegedly racist. Other unusual “coincidences” have included being removed from a planning committee by a last-minute rule change, and being the apparent subject of unusual curricular review and of attempted cancellation of a campus project I was coordinating.

Maybe that’s not surprising given that I’m often a visibly different person among our faculty (even pointed out as being such in a joke by a dean at a faculty meeting): The Russian Orthodox cleric with the long beard and hair wearing riassa and skufia, in a blended Russian-American family with children identifying as Russian. But my ostracism started when writing about religious freedom with regard to sexual and family anthropology in my Russian Orthodox tradition, out of line with Bucknell’s dominant secular progressive ideology. Yet attempted cancellation for my allegedly unethical Eastern Christian “gender expression” came from colleagues who seemed to tolerate other faculty who apparently without serious stigma engaged in activities such as sex with a student and unwanted personal attention to a colleague leading to distress.

Meanwhile children of faculty, including my own, have been cyber-bullied and physically bullied for being out of step with Bucknell-dominated community ideology in our small town.

Bucknell is a great university. It is an honor to work there and serve wonderful students. But the potential negative impact of out-of-control toxic faculty culture on students, their character and education, is corrosive. Princeton’s Robert George, on a visit to campus with Cornel West, hearing a complaint from a leftist student about the lack of “diverse perspectives” on campus, diagnosed the problem as “academic malpractice.”

The Bucknell student newspaper has covered these free-speech efforts negatively for the most part. A columnist wrote three articles critical of the Peterson event, in which she went from calling him “Jordan Peter-Sucks,” to bemoaning how Peterson as a powerful media figure allegedly had bullied her by re-tweeting her article with its epithet about him (garnering her much negative feedback). She attended the campus event, when attempted censorship of Peterson’s event was announced, but did not report on that. Instead she went on in a new column to blast the Chicago Principles in caricatured form. After the recent vote, a faculty critic of free-speech efforts (and open admirer of Lenin) boasted of his contacts among students at the paper. Coincidentally, the aforementioned writer is a major in his small program.

On all this the faculty motto seems to be: “Nothing to see here, move along.”

Adapted from a paper entitled “The Compleat Angler on Penns Creek,” given at the Keystone Coldwater Conference, Feb. 13, 7530 (civil calendar Feb. 26, 2022), in State College, PA.

I wanted to share a bit today about ideas for linking a university community to nature through story, and the relation of a meaningful life in nature to spirituality. I’ll tell the story of a class visit to Penns Creek while reading The Compleat Angler and its connections to related efforts in environmental humanities. Then I’ll talk a little more about models for linking story to conservation though a field known as environmental semiotics.

I teach a class called “the hidden God of nature,” which is about nature and spirituality in literatures of Christian cultures from the Middle Ages through the nineteenth century. I also have been involved for years in a project called Stories of the Susquehanna Valley. At the heart of these efforts is the simple idea that landscape is a dialogue, which involves multiple actors and voices so to speak, in a complex story or dance that nonetheless involves an objective reality, which is perceived through what metaphorically we might call a variety of visual spectrums. That variety of spectrums involves species, the animate and inanimate, and even what can be called the spiritual, which I’ll seek also to explain briefly in relation to literature.

In my course, we read The Compleat Angler by Izaac Walton as an example of 17^th century literature. We discuss in a Bucknell classroom (or this past fall mainly under a large tent due to Covid restrictions) the ideas of Walton regarding human interactions with nature as a type of spirituality. He does this through the medium of fly fishing, somewhat in the way that a 1960s writer did it through accounts of cross-country motorcycle travel in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Yet Walton does this of course with much greater attention to fauna and flora and especially the details of a specific interaction with life on earth and landscape through fishing.

In the case of our class we then go on a field trip to the Union County Sportsmens Club near Weikart, along Penns Creek. This past fall we were joined by a number of members of the Union County Trout Unlimited Chapter who kindly helped demonstrate fly fishing and talk about Penns Creek. In the past we have also had also appreciated guidance there from staff of Bucknell’s Watershed studies program at its Sustainability Center.

Izaac Walton as many of you I’m sure know was a draper turned writer, who sought refuge from the English Revolution on the banks of the River Dove in England, among other spots, at the Fishing House with his friend Charles Cotton. On our field trips, the Sportsmens Club in effect became our class’ fishing house on the banks of Penns Creek, a refuge and a different dimension offering reflection on life through the discipline and mindfulness of fly-fishing, and the peaceful rushing of the water beneath the trees, another world from our current online and onpavement lives at a university campus whose students come mainly from well-developed suburban metropolitan regions.

