Burdened with history:

...Bishop Vsevelod, primate of a Ukrainian diocese in America under the ecumenical patriarch, expresses hope for canonical acceptance of all Ukrainians in the homeland and abroad, and has broken new ground in communicating with Ukrainian Catholics...

...Simple inconvenience has been carefully honed to an excruciating, exquisite perfection...

...What is happening today in the Western Ukraine-in those provinces which were free of Soviet antireligious terror before the war-is that an effort is being made to restore this ancient, independent Ukrainian mind set...

...One example will suffice to show the contradictions in church administration...

...It also gave me access to a magnificent library of pre-1917 texts, a vantage point from which to view the new resurgence of religion in the USSR, and a place in a city perched on top of East Europe in this most tumultuous of years...

...But following the ceremony, the remaining books were spirited away to the basement...

...Last year, for example, the literary critic Konstantin Kedrov published The Poetic Cosmos, a creative and restless exposition of Russian literary history through the analogue of the stars and constellations...

...But we must not mistake this antipathy as a merely historical resentment...

...Above all, however, Msty Slav's choice was an embarrassment for the newly elected patriarch of Moscow, and Moscow can be expected to resist this growing independent Orthodox movement...

...For while we Westerners have the freedom to engage each other and to publish-a freedom for which they have so ardently longed-they have an abundance of spiritual energy which we crave...

...One young father, with a black T-shirt celebrating Heavy Metal and an earring peeking out from his longish hair, stopped me one evening after a service...

...Only three bishops had survived...

...We must study our own lost canon, simply to reawaken the capacity in us to conceive a vision...

...I myself served as an Orthodox deacon in Leningrad, where it was not unusual to baptize seventy-five to a hundred people on a Saturday...

...The conflict is undeniable and has already threatened many an ecumenical conversation between Orthodox and Catholics in the U.S...

...The contrast between them was startling...

...The tragedy is that the very ethical sense upon which it was built has been ruined for us...

...He held out his infant daughter, swaddled tightly Russian-style and capped in white embroidery...

...Ecumenism, to us, means haul out the cognac for another foreign delegation, and above all, smile and keep your mouth shut...

...Dressed in expensive Western jogging suits, these gangs are hardly impoverished thugs...

...Two themes emerged with astounding regularity: first, the theme of ruin...

...The Ukrainian mind is now struggling to shrug off the heavy, dead weight of the Soviet imposition upon the churches...

...Yet there is an irony in this resistance...

...A pensioner doesn't earn a hundred roubles in three months...

...The church's lock-step, defensive stance, once a necessity for its survival, now threatens to keep it from thriving...

...Msty Slav's appointment has reawakened old controversies about the canonical status of his movement...

...For my daughter, there is hope...

...Yet there is none of that openness of discussion, that willingness to entertain a question, which pervaded the Orthodox intellect at the end of the last century...

...Spiritually and intellectually, the Ukraine has been a constant link between East and West...

...We tend to see the rift between the Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox-particularly the struggle of the latter for an independent, auto-cephalous jurisdiction-in the same light...

...Only here will the Russian church find release from "sovietization...

...People flock to this church in a quest to return to traditional Russian values (even rock lyrics, vibrating with Heavy Metal amplification, thank the church for its perseverance), yet those who administer the church are still deeply affected, even shaped, by the Soviet system from which the new converts seek a remedy...

...This movement was initiated in October 1989 by Archbishop loan Bodnarchuk in Lviv...

...By and large, however, the Orthodox world has not recognized the plea to restore their ancient status...

...In the past, the Orthodox and Baptists alike, caught in this practice of Bible-sales, have responded that for the church to survive it is necessary to collect such funds...

...Meaningful discussions take place only conspiratorially...

...In the West, in 1596, the Catholic overlords of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth imposed a union with Rome on their Ukrainian Orthodox subjects...

...It's a forgivable mistake...

...And where church members ache to shrug off state interference, he takes up added state appointments...

