If England were Orthodox …

  • salisbury-cathedral-2_6x8.jpgThis may just be one for the Anglophiles like me, or maybe all of us can iden­tify with the sen­ti­ments. In any case, I was fol­low­ing links of links and came across this arti­cle enti­tled “The Reawak­en­ing of Eng­land” on a Web-site devoted to Ortho­doxy in Eng­land. I just thought it was won­der­fully writ­ten. The author men­tions Orthodoxy’s begin­nings with St. Augus­tine in the sixth cen­tury, and then goes on to won­der what Eng­land would be like today if it had lived up to that early promise. (I’m abbre­vi­at­ing because I know our Amer­i­can atten­tion span, but it really is worth read­ing in full.)

    Firstly, with all our hearts we would love God through the saints. They would be famil­iar to us, lit­er­ally famil­iar, part of a fam­ily to which we would belong.

    And not only the uni­ver­sal saints, such as Sts. Peter and Paul, the patrons of Lon­don, but also the local saints. … How could we for­get Sts Mel­li­tus and Jus­tus, Lau­rence and Pauli­nus, the patron of York and all the North? … St Bene­dict Bis­cop, that lover of icons and holy books, would be a patron of Church Art; the great Theodore, the first Greek Arch­bishop of Can­ter­bury (may God send us a sec­ond), and his faith­ful com­pan­ion Adrian, would have their icons hung in our schools and seats of learning. …

    Sec­ondly, with all our souls we would love God through places. We would know a spir­i­tual geog­ra­phy of Eng­land, a geog­ra­phy where the Eng­lish Earth would meet an Eng­lish Heaven and an Eng­lish Heaven meet the Eng­lish Earth. … And we would hon­our Can­ter­bury as our spir­i­tual cap­i­tal, the Mother-City and cra­dle of the Eng­lish Faith, the spir­i­tual birth­place of Eng­land and its 22 sainted Arch­bish­ops. Lon­don would remem­ber the Holy Apos­tles, Paul, in the East, and Peter, in the West. West­min­ster would once again be the monastery in the West. The Holy Moun­tain of the Eng­lish Church, the Athos of Eng­land, would not be a moun­tain, but an island, Holy Island, Lind­is­farne. … And all along the roads there would be crosses and way­side shrines, where lamps would shine in the dark­ness to show the way. And thus there would be isles and havens of peace in this land. …

    Thirdly we would love God with all our minds. We would not think of some Eco­nomic Com­mu­nity, but of a Spir­i­tual Com­mon­wealth. Our indus­try would build churches. All the tools of the mod­ern world would be turned God­wards. Our cul­ture would be dom­i­nated by the quest for the Spirit. In Art we would paint icons and great fres­coes of the spir­i­tual his­tory of Eng­land. Our lit­er­a­ture would be about the lives of the vir­tu­ous. Our cin­ema would show ascetic feats, our schools would train young peo­ple either for mar­ried life or else for monas­ti­cism. In a word, our minds would be occu­pied with the one thing need­ful, the sal­va­tion of our souls, the love of God.


    Related posts:

    1. A Vic­to­rian take on the Ortho­dox Church
    2. A splen­did exhibit at the Getty Museum
    3. The Ortho­dox prob­lem in Jerusalem
    4. The scary Mary prayer
    5. 9/11, Kat­rina and St. Euphrosynos

    January 28th, 2007 | Grace | 5 Comments |

5 Responses and Counting...

  • Jim N. 01.28.2007

    I never fin­ished read­ing this, but per­haps it’s related: The Fall of Ortho­dox Eng­land.

  • Mimi

    Wow, that is a great arti­cle.
    My non-Orthodox husband’s patron decided by me and he doesn’t know it, is St. Edmund the Mar­tyr. May St. Edmund’s prayers keep us in his sight.

  • Grace

    Wow, Jim. I couldn’t make it very far into that before my head started swim­ming. But I wish I had a bit more of a grasp of world his­tory to begin with — I might have got­ten fur­ther, and it does seem like fas­ci­nat­ing stuff.

  • Jim N.

    “world his­tory”

    A tan­gled web to be sure. :) Fr. Tom Hopko, in his Pray­ing with Icons lec­ture on CD, said about the cru­ci­fix­ion (para­phrased): “To be hon­est, we don’t even really know what hap­pened. The num­ber of cock crows itself is related dif­fer­ently among the Gospel writers!”

  • jamie

    So inter­est­ing that you wrote this blog…when I was in Lon­don this past sum­mer and vis­ited the Sts. Peter and Paul Cathe­dral, along with West­min­ster Abbey, I couldn’t help but feel sad­ness and dis­ap­point­ment as I walked through the Abbey and Cathe­dral, and how amaz­ingly won­der­ful it could have been if it were Ortho­dox, and how much more mean­ing it would have.

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