The main part of the Walton’s book ends with the character Venator, who is the hunter converted to a love of fishing by his new friend Piscator, saying

“So when I would beget content, and increase confidence in the Power, and Wisdom, and Providence of Almighty God, I will walk the Meadows by some gliding stream, and there contemplate the Lillies that take no care, and those very many other various little living creatures, that are not only created but fed (man knows not how) by the goodness of the God of Nature, and therefore trust in him. This is my purpose: and so, Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord. And let the blessing of St. Peters Master be with mine.”

To which Piscator concludes: “And upon all that are lovers of Vertue; and dare trust in his providence, and be quiet, and go a Angling.”[1] Angling for Walton involved a kind of spiritual pun, for he referenced its connection to biblical accounts of fishermen as central figures in finding faith, and on the Anglicanism that he saw as a faith associated with country apart from extremes in his view of historical English religious and political strife. It involved the recognition of how in the words of an epigraph to the book that “The world the river is; both you and I, / And all mankind are either fish or fry,”

The conversations between Piscator the fisherman, Venator the hunter, and Auceps the falconer, establish a triadic relational identity for the book’s focus on human beings in the natural world. The fisherman’s opening critique of “money-getting men,” “poor-rich-men” anxious for material gain and cares of the world, rejecting pastimes such as fly-fishing, also forms a Christian critique of modernity the Puritan tendency paradoxically to prove pre-determined election by material success, in spite of scriptural and patristic admonitions on the dangers of material riches. The self-described voice of the “old-fashioned country squire,” Walton, sometime parishioner and biographer of the metaphysical poet John Donne, is neither capitalist nor communist in any seventeenth-century sense, but a type of otherworldly ecologist, to use a modern term. For, as his fisherman Piscator notes early on, simplicity “was usually found in the primitive Christians, who were, as most Anglers are, quiet men, and followers of peace; men that were so simply-wise as not to sell their Consciences to buy riches, and with them vexation and a fear to die,” in simpler times with “fewer Lawyers.”[2]

The conversation ranges from the comic to the cosmic, as Auceps lectures on the elements and the virtues of his favorite, the air, and its birds; Venator on the earth and wildlife; and Piscator on water and the fish. The seventeenth-century rural English worthies are transfigured for moments, as if philosophers be-draped in Classical robes in the countryside, or somehow cosmic poetic representatives of their art and element on Olympus, and certainly characters of an English Arcadia in the Midlands. In this they are, however, very much rough-and-ready heirs of the Hellenic-Christian synthesis. Piscator ties the discussion together with Genesis as Moses’ retro-revelation of Creation, in which the Spirit moved upon the waters. Venator later references the biblical “meek shall inherit the earth,” when noting the unhappy cares of a rich man with estates in the countryside through which they hike, while stopping at pubs, like JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis on their later countryside rambles between the world wars.[3] Piscator quotes the poet George Herbert (whose biography he also wrote) in a pun on his own book’s title–“And none can know thy works, they are so many, / And so compleat, but only he that ows [owns] them [God],” and Psalm 104 for its mentions of the sea, the rivers, and the fish contained therein. This is, as he notes in a later chapter, all under the care of “the God of Nature.”

The outdoorsmen-friends while fishing also meet milkmaids, whose songs of nature they praise in a rural cosmic complementarity of the sexes from a Christian standpoint. Venator notes, “I now see it was not without cause, that our good Queen Elizabeth did so often wish her self a Milkmaid all the month of May, because they are not troubled with fears and cares, but sing sweetly all the day, and sleep securely all the night.”[4] In one of the poems within the book, “The Angler’s Wish,” Piscator tells of his wish to be in flowery meads by crystal streams, rejoicing in their harmonious noise, with his fishing rod, watching the turtle-dove court chastely his mate. In so doing, he addresses Walton’s real-life wife, Kenna, about watching a blackbird feed her young, a laverock at her nest “free from lawsuits, and the noise of princes’ courts, with a book and friend,” wishing to “meditate my time away; and angle on,” begging for “A quiet passage to a welcome grave.” Here Walton through his alter ego juxtaposes images from the natural world with theor own family life.

