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

It really doesn’t seem to me that so many people in the world have caught the importance, and the meaning of the last word that we just heard from the mouth of the Saviour: “Many that are first will be last, and the last will be first”. Certainly, in the world in which we are living, everything is about 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 as we live our own lives, there is nothing clearer than that Christ is in the backseat, not in the front. He is on the backburner, not on the front. Christ is not our first priority (that’s our current lingo). The way of the Christian is the way of suffering, and service following exactly in the footsteps of our Saviour, Jesus Christ, 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, allowing Him to direct our lives, and allowing Him to look after our needs. When we are doing everything ourselves, and showing how competent we are at acquiring everything we need, we are saying (in effect): I am afraid of the Lord. I don’t trust Him to look after me. I don’t trust Him to provide.

It’s important for us, Orthodox Christians in North America, to do our best to live according to what is the foundation of the Orthodox way, in whatever way that works out in our lives (because none of our lives is the same, and we are not all monks or anything like that). Even monks, and nuns don’t 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, and allow Him to show us how He wants us to live that out. He is not asking all of us to live in a basement suite or some sort of shack somewhere. He does expect us to live with dignity in this world as well as we can. But, nevertheless, because He loves us, and gives us everything that we have, He expects us, out 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 accordingly.

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

Not even all the saints are on the world’s calendar. There is a list of saints that is in use generally throughout the whole Orthodox world, but then there are many 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 many saints unknown to us altogether.

We don’t have too many saints. We have lots, but not enough. There would be enough saints if we were all holy, all of us, and if the whole world were holy. Then it would be enough, I guess, but then I am not God to say that. That would be my guess.

It’s important for us again to remember that being a saint is not being a “professional Christian”. It is the average 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 came back, confessing fully, and repenting fully, and they still ended up on our calendar. But the normal way for all of us to be holy is to be trying to live this life of simple, straightforward, honest, Christian love, and service. So let’s try to remember that when we are living our lives.

Now for the travelogue. For the past two and a half weeks, I was in Ukraine, leading a pilgrimage of twenty-two. It turned out that lots of people didn’t know about this pilgrimage, because for some strange reason it didn’t end up being advertised in our Messenger. That is because of temptations that befall us before, and after pilgrimage, and even during it. This sort of thing always happens. You can’t go on a pilgrimage without being tested at first, tested during, and tested afterwards. During this pilgrimage, certain parts of our anatomy were very much put to the test, because we spent up to thirteen hours 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, it was cool weather most of the time (in the teens, and the twenties), with quite a bit of rain, and we didn’t live permanently in our own little sauna there (not that a sauna is anything to complain about – but twenty-four hours a day is a bit heavy).

In the first place, we began in Kyiv. While I was having 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 got 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 was 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 one hundred per cent obedient. However, in that particular army, one hundred per cent obedience doesn’t necessarily mean that you escape from that sort of discipline. So when you see an icon in the church of a nun holding a church in her hand, you will know that that is St Dimitra of the Vvedensky Monastery in Kyiv, and her relics are in the basement of this church. That church is braille-friendly because the iconostasis, and the icons, are carved in marble, bas-relief.

I will give you a really short account of the pilgrimage. After Kyiv, we went 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 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 an hour’s drive to the south to Akhtirke, the second cathedral city of this diocese, for a Moleben to the Mother of God in the evening. In all of these 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? Because the people need the encouragement, and strength, 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 streaming from them.

From Sumy, we went to Romne. In order to do that, you have to go back through Kyiv, because Kyiv is the only place on the Dnieper River where there are bridges. That’s an old, long-standing defense tactic, and it helped to minimise the damage of the Nazis on that territory. They haven’t changed it to this day. There are still no bridges on the Dnieper River, except in Kyiv. There aren’t many bridges there, so getting through Kyiv takes quite a bit of time. Kyiv now has 3,500,000 people. For Sunday Liturgy, we went from Romne to Pochaiv. I, and the sub-deacon 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’s an example of how life is improving, spiritually speaking, in Ukraine. Materially – forget it – but 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 it sound intimidating? Well, it isn’t all that bad. If you are the bishop, and you are anointing people, and there are about 3,000 people in church – it takes time. They have to sing the whole canon in that case. In the end, I was not alone doing the anointing. They counted, and said I had anointed about 800 people by the time they dragged me out. But what I didn’t notice was that there were six priests also anointing on the side, and each of them had anointed seven or 800 people too. Those monks are very clever, and know how to save the Bishop from himself, helping to accomplish what was necessary in anointing all those people.

Then we went to Chernivtsi, which is about 250 kilometers to the South. We got there rather late because you can’t get away from Pochaiv very quickly. There are many 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 from 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 open arms, and love. In fact, it is the province of Ukraine which produced the greatest number of Orthodox immigrants to Canada in the last one hundred years. However, you have to know, for the sake of information, that the province of Chernivtsi didn’t belong to Ukraine until World War II when Stalin annexed it from Romania, to which it had always belonged. The diocese is packed with Romanian speakers, and in this diocese there are quite a few Romanian customs that people don’t necessarily pay attention to, because they think that they are all from Ukraine. The main part of our inheritance 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 you don’t need visas to cross that border back and forth, it isn’t so easy to cross that border. The reason they really wanted to go this time was that Matushka Dianne Kennaugh, thinking that she was Austrian in ancestry, had done some research on the 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 got a chance to venerate the relics of St John the New of Sochava, which although I have been there, I never got to do, so they are more blessed than I am. You never know how God can bless you. He blesses all sorts of things you don’t expect, but what you really want, He says: Not now. You don’t know why until later sometimes (if you ever really know). The Lord knows why. But they were really blessed by the Holy Spirit, and really 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 church 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. It’s minimum everything, absolutely minimum 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 go to them, and to their families. However, we are concerning ourselves as well as we can with people that are most trustworthy. At the age of fifteen or sixteen, children from these government-run orphanages are told goodbye, and that’s 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. Garbage bins are full of such people, too, who end up being 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 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 from Ukraine taken there for a certain sort of slavery, if you know what I mean. A hundred thousand young women are removed from Ukraine, annually, because 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 can’t just 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’re comfortable, and that is our downfall, because we think that we are so self-sufficient, and don’t 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, 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.

So, how can we help them here? We can remember that everything is not simple, or just how it appears. 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”. So, 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. Amen.

† Archdiocese of Canada - Orthodox Church in America