Of Guatemala and Gaza

This past Tuesday, after two and a half years of construction and labour of those monastics and faithful under the guidance of Archimandrite Evangelos Patá, a seminary and mission centre opened in the Huehuetenango District of Guatemala, reports Pravoslavie.Ru. The Orthodox community in Guatemala is one of the explosive success stories of twenty-first century Orthodox mission work, particularly after 2010 when 500,000 Guatemalans—mostly indigenous Maya people—converted en masse. A steady stream of converts into the Orthodox Church has continued since then.

This new seminary and mission centre will ‘serve the spiritual, educational and administrative needs of the faithful’, who are As Fr John Chakos puts it on his blog: ‘The palpable joy that filled this day reflected the vibrant Christian faith of the long suffering Mayan people who endured much throughout their tragic history, but never lost hope.’

How true this is. The ‘tragic history’ of the Guatemalan Mayan people is one which can be attributed directly to American imperialism and the legacy of colonialism. During this time, the Guatemalan military and government forces, trained by the School of the Americas and funded by the American government, used ‘scorched earth’ tactics against the Indigenous people of the country: including death squads, ‘disappearances’, strafing from helicopters, internment camps, forced starvation, torture and sexual violence. Leftists, labour leaders and union organisers were also subjected to this targetted violence from the state. Canadian folk-rock musician Bruce Cockburn, after visiting Guatemala during this time, wrote the song ‘If I Had a Rocket Launcher’ specifically about this situation.

The flocking of Indigenous Maya Guatemalans to the Orthodox Church in the present day, may be considered one of the fruits, primarily, of the career of Archimandrite Andrés Girón, a cleric who took up the cause of the Indigenous peoples of Guatemala, specifically during this time of the US-backed military dictatorship in the 1980s. For his efforts, Archimandrite Giron was excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church on account of his pro-Indigenous stand, and he fled to Mexico after several assassination attempts on him by the right-wing government, after which he joined the Orthodox Church and continued his advocacy work. Although he was an agrarian-minded Christian and not a Marxist, he gained the moniker ‘Father Revolutionary’ from both his supporters and his opponents, particularly when he began supporting progressive land reforms which would benefit the Indigenous peoples. He even began political action against the US-backed military government, at the head of the left-wing, anti-capitalist Asociación Nacional Campesina Pro-Tierra, and direct action by occupying and farming land collectively for the benefit of the people living there.

Archimandrite Andrés Girón

Even though his electoral campaigns did not win him much support in terms of government reform, the Indigenous Mayans quickly gravitated to his social ideals, not to mention his religious convictions. At a time when the Catholic Church was divided between a reactionary hierarchy and a liberation-theological parish priesthood (and the hierarchy winning out more often than not); and when Evangelical Protestantism was marching in lockstep with state violence and American-style capitalism and white supremacy; Orthodox Christianity began to look all the more attractive. When Fr Andrés Girón joined the Orthodox Church in 2010, hundreds of thousands of Indigenous Mayans came with him. Stop me if any of this starts to sound familiar.

I beat this drum a lot. I have remarked before, and repeatedly, that the Indigenous peoples of Asia and America are a valuable witness within Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy at its best does not see Indigenous traditions and languages as things to be assimilated from the outside or suppressed from above. It values these traditions and languages in themselves, and transfigures them from the inside.

Orthodox womens’ monastery in Kyltovo, Komi Republic, Russia

For example: Orthodox Bibles, prayer books, patericons and religious texts have been published in Indigenous languages such as Sakha, Nenets, Evenki, Chukchi, Khanty, Skolt Sámi, Komi, Veps, Aleut and Tlingit and Yup’ik. Saint Innocent of Irkutsk, Saint Herman the Wonderworker of Alaska and, later, Saint Tikhon of Moscow defended Indigenous rights against oppression and exploitation first by Russian and later by American pecuniary interests and colonisation. (One can see from these examples that the witness of Fr Andrés Girón was not without precedent!) But Indigenous people themselves have contributed to Orthodoxy in profound and ineluctable ways. Saint Peter the Aleut, Saint Jacob Netsvetov, Saint Olga of Alaska... these Indigenous saints have deeply and without question enriched the experience of American Orthodoxy. And the former two of these saints did so, while Indigenous people in the Americas were undergoing one of the worst genocides of human history.

Now, let us turn our attention, for the sake of comparison, to another Indigenous people. The people of the country of Palestine are descended, indisputably from a scientific and genetic point of view, from the ancient Levantines. Modern Palestinians are genetically closest to the Bronze Age inhabitants of Canaan, with unbroken ancestral roots in the Levant going back nearly 4000 years. (We ethnic Ashkenazim simply cannot claim the same thing: over forty percent of our autosomal ancestral DNA originates in Western Europe--France and Germany.) What appears clear now, is that this Indigenous population of the ancient Holy Land has undergone numerous cultural and religious and linguistic shifts through the millennia. So although Palestinians are culturally Arabic, and the majority are Muslims, their presence in the place where they are long predates the Arab conquests and the rise of Islâm!

Church of St Porphyrios, Gaza, Palestine

Indeed, Palestinians were among the first Christians. Gaza was a Christian city. The Church of Saint Porphyrios, which was bombarded by the Israel Occupation Forces two weeks into their current war, dates back over sixteen hundred years. Gaza was home to Christian saints such as Bishop Saint Porphyrios himself, Abba Dorotheos, Saint Vitalios and Saint Silvanos, to name but a few. Before Palestine was Muslim, Palestinians followed Jesus Christ. And before Palestinians followed Christ, Palestinians were without question among the people who worshipped the God of the Hebrews, the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, at the Second Temple.

Despite the prevarication and mealy-mouthed excuses that issue from on high in Washington and New York, there can be very little doubt now that what is going on right now as we speak, in the home territory of this very oldest of Christian Churches, is a genocide of the Palestinian people, at the hands of another US-backed far-right parafascist government: complete with scorched-earth tactics, death squads, weaponised starvation, torture, sexual violence. In short, the Palestinians now are suffering everything that the Indigenous Guatemalans faced from the military dictatorship of that country in the 80s and 90s. And the American government backs the Israeli fascists to the hilt.

Archbishop Alexios of Gaza

But if there is another Indigenous genocide occurring right now in Gaza, there is also another Fr Andrés Girón, in the saintly Archbishop Alexios of Gaza. Archbishop Alexios has courageously declared that he will not abandon his flock there even if he is the last Christian standing in Gaza. And he has dedicated his work to giving food and clean water and shelter to any who have come to need it, even as they are being denied these by the military. And he has rededicated himself to praying for the dead, the dead without number: and many of these dead are Christians.

