Posts and palings

I wonder at times whether we have not got things very wrong in the western church, now that everyone seems to want to be his own spiritual master and guide.

The image that comes to mind is the common garden wood fence, of the type that surrounded thousands of English suburban gardens, including my parents, in the immediate post-war years: solid posts rooted into the earth every three yards or so, joined by two cross-bars, against which were nailed a series of vertical palings. 

This was the basic Christian pattern until the 1950s: one person in twenty or so were posts, solidly rooted in God and the Church. It was their duty to keep the fence up. The rest of us were palings, doing pretty much what we were told in sermons and the confessional.

Those rooted as posts (mature priests, older religious, lay people with serious spiritual lives) were by and large well trained, with a spiritual depth derived from prayer, disciplined lives and experience. The rest of the faithful accepted this situation: their job was to go about their daily work - office, home, school, mass on Sunday - with a sense that both palings and posts were all part of one fence.

This old style, solid wood fence is no longer. I would now describe it as a series of individual posts and palings, all sticking into the ground directly, some straighter and more firmly than others, in a rough line (the cross-bar has gone), and with holes through which cats, dogs and small children can stray in and out. In other words, a fence that is no longer doing its job.

The palings have decided that they should be posts, and the posts are unable or unwilling to bring them back into line.....

Russian glimpses 1: Intelligentsia and Church – an uneasy co-existence

Throughout its existence, the Russian intelligentsia has found itself in loosely networked dissent against an authority seen to be (and which was) sophisticated only in its brutality From the mid-80s onwards, led by figures like Fr Alexander Men and the group in Moscow which became St Tikhon's Orthodox University, part of the intelligentsia found its way into the Orthodox Church. But twenty years on the Christian intelligentsia remains edgy, often deeply believing and extraordinarily well-read in theology and church art and history, but unwilling to commit fully into mainstream church life.  It is viscerally anti-power, and the Orthodox Church has quickly been perceived as a power structure which, notwithstanding deep faith, is little different to any other in Russian history. Not all bishops and priests ordained in a hurry as the Church restaffed in the nineties have been models of Christian honesty, humility or simple living, and everyone outside the church nomenklatura has their stock of episcopal horror stories. The fundamentalist right has set itself up as the self-appointed vigilantes of the Orthodox blogosphere, whose onslaught of rude and crude comments caused a leading Russian Orthodox Live Journal blogger to retire from the fray last week with what looks like a nervous breakdown. Everyone in the Russian Church – even your non-Russian correspondent ­– knows instinctively just how far they can safety go (a bit further if you know how to write to be read between the lines or are covered by someone in the hierarchy). 

My English sense of fair play tells me that it is unjust to place the entire blame on the central Church hierarchy, many of whom are men of considerable spiritual and intellectual vigour and pastoral concern. Indeed I at times ask myself – as have others in the western press – just how much they are masters in their own house, given the blurred frontiers between secular and spiritual power, including a deep-rooted nationalist and anti-western populism, in which Church and State are hopelessly fused. Coming back to the intelligentsia, the Roman Catholic church has perhaps been wiser: it has parked its intelligentsia in organizations like the Jesuits, Dominicans and Opus Dei, which are answerable directly to Rome and not the local bishop, as are the monastic orders. A possible new development in the Russian Church is that many competent clergy are staying away from the church power centres of Moscow and St Petersburg, a position that internet, skype and the blogosphere are making increasingly tolerable.

(Please feel free to comment in Russian also).