There cannot be too many Saints

Bishop Seraphim : Homily
There cannot be too many Saints
Sunday of All Saints
1st Sunday after Pentecost
18 June, 2006
Hebrews 11:33-12:2 ; Matthew 10:32-33, 37-38 ; 19:27-30


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

It seems to me that very many people in the world have not caught the importance and the meaning of the last word that we just heard from the mouth of our Saviour : “‘Many that are first will be last, and the last will first’”. Certainly, in the world in which we are living, the first thing that matters is striving to be first, striving to be recognised, striving to be thanked, striving to be comfortable in this world all the time. As a poet said : “I am the captain of my own ship…”.

As long as we have this attitude while we are living our lives, there is nothing clearer under these circumstances than that Christ is in the backseat, not in the front. In the context of that mentality, He is on the backburner or even off the stove, and certainly not on the front burner. The way of the Christian is the way of suffering and service, following precisely in the footsteps of our Saviour, Jesus Christ, and imitating Him in every way. This means living a life of love, which puts the service of God and doing His will first, above everything else, as we allow Him to direct our lives and to look after our needs. When we are doing everything ourselves and showing how competent we think we are at acquiring everything we need, we are saying, in effect : “I am afraid of the Lord. I do not trust Him to look after me. I do not trust Him to provide”.

It is important for us, Orthodox Christians in North America, to do our best to live in accordance with what is the foundation of the Orthodox way, however that may work out in our lives. Not one of us is the same, and we are not all called to be monks ; but neither are all monks, by any means, the same. Monks or not, all Christians are to have loving Christ and serving Christ as our first priority. Even monks and nuns often do not succeed so well at this. However, still it is important for us, when we wake up in the morning, to try our best to put the Lord, His service, and doing His will first. Of course, we must allow Him to show us how He wants us to live that out. He is not asking every one of us to live in some basement suite or some sort of shack somewhere. He does expect us to live with dignity in this world as well as we can. Nevertheless, because He loves us and gives us everything that we have, He expects us, because of love, in the same way to acknowledge that He gave us everything, and that we owe Him everything. We have to live our lives in gratitude accordingly.

Today, we are celebrating the memory of all the saints, both known, and unknown. It is interesting that there are actually some people who think we have too many saints because our Church calendar is so full, and there are so many names on that calendar. They seem to think that we should be paring it down, and simplifying it all. The fact is that God calls every last one of us, everyone, and not merely some chosen few. The ones who are on the calendar are the ones that are stronger examples, somehow. It could be said that those are the ones that the Lord has set apart as examples for us. We cannot even say that the fact that they are on the calendar is our doing. It is the Lord’s doing that they come to be listed on the calendar.

Not even all the saints are on the calendar of the Orthodox Church throughout the world. There is a list of saints that is in use generally throughout the whole Orthodox world, but there are plenty of other saints that are more locally known. Then there are some saints that are known only in their diocese, and others that are known only in their parish. There are some saints that are known only by a few people. There are plenty of saints altogether unknown to us.

We do not and cannot have too many saints. We have lots, but not enough. There might be enough saints if every one of us were holy, and if the whole world were holy. Then it would be enough, I suppose, but then I am not God to say that. That would be my guess.

It is important for us to remember that being a saint is not being a “professional Christian”. It is the average way, the normal way a Christian should be. We, who are not like that, are far below average. There are many ways of being holy. Some people become recognised as being holy because they die for the sake of Christ. Some people are known to be holy by other people because their faith has been put to the test. They have been tortured in one way or another, and they do not give up. In fact, I think a few of them may have weakened at some moment, but they came back, confessing fully and repenting fully, and they are still named on our world-wide calendar. However, the normal way for us all to be holy is to be trying to live the life of simple, straightforward, honest Christian love and service. Therefore, let us try to remember this when we are living our lives.

Now for the travelogue. For the past two and a half weeks, I have been in Ukraine, leading a pilgrimage of 22. It turned out that many people did not know about this pilgrimage, because for some strange reason it was not advertised in our Messenger. That is because of temptations that befall us before and after any pilgrimage, and even during it. This sort of thing always happens. One cannot go on a pilgrimage without being tested at first, tested during, and tested afterwards. This testing is not from God, but from below. During this pilgrimage, certain parts of our anatomy were very much put to the test, because we spent up to thirteen hours in a day, sitting in an old bus that was not air-conditioned (except for opening the windows). This old bus was nick-named by Metropolitan Onouphry of Chernivtsi the “Pakistan Express”. Mercifully, this time, unlike all the other times, there was cool weather for most of our stay (in the teens, and the twenties). There was frequent rain, and we did not have to live constantly in our personal, private sauna there (not that a sauna is anything to complain about – but 24 hours a day is a bit heavy).

