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Millennium Madness and True Sanity On 11th August this year in Great Britain, citizens and visitors in the South West of the country will experience a total solar eclipse for a brief two or three minutes. It is widely anticipated that the sheer numbers of people trying to cram into Devon and Cornwall along difficult roads to a destination that can barely cope with the influx will generate not a few headlines. All sorts of kooky and dangerous people are jumping on this bandwagon. New Age couples will get "married" in stone circles as the sun is darkened; even the Anarchists are widely expected to try and wreak their havoc again after the appalling mayhem and damage they caused recently in London. Add to all of this that monstrous waste of money, the Millennium Dome, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. George Carey apparently making sceptical comments about the "knowability" of the resurrection (per the "Mail on Sunday") and this year, this century, this millennium seems to be ending on a very curious note. I suppose we ought not to be surprised by all of this. Society in Britain is drifting (some would say rushing headlong) towards an uncertain post-Christian future in which everything our forefathers lived and died for is now simply an "alternative lifestyle." The architects of this New Age see in the dawn of the Third Millennium a great promise of new things for humanity. As Orthodox Christians we are bound to conclude that this rag bag collection of empty headed idealists can only serve up a banquet of empty promises and soul-less food. I am very much reminded in all of this of the Apostolic Age when the pluralist Roman Empire was at its zenith. "Bread and circuses" for the masses .... any faith will do just fine provided you burn incense to the Emperor, (don't rock the boat). Orthodox Christianity will have to go underground again in order to retain its authentic witness. It will have to distance itself from the World. That will not be difficult since the World has already put that distance between us! More positively, the Church will have to be much more radical about its "alternative lifestyle." We must not make of ourselves an anachronistic time piece, an exhibit in a Byzantine museum; we must live out our Orthodox Faith and Life in common again. "In common" is the key. True community life for an Orthodox Christian will become what it truly is and should be: a divinely sustained common life which irresistibly attracts because of its love and power. We can all make a start here by renewing the idealism of our commitment. This commitment is not simply to run a "good" parish and have lots of interesting groups and activities. It is for every parish and every community to become a place of change and growth, an environment in which a new humanity is being forged in the resurrection life of Christ by the Holy Spirit from the Father. Two things will then happen. The Church will grow and the Church will be persecuted. We await a new legacy from a new Constantine, sometime perhaps in the 23rd Century??? Fr Gregory |
