Fr Aleksandr Groves | Orthodoxy reveals our true humanity

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Something strange happens when you step into an Orthodox church: the room is full, yet nobody is performing for anybody else. Attention stops being stolen and starts being trained. 

We’re joined by our own Father Alexander Groves to talk about Orthodox Christianity as the work of becoming fully human. We dig into why the Orthodox life involves effort and sacrifice, why that struggle is worth it, and how the Church heals us through prayer, confession, and the Eucharist. Father Alexander also shares his personal journey from an Anglican choirboy with a sense of vocation, to a Church of England priest, to Roman Catholic lay life, and finally to what he describes as a joyful homecoming into the Orthodox Church. 

We go deep on Russian Orthodoxy, not as an idea but as lived history: the persecution under communism, the witness of martyrs, and the quiet heroism of grandparents who kept the faith alive when the state tried to crush it. From there we turn to the saints, veneration, and the startling closeness of holiness, including Father Alexander’s own patron, Saint Alexander of Svir, and the story of relics rediscovered after 1989. 

Finally, we bring it home to Hastings and St Leonards in East Sussex: a tiny chapel built on a sliver of land, a growing parish, and the surprising chain of events that led to renting a larger building while we work towards buying it, including a visit from the myrrh-streaming Hawaiian icon of the Mother of God. If you care about Orthodox liturgy, Christian tradition, spiritual discipline, and building a real local community, this one’s for you. 

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Transcript

Welcome And A Church Building Goal

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Sunny Bunani. Welcome to the Sunny Bonana ICU. And today is a very special day. Because we have our own father, Alexander Groves, here today.

SPEAKER_00 0:15

Good morning.

SPEAKER_02 0:16

Thank you for being with us. Great pleasure. If you're joining us for the first time, please subscribe. It's only about £2.47 a month. And what we're doing here with the Sunny Banana is we're trying to build, I mean, excuse me, we're trying to buy our church building that we're worshiping. And I'm sure the story will come out today of how we got into that building in the first place and this beautiful mission that is happening here in Hastings, St. Leonard's, in Pavancy Road. We are in a beautiful place. We are in the B and B that Father Alexander and Paul run together. It's, as I said, Pevancy Road. It is the best B in East Sussex or south of the border between North and South.

SPEAKER_01 1:05

Thank you.

Becoming Human Through Struggle

SPEAKER_02 1:08

There's so much to talk about, Father, but um just to keep us grounded in what the sunny banana is all about, it's all it's all about being human. And I remember one of my brothers who I was baptized with, he said this. Father Alexander said, Orthodoxy is about being human. Is how is is is a is a way of becoming more human than ever before. And the sunny go on that I see you means we we need to see each other as humans and start to understand each other. So it's beautiful to have a video like this and you in the in the presence for us to take care of you today. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 1:50

Father, yes. I think the Orthodox Church is always about making us the very best humans that we can be. It's about healing us and reconciling us and helping us to grow in our spiritual lives. And as a result of that, one's real humanity comes to the fore. And that is the healing work of Christ that carries on in his church. And that's what we are trying to do by living our orthodox life here in Hastings.

SPEAKER_02 2:20

Yeah. Well, let's drive straight into it and run into the deep end. I always just say, as a philosophy teacher, if you read the conclusion of the essay, you could get the chest of what the person wants to say. And you are the conclusion. You are dressed like that, with a beautiful beard, and on a wonderful cross, and you always go out, always go out like that. No one sees you in anything else, and we appreciate that. So orthodoxy is a li it's it's more than a lifestyle, but it has to infuse your whole life. And I've just been baptized just on that point of being human. I have found in orthodoxy, my short time in orthodoxy since baptism in April, that I understand more now the humanity of Christ. We know that he's fully human and he's fully God. But this is it's almost like the original humanists. We have such a high view of humanity, and part of that is struggle, part of that is not comfort. You know, Christ is the ultimate comfort. When we were talking about earlier about modern Christianity appealing to people, making it irrelevant to them in their life, but it's actually for what I understand is your you need to come and offer something to God, and that takes effort and that takes sacrifice. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 3:37

Yes, anything worthwhile in life is a s is an effort, isn't it? If all we do is just sit to be entertained and to have an easy life, then we're not going to make the best of ourselves or to grow in any direction at all. So what Orthodox people seek to do is to enter into the great stream of the life of orthodoxy, to immerse themselves in the tradition with a capital T, to live their Christian lives with the saints, with the apostles, with Christ, and to fully understand throughout a whole of a lifetime what it is to be an Orthodox person, a Christian person, Christian man, Christian woman. And that does take struggle. There are times when everybody wrestles with doubt and with human failing, not wanting to pray, making it a struggle to go to the liturgy. So these things are part of our human experience. Nothing that is worthwhile comes easily to us. It's worth the struggle. Anything in life is worthwhile, is worth the

