ECUMENICAL PATRIARCHATE

Exarchate of Parishes of Russian
Tradition in Western Europe

Address by Bishop-elect Basil at his Nomination at Vespers on Saturday 6 March 1993

In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Most reverend bishops, reverend fathers, brothers and sisters in Christ:

It may well seem strange to you that I should be standing here this evening, about to begin a new life of Episcopal service in the Church, since this is a life for which I am in so many ways unprepared. Those of you who know me will realise that I am by training an academic, but am being asked to be a pastor; that I am an American by upbringing, but am being asked to serve the Russian Church in Britain; that I have been married for thirty years, have three children, and nevertheless am being asked to be a monk. How strange, though, is this really? Does not God say through Isaiah, his prophet, that ‘My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways’? The life we plan for ourselves is not always the life marked out for us by God.

I feel very much as Peter must have felt when the Lord said to him, ‘When you were young you girded yourself and walked wherever you wished: but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands and another shall gird you and carry you where you do not wish to go.’ I would not have chosen this path for myself. I did not choose it. And yet when God speaks to us through the events of life – even the saddest of events – when the voice of Christ speaks, as we believe it does speak, through the bishops, priests and the faithful of the Church, what reply can be given? ‘Does not the Potter have power over the clay?’ (Rom 11:21), Can one say more than, ‘Here I am Lord. I do not object’?

The burden of the episcopacy is heavy. We all know that this is true. It is difficult even to contemplate the responsibility which it entails: responsibility for human souls, for their salvation, responsibility before the judgement seat of Christ. It is something which human strength alone cannot bear. And yet those in whose hands it is to impose this burden find that they can do so with love, with tenderness, that they can bestow it as if it were a gift. And this they can only do in the confidence that Christ will share the weight, the heaviness of this ministry, that his strength will be there to carry what cannot otherwise be borne. At the same time episcopacy can only be received with the acknowledgement of one’s own insufficiency and inadequacy; and with confidence in the reality of God’s grace. It is a source of comfort to me personally to realize that I am known to those whom I shall serve. My weaknesses are known: what you see is what you get. But what you see is also what you have given me.

A parish priest may or may not set his mark upon his parish, but a parish certainly sets its mark upon its priest. So much of what I am able to bring with me I have received. And not just ordinary knowledge, but insight into the ways of God in the world: insight that is only born of experience and which exists then to be shared. It has been shared, and for this I am deeply thankful. This is the only true preparation for a task for which one cannot otherwise be prepared: to have shared the experience of those who have gone before you in the faith.

This can also be said of my wife, Rachel, who has gone before me in so many ways. To beome a monk means to die to the world in order to gain the world – as Kingdom. To have lost the best part of one’s life – or rather, to have seen it slip away into eternity – means always to have an anchor on ‘the other side’, firmly fixed in God – a link with God in Christ which can never be broken. Rachel will always share in my ministry.

It is an honour – and deeply moving – to have been assigned the see which belonged to Metropolitan Anthony when he first became a bishop. For this I thank our Patriarch and the Holy Synod. But more important still for us all will be that, in the ministry which I will share with him and Archbishop Anatoly, I shall follow Metropolitan Anthony along the path which he has chosen for the diocese. For it was he who quite consciously chose to open the Russian Church to the people of Britain, to all those who, by God’s mercy, could find in Orthodoxy their spiritual home. For this a two-fold preparation was necessary: the Russian community itself had to be prepared to receive this new blood; and these new Orthodox themselves had to be prepared, carefully prepared, to enter into an inheritance which, in fact, was by rights their own. For this land, too, had once been Orthodox, part of a truly universal ‘ecumenical’ Christian fellowship embracing both East and West.

And now, without ceasing to be British, they were being given the opportunity to be Orthodox again, to live in communion with the ancient Patriarchates of the East without ceasing to be ‘Westerners’ in manner and in culture, and without simply turning their backs on the religious traditions from which they had come. All that was good in their past they brought with them into their new home. What is more, the Orthodoxy which they felt drawn to embrace had been offered to them as a gift, and they were now encouraged to offer it in turn to others, not in the spirit of a confessionalism which divides, but as a truly ‘catholic’ interpretation of our common Christian tradition, which has the power to draw together the divided sons and daughter s of the Church.

In this context it is particularly significant that Archbishop Gregorios of Thyateira, the senior hierarch of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Great Britain, and therefore the representative of the ‘mother’ of our Mother Church, and Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia, also of the Ecumenical Patriarchate and my colleague and friend with whom I have shared pastoral responsibility in the Oxford community for almost twenty years, are taking part in these services. True Orthodox witness in Britain must be founded on Orthodox unity and on our common devotion to the one Orthodox faith.

During the office of Nomination, as bishop-elect, I promised to do a number of things, all of them needful. But tomorrow, during the consecration ceremony itself, after calling for the descent of that divine grace ‘which always heals that which is infirm and completes that which is lacking’ the presiding bishop will ask for one crucial thing: that the new  bishop ‘may be worthy to ask those things which are for the salvation of the people’ and that God may hear him. Prayer is at the very heart of the episcopal ministry, beginning with the offering of the bloodless sacrifice for his own sins ‘and for the ignorance of the people’. But to pray for the people means also to hear them, to accept the obedience of listening to them and entering into their needs.
As I embark upon the mystery of episcopal service, I ask that God will enable me, in the course of it, to plunge ever deeper into that living sacrament which is the Body of Christ, the Church.

And may God grant to me that purity of heart which is needed in order to hear the often unspoken prayers of others and to ‘discern the spirits’ in the days that lie ahead. Not everything that seems to be true is true, and to discern the Truth one must have at least some share in the light which Christ came to spread throughout the word. Amen.