The Morning After

You, whoever you are, have absolutely no idea what this Church is all about. Absolutely none. High minded talk about canons and questions of the legitimacy of the faithful’s problems with Nikolai proves that nothing that is written in the Gospels has been absorbed. That’s sad and it cuts to the core of the problem. You have reduced the Church to set of rigid legalisms concerning behavior that is so ungodly so as to protect the person(s) exhibiting that behavior. Its interesting in how you completely set aside any of the commandments given by God and Christ Himself in order to resort to the canons and the “legality” of comments received from an aggrieved group of people, namely the faithful of Alaska. Its beyond me to fathom questioning the “legality” and admissibility of the pain that the faithful in Alaska is enduring. Why not just call this a fraternal organization like the Elks? For all that we center our behaviors on the Gospels it might as well be some secular fraternity! Mark is partly right, such is the foolishness that is destroying this Church. The real truth is the complete lack of belief in Christ is what is killing this Church. The “me” before “we”, the “I” before “Christ”. This is clearly exhibited by the hierarchy of this Church.

For all those that want to question the validity of whatever report Fr. Garklav’s had prepared, you can call it whatever you want, you can demean it whatever you want, the facts contained there are as a true as you’re ever going to see heard in the Church in Alaska. The Synod, in its usual unconscionable thinking, doesn’t want to be confused with the facts in anyway that might bring light to their ungodly behavior. Why do you want the report to be discarded so badly? Because its damning? It tells of a man who’s done all he can in direct opposition to all the Gospel teaches and to what end? And then he wants people to think he’s great. All great men make others cower and bow down on their knees begging for mercy because they made a mistake, or spoke the truth as they know it, or tried to do some other good that was seen as contrary to the ideas of this great man! How demeaning, utterly DEMEANING, it is for whoever has to bow down to another man begging for forgiveness. Christ taught us to GIVE forgiveness, not make people BEG us for it! It should be given freely and as happily as you are when you take a donation! I ask again, HOW MANY OF YOU could subject yourself to such abject humiliation? And to whom? Where in the GOSPELS DID JESUS subject anyone to this? WHERE!? This single act, reportedly repeatedly, rocks me to my very core. And its done by a Bishop in our Church who uses the canons to prevent accountability. How sad, how very sad.

What’s so damn annoying with this is that some people have reduced the Truth to a bunch of legalisms that have absolutely nothing to do with the word of the Gospel. None. Period. Now, some like the legal canonical eagle Tikhon, will come back and say that its necessary for the good order of the Church and point to a million reasons we should have them, but, people, if people just followed the commandments given to us from above the canons would be made redundant. Do you understand that? The canons are a fallback, yes, a fallback. A fallback in case people can’t live up to the commandments. For there is nothing in the canons that extends the commandments. There is a feeling among a certain lot that any behavior no matter how despicable, secularly illegal, immoral, can be dismissed and ignored and not dealt with just because some canon was not followed! If its not written in the canons as being wrong then its not wrong is the mentality that some follow. Where is the common sense? The canons here, and they have been beaten like a dead horse, have been contorted to preserve BAD ORDER in the Church. How? Because they have been used as a shield to protect the guilty and destroy the innocent who are so pained over all the malcontents running the Church.

Mark does have one point wrong, this isn’t foolishness on the part of those perpetuating crime against the Church. This is a well planned and thought out attack against the Church which reminds one of what’s going on in our secular world where a group determined to see our downfall are using our own freedoms against us in order to defeat us. This is what is going on here, we have a group of severely demented malcontents filling the ranks of our clergy from Priest to Metropolitan, who, for their own selfish, twisted reasons, need to maintain power at all costs lest the façade of their sacrilegious ministries be brought to light! That is IT! The whole thing in a nutshell. They are a group of bad people. They use the canons against us and people feel, like people in the secular world do too, that if only we follow a procedure never conceived with the foresight of what we are now facing and play nice, that we will prevail over the evil. BS!

What the Synod did last Thursday was the equivalent of the Jews calling for Barabas rather than Jesus. Plain and simple. And true to form, the Synod, like Pilate, set Barabas on his way and condemned Christ, in the form of the Church, the Alaskans, and the faithful in general, to more persecution, and maybe a diocese to crucifixion, lest they be concretely exposed for the Godless bunch they are. Unfortunately they weren’t listening to the faithful, who again and again, fall down to cry for Jesus to be heard in HIS Church.