Father Alexander’s Path To Orthodoxy

SPEAKER_00 4:40

struggle.

unknown 4:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:42

So for the event caught the journey to orthodoxy. Yes. A bizarre one. Well, I was a priest of the Church of England many years ago as a boy. I always wanted to be a priest. I joined an Anglican church choir and I loved it, and I got a sense of the other, the numiness of another dimension to life, and it really grabbed me. I was 10. And by the time I was 12 or 13, I had deep inside my heart a feeling that I should be a priest. And I didn't tell that to many people because it seemed I was rather a shy little boy. My father once said to me on the way back from a lesson, he said, What do you want to do with your life then? And I said, I want to be a priest. He said, Oh, that's that's good. That was it. So that was my one direction. I was an Anglican and an Anglican priest, and in the 1990s, I felt that I couldn't continue with any degree of integrity in that life and that ministry. So I left the Church of England, and at that stage I became a Roman Catholic, a Catholic layman. I worked in a Catholic school, taught in a Catholic music department, and I did music in a Catholic parish, just as a layman. But always in my life there had been the background of orthodoxy. I'd always loved everything I'd seen about Orthodoxy and everything I read about Orthodoxy, I felt, oh, that's true. I really understand that. I get that. So I think really I have always striven to be an Orthodox Christian with a small O, but it's taken me a long time to get to being an Orthodox Christian in in the real sense of that word. But coming home and being in the right place has been absolutely joyful for me.

SPEAKER_02 6:42

Beautiful. There's a joke by Robin Williams, rest his sole. Very funny man. Very funny guy. He was saying, because he was all by all accounts an Anglican or Episcopalian, as it is in America. He was like, he was joking about that being he was he was like diet Catholic. Anglicanism. Catholic light. Catholic light. Exactly. And it seems to be a sort of a lightness. You said a small O, always, always in the background, and then it became full fit. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 7:19

Uh full cream. That's absolutely my experience. I grew up as an Anglo-Catholic. That was the stream in which I was. And Anglo-Catholicism had its serious side and also its light side. It was great fun. You know, our parish has six candles and a tabernacle, and the nasty Protestant one down the road doesn't, and all that sort of fun element of Anglo-Catholicism. But as I've gradually come to something I consider more serious and deeper, it's been a very different experience. And I value what I have had as an Anglican because it was part of the journey. You know, it started my love of the saints and Our Lady and the sacraments and the priestly life. These things were there in part in Anglicanism. So I don't think of everything that I've received as negative or a failure or a waste of time. It was part of my journey. Yes. Towards the fullness of orthodoxy in the Orthodox Church.

SPEAKER_02 8:24

You said something about seeing things of orthodoxy, seeing orthodoxy. Now in uh on the Sunny Banana, we have the word we talk about to have an idea of something, the Greek word idea, to to see it actually means to see something, is to get an idea of something.

Seeing Russian Orthodoxy And Its Revival

SPEAKER_02 8:37

Can you delve more into that? What what were you what were you seeing as part of that?

SPEAKER_00 8:42

Well, the first thing I saw was the tiny Orthodox chapel in the Norfolk village of Walsingham. My parish went once a year on pilgrimage to Walsingham, and the former railway station had been converted to an Orthodox church with a little dome and some icons. And in 1970, I went into that building for the first time. And looking back, it was an influence and a start. It was a wonderful place. It is a wonderful place. And then later on, when I was a student, I found a picture book published by Thames and Hudson called The Orthodox Church in Russia. It had just been produced, and it was full of the most wonderful pictures of churches, full of men and women, marvelous clergy, great ceremonies, enormous beauty. And this was a revelation because I had thought the church in Russia is dead and closed and something of the past. And this little window into Russian Orthodoxy was continually an inspiration to me. And then when I went to Russia as a tourist for the first time in 1988, before the fall of communism, the church life that one saw was beautiful and vital and with utter integrity.

SPEAKER_02 10:08

Well, that's a good opportunity to go because I experienced it myself, I'm a celebration, but I'm in the Russian Orthodox Church abroad. What you you mentioned something about the beauty of Russian Orthodoxy in that. But could you go deeper into why Russian?