...In the Uniate (Catholic) movement centered in the Ukrainian city of Lviv, and the autocephalous (Ukrainian) Orthodoxy centered in the same city (Lviv became Soviet only after World War II), clergy follow the lead of the laity in this quest...

...We no longer know how to build a culture, Christian or otherwise...

...No others were the object of such attacks...

...The Ukrainian intellect has been vastly underestimated...

...Ukrainians constitute a plurality, if not a majority, among Slavic Orthodox Christians in the USSR...

...The church is not yet ready to meet its new challenge...

...Much of the energy within the church in Eastern Europe-both Catholic and Orthodox-springs from the Ukraine...

...The move to Russian Orthodoxy among Soviet Jews has, after all, been widespread...

...And the head can wear a golden crown while the limbs shiver in relative poverty...

...Clerks stash away goods in short supply and sell them later, from their own back doors, for inflated prices...

...Church weddings, too, have become the height of fashion...

...As part of a scholars' exchange arranged through the associated Soviet church bodies and the National Council of Churches, this past year (September 1989-May 1990) I was the first American scholar to reside at the Theological Academy in Leningrad...

...His response struck at the core of his assumptions...

...You've got to be believers to engage in a sacramental act...

...Thus both the Orthodox and Catholic communities here and abroad tend to perceive the 50 million Ukrainians as "nationalists" the very moment they refer to themselves as Ukrainians...

...Paralleling the rush back to Rome is a drive for an independent Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox church...

...Social science can analyze the phenomenon and its growth, but it is at a loss to explain the object of its attraction...

...Viktor Popov, a layman once imprisoned under Brezhnev but now active in Christian social action in Moscow, was badly beaten last December...

...Its clerics are much more comfortable with the old church-the determined, respectful, adulatory, and grandmotherly babushkas-than they are with the youth (whom they largely ignore), their bold new converts, or the even bolder dissidents now released from jail...

...Vladimir Poresh in Leningrad is another example of the energy and creative intellect in Orthodoxy...

...Christian academics in the West sometimes fall victim to the same mistakes as secular Sovietologists...

...The closed system thrives in the church, and glasnost has not touched the system of theological education...

...Just before Christmas 1989, at a convocation at the Leningrad Academy, I witnessed an American Lutheran bishop, the Reverend Lowell Knutsen, present a gift of some ten thousand Bibles to the Russian church on behalf of the Seattle-area Council of Churches...

...In their "lost faith" and "lamentation" we may find a quality we too would like to instill in our nation-a hunger for the holy...

...To his credit, as metropolitan of Leningrad he gave the church a more visible, active ministry...

...It strives to feed the hunger of the masses of young people who come to the church, are baptized, and then find no one to meet their spiritual or intellectual needs...

...My experience in the Soviet Union helped to correct that...

...In late August, the New York Times reported a "religious war" between the two...

...The "sovietized" church is afraid of its laity...

...The resurgence of "nationalism" in the USSR is a function of a broader, essentially metaphysical movement...

...That grand structure of Russian culture, based upon a real moral vision, has been destroyed, ruined, utterly lost," he insists...

...On June 6,1990, an assembly in Kiev of seven bishops, 300 clergy, and a large number of laity elected Metropolitan Msryslav as patriarch...

...BURDENED WITH HISTORY SOVIET CHURCHES & THE SEARCH FOR AUTHENTICITY ANTHONY UGOLNIK The truest view of what is happening in the Soviet Union today is gained from staring at the back of someone's head in a queue...

...It has not looked to its real resources...

...In America, most Christians approach the insights of Orthodoxy among Slavs as specifically "Russian...

...On September 26, the Soviet Parliament wrote religious freedom into law...

...Individuals can be warm, gracious, helpful...

...It is in the laity that the real future of Orthodoxy lies...

...In the east, Ukrainian Orthodoxy was subjugated to Moscow, which suppressed Kiev's episcopal independence, destroyed its presses, and Russified its thinking...

...The newly elected Patriarch Alexei has had a favorable press in the West...

