I’ve gotten now through half of my two weeks in the United States. After visiting Houston and Dallas, I’ve spent three days in Lake George, Colorado at the Monastery of the Protection of the Holy Virgin. I’ve come here simply as a way to say thank you to Mother Cassiana and the sisterhood here for all the help they have offered to our own monastery in the Hebrides. Our Monastery of the Celtic Saints and their Monastery of the Protection of the Holy Virgin have become sister monasteries. We try to support each other as much as we can in our vocation and in our mission in the world. Being here for their feast day, the first of October, is the minimum, I think, I could do. Especially since things just settled in and fit into place so nicely with the panel in Houston last week and the Celtic festival in Monroe, Louisiana in a few days. I had this space in between.

This space in between also meant I’ve met quite a number of people. There is something I noticed last year, when I was traveling the US, and in my previous journeys to the United States. There is a type of concern with certain questions that seem to just take over the minds and the lives of many of the Christians here. Questions like those concerning abortion, or gay rights, gay marriage, and particularly in America, questions concerning the involvement of the government in the life of the church. They seem to become the main theme that preoccupies these Christians’ minds. Somehow, in their system of priorities these questions come way before the ones that I would consider essential or central to our lives. I thought it’s worth simply noting that these worries, important as they are, and contemporary as they are, are secular worries. I don’t know how to better phrase it. On the one hand, yes they are our worries as well because they are part of our lives as one humanity. But, on the other hand, they are secular worries. They are not our central message, so to put it. They are taking over and, to some extent, deforming us and our presence in this world.

I’ll tell you at least two reasons why I don’t waste almost any time thinking about these questions. On the one hand, they are very general, impersonal questions. Not that there is anything that could justify murder. Not that there is anything that could justify abortion. But, to phrase it in such a general, impersonal way, “What is your stand concerning this or that?” That feels alien to me. Because the only impersonal systems I’ve known, that I’ve been unfortunate enough to know, are those that are basically dictatorship and the Communist regime that I’ve known as a child in my country, Romania. There is nothing impersonal about the church, because there is nothing impersonal about the way in which Christ reacts to us, about his relationship to us. So that is my main and first concern, simply an alarm-call telling me there is something wrong about the way we approach these things, that it is just too impersonal. We seem to be looking for a system rather than the truth. And the truth is a being, is Christ. Whereas a system has nothing to do with Christianity, precisely because it is impersonal.

So that would be one reason. The second reason, which I’ve already mentioned briefly, is that all these questions are not our own message. They are not what makes us who we are in the world. We’ve gotten to the unfortunate point where if you stop somebody, a young person, in the UK as much as in the US (and probably more so in Western Europe), and you ask this person something about Christians or Christianity, it is very possible that all they know about Christians is that they oppose abortion and things like gay marriage. That is very painful. That is very painful and a clear sign that we have missed our vocation. We have missed our mission in the world. How did this happen? How did our message become so absorbed with these secular questions? With these secular worries? We’ve forgotten the true message that Christ sent us to bring to the world. We are supposed to bring the good news to the world. Well, if you ask anybody in the streets of London today, “What is the good news?” very few people will have the answer. We are not here to go out and preach anti-abortion. We are not here to go out in the streets and preach anti-gay marriage. These are not our concerns. Our concern is the good news: the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—Trinity. Christ’s coming, his incarnation, his work into the world, the good news of the resurrection and eternal life. All these other-worldly, and clearly out-of-this-world concerns, these are our message. This is what Christ has sent us to give to these people.

How did it happen that we became so worldly? How did it happen that we became so absorbed in a conversation that is basically not our own? Yes, that’s perhaps the best way to phrase it. We got trapped into a conversation, into an argument which is not central to Christianity. The central focus of Christianity is Christ. The central message of Christianity is the hope of resurrection and eternal life. Today, this must be one of the greatest and most successful temptations the devil has ever put forward. To get us trapped into an argument, into a fight, that is not central. As we fight to win this argument, to win this battle, we have left aside, we have lost sight of the central message, of the thing that Christ himself has asked us to preach. I suppose the only explanation I can think of is that by looking at contemporary issues, the church must think that it becomes relevant to people and that it reaches out to the new generation. Unfortunately, I seriously doubt that that is the way forward. We can look at the experience of other Christian churches that have made this effort, that have gone this way before the Orthodox Church. If you look at the their evolution, there is a clear proof that this approach does not work.

