Perhaps even more, we can learn from the suffering people of Russia and other Communist countries. I don’t want to frighten you, but we’d better face the fact that what they’re suffering now, or something similar, is probably coming here, and soon.
We’re living in the last times, Antichrist is close, and what happens in Russia and other countries like it is the normal experience for our times. Here in the West we’re living in a fool’s paradise which can and probably will soon be lost. Let’s start to prepare — not by storing food or such outward things that some are already doing in America, but with the inward preparation of Orthodox Christians.
Have you ever asked yourself, for example, the question how you will survive if you are placed in prison or concentration camp, and especially in the punishment cells of solitary confinement? How are you going to survive? You will go crazy in a very short time if your mind has nothing to occupy itself with. What will you have in your mind? If you are filled with worldly impressions and have nothing spiritual in your mind; if you are just living from day to day without thinking seriously about Christianity and the Church, without becoming aware of what Orthodoxy is, and you are placed in a situation like solitary confinement where there is nothing to do, nowhere to go, no movies to see, just staying in one spot facing four walls — you will scarcely survive.
The Rumanian Protestant pastor, Richard Wurmbrand, has a tape devoted to this subject which is very interesting. In a crisis situation like that, when all our books and outward props are taken away, we can depend on nothing except what we’ve acquired within ourselves. He says that all the Bible verses he knew didn’t help him much; abstract knowledge of dogmas didn’t help much — what is important is what you have in your soul. You must have Christ in your soul. If He is there, then we Orthodox Christians have a whole program which we could use in prison. We can remember the Orthodox Calendar — which saints and feasts are commemorated when. We don’t have to know the whole Calendar, but from our daily life in the Church we will remember the milestones of the Church year; whatever we have stored up in our hearts and minds will come back to us. Whatever prayers and hymns we know by heart will help us, we will have to sing them every day. You will have to have people to pray for.
The world-wide dispersion of our Russian Church Abroad is ideal for this. You can go over the whole globe in your mind, one country or continent at a time, and pray for those you know, even if you can’t think of their names — bishops and abbesses, parishes and priests both Russian and missionary, the monasteries in the Holy Land, prisoners in Russia and Rumania and other lands under the atheist yoke, the missions in Uganda and elsewhere in Africa where it is very difficult, the monks of Mt. Athos, the suffering Old Calendarists of Greece. The more of these you are aware of and praying for now, the better it will be for you when you have to suffer yourself, the more you will have to take with you into prison.
As Andreyev says, it is “one for all and all for one” — we are involved in practicing our Christianity in a world that has become atheist, whether or not open persecution is going on.
Excerpt from homily by Saint Seraphim (Rose), delivered at the Saint Herman Winter Pilgrimage on December 12/25, 1979, at Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville, NY.