 The Passion
of Father Alexander Men was Christ and the Church.
Under increasing KGB scrutiny, Fr Alexander began in the 1980s giving impromptu talks in houses of parishioners--often in kitchens. His topic was whatever was on the hearts and minds of his listeners. Sometimes the rattle of tableware and the prattle of wee ones would threaten to out-peal Fr Alexander’s voice. Nevertheless, the gatherings produced a rich staple of Christian instruction. |
 About Christ and the Church comprises the English translation of
ten of these talks (which had been transcribed from cassette recordings).Click on any of the following topics or scroll down
to read one of my favorite excerpts.
Note that the topics do not represent whole talks, nor are they chapter titles of the book.
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On Encounter with Christ
"The word 'Meeting', or 'Encounter' ...
is the most important word of our inner life, because the most important
moment for all of us is our Encounter with the Lord, our own personal
Encounter with Him. We have all come to Him and to the Church precisely
because this Encounter has taken place. I am convinced that God knocks at
the door of each of us, while often remaining anonymous. But man can reject
Him, can turn his back on Him, can wish that the Encounter would not happen.
And for us, who have responded to this Encounter, however weak our voice,
most precious is the fact that along our own path we have met You, Oh
Lord. [...] We can testify that this has infinitely deepened our life,
expanded our horizons, opened inexhaustible levels, given us strength for
the struggle despite the difficulties on our path.
"Nevertheless, our journey upwards has
begun. For you fairly young people the upward path is not always
clear, because you are as yet ascending in life’s basic aspects,
physically. But when a person reaches a critical point in life, he
begins to descend physically. And when you experience this, you will
know how precious the fact that the Gospel, the power of God’s Spirit, the
Encounter with Christ, gives us the possibility of always ascending to such an
extent -- that however we crawl, whatever zig-zags we make, however we may trip
up, however we fall back -- still, we are growing. The natural,
unspiritual man always perceives only more and more loss, while we are always
gaining. If I were offered the chance to return to my twenties I
would be horrified because, recalling this time of my life, I would feel
impoverished, robbed in relation to all that I have acquired since those
days. To part with such treasure would indeed be hard. That’s why for us this
Encounter is always a stimulus, a movement, an invitation to ascend. [...]
"If you want to find something real in
Christianity, then search for it only through the Risen
Christ. Secondly, the Resurrection means victory. It means that God entered our human struggle, the great struggle of spirit against
darkness, evil, oppression. He who was rejected, condemned, killed,
humiliated, somehow focused all the misfortunes of the world in himself and
triumphed over all of them.
"In weakness, in crucifixion God revealed his power,
and he reveals it still. I need to remind you that the Apostle Paul
said: all of us need to experience the Resurrection, this special Encounter
with God, in this life; but this is inseparable from crucifixion. He
says (as in the epistle read at baptisms) that we are crucified with Christ,
that with him we share sufferings common to us all, inner torments, external
sorrows -- each one has his own difficulties which he carries in life -- if we
understand them as participation in the sufferings of Christ, who suffers for
the whole world, whose heart bleeds, because that heart contains all the hearts
of the world. To die with him in order to rise with him. [...] To talk
about it is rather hard, more precisely, almost impossible. But each
of us who finds himself in a critical situation, an illness, a tough condition,
should remember that this condition can be sanctified; we can transform it into
a cross. We always need to remember that next to Christ were two thieves, one simply suffered,
while the other co-suffered with Christ and heard the words, ‘Today, you will be with
me in paradise.'"
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| On True Christianity
"Often what passes for Orthodoxy or another Christian confession is simply natural religiosity which, in its own right, is a kind of opium for the people. It functions as a sort of spiritual anesthetic, it helps a person adjust to his surrounding world, over which one can hang the slogan: 'Blessed is the one who believes that it is cozy in the world.' Most people who find that it is cold in this world are drawn to this warmth and imagine Christianity as a kind of -- well, if not a bath, then at least some sort of tepid place like a mud-bath where one can warm up.
"This is all wrong! Even if I were a Moslem and came to you, having read your Christian books I would have to say to you: 'Folks, it's not this way. Your religion does not consist in this at all. Your God is a consuming fire and not a warm hearth, and he is calling you to a place where all sorts of cold winds are blowing, so that what you imagine does not exist. You adapted and developed a completely different teaching to suit your own human needs. You transformed Christianity into a mediocre, popular religion.' [...] That is to say that Christianity can be authentic and it can be false. The false form is always more convenient. It always suits us better, which is why contemporary religious life is often characterized by a churchly falsehood when people prefer that which is convenient, calm and pleasant, conforms to their own ideas, consoles them, and which they enjoy. It is not at all to this that the Lord called us when he said 'the gate is narrow' and 'the way is narrow.' And again and again we need to understand that this Spirit is not a warmth but a fire. It is a fire. [...] We have to discover true Christianity within ourselves."