...Yet both the Ukrainian Orthodox and Eastern Rite Ukrainian Catholics have suffered a cruel irony...

...While state-approved studies of religion were blundering, even stupid at times, they tended to monopolized religious discourse, convincing many Soviets who longed for religious belief that it could never be something they themselves would attain...

...Neither of them is baptized...

...A percentage of the sales, however, remands to the state in taxes-a tax which sustains the very organs which up to now have monitored and regulated the church...

...Vocal critics of church-state collusion have been attacked by unidentified assailants in Moscow and Leningrad...

...Belief is rarely a matter of discussion...

...They uncharacteristically respected the Ukrainian identity of their new subjects, however, and restored their religious organization...

...It has grown quickly, and in unexpected ways...

...I thought maybe we could come to some kind of mutual arrangement" {blaf-the word "bribe" somehow doesn't capture the fullness of the term...

...The body, it is said, becomes comfortable within a coma...

...On visits there a decade ago, I could look down from the altar and see a sea of headscarves, an ocean of old women...

...They have killed it in me...

...The Department for External Church Relations is vastly unpopular among parish priests (its name, equally unwieldy in Russian, is simply shortened to "the Department...

...In a society where public transport is crowded and overburdened, he glides to appointments in limousines...

...Already, there are new Solovyovs, new Florenskys, struggling to be born...

...Today, the hierarchy-and it is, like any hierarchy, profoundly political in its jockeying for power and privilege-is a Soviet product, and the church organ for dealing with foreigners is state-conceived and state-influenced...

...In a grisly but symbolic assault, an unknown assailant followed him on his way to church, and sliced through his skull with an ax...

...Like any nomenklatura, they can only be moved from below...

...It is more profound than that...

...On September 8,1990, a vicious attack shook the entire Russian church...

...We would do well to engage them...

...Theology and religious awareness have sprung up in the Soviet Union like a long-kept family secret-always there, but never acknowledged...

...You must realize," a young Ukrainian priest told me, "that the Department gave ecumenism a bad name over here...

...Until 1686, Kiev had its own independent episcopal see...

...That resentment is seated in the contemporary corruption and arrogance of the Russian Orthodox hier-archs who still serve in the Ukraine...

...Her grandson was nestled in her lap, but her smile was bitter as her eyes looked from a richly etched face full of character, full of moral struggle: "...we have lost our faith...

...These scholars and others like them-historians, archeologists, students of architecture and philosophy-refused to deny the power of their religious beliefs...

...It is this sense of tragedy, this defacement of human aspiration, which so many observers of the Soviet scene fail to discern...

...In the dark days of the seventies, scholars in the Soviet Union like Dmitri Lichachev and Sergei Ivarantsev used to pack lecture halls with their impassioned analyses of ancient Rus and classical Byzantium...

...Stalin, when he so graciously suffered the church to exist in its present organizational form, reshaped the administration of a decimated body...

...Thus the dilemma of modern Orthodoxy in Russia rests upon a paradox...

...A few months later, the Bibles were showing up on the black market, selling for over a hundred roubles...

...Yet the fact is these are two wings of the same intellectual movement...

...Strategically, this resistance serves Moscow's desire to maintain central control over Orthodoxy in the rapidly changing USSR...

...Instead, they see the long lines waiting in the stores and the imminent collapse which seems to hover over the Soviet economy, and they can't help suppressing a surge of Western triumphalism...

...In the U.S., Ukrainian Eastern Rite Catholics have been forced by Rome to accept a celibate priesthood and Western "biritual" priests, as well as Roman (meaning, in America, Irish or Italian) devotions...

...Human discomfort has been finely tuned in the USSR...

...The Russian Orthodox, however, dominated by their clergy, suffer a profound inertia...

...The much-prized Bibles were distributed to the student body, numbering several hundred, and Metropolitan Alexei was profuse in his thanks...

...Some former dissidents have submitted to the temptation of empire-building, and some have shown a conservatism that is comfortable with intolerance...