Walton’s book is a prototype of the modern Anglican philosopher Roger Scruton’s call for an “eco-patriotism” embracing England’s countryside, rather than globalization and technocracy as merely a new form of technological colonialism. Walton’s reflection shares the spirit of Tolkien’s love of the country, and detestation of a nation made abstract by global colonialism. In a sense, The Compleat Angler is not mainly a fly-fishing manual, although it is that, but a manual for what the philosopher David Bentley Hart has called anarcho-monarchism in the sense of Tolkien’s Shire, where government is an elusive and otherworldly force of nature, and Edmund Burke’s networks of organic tradition abound, evenon Penns Creek  in the sportsmen’s club and local Trout Unlimited chapter. Then there is the symbolism of the hook, which is for a fish, but is a term theologically used for the trapping of the devil in the Crucifixion in the divine economics of the Incarnation, a reminder also of how human beings can become enmeshed in worldly objectification, and of the river as an image of the overlay of spiritual life on earth. For Walton, the king who provides sustenance during a time without a king is God who forms a triad with human being and nature, and prevents nature from being objectified.

Even in the quiet of Penns Creek on a fall evening, there was a sense of the sublime as the class discussed The Compleat Angler, a sublime sense of being on the edge nonetheless, if safe in God. A sense that the whole direction of secular modernity, and all the revolutionary identities formed in it, form an otherworldly terror beyond, contrasting with a glint of Paradise on the creek. The Anglo-Irish writer and environmental activist Paul Kingsnorth, a developer of the dark ecology movement, has used the term The Machine to describe the modern world including our digital lives. There on Penns Creek, practicing basic moves of fly fishing at the stream, the students had a sense of the curtain being lifted on a reality beyond The Machine, so to speak.

I have mentioned Walton’s emphasis on relationship with nature through a triad. That idea of relationship and triadic communication is explored by Estonian scientists and academics today in the fields of biosemiotics and ecosemiotics. Of course Christians like Walton long ago understood the importance of triadic relationship, which was woven into the heart of their theology. Professor Timo Maran recently told a group of Bucknell professors in a Zoom call from Estonia’s Tartu University that in ecosemiotics, landscape is a dialogue. It is not a binary of self and other. It is a relationship. For Walton, this was based in God as the third element, but even more ultimately in the mystery of God as Trinity. There are other triadic relationships of course at any moment involved in reading and discussing The Compleat Angler on Penns Creek. There is the relationship with others, within the class, and with local fly fishers, and of course with the creek ecosystem and all the species there with ourselves. Eastern Christian philosophy has a name for this, sobornost, or mystical hidden unity of all beings with God.

The late Wendy Wheeler, a writer on biosemiotics and ecosemiotics in England, discussed how understanding an ecosystem as a web of communication, of meaning, shaped an otherworldly dimension to landscape. Wheeler explained that this helped highlight two of Aristotle’s Four Causes that often are neglected in The Machine globally today. It focuses on material and efficient causes that are visible. But the two “invisible” causes of form and purpose often get lost. Those can be seen as involving communication between and among species, in what I have called an ecosemiosphere, as imagination, and even as involving the spiritual.

I’ll just close that in addition to this modest class effort we continue to try to practice that sense of unity in an ecological and cultural sense by campus efforts that include development of a sustainability path around Bucknell. We hope to include public art linking the path to past history such as the Civil War and Native American culture, the founding of the university, but also link the path online and in physical ways to neighboring regions such as the John Smith Chesapeake National Heritage Corridor and Penns Creek Wilds, the state-designated area that includes state forest lands to the west of where we visited. The Penns Creek greenway is a great natural treasure that is also a great cultural treasure. In the small Russian Orthodox mission parish where I serve as a clergy member, we are building a modest temple in the countryside in Union Twp. near Penns Creek. We plan to include a garden and beekeeping and an orchard around it, modestly to encourage a community across generations such as that Walton encouraged in his writing on the River Dove — a Fishing House for biblically being “fishers of men” (including ourselves), in the spiritual dimension that Walton loved in his own Anglican way, and to find peace away from the revolutions technological and otherwise that distract us from our hearts and faith.

To return again to The Compleat Angler, “The world the river is; both you and I, / And all mankind are either fish or fry.”

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[1] Izaak Walton and Charles Cotton, The Compleat Angler, ed. John Buxton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 229.

[2] Ibid., 23.

[3] Ibid., 192.

[4] Ibid., 82.