Worse than the Africans #
Kiril Tovbin
On November 1, 2007, I attended a lecture by Deacon Maximus Urbanovich of the Orthodox Church in America. The topic was “Why I Became Orthodox.” I had prepared many questions, but instead of a lecture I witnessed an ordinary Protestant-style sermon. Urbanovich waved the Bible, made theatrical gestures, and jumped around, shouting into the microphone alongside his interpreter. I found it absolutely off-putting. I cannot abide the worldly antics of Protestants, this stage performance aimed at emotional impact.
But—I was pleasantly surprised by the topic of the sermon. It was astonishing to hear from the mouth of a modern new-ritualist in a cassock words about a personal encounter with the Savior, about the chains of sin that bind us, about the success of Urbanovich’s preaching among Africans, and about the healing of bodily ailments through prayer in faith.
After the sermon, a well-known professor of cultural studies in our city, a candidate of philosophical sciences, approached me and voiced her categorical rejection of Urbanovich’s performance: nothing Russian, nothing traditionally Orthodox—just an ordinary American-Baptist show. “At this rate, they’ll eradicate everything that is OURS. Why does he come to US with the same standards as to those Africans he talked about? Are we worse than Africans?”
Yes—we are worse than the Africans! They were never enlightened by the Christian Faith, but we renounced True Christianity in the 17th century. All our post-schism “high culture” is an era of apostasy, debauchery, worship of power, and imperial ambition.
Everything that came before Peter and the Schism is labeled by cultural scholars as a time of barbarism, darkness, vulgarity—“the era of great silence.” Truly, the pre-schism period did not have Peterhof, Tchaikovsky, or Akhmadulina. What it did have (though not universally) was genuine FAITH in Christ. People feared sin, feared the obstacles that might bar their entry into the Kingdom of the Father. The Russian of the pre-schism era believed that earthly life was but a mist of temporality—and when that mist lifts at death, Real Life begins in union with God. Man is incomplete without the Kingdom of Heaven, for the true name of a person is given by the Savior.
Now we are worse than the Africans. We are spiritual degenerates. And let us have no feeble-minded talk about “non-church spirituality.” Spirituality is life in the Holy Ghost, who is fully present only in the Ancient Orthodox (Old Believer) Church. Spirituality is life in faith in the Savior, in His Body—that is, His Church. If He is not in our life, then our life is without spirit. (No matter how many theaters we attend.) And a life devoid of spirit leads to the degeneration of the person. Russia’s grand history is proof of that. The West’s history—even more so. But the spiritual history of central and southern Africa is only just beginning.
What is corrupted is worse than what is unfinished.
The age of great popular spirituality is behind us. Around us lie the twilight hours. Ahead—darkness. Things will not improve; they will worsen—that is the Orthodox philosophy of history. The True Church dwells in the wilderness of Antichrist.
But we, Orthodox Old Believers, believe that not all is lost. “And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold. But he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved” (Matthew 24:12–13). He who breaks through the surrounding chaos in a leap toward the Savior will become a great saint. In an age of universal lawlessness, the only possible ascent to God is a personal one—personal union with His Body, the Church. Orthodoxy teaches the concept of synergy: the more a man stretches toward the Lord, the more effectively the Lord reaches toward him.
If you stretch toward Him, He will reach you. For He is not outside, but within you—and stretching toward Him means clearing away what you yourself have piled up between yourself and God. Do we Russians have fewer such obstacles than the Africans?
From every generation, we constantly hear:
– Give us projects and development prospects!
– Give us safety, abundance, and sustainable growth!
– Give us a light shining on the horizon!
– Give us a spiritual rebirth of the nation!
Consumerism and blind reliance on authority have taken root.
But who among us is capable of opening himself to God, of rising above the mundane, of developing the capacity to strive toward Him?
Are you capable of recognizing your own depravity, sinfulness, wrongness?
Are you capable of turning to the Savior with a plea for the healing of your inner soul? And casting that plea heavenward—waiting in hope for an answer?
Do you understand that your soul is swallowed up by the belly of your body? That the chance of Eternal Life in the Kingdom of Heaven is so slim for you, it only evokes a rotten smirk?
Are you prepared to be so thoroughly disappointed and repentant of your ordinary life that you utterly cross out your sinful “self”?
Afraid? Holding back? Justifying yourself? Don’t be afraid! You only need to shatter what is sinful, superficial, and artificial. But—it will hurt.
Christ doesn’t give you a new “self.” He reveals your true self—forgotten, buried, trampled. He reveals what is within you—a silver thread, hidden under layers of flesh. He reveals you to yourself. Do you understand?
Do you realize that you are nothing? You’ve bloated yourself out into the world, but what you live for—illusions, nonsense, madness. If you realize this, you are close to Him.
And He is always near. Christ is closer than your fingernail: the nail can be torn off, but Him—you cannot tear out of yourself! By His Holy Ghost, every person lives—even the pagan, the heathen, the godless. And He loves each one. He loves you.
But until you subject your very existence to total destruction for the sake of gaining Him—there’s no point in even talking to you. You’re a pustule on the deformed body of modern senselessness. The best you can manage is a kind of worldview onanism—leaping from one pleasure to the next.
And you don’t even need to go far—you need to go deep. To find within yourself the silver thread of His voice, you must tear down everything you’ve built out of yourself and for yourself.
Are you capable of self-destruction in the name of the Lord? Or does the belly of your mind recoil—“How can I go on without myself?!” But there is no “you!” Beneath all your masks gape syphilitic chasms of meaninglessness.
You have comfortably convinced yourself that you are worth something. But your value in the eyes of another is emptiness. And in the eyes of Christ?
Only the Savior has valued you—but not with your scraps and shreds, rather with His price—an awful price. A price you do not understand and are afraid of. That price is the Blood of the Son of God, the God-man Jesus Christ, shed for you on the Cross. To give you the chance to gain your true name.
“To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it” (Revelation 2:17).
Every Sunday at the Divine Liturgy in the churches of the Orthodox Old Believers, the bread and wine are truly transformed into the Body and Blood of Christ—and through this, you can be united with Him even here, on earth. That you might have strength to unite with Him There, where True Life begins.
That is the value given to you by the One who created you.
But can you understand it? Or is all of this for you nothing more than the mumbling of some backward priest, a thing of the past, nothing original?
Then how are you any better than the African who hasn’t been ruined by television, the thirst for comfort, snowboards, and “self-expression”?
What is corrupted is worse than what is unfinished!
December 29, 2007 — Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk