All Saints of Great Britain and Ireland
 |
 |
 |
 |
The Orthodox West - a Story of Decline and Hope
by Fr. Gregory Hallam
On a recent trip to Wales, I was, on occasion overcome
with a profound sadness. Where was God now in this fair land of green
clad hills and ancient springs? I suppose I meant, where was God in the
culture? - for He was everywhere to be seen in the landscape. In human
terms though there was a curious vacancy, a sense of a time long
forgotten, or as Peter Berger once said “a rumour of angels” - now
barely heard. There were of course churches and chapels a-plenty to be
seen, but they seemed to be caught in a time warp and others were
ruinous and effectively abandoned.
The churches in rural mid-Wales are pretty, compact, well maintained on
the whole. They seem nonetheless to suffer from a certain cultural
disconnection, except that is when hosting concerts for the tourists in
tourist areas! Does God still matter though to the Welsh? The
chapels have fared even worse. Village after village after village
embarrasses itself with the crumbling facades of the long gone 19th
century Welsh revival. It is as if the dragon had roared but the fiery
embers were always destined to grow old, cold and forgotten. But why?
Why could not the fire of Christ ignite Welsh culture beyond the
immediate generation of those original (largely) Methodist apostles? Why
is Wales now seemingly so neglectful of the faith of David, Non, Seiriol,
Illtyd, Dyfrig, Gildas, Dwynwen, Melangell, Gwenfrewy, Winefride, Beuno,
Asaph and countless others?
The same questions could and should be raised for England, Scotland and
perhaps to a lesser extent Ireland, north and south. Why have the
landmarks of sanctity in the lives of the Christian heroes of these
lands been erased from the public mind, confined to the private realm of
the dwindling faithful and the secular archives of the historian? Why
has Christianity become disconnected from the culture and replaced by a
secular mind more entertained by New Age fripperies and the gods of
hedonism and individualism? As the Anglo-Catholic priest Fr. Eric
Mascall once penned as a title to a book:- “Whatever happened to the
Christian mind?”
The trouble is that the Orthodox know the answer but few seem to
understand the question. We say, of course, that Britain has both
forgotten the treasure (our Orthodox faith) and where she has buried it
(in the distortions of Rome and Geneva). The incomprehension of the
post-Orthodox Christian in the face of this answer is understandable for
too many years have passed since the burying and the earthworks have now
all but gone. The preachers of the Welsh Revival and all the other
revivals of British Non-Conformity faced the problem of Christianity’s
decline during the Industrial Revolution but they did not do their
homework; they failed to look for the buried treasure but instead
mistook fool’s gold for the real thing. They can’t be blamed for this.
They were children of their time in revolt from a contaminated spiritual
source, but sometimes in their confusion mistaking elements of its
corruption for purity, its artifice for authenticity. The writing was on
the wall no sooner than the wall had been built.
There are some Orthodox who say that British (or if you like, English,
Welsh, Scottish and Irish) Orthodox Christianity is dead and buried and
incapable of being revived. These claim that only through a fresh
infusion of Orthodoxy with a very clear “country of origin” sticker
affixed will the real thing be recognised once more. I beg to disagree
... and most profoundly! It is no solution at all to point a lost soul
to a foreign country just because he has got lost in his own. We need to
need to repaint the signs; not have them repositioned in a new
direction.
St. Arsenios of Paros, a Greek saint of the 19th
century knew this full well. He said presciently ...
“When the Church in the British Isles begins to venerate her own Saints
then the Church will grow.”
St. Arsenios of Paros (+1877)
This is the remedy for the amnesia of the British. Let them see their own saints again ... not just in the churches (that they may never frequent) but in the countryside, in the cities, in the towns. We need to reconnect Christ and Culture in the Orthodox way. We need to roll back of the desert of secularism by touching the heart, by restoring the memory, by energising the will. We need to get out there and make Christ visible again.