We know they’re Godless, last week’s actions confirmed it. What CAN they be hiding, what CAN they be so afraid of as to cower and fall down to any threat that Nikolai would dare to give them. How does hiding it make them look any better or maybe not as bad? We know they’re bad, every last one of them. They have lost the last bit of shame, not even making it seem like there was discussion, they just cut to the chase. Thousands of dollars, more than on any Church program, was spent for them to be dressed down and lower this organization more than we could have imagined possible. How can they allow bad to triumph over good and then walk through the airport with people looking at the holy man going to his plane back home? If only those people who saw these bishops at the airport and on the plane knew that what they were seeing was merely an act. Nothing but a mirage, because they had just sentenced people to more persecution, a diocese tossed the wolves, and, they say, all in the name of God and being guided by the Holy Spirit. Brothers and sisters, that is the definition of blasphemy! I’m sick and tired of people calling their bishops good men and how they like them. They’re complete failures. They’ve abandoned their faith, they abandoned their God, they’ve done all they could to keep the pain going. And people call these men GOOD?! ENOUGH!

Some people live all their lives and never come face to face with evil as we have in this Church. Fortunate are those who do not have to be part of an organization run by supposedly good and righteous men who exhibit nothing but the lowest level of human behavior that can be found anywhere. They may not have killed, but they’ve crucified the Lord again and again with their treachery against His Church. Do not think that they are taking a long time to debate within themselves and in prayer as to what to do. We know that what belies their thought processes are the basest of human instincts that being survival. And they will try to survive no matter what. No matter that gnashing of teeth of those that try to cleanse this mess.

If Nikolai or ANY of his supporters want to talk canons, statutes, fairness, and whatever else to water down his ungodly behavior, then let’s revisit the defrocking of priests under Nikolai that were not afforded the same! Bringing up two lackey priests from Syosset to do the dirty work of defrocking a priest that Nikolai wanted out hell or high water, but no priest in his own diocese would have done conscionably is an example of what Nikolai REALLY thinks. Don’t believe the repentance baloney. Actions speak, and the man who lives by the canons and the statutes wouldn’t allow anyone he didn’t like their protection. The canons be damned when its in his way, but the mountain they are if you need comfort! He doesn’t want fairness, he wants what needs to be done so that he may be kept in power in Alaska and to what end? He’s destroyed a Church, people are leaving in droves, clergy thinking of jumping jurisdictions and we’re playing legal games with the canons so that he can continue indefinitely! Where does that make sense? What do we not understand about what this religion is and this Church that was built? Where did Jesus resort to legalisms to shut out people. Where did he cast out people PERIOD!? Where did Jesus use legalisms to keep out those that opposed him? Where did Jesus make people bow down and prostrate before Him? Nowhere, and Nikolai and his malcontents, the REAL dissidents in the Church, and the Synod who has so much to hide they can do nothing but bow down in obedience to his threats have to perform canonical contortions to prolong this agony in the hope that Nikolai can do a dictatorial purge of those that have created this so then when the time comes he can say their accusations are baseless because they are no longer in good standing in the Church. And there, friends, is how one uses the rules to run amok and preserve unchristian behavior all to preserve a power which he needs to feel good at night.

In an earlier comment Mina says what good Nikolai has done. The incredible feats of beautification, a museum, and the like she uses as proof of what a good man Nikolai is. BS! Look at history, Mina! All dictators throughout history have built monuments to themselves to proclaim their greatness because no one else does! They have created works that they hope to use as arguments, as you have done, that they are great people and have done much for their people, hoping that this overshadows the persecution those people receive. Why do they do this? Because you’re not going to hear of any people under them speak under penalty of brutality, but only see the tremendous monumental works. How can a man who makes a museum, commissions the greatest iconography, schools his seminarians for free, be as bad as every one says? Hog wash! He’s a great man! Break out the fatted calf in his name! Wine for all! Truth is held hostage under dictators and only they let known what they want to be known. What has been Nikolai’s great failure in his eyes? That he wasn’t able to do more to contain and beat down those that spoke! I don’t want to hear about monuments to his greatness, I want to see people, the faithful, tell me of his greatness. I want to hear about Churches that are packed, and not when people are led to believe that Nikolai is under leave of absence and a knight in shining armour is sent from Syosset to investigate the problems. The fact is, no matter how much the Nikolai faction wants to spin this, that the Church in Alaska is dying and what the Synod did to protect their own immoral behaviors is to put a knife in its back and turn it.

Leaders that mouth the words of St. Ephraim but don’t believe it. Leaders that created a fraternity where anything goes and everyone covers up and the people are paying the bills because these leaders blaspheme the Lord in order to play on our emotions that we need to fund the Church because its doing God’s work. This is not God’s work. The truth is that the emotions are played upon to send in money to promulgate a behavior that you wouldn’t want your children to know existed. People, the ground shook in Kodiak on Thursday, a tremor was felt, maybe it was the Alaskan Saints spinning in their coffins unable to take any longer the tragedy that has become of what they worked so diligently and selfishly for. They rightly did it in the name of God.

No, I do not have any faith that Nathaniel or Tikhon will do anything of any use. If they haven’t done any good to this point, there’s no reason to believe they’re going to get enlightened now!