The Indigenous Christians of the Holy Land need our solidarity, and they need it now more than ever. But, just as Efraín Ríos Montt has gone down to Sheol, while the relatives of people he ordered to be slaughtered by the tens of thousands are flocking to the Church to be joined to Christ, so too will Netanyahu and his hateful right-wing butcher-regime and his death squads go down to the pit, while the names of the innocents who died at Saint Porphyrios shall be sung by the heavenly choirs without end. Of this I am sure. And if God wills it, may He let Gaza again breathe, be free and be green, as Guatemala may now (to a certain extent) do.

Collected aphoristic thoughts and quotes on Palestine

All thoughts are my own unless quoted otherwise.

I honestly think that for most people, they simply parrot [about the conflict] what their favoured media outlets tell them to, and CNN, Fox, MSNBC, NYT, WaPo and WSJ all tell them the same thing... with some surface-level permutations based on domestic political / cultural / tribal alignment. God forbid we should read actual books about each region’s history and the roots of each conflict, instead of just regurgitating easily-digestible headlines, op-ed columns and talking-head takes.

~~~

One thing that Vladimir Solovyov got very much right in War, Progress and the End of History, is that there is a kind of falsehood, a deep moral obscenity, in those who preach non-violence to the powerless, from a position of safety and security.

The argument between the General and the Prince in the first conversation was over the Armenians in the late 1800s, but equally so I think it could apply to the Palestinians today.

~~~

Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English, or France to the French.

- Mahatma Gandhi

~~~

We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.

- Nelson Mandela

~~~

It’s tragic that so many people are made unable to tell the difference between “explanation”, “justification”, and “apologia”. Often, those things are conflated on purpose with the help of the media to prevent/shut down any civilised discussion around certain subjects.

- Denis Vladimirovich

~~~

A few assorted thoughts. Not all of them are completely consistent with each other, but so be it.

1. All war is bad on all sides.
2. Some casus belli are more just than others.
3. Few conflicts have stable solutions (this side of Parousia).
4. Still fewer conflicts have obvious solutions.
5. That does not mean we (individually and collectively) shouldn't look for solutions.
6. No one who isn't in a position of power should be expected to have the solutions.

~~~

Imagine engaging in abstruse academic debates about dogmatic vs. hopeful universalism as Gaza burns.

~~~

To have empathy is not to assert power or to take revenge. It is to feel broken with those who have been broken—and if you are a follower of Jesus, which, de facto, we are not, is to be broken with them.

- Fr Marc Boulos

~~~

My hope and prayer is to be a source of light, and not darkness. Let’s be honest: this pain we’re all feeling isn’t specific to this moment; it’s ongoing. The truth is that for me, for my family, for Palestinians: this is life.

- Mo Amer

~~~

Enough oppression against the Palestinian people! Peace does not come from the bodies of children, killed people, innocent people, and women. Peace comes when the decision-makers in this world realize that our people have dignity, as all the peoples of the world. We are not advocates of war, we reject violence and killing, and we are seekers of peace, but at the same time, we seek justice and have a right that we will not give up.

- His Holiness Patriarch John X (Yazigi) of Antioch

~~~

In the Middle East, the net effects [of European cultural hysteria] are:

1. that Europe is burdened with the heavy baggage of interventions that inflame Muslim hostility toward the West, and
2. to create the psychological imperative to find some way to assuage their own sense of guilt by finding, and magnifying, the sins of their victims.

- Dr Michael Brenner

~~~

Moral discourse in the West has degraded so far that even the most basic calls for justice and humanity are considered to be Marxist, subversive or terroristic.

~~~

The descent to evil. “Do unto others what you would like them to do to you” has increasingly been replaced by “Do unto others the evil they did to you”, and even by “Do to others the evils before they might do it to you.”