SPEAKER_00 10:28

Why Russian la Russian Orthodoxy later on in life for me? Well, because having seen the church under communism, and then latterly having seen the great resurrection that the Russian Orthodox Church has had since 1989, how it's got its buildings back, how it's built new ones, but more importantly than buildings, how it's become important to so many Russians who are able for the first time to express their faith, to come to the Christianity, which for many of them was a completely unknown and new thing. This revitalization of a church which is both traditional, if you like to use the word conservative, but deeply faithful, is one of the most exciting and unforeseen events of the church in the 20th century. Russia, the Russian church gave more martyrs to the Christian faith during the persecution of seven decades of communism than any other church at any other time in Christian history. And it's almost as if this is the living truth that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. Because the church has come back so strongly in Russia, because so many people had to suffer for it. Saint Ignatius or Irenaeus, said that. One of those. I can't remember. But it's certainly true, isn't it? You know, absolutely. Because that witness of martyrdom is so strong. I had the privilege of going to what they call one of the killing fields outside Moscow, where you see in the forest land just undulations which are filled in shallow graves. It was during the time of Stalin in the 1930s that many thousands of Christians were just taken out and shot and buried there. And they have up now, it's a great memorial site. There's a wonderful church there. And they have the photograph, the prison mugshots of all these men and women. And they're an extraordinary memorial. You see in those faces both fear and courage. You know?

SPEAKER_02 12:43

The human experience, I think that goes back to where we started this talk, is that it's a great testimony to orthodoxy that it's it's struggle and hard. It's not easy. But to see that the Russian Church went through that persecution and then to be the largest Orthodox Church.

SPEAKER_00 13:04

It is the largest Orthodox Church now, and an extraordinary proportion, I can't remember exactly what it is, of Russians identify themselves as being Orthodox. This is, you know, after seven decades, where it was illegal for young people to be taught, illegal for young people to be brought to church, very difficult for working-age men. If it was found out that you had been to church on Sunday, you might well lose your job. If you were found to be teaching your children the Orthodox faith, you could be consigned to a mental institution for being crazy. And everything else that went with that, the restrictions on preaching and on publishing. It is extraordinary that the church, despite all the things the Russian government threw at it, all the powers of the state, not only survived but lived in the hearts of the grandmothers who passed it to their children. I know a priest who was completely an atheist through his parents and his education, but he said he used to go and stay with his grandmother in her datcha, her summer house, for the six weeks of the summer holiday. And she showed him pictures of the saints, and she talked to him about the faith, and that lit the kindling fire in his heart. And that man then went to the Kiev Theological Academy and is now a priest, actually, in our own diocese.

SPEAKER_02 14:28

Beautiful. Praise God.

Saints, Veneration, And Transfigured Lives

SPEAKER_02 14:30

Yeah. There's a testimony again to the lives of the saints. People may think that the veneration of the saints, or even we think that Orthodox worship the saints. We don't worship the saints, we venerate them. But they're calling for us. It's not us some, it's not these people that lived in the past. They're a very present presence. They're very calling us. And it gives us hope, that story, and these stories for the world.

SPEAKER_00 14:55

Absolutely, because the saints have such varied lives. You know, there are kings and peasants, there are professional people and unlettered people, there are great monastics. So, in a sense, there's somebody for everybody. If you read the life of the saints, sometimes one of them springs out at you and you really feel an empathy. Perhaps you're experiencing the same things, perhaps your life is in the same place. And you realize that that man, that woman, managed to, despite all their own difficulties in their own situation, become a saintly person, the person transfigured, a person whose life was enlightened and brought nearer to God. So and the saints are part of the Orthodox Christian family. That's why we venerate them, just as we love our parents. You know, they are part of our tradition. They help us, they encourage us, they inspire us.

SPEAKER_02 15:57

And there's a a little boy next to me who I don't know. But it was a moment of we we're kissing our family. He's not my family in that sense of blood family, but we we are family kissing our family.

SPEAKER_00 16:09

Yes. Kissing something is the greatest act of love and veneration that we have, isn't it? Yeah. We touch people, we shake their hands, maybe pat them on the shoulder. But we kiss the things that are most dear to us, our wives, our children, and in the Orthodox tradition, the icons, or even the hand of a priest, not that you're kissing the individual, but you're kissing the hand of the priest who blesses you, who baptizes you, who anoints you, who absolves you, and who gives you holy communion.

SPEAKER_02 16:42

Absolutely. And that's a shout out to a throwback of one of my episodes called I Kissed a Priest. Yes. And I liked it. Terrible, terrible um title. But in that sense, yeah, we're not worshipping you, we are also venerating the role you play for us, that Christ being the Christ figure for us.

SPEAKER_00 17:05

Priests are always unworthy people. No nobody's worthy of doing the extraordinary things that God does through through his priests. And and a priest who isn't aware of that is missing something. Excuse me. I mean, at the end of a confession, uh, I always say, pray for me, a sinner also. You know.