I would also say that I don’t think I would have been in the church today if what I had found in the church was simply a place for debate, a way of taking the debates people see on television or in government and parliaments, and take them from there and move them into the church using other words and other arguments, but the central focus is the same. When I got back into the church I wanted out. I wanted out of this world. I wanted out of the misery of my own self. I wanted help. I wanted hope. I wanted to move forward. I wanted to know there is somewhere to move forward to. I came into the church for the hope, not for the arguments. I suppose this is the last thing I want to say, that I believe that the church, and within the church each of us, we need to rediscover this sense of not belonging to the world. Of being part of another world. We need to regain our out-of-worldliness, if such thing exists. Because that is where the hope of our salvation is. And, also, if we want to do mission in the world that is the one message that will speak to people regardless of where they live, regardless of when they live. We all have a longing for eternity. We all have a need to be reassured, to have this longing confirmed, to have it answered. That is what we need to do. That longing, we need to reawaken it in people and then answer it with the hope that is in Christ.

Yes, there are questions, and they are real, and they concern us and the church in a secondary way. But, this is why we have bishops and synods, for them to decide on these matters. We have the freedom to focus on our salvation and the salvation of those around us. Let me ask you something. Have you reached the end of your repentance? Have you reached the end of repentance for your own sins? Have you exhausted everything that concerns your own sinfulness? If not, dear brother or sister, why are you wasting this precious time thinking and worrying about things that do not exist? Because that is all impersonal questions are. Why do you waste your precious time worrying about things that do not exist, while you yourself have not found a way out of your own sinfulness? Now, of course, if you have reached the end of repentance and you have exhausted all ways to repent for your own sinfulness, then by all means go ahead and start repenting for these sins that you are so concerned with. Start repenting for these people who have fallen into these sins and temptations. That is all we have to do; pray and repent in the hope of resurrection and eternal life.

I somehow have a feeling that none of us has reached the end of repentance. I have a feeling we still have a long way to go to get there. That is why the Orthodox Church has kept ascetic struggles, or at least a sense of asceticism, central to its message since day one. An ascetic, or someone who at least tries to do the things of an ascetic, does not think about others. There simply is no space in his or her mind for anything else except their own sinfulness. If you are a true ascetic, if you are a true Christian, you are so consumed with your own sinfulness, with the break between you and Christ that the mere thought that you would get out of yourself in order to judge and condemn something or someone else would sound like a horrible thing. A true ascetic does not waste precious time, the precious time he or she has for salvation, to engage in theoretical, generalized, barren, impersonal arguments. The battle is within. The Kingdom of heaven is within, and hell is within. You have to fight hell and welcome the Kingdom within yourself. Go back to the basics. I think I’ve said this so many times before: back to the basics. Honest repentance. Honest humility. Humble love. Bearing one another’s crosses. This life that sounds so simple and dull and uninteresting, this dull life will set you on fire. Just allow it to do that. Just allow its seeds to grow.

There isn’t much else I feel I should be telling you today. I’m leaving today to go to Monroe, Louisiana for a Celtic festival. I don’t really know what to expect, but again, it’s not about what I expect from them, but what I can do for them. Remember that you may be the only chance many of the people you meet in your daily lives have to at least perceive, sense, if not see and touch, something of that other-worldliness the true Christian should be defined through. Don’t let yourself be trapped in a fight that is not your own. You risk spending your whole life fighting it, and you may win but you will discover at the end of your life that you fought the wrong fight.

May God keep us and preserve us and save us all from wasting this precious time we have for repentance for ourselves and for the others around us. Amen.