Amen!

Thank you for this Grace. I also find the sto­ries of the mar­tyrs (from any cen­tury) to be quite encouraging.

Hi Grace,

My son is a Mor­mon mis­sion­ary in Rus­sia right now serv­ing in a town called Jaroslavl. He loves the peo­ple he meets, though few return the favor. I under­stand your bent towards Mor­monism in gen­eral [Red Pen Nicene Creed blog], but I thought you might enjoy this com­ment from my son:

“First off, I really feel like I should tell you just how grate­ful I am to be here. I was think­ing about it, and if I had never come here to Rus­sia, never had the chance to come to love these peo­ple, there is just a part of me that wouldn’t have come around. If I had never met any of these won­der­ful, beau­ti­ful, inspir­ing chil­dren of God… what would I do? Life just isn’t worth liv­ing with­out them. It’s like I’ve given away so much of my heart here (but at the same time, not nearly enough), and when there shouldn’t be any left to give I find out that there is more there than there ever was in the first place! I love Rus­sia. I love these peo­ple. I love my Lord and my God, because he knew before I did that I would feel this way, and in his mercy he sent me here.”

Believe me, when my wife and I sent our son to Rus­sia, we were com­pletely aware of the sac­ri­fices of the Russ­ian mar­tyrs, and we pray daily that our son will be pro­tected by angels as he serves. But if not, he has found a heart full of love. Is it not in the New Tes­ta­ment where reads “If you do not have love, then you have noth­ing.” I am grate­ful for my faith in Christ as taught to me by the Holy Spirit as a mem­ber of the Mor­mon faith. I am grate­ful to know that “God is Love” and that “Love is Good.” I am grate­ful my son has learned this les­son about a peo­ple so far from his home, and despite over­whelm­ing dif­fer­ences in faith, cul­ture and history.

May God bless each of us in our daily walk. And may God bless your efforts for what­ever pur­pose he has for your life.

BTW: For your future ref­er­ence and Nicene Creed com­par­isons, the offi­cial doc­trine of the LDS church can be found on LDS.org or Mormon.org web sites. Those who leave the church fre­quently pro­vide inter­est­ing per­spec­tives, but the offi­cial line of the church is now pub­lished on those web sites.

Thomm:
Praise God that your son got a chance to expe­ri­ence this kind of epiphany! I have never been to Rus­sia, but I have heard many oth­ers express this opin­ion of the peo­ple. I thank God that the Holy Russ­ian Ortho­dox Church can finally rise again after the ter­ri­ble per­se­cu­tion it endured under com­mu­nism. It’s a lovely tes­ta­ment to the tenac­ity of the human spirit that the Russ­ian peo­ple have come home to the church that they suf­fered and died for. If your son is there to see it first-hand, then he is see­ing some­thing truly wonderful.

About the Red Pen thing: I’m glad that LDS.org has the Mor­mon beliefs up for every­one to see — that’s a good thing. But you sort of missed the point of the post, as did the other Mor­mon com­menters. My state­ment from the begin­ning was (and is) that there is ONE true creed of true Chris­tians every­where — Catholic, Protes­tant and Ortho­dox. It is the Nicene Creed. That is the pre­cise state­ment of what all Chris­tians have believed and affirmed since the 4th cen­tury as their state­ment of faith. I’m glad if the Mor­mon Church is ready to state what it truly believes, but quite sim­ply, if they have a state­ment of faith that isn’t the Nicene Creed, then they are plac­ing them­selves squarely out­side of Chris­tian­ity and any other dis­cus­sion is just a game of semantics.

I’m glad that you love your church. I love mine as well. But just as you wouldn’t want the main branch of the church of LDS asso­ci­ated with the polyg­a­mous sect of the LDS that has been in the news lately, I wouldn’t want to blur the line of what it means to be truly Christian.

This is inter­est­ing to me — thank you for post­ing it.

A year ago I vis­ited a local Ortho­dox parish just after Pascha. The (con­vert) priest of this parish had taught his tiny mis­sion con­gre­ga­tion to say “Christ is Risen — indeed he is risen” in Klin­gon (at which I was hor­ri­fied and upon hear­ing it then decided that this would likely be my first and last visit to this parish).

His ratio­nale for doing this was that learn­ing this Chris­t­ian greet­ing in Klin­gon was just as rel­e­vant for mod­ern Amer­i­cans as learn­ing it in Slavonic — a dead lan­guage from a cen­tury gone by.

If I’d have been quicker on my feet I’d have asked how many Chris­t­ian Klin­gon mar­tyrs he knew of.

It might be that Joe-Average mid­west­ern con­vert Ortho­dox knows lit­tle of church slavonic, but this doesn’t mean that the mem­o­ries of those Russ­ian mar­tyrs should not be hon­ored. The OCA (the juris­dic­tion to which this parish belongs) owes those mar­tyrs a great debt.

So does this priest, whether or not he chooses to acknowl­edge it.

–c

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I am speech­less. If I tried to come up with some­thing appro­pri­ate it wouldn’t be in Eng­lish and it cer­tainly wouldn’t be in Klingon.

Well, with a heavy sigh, I’ll con­sider that just the same as a prophet is not with­out honor except in his own coun­try, it’s dif­fi­cult to see real great­ness when it is from your own recent his­tory on your own soil. Amer­i­cans cer­tainly get ribbed a lot for blow­ing our own horn (glob­ally speak­ing), and maybe we are bad about that. But to err in the oppo­site direc­tion doesn’t make any sense to me either.

Rus­sia seems like a VERY strange coun­try some­times. A rid­dle, wrapped in a mys­tery, inside an enigma, as the man said.