SPEAKER_02 17:30

Yeah. When I wasn't Orthodox, there's a couple of things that you hear from the Orthodox world and you think, wow. How does that work? And then just to get back to saints again, Father. Now that I'm Orthodox, I understand that we're actually called to be saints. Yes. It's a it's a the church helps you with the saints and its sacraments or mysteries, should I say. Yes. To help you become a saint and live with Christ.

SPEAKER_00 17:58

It's an extraordinary statement, isn't it? It is. That you can become godlike. And if you look at some of the lives of the great saints, let's take, for example, since Seraphim or some of the most almost the most popular of the Russian saints, there are many people who attest to seeing his face shine. So transfigured was he. I think this is the idea when you see a saint in an icon of the gold ring round in the halo. Yes. It's a reminder that people who are holy do shine. I I've been lucky to meet people in my own life who are not officially saints, but who I think I would want to say were were touched by holiness and near to God. And it's been my experience that you want to be with them physically. And you know, it's a it's a great grief when you have to say, Oh, goodbye, I'm going now. Yeah. You have to leave. Because there's something luminous and deeply, deeply attractive about people who are that close to the things of heaven.

SPEAKER_02 19:02

Yeah. A friend of mine, I was telling you the other night, who met a nun like that in South Africa, and he would say those things. Your face was shining. Yes. Her face was shining. Yes. While we are on Saint, so you were Stephen Groves. Yes. Before. And now you are Alexander.

SPEAKER_00 19:24

And could you tell us a little bit about your saint's name is Alexander of Svere. Svere is a a small place with a large monastery in the far north west of Russia. And Alexander of Svere in the 14th century went out into what was the deserts of just forest land, no human habitation, and set up a small community of monks. And as always happens when they found these monasteries, people come to them, people join the monastery, pilgrims come to experience something of the holiness, and he became a great, renowned and wonderful saint in that monastic revival. And in the 20th century, when the eight communists took over, like many of the relics of the saints, he was taken away from the monastery. His body was actually put in a cardboard box, cardboard coffin, and stored in the basement of a museum in St. Petersburg. And when communism fell in 1989, the church had a great hunt to see if it could discover the relics of the saints. And St. Alexander was found in the museum store. And when they lifted the lid off the coffin, his body was, as it is today, incorrupt. There's flesh on the bones, there's skin, and it's an extraordinary fact. And his body was taken to a church in St. Petersburg, and then eventually back to the monastery in sphere, where you can venerate his his holy relics. And you can see his body incorrupt uh 700 years later. So to me, he is a great symbol of the restoration of the Russian church, its glorious past, but also that it is now alive and beautiful and faithful. And that story of St. Alexander really moved me. And I had the great privilege some years ago of going very briefly to Sphere in and that wonderful monastery.

SPEAKER_02 21:38

So he's my saint. Beautiful. And it was his I forgot to mention to you on Sunday that his parents were were were remembered. Did you see that? I'll show you. Yeah. Alexander Sphere's appearance. Right. Wonderful. Yeah. Well,

From Tiny Chapel To Buying A Church

SPEAKER_02 21:55

we want to know, I think, how we go from From this beautiful little chapel in this B and B. There's a B and B, there's a chapel. And there's an there's a there's another there's two chapels on this property, and now we're in Albany Road. And now being blessed to to be living here for a bit and lodging. I've witnessed your handiwork and you you're a musician, you are a pastor, and you are a handyman or creator.

SPEAKER_00 22:32

Well I say I'm a bodger because uh my I have no real skills at woodwork or painting or anything, but I have over the years developed a habit of being able to copy things. Often with polyfiller and two-pack filler, and all you know, as I I bodge things together, but I have a certain ability to do it. Yes. So about five years ago, myself and some other Orthodox people in St. Lennon's, we were meeting once a week just to have a sort of Vespers that can be done quietly by lay people. We asked our bishop's blessing to do this reader's vespers, and we just met to do that. And the idea was formulated that we should try and have a little space to meet properly, to perhaps build a little chapel. And there's a small sliver of land beside my house that was full of builder's rubble and old furniture. I'd recently acquired that little bit of land, and the idea was to build a tiny church there, not much bigger than a garage, in fact a bit more narrower than a garage. So we built a small brick building, and Vladika Irene, our wonderful bishop, came and laid a foundation stone, and we were able to decorate it and paint it and put some icons in it. And in due course, thanks be to God, I was ordained a priest. So we were able to start a small parish here in St. Leonard's, and that parish, glory to God, has grown steadily, and it became obvious very soon that this tiny building was not going to be enough. So we started looking round the area and we found a Protestant chapel, an independent church, still used by its minister and a few people who came on a Sunday. And I thought how perfect that would be for us. I knew the minister was in his mid-80s. So I took the courage and I wrote to him, and I said, I don't know if you have any plans for the future, but if at any stage you felt that it was right that you couldn't continue, we'd love to be considered because it would be good for our community. And I said, You don't have to reply to this letter, just put it in your drawer and it's there if you need it. And then something extraordinary happened. We had visiting our parish the miraculous Hawaiian icon of the Mother of God, which some of you may or know about. This is an icon kept in a church in Hawaii, which for many years now has been exuding a myrrh, an oily substance, which is considered a sign of grace, sign of God's presence, sign of blessing. And this icon is occasionally taken round to other parishes around the world with its keeper, Father Nectarios, and it came to our parish, and it was a very extraordinary evening. Many people came, and this icon did have a great feeling of power and sanctity to it. So when Father Nectarius was leaving on the Monday morning, we took this icon in its case and we stood outside the chapel, and Father Nectarius blessed the chapel with the icon, just from the road. And six weeks later, the minister got in touch out of the blue and said, it's now the right time to think about selling our building. So I do really think that this was a miraculous thing for us and our community. And this is the building that we're now renting while we go through the legal stuff of buying it and raising money. And we're altering it. We've put an iconostasil in, which we're making. We made a choir gallery, we're gradually turning it around into what hopefully will be a beautiful Orthodox church that will eventually, God willing, be owned by the parish and be something for the future.