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| On Returning to the Sources
"If you examine the history of the Church at the time when the direct Apostles of Christ were active, you will see that it was built not on bells or bell towers, not on icons, not on glorious temples, not on elaborate altars, not on shining vestments and not on brilliant theology. It was built on the fellowship of people -- in faith, prayer and mutual aid. 'Why do we have to constantly return to the sources of the Church?' In a way each person is purified when he returns to the origins of his spiritual birth, birth, childhood, or spiritual infancy, the time when he took his first steps in the spiritual life. We're always oriented by this, it is how we always correct our path, our Christian path, our churchly path. We correct it through the gospel.
"Church history is a somewhat melancholy study because essentially its is a description of people's sins. The facts of Church history essentially tell us about the falling away of people from Christ, their betrayal of Him in words and deeds. Often the history of the Church is the history of its art, culture, philosophy, wars, conflicts, the persecution of non-believers, and so on. But to find within Christian history the deeper History of the Church with a capital "H," is quite a difficult art. We can compare Church History to a large river which after a flood or some catastrophe carries debris, corpses, logs. Where is the clean water? We have to direct our attention to the early evangelical apostolic Christianity. This is what the Fathers of the Church taught us. The Fathers of the Church are its founders. They are responsible for the Church's foundation as a structure and they had two criteria: first, they always referred to the Apostles; second, they were always open to the world."
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| On Sectarianism
"The first Christians managed to find balance without becoming a sect; without isolation from others they found a unique way. They became people who, although despised, were nonetheless enviable, and in the end others wanted to emulate them. This was the main cause of the Christianization of the Empire. [...] Of course there was always the danger of becoming a sect, some sort of club. Why is the Church not a sect? Because it is open to the whole world. The sectarian mindset closes itself from people, and a kind of distortion and collapse ensue: the whole world is considered either immersed in sin, or insufficiently worthy of these chosen ones, or already predestined by God for destruction, or a host of other things. We find this mindset even among those who consider themselves Orthodox, Baptist, or whatever. 'Let the world out there go up in blue flame, that doesn't concern us!' This is the sectarian mindset. 'Here we remain, the chosen ones, the saved ones.'
"If from the outset the Church had taken this approach, it would have scarcely left that room in Zion where the Holy Spirit descended upon it and where the disciples rejoiced when their Lord came among them. And when the Holy Spirit descended upon them, instead of speaking in varied tongues, should they have said, 'We're not setting foot out of here! This is where the Spirit of God dwells, so let all those outside this house perish!' This did not happen. As we know, they came out and spoke, each according to his ability."
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| On True Asceticism
"The Gospel teaches us that the love of the Pre-eternal One for the world is so great that he gives himself, his power, so that the world may be saved. And suddenly it seems to people that the world is something horrible, that nothing remains but to inflict punishment -- the fiery Gehenna -- upon it. Then begins the flight from the world, starting in the fourth century, and actively developed in the Middle Ages. I am not claiming that monastic movements, modeled by the Church on pagan cults, were without purpose. They indeed had meaning, for the deepening of spiritual life, for the development of prayer and contemplative practice, for the preservation of spiritual, intellectual and theological values as well as cultural values. Monasteries were places where frescoes were painted, books published, scientific theories and accomplishments were developed and preserved. All the same, the idea that the world is fallen, wallows in sin, but we who have gathered here are saved -- this notion, of course, is entirely foreign to the One who speaks of the shepherd leaving the ninety-nine sheep in order to save one. Was Christianity then not ascetical? No, of course it contributed an element of asceticism. There isn't a single answer. But if you insist on a single answer, you may do so dialectically: renunciation of the world, in order to reclaim it on another level. [...]
"This is very evident in the personality and life of St Francis of Assisi. He reached the limits of asceticism. He left his father, house, profession, became nothing. He lost everything. It would appear that for him the world was totally useless. And yet, there was no person in medieval hagiography who had greater love for each goat, each person, each creature, each facet of nature -- he treated them as brothers and sisters. You know all this. Well, here is the fundamental evangelical attitude. Francis of Assisi preached the gospel anew to the medieval world as an ascetic who loved the world.
"In the East there lived a very famous holy man, whose name I won't mention. He didn't wash for forty years, bound himself with ropes, his body rotted, and he had an intolerable odor. But this was a political reactionary who supported particularly repressive measures against the heretics, the Jews. Emperors sought his advice. When they tried to act according to their own laws and not the Gospel, he immediately sent emissaries from his desert with appropriate instructions. Of course it is not for us to judge, but for the Gospel. It judges holiness. In the light of the Gospel it is clear that all this is unnecessary. We receive no preaching about rotten ropes and columns. A man does not become holy by simply not washing for forty years; this is the witness of Tradition."
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| Selections from About Christ and the Church Copyright 1996, Oakwood Publications (purchased in 1999 by St. Vladimir's Seminary Press). Posted with permission. English translation by Fr Alexis Vinogradov. |