WE SHOULD ENDURE THE FREEDOM OF GOD. Interview with deacon Andery Kuraev

Deacon Andrey Kuraev interviewed by Roman Makhankov and Yekaterina Litovchenko, correspondents of Mission Magazine issued by the Missionary Faculty of St. Tikhon Orthodox Theological University. Father Andrey elaborates on missionaries’ mistakes and attitudes towards Orthodox mission in our religious environment

Reprinted with permission from the website of St. Thomas Magazine http://www.fomacenter.ru/materials/?cat=41&nid=321

— Father Andrey, why do you think a missionary sometimes fails to capture the hearts of the audience? Are there any “safety measures” for missionaries?

— First, I would strongly recommend not to apply any safety measures. Second, I don’t think one could ever capture the hearts. Let’s recall that Jesus of Galilee, the Best Missionary of our planet, failed to capture the hearts and minds of His audience. Twelve or even seventy apostles in Palestine with its million of population – such result would disappoint any present-day PR expert. Therefore, there is no need to strive for quantity. One has to admit that God has His Own Providence for each man, so missionaries have to accept their failures. This is very important because many young missionaries break at this very point: they start their work, then follows a crash, a failure, after which they often say: “Ah, this is the end of the world; youngsters do not want to hear anything, so I’d rather leave them and sit in my church, God will take the right people to me”… Or in a milder tone: “Alas… I tried hard, but it didn’t work, it is not my type of business, I was wrong, missionary work is not my vocation and I have to look for another path in my church life”.

So, you have to be able to meet with failures. You have to be able to ask yourself: “Look, are you sure this man needs to come to the church via you? Maybe it is not the right time for him to come there at all”. So, you have to be able to endure the Freedom of God and allow Him the determine the fates of other people regardless of your missionary whims or plans. You must be able to feel happy about small private victories. If you come to a school class and two kids listen to you – this is great. Not only the full conversion and churching of a human being can be considered a victory. There are tactical victories, small joys when, for instance, you just see the light in the eyes of your interlocutor, you see that he is no longer afraid of the Orthodoxy and that he has reduced the number of his anti-church prejudices.

Therefore, always remember that a missionary’s task is not only to convert people into Orthodoxy. It can be expressed in another words: to destroy the stereotypes with regard to Orthodoxy; to help people understand that the Orthodoxy is not necessarily an escape from reality and that it is the world where one can live today; to explain the logic of the Orthodox approach to various issues so as to make them understand that our faith is not just a conglomeration of absurdities. Perhaps a man disagrees with you, but he understands: “There is something in it. I do not share you views, but if this is so, then something follows from it”. So you must be able to direct yourself toward such particularities. When a parson is building a church he does not set the goal of erecting a cathedral with gilded iconostasis in a week. Each month the parson handles minor matters. Each day he on the construction site, he sees to it that cement is poured to the proper place … that the brickwork is even… Missionary’s work is just the same.

• Is there a borderline in the missionary work that no one must cross, some borderline separating the Church from the world? For example, “My Posthumous Adventures”, a book by Julia Voznesenskaya. Can there be a humorous description of hell?
  
  — I think that there can only be a humorous description of hell. It is by no chance that we say in our Holy Week services: “Hell the all-ridiculous”, meaning hell worthy of every ridicule. Apostle Paul once said: “Hell, where is your sting. Death, where is your victory”. It is some kind of a mockery. It should be noted that this theme is present in some apocryphal stories which elaborate on Christ’s descent into hell. I think it’s great that we have books like Julia Voznesenskaya’s, some sort of “Orthodox Fantasy”.

Now about the borderline. I think we have to use the tactic of aggressive missionarism. It means that if there are some spaces not reduced to ashes and not openly anti-Christian, then such spaces must be captured and placed under our control. There is a well-known farming principle: a field without care becomes overgrown with weeds. Let’s take a book about Harry Potter. The easiest thing is to get startled by it and run away. But in such case we would leave the field to our enemies who would sow it with their weeds, and these weeds would give a very good crop, but it won’t be a crop for us. This is what would happen if the Church says: “Yes, Harry Potter is a Satanist”. Satanists would happily support such statement, and then every issued copy of the book would increase their numbers and the book would become their advertisement.