SPEAKER_02 26:44

Yeah, beautiful. And that's what we're trying to do in the Sunny Banana, is to support that. Yes, to raise the money. Yeah, getting that community. Yeah, it really is a beautiful, beautiful community community already. We're we're lucky we've got Russians, Bellarussians, Romanian, Ukrainian, Greek, and English people.

SPEAKER_00 27:07

Increasing number of English people who are coming to an interest in orthodoxy, and sometimes, very often, they come to a liturgy and something goes click inside, and they don't know quite why they want it, but they know there's something here that is deeply attractive to them.

Liturgy, Attention, And Standing To Pray

SPEAKER_02 27:28

That's one thing about orthodoxy, Father, you can comment on this is you go to a lot of churches and there's someone at the door with a pamphlet and welcoming you and ushering you to your seat and and all this. But what I found in Orthodoxy is when I've come to an Orthodox church, it's it's about worship. There's none of this um sort of Yeah in my experience, and you you have a deep sense of something special is going on, and the reverence in the people, people are not really looking around and bothered. They're trying to they're trying to worship, they're trying to they're trying to stay present because something holy is happening. This it's not a Yes.

SPEAKER_00 28:06

We're not looking at each other, we're not we're not there to express ourselves, not there to play an instrument or to or or to show off or to express ourselves in any way. We're there to come humbly and simply and try and enter into the great mystery, which is the liturgy, the Eucharist, the Mass, whatever you want to call it. In one way, Orthodox people don't participate. So they don't sing very much, there's nothing to say, there's no book, no pamphlet, no thing to join in, you're not sitting and standing and and and kneeling and doing that sort of participation. But in the most important way, Orthodox participate through concentration, through standing still, the sacrifice of standing still and focusing and being caught up into this great mystery, which is the liturgy. It's a very different experience, isn't it? Yeah. Of church.

SPEAKER_02 29:06

Because with the whole social media and screens today that harvest our attention. They want our attention. It's the new gold, I call it, you know, for for for companies. They want our attention. But at church, you are actually strengthening your attention. It's it's you actually almost if you think of it as like a muscle, you're going there and you are strengthening your attention, being present. It's not, yeah, it's not it's feeding you, and it in if I speak personally, it it it's strength, it's strengthening, it's medicine. Yes. In other traditions in my life, if you you feel like I'm going to church to get something from God. So this is the other s other part of the coin. You're actually going there to offer something. You're going there to offer something to God and offer your offer your presence, offer your time and sacrifice. Yes. Not what can God give me. Yes. You're not walking up there and obviously there is that. Obviously, there's people who come with with hard hearts or struggles, and you do, you come and ask for God for mercy, obviously. That's what we need. We need mercy to be humans. But that's the idea of I am I'm in the presence of God, I'm going to stand. One of the most beautiful things you've said in a in a homily, among the many other things, is we can be like candles, standing upright, because that's one thing you can comment on. We don't have many pews. There's a couple of seats. So you stand upright, and the more you stand upright and the candle is still, like a candle burns brighter, so the more you the candle is consumed in the candle. That's it, yeah. That's what I'm trying to say. The candle's disappearing. You should disappear and just seek to be a light.