...It is a manifestation of the hunger for holiness-widespread throughout the Soviet Union-a hunger which finds its inspiration deeply rooted in ancient Kiev...

...So was his plea...

...Much has been made by non-Ukrainians of the intense conflict between Eastern Catholic and Orthodox Christians in the Ukraine...

...It is the book of a believer and it violates virtually every assumption of the traditional Marxist literary establishment...

...We must learn, once more, how to see...

...That's impossible," I said...

...If the "person" is communal in essence-as opposed to the isolating emphasis placed on the "individual" in the West-then the restoration of faith is a part of the restoration of the community...

...With an exciting, well-edited journal called Amin, produced in pitifully small quantities in carbon copy, this former political prisoner now renounces any political ambitions and fosters a dialogue between believers and nonbelievers on fundamental questions of ethics and values...

...In that year, the Ukraine's religious identity was split by two forces...

...Where young couples wait up to twelve years for an apartment, he has a row of imposing residences...

...No money was taken...

...They were quick to recognize the "sovietization" of the Orthodox church, and they have rejected it with a fury that is likely to alter its future...

...I do not mean to suggest that dissent is a badge of competence...

...Corruption infects virtually every transaction...

...Father, please get her baptized," he said...

...The media here and in the USSR speculated that anti-Semites were to blame...

...In some of my own writing I have been guilty of dealing with Ukrainians as a function of somebody else...

...Yet most Slavic Orthodox in America originated far west of Russia...

...Like the Soviet system itself, the church is laden with bureaucracy...

...To most Western Sovietologists, Orthodoxy remains a mystery...

...In the United States, I teach at a tough-minded little bastion of the new secularism...

...In their penetration of the spirit of prerevolutionary Russia, they have asserted what we in the West have forgotten: that culture must express a common life, a shared soul...

...A bold critic and charismatic speaker, Menn had begun appearing on Soviet media, preaching forcefully to the uncatechized...

...But the explanation cannot stop at an indictment of this once stagnant but at least predictable economy...

...No wonder we have little understanding of their real concerns and know so little of the profound spiritual and religious search now animating the Soviet Union...

...He carried his assumptions too far, but his cynicism wasn't totally without justification...

...Village priests are now baptizing hundreds of adults at a time...

...Atheism has had the same effect on many Soviets: They do not know what it is, exactly, that they do not believe...

...Other possibilities, however, are more likely...

...I want to be a believer, but I can't...

...For many years, American institutes of Slavic studies virtually overlooked religion and its role under socialism...

...Ukrainians express a longing for an unambiguously recognized yet independent Ukrainian Orthodoxy...

...But, in 1686, Poland entered into an ill-named "Treaty of Eternal Peace" with Russia, which severed the Ukraine into "Catholic" and "Orthodox" halves...

...Yet now that the Soviets themselves have discovered the impoverishment of their ethics and of their imaginations, it is to Orthodoxy that they are turning...

...Now young parents lift up their children to see over the heads of the crowd...

...These "down-home boys" turned out to be far less tractable than anticipated...

...The ecumenism it fosters is equally unpopular...

...Yet he also maintained the grand style of his predecessors...

...As long as the patriarch of Moscow suppresses the restoration of an independent Kievan patriarchate, he also assures the continued growth of the Eastern Rite Catholic movement, a movement unhindered by the civil government since last year's meeting between Mikhail Gorbachev and Pope John Paul II...

...The Russian Orthodox church is, after all, a profoundly Soviet institution...

...With his imposing white beard and robes, his urbane and polished presence, he captures the affection of Western visitors...

...An astute, ninety-three-year-old Ukrainian then serving as bishop in the United States (and representing the vast majority of exiled Ukrainian Orthodox), Mstyslav has fought for recognition of his autocephalous Ukrainian movement among other Orthodox in the West...

...In a particularly poignant confession, an older woman from Smolensk who had been a party member her entire life confided to me, "All we hoped for, all we believed in, all we sacrificed for-were lies...