The pilgrimage began in Kyiv. While I was participating in necessary meetings, the pilgrims went to venerate the saints in the Far Caves. After that, we went to the Vvedensky Monastery in Kyiv, which is the Monastery of the Meeting of the Lord. This monastery was founded after the Crimean War, about 150 years ago or so, by Saint Dimitra. She was the widow of a warrior who was killed in the Crimean War, and she was a Bulgarian. After the death of her husband, Dimitra moved to Kyiv, became a nun, and then received the blessing to establish her own community. Because she had some friends in the imperial court in St Petersburg, she got extra funding to help this along. During communist times, the monastery served as a jail for the army, so naughty soldiers spent time in this monastery building. One of the priests, who was serving in one of our dioceses, had been given a discipline in this jail when he was a young soldier and not 100 per-cent obedient. However, in that particular army, 100 per-cent obedience does not necessarily mean that one would therefore escape from that sort of discipline. Therefore, when anyone might see an icon here in this Temple of a nun holding a church in her hand, it will be understood that that is Saint Dimitra of the Vvedensky Monastery in Kyiv. Her relics are in the basement of that Temple. That Temple is Braille-friendly because the iconostasis and the icons are carved in marble, bas-relief.

I will give you a very short account of the pilgrimage. After Kyiv, we drove to Sumy, which is about 300 kilometers to the east of Kyiv, very close to the Russian border in the diocese of Sumy and Akhtirke. We served Vigil for Ascension in Sumy, and the Divine Liturgy in a village an hour and a half bus ride outside of Sumy to the west called Romne. In the evening of Ascension, we went back to Sumy, and then we drove south for an hour to Akhtirke, the second cathedral city of this diocese. There, in the evening we served a Moleben to the Mother of God. In all the places that we were, there are wonder-working icons of the Mother of God. There are many of these wonder-working icons of the Mother of God in Ukraine. Why ? I believe that it is because the people need the encouragement and strength of these signs of the Lord’s love. We need encouragement and reminders in the course of our suffering here. Through the Grace of the Holy Spirit come wonders from these icons : sometimes oil is streaming from them.

From Sumy, we went to Romne. In order to do that, we had to go back through Kyiv, because Kyiv is the only place on the Dnieper River where there are bridges. Having few bridges is an old, long-standing defense tactic, and it helped to minimise the damage of the Nazis on that territory in World War II. The Ukrainians have not changed it to this day. There are still no bridges on the Dnieper River, except in Kyiv. There are not many bridges there, so getting through Kyiv takes quite a bit of time. Kyiv now has 3,500,000 people. For Sunday Divine Liturgy, we went from Romne to Pochaiv. I, and the subdeacon from Edmonton who was accompanying me, had gone there on Saturday to serve Vigil with the monks. In 1994, when I first went to Pochaiv, there were sixty monks. Now there are over 300. That is an example of how life seems to be improving, spiritually speaking, in Ukraine. On the other hand, we might just as well forget it in terms of material improvement. Except for the rich people, it is still a hard life economically. Nevertheless, spiritually, life is really mushrooming there ; Orthodox Christian life is really mushrooming.

Vigil was the typical Vigil for Saturday night for them (four and a half hours in length). Does that sound intimidating ? Well, it is not all that bad. It is not all that bad even for the bishop who might have to anoint many of the 5,000 in the congregation. This anointing alone can take half an hour in itself. It could take the bishop right until the end of Matins (which they serve with no shortcuts). He cannot lose any time on each anointing – there is no conversation. I was not alone doing the anointing. They counted, and said I had anointed about 800 people by the time they dragged me out. However, what I did not notice was that there were six priests also anointing on the side, and each of them had anointed 700 or 800 people too. Those monks are very clever and they know how to save the enthusiastic bishop from himself. (He wanted to anoint everyone.)