SPEAKER_00 30:43

And yeah, your light would be seen that way. The Orthodox traditionally stand for liturgy as an offering. It's a physical when I first became an Orthodox. The standing, I thought, how am I ever going to stand for an hour and a half or two hours? And it it felt very difficult when I first started. Now, of course, one doesn't notice it. It just becomes part of what what what you do. Because if you think about it, when we sit down, we sit down to relax, we sit down to be entertained, we sit down to be instructed. And those things are not really parts of the Orthodox liturgy. Okay, the priest does say a few words to you at the end of the liturgy of instruction, but you're not there in that sort of Protestant way to be taught. One is taught, but it's much more through the senses, through what you see and smell, what you hear. So standing is a very different experience, a very wonderful one. We always have some seats. There are some people who, for all sorts of reasons, can't stand. Yeah. They're elderly or they're poorly. They're always benches, usually around the the edges of an Orthodox church. Yeah. But on as a general rule, we stand to pray.

SPEAKER_01 31:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 31:59

There's a different mode of attention that you give when you when you sit down and stand up. If someone special walks into the room now, you will stand up as a as a sign of respect. So of cour of course you would do that for the the creator of the universe if you are w if you can. If you are able.

Faith In Public And Gentle Invitation

SPEAKER_02 32:18

I just want to pop back a few moments in our talk about the Saints and it just popped it occurred to me, even in in our times, they sort of tried to squash out religion and in in in public life. And it's it's just a a cause of joy and hope to hear those the story of the Soviet Union and the and uh and the Christians there.

SPEAKER_00 32:43

Yes. It's the great untold story in the West, particularly because it's Russia, because of all the political difficulties. Yeah. And I want to say the church in Russia is, you know, has always had an uneasy relationship with the state. Yeah. It has to coexist because the church in Russia is not entirely free. It can't say what it, you know, always what it would would normally say.

SPEAKER_01 33:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:08

It has to survive. The difficulties with the with the state in Russia actually started with Peter the Great at the beginning of the 18th century, who sought to really keep the church down and took away its patriarchate and its self-governance. And of course, that accelerated and became communism, which actively sought to close the churches. The president of the Soviet Union, Khrushchev, as late as the 1960s, he went on TV and he said, Within ten years, I will bring with me the last Orthodox priest in 1960. Even in the 60s, they were putting people into mental institutions because of their Christianity.

SPEAKER_02 33:54

And you hear this today, people praying in certain places or talking about Christ in public and telling and police coming around to usher them away.

SPEAKER_00 34:02

Yes. We're living in a world now that is i in the West quite hostile to faith. When I grew up in the 1960s and 70s, faith was was tolerated and even had a degree of respect, if not enthusiasm, from your average English person. But now I think unfortunately many people see faith as at best a kind of mental oddity, and at worst a dangerous perversion, you know. And I think there are some reasons for that, but it has to it it is to be resisted. That's why I wear always the cassock. Whatever I'm doing, I never go out of the house without it, because although that's sometimes difficult, it's very important that people see the church.

SPEAKER_01 34:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:46

That's why I encourage Orthodox people to wear a cross. You have to be seen. That's why Orthodox people, when they feel it's appropriate, must talk about their faith. Yeah. Not pushing, not demanding, but neither hiding the fact that to them Christ is the thing in their life that gives meaning and grounding. And I was very, very encouraged. Two weeks ago, somebody came and talked to me. He'd been to church twice, and he said, I don't know what's going on. I don't understand what's happening inside me, but it's the place I feel completely peaceful and different from any other part of my life. Which is a wonderful beginning. Yeah. Yeah. Hopefully that person will grow and understand and may in God's good time be baptized and become an Orthodox person. Because if we grow up in the West, in our modern society, it says to us, life is about experience and shopping.

SPEAKER_01 35:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:49

It's about what we own and what we have, it's about having a good time, having a good relationship, it's about experience only. And the Christian faith says that is another dimension, different altogether, that is in fact the most important dimension in life.

SPEAKER_02 36:07

This is a plug for this place. Every Saturday, if you're in the Hastings area, and even if you are far further afield, on Saturdays from 11 to 4, this beautiful garden is open. Teas and cakes are available, and a house, a house tour, this magnificent Victorian house. And I can see also people coming here, because the sign can't be clear, it says, for the Orthodox, the Russian Orthodox Church to support us going forward. And it's so beautiful to see non-Orthodox people coming and having finding solace here, finding peace and and grace. And I don't know which saints said it on Alder. They said that if all the if all the whole Bible was destroyed and all written accounts of Christianity was destroyed, they people just have to look at us to know what being a Christian is. Something along those lines.

SPEAKER_00 37:10

That was the great challenge and the great goal, isn't it? Yeah. And we all fall short of that a lot of the time. One of the things I like about the opening the garden and people sitting around having tea and coffee and walnut cake is that very often actually the the the chit-chat turns towards faith. Towards an inquiry about orthodoxy. What's this about? And it's a non-threatening environment sitting in the garden. Yeah. So I have had some quite important conversations with people, just in that very informal setting. Yeah. And it's a great fundraiser and good fan so do come.