There is a considerable gap between the poetics, the symbolism of Evangelical Parables, the Apostolic Church on one side and our present-day church life on the other. The symbolism of Christ’s Parables about the Kingdom of God is such: grain thrown in the soil, treasure buried underground, leaven thrown into dough, meaning something sacred, pure and good thrown into an improper place, trampled into mud. But this mud transforms itself. An opposite trend became predominant in the history of Orthodoxy: to withdraw a sacred relic from secular surroundings and hide it. Iconostasis is growing, the path towards the religious sacrament becomes more complicated (so as to make it uncommon, so as to follow some technology before touching it). This can be seen most clearly on many icons where a saint holds the Gospel not in his naked hand but having placed a kerchief under it. So, as it turns out, you cannot touch the Gospel directly, you must have some intermediary because a man is perceived as a source of filth. It turns out that he is a threat to the holy relic and the relic must be saved from him. This, by all means, is a radical anti-missionary directive because the emotional content of the Gospel is quite different – the holy relic comes to save me.

— But isn’t there such mud where nothing can grow?

— It is not so terrible when nothing grows. The most important thing is not to allow anything else to grow there. For instance, in the bar-code dispute Elder Paisius once said that there were people who were not afraid of a bar code on a product and who thought: “I will take it, cross it and thus sanctify it”. But he opposed to this view saying that not everything could be sanctified, water, for example, could be sanctified whilst urine cannot.

This is a very elegant thought, but logically it is incorrect because we cross objects not only to sanctify them but also to cast something out. There is the power of the cross which exists as something which protects, as exorcism. We can sanctify some things in terms of “filling it with grace”, whilst other things (say, a toilet) we asperse with the holy water from the Epiphany, so as no evil could hide in there, and not for the consumption of the holy relic in such place. It’s the same here. A Christian fruit may not grow on this plot, but by our work we will prevent someone from growing his weeds there. The principle here is: “I will eat what I can and I will bite at what I cannot”. In this sense a missionary is the same as a dog in a manger who neither eats nor gives food to the others.

• What is, in your opinion, the most terrible mistake of a missionary?

• There a great lot of such mistakes. I cannot single out the most terrible one. One of the mistakes is an excessive assimilation when a missionary who tries to find common language with his audience outside the Church becomes so successful in it that in the end he turns to be “one of them through and through”. In such case it is quite natural for people to get astonished: “If you are the same as we are then we do not need your faith because we already have everything”. This is where Nestorian missionaries lost themselves in China when they were simply “dissolved” in Buddhism.

The second extreme, the opposite one, is when a preacher takes the pose of a monument to himself and his holy order or position, when he preaches to non-church people and thinks during his sermon not of how his words would be reflected in their life but of what his concelebrants and confreres would say about him. This is definitely an anti-sermon. I sincerely envy Apostle Paul because he lived in the times when there were no dictaphones. He was able to enjoy the luxury of speaking with Greeks as a Greek and with Jews as a Jew.

Image a Jew recording Apostle Paul’s sermon to Greeks on a dictaphone and then letting his fellow Jews listen to this sermon in a synagogue. The effect would be quite imaginable. But this is what happens today. For thousands of years the missionary sphere and the sphere of church life had been separated by borders: you have an empire where everything is good and quiet and you have missionaries working beyond the borders of this empire and in its remote places. In this sense they were freer in the choice of methods for their sermons. And this freedom of theirs, the requisite parsonic missionary freedom, was of no embarrassment to Orthodox church-goers who were facing other spiritual tasks.

Today we are the first to find ourselves in a situation where the church and missionary spheres have interwoven. Missionary work has to be done in the same town, on a same lecture, in the same auditorium where unbelievers, young people, intelligentsia, sectarians and Orthodox believers meet. I know that I must speak of things that are of interest to the church-oriented part of my audience, but in this case I run the risk of losing its secular part. Here I have to choose, and a missionary must be capable of sacrificing his reputation among church-goers for the benefit of their unbelieving confreres. This is the way of a fool for Christ in some way.

After my lectures I hear the opinions of Orthodox believers: “Father Andrey, you have embarrassed me by this or that example or anecdote”. But here is what I can say to that: “Excuse me, whom have I embarrassed? You? So, what are you embarrassed of? Will you stop going to church because of this embarrassment?… You will not. You are an Orthodox believer, and this is great. You thought of me as of a man of enormous spiritual power, and now it turns out that I do not have it? But take my word of honor: the professing of the holiness of Deacon Andrey Kuraev is not a pre-requisite for salvation and your membership in the Church. Therefore, your embarrassment is not dangerous for you”. But think of how many people were embarrassed by totally correct sermons of totally correct parsons? When a parson comes to speak to university students, when he speaks correctly and piously abounding in elaborately fine words all in line with the rules of Homiletics taught in seminaries, flies and students perish in this piety. Unfortunately nobody counts these casualties. How many people have abandoned Orthodoxy because of being embarrassed by correct sermons? It is not customary among us to count such casualties.

“The troop failed to notice the loss of their friend

While singing anathema up to the end”.