Then we went to Chernivtsi, which is about 250 kilometers to the south. We got there rather late because no bishop can get away from Pochaiv very quickly. There are plenty of people to talk to, including the parents of Matushka Irina Melnyk. The local pray-ers pray to God there, and they do so in order to protect the monastery from the dangers of the take-over attempts that sometimes happen on the part of the Autocephalists and the Uniates there.
In Chernivtsi, Metropolitan Onouphry always welcomes us with love and open arms. In fact, this is the province of Ukraine which has produced the greatest number of Orthodox immigrants to Canada in the last 100 years. However, it is important to understand for the sake of information, that the province of Chernivtsi did not belong to Ukraine until World War II when Stalin annexed it from Romania, to which it had always belonged. The diocese of Chernivtsi is still packed with Romanian speakers. In our own diocese there are quite a few Romanian customs that people do not necessarily pay attention to, because we think that all Bucovinians are Ukrainians. The main part of our inheritance in this diocese is from this province of Chernivtsi.

Thanks to Metropolitan Onouphry, a few people went in a mini-van with a Romanian-speaking guide to Sochava, Radaouts, and Voronets in one day. They learned how to drive fast in that van, and they also learned that even if visas are not required to cross that border back and forth, nevertheless it is not so easy to cross that border. The reason they very much wanted to go this time was that Matushka Dianne Kennaugh, thinking that she was Austrian in ancestry, had done some research on part of her family, and found that they all came from Radaouts, and from a village close to Sochava. They did some investigations, and found that there was no-one left from the family, and whoever else was left there had been given a “vacation”, shall we say, to go somewhere else. Stalin was good at that, and so were other Communist regimes good at giving “vacations”, or “tickets to exotic places” like Tobolsk, Vladivostok, Arkhangelsk. They had the opportunity to venerate the relics of Saint John the New of Sochava. Although I have been there, I never got to venerate these relics, so they are more blessed than I am. We never know how God can bless us. He blesses us in many ways that we do not expect, but about what we think that we want now, He often says : “Not now”. We probably do not know why until later sometimes (if we ever really know). The Lord knows why. They were very blessed by the Holy Spirit, and very much uplifted by the whole experience of going into Romania.

After that, we went to the second and most serious part of our pilgrimage (which included not only going to holy places). We visited a village called Kolomeya in which there is a 400-year-old Temple built out of wood, from whose walls sometimes comes myrrh. People are sometimes delivered from demons and diseases just by touching the walls.

Then we began to visit orphanages. For the last three times that I have gone, this pilgrimage has always involved encountering orphanages, and the poor in one way or the other. People who are on the pilgrimage come armed with suitcases full of things that are necessary for needy children, and for some of the adults, too. Orphanages over there are nothing like what we expect of an orphanage here. They have only a minimum of absolutely everything. Many of these orphanages are operated by people who are not, shall we say, those most guided by Christian principles and honesty. Things that should go to the children often go to them and to their families. However, we are concerning ourselves as well as we can with people that are the most trustworthy. At the age of fifteen or sixteen, children from these government-run orphanages are told goodbye, and that is all there is – bye-bye. At that age, the doors open, and – bye-bye.

As a result of this, terrible things happen to these children, and the jails are full of such people. When the children are ejected from the orphanages at the age of 15, they encounter predatory people ready to pounce on these helpless victims. Garbage bins are full of such children who have been killed one way or another. It is very popular for people who run prostitution to snare the young people as soon as they come out of these orphanages. We learned to our horror that at the recent World Cup, there was a whole village set up beside the places where the athletes lived, and there were 4,000 girls between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five who had been taken there from Ukraine and Romania for the purpose of sexual slavery. Annually, a hundred thousand young women are removed from Ukraine because of this sort of slavery. Five thousand of them are in Canada, it turns out, at the present. We, who think that we are so nice, are not so squeaky clean as we think.

This is how denial and deception play with us. We cannot simply look down on the weaknesses of other people. We have to be prepared to say, as my Mother used to say : “There, but for the Grace of God, go I”. We have it good in our lives. We are comfortable, and that is our downfall, because we think that we are so self-sufficient and we do not need to pay attention to the suffering of other people. Those 5,000 and more girls brought to Canada as slaves (and there are probably boys in the same boat) were brought here with false promises of a real job, and not because they wanted to enter this way of living. They were living lives in poverty that Canadians cannot comprehend. They had no one, because they were already abandoned. How can we help them here ? We can remember that everything is not simple, or how it appears to be. We can pray for the captives, and remember that these are captives, also. We can look these persons in the face when we see them, treat them as human beings, and pray for them. If the Lord puts any of them in our lives, we can do what the Lord gives us to do for such a person. The way of the Lord is the practice of love. Again, as my Mother used to say : “Practice what you preach”. Therefore, asking the Lord to help us do just this, let us glorify Him : Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages.