There is an icon of the Theotokos that I have long treasured in my journey into Orthodoxy, and that is the “Theotokos Seeker of the Lost.” The icon depicts the Mother of God as seeking out and rescuing those who are lost, perishing, or in danger of spiritual death. There are different versions of this Russian icon. But the one I felt the deepest bond with shows our Lady holding the child Jesus Christ with part of the background showing a doorway (see image above) that conveyed a sense of spiritual death. She as intercessor, our Mother in the Church, is the rescuer from that trap. This meant much to me when I in graduate school felt very much cut off from family, community, and my former heterodox religious beliefs, embarking on a new career, often in a sinfully nihilistic-tending state. The most significant element coming out of that period began when I was baptized Orthodox 25 years ago this year, and married my wife in the Orthodox Church three years later, but not without a lot of struggling, wandering, and sin in that whole journey, a journey that continues with God’s help for this sinner, thanks be to Him for His grace and love! In all this, the Theotokos was Directress for a most unworthy convert!

The Theotokos as Seeker of the Lost, highlighted in the icon, is an element from her whole life, from the time she was a very young child. She left her family behind to enter the Temple, where according to tradition she lived probably until around 12 years old, when she became chastely betrothed to the noble Joseph, an elderly widower, as her protector. Her move to the temple when she was only 3 years old according to tradition is commemorated in our feast today. The icon of the feast pictured below (from St. Elisabeth Convent in Minsk) beautifully portrays her entering the Temple and then (in the upper right) her dwelling in the Holy of Holies there.

According to the Protoevangelium of James, an early Christian text, she was brought to the Temple by the Chief Priest Zacharias and lived behind the veil of the Holy of Holies, fed by angels. In this way, symbolically from the standpoint of the Church, she fulfilled Jeremiah’s prophecy (as recorded in II Maccabees 2) when the Old Testament prophet hid the Ark of the Covenant from the Holy of Holies at the time of the destruction of the first Temple, and told those curious about the location that God would reveal the Ark again in His own time. As the hymns of the Church indicate, the Theotokos fulfilled the Ark by becoming the dwelling place (in her womb) of the God-man Jesus Christ fulfilling Scripture, and encountering the Lord directly as in the Holy of Holies of old. She also according to tradition prepared herself there in childhood through prayer, worship, scriptural study, the crafting of liturgical garments, and angelic encounters, with God’s grace.

In walking up the steps into the Holy of Holies when very young, she thus assumed the way of life even as a child, which with God’s grace led her to that moment of assent with the Archangel Gabriel, who telling her of how she would give birth to the hope of Israel, met with her response: “Behold the handmaiden of the Lord, be it unto me according to thy word.” Based on tradition, she would have given birth to Jesus Christ when she was about age 14. But she was seeking us out, the lost, even as a very young child during her entry to the Temple, by signaling the its coming transfiguration into the Body of her Son, which Body dwelt within her own at the start of His Incarnation. The Body of Christ, the Church, superseded the Temple, which in its second form was destroyed in AD 70 after the rejection of Jesus by Jewish religious leaders and the focus of many of them on religious nationalism instead. In the meantime, the Mother of God following her Son’s Ascension had helped nurture the beginning of the Church in Jerusalem from Pentecost onward, according to tradition also living in Ephesus, and journeying in the regions of the apostolic church, from her illumined state as the first and ultimate model of theosis or oneness with God’s uncreated energies.

Yet the Entry of the Theotokos has been called the most childlike of all the major feasts of the Church calendar. It is also the one, together with the Dormition of the Theotokos, that depends the most on Church Tradition rather than on Scripture. It is thus a reminder of the nature of the Orthodox Church as the one holy and Catholic apostolic Church referenced in the Nicene Creed, whose Tradition encompasses Scripture. The Feast affords a great remembrance to us of the entryway into the Church provided by the Mother of God in her assuming and fully realizing the living embodied symbolism of the tabernacle and Temple from the old Testament.

Literally, the feast celebrates, as its dismissal indicates, her entry into the Holy of Holies, the adventurous journey of a 3-year-old girl, full of destiny from God. Morally, today we remember as a model and lesson the Virgin Mother’s faithfulness and persistence in prayer, purity, and devotion to worship of God throughout her life. It came into view publicly first at her entry to the Temple. Allegorically, that entry fulfilled the Old Testament prophecies and promises by our Lord, her son. Spiritually she is revealed in today’s feast, even as a child, as she who would become the greatest of the saints and our intercessor, the exemplum of theosis for all time. Her entry into the Temple marked the beginning of the realization of the Temple as the Body of Christ, His Church, the portals of which can be found in every Orthodox Church parish throughout the earth when their royal doors open and the Eucharist comes out to the faithful. The feast spiritually prefigures our own hoped-for entry into Paradise renewed, through her intercessions, at the coming again of her Son.

This feast reminds us too of the great blessing of entering the Church. How many within Russian Orthodoxy alone had to worship under great persecution and sometimes in secret or in prison camps within living memory, under atheistic Communism? Yet, today in America, how hard we often find it to go to Church due to often trivial distractions, and sometimes due to direct interference from society, demonically. How relatively few are here today on ths major feast day, which on the Church calendar is a joyous duty to attend for worship, in the company of an overflowing host of holy saints and angels. Orthodox Churches for this and other major feasts should be crowded into the streets in this supposedly free country, in which we are grateful for freedom to worship but often constrained in other ways due to the hostility and lure of worldliness and its obstructing tentacles and our own sin. Rather than the modern Western habit of just coming to worship often or sometimes for Sunday, we can “force ourselves” (as holy people have said) to habits of deeper prayer and worship in Orthodoxy, and with God’s help overcome many obstacles. May our Lady’s Entrance and her life in the Temple be our example!

Truly she is here for all of us. At American Thanksgiving time, as with this past weekend, often we think of classic pictures of mothers and grandmothers bringing out turkeys and food. Yet some of us no longer have mothers on earth, some of us did not have mothers, and some of us have hard relations with our mothers due to the past and perhaps illness. Yet our heavenly mother is always there. In honoring our father and mother we are honoring her, too, alongside our heavenly Father, and also the Son Whom she bore, as the greatest gift to the world this Nativity Season, of which this feast is the great opening. The Theotokos in the arc of her whole life, from birth to her Dormition, with Christ gathering up her soul and then the assumption of her body into heaven according to tradition, illustrates purification, illumination, and contemplation, the three phases of theosis or unification of men with the uncreated energies of God, and the basis for the noetic life of the Church in Orthodoxy, so different from Western rationalism and hyper-individualism.

This feast is a great gateway for us into the road to Nativity, near the start of the Nativity Fast. As Orthodox Christians we are called to set ourselves apart from worldiness, by eating a less carnivorous and more peaceable and modest diet for 40 days, while also being more aware of our obligations of prayer and charity. The Church calendar, in which Dec. 25 is Jan. 7 on the civil calendar, also serves as a protection for us in this today, separating us from much worldliness in the observation of a Christmas holiday that too often has become secularized and commercialized and even paganized.

As our mission prepares during this Fast and this Christmas season to enter, God willing, our own humble new temple soon, let us look to our Lady and her intercession, celebrating the ultimate Entry into the Temple today with Thanksgiving at our Eucharist. We remember Jesus Christ’s words: “Destroy this temple and in three days I shall raise it up.” Our remembrance of her today is part of our needed self-emptying in her Son across the ages.

Of this feast of the Entry, St. John of Kronstadt wrote in a homily:

“On this day, my brethren, the holy Church celebrates the solemn Entry into the temple in Jerusalem of the three-year-old child, Mary—the blessed daughter of righteous parents, Joachim and Anna—to be in instructed in the Lord. Zacharias—the elder and high priest—meets her with priestly splendor; and as he was instructed to do by the Spirit of God, he brings her, accompanied by young maidens, into the most interior part of the temple, the Holy of Holies, where the high priest himself enters but once a year, and where the Holy of Holies, the Lord Himself dwelt—for she was to become the Mother of His flesh.

“How did the most blessed Virgin spend her time in the temple? Taught the Hebrew written language and prayer by the Holy Spirit through the maidens, she spent her time in prayer, reading of the word of God (as you can see on the icon of the Annunciation), in divine contemplation, and handiwork. Her love for converse with God and for reading the word of God was so great that she forgot about food and drink, and an Archangel brought her heavenly food at God’s request, as the Church sings in the stichera for today’s feast.

“What an excellent example for fathers, mothers, and their children; for Christian maidens and youths! They are obligated as followers of the Lord Jesus Christ, as servants of the Heavenly Queen, the Mother of God, and Founder of Spiritual Instruction[1] (meaning the Church to which they belong), to emulate as well as they can her fervent love for God, her zeal for reading the word of God, for prayer, for divine contemplation, self-restraint, and love of labor! If we do not want to be falsely called spiritual members of Christ’s Church—that holy House of God, the Queen and Mother of which is the Most Holy Virgin—then we should also have the same thoughts as She has. May her children by grace be of one spirit with Her! Let them learn from her how to love the Lord, our Creator, more than anything else in the world, more than father and mother, more than anyone dear to us; how to avidly study the word of God—something unfortunately not seen amongst the disciples of Jesus Christ; learn with what warmth of heart and love we must pray to the Lord; how we must dedicate ourselves to him wholeheartedly; how to entrust our fate to His wise and all-good Providence; with what purity, meekness, humility, and patience we must always clothe and adorn ourselves and not with the vain embellishments of this adulterous and sinful world which knows no bounds of luxury and elegance in bodily clothing; how to love a life with God and the saints more than to dwell in the tents of sinners (Ps. 83:11)….

“…. Do you see how beneficial and necessary it is for a Christian to visit the temple of God in order to educate himself for the Heavenly Fatherland, in order to bring the spirit of Christ into himself, to engender heavenly, saintly manners? For, where else besides God’s temple will you hear the word of God; where, beside in church, will you receive the mysteries of faith; where will you obtain the strength to live in a Christian way? All of this is in church and from church. Love going to God’s church, and prepare a temple of your own selves for God: Ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ (1 Pet. 2:5). Let parents, teachers, and relatives take or send their children to church often, every Sunday and feast day without fail, and not to the theatre, where they will only learn what the young should not know. In church, they will hear the name of the Lord more frequently; they will learn the great truth of the creation of the world and mankind; they will come to know the Savior, the Mother of God, and the names of the saints. They will learn about the resurrection of the dead, the future judgment, the future life, and the eternal torments of sinners. They will learn from the Spirit of God to be good Christians; and that is more valuable than anything in the world.”

Glory to God for all things! Most Holy Theotokos save us!