- Fr John D’Alton

~~~

As an Orthodox Christian leftist with Semitic ancestry, I have two questions.

1. By what moral logic are the Arabs supposed to shoulder 80 years of responsibility, at the cost of their lives and their homes, for the crimes of Hitler?
2. By what moral logic are Palestinian Christians supposed to shoulder responsibility, at the cost of their lives and their homes, for the recent crimes of Hamas?

Neither Fordham nor Montanika, pt. 2

The émigrés and samizdat thinkers of Soviet Union, including the ones of the ‘liberal’-left who have most deeply inspired me (Nikolai Berdyaev, Fr Sergei Bulgakov, St Maria Skobtsova, St Ilya Fondaminsky, etc.) saw their task as being the overthrow of a monolithic, impersonal, totally-mobilised system which completely constrained thought and freedom of the spirit.

But in the wake of that system’s collapse, what took its place was even worse—an anarchic free-for-all hellscape in which those who could not help themselves were brutally trampled underfoot, or left to rot through starvation, or homelessness, or drink, or drugs, or hopelessness. Among the internal critics of the Soviet Union, all but the most ideologically-blinkered neoliberals were left aghast by the human waste and wreckage that took its place.

And now, in the absence of the Soviet system, we are faced with a very different monolithic, impersonal, totally-mobilised system which completely constrains thought and freedom of the spirit... though it masquerades itself underneath the banners of ‘freedom’. This is a system of monopoly, of endlessly-volatile finance-capital, of techno-dystopian nightmares which dissolve the barriers between person and machine, of destruction (not even truly ‘creative’ anymore, if indeed it ever was) with the military-industrial complex as the vanguard of concentrated wealth.

The task which is before us, now, as before the Soviet émigrés of a prior age, is the utter demolition of the spiritual roots of this hateful, faceless, godless system.

If I am critical of Fordham, it is because not only have they abandoned this task—they have taken up a position as the handmaidens of this anti-personalist, hyper-capitalist system... in the very name of personality! Witness how they attack the outward enemies of finance-capitalism when they are, or appear, strong (Russia, China), and wholesale ignore the victims of finance-capitalism when they are weak (Palestine, wherein the only three Fordhamite articles on offer are afterthoughts over two years old and provide nothing but weak-tea platitudes based on outdated Clinton-era political thought).

And if I am critical of ‘Montanika’ / Patristic Faith / Ludwell Fellowship, etc., it is because they have misconstrued this task of our age entirely. Clinging to the tattered rags of white émigré politics and homebrew backlash-political ressentiment, they are still fighting rearguard battles of a war which has already been won (or lost, depending on your perspective). They are still looking for enemies on the outside, when in fact the enemy has already taken the castle, and is issuing their orders for them.

The haute-bourgeois academic Fordhamites may occasionally make pious noises about standing up for the victims, but Catherine Liu straight-up has their number. They are currying and hoarding ‘virtue’ (or rather, what passes for it in our age), while at the same time seeking the cosy embrace of tech-bros and Wall Street finance, particularly Teradata and CitiBank.

And the petit-bourgeois YouTube personality-cultists, profiteering pedlars of an older brand of Whiggery, street preachers and psychological charlatans which make up the ‘native opposition’ within Orthodox Christianity are... well, perhaps they are not as close to being antichrists as the Fordham types are. At least they are sincere. But they are still cultural and political sectarians. They are raskolniki and Old Believers in their spiritual ‘type’, and as such they are pitiable and deluded. And they draw people in--idealistic, lost, ‘angry young men’ in particular—with the exact same lures and promises that the German, Dutch and northern French Reformers did in the 1500s and 1600s.

I don’t know how else to describe my position here. I find Anglo liberalism, particularly in its ‘woke’/rainbow-flag/ersatz-radical form, utterly repugnant. But Anglo conservatism has no draw left for me. Neither political ‘pill’ can cure the disease that afflicts us all—including myself. All I am left to say here is: эй, приди, Господь Иисус!

A plea for peace in Palestine

Another ‘tolle, lege’ moment here, in the wake of recent events in Gaza. This is excerpted from the Epilogue to Fr Paul Nadim Tarazi’s book Land and Covenant:

In the 19th century, with the rise of nationalism in Europe, anti-Jewish sentiments were on the rise, especially in Russia and France. Some leading European Jews realised that the mood presented an opportunity for them to establish a ‘Jewish homeland’. The culmination of their efforts, and especially those of Theodore Herzl, a Viennese Jew, was the First Zionist Congress convened in Basel, Switzerland in 1897. Until 1905, Argentina and Uganda were considered as possible sites for the establishment of a ‘homeland’. So, the idea of a ‘return’ to Palestine and Jerusalem was not as essential then as it is presented nowadays. Even when the choice eventually tilted toward Palestine, this cannot be taken, per se, as a proof that it was a de facto realisation of a perennial dream or even triggered by the ‘obvious’ understanding of ‘Next Year in Jerusalem’ and the ‘aliyah. If Jews were genuinely interested in the ‘return’ to Jerusalem for religious reasons, they could have done so over past centuries. They did not do so because they fared well or preferred to stay, for other reasons, wherever they were dwelling. [...]

From the beginning of the 20th century, governments that supported the establishment and later the policies of the state of Israel did so and still do for political reasons. Their interest then and now lies in the control of that region for its geopolitical and oil-related economical importance. But, here again, while Jews and superpowers look to their interests, which can be explained on a human level, it is the religious factor that complicates the matter in an unprecedented manner. The introduction of an unwarranted divine element makes the situation of the Middle East even more complex. The most pernicious aspect of this factor is that it is affecting policy making for and in the region. Such an attitude becomes dangerous when people believe they have figured out God’s ongoing activity on the historical realm from the perspective of their specific group or nation, their collective. In doing so, they create a monster, if not an idol, to which they chain God. But the biblical premise, as I have repeatedly shown, is that history is still trailing along not because of man’s realisations, but out of God’s mercy and longsuffering.

The earth--every earth--is the Lord’s as are those who dwell therein. The Middle East, as any other part of the earth, is the patrimony of those who have lived there for centuries. It is their duty, regardless of their religious affiliation, to make it a better place for the upcoming generations. More specifically, the earth of Palestine is the patrimony of the Palestinians, and they alone have the last word in its future. Others are welcome to help, but not to dictate. This scriptural teaching does not apply solely to the Middle East. Our entire planet would be a better place if that rule was applied in every earth on our planet.

Whether Palestine will prove to be a ‘holy land’, is up to God, and him alone, to decide when he comes to judge the living and the dead. The nations of the world and, more importantly, the Christians of the West, are to extend a helping hand for the purpose of committing the Palestinians to the Lord’s peace. They are not, through their self-serving policies and attitudes, to force Palestine into a bloodbath and then use the situation they create as a renewed opportunity to intervene. To live in peace, the Palestinians need to be left in peace!

Baran: a working-class romance with Biblical themes

I had the pleasure of watching Majid Majidi’s film Children of Heaven some years ago, and I liked it so much that I decided to go back and watch some of the other notches on his directorial belt. I managed to pick up a used DVD copy of Baran at Half Price Books some months back, and finished watching it yesterday. Watching this movie turned out to be a thoroughly serendipitous choice, as it helped me to illustrate a portion of the Bible study group at St Herman’s Orthodox Church, for which I was the discussant. I was discussing the early life of the righteous patriarch Isaac, the son of Abraham.

