ECUMENICAL PATRIARCHATE

Exarchate of Parishes of Russian
Tradition in Western Europe

Sermon by Bishop Basil of Amphipolis
Sunday of All Saints of Britain, 2 July 2006
Russian Parish of the Annunciation, Oxford

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

Today we are keeping a very special feast for this parish and for all Orthodox in this country – the Feast of All the Saints of Britain, of all those who have "shone forth" as saints in the British Isles. And it is quite appropriate that today there is a pilgrimage to venerate the memory and invoke the prayers of St Birinus at Dorchester – a number of our parishioners have gone today on this pilgrimage.

This takes me back to the first years that I spent in England and a trip that Rachel and I took to Dorset. By chance we came across a village called Whitchurch Canonicorum. It has a mediaeval parish church, ordinary in some ways, but very special in one respect: it has one of the very few saints' shrines that have survived in this country from the Middle Ages. I am not sure we even know who this saint is — just a saint. The mediaeval shrine has a vertical stone panel above the coffin, and in this panel are a number of round holes into which you can put your hands and rest them on top of the coffin itself.

But you can also leave pieces of paper there with your prayers. We walked into the church — there was no one else there — and when we came up to the shrine we saw that there were little piles of scraps of paper with prayers written on them, sometimes just a name. Now in this country that practice probably died out — as a general practice — about five hundred years ago. But it has obviously not died out completely. It continues. There are still people walking in "off the street" — as we were walking in — who were saying to themselves: "Perhaps I should say a prayer." And they would find a bit of paper, write on it a few words, and leave it as an indication that they had been there, that they had been there, near the saint, and had also sought to draw near to God.

Another similar spot — one which I came across more recently — is Pennant Melangell. Now this is a small — a very small — village on the Welsh Borders. In fact the road that leads up to it through the Pennant valley actually stops there — you cannot get any further into the mountains. The only way out is to turn back. The village is obviously named for St Melangell — an Irish saint who settled there in the seventh century. There was an important shrine there for her in the Middle Ages, and at the time of the Reformation the people who were perhaps forced to destroy the shrine took the trouble to build large parts of it into an addition at the back of the church.

Not long ago, towards the end of the last century, there was a move to restore the rather dilapidated mediaeval church. And in the course of the restoration, the workmen came across the pieces of this shrine that had been preserved out of sight for hundreds of years. So the Anglican vicar who was in charge of this parish decided to reconstruct the shrine on the basis of the fragments that remained. And it turned out the church, with its shrine, became a special place of healing — a place to which people could come – especially people suffering from cancer — to put their lives in the hands of God and to pray for healing.

Now I am saying all this because I want to make the point that the desire to draw near to holiness which is reflected by people leaving their pieces of paper at the shrine in Whitchurch Canonicorum, or by their going to the shrine of St Melangell at Pennant Melangell to ask for healing is something that is built into the human being. You cannot in fact get rid of it. The whole of the communist experiment in Russia was an attempt to get rid of it, and we know from our experience of the rebirth of the Church in Russia since the collapse of communism that it simply failed.

This tells us something extremely important about the nature of the human being. It tells us that we humans are meant by our Creator to seek him. We don't have another way forward. Every other path is in some sense a path backwards. What we are dealing with here is an elemental perception of the attractiveness of the holiness of God — the "otherness" of God.

Holiness is quite an extraordinary word. It is extremely difficult to define, because in the end holness always is something beyond, something other than what we have in mind, other than what we know. It is, if you like, the ultimate apophatic category.

When Dionysius the Areopagite writes about God he goes through a series of steps to explain what he means. God is outside of time. God is outside the framework of space. But then he goes a step further. He says God is beyond goodness. He even says that God is beyond beauty. But he does not say that God is beyond holiness. Holiness is the ultimate otherness of the Creator in his relationship to this world. It is the song that is sung by the seraphim — those angels that are closest to the Godhead: "Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Sabaoth". And we sing these words ourselves. We take them up from the seraphim and repeat them at every Liturgy.

Today's Gospel relates to holiness and to the saints in its own way. It is taken from the Sermon on the Mount in the sixth chapter of St Matthew, and it is essentially about simplicity.

Christ tells his disciples: "If therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light" (Mt 6:22). Here the picture is of light coming in through the eye, and the notion of the simplicity is reflected in the use of the Greek word haplous — which means simple, without admixture of anything else. It as if we are presented with a normal eye as compared with one that has a cataract. An eye with a cataract is no longer simple, and the cataract impedes the light entering the eye. As a result we cannot see as we should.

Christ then goes on to say: "But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness." The clear implication here is that evil, or wickedness (poniria), is the opposite of simplicity. And by extension Christ is saying that the wicked man has something in his eye that prevents him from seeing properly, something that prevents the light from entering in. It is only simplicity, by implication, that allows the light of God to enter into our hearts.

Now the saints of Britain whose memory we keep today are precisely those people who saw the need for simplicity, who saw the need to do only one thing. And what is that one thing? It is to draw near, so far as this is possible for us as human beings, to the "otherness" which is the holiness of God. Amen.