***

For more reading on the Most Holy Theotokos’ entry into the Temple and its spiritual significance, please see:

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St John Russian Orthodox Mission Church and the Bucknell Orthodox Christian community will host a Thanksgiving feast with all the fixings, and a little Viking Orthodox Christian lore thrown in for dessert. The Thanksgiving meal will begin right after Divine Liturgy on Sunday Nov. 24. Orthodox Eucharistic thanks-giving worship to God starts at 10 a.m. at the Lewisburg Club, 131 Market St., back entrance, and will be immediately followed by an informal Thanksgiving smorgasbord (a feast of gratitude that will precede the start of our Nativity Fast, which we will also mark on Wed. 11/27–Thanksgiving Eve–with the Thanksgiving Akathist prayer service at 7 p.m.). At Sunday’s meal we’ll also celebrate the landing of Viking Orthodox Christians in North America around 1000 AD, beating the Pilgrims and Columbus, and leaving a lot less controversy! (Almost-authentic photos below show Viking explorer Leif Erikson, according to actual medieval accounts an Orthodox Christian, spotting a flying wild turkey.) His landing in North America is thought to have been in the fall in Newfoundland, Canada, which is considered the northern tip of the same Northern Appalachian mountain network in which our mission Church lies in central Pennsylvania. His landfall, a Christian mission with priests aboard according to a saga account, would undoubtedly have involved thanksgiving prayers upon landing.

For about two millennia Orthodox worship services have had as their centerpiece the Eucharist, which means “thanksgiving.” Thanksgiving has a meaning of glorifying God, and the meaning of Orthodoxy itself as a name is “right glorifying” or “holy glorifying.” One of the most famous modern Orthodox Christian Akathist services is the “Thanksgiving Akathist,” known also for its refrain, “Glory to God for all things!”

Yes, Erikson and his intrepid Vikings landed in North America around 1000 AD, and according to medieval accounts would have been Orthodox Christians. The Vikings were also closely connected to early Russian and Byzantine Orthodox cultures. The Sage of Erik the Read (c. 1200) indicates that Leif Erikson was on a mission trip to Greenland with priests aboard when his boat was blown off course and landed in “Vinland,” a name for a Viking settlement in North America that the saga describes as founded by Erikson, and which archaeologists associate with a site in Newfoundland.

All are welcome! Festivities will also include a brief Smorgasbord Sunday School presentation on “The First Orthodox Thanksgiving,” based on the early landing of the Orthodox Leif Erikson in North America, touching also on aforementioned strong connections between Viking culture and the Orthodox world, as well as early pioneering Christian Scandinavian saints from that era, including St. Olaf of Norway and St. Anna, Princess of Novgorod. The mini Smorgasbord Sunday School will be facilitated by Fr Paul Siewers, a priest at St. John’s and a professor at Bucknell University, who teaches and writes about Viking literature and culture, and is adviser to the Bucknell Orthodox community.

Come and enjoy American Thanksgiving fare (including turkey and ham) with all the fixings, and a little Slavic and Scandinavian flavor thrown in. Avoid any family controversy over the Pilgrims and Columbus Day and the US election, while still celebrating our gratitude to God for his blessings as Americans, in a friendly cross-cultural environment at the Russian Orthodox mission to Northern Appalachia! All are welcome!

Then come to more Thanksgiving goodness mid-week: The Orthodox Christian Thanksgiving Akathist Prayer Service, “Glory to God for all things,” will be held at 7 p.m. Wed. Nov. 27 (Thanksgiving Eve), in the Willard Smith Library at Vaughan Literature Building, Bucknell University (next door to Vaughan 121). All are also welcome to this beautiful Thanksgiving service, which was prayed by concentration camp inmates during World War II, and celebrates even amid the hardest struggles imaginable God’s gift of life, redemption, and Creation. Glory and thanks be to God!

One of our reasons for giving thanks this week was the entry of our second current adult Catechumen-convert into preparation for baptism, pictured below before Liturgy on Nov. 11, 7533 [Nov. 24, 2024 on the civil calendar].

(The full film is available on Amazon or Youtube rental.) This paper was given on Sept. 14, 7533 (Sept. 27, 2024 on the civil calendar) at the Nature, Philosophy, and Religion Society session of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy’s annual conference in Rochester, NY.

John Ford, one of classic Hollywood’s greatest directors, made a short film segment known as “A Minute’s Wait,” about 25 minutes long, as part of his longer 1957 anthology film The Rising of the Moon, which drew on actors from Dublin’s famed Abbey Theater in an effort to encourage Irish film-making. The segment was a kind of art-film sequel to his famous 1952 film The Quiet Man. Ford one called the whole anthology his favorite film, although he also said the same supposedly about his likewise brilliant but eccentric and little-known 1953 film The Sun Shines Bright. The latter also featured, in an American setting, a weird sense of temporality, different from Ford’s signature Westerns, melding Confederate Lost Cause, Lincolnian nationalist, and early Civil Rights era themes, strangely but somehow humanely. A Minute’s Wait as a segment of The Rising of the Sun opens awkwardly like the rest of the anthology in an introduction by Hollywood legend and Irishman Tyrone Power, with whom the mercurial Ford reportedly had a spotty relationship. Nonetheless, looking at this center of the three short films in that anthology, A Minute’s Wait, I’ll argue that we can put this film in relation to Christian existentialist ideas of time and Creation, and find in it a source of resistance to modern technocracy or rule by technology, the source of our globalizing administrative state and its affinity for what is called “workeness.”

Christian Existentialism and Orthodoxy

Christian existentialism, a label based in the work of Søren Kierkegard but even more for Orthodox Christians that of Fyodor Dostoevsky, has been defined as rejecting efforts to contain God in an objective, logical system, while focusing on existence rather than any essentialism about life. Rather, the focus of theology in it shines on a person grappling with subjective truth, rather than a set of objective claims. In an Orthodox sense of this, St. Basil the Great intimated that natural law was the spark of God’s love in the human heart, and this could be considered an ancient patristic basis for Christian existentialism, still living in the Orthodox Church. Contrariwise, C.S. Lewis presented the modern term technocracy (albeit critically) in opposition to Basil’s view, meaning a totalizing and ultimately totalitarian system that ultimately is transhumanist (The Abolition of Man). The 21^st-century Anglo-Irish Orthodox Christian writer Paul Kingsnorth calls our current technocracy “The Machine,” by which the combined utilitarian and nihilistic assumptions of modern scientism come to shape all-encompassing realities through technology, as seen in cyberspace and artificial intelligence, and how so many people globally now spend much of their time on devices, much more than in prayer or worship, even especially those claiming to be Christians and even us Orthodox.

A Patristic View of Time

In Lewis’ view, technocracy while at odds with Christian existentialism, makes use of a parody or incomplete sense of it, in what becomes a postmodern sensibility. Focusing on a person grappling with subjective truth, the technocratic mindset seeks to obscure and forget the Person of Christ as that ultimate source of relationship, freedom, and personal dialogue, as Mikhail Bakhtin described the personal Christocentrism of Dostoevsky’s work. Thus unhinged, subjective truth is lured by impersonal claims to instrumentalize, manipulate, and from an insanely demonic sensibility according to Dostoevsky, in effect to blow up the world by will to power. The controversial Russian philosopher and polemicist Alexander Dugin, in his studies of Martin Heidegger’s critique of Western ontology as nihilist, argues that the West’s sense of reality has become hegemonic and virtual. By identifying individual beings falsely with both mystical Being and ideas, Dugin argues in effect that the Western lobotomizing of Christian existentialism left a self-willed struggle for power in virtual realities, which depend evermore on addictive technology to exert that will over the world. In short, the technocratic flip side of Christian existentialism has become for Lewis, Kingsnorth, and Dugin what the evangelist John called the spirit of Anti-Christ, denying that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh. It fashions an emphasis on self-assertion through technology, which all becomes like Behemoth or Leviathan in apocalyptic scope. The paradox is that hyper-atomization of person becomes susceptibility to techno-totalitarian control, as the Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, a student of Heidegger, noted in her The Origins of Totalitarianism. This all develops into a managed normality of evil, which she called “the banality of evil.”

The distinctive patristic Christian model of simultanous temporalities and non-temporality provides an antidote. Orthodox Christian modes of time and non-time resist any objectifying and instrumentalizing of Creation and also of man, and so resist technocracy. The patristic vision of time and beyond-time can be thought of in four aspects. (1) The first is the natural time suggested by St Basil the Great’s writings on the Six Days of Creation. This is the time of the stars and the plants and animals and the seasons. (2) The second is fallen human time, which attempts to fragment and measure this in human terms alone, ultimating in what we might today call cellphone time. (3) Then there is eternity of the created angels, demons, and immortal human souls. (4) Beyond that we find the uncreated beyond time, the everlasting, of the energies of God. This constitutes that spark of God’s love in the human heart that Basil indicated is natural law. Together all these modes entwine in human experience of Creation. That personal experientiality of the heart forms the subjectivity or personhood of truth in Christian existentialism, found by emptying self in the Person of Jesus Christ, fully God and fully man. It resists objectification, essentialization, conceptualization, and utilitarianism or nihilism. That’s because here lies what the Anglican Christian phenomenologist Erazim Kohak called the Venn diagram of time and eternity, although even more than this in Orthodox cosmology lies the Venn diagram of time and eternity, in the context of the uncreated energies of God, the Holy Trinity, which models a mysterious meta-Personal relationship. This cannot be systematized or controlled by Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality.

Back to the Film

Dugin argued that the atomization of postmodernity in the West yields to the importance of the subatomic, as he puts it. But Christian tradition can renew such a  dreary particle view, by flipping the landscape to energy: the uncreated energies of God, grace–the field or landscape of God’s uncreated light. Now, finally, to return to John Ford’s film, an existentialist comedy by reason of its ending in an engagement between Paddy and Pegeen made in a moment and framed by talk of a cemetery. Their younger counterparts Mary Ann and Christy also end up by the end of the film segment in an engaged marriage that is also reflective of their own attraction to each other–fate meets free will in medieval weirdness in their relationship as well, sealed by bonus dollars from the American military in which her father had lost his life. Death frames both marriages.

Filmed in 1956 in Kilkee, and featuring a fictional form of the West Clare Railway, called the Ballyscran and Dunfaill Railroad, and based on a one-act play by Martin J. McHugh from 1914, “A Minute’s Wait” features a mythic old rural Ireland fallen between the cracks of time, with no specified year in the film. I’m tempted to think of it as existing somewhere in the 1921-1922 odd realm of Southern Ireland, a temporary partition of Ireland affected by the Government of Ireland Act, drifting between old Ireland as a British conquest and the Irish Free State hanging weirdly as a British Dominion but disputed with the revolutionary Republic of Ireland that claimed to encompass it. So temporalities of Creation here also can be contextualized with colonialist problems, while hanging in a form of created cinematic timelessness.

From the beginning, the Porter Paddy announces to the train that there will be one minute’s wait when it arrives at the Dunfaill station. But he also announces the refreshment room is open. And when asked by one of the passengers who knows his name whether he will have time to order and drink a pint, Paddy responds there will be lots of time, and more if he joins him in the middle. Then Paddy announces again to all that there will be one minute’s wait. As the film goes on and in its title, one minute’s wait becomes later called a minute’s wait, not so numerically defined but perhaps typing some sense of eternity. The railroad could be taken as representing human time run amuck or demonic as technological time, falsely laying claim to eternity. In this in a sense it could type prelest or delusion as demonic, polluting human time as in the time of Nimrod and the Tower of Babel and Babylon in technocracy, a reference made by CS Lewis in the title of his dystopian book That Hideous Strength, a poetic reference to Babylon and the hubris of technology. This is a time that ultimately for Lewis expresses that spirit of the Anti-Christ in the Evangelist John’s terms: A time that is a blasphemous parody of not just eternity but the everlasting of God’s beyond-time in its perverse and pervasive immersiveness. In it again human time really becomes demonic time in a misleading sense of eternity.