Baran is a romantic melodrama, but it is much more than that. It is deeply specific: it involves an Iranian construction worker who falls in love with a crossdressing Afghan refugee who is trying to earn money to support her injured father. But for all of that specificity, it carries all the weight of a fable—a tale with universal importance and appeal. And, Majidi being a religious director, there is also a spiritual significance to the film, and the references and appeals to Scripture were probably not at all unintended.

Lateef (a name which means ‘gentle’ in both Arabic and Farsi) is a young Iranian who works on a construction site. Actually, he has it fairly easy. He’s the tea boy, and his job is to boil tea and carry it on a platter to the other workers on the site. His boss, Memet, in order to get his construction work done faster and cheaper, hires on the down-low Afghan migrants and refugees from the Taliban, who do back-breaking manual labour for cents on the dollar (dinars on the touman?) compared to their Iranian coworkers. One of these, a man named Najaf, falls and breaks his foot; he has to be trucked home. But this incident attracts the attention of government inspectors who question Memet about his illegal hiring of Afghans.

Najaf’s replacement, brought by his brother Soslan, is a young boy named Rahmat (whose name means ‘mercy’ or ‘graciousness’)… who is actually a girl in disguise. After Rahmat has an accident herself and spills half a bag of cement on a fellow-worker from two stories up, Memet assigns the Afghan ‘boy’ to do Lateef’s job—and Lateef to do real construction work.

Lateef, who is money-grubbing, lazy, hotheaded and more than a bit arrogant, holds a grudge against Rahmat and tries to undermine ‘him’ and play pranks on ‘him’ at every turn: including dumping dirty water over ‘his’ head from three stories up, and trashing the kitchen where ‘he’ works. But as Lateef is plotting yet another scheme against ‘him’, he discovers—as the wind wafts away the curtain from the kitchen area and Rahmat is doing up ‘his’ hair—that ‘he’ is actually a she.

Lateef’s attitude toward Rahmat changes, and he begins to observe her more closely. He discovers that she is in fact not an opportunist or greedy at all, and in fact lives up to her name. She does her best to give good tea and bread and cigarettes to the workers, and she takes the scraps and goes up to the third floor of the construction site to feed the doves with them. Lateef observes all of this in secret, and begins to help Rahmat both secretly and in the open. The story is really one about Lateef repenting, about his character changing. He gradually goes from being a grudging, arrogant, pugnacious lout—to also living up to his name.

There is a lot in the story of Lateef that is Jacobean… that is to say, that reflects the story of Jacob as he labours for Laban to win the hand of Rachel. Lateef’s labours for Memet and his acts of kindness toward Soslan and Najaf—and his disappointments when these go astray or unnoticed also reflect this story (as when Laban tricks Jacob into marrying his elder daughter Leah). But there is one scene in particular which reminded me more strongly of Isaac and Rebekah.

There is a scene close to the end of the film, where Lateef is helping Rahmat (whose actual name is Baran, or ‘Rain’) pick up some vegetables that she spilled on the ground. The two of them make eye contact. Their expressions change. It is clear—despite Rahmat-Baran’s character not saying a single word throughout the entire film—that Baran returns Lateef’s feelings for her. But then she puts on her niqâb in front of him. All the time, she does not break eye contact with him, even while the truck which is taking her back to Afghanistan is driving away. But Lateef smiles as he watches one of her footprints being washed away by the rain.

This scene seems to be a direct reference to the passage in Genesis where Rebekah is approaching Abraham’s camp from afar, and notices Isaac at a distance. She questions Abraham’s servant about who he is, and upon learning that this is her intended husband, she leaps down from her camel and veils herself before him, presenting himself to her as a bride. The emotional poignancy of this scene is enriched by this parallel to the Hebrew Scriptures.

Again, this is such a sweet, beautiful, wholesome, heartfelt film that its appeal becomes broadly universal despite the deeply Central-Asian particularity of its setting and characters, and the barriers of language and class and sexual mores that divide the two protagonists from each other. The cinematography is also amazing… Majidi has the ability to create a film that has a certain weight, using natural lighting and long static shots in order to mimic the same effect that American movies had from twenty years before (but have since lost). I highly, highly recommend Baran as a film with both deeply human and deeply spiritual significance.

The Asianness of Jesus (and why it matters)

Recently I wrote this post on Facebook.

Jesus was not American.
Jesus was not European.
Jesus was an Asian who was raised in Africa.

This struck me as being simply a bald statement of historical and geographical fact, unassailable from the standpoint of simple empiricism. Bethlehem, where our Lord Christ was born (Luke 2:1-20), is a town in the West Bank of Palestine, which is on the continent of Asia. And the town where our Lord Christ was raised by the Theotokos in exile, al-Maṭariyya, is just outside of Cairo in the mainland of Egypt (Matthew 2:13-23), which is on the continent of Africa. And the importance of this fact to me seemed to be obvious, simply by reference to the logic of the Incarnation. God had a flesh-and-blood body. God therefore had a mother, a birthplace, a homeland, a biological family, a career—and all of those things should be revered as such.

For example: we know that Jesus was a practising Palestinian Jew of the Second Temple. He was descended from the tribe of Judah through His maternal grandfather Joachim, and from the tribe of Levi through His maternal grandmother Anna (according to the Protoevangelium of James). We know that Jesus spoke a Northwest Semitic language as His mother tongue (Matthew 5:22; Matthew 27:46; Mark 5:41; Mark 7:34; Mark 15:34). In terms of language, the closest modern-day kin to Jesus are the neo-Aramaic-speaking Syrians who live in Ma’lûlâ, Syria. We know that He learned Hebrew as a second language: otherwise He would not be able to read and discuss Scripture (Luke 4:16). And He also very likely learned Greek, the common tongue in His region of the Roman Empire, as a third—which is how He would have conversed with Pilate (John 18). We know that Jesus is identified as a Galilean (Matthew 4:12). We know all of this from Holy Scripture.

However, this was apparently a bit too much for some of my commenters, some of whom baldly asked, ‘So what?’; while another replied a bit more waggishly by pointing out that in those days, Asia referred only to Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey) and Africa only to the Roman province of Africa (which is now in Libya and Tunisia). To the last point—fair enough. But the former question is one which I think deserves a bit of unpacking.

As inheritors of Western Christendom, there is a prevailing attitude that Jesus is ‘ours’ by default. Not only is this attitude untrue, but it was also never true. Jesus is not our inheritance by way of civilisational legacy or cultural osmosis. Rather, Jesus becomes our inheritance when we become His, when we join Him in the Eucharist, and through the prayers and disciplines of His Church. Thus, when I say that ‘Jesus is not European’ and ‘not American’, my purpose is not to belittle Europeans. We know that Jesus had among His followers those whom we would now consider European and white, such as the Roman centurion in Matthew 8 and Luke 7. Likewise Jesus had among His followers those whom we would now consider to be black Africans, such as St Simon of Cyrene in Mark 15 and the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8.