Freedom, Salvation, Confession, And Beauty

SPEAKER_02 37:48

Please. Also the best coffee and walnut cake and lime drizzle this week.

SPEAKER_00 37:53

Lime dribble cake, yes. Drizzle cake.

SPEAKER_02 37:58

Yeah, we Orthodox the Orthodox don't bang on their drums on the streets or hand out pamphlets, although they could. And I think it's a when the time is right, live a life, obviously, that that attracts, that that that brings people in. I think a lot of people from the outside can can look at it. I did as a I'll I'll say the word cult. Sorry to say that, but I thought that. I thought it was quite brainwashing because, you know. But actually, I'm in it now. Like you said when we went for a swim. And when you're in, you uh you actually understand that it's washing your soul. It's it's not brainwashing you, it's actually washing and making you, to go back to our first point, more human that you can ever imagine yourself to be in. It makes you grounds you into reality.

SPEAKER_00 38:58

Well, I think a cult seeks to restrict your humanity. It it seeks to stop you asking questions, it seeks to brainwash you into one way of thinking only, and therefore reduces your humanity. I think that's that's always a sign of the cults. But Christianity seeks to do exactly the opposite. It seeks to allow you to ask questions, to air your doubts, to bring the whole of you to this journey of faith and see how you you will grow into the Christian life. It's there to help you, to give you a ladder, to suggest and to encourage. The church does not demand. The church can can suggest and show you a way. Our life is made up of feasts and fasts, the whole church calendar, of disciplines, of prayer and of sacrament. And these things provide a spiritual ladder by which you can grow. People grow at very different speeds in different ways and in different degrees. But it's there for you to find a spiritual path. All churches should do that. But the Orthodox Church has not changed in its way of doing this, and it has the wisdom of the ages and the experience of 2,000 years of men and women whose lives have been deepened and sanctified by him.

SPEAKER_02 40:29

Yeah. You could, like I did, you could think orthodoxy was very rigid, and you you have of the orthodoxy means right belief. However, as you were saying, it's it's there's stages to that. So you come here as you are, there's stages to that. It's a journey. No one is quite there yet. This beautiful story about elder sovereigning when a person came to him and said, Oh, I'm orthodox now, I'm orthodox now. And he said, Oh, I how do you how how are you that? How did you do that? I'm not orthodox yet. Yes. An elder who's now a saint of the church said that, you know.

SPEAKER_00 41:02

So I think it's very unfortunate the way that some Christians will say to you, Are you saved? Because an orthodox answer is, I am on the way, in the process, I hope to be saved. We were talking the weekend as Morgov about Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Christ. And of course, you could say, Well, Judas was saved because he followed Christ, he heard the Sermon on the Mount, he saw the miracles, he he was there. But of course, it was possible for Judas to turn away, as he did, and he betrays Christ while he himself was on that journey. So it's always possible for us to turn away. Being saved is not a once and for all one thing. It's a lifetime, pardon me, it's a lifetime of self-sacrifice and prayer and dedication and love. And in God's good grace, we we do hope to be saved, but we're on a journey.

SPEAKER_02 42:09

That's a beautiful journey in and hard as well, at the same time. Bittersweet.

SPEAKER_00 42:14

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 42:15

There's a beautiful term in lent, bright sadness.

SPEAKER_00 42:19

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 42:20

Because we Orthodoxy sh shows you how much far you need to go.

SPEAKER_00 42:28

Yes, and in a sense God, isn't it? The more we get to know ourselves. Don't you think that w we get to know actually how much we do fall short and how we do let ourselves down, let God down? And in the sense, the more you get to know yourself, the more you see yourself perhaps as you really are. Yeah. And that the more, therefore, we do need God's grace. We need to bind ourselves more closely to the church and to the faith.

SPEAKER_02 42:57

What's beautiful and what I'm learning is not to despair when we sin. No. Because that's what the devil wants. He wants us to go, well, that's me. I have no hope. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 43:09

The devil wants us to despair, wants us to give up, wants us to say there's no point in life. It doesn't matter what you believe, therefore you can believe nothing.

SPEAKER_01 43:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 43:16

This is directly the work of evil. And one of the things that I I often say to new people in Orthodoxy, as they come to confession week after week, when you're new in it, I'm sure I don't know if you think, well, I'm going to be perfect now, I'm going to manage to conquer my sins and my bad habits and all the ways I fall down. And coming to confession week by week before you receive Holy Communion, one realizes that unfortunately many of the sins and the grottinesses that one brings to confession are actually the same week after week. Now it tells you something about one's state and oneself, and it's not to despair, because firstly it is possible. To work on the things, and one does grow in one's ability to control oneself, exercise self-control, grow in love and in charity to other people, but that one will always fall down. That's what human nature, that's what you know, original sin means. We have a propensity to sit to give up to you know to sin, really.