But arguably, the comedy also lies in the resistance here to globalization, and could be said symbolically to type the true eternity that lies in the human soul and in the angelic and demonic that influence it. But the immersiveness and homogeneous monolithic qualities of the railroad time indicate something more sinister too, despite the best efforts of the people to pay no mind. Perhaps it is also indicative of the passage to death, in which in the end like the hurling team people can only celebrate, but only authentically if Christians in hope of being with Jesus Christ. Could the transformation of railroad time yet still also type the sobornost or spiritual unity written about by another lesser-known philosopher counted as a Christian existentialist, the Russian Orthodox S.L. Frank? Sobornost at its root comes from a Slavonic term used as a calque on the Catholic in the Nicene Creed, but having the meaning more of deep solidarity and underlying connectedness rather than universality geographically. Sobornost can be thought of as the dynamic field of the uncreated energies of God, scrambling various temporalities.

Against this lies the technological will to power represented by the railroad. In The Coming Wave (2023), Mustafa Suleyman, cofounder of DeepMind and CEO of Microsoft AI, attacks the notion of technological neutrality and declares that “Technology is a form of power.” The Orthodox Christian writer Rod Dreher summarizes how “Suleyman calls on governments and international organizations to develop a regulatory structure of “containment”—that is, to grant corporations like Microsoft monopoly power over technologies like AI and keep them from “bad actors” [dissenters and non-conformists resisting technocracy and globalization]. Such groups are deemed too dangerous to have a say over the technologies of “the future.” Such a judgment, openly made, suggests that an era of strife and force is not far off,” Dreher writes.

More primitively, cinematic time as of the black-and-white film A Minute’s Wait could be taken as symbolizing the technological time mentioned above as well as the railroad. A famous silent movie featured train headed toward scared yet enthralled audiences. Was it a precursor to the internet and cyberspace? The latter is based on a linear sense of progress likewise that paradoxically becomes strangely hegemonic.

The blurred political time of Ireland in the period depicted by the movie evokes de Valera’s unsuccessful attempt at a kind of agrarian Catholic republic. The Anglo-Irish were distinguished by Yeats in their own effort at a kind of timeless human time, but one ultimately dedicated like Yeats to esoteric globalization involving the occult, and with an ultimately off-key tone like the hapless English couple on the train. Another example, at this same time, very involved in the whole effort to create a federation of British dominion states in what became the Commonwealth of Nations, was the so-called Milner Group and its offshoots, traced by the Georgetown historian Carrol Quigley. The Milner Group was influenced by the Christian Science religion of several of its key members, notably the Astors and Lord Lothian, likewise tending toward the global occult. That was a gnostic mind-healing sect, ultimately discredited by alleged Appeasement and medical ineffectiveness, but with themes of British Israelism, the idea that the British Empire genealogically or spiritually marked the coming forth of the lost tribes of Israel, with enduring influence on Protestant Zionism and its impact on the Middle East. Such gnostic ways of thinking sought to disavow that Jesus Christ had come in the flesh, in the spirit of Antichrist from the standpoint of traditionalists like Lewis. They emphasized a false transcendent beyond-temporality out of reach of embodied experience.

Rules and Timing for Orthodox Christian “Existentialism”

We can find as an antidote, in Orthodox time and Orthodox Christian existentialism, Blessed Seraphim Rose’s principles for his Orthodox teaching. Fr Seraphim, a 1970s Orthodox Christian writer in America who went from being a fellow traveler of the beatniks in northern California in the 1970. Three principles of his, according to his biographer:

1. We are pilgrims on earth and we do not take anything with us in the sense that the worldly things that preoccupy us have no absolute significance.
2. Orthodox Christianity is not academic but lived embodied experience.
3. If Christ is not found by us in this life, He will not be found by us in the next.

These all imply a strong emphasis in the existential Christian model of Christian temporality already mentioned, with its elements on natural time, human time, eternity, and the everlasting, all entwined simultaneously. This can also be explained by a dive into the etymology of the term weird. Weird now rests as a term that was an issue in the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign, in talking about which candidates were the oddest. But its ancient meaning in the era of Christian patristics was different than merely odd, and its queerness not about sexual preferences. Weird had a meaning of the otherworldly, the crucial moment where one’s destiny shaped by all the community of one’s life came into place with an opportunity for a decision. In a way this can be compared to being on a surfboard driven by a giant wave, when you can shift and steer your surfboard a bit to guide your trajectory of landing. This models too the operation of grace and being free in Christian existentialism of the old sort. For to be free in early English is to be generous, a term related to friend, having in it the meaning of Jesus Christ’s new commandment to love your neighbor more than yourself, to empty yourself in Him, rather than to assert yourself.

The Cosmic Symbolism of Christian Marriage

Those who would assert themselves seem most in line with the technology of the railroad in Ford’s short comic film. But even the scheming relatives of Christy and Mary Ann in their money-based matchmaking merely parallel most comically what is already organically happening with the young couple. Throughout, the film’s comedy suggests that temporality is not absolute, but by extension can become an ontological model related to experience.

The presence of the religious in the short film is directly in two areas, one being the pious conventions observed by the characters, tipping a hat in remembrance of the dead and suggesting a prayer. The other is the relation of the Catholic and Anglican Irish churches, indicated by Paddy’s tricksterish storing of the lobsters for the Catholic Bishop’s Golden Jubilee in the train care of the English couple. Religion per se is a matter partly for comedy, as in The Quiet Man at times. But in the background it also offers an experiential typology for how the everlasting of God’s beyond-time in His uncreated energies may be taken as the immersive film experience of the whole encounter of the train with this rural station and the effect on the viewer. To use an ecosemiotic model, the roles of filmmaker, film, viewer, and environment or context of the movie, all together could be seen as a typology of the sobornost or mystical unity formed by the beyond-time field of the uncreated energies of God.

Paddy and Pegeen’s engagement is interrupted by the train, after she says it would be lovely to be buried with his people, and gives him her hand like a noble lady. But the train when it leaves the station is transfigured, buoyed by boisterous Irish music, waving and shouts of goodbye, with practitioners of the supposedly ancient Irish art of hurling waving their sticks from the roofs of the train, as the English couple is left perplexed behind, having been lingering at their makeshift station tea table. It is as if the train transcends the utilitarian and the nihilistic, the worldly. Paddy is left behind too, to go back to talking to Peggy off screen, while there also is still the beleaguered station master at the little country stop, and Mary Ann and Christy on the train heading off to their agreed-upon marriage. The growing claim of an homogenous time for the railroad is superseded by the human and archetypal comedy of the happening at the station, in which the couples assume typological roles of the Bridegroom and the Bride, familiar archetypes in biblical terms, captured for a moment on film like the character shots of the villagers at the end of The Quiet Man. Symbolically, for a moment of grace, the whole claim to inevitable expansion and immersion of the Machine as a way of life becomes absurd and unreal, caught in an underlying personal energy akin to sobornost, the mystical spiritual unity of the uncreated energies of God’s grace. We are reminded of how we really come to life in a mysterious narrative of God in which we are in a sense but types ourselves. That we are watching all this typology, however, through the technology of cinema, and now on digital technology, nonetheless forms part of the sobering comedy of the railroad happening.

(Above: Icon of St. Alfred the Great of Anglo-Saxon England)

A paper given at “A Flame Imperishable: The Christian Legacy of J. R. R. Tolkien, Sept. 15, 7533 [Sept. 28, 2024 on the civil calendar], co-hosted by the Albert M. Wolters Centre for Christian Scholarship at Redeemer University ,and the Andrew Fuller Centre for Baptist Studies, in Ancaster, Ontario. Glory to God!

The problem of kingship in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien’s masterpiece and the apotheosis of all his backstories, parallels the problem of kingship in the Bible. God tells Israel of the problems they will have with the kingship they want. They will have tyranny for getting the worldly protection they seek like other nations, along often with the idolatry of the backsliding and ultimately destroyed kingdoms of Judah and Israel of the north.

Yet across later Christian tradition, as Israel became fully realized in the Church, kingship became the norm in terms of forms of secular government, with the alternative not being the Old Testament rule by Judges in what has been called a theocracy, but the perceived potential mob tyranny of a kingless republic and revolution. In this, the Puritan Commonwealth arguably did not end well, especially if you are of Irish background. But to Tolkien, the project of the British Empire was also suspect, the Protestant kingship of England wrapped in effect in apostasy. (That today seems suggested in another way by the fate of the mainline Church of England and the transition arguably to a more extra-Christian perennialist view of religion in the constitutionally limited royal family.) Tolkien was no Puritan or Anglican of course, but a Catholic. In his own lifetime, amid the toppling of the major unconstitutional Christian kingships of Europe after World War I, he supported General Franco in the Spanish Civil War, who later would reinstitute the Spanish monarchy.

Still, in The Lord of the Rings kings did not do too well overall until the end. The old northern Kingdom of Arnor had fallen into a kingless place of the occult, and the lesser kings of the north had become the undead Barrow-wights of the Barrow-downs. The line of kings in Gondor had faltered and been replaced by a line of Stewards. Hubris and lust for power marked the decadence of kingship, but also perhaps what Faramir noted of the Numenorean aristocratic elite, that they sought to extend their own lives rather than care about children. This should sound familiar to us, living amid what Tolkien’s contemporary Oswald Spengler called The Decline of the West.

Even the Rohirrim, representing the vigorous hope of the barbarians coming to the rescue of civilization that Tolkien saw in the legacy of the Anglo-Saxon culture that he loved, endure long years of the deadened rule of King Théoden, before he is released from the hypnotism of Grima Wormtongue, the agent for Saruman, who himself has become the agent of Sauron. Not only Kings but Wizards like Saruman are subject to corruption in Tolkien’s Legendarium, and even the equivalent of angels like Sauron and his master Melkor, reminders of the fall of Lucifer in Christian teaching.

There are some standout places in Middle-earth that have the equivalent of righteous kingships. These are mainly Elvish places. Rivendell, ruled by Elrond like a king. Lothlórien ruled by Galadriel like a queen. But there is a third, the strange case of the Shire, yet its name offers a clue. Downstream from the old capital of the northern kingdom of Arnor, the Shire still bears as its name an indication that it is part of some larger government. We are told that while the kingdom is missing, the king’s law continues in the Shire as if it is still in force, observed by the Hobbit inhabitants with a minimum of government. In this the Shire exemplifies Tolkien’s own political philosophy, which he characterized in letters as unconstitutional monarchy combined with anarchism. In other words, Tolkien prefers a lack of the modern developing global administrative state, which writers such as Eric Voegelin identified with the gnostic heresy, others with Leviathan, and the Orthodox Christian writer Paul Kingsnorth calls The Machine. This might for believing Christians of our age even be identified with a growing spirit of Anti-Christ and preparation for the latter’s global rule, a system of combined economy, state, and culture, denying the Incarnation, the capacity for which today C.S. Lewis in his The Abolition of Man called technocracy. The impending prophesied rule of the Anti-Christ is negative demonic kingship, at odds with our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ, but as such for believers doomed to defeat.

