19. Orthodoxy from scratch?

Who did not dream of great discoveries in childhood... A caravel or a frigate cuts through the ocean waves, and shouts from the mast about the land that is near, and the boat is already launched, and the captain girds himself with his sword to give the island a new name and hoist the banner of his kingdom over it. And curious people look from the shore — and who knows, aren't they bloodthirsty? — natives. They marvel at this miracle, a huge wooden fish in which pale-faced people, or even gods, swam in, who can make them apart!

And then everything is not so romantic: you need to look for water and grow food, build housing and defensive structures, trade and fight with these very natives, in a word, start a new life in a new place. And one day another ship will anchor in the harbor, on which settlers from a distant and almost forgotten homeland will sail to start life anew in this harsh land and arrange everything here better and easier than it was at home. They will sail in search of happiness.

Today, everything is not so romantic at all: airports and train stations, passport control, and the natives are not savages in palm leaf skirts, they wear the same jeans and drink the same cola or beer. And in general, they look, as a rule, much more civilized than migrants looking for a better life. But the problems, in fact, are the same. And looking at how millions of our former and current fellow citizens are leaving our country, how the very borders of this country are changing, cutting off from it those who did not even think about emigration, one cannot help but wonder: what will happen to the Russian diaspora in a hundred or two years? What will it preserve in the diaspora: language, culture, religion? The Jews, for example, for thousands of years have preserved their religion, but not the language, the Gypsies are exactly the opposite, the Chinese manage to preserve both, but the Irish lost their language even in their homeland, but taught everyone else beer and songs of their country...

But now, of course, I want to talk not about beer, not about songs, and not even about language, but rather about Orthodoxy. For centuries now, wave after wave, generation after generation, our countrymen find themselves on foreign shores, and there some preserve the faith of their fathers, others regain it for themselves — and there are more of them, it must be said. Yes, at home they could go to the church, which was part of the landscape for them, but on other shores the landscapes are not the same as before. And the churches that come across in the main squares of cities are not Orthodox at all. You can go there too. But you often have to go to an Orthodox church in a neighboring city (and transport is expensive!), and on the only day off, and you have to maintain the church on your own meager means...

A luxurious church complex is being built in Paris now, and other Orthodox churches there are in perfect order. And in the thirties of the last century, the liturgy was served in the garage, the emigrants simply did not have enough money for another room. Only those who prayed at that service later remembered this garage with icons as something most beautiful and precious in life. There they met something that they did not find in the Kremlin and St. Petersburg cathedrals, in the best monasteries of abandoned Russia... Is it only because these people turned to faith in a desperate time, when they had lost everything earthly and could only hope for heavenly things? Or for some other reason?

I was told by a Russian priest serving outside of Russia, and then his words were confirmed by another priest, a European, serving in an Orthodox church in his native country: it is easier to start from scratch. There are too many demands on Orthodoxy, firmly inscribed in the familiar landscape. And it's not even about those crowds who come to bless willows and Easter cakes and sort out the Epiphany water, not about those parishioners who bring to baptize babies and bury the dead, not wanting to know anything else. They have one requirement: to be ritually served, and they do not particularly interfere with the worshippers.

It is much more difficult with those who know exactly what true Orthodoxy should be like, who want to put not only one willow, but an entire local Church, or at least a parish or monastery, in its proper place. How and for what he should pray, how he should build relations with the authorities and society, what he can talk about and, most importantly, in what language – almost everyone has an accurate opinion on each of these issues, and sometimes it seems that every second person is in a hurry to declare it apostolic and patristic, obligatory for universal fulfillment. No, in fact, there are not too many such demanding people, but their voice is sometimes too noticeable...

"I don't go to that church, there..." – these words I have already become accustomed to hearing from the time of my church youth. The funniest incident was back in the twilight of Soviet power, when a certain gentleman came up to me, a curly-haired blond-haired young man with a clearly Nordic character, right in the Church of the Resurrection of the Slav in Bryusov, and began to explain that I, as a Slav, should not go to a church where there were only Jews. But then his wife and daughter stood next to him (they went to venerate the icon) and, looking at the Middle Eastern, I would even say biblical features of my dear girls, he immediately realized that this round of the struggle for the purity of the Slavic race was already hopelessly lost. So it was not only the Slavs who were on the icons.

How many times since then have I heard about the wrongness of my own and other people's Orthodoxy! At first they were annoying, then amusing, now they sound like a familiar background. How many times have I heard about someone's most Orthodox Orthodoxy, in which there was so much of the adjective "Orthodox" that the noun "Christianity" was completely lost behind it, became somehow invisible... And at such moments you begin to yearn for the garage, where people come to the liturgy exhausted by a week, they simply have no time and no need to prove anything to each other. But they understand that "Christ is in our midst" is not just a beautiful phrase for those who are in the altar (and the boundaries of the altar space are only marked there), but the reality for which they come there. And if it does not exist, there will be no sense either in adjectives, or in verbs, or in all rhetorical constructions and exercises.

I will not say that there are no problems of this kind abroad, in émigré parishes. On the contrary, it is characteristic of people to transfer the function of a cultural center to the church, to gather in it for the sake of communication, maintaining traditions and simply speaking the language of their distant homeland. But they are too different there, and when a Siberian, a Ukrainian, a Muscovite and a Moldavian stand side by side, and a European who has converted to Orthodoxy at a distance, and sometimes a Serb, a Greek, an Ethiopian, an Armenian, and anyone else, and half of them are in mixed marriages, these people are really united by faith. It will not be possible to isolate oneself either on national or any other grounds, it will not be possible to present one's demands to the church.

And how to present it? The country is foreign, you have to learn its language, obey its laws, get acquainted with its customs. A person gets used to adjusting to the world around him, and he no longer has time to adjust church life to his own expectations, he would like to find the main thing for himself. And therefore it is really easier there, abroad, to build parish life from scratch... I guess. I haven't tried it, I can't say for sure.

But I can well imagine such a situation... If we do not stop bickering over petty issues and demonstrating our superiority to each other, one day we will get – and perhaps our children – a chance to start from scratch in some completely different country, in which Orthodoxy will no longer be considered a traditional religion, and the majority of opinion polls will no longer identify themselves as such. However, based on the current demographic realities, such a development of events is quite likely in any case, but the question is not in demography, but rather in our own readiness to deal with the main, the only thing that is needed. What will come, we cannot know for sure, but how we will meet the future depends to a large extent on us. And if we keep silent about the main thing, others will say it for us, and then we will have to try on not the ceremonial jacket of the discoverer, but the grass skirt of an unreasonable native.

20. Why are we to the youth?