Another reason I point this out has to do with modern geopolitics. Jesus Christ lived His life on the ragged periphery of the Roman Empire. The Jordan River marked in a very real sense the liminal division between West and East in the Hebrew imagination: it was the Schengen Line of His time, and His Baptism was very much so an act of religiously-imbued (think: Exodus) civil disobedience to Rome. The Roman Empire and its logic were pagan. Judaism was very much so a minority religion and as often as not a persecuted one within the Empire. The fact that Christ appeared as an Aramaic-speaking Mizrahi Jew, that is to say as a West Asian, at that moment in history, is significant. He became Incarnate in a contested region between two huge world empires: one need only look at maps of Rome and Persia all throughout this period to see what I mean. And He was wrongly condemned and crucified as an enemy of one of those empires.

Just as it was the job of Christians in the first century to peaceably resist the evils of the Roman Empire, so too it is the job of Christians in our day to resist the current Atlanticist, Euro-American Empire, which is ideologically post-Christian and in many senses sub-pagan in terms of our retrograde rejection of metaphysics and higher culture, not to mention our false pretences to being the arbiter of universality and universal values.

Note that Jesus never appeals to what the Parthians do at any point in His ministry. In no case, therefore, should our resistance to our empire be conditioned by or referred to what is done by the Russians or by the Chinese. The Russians worship God and God will care for them. And the Chinese are yet in the process of rediscovering God after a long period of state-enforced atheism. Rather, it is for the evils of our own culture and our own civilisation, which we shall be called to account at the Last Judgement. And make no mistake that, collectively, we in the West will have some ‘splaining to do.

But, as one particularly astute commenter observed,

I suspect if you’re getting pushback, it’s from folks who see the “Jesus wasn’t white” line used by people who then try to shove Christ into their own particular postmodern identity politics or to peddle particular partisan liberal political positions. When Christ asks either the “Western chauvinists” or the liberal identity politics advocates “Who do you say I am?”, he’s bound to get the wrong answer either way.

This is quite true, and a necessary corrective to what I originally wrote. And, as I responded to him, as often as not nowadays those two groups (Western chauvinists and id-pol liberals) tend to overlap significantly. The significance of the Asianness of Christ is lost, every bit as much on those who would uphold a highly-specific, deracinated, bourgeois boba liberal understanding of ‘Asian’, as on those who refuse to acknowledge Jesus as anything but a white Anglo-American, whether of a liberal or a conservative cultural posture. Making Jesus a champion of ‘woke’ racial shame in the name of equity, is every bit as spurious and idolatrous as making Him a champion of gun rights.

When I speak of Christ as Asian, I speak in the mode of St Ilya Fondaminsky, when he spoke of Christianity as the ‘response of the awakened East’ to the ersatz universalism of the Hellenic West: a response which ‘tore apart’, even ‘to shreds’, the world order of that time. Even if it’s not entirely right to cast our Saviour as the bringer of a spiritually multipolar world (Christ Himself became the pole), still it’s not entirely wrong either. Rather than swearing fealty to the singular self-sufficient ‘universal’, to the man-god in Rome, the early Christians swore fealty rather to the God-man Who was crucified and Who rose from the dead: to a particular (and only because particular, truly universal) Who was both One and Plural as the Holy Trinity.

An aphoristic reflection

What God asks of us is so simple. To love Him, and to love our neighbour.

How easy the yoke! How light the burden!

Yet to fulfil these commandments is the work of a lifetime.

Lord, when did we see...?

For I was hungry, and you cut my SNAP benefits;
For I was thirsty, and you ran tar sands pipelines through my water;
I was a stranger, and you detained and deported me;
Naked, and you set the cops on me;
Sick, and you handed me a six-figure medical bill;
In prison, and you said I deserved to be there for life.

‘Humble Month’?

I have seen some Orthodox Christians recently begin talking about the possibility of making June ‘Humility Month’ or ‘Humble Month’. The idea is that, as the secular culture around us is celebrating gay pride (including the advocates of secular culture from the sadly predictable usual quarters), we should seek to exalt instead the virtue of humility as an antidote to pride of all kinds. Speaking as an Orthodox Christian layman, I’m here to say that ‘Humble Month’ is a bad idea… but not for the reasons you might think.

Two days from now, in the Orthodox Church, we will celebrate the feast of the fullness of the revelation of the Holy Spirit in history. We will celebrate the Last and Great Day, the dawning of the great fire, the holy fire which descended upon the heads of the Apostles as they gathered together ‘in one place’, in the Cenacle at Jerusalem. It is the last of the great feasts in the Church, and it marks the historical beginning of the Church in the world.

Let us be absolutely clear about the meaning of this feast. It is a day upon which the Gospel of salvation went forth by grace into the hearing of all peoples. A new word, indeed the Word of Truth, was proclaimed even in the tongues of the most despised barbarians.

The Book of Acts mentions several nations which heard this word in their own native language: Parthians and Medes (speakers of Iranian languages); Elamites (speakers of an extinct language isolate); Mesopotamians (speakers of Aramaic, with Akkadian still in liturgical use); Judæa (Aramaic and Hebrew); Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia Minor (dialects of Greek); Phrygia (Phrygian); Pamphylia (Greek); Egypt (Coptic); Libya (Tamahaq, Greek and Latin); Rome (Latin); Crete (Greek); and Arabia (Arabic). These languages were all explicitly sanctified in Scripture by the Holy Spirit. And even those which were not explicitly sanctified here were blessed in the Great Commission. (As a result, it makes better sense, following the logic of Pentecost, for Orthodox Christians to celebrate June as Indigenous History Month the way they do in Canada. The languages of those who were here first are similarly blessed. But I digress.)

The fire that descended upon the Apostles at Pentecost was not a destroying fire. It was not the fire that consumes. It was the same as the fire that Moses beheld in the Burning Bush—a fire which illumines, is the essence of creativity. This is the fire of the Holy Spirit. Pentecost calls us to a creative and self-giving relationship to the world. What better evidence could there be of this, than of the Word being preached in the tongues of all the nations present in Jerusalem? It ought to go without saying, though, that Pentecost also calls us to be humble. As Saint John of Kronstadt said: ‘The Comforter, the Holy Spirit, who fills the whole universe, passes through all believing, meek, humble, good, and simple human souls, dwelling in them, vivifying and strengthening them.’ Pride has no place at Pentecost. The Holy Spirit finds no place to dwell in those who are filled up with themselves, their own ‘me’-ness.

So ‘Humility Month’ gets at least this one thing—and it is quite an important thing—right. Humility before the Holy Spirit is very much needful; without it, we are nothing. On the other hand, though, the whole ‘Humility Month’ business strikes me as a purely reactive posture. It takes as primary, not the witness of the Orthodox Calendar and the Liturgical cycle ordained by the power of the Holy Spirit… but instead the imitative liturgics of the surrounding secular culture. It bases its witness not on Pentecost, but on an evil or a privation to be opposed. This is, to put it bluntly, almost an anti-Pentecost approach.

If such reaction is at times a deep and understandable temptation in an age where identity politics and ‘woke’-ism seem to have gone completely amok, we should nonetheless understand the impulse as temptation, as a passion in the Patristic sense. Orthodox Christians should certainly not strive to mimic the culture in opposition—in other words, to posture as a set-theoretical not-X to the culture’s X. There is so much that is truly good, that is original in the Orthodox culture—what I should say is, the Orthodox cultures that were sanctified at Pentecost, be they Greek, Arabic, African, Persian, Syriac, Latin, or any of the cultures that were baptised afterward—that there should be no need for us to make a commemorative ‘Month’ that is simply the stated opposite of what a weak, shallow and exhausted consumerist culture finds ‘good’.