Tolkien as a man who came of age amid the horrors of combat in World War I, and whose fantasy history seems to have been in part a coming to terms with those horrors, was writing for latter days in which actual Christian kingship had disappeared and had seemed to many to have failed, while believers even more keenly anticipated the coming again of Christ. Come quickly, Lord Jesus, as the end of the Scriptures say. In this context, Tolkien again expressed a kind of nostalgia for an anarchism ruled by an unconstitutional monarch, presumably one like Aragorn, who would grant a certain autonomy to different peoples and lands, but whose law of the king would be maintained in the hearts of the people as in the Shire, after it was rescued from corruption. For Aragorn’s rule, like the government of the Shire, is an imperfect type of Christ’s rule, and the Return of the King as a title resonates theologically and eschatologically.

All this is imperfect, however, because of the fallen nature of the world in Tolkien’s Christian frame. The exemplary lands with quasi-functioning kingships are lands in the case of Rivendell and Lothlórien where the Rings of the Elves protect and empower such rule. Yet when the One Ring is destroyed, so will fade that protection and presumably those realms. This simplifies the link between earthly kingship, even on Middle-earth, which of course is an ancient name and ancient fantasy history for our earth, and the fallenness of things and Men, to whom belong the Fourth Age. I would argue that the Shire herself is most likely protected by the third Elvish Ring, safe-kept by Gandalf but arguably losing its signal while he was with the Balrog and Sharkey-Saruman took the Shire.

Meanwhile the Dunedain, of whom Aragorn functions as leader, are the descendants of the old rulers of the Kingdom of the North, the Rangers of the North, who did not fall prey to the lust for power and treasure that consumed those haunting the Barrow-downs. There are rangers of the South, too, led by Faramir in Ithilien, the dissheveled Garden of Gondor right on the border of Mordor. Both groups of Rangers are like guerilla fighters, and reminiscent of legends like the Texas Rangers, literally ranging across an area to defend a landscape. Faramir later returns with Eowyn to Ithilien after the defeat of Sauron, to help revive the Garden of Gondor with the soil and seeds gifted by Galadriel, which did not fade with the loss of the Elvish Rings. That job of gardener, as with Sam Gamgee arguably the real hero of the book, seems connected symbolically to kingly qualities in Tolkien’s storytelling. Tending the garden of a region, a community, the fallen world, is the kind of cultivating mandated in Genesis and related to the dominion or sovereignty given by God. That sovereignty is a freedom in the old sense of generosity, rather than self-assertion, of self-emptying in Christ. Those are the kingly qualities for which Aragorn too stands, albeit in a transcendent way. The King James Version translates a verse from Psalm 50 as “uphold me with Thy free spirit,” while other translations use the term “with Thy sovereignty.”

Faramir, head of the Southern Rangers and heir of the Gondor stewardship superseded by Aragorn’s rule, was said by Tolkien to be his favorite character, the scholar-warrior. Faramir famously said “I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”

With this, Faramir rejects the use of the One Ring as a potential help in the war against Sauron, unlike his brother Boromir, who dies in a struggle related to the attempt to use it as a weapon for good. In that, Faramir examplies a quality of Christian kingship that goes back to Byzantine Christian civilization, namely the standard of necessary war rather than just war. Part of today’s globalization seems bound up with the idea of an atheistic sense of just war, an alliance of good versus evil. But St. Basil the Great in the fourth century cautioned Byzantine Christians to be discerning about the fallenness of human endeavors. He wrote that those soldiers who killed an enemy, even in a legal and justifiable war, should do penance for three years by refraining from the Eucharist. For killing remained a sin even in such an apparently sanctioned situation. The idea of necessary war relates to this, seeing war as a necessary evil, not righteous or just, but still necessary and right. This also sheds some light on the question of kingship today at least as it may apply to the role of believers in an era without Orthodox Christian kings.

University of Ottawa Prof. Paul Robinson contrasted the “just war” doctrine of the West with key aspects of “necessary war,” as found in the Russian philosopher Ivan Ilyin’s 1925 book On the Resistance to Evil by Force, in which Ilyin in effect had justified in Christian terms the fight against Communism in the bloody Russian Civil War. Ilyin argued against Tolstoyan pacifism, which he said among pre-revolutionary Russian elites helped pave the way for the Communist takeover with its ensuing mass murders and cultural genocides. The issue of worldly war reflects the issue of kingship for Christians, since the two were so releated.

For a war to be “necessary,” according to Ilyin: There must be “real evil,” not only suffering, but evil human will expressed in external deeds; such externalized evil human will must be recognized on a deep level as a prerequisite for fighting it; those fighting it need a “genuine love of good” and a repentant attitude in realizing the sinfulness of war on all sides; and its fighters need a “strong will” that is not indifferent to evil. Force he argued also becomes necessary only when other measures such as psychological coercion fail. (The latter point doesn’t mean that force is a last resort, as in Western “just war” doctrine, only that it becomes needed after it is realized that any alternative deemed practical is gone.) This parallels the writer Fyodor Dostoevsky’s philosophy of a common guilt for sin, which needs to be claimed through repentance, is personal, and cannot be resolved simply through abstract legal views and processes. In that sense, there is larger complicity for the parricide of Fyodor Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov, for example.

To Ilyin, likewise, the spiritual causes of evil must be recognized within human souls. Fighting the external manifestations while leaving the roots intact will not lead to success, and there are unintended consequences and collateral damage in addressing merely the external. God and faith are integral factors in calculating a necessary war and repenting for it. All of this paradoxically makes for an approach to war that is perhaps both more extremely skeptical and more likely in select cases.

The necessary war doctrine in my view had its basis in pre-scholastic Christian cultures, which were familiar to Tolkien, despite his Edwardian Catholic background, because of his study and love for literatures of the British Isles prior to the Norman Conquest. In that cultural environment, there was also a sense of rulers having a kind of contract with God. A surviving Byzantine mural in the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople typifies this by showing the Mother of God bestowing crowns to the kings of the day.

Besides his words on necessary war, St. Basil the Great also had words on natural law that indicate something about the qualities of kingship known from those early Christian cultures that fascinated Tolkien, and their sense of necessary war. Basil suggested that natural law is the spark of God’s love in the human heart. This is different from a legalistic sense of rule or any Old Testament type of theocracy or even a legal-heavy sensibility of the divine right of kings as found in later Christian Europe.

Scripture has a term for such kingly quality in our latter days, katechon in Greek, from First Timothy, related I think to this sense of natural law. It means a withholder, a protector, or restrainer, as understood today sometimes controversially as a ruler or country holding back the spirit of Anti-Christ to permit more time as it were for more souls to be saved. I think this too is reflected, though perhaps unintentionally, in Tolkien’s writing. While opposed to Nazism and Communism, Tolkien was also opposed to globalizing secular liberal capitalism, and critical of the centralizing tendencies of what he called “Winston and his gang,” in reference to England’s storied leadership during World War II. Just so he was skeptical about American capitalism, whose apotheosis for him may have been Walt Disney, whom he criticized for commercializing myth and dumbing it down for children. Catholic distributism and subsidiarity could help explain some of Tolkien’s sensibilities, along with his focus on Late Antique and Early Medieval Christian cultures. One message about kingship as referenced in Revelation, believers being made kings and priests unto God, may engage well with Sam Gamgee as a hero of The Lord of the Rings, suggesting that each believer in these latter days can have a role as katechon, nurturing and protecting the spark in effect, especially for the vulnerable.

A final example of kingship in Christian tradition as applicable to modern times may be seen in martyrdom. In Christian history, those kings considered holy were martyrs for the faith, witnesses unto death, or especially self-sacrificing and protecting of the vulnerable faithful in life. Martyrs received crowns. Even in the tradition of marriage, we see in the Orthodox Christian wedding rite for example crowns that are held over the bride and groom symbolizing crowns of martyrdom within marriage. The royal weddings at the end of The Lord of the Rings can be read as symbolically related, as in Arwen’s sacrifice of her Elvish un-mortality.

I think three principles attributed to the Orthodox Christian American convert Father Seraphim Rose in the 1970s also bear relevance to Tolkien’s idea of kingship. They suggest the role of the reader in receiving Tolkien’s book, in experiencing a typology of how we can be made kings and priests to God in emptying ourselves in Christ, and in loving our neighbor more than ourselves, in line with Christ’s New Commandment, and how the ultimate King is Christ. These three principles of kingliness of believers are:

1. That we are pilgrims on Earth and whatever we possess here in worldliness will pass.
2. That Christianity is not academic, of the head, but lived in an embodied way.
3. That, despite but also because of the fallenness of the world, if we do not find Christ here on Middle-earth, in the Creation He gave us and into which He came, we will not find him in the hereafter. So our lives here, the openness of our hearts to grace and the cultivation of the gardens of our life, do matter.

These suggest to us how the crowns of martyrdoms of believers provide qualities of Christian kingship in these latter days, relating to Creation in a transfigured sense imbued with the uncreated energies of God, and the steps of purification, illumination, and theoria in our salvation. This is exhibited in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov when Alyosha falls to the earth and waters it with his tears. Then feeling the intercession for him of his reposed spiritual father Elder Zosima, he rises a fighter for truth, energized by illumination. For the Israel fulfilled from the New Testament is the Orthodox Church, and we are sworn to protect her and those vulnerable to the spirit of Anti-Christ that would seek to overwhelm Orthodoxy and harm the oppressed in cultures hostile to Orthodoxy, most notably in the gnostic techno-totalitarian cacophany whose dungeons are the global West’s post-human digital simulacra.

As Ilyin’s fellow exiled Russian philosopher S.L. Frank put it, for the Orthodox Christian, freedom is voluntary service to universal truth, in the Person of Jesus Christ. That freedom is the calling to spiritual struggle of the believer who is made a king and priest unto God, in the vision given to to the Evangelist John in Revelation. That kingship involves the experience of Creation as the gift of God, the natural as the spark of God within our hearts, as St. Basil the Great put it, and unseen or spiritual warfare to preserve the otherworldly natural of what the Wise Thief saw as the “hidden God” on the Cross, labeled the “King of the Jews” by Pontius Pilate. What we may call Christian ecopoetics, or the shaping (poiesis) of home (oikos) in our faith, can inform our duty to support the katechon or restraining force on our Middle-earth today. The latter can help provide time and space, hopefully for ourselves and other lost sheep, to repent and to find salvation in the Church as the fulfilled Kingdom of Israel, the Body of Christ, and the opening up to us of the Kingdom of God, in His will being done “on earth as it is in heaven.” Tolkien wasn’t Orthodox. But he knew from his studies a lot about early Christian kingship, and its hidden applicability as a rallying standard against the Machine.