SPEAKER_01 44:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 44:22

But that God always forgives us, picks us up and says, now start again, have hope. And that's a wonderful gift for us. It enables us to sustain our Christian lives. Yes. And many of these can take a lifetime.

SPEAKER_02 44:46

Yeah. Or most of a lifetime, you know, to do. Yeah. But of course, as you said earlier, the the Orthodox offers the Orthodox Church offers a well-trodden ancient path that works. I think CSGO is something about this, it's not it's not true because it doesn't work because it's true. It's true because it works, or something like that. Maybe I've mixed it the other way around.

SPEAKER_00 45:10

It's not a novel made-up religion. Because it's true. Yes, it works because it's true. And it's been tried by all those Christian lives that have been encouraged and sustained and made holy by it. The human soul doesn't change. So people say, oh, well, we want our church to be relevant. But orthodoxy is always relevant because it's always new. You know, our sinful, ordinary human lives are exactly the same today as they were when Jesus walked in Palestine, in the Holy Land. Yeah. Yes. We're still people of passions, of spiritual need. Yeah. So we don't change inside. The externals change. Yeah. Our modern world. But the the human soul is the same.

SPEAKER_02 46:03

A a well-known saying of the Orthodox Church is not this is it's not a museum for saints, it's a hospital for sinners.

SPEAKER_00 46:08

Yes, I like that.

SPEAKER_02 46:09

That's a lovely one, isn't it? Yes. But you get the medicine and and and through the not the sacraments, we like to say mysteries rather in the in the Orthodox Church. Through the mysteries of the church, communion, confession, baptism, they are they are rooting out, weeding out our our sin and bringing us closer to God.

SPEAKER_00 46:31

Yes, they're the particular ways in which God seems to come to his faithful people. Through confession, through the chalice, through baptism, through the sacrament of marriage, sacrament of ordination, sacrament of unction of the sick. God comes to us in many ways in life. God can come to us when we see something beautiful. Look at a wonderful garden or a tree. Well, the beauty that is in that is is made by God. All beauty is there to move us towards Him, the creator of all beauty. And the sacraments are particular ways that God helps us, draws us in, heals us, restores us, grants us himself. So it's why the liturgy is the central act of the Christian life. Our Lord said, Do this bread and wine, my body, my blood. That's what Christians do. And Christians have always sought to make the presentation of this as solemn and as beautiful and as prayerful and as exquisite as possible, so that all our senses can focus us on the absolute wonder that is going on for us in that central act of Christian worship.

SPEAKER_02 48:02

When you were talking then, Romano Dostoevsky's Beauty Will Save the World.

SPEAKER_00 48:07

Yes. Comment. Yes. Because God creates that beauty.

SPEAKER_02 48:14

Yeah. Oh Father, as we start to wrap up here, I'm really enjoying this. But is there something, if there's one last word you'd like to say to people about becoming all if they're cradle orthodox, or they're just listening to this and they're non-orthodox, or they they're just curious about how faith affects life? What would you like what would you like to say to them?

SPEAKER_00 48:47

Well, I'd just like to say that in i in our modern Western world, it is a difficult struggle. It is absolutely worthwhile this journey of the Spirit, this life-enhancing, joy-giving, deeply important aspect of our lives is there to discover whether you're a cradle Orthodox, or whether you're lapsed and coming back to the faith, or whether you're just an inquirer and you're gripped by the idea that there's more to life and you want to find out what it is. Christ said, I have come that they may have life and have it to the full. And this is this is what the church has always done. This is what the church does now. And glory to God for it.

SPEAKER_02 49:39

I think that's all I can say. Thank you for that. One last thing from me is that this is brought to you by Java Bilton. And for my brothers out there and sisters out there who have just finished the Apostles' Fast on the old calendar or new calendar, you can eat meat now. Go over and look at the website in the link below. And also, it's a business that makes Biltong, a South African meat snack that is packed with protein and delicious flavor that supports the church as well. It's an Orthodox business. And I just want to say thank you very much, Father, for your time today and coming on the sunny banana. It's been too long. And it's the 50th episode. I can't believe it's taken that long to get you on there. But you are so busy. You either you're either making something for the the church or you're playing music here, or you and you you're so hospitable to everybody that comes into your house. A very busy man and a wonderful person. And our father Alexander, thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 50:53

Thank you very much, Jonah. And everyone, I do recommend the built on. It's very good. And it supports our Orthodox Church. Thank you. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 51:00

God bless you. God bless. Sunny Bunani. Thank you for listening to the Sunny Banana. We see you.