Let us be truly humble, then, if that is our aim. Let us proclaim the Pentecost in whatever language we can find to hand—surely that language will by no means exhaust the Holy Spirit’s glory. Let us be creative and self-giving as the Apostles were then. Let us make more than a Month of it, for the Pentecost is the fiftieth day, the fullness of time in the new creation. Let us be proclaimers of Christ Risen and Ascended. Let us be seekers of the Father’s abundant mercies. Let us be witnesses of the Holy Spirit’s work in the world.

Why does Saint Paul mention the Scythians?

Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all. (Colossians 3:11)

In terms of ancestry, I am genetically related to a number of different peoples who lived in Late Antiquity: the Visigoths and Ostrogoths, the Cherusci, the Chatti, the Thuringii, the Langobardi (all Germanic peoples), the Gauls and Britons (both Celts) and the Pannonian Illyrians. One tribe among my ancestors, however, stands out: the Scythians. The Scythians were a nomadic people who lived in the Caucasus Mountains around what is now Georgia and southern Russia; as they expanded, their territory extended across the Pontic Steppe as far as Moldova and Romania to the west, and to the east as far as Kazakhstan. Like most nomadic peoples of the time, they were a motley crew, and probably included diverse elements including Iranian, Turkic, Finnic-Ugric and Caucasian. Their rule extended briefly into Asia Minor; later on, a number of allied tribes emerged from what had been the Scythian Empire: the Sauromatæ, the Massagetæ, the Cimmerians and the Saka, or Sai. The Alans (or Yancai), the nomadic people who invaded Europe along with the Huns and from whom the modern culture of the Ossetians descends, were themselves a scion of the Scythian stem.

The great question is: why did Saint Paul include the Scythians in this passage in Colossians?

To answer that question, we need to understand first the connotation that term Σκυθης had to the Greek-speaking audience that Saint Paul was addressing. To the Greeks, and to the entirety of the Roman Empire in fact, the Scythians were the penultimate barbarians. From the Greek perspective, the Scythians were seen as savages: ruthless, cruel, inebriated, undisciplined, lacking in restraint. They were purported to drink the blood of their enemies and fashion the skulls of those they killed into drinking-vessels. The Greeks often used the imagery of wild animals to describe the Scythians.

But the relationship of the Greeks to the Scythians was more complex than this. Scythian culture was as often an object of desire or wistful longing. For example, the Greek myth of the Amazons was probably derived from the way Scythian (specifically Sauromatae) women would wear weapons and armour and participate in war. There was thus an element of sexual exoticism that accompanied the Scythians. In other places, Scythians were often cast in the role of the ‘noble savage’: free from the constraints of civilisation and thus in a permanent state of childlike innocence. In a word, the Greek attitude toward the Scythians may be described as a progenitor or as an early example of orientalism.

As Saint Paul was both an educated Jew and a Roman citizen, we should not imagine that he was ignorant of any portion of this context, or that his choice of the word Σκυθης in this list was accidental. On one level, we may take it as read that there were Scythians among the members of the Early Church; there’s not really any reason to doubt, given the presence of Scythians in Asia Minor, that Saint Paul was not speaking literally here. But on another level, the inclusion of Σκυθης points to a much deeper element in the Pauline discourse. Given what the Scythians represented to the Greek audience he was addressing, Paul’s explicit inclusion of them in his description of the Church and its members is an implicit rebuke of these orientalist or proto-orientalist attitudes among them. Just as Greeks did not have to undergo circumcision to be included in the ἐκκλησία, so Paul is saying, nor did Jews have to give up their identities as Jews to be included in the ἐκκλησία, so too were barbarians welcome as long as they were sincere in following Christ. Even Scythians were welcome in the ἐκκλησία, without having to be Hellenised first!

Does any of this sound familiar?

These days there is a marked increase in orientalist discourse on account of the world organising itself into a ‘harder’ NATO bloc, the ‘West’, aligned firmly against ‘the rest’, most notably against Russia and against China. It is disingenuous to pretend that the facts are otherwise. It is also disingenuous to pretend that Russian and Chinese people are not the objects of orientalist fantasising on the part of the West, even in the present day, or that Ukrainian nationalist discourse (fervently stoked by NATO actors) isn’t deliberately invoking these orientalist tropes as part-and-parcel of its anti-Russian pathos.

Saint Paul would reject all of this, utterly. He would reject out-of-hand the a priori assumptions of both Ukrainian nationalism and the aggressive Western, particularly American and British, chauvinism against Russia and China. He rejected them in his own day, as Colossians 3:11 makes plain. Saint Paul was neither in the business of ‘defending the West’, nor of ‘defending democracy’. He was not in the business of defeating the enemies of Rome by force, no matter how ‘barbaric’ they were. Nor was he even in the business of converting the ‘barbarians’ to either a Greek or a Jewish civilisational standard. He was in the business of bringing the good news of Christ—who was both Jewish and Roman, as well as being an outlaw to both worlds when He was put to death on the Cross—to the world, barbarians, even Scythians, and by extension those even further east, very much included.

Saint Ilya Fondaminskii-Bunakov, himself a Jew by ancestry, provocatively suggested that Christianity was the spiritual response, even the ‘revenge’, of the awakened East against the false, pretentious, homogenising universalisms of Greek and Roman civilisation. Intriguingly, he even referred specifically to the Scythians as a formative ‘Eastern’ influence on the Russian state. In our own day, we need to recover this insight with regard to the false, pretentious, homogenising universalism of the American imperium. Our own imperium elevates to godhead not necessarily a Cæsar or a god-emperor (though we do have people with such pretensions, for which irony is but a flimsy excuse). Instead we promote a set of falsely-universal ideals (whether bourgeois democracy, capitalism, industrialism, even shallow identitarian ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘diversity-equity-inclusion’) in whose name that imperium is enforced through economic, political and military violence. If we are to take Saint Paul’s admonition to the Colossians seriously, then we should prepare a world, at the very least an ἐκκλησία in which Russians are free to be Russians, Chinese are free to be Chinese, Iranians are free to be Iranians, Syrians to be Syrians, Vietnamese to be Vietnamese, Indigenous to be Indigenous—not with any chauvinism or pretensions to grandeur attached, for in Christ and His kingdom such worldly distinctions are devoid of importance, but in the full depth of their cultural belonging.

Христос Воскресе!

Христос воскресе! Воистину воскресе! (Church Slavonic)
Христос шэнтэ! Вӯййкэсьтан шэнтэ! (Kildin Sámi)
Чырысти райгас! Æцæгæй райгас! (Ossetian)
Христос чĕрĕлнĕ! Чăн чĕрĕлнĕ! (Chuvash)
Христос бунидиэни дидюхэ! Тэде бунидиэни дидюхэ! (Hezhen)

Prophets, not without honour

Marianna Vyshemirskaya, Faina Savenkova, Ekaterina Ershova

The Gospel reading from Holy Tuesday’s Matins service was from that of Saint Matthew, chapters 22 and 23. In it, our Lord pronounces woe upon the scribes and Pharisees. He speaks of how they devour widows’ houses, but make long prayers for show. He speaks of how they travel land and sea to win one convert, but then make that convert twice as much a child of hell as themselves. He speaks of how they dishonour the Temple by saying that it is not the Temple which is sacred, but rather the gold which is sanctified within it. They strain gnats but swallow camels. They clean the outside of the dish, but leave the inside filthy. He speaks of how they tithe mint and anise and cumin, but neglect the weightier matters of justice and mercy and faith. And He speaks of how they venerate the prophets of days past with much pomp and splendour, but then kill and scourge and crucify and persecute the prophets and wise which come before them. In this, Jesus Christ calls to mind His own earlier words, in Matthew 13, of how the prophets are not without honour, save in their own land and in their own house.