Looking at 2024 US presidential election results in two places where I have deep personal lived experience, Chicago and Union County, PA, I am struck again by the role of culture. In Chicago, the few but increased neighborhood precincts where Republicans took the majority included the fringes of the Northwest and Southwest Sides, the old Reagan Democrat lands of the police and firefighter clans (historically Irish Catholic), such as the now-red-again 41st Ward on the Northwest Side, and Mount Greenwood on the Southwest Side. There were also red precincts in areas with a significant Chinese-American, Mexican-American, and Orthodox Jewish presence–the latter in my old neighborhood of West Ridge (50th Ward), which on the west end has become more of a Chabad neighborhood in recent years. Funnily enough, the precinct in which the Cook County Jail predominates also broke for Trump and the Republicans, perhaps in the grand old tradition of Chicago’s last Republican Mayor Big Bill Thompson and his alleged connections with Al Capone, but also possibly reflecting cultural resentment against a criminal justice system that often predominantly in Chicago involves African-American males.

This map and the places behind it suggest cultural reasons why some micro-areas in Chicago went Republican in 2024. Nationally it is hard to figure deep philosophical differences in our two political parties. They often seem a little more like the Blue and the Green factions in Byzantine Constantinople of yore, or almost like sports team allegiances like the Cubs versus the White Sox, or brand allegiances like Ford vs. Chevy or Mac vs. PC. Breaking Republican at the micro-level of Chicago neighborhoods seems to me from this map more related to cultural preferences on issues such as clannishness related to borders, perceptions of household-family economics, resistance to the bureaucratic culture of the secular “scientific” state, and adherence to traditional human anthropology of sex– than acceptance of ideas of related Anglo and Russian conservatism from an Edmund Burke or Konstantin Pobedonostsev. Patterns of support seem to follow the cultural. The racist and anti-LGBTQ labels hurled by the Left as explanations for the 2024 vote end up as reductively Eurocentric and systemically secular as any anti-government libertarian analysis centered on free markets from that faction of the establishment Right.

But it’s been nearly 25 years since I considered Chicago home, and a bit longer since I was a newspaperman there on the staff of the Chicago Sun-Times, including a stint as urban affairs writer. Although I have known and loved Chicago well, my more recent station has been in rural northern Appalachia, in central Pennsylvania. Here in Union County, contrary to Chicago’s great Democratic sea, only 29% are registered Democrats, with 53% Republicans. In last week’s election, former President Trump won Union County with 61 percent of the vote to Vice President Harris’ 38 percent (with 95 percent of the vote counted). Yet on the university campus where I work in the county, student journalists found that nearly 92% of identifiable faculty on the county voter rolls are registered Democrats, undoubtedly voting for Harris based on visible campus political culture, while just 6 percent are registered Republicans. That, too, says something about culture and politics in a county typified by deeply rooted small towns and Amish and Mennonite communities, in which the contrast between campus and rural life could be tracked in good part by church-going trends and faith beliefs. Moving beneath culture lies religious sensibility, whether overtly so or apparently anti-religious as on my campus, from which politics comes downstream. On the post-Christian Left such as campus faculty culture, support for Trump is not so much a political sin as a kind of religious apostasy, supposedly deserving an incredible intensity of emotional reaciton and ostracism, but minus Christian charity.

Meanwhile, at the top level of national cuture morphing into the “global West,” beyond the vagaries of actual neighborhood voting, American political culture’s civic religion continues to follow its trend into ever-more extreme forms of the Monophysitism characterizing Protestant culture across generations, with roots too in medieval Scholastic Catholicism. Monophysitism is a heresy muddling the human and divine natures of Christ, by emphasizing the latter only, and tending toward Unitarianism. It ultimately strengthens self-assertion. This tendency in Anglo-American civilization traces all the way back to the addition in the West of the filioque to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed by the end of the first millennium, as a symptom of the tendency in the rationalistic Latin West to over-homogenize the mystery of the Holy Trinity, to meld the Divine Persons of Father and the Son in heterodoxical subordination to them of the Holy Spirit. The result was an instrumentalist cosmology and anthropology of created grace, and an individualism that paradoxically lent itself toward a technological worldview. This shaped the tendency toward Unitarianism and Deism in Western theology, culminating religiously in American culture at large with its heavy doses of New Thought and New Age-iness, in both conservative and liberal aspects of the Protestant Enlightenment that have lingered long in America. (This also helps explain why Puritanism in New England historically turned into Unitarianism and New Thought.)

Far from a badge of authentic Christian experience (however authentic any personal experiences in it may have been), this cultural atmosphere relates to what the Evangelist John writes of in Revelation as the “synagogue of Satan” in his message to the Church at Philadelphia, in an amorphous Unitarian-Masonic-style sense of divinity, drifting into self-assertive neopaganism, in the spirit of Anti-Christ denying the Incarnation and setting up a culture of technocratic and anti-Christian global management. The trend increasingly cuts itself off from the legacy of Israel as understood in the continuities of Orthodox Christian tradition — the realization of Old Testament Israel in the Orthodox Church of the Apostolic succession from Pentecost, fully Trinitarian in relationality, and as such embracing all peoples within their varied cultural traditions. The emerging civic religion instead involves a neocolonial sense of the particular sensibility of Western individualism as universal, and of beings as ideas in a virtual reality subject to technocracy. Individualism becomes the atomization against which Hannah Arendt warned as a paradoxical symptom of a developing totalitarian-included culture. That is the non-partisan and accelerating marker of American life at a meta-level.

Indeed, American civic religion today, while often wrongly seen as the most overtly religious culture among major world powers, increasingly has become the most aggressively globalistic and worldly in the neopagan inclinations of a technocratic “Deep State” (“Burning Man” meets Jeffrey Epstein) that oddly embraces both neoliberalism and neoconservatism. This affects the top level of politics in what some call the U.S. “uniparty,” in sync with a developing global mindset in which traditional Christians may detect a whiff of what the Evangelist John also called in one of his Epistles indeed called “the spirit of Antichrist,” the denial in the midst of post-Christian “Christendom” that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh. This follows the prophetic foreshadowing of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov. The new globalistic civil religion is in influence more cultural at a stratospheric level than political, interwoven with religious sensibilities.

One specific example with which I had personal experience through my family’s history was the influential cult Christian Science, which Georgetown historian Caroll Quigley (President Bill Clinton’s reputed mentor on the history of modern trans-Atlantic international relations) called the religion of the so-called “Milner Group” in his book The Anglo-American Establishment. In the 1920s into the 1940s the Milner Group (an outgrowth of Cecil Rhodes’ earlier network) exerted a cultural influence at the top of Anglo-American relations, helping to form the Commonwealth of Nations while envisioning a technocratic American succession to the British Empire. The Milner Group involved the influence of the “Christian Science Church,” a liberal conservative religious cult, with which I had family experience. It was a mix of postive thinking and Puritanism, drawing on a purported new vision of spirituality, while enhancing ultimately a strong sense of self-will, in a WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) milieu. Its adherents also dabbled with the idea that the British Empire marked the modern rebirth of the biblical “lost tribes” of Israel. It declined along with the shadow of the British Empire, while leaving remarkable traces of its past presence and influence. When President-elect Donald Trump announced his new White House chief of staff appointment, Susie Wiles, for example, he did so at Mar-a-Lago, which was built for a Christian Scientist social influencer originally, Marjorie Meriwether Post. Wiles herself was formed politically by Jack Kemp, who was raised a Christian Scientist and continued to be influenced by its ideas, articulated by the writer Warren Brooks in his book The Economy of Mind. And the very position of White House Chief of Staff had been fashioned in its modern form by the Christian Scientist H.R. Haldeman, one of many members of the sect present in the Nixon administration.

But my second and more current personal connection to cultural religious influence reflecting this trend toward a global civic religion unfolds in this pre-election piece I wrote for The Federalist. The killing of a cousin in the Jonestown massacre in 1978 highlighted a particular example of today’s evolving top-level, paradoxically globalistically-minded but individualistic spirituality. This non-partisan Deep State culture hovers invisibly because it lacks the local specificity of the cultures of neighborhoods in Chicago mentioned earlier, or in my Appalachian region. The vote in the 2024 presidential election interestingly may reflect at the neighborhood level resistance to the development of a globalistic neopagan religious sensibility. But the actual mechanics of any such neighborhood resistance are as likely as not themselves to be immersed (and co-opted) in this higher-level cultural trend. The latter, in its beyond-neighborhood dimension, moves into ever-more amorphous New Age notions. Dangerously identifying deity with individual will, it sets the stage for techno-totalitarianism. Below is the text of my Federalist piece, a snapshot of a particular aspect of this cultural-religious trend.

***

A new religious spirit is at work, permeating all sides of American politics.

BY: PAUL SIEWERS

NOVEMBER 01, 2024

As the major presidential candidates proclaim their faith credentials in the final days of the election, it’s noteworthy that Kamala Harris got her big boost into politics from a lover who was a close ally of the cultic mass murderer Jim Jones.

In 1978, Jones led more than 900 followers to their deaths in the jungles of Jonestown, Guyana, by having them drink poisoned juice. It was one of the darkest days of the revolutionary after-life of the 1960s in America.

The sulphurous stench of Jonestown still lingers in American culture. The tragedy was inextricably linked to the trending emergence of a new civil religion replacing “old Christendom.” Charged by hyper-racialist and pan-sexual self-expression, it proved hostile at its core to traditional Christian family life as the foundational basis for the U.S. republic.

The opening ceremony at the Olympics this summer showed how that new civil religion has gone global. Dionysus prancing around a blasphemous LGBTQ parody of the “Last Supper” was very much in the spirit of Jones’ culturally Marxist and nominally Christian new order. That revolution in “normalized” form is now not only livestreamed but mainstreamed. In the United States, it replaces lingering quaint nods to Christianity such as President Eisenhower’s 1950s “In God We Trust” motto on U.S. currency.

Cult Leader Helps San Francisco Democrats

Jones demonically combined a racialist and pan-sexualist political machine with a cult, attracting San Francisco political boss Willie Brown, Harris’ lover and mentor, among other leftist leaders. Jones harvested votes to help their careers and spread their post-1960s ideologies. This new civil religion of power is not so much an atheistic revolutionary ideology as a kind of pagan challenge to what John Adams called the “general principles of Christianity” underlying America.

The goal of destroying the Christian sense of family came from both a Trotskyite sense of The Communist Manifesto and hedonistic consumerism out of Silicon Valley. It exalts personal will while ironically making people more submissive to social control. As if a revolutionary LinkedIn to advance careers, it afflicts all sides of the political spectrum, although the Harris-Walz ticket of “change” is the clearest avatar this election season.

In the 1970s, support from Democrat leaders enabled Jones to operate his abusive cult. Harris’ ex-boyfriend Brown, a former California Assembly speaker and San Francisco mayor, reportedly attended Jones’ Peoples Temple several dozen times and praised Jones liberally. San Francisco Mayor George Moscone appointed Jones chair of the city Housing Authority Commission.

LGBTQ icon Harvey Milk spoke often at Jones’ congregation, saying he found there “a sense of being … I can never leave.” Brown introduced Jones at a testimonial dinner positively as “a combination of Martin King, Angela Davis, Albert Einstein … Chairman Mao.” Brown’s flippancy about Mao, likely the greatest mass-killing leader of history, was more chilling given Jones’ finale, the greatest cluster of forced civilian deaths of Americans prior to 9/11.

Until then, with Jones as an ally Brown spearheaded legalizing homosexuality in California, building his political clout in what became ground zero of the new American civil religion, now also known as “wokeness.” The new quasi-religious awokening from the start sought to override the “laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” cited in the Declaration of Independence.

