Dark days...

We are prone these days to feel, often as a result of the superb international news reporting available to us, that we are living in uniquely dark times, and that the good old days are fast slipping beneath a horizon stained with blood, and with the meltwater from the shrinking icecaps.

Now I don't mean to minimise for one minute the dangers of global warming, or the immense suffering and injustice in the world, even in the most "civilised" countries. But to think that "we've never had it so bad," to paraphrase Harold Macmillan, is just plain wrong.

Imagine being born in the fourteenth century. One-third of the population and nearly 40 percent of the clergy were wiped out by the bubonic plague. The Western Schism split the Church with two or three claimants to the Holy See at one time. England and France were at war. The city-states of Italy were constantly in conflict. No wonder that gloom dominated the spirit of the culture and the times.

John Capistrano was born in 1386. His education was thorough. His talents and success were great. When he was 26 he was made governor of Perugia. Imprisoned after a battle against the Malatestas, he resolved to change his way of life completely. At the age of 30 he entered the Franciscan novitiate and was ordained a priest four years later.

His preaching attracted great throngs at a time of religious apathy and confusion. He and 12 Franciscan brethren were received in the countries of central Europe as angels of God. They were instrumental in reviving a dying faith and devotion.

The Franciscan Order itself was in turmoil over the interpretation and observance of the Rule of St. Francis. Through John’s tireless efforts and his expertise in law, the heretical Fraticelli were suppressed and the "Spirituals" were freed from interference in their stricter observance.

(from Saint of the Day)

The Franciscans throughout that period reacted to the chaos and misery around them not with despair, nor with recrimination: they simply got on with following their Lord, in teaching, in acts of mercy, in prayer.

In the years following World War I, the Soviet Union grew in power and scope, until in 1928 Stalin's Five Year Plan set in motion an era-long nightmare for the whole of Eastern Europe. Lenin, the founder of the Soviet State, believed that "Religion is the opium of the people: this saying of Marx is the cornerstone of the entire ideology of Marxism about religion. All modern religions and churches, all and of every kind of religious organizations are always considered by Marxism as the organs of bourgeois reaction, used for the protection of the exploitation and the stupefaction of the working class." 

The Orthodox and Catholic churches were all but crushed, with only a few state-sponsored fragments remaining to placate the the faithful; most Baptists and many of the other Christians were driven underground, exiled, imprisoned or killed. Catholic religious, and those of the hesychast tradition among the Orthodox, most of whom were driven into exile (many of the latter ended up on Mount Athos in Greece) simply went on praying.

It has been said the Christian saints are the world’s greatest optimists. Not blind to the existence and consequences of evil, they base their confidence on the power of Christ’s redemption. The power of conversion through Christ extends not only to sinful people but also to calamitous events.

(Saint of the Day again)

We forget at our peril, I think, the sufferings of those who have gone before us. Surrounded as we are by "so great a cloud of witnesses" (Hebrews 21.1) we know that our generation is not the first to suffer, nor is it likely to be the last. How we handle that, as individuals, has at least I think the potential for eternal significance.

Saint Silouan, one of the great Russian intercessors who spent the years of the Soviet era on Mount Athos, wrote:

What does inner silence mean? It means ceaseless prayer, with the mind dwelling in God. Father John of Kronstadt was always surrounded by people, yet he was more with God than many solitairies. I became steward in an act of obedience and because of the Abbot's blessing I can pray better at my task than I did at the Old Russicon where out of self-will I had asked to go for the sake of inner silence... If the soul loves and pities people, prayer cannot be interrupted...

The soul cannot know peace unless she prays for her enemies. The soul that has learned of God's grace to pray, feels love and compassion for every created thing, and in particular for mankind, for whom the Lord suffered on the Cross, and His soul was heavy for every one of us.

The Lord taught me to love my enemies. Without the grace of God we cannot love our enemies. Only the Holy Spirit teaches love, and then even devils arouse our pity because they have fallen from good, and lost humility in God.

(from the above link, and from Hieromonk Gregory's obituary of Silouan's pupil Archimandrite Sophrony.)