Am I not guilty of all of these things myself? Do I not make outward shows of piety and righteousness, while my own eyes are full of sin, and my own body is full of darkness? When I show up at church in my best clothes, but the inside of my own soul is full of lust and despair and rage, what right do I have to speak? What right do I have to expect Jesus to recognise me as His own, when I am not at peace with myself, and when I struggle to make peace even with my family and friends who love me?

And more, is not our own nation guilty, and will we not all stand guilty before Jesus Christ, as we have destroyed and expelled the prophets who are sent to us? On NPR this morning, in light of the recent Discord leaks, they spoke of Edward Snowden and Pvt Chelsea Manning, not in terms of the right and wrong of what they exposed to the light of day, but only in terms of how they embarrassed the United States, and of their guilt, which was assumed. And all of this, while Australian citizen Julian Assange remains in prison, merely for speaking about what even the governments whose secrets he leaked to the public acknowledge is true.

I had cause to think about prophets who are not without honour save in their own land, when I saw the video of Ekaterina Ershova (pictured at right above), kneeling down in silent prayer on the concrete in front of the Kiev Pechersk Lavra, while she is surrounded by a throng of jeering, mocking hooligans prancing around her in unholy jubilation at the eviction of the Lavra’s monks. She is to me a model of faith. Evidently she was seized by the SBU (security services) after she was taken away from the Lavra; her social media accounts have been deactivated and her family haven’t heard from her since. What is she if not a prophetess?

And I also thought about the ‘Madonna of Mariupol’, Marianna Vyshemirskaya (pictured at left above). She was all over the news after an AP report which reported on a Russian air raid on a Mariupol maternity hospital. She had the misfortune to be in that hospital while the AP camera crews were there. She came in for unwarranted vituperation from Russian netizens on account of this alone. And then when she spoke up about what had truly happened to her when she was taken out of the hospital—that there had been no air raid and that she’d been photographed without her explicit permission—all of a sudden it was the Ukrainian nationalists who reviled her and cursed her, and clamoured for her and her child to be put to death. Her name was added to the infamous Myrotvorets database. She is to me a model of patience. Despite all that she has had to endure, she is not bitter, but rather continues to focus on raising her daughter and being of service to her community near Donetsk.

And then I also thought of Faina Savenkova (pictured above in the centre), the teenage poetess and science-fiction author. She is to me a model of honesty and truth-telling. She has been talking about the war that has been taking place in her home for the past nine years. She talks about being one of the ‘wrong children’, ‘born and living in the wrong place’ (like children in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Palestine), one of the children on the ‘wrong side’ of a line drawn by political operatives in Kiev in 2014. And the Ukrainian government continues to want to silence her for talking about it.

Like the three youths in the Book of Daniel, these three young women have bravely refused to bow to the graven images and idols of nationalism. They have so far refused to glorify the worldly Nebuchadnezzar over God. And for that, the powers of this world, including the powers which rule us here in the West, would consign them to the fiery furnace. The nation which proclaims ‘glory’ to itself, and ‘glory to heroes’, refuses to honour the prophets which are sent to it.

But the fiery furnace is not the end—even Daniel could see that. The prophets are not without honour in the kingdom to come. Lazarus was raised. There is a Resurrection. We shall see it, three days from now. Today we see the powers of this world—the imperial power of Babylon, the gravitas and military main of Rome—exercise their judgement upon the just Judge, and heap blame upon the blameless One. Tomorrow we shall see Him put to rest in the tomb. But come midnight, the day after tomorrow, we shall see the tomb lying empty: glory to God.

Encouragement to new believers in other lands

Father Artemy Vladimirov, a popular Moscow-area priest, gave several interviews, epistles and other writings over the course of about twenty years while he was rector at All Saints’ Church in Moscow, which have a particular importance to an American audience. These were very kindly translated, compiled and edited by Sister Nectaria (McLees) and published by the Road to Emmaus journal as a single volume in 2010: Bright Faith.

One of the major draws of Bright Faith, at least for me, is the fact that Fr Artemy has a warm and understanding sense of humour. (Speaking of humour, Fr Artemy advises us to look at the motivation. He has little use for cynical or belittling humour, the sorts of laughter that cut others down, but he speaks very highly of self-deprecation and situational humour.) He clearly ministers to people who come from outside of Russia, and embraces them with empathy even while he also very much loves his own country. He is also, in a manner I’ve personally found to be the case with many Moscow Patriarchate priests, down-to-earth, approachable, genuine and sensible—without compromising on matters of importance to the faith. He sometimes advocates a kind of ‘tough love’ with people who aren’t sincere in their spiritual demands on him, but it’s love all the same. He also understands the temptation and pull of the ‘hyperdox’ tendency, and gently urges moderation in its place.

Fr Artemy firmly champions the traditional nature of the Orthodox faith. He cautions against the consumption of popular media, and he urges young people in particular to embrace chastity with burning zeal. However, there are times when he comes down firmly on the ‘left’ side of things. He has high words of praise, for example, for the radical anarchist priest and new martyr Saint Valentin (Sventsitskii), whom he cites as ‘one of the most interesting writers of the century’. Writing as he did during the 1990s, he laments the disappearance of government assistance programmes for the poor and the destruction of the social fabric in Russia, which accompanied the fall of communism. Even though he has very little good to say about the atheistic Soviet state or its ideologues, he still has a heart which is clearly moved by the people—widows and orphans—who were dispossessed by the ruthless cutthroat gangster capitalism which took its place.

One thing Fr Artemy is very good at in this collection of essays, is referring people to works by other authors whom he considers to be better informed and better suited to guide seekers than himself. Fr Artemy is not being falsely modest here—his perspective is informed by a historical understanding that the startsy in ages past were much more spiritually-refined than the present-day teachers, who seem to have all but disappeared. He is hopeful, however, that people who earnestly seek guidance will find it in the writings of the Russian bishops of the nineteenth century. Fr Artemy is particularly fond, it seems, of St Feofan the Recluse, Bishop of Tambov, and St Ignatii Brianchaninov, Bishop of the Caucasus and Stavropol. He recommends these bishops’ writings precisely because they are practical, and they do address questions which are applicable to the day-to-day life of new believers.

As a teacher, I was particularly gratified to note how well-attuned Fr Artemy is to the character and spiritual needs of young people. He talks about this at length in one of his essays, specifically about the spiritual life of teenagers. He strikes a very fine balance between the need for discipline (which all children do crave, at some level, for a sense of security) and the need for gentle guidance in self-motivated growth in the faith. Once again, he makes reference to St Feofan here: clearly there are some writings which I need to follow up on from this one. Fr Artemy’s Lenten reflections, as well, are of particular use and guidance to people approaching the sacrament of Confession.

This book is one I’d recommend, not necessarily to catechumens or the curious, but absolutely to new believers who are looking for a nudge in the right direction. Fr Artemy is a healthy and sane voice amid an English-language Orthodox Christian literary and social media landscape riddled with various neuroses and unhealthy fixations. Many thanks are owed to Nun Nectaria (McLees) and the folks at Road to Emmaus for making this volume available in English!