Kamala Tied to Sexual and Other Marxists

Brown disavowed Jones, but only after the tragedy at Jonestown. Harris never disavowed Brown, who reportedly gifted her with a BMW and travel to Europe while they were lovers. They “dated” in 1994-1995, during which he appointed her (a younger deputy state’s attorney) to two commissions, which gave her a statewide profile. He supported her election as San Francisco district attorney.

Her underlying views continue an ultra-racial and hyper-sexual reinterpretation of what it means to be human that bloomed among northern California leftists in Brown’s era, a culture hostile to what Abraham Lincoln called “one nation under God” and to the Declaration’s view that rights come from God in a Christian context. A century before Jonestown, Fyodor Dostoevsky considered demonic influence a factor in such nihilism in his novel Demons.

Indeed, Jones decided early that as a revolutionary it was not profitable for him to continue in the Soviet-allied American Communist Party, then dogged by an anticommunist FBI. So, he decided to infiltrate American Christianity. He became a pastor in the Disciples of Christ, a time-honored Protestant denomination in which he and his congregation remained until their violent end in 1978.

The new culture behind radical politics in northern California aligned itself with a worldly view of human beings categorized by skin color (the mystical unity of “voices of color”) and preferred sexual orifices and stimulation. Yet it paradoxically presented identity as fluid, unbound by objective limits, except self-willed racial and sexual identities linked to career success.

Claiming a Pastor 400 Miles Away

Harris both benefits from and participates in this new religious culture of the American-led global West. Her parents are of Irish-Jamaican/African and Indian backgrounds. Although her mother and name come from Indian Hindu tradition, she joined an African-American Baptist congregation in San Francisco growing up and married a Jewish man.

After living in Los Angeles for years, she still identifies her home place of worship far away at Third Baptist, San Francisco. The pastor at Third Baptist, the Rev. Amos Brown (no relation to Willie), controversially blamed America for the 9/11 terrorist attack and supported Rev. Jeremiah Wright as President Obama’s former pastor when Wright was attacked for his comments on “God damn America.”

Despite living so far from Third Baptist, Harris often shouts out praise to Amos Brown, and he was one of her guests at Joe Biden’s inauguration. “He has been on this journey with me every step of the way, from when I first thought about running for public office almost two decades ago,” Harris has said. “And he has been such a voice of leadership, more leadership, and leadership in our nation. And so I want to thank you, Dr. Brown, for all that you are – all that you are.”

Consider, too, Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. He supported placing tampons in boys’ school restrooms to accommodate transgenderism and prioritizing Covid medicine by race. Critics say he let racialist concerns rather than legal principles affect his response to the devastating Minnesota Black Lives Matter and Antifa riots. He assumes the role of “normal” American.

The erosion of the republic’s first principles symbolized by the Harris-Walz ticket doesn’t attempt to erase the Eurocentric Enlightenment, but is its extreme apotheosis. Decoupled from the traditional Christian family, the country stumbles like a sleep-walking giant conflicted by an ethos of self-will, as John Quincy Adams predicted it would.

The Spirits Inside Bolshevik Atheism

The late Dartmouth poet Donald Sheehan said the lesson of the great novels of Dostoevsky — a writer obsessed with nihilism’s advance in the West — was the need for self-emptying in Christ rather than self-assertion. We have the latter today in spades in our new civil religion.

Amid all the self-willed identity power, where is loving our neighbor more than oneself in Christ? In The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn summed up three basic principles of Bolshevik atheism that oddly mesh with the self-assertion of today’s globalizing ethos:

1. Survive at any price. The ends justify the means, even the death of others.
2. Only material results matter. Two wrongs can make a right.
3. Adherence to the “permanent lie.” Don’t disturb the virtual reality in which we all supposedly must swim, lest you disturb your career and loved ones.

Scarily, these rules guide today’s civil religion under the banners of social justice and careerism. In them, “love is love” flatlines as self-love, as the revolution has become live-streamed.

Expressing self-will for power means submitting to the new secular high-tech mass as a rite. It is like a parody of Christian sobornost, or mystical unity, outside the Church as the Body of Christ, and in a dark mist like the biblical sorcerer Bar-Jesus, unable to see.

We are left with the body of Dionysus at the Olympic rituals and the long shadow of Jonestown in the background. We learn to love live-streamed kindly “Momala” and allegedly affable Walz, while off-screen Dionysian maenads would, like Jones, tear apart our children in the medical neutering supported by Harris-Walz.

What’s Weird: Paganism or Christianity?

A new religious spirit is at work, permeating all sides of American politics. We increasingly live in a demonized virtual version of God’s Creation, which often we look right through without seeing.

As a boy, I remember watching in our working-class Chicago neighborhood the broadcast reports of the massacre at Jonestown, feeling “something wicked this way comes.” Jones also directed the killing of investigators including my own cousin, Rep. Leo Ryan. Ryan grew up with my father in a West Side Irish-American enclave. The two went on double dates in high school. I have an early home movie of them wrestling on an inner-city lawn, leftover from an earlier American Dream.

Now the new virtual-reality civil religion as system immerses us online as the new normal. It defines the traditional as “weird,” synonymous with creepy. But once “weird” meant having an otherworldly destiny.

Indeed, traditional Christianity and ideas of self-government that emerged from it have always been weird in the older sense. The memory of Jonestown and the recent live-streaming of global Dionysus from Paris by contrast warn of the danger of normalizing the diabolical.

Christians, however, know this live-streamed revolution will not be the last word. Thank God.

Homily from St. John’s Russian Orthodox Mission in Lewisburg, PA, for the Sixteenth Sunday of Pentecost, the Feast of St. Michael of Kiev, Sept. 30, 7533 (Oct. 13, 2024 on the civil calendar).

Blessed Seraphim Rose, a spiritual son of our patron St. John of San Francisco, once wrote: “Why is the truth, it would seem, revealed to some and not to others? Is there a special organ for receiving revelation from God? Yes, though usually we close it and do not let it open up: God’s revelation is given to something called a loving heart.”

Today’s Gospel readings (texts at the end below) remind us of this with Jesus Christ’s teaching of the Golden Rule, to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. This is an extra positive statement of the Old Testament teaching that Jesus taught as the Great Commandments—to love the Lord our God with all our heart, and will, and strength, and mind—and to love our neighbor as ourself.

But Jesus didn’t stop there. He said He gives us a New Commandment to love one another as He loved us. That means to love our neighbor as more than ourselves, because He gave up His life for His love of us. Yet these statements, the Golden Rule, the Great Commandments, and the New Commandment, are all beautifully interwoven.

Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan helps illustrate this. Orthodox Tradition and iconography have understood the Good Samaritan as a symbol of Jesus Christ. In response to Jesus’ teaching about loving our neighbor, He is asked who is our neighbor. He tells the parable. And at the end the answer is that the person who was the neighbor was the Good Samaritan. This is an extra twist, because then Jesus’ teaching would mean that we need to love our neighbor as we would love Christ. This makes sense, though, because we are told to love God with all our self.

There are many indications of this command to love our neighbor more than ourself in the Gospel, but crucially this involves losing ourself in Christ, not just in a fallen human sense of people. In Matthew 25, we are told that what we do to help the least of our fellow humans we do to Christ.

The Orthodox poet Donald Sheehan, in describing the lesson of the Orthodox writer Dostoevsky’s great novels, said that they were about the need to empty one’s self in Christ instead of asserting one’s self. Jesus Himself put it this way, that we must lose ourself to find our self. This makes sense because in Orthodoxy we learn that we are made according to the image of God, which is Christ. We find our self in Him, and in the Body of Christ, His Church. Jesus Himself described the Church as His Bride. St. Basil the Great wrote of “the spark of divine love latent within you,” and this indicates how Orthodoxy regards love as the fulfilling of the law in Christ.

The more we give of ourself into Christ, the more we will live in love. We see this in the life of St. John our patron, whose fall feast we celebrated yesterday. He with God’s grace went through the steps of purification, illumination, and contemplation that are the way of holiness in Christ. He gave his life to this, and the uncreated light of God shone from his heart in his love. At night in Serbia at a seminary he would pray over the young students who were his charges in the midst of the trauma of exile from Russia amid great persecution, making sure they were tucked in as they slept. He walked dangerous streets in Shanghai to rescue orphaned children from trafficking and abuse, and brought his charges safely to America out of conflict there. He gave of his love to nurture seemingly unlikely people such as the American convert Father Seraphim Rose, whose writings helped lead many of us to Orthodoxy.

I spoke yesterday briefly here about my own experience of almost being killed in a car crash two years ago and how this led to my sense of an urgent calling to the priesthood. I felt this was a wake-up call in terms of the need unworthily to empty myself in Christ in our local mission work in this region. The priesthood as illustrated by our patron St. John is at best a sacrifice of self and by family, requiring that self-emptying in Christ, however all-unworthy the vessel such as a sinner like me. It involves for our mission many volunteer hours each week, both serving in Church and in visiting people and other activities. Yet the Cross as we know is a great blessing that unworthily in my case covers a multitude of sins. St. John provides the example with his illumined heart. He would not sleep lying down, in fact would barely sleep, would serve the Liturgy daily, and was a great wonder-working saint. In humility and awareness of our sins, this should seem beyond us. But we can ask the saints for help. And as we empty ourself in Jesus Christ, instead of asserting ourself, God’s grace or uncreated energy will help us. It is not from our self-assertion, but rather it is the beating life of the Church, the life of the heart and the spark of God’s love there, of which St. Basil spoke.

This is not at all limited to clergy and bishops, for as an old Orthodox saying goes, the road to hell is paved with the bones of priests and bishops. Self-emptying love in Christ can be seen in an Orthodox Christian father or mother as parents, for example, and in all of us as missionaries in our Church mission community. I’m thinking also of Thea and Dalton driving to North Carolina to help bring supplies to those in need amid the flooding in witness of what it means to be a follower of Jesus Christ in Orthodoxy. And of Justin and Nik on Friday giving of their time to fix the Church property’s flooded gravel driveway with their labor, perhaps saving us as a community hundreds of dollars, and then showing up to attend a 2 ½ hour Vigil service for our patron’s feast day out of love for our Lord’s Church. I know there are examples from each of you in our Church family of beautiful self-sacrificial love as Orthodox Christians.

Tomorrow will be our Church’s old feast day, of the Holy Protection of the Mother of God. Although on the calendar this has been superseded for us now by our new patron St John’s fall feast, the two are in blessed coincidence, linked neighbors so to speak, on the Church cycle of feasts. For the Mother of God is the ultimate and first example of theosis, of the fully illuminated heart, and the fullest patron of the Church. She emptied herself in Christ and with her intercessions illumines us to do the same. Our patron St. John once recounted a prophecy that in the end times the Ark of the Covenant would reappear. According to Maccabees, the Holy Prophet Jeremiah hid the Ark at the time of the destruction of the first Temple and the exile of Judaea to Babylon. St John recounts a tradition that Jeremiah hid the Ark in a secret place by a well, and that water from the well thereafter would draw up fire, but the Ark was not found. Jeremiah indicated that the Ark would be found at the right time later, andwould not reveal how to find it. In Orthodox tradition, the Mother of God is seen as typed or symbolized by the Ark of the Convent, as the dwelling place of God, which shines forth fully in the Book of Revelation. Such is the power of her love, by which the Ark is realized in Christ.

