“What happiness it was!” – this is the final entry in Father Alexander Schmemann’s diaries, written shortly before his death.
This acceptance of life, this understanding of life is where one finds true faith; a total confession of faith to the end. This is what we need today as never before: a word of such power and sincerity that it becomes a deed.
Father Alexander Schmemann never was in Russia, but his presence was felt in the most important moments of our life.
At the end of the 80s, many people – my friends among them – started seeking a way to faith. Churches were reopening, thousands of people were being baptized. In the heat of the moment, there was even talk of a religious rebirth of Russia. This was perhaps the most powerful and the purest quest for truth, in many ways intuitive and internal, in a nation that could not bear to remain under the long pall of lies. A thirst for truth filled even the political life of the country, even if only for a brief time, with strong moral purpose.
Today it is hard to imagine how few such books there were then, how hard it was to find them, how avidly they were devoured! For many here, Christianity began with the words of Father Alexander. His books were passed from hand to hand; they were discussed. When priests felt a serious interest in questions of faith, they said, “Read the books of Father Alexander Schmemann.”
Today an interlocutor such as Father Alexander is simply critical. And in his Journals, published by “Russkii put’,” we find just that critical word for today. This word is “not for slaves, but for friends (Jn. 15:15).
People who thought they were moving toward Christ ten-fifteen years ago now find themselves with a very complicated religious life. Much in the church is unfamiliar, unacceptable and confusing, and only raises more questions. These people urgently need a pastoral word that would explain what’s what; a word that would erase doubts, support faith; a word that would draw a sharp line between the search for Christ and manifestations of religious life that not only can shake, but even destroy the beginnings of faith.
One always reads diaries with apprehension and the diaries of a priest even more so. But the journals of Father Alexander demonstrate a form of life and thought that cannot be seen as “appropriate for the moment”; this is that daily Christianity that we never knew, that we do not know, and in which we do not know how to live.
The diaries of Father Alexander seem entirely ordinary – talk of books, authors, his relations with his wife (where husband and wife and indeed one flesh), his children, students, his views on world events, nature, holy days, the joys of life – “an almost pathological intensity of life, of youth, of happiness.” But here is where these diaries are unique – and everything is in this: They are a living revelation of faith, and not just talk about it. In a certain sense this is a contemporary witness to Christ that is in no way inferior to any fiery profession of Christianity.
To a Russian person, given either to internal collapse or external browbeating, such a normal life is largely unfamiliar. The life of Father Alexander demonstrates that normalcy in which what is most important is living faith.
It is precisely this faith that does not allow one to be content with a happy family, books, thoughts about God. Against the backdrop of an ordinary life, a painfully clear sense of the ulcers of contemporary religious life become only more acute. For this reason this faith cannot avoid the damned questions. It poses them, revealing habitual, lukewarm manifestations of religion as empty piety and falsehood that forms a wall before the living person of Christ.
“Recent conversation with I.M.: about the contemporary decline of Orthodoxy, about its profound crisis. He: But how then can we know where Truth has been preserved? Always the same concern — external guarantees. ‘Orthodoxy has preserved truth.’ But in fact it should be approached the other way around: Nothing external can ‘preserve’ Truth by itself. Truth lives and triumphs through itself.”
With what anguish he spoke of the dangers of Christianity without Christ! With what boldness! For this needs real daring. Father Alexander Schmemann was not only a theologian in the almost forgotten sense of the word, but one of the most daring people I know of.
Should someone living in America, where Orthodoxy plays such a minor role, talk of wrongs, crises? Would it not be easier to limit discussion to one’s superiority, to dawdle in the past – which is never a problem, to replace the search for Christ with glorification of one’s ethnic church? Isn’t this a favorite pastime today?
But Father Alexander, walking all his life toward Christ, saw only His truth. It is this vision that gave him strength and true direction. No superficial considerations — should I be doing this here and now? will this provoke our people? how will Moscow react? what will the old parishioners say? the new emigrants? the liberals? the nationalists? Nothing that compels us to shape our decisions according to practical considerations had any influence on him, because his point of reference was immutable.
The truth which he searched for all his life does not wait for an opportune moment or for worthy and competent listeners. It demands to be proclaimed even if it might intimidate the weak of spirit or provoke those who have appropriated for themselves the truth.
Father Alexander valued above all “honesty with himself, with people, with life.” He had a lot of contact with people; he had a clear notion of the “peculiar facial expression” of the modern man. If he had had fewer students, friends, interlocutors, he would still have understood the state of a soul seeking with all its might to make a “leap of faith,” in Kierkegaard’s expression. He understood how hard this is, what forces stand in the way of this move toward God!
This “honesty with himself, with people, with life” was for him the criteria of a man’s integrity, of the presence of God in him. Conversely, phony piety — “the falsehood with which religions, Christianity and church life are permeated, repels me more and more. All this pseudo-depth, pseudo-problems, pseudo-spirituality; all these pretensions to loftier understanding! All these declamations!” – can drive a man so far from Truth.
Is this not the greatest problem of religious life today — and of life in general? We talk of everything except what is most important. “Honesty” is a most important word today. Will it be heard? Will it be understood?
There have been different reactions to Father Alexander’s book.
Many found in it the answers even to those questions they had been afraid to formulate, fearing that they might go too far. Having read Father Alexander’s diaries, and not only once, they have now received a template for their thoughts and search. They have an example of how to look at the contradictions inevitable in church life on the basis of a firm faith, without fear or faint-heartedness.
Others have angrily rejected the book.
Father Alexander would not have been surprised. He knew well the power of the superficial side of church life! For so many people this superficial side is totally suitable; they perceive it as the only true faith. It is painful for them to think something so familiar, that the only life they can conceive of, is false through and through. God be with those who think thus in the simplicity of their heart. But there are others, for whom Orthodoxy is not so much a faith as an ideology.
“On my way home I was thinking, what primitive and unnecessary barriers our ‘Orthodoxy’ has placed before such people. This is the time it could be purified, renewed; it could shine! But that would require renouncing the idols, and especially the idol of the past, which is something Orthodoxy is least capable of doing since these idols are what they most cherish in Orthodoxy.”
A religious renewal of Russia, like a political or socio-economic renewal, has yet to happen.
For it to happen, we need to hear what Father Alexander Schmemann has to say today on the pages of his journals.