The Prayer of a Broken Heart: a review

Fr Paul Abernathy’s new book, The Prayer of a Broken Heart, is a splendidly multifaceted exploration—from a perspective rooted in the Orthodox Christian tradition—of the religious history and spiritual character of African slaves in America and their descendants. Speaking as a white American Orthodox Christian, I’m sure that what I got out of it would be very different than what a black American would get out of it. And I’m sure that a ‘cradle’ Orthodox Christian from within one of the traditionally-religious immigrant communities that came here after slavery had been abolished would get something else entirely out of it. However, the fact that The Prayer of a Broken Heart has something to say to each of these groups is a mark of its strengths. Although it is an adaptation of his seminary master’s thesis, precisely as a work of religious history it stands firmly on its own merits.

The Prayer of a Broken Heart may be said to have three strands. The first strand is an apologia of African-American Christianity as an, if not the, authentic and valid expression of African-American culture (as opposed to being a ‘white man’s religion’ or a ‘slaveowner creed’ foisted upon the slaves by their masters). The second strand is a portrait of African-American spirituality as it was formed through and the experiences of slavery, race-based terrorism, segregation and informal discrimination. And the third strand is an exploration of the commonalities between the African-American religious experience and the historical witness of the Orthodox Church. Interspersed through all of these strands are the accounts of pastoral experiences Fr Paul himself has had, working as a priest in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. The men and women whom he encounters have lives shaped by profound grief and loss. But that same suffering leads them, just as it has led many generations of their ancestors, before the Cross.

The historical aspect of the book is logically presented and carefully argued from primary source materials—slave narratives in particular. Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Charles Ball, Josiah Henson, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown and others are given space to speak in their own words from their own experiences. If Fr Paul’s authorial voice is somewhat more distant in these passages, that is all to his credit, as these narratives have their own power. The picture he draws out of these narratives is one which complicates and deflates both triumphalist-panglossian white accounts of slavery as a ‘civilising mission’, and anti-Christian tendencies in black-nationalist thought that portray Christianity as a ‘white man’s religion’. It becomes quite clear in these accounts that slave-owners had no interest whatsoever in edifying their slaves or leading them to Christianity. Their sole interest in their slaves was as productive property. In fact: slave-owners feared slaves’ expressions of religiosity, as the prayers of slaves were a powerful implicit witness to their spiritual equality before God.

Slave-owners were known to hold dances and parties with music and secular entertainments for their slaves to keep them ‘happy’. But religious gatherings were feared and forbidden. It was common for slave-owners to have slaves beaten cruelly or even killed for praying. Slaves would therefore organise prayer meetings in ‘hush harbours’: backwoods or basement locations hidden from the eyes of masters and overseers. For two hundred years, African-American Christianity was by necessity an ‘invisible institution’—a phrase borrowed from the religious historian Albert J Raboteau, whom Fr Paul Abernathy quotes at length. The message that he draws from this is clear: African-American Christianity, far from being received by slaves from masters, was attained and held in spite of the suppression of Christianity by their masters. Fr Paul tells us outright that the first records we have of slaves converting in any significant number to Christianity occurred during the first Great Awakening, when ‘New Light’ itinerant preachers would draw mixed-race crowds to revival meetings… often over the strenuous objections of the supine ‘Old Light’ pastors who were the representatives of the slave-owners’ religion.

This leads Fr Paul to open a descriptive account of the character of the Christianity of black America. Because it was an ‘invisible institution’—a church of the catacombs, shaped by the ever-present reality of persecution—it quickly became characterised by a radical trust in the will of God; an extended hope of justice however long deferred; a reliance upon the power of prayer; deference to the witness of elders who had experienced God’s action in their own lives; and an emphasis on salvific suffering and the openness of a ‘broken heart’ to God.

This provides an opening for Fr Paul Abernathy to explore the parallels between the African-American religious experience and Orthodox theology. To a certain extent, he counts on the Orthodox Christian section of his audience to have a great enough familiarity with the rudiments of hesychasm and the words of Psalm 50 to make certain connexions on their own. But he deftly illustrates how the sublative, broken-hearted and penitential character of African-American Christianity shares fundamental similarities with Orthodoxy—drawing upon numerous Patristic writings from Saint Isaac of Nineveh through Saint Gregory Palamas to Saints Silouan of Athos and Sophrony of Essex for demonstration.

Here Fr Paul Abernathy has a much clearer and direct case to make for a connexion than does, say, Hieromonk Damascene Christensen in Christ the Eternal Tao. Fr Paul has enough respect for the tradition he examines to acknowledge the clear differences between it and the Orthodox tradition. At the same time, though, he makes an honest appeal for the Orthodox ‘case’ with African-Americans. He notices in the remnants of African religion which were carried over into Christianity still more similarities with Orthodoxy: communality, the person as a web of relationships, the closeness of the human world to the Divine. And he notes in the tradition of African-American Christianity certain unmet needs and expectations in itself, most notably: a desire for self-denial, for discipline (explaining the appeal of the Nation of Islam), for mystical communion with God. And he argues that the Orthodox Church is capable of meeting these needs and expectations, as Protestant churches are quickly finding themselves deficient of these things.

Ultimately, though, this book is a labour of love. I use that term advisedly. Fr Paul Abernathy is not a nationalist of any sort: indeed, he considers pride (including national pride) to be the very source of many of the ills which the love of Christ must heal. For him, the most salient and salvific features of African-American Christianity are its insistence on forgiveness and on love of enemies: both insistences which are shared by the best aspects of Orthodox Christianity. And it is clear that he himself speaks from a position of love, even when he issues criticism.

His analysis is not without its critical dimension. Although he has nothing but words of praise for the musical tradition of the black spiritual (that true cry from the bottom of a broken heart, expressed in a cappella harmony!), he waxes particularly critical of modern African-American culture when it comes to popular music and consumption habits. He considers much of modern black musical and popular culture to be a form of propaganda which weakens the spirit—in much the same way as the secular dances and parties held by the slave-owners kept their slaves docile. I was rather surprised and a bit dismayed to read the harsh words he had even for blues and rock-‘n’-roll music, both of which (instrument-driven, individualistic, disillusioned and worldly) he views as a qualitative falling-away from the otherworldly hope and communal fellow-suffering epitomised by the spirituals.

Many thanks to Fr Paul Abernathy for publishing this work in a form which makes it available to a broad audience outside the academy. The Prayer of a Broken Heart is very much worth the time taken to read. For American Orthodox Christians in particular (and anyone interested in the history of American religion and constructive modern approaches to race relations generally), it is an excellent source to ingest, to ponder, and to begin conversations from.