The desert father Abba Dorotheus wrote, the closer we come to God, the closer we come to one another. And the way to come close to God, to become one with his uncreated light, is in the Church as the Body of Christ. The saints beginning with the Theotokos show us the way through purification, illumination, and contemplation. The latter means consistency. This comes from the grace that is the uncreated energy of God, which is love, as we empty ourself in Him, and find unity with others then as well.

St. Michael of Kiev whom we commemorate today is yet another example. He came to ancient Kievan-Rus in answer to a call from the new Orthodox Christian Vladimir the Great, the ruling prince. St. Vladimir wanted a bishop from Constantinople, the Christian civilized center of the world at that time. Prior to becoming Orthodox, Vladimir had sought to consolidate and centralize pagan worship in his realm, which spiritually is the origin of Christian Russia. Vladimir’s earlier pagan project had been much like globalization and New Age spirituality today, to try to centralize people in servitude to the demons of the air in some kind of delusional rationalized form. Yet St. Michael arrived to become the first Metropolitan bishop of Kiev, and in his sacrificial love built beautiful Churches and overturned terrorizing idols. His giving of himself in the work of the Church was a model of love that left an enduring imprint across centuries, and still shines today within the outgrowth of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, in the world at large and here in Northern Appalachia. May St, Michael intercede for us, that we may consistently follow Jesus’s new commandment to love our neighbor more than our self in Orthodoxy, which means not merely right teaching but right-glorifying, which is love. Christ’s love is also, as the Evangelist John noted, truth. Love is not love if a lie about God or ourselves or our neighbor. For Jesus Christ said I am the way, the truth, and the life. And as John notes, God is love, and so we must love in truth as Orthodox Christians in our God’s Church, to really help ourselves and others.

Jesus in our other Gospel reading sums it up when he says, I Am the door, and I Am the Good Shepherd. These are some of the great “I Am’s” in the Gospel of John, by which he shows Himself to be the God who spoke with the Holy Prophet Moses at Mount Sinai. The name of God given to Moses is “I Am the Existing One,” rendered in iconography as “He Who is.” He is both the door and the Good Shepherd, the loving yet stern protector. We love because He loved us first. We find our love in Him in order to be a full human being, to trust ourselves fully to Him.

Lord Jesus Christ, have compassion on us. Amen

***

The Reading from the Holy Gospel according to Luke,

§26 [6:31-36]

The Lord said, ‘As ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise. For if ye love them that love you, what thanks have ye? For sinners also love those that love them. And if ye do good to them that do good to you, what thanks have ye? For sinners also do even the same. And if ye lend to them from whom ye hope to receive, what thanks have ye? For sinners also lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love ye your enemies, and do good and lend, hoping for nothing in return; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest; for He is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil. Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.’

Holy Gospel according to John,

§36 [10: 9-16]

The Lord said to the Jews who came to Him: ‘I am the door: by Me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture. The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly. I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep. But he who is a hireling, and not the shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep, and fleeth: and the wolf catcheth them, and scattereth the sheep. The hireling fleeth, because he is a hireling, and careth not for the sheep. I am the good Shepherd, and know My sheep, and am known of Mine. As the Father knoweth Me, even so know I the Father: and I lay down My life for the sheep. And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear My voice; and there shall be one fold, and one Shepherd.’

Homily from St. John’s Russian Orthodox Mission Church in Lewisburg, Pa, on the Feast of the Uncovering of the Relics of St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco, our fall patronal feast, Sept. 29, 7533 (Oct. 12, 2024 on the civil calendar).

Holy St. John pray to God for us!

Today is our parish’s second patronal feast day of St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco, our fall feast, in the morning of the new Church year, marking the uncovering of his relics in San Francisco, 31 years ago. The Church views a patronal feast as an additional great feast of the year in the local parish, a little Pascha. We should make every effort as sinners, myself more than all, to be here in worship, and if so to pray on behalf of our community who is not able to be here. What a blessing it is for us humbly and unworthily to worship and partake of the Eucharist together today in commemoration of the uncorrupted relics of St. John, whose life shows us the way for the Orthodox mission to North America today, in which we all engage as missionaries with an urgent mission, with God’s grace, to save our own souls and unworthily those of others, God willing, in these latter days as the hour grows late.

St. John truly can be said to be patron saint for the Russian Orthodox diaspora. Yet he is also the patron saint for the American Orthodox diaspora.

What is the American Orthodox diaspora? It is those who have left their homes and comfort and old lives for the work of the Orthodox mission to North America, and especially those who do so in the traditional spirit of the Russian exile tradition embodied in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia.

Consider my own unworthy self. I had wanted to remain in the Chicgo area, hoping to get a community college teaching job, to be near my parents and my familiar home city and friends and social networks. But driving back from job interviews at a conference in New Orleans, my car literally caught fire. I escaped holding an icon I had with me of the Mother of God the Joy of All Who Sorrow, for which the Cathedral that St. John built in San Francisco is named. It still has fire marks around it.

This marked for me the need to re-orient my life around Orthodox mission, although I did not fully realize this at the time. Having not gotten the community college job, and with a new family to support, I took the job at Bucknell and we moved out here. This was only a couple years after I had been baptized into the Orthodox Church 25 years ago this past month. When we moved, we joined a flourishing Orthodox Church in America community in a city to the north of us. We had been married in an OCA cathedral and I had been baptized in a Greek church and it seemed familiar, and well-established, not involving extra work from the standpoint of my own sinfulness. We did not envision going somewhere else. Yet when an OCA mission opened slightly nearer, we joined to support it. It was a close-knit faithful community. Both parishes were blessings but unworthily for me I did not extend myself much in mission work in either, being most focused on secular work and family life. Yet again unforeseen circumstances in God’s plan moved us. As a result, we became founders of this new mission in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia.

Then, almost two years ago, I was in a second framing car accident in my life as an Orthodox Christian. I was almost killed in a car crash as a truck rammed the back of our small car. The driver had passed out in a diabetic seizure. It turned out he was Russian Orthodox and we prayed together afterward. But it seemed to me this was yet another signal, to move out of my comfort zone, and with the blessing of our Metropolitan to become a priest to help serve our mission as a local priest also working on campus. A leave opened up at work that helped me with this. I spent 40 days at the end of the summer in training at Holy Trinity in Jordanville, a year ago, to become unworthily the first priest in our mission to be fully trained within ROCOR (including my earlier work in the Pastoral School and training visits to Jordanville). All this changed my life.

Why do I mention this? Because in a small way this illustrates what I mean by the American Orthodox Diaspora. We are called to leave our comfort zone and leave our familiar places and work and be missionaries. St. John illustrated this. Think of his amazing missionary work in Shanghai, in San Francisco, but also in Western Europe and earlier in Serbia. It means becoming something different from a so-called normal American while still being an American Orthodox.

St. John as holy missionary showed us the way to minister unworthily to the American Orthodox diaspora. He exemplified the qualities of the katechon mentioned in Holy Scripture, the protector and withholder standing watch over the Orthodox remnant, as well as pointing us to the Comforter or Holy Spirit that is the warmth at the heart of our Church in the Pentecostal fires that we can still access in the noetic life of the saints such as St. John. We see this vividly illustrated in his night-time prayers and tucking in of seminarians in the traumatic Russian Orthodox exile in Serbia. We also see this in his care for the orphans of China, in his nurturing of the saints of Old Europe in the practice of the Orthodox Church, and in his finishing of the cathedral in San Francisco against all odds. His spiritual son Blessed Seraphim Rose became a light to me and many others in the journey to Orthodoxy.

Further relating his work to the Orthodox mission to America, St. John had eloquently sermonized about the Wise Thief who was first in Paradise. In a way Russian Orthodoxy, as he exemplified her, typifies the Wise Thief, the repentant sinner showing the way to Paradise with Jesus’ help. For as a holy elder has noted, what has happened in Russia under the Communist yoke will happen in America.

Brothers and sisters, this makes our commitment to the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia more urgent in our missionary work here in Northern Appalachia. We are not Russians but converts as a parish community. But we revere the tradition of the holy elders and saints of Russia, notably St. John who came into our land. We are willing to go into diaspora, so to speak, within our own secularizing and neopagan and increasingly hostile North America, for the sake of the Holy Orthodox faith. And we are not ashamed of the Russian Orthodox tradition but see it in humility and repentance as a source of spiritual strength. To illustrate, recently our new Parish Council was sworn into office with a sacred pledge. But in a mishap that was accidental and on one level humorous, the oath was to the statutes of the Orthodox Church in America, not the Russian Church Abroad, due to the wrong script being used. This mistake was then corrected, to reflect our tradition and Synod, of which of course we are not ashamed. One well-meaning Orthodox brother in another denomination suggested that as we open our new temple we change the name of our parish to eliminate the term Russian. Some outside our community have argued that we will eventually leave the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad for a more comfortable Orthodoxy on the new calendar. A Bishop in another jurisdiction had objected that we had no right to start in central Pennsylvania as a canonical ROCOR parish without his approval, although his own jurisdiction traces its roots to questionable circumstances in the communist era in Russia. We respond in love to our fellow Orthodox Christians of all backgrounds. But we stand witness with our living heritage, with the new martyrs and confessors of Russia, among whom St John stands as a confessor in the way that he gave his life to the Orthodox mission to the world.

Who knows what the future will bring but God? But at today’s feast we are Russian Orthodox Christians of the American Orthodox diaspora as we are true to the legacy of our patron St. John, unworthily as sinners, not prideful as falsely claiming to be better than others. We recognize the martyric witness of the Russian Orthodox tradition embodied by St. John to the modern world against the worldliness of atheism, false liberalism, and compromising comfort and worldliness.

St. John in a homily on the Last Judgment expressed the need for wisdom and grace in these latter days, in a way that should make us thankful for our legacy of Russian Orthodoxy, however unpopular that may be in establishment America today. St. John referred to the writing of the Russian philosopher Soloviev about the Anti-Christ.

“The mystery is already at work,” he quoted also the Apostle Paul, “and the forces preparing his appearance struggle above all against lawful royal authority.” This is why St. John was always such an advocate for the full proper recognition of the Holy Royal Martyrs as such. , the last of the great Orthodox royals and witnesses to their death for our faith. Their veneration as holy martyrs will always be based thanks to St. John’s efforts in our Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia.

As for the coming Anti-Christ, “He will do what pleases men,” St. John summarizes, “on the condition that they recognize his Supreme Authority. He will let the Church function, and allow her to hold Divine Services, he will promise to build magnificent temples—provided that he is recognized as the ‘Supreme Being’ and that he is worshipped. He will have a personal hatred for Christ. He will live by this hatred and will rejoice at seeing men apostasize from Christ and the Church. There will be a mass falling away from the faith; even many bishops will betray the faith, justifying themselves by pointing to the splendid position of the Church.

“A search for compromise will be the characteristic disposition of men. Straightforwardness of confession will vanish. Men will cleverly justify their fall, and an endearing evil will support such a general disposition. Men will grow accustomed to apostasy from the truth and to the sweetness of compromise and sin.

“Antichrist will allow men everything, if they will only ‘fall down and worship him.’ This is not something new. The Roman emperors were similarly prepared to grant the Christians freedom, if only they recognized [the emperor’s] divinity and divine supreme authority; they martyred Christians only because they professed: ‘Worship God Alone and serve Him Alone.’”

Brothers and sisters, let St. John be our example in these latter days. He did not succumb to the spirit of Anti-Christ, but in joyful sorrow upheld the standard of Jesus Christ and the Holy Tradition of the Orthodox Church, our home and ark of salvation. He did so as a missionary saint by offering his illumined heart as a sacrifice to God, for the living heritage of the martyrdom of the Russian Church to the world.

Holy Saint John, pray to God for us!

As we head toward the end of the first month of our new Church Year, we have just passed the Apodosis of the Exaltation of the Cross. Now our mission parish looks toward our patronal “second feast,” of the uncovering of the relics of our patron St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco, this Friday and Saturday (services Oct. 11 and 12, 7 pm and 10 a.m. respectively). Here are words of St. John on the Cross, with a slight addendum, which were given as the Homily for the Exaltation of the Cross at our parish this year.

***

Our patron, St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco, said this of today’s Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross:

“Before The Time of Christ, the cross was an instrument of punishment; it evoked fear and aversion. But after Christ’s death on the Cross it became the instrument and sign of our salvation. Through the Cross, Christ destroyed the devil; from the Cross He descended into hades and, having liberated those languishing there, led them into the Kingdom of Heaven. The sign of the Cross is terrifying to demons and, as the sign of Christ, it is honored by Christians. The Lord manifested it in the sky to the Emperor Constantine as he was going to Rome to fight the tyrant who had seized power, and the Emperor, having fashioned a standard in the form of a cross, won a total victory. Having been aided by the Cross of the Lord, the Emperor Constantine asked his mother, the Empress Helen, to find the actual Life-giving Cross, and the devout Helen went to Jerusalem where, after much searching, she found it.

Many healings and other miracles were wrought and continue to be wrought by the Life-giving Cross and also by its depiction. Through it the Lord preserves His people from all enemies visible and invisible. The Orthodox Church solemnly celebrates the finding of the Cross of the Lord, recalling at the same time the appearance of the Cross in the sky to the Emperor Constantine. On that and other days dedicated to the Holy Cross, we beseech God that He grant His mercies not only to individual people, but to all Christendom, to the whole Church. This is well expressed by the Troparion to the Cross of the Lord, composed in the eighth century, when Saint Cosmas, Bishop of Maiuma, a friend of St. John Damascene, wrote the service to the Exaltation of the Cross of the Lord.

“’Save, O Lord, Thy people, and bless Thine inheritance, granting victory to (right-believing) kings over adversaries, and by Thy Cross preserving Thy community.’

“The beginning of this prayer is taken from the twenty-seventh Psalm. In the Old Testament the word ‘people’ designated only those who confessed the true faith, people faithful to God. ‘Inheritance’ referred to everything which properly belonged to God, God’s property, which in the New Testament is the Church of Christ. In praying for the salvation of God’s people (the Christians), both from eternal torments and from earthly calamities, we beseech the Lord to bless, to send down grace, His good gifts upon the whole Church as well, and inwardly strengthen her.

“The petition for granting ‘victory to kings,’ i.e., to the bearers of supreme authority, has its basis in Psalm 143, verse 10, and recalls the victories King David achieved by God’s power, and likewise the victories granted Emperor Constantine through the Cross of the Lord. This appearance of the Cross made emperors who had formerly persecuted Christians into defenders of the Church from her external enemies, into ‘external bishops,’ to use the expression of the holy Emperor Constantine.

“The Church, inwardly strong by God’s grace and protected outwardly, is, for Orthodox Christians, ‘the city of God,’ God’s community, His commonwealth, where the path to the Heavenly Jerusalem has its beginning. Various calamities have shaken the world, entire peoples have disappeared, cities and states have perished, but the Church, in spite of persecutions and even internal conflicts, stands invincible; for the gates of hell shall not prevail against her (Matt. 16:18). Today, when world leaders try in vain to establish order on earth, the only dependable instrument of peace is that about which the Church sings:

“The Cross is the guardian of the whole world;

the Cross is the beauty of the Church,

the Cross is the might of kings;

the Cross is the confirmation of the faithful,

the Cross is the glory of angels and the wounding of demons.”

(Exapostilarion of the Exaltation of the Cross)

***

There is nothing to add to those words of St. John’s, who bore the Cross in his life from China and to Western Europe and to North America in bringing Orthodoxy to the world out from the sufferings of the twentieth century, a standard of victory in Jesus Christ.

On the form of the Cross, though, here are a few more words to consider today on the Church Year’s second major feast, from our holy Tradition. The Holy Cross with its vertical and horizontal lines reminds us of how we both look to the heavens to God our Father and also acknowledge how the Holy Spirit, Who is everywhere present and fillest all things, embraces us together here in the Church, and of course the Holy Trinity is all together in all actions. For in the central focus of the Cross is the God-man, Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Here is the entire Holy Trinity emblazoned.

The Slavic Byzantine Cross adds to this the additional diagonal Cross-bar or footrest, as well as the headrest. The footrest balances up on the right side of Jesus Christ symbolizing the Wise Thief, St. Rakh or Dismas, who asked Jesus to remember Him in His kingdom, and thus stole Paradise. Likewise we hope to follow that Wise Thief unworthily, rather than the Foolish Thief, represented by the downward side of the bar, who did not so find salvation in our Lord’s memory. The footrest pointing up represents deification imparted by the Holy Spirit. The head rest reminds us of the Father. The Son again is in the middle focus. All are one in essence, and so there are multiple dimensions of the mystery of the Trinity in the Holy Cross, which we kiss at the end of Liturgy and mark on our bodies every time we cross ourselves.

Unworthily, as a reminder of Jesus’ death for us, the Cross as explicated by our patron St. John remains a lesson I a sinner need continually to learn, for the Cross also brings us face to face with Jesus’ New Commandment, to love our neighbor more than ourselves. On the way to the Cross He suffered in the Garden, sweating blood, confessing “Not my will but Thine be done.” I remember my first encounter with this fuller Orthodox sense of the Cross before I had converted, in life experiences, and then also reading the Old English poem “The Dream of the Rood.” There Jesus leaps onto the Cross like a hero, onto his emblem of suffering, whic is also a standard of victory. This is the Cross which we exalt today with the memory of its rediscovery by St. Helena and the Holy Hierarch Macarius of Jerusalem, appropriately a leading opponent of Arianism.

With the Cross also comes the tradition that it was made from Old Testament times of three woods of cypress, pine, and cedar, in fulfillment of ancient biblical verses, the woods entwined together also to typify the three-in-one Trinity. As the Old Testament readings at Vespers noted, divine Wisdom, which we identify with Jesus Christ, is a tree of life. And here it is before us, the power or virtue of the precious and life-giving Cross, as the Tree of Life, so unfathomably deeply rooted and so wonderfully and infinitely high and broad.

May the Lord through the power of His precious and life-giving Cross be gracious to us, bless us, make His face to shine upon us, and have mercy on us. Amen

The inscription of the Greek letters  ὁ ὤν around the head of our Lord Jesus Christ in icons can be seen in Orthodox Christianity as a reference both to Exodus and to Jesus’ “I Am” statements.

The letters stand for “He Who Is” or “He Who is the Existing One,” and are part of God’s statement to Moses in Exodus 3, in the Greek Septuagint ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ ὢν.

This is slightly different in emphasis than the Hebrew Masoretic text, “I Am that I Am.”

Generally, Church Fathers believed that the Angel of the Lord speaking to Moses was God the Word, which fits better perhaps with the Septuagint Greek.

This does not exclude for Orthodox Christians God the Father and God the Holy Spirit, who are God, One in Essence.

The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, following its original Orthodox form, indicates that the “One God, the Father Almighty,” is Maker of Heaven and Earth, and of all things visible and invisible. Yet it adds that the “One Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Only Begotten, begotten not made, of one essence with the Father, by Whom all things were made,” indicating that while God the Father is Maker of all things, it was by our Lord Jesus Christ that all things were made. The Creed later states that the Holy Spirit is “the Lord, the giver of life,” proceeding from the Father and worshipped with the Father and the Son, “Who spake by the Prophets.”

Our Lord Jesus Christ seems particularly identified, but always with the Trinity as a whole, as the special agent for Creation, and as Incarnate Lord “He Who Be’s,” in effect.

At the same time the Holy Spirit waters the Creation, as one liturgical hymn puts it, especially identified with the uncreated energies that, while from the Holy Trinity, come in particular from the Spirit in the Church, the Body of Christ.

The Holy Trinity is the One God, as is the Son, while the One God is the Father from Whom the Son is begotten before all ages, and from Whom the Holy Spirit likewise proceeds from all ages, All being One in essence, and All being God.

The Son, in what could be called using a Christian existentialist approach, is “He Who Is,” and in John 8 declares Himself the “I Am” of the Old Testament fulfilled in full personhood in the New.

In Orthodox Christian Tradition, the Lord’s Day (as it is called in Greek) is the Day of Resurrection, Sunday in English or the Eighth Day.

So while we still honor the Sabbath as the day on which God rested following Creation, and on which our Lord Jesus Christ rested in the tomb on Holy Saturday while harrowing hell, it became with His Resurrection a day of preparation for the Eighth Day.

The Eighth Day is “something more” than the seven days of Creation, just as our Lord gave us His New Commandments as “something more” than even the beloved “Great Commandments” of the Old Testament, namely to “love our neighbor as more than ourself,” following Him, Who laid down His life for His friends, His followers but also as “the lover of mankind” all human beings as His kindred in His human nature and also His creatures in His divine nature.

The Old Sabbath should be a day of preparation for the Day of Resurrection, including preparing for evening services, Vigil, which are at the entry of the Eighth Day but into which the Sabbath leads us. Too often Saturday has become for many a recreational day in which attendance at Vigil services is not part of the schedule. The highlight becomes some other Saturday night social or family or entertainment event, or just a time for sloth and gluttony and lust.

Preparation for the Day of Resurrection and Liturgy should include not only the Vigil (a unity of Vespers and Matins) but also of course preparation prayers and total fasting starting later Saturday night.

So the Sabbath should be a time to wind down and plan ahead, to guard our time and desires so we are focused on preparation for the Day of Resurrection. And the Day of Resurrection also should be seen as every day in our prayers and life, for it extends above, beyond, and amid all the seven days of Creation, even transcending the old Sabbath, which we remember in anticipation of the Resurrection but without all the requirements of the Old Testament law, which are fulfilled in Jesus Christ and His Body, the Church, Israel.

As Orthodox Christians, it is good too for us to support keeping Sundays as clear as possible of work other than work for Church and to help others in the spirit of our faith, and to pray for freedom from worldly cares that interfere with Church and peaceful time for Bible Study, prayer, reading, and active alms-giving.

Glory to God for all things!