...The rush to Rome now taking place in the western provinces of the Ukraine is actually a rush away from Moscow, which suppressed (and would still suppress, if it could) the Eastern Rite Ukrainian Catholics with the help of the Russian Orthodox hierarchy...

...Now they long for a relational identity, an identity rooted in the consubstantiality of the Trinity itself...

...The results, however, can be tragic...

...An elaborate system of accountability, not likely to change under the new law, places government and church in constant contact, and contact elicits pressure...

...But you're my friend," he said, "and you're a deacon...

...But among these people there lies a talent which the church has yet to tap...

...Like many converted priests from the intelligentsia, Menn was an ethnic Jew...

...We look at the bitter struggles between Uniates (those who seek to retain their Eastern liturgy and practice under the jurisdiction of Rome) and the Orthodox as manifestations of "nationalism...

...Now they are paying the price...

...Dominated by Russian Orthodox centralism in the East and Roman centralism in the West, both have been marginalized by the communities with whom they share faith and tradition...

...and Canada...

...Some courageous Orthodox make an attempt at resuscitation...

...Thus the patriarchate of Moscow seems willing to preside over a shrunken Orthodoxy in its western eparchies rather than witness the growth of a neighboring Ukrainian Orthodox patriarchate...

...Mipoteryali svoyu veru...

...A friend of mine, a workout partner at the gym, asked me in April if I could arrange a church wedding for him and his bride...

...By no means is its future success assured...

...My students often profess to be believers, but they do not know precisely what they believe...

...Russian Orthodoxy's attitude toward women, so often cited in the West, must be understood as part of this larger problem...

...It was to him that the Ukrainians turned in an effort to revitalize the ancient patriarchate in Kiev...

...Misinterpreted, even trivialized in the media, the religious turmoil there cannot be understood as simply a "nationalist" movement...

...There are new movements, however, toward conciliation...

...Those who know the religious scene in Moscow have long looked to Father Alexander Menn as a voice for the future...

...A thirst for novelty infects the faith crisis of rationalist materialism...

...Today, the historical insights of these lay scholars challenge the best Orthodox seminary students...

...Even the secular establishment in the Soviet Union is taken up, at unguarded moments, with this new spiritual self-assertion...

...In July, the large Ukrainian Orthodox community in Canada won canonical recognition from the ecumenical patriarch in Constantinople...

...It requires laborious therapy to wake it up...

...As theologians find a new audience, it is the materialists-the scientific rationalists and the Communist dialecticians-who complain of their own moral crisis...

...Over the span of centuries, a process of Romanization subsequently impeded the free flow and development of the authentically Ukrainian tradition...

...My friend's cynicism was, in a way, innocent...

...He assumed that the church would operate according to his Soviet assumptions...

...Some church activists believe, rather, that Main's well-known objections to corruption in church-state contacts led to his martyrdom...

...This role entitled me to meals and a cot in a tiny room that I shared with a tall Ukrainian (Ukrainians constitute a solid majority of the divinity students in all "Russian" Orthodox seminaries...

...Their native traditions were sometimes suppressed, however, by Russian leaders...

...I worked with Poresh and his friend, the Leningrad philosopher Konstantin Ivanov, for the Society for an Open Christianity...

...Victims of their critics' own nationalism, both Ukrainian Orthodox and Eastern Rite Ukrainians are persistently accused of "nationalism" by those who have denied them an identity...

...Corruption can flourish in a sovietized administration that keeps each organ of the institutionalized body isolated from all the others...

...There are new theological insights in Russia, Byelorussia, and the Ukraine which can help shape the way we in the West look at the world...

...They live well-as do their priests-and like officials in the Communist party, enjoy better accommodations, more money, and the same vested interest in a closed system...

...The present Orthodox hierarchy-the same bishops who have received the congratulations of the West for the new Orthodox awakening in the Soviet Union-are the very bishops who presided over the church's long and often artificially induced sleep...

...The Communists, after all, have been startlingly effective in their eradication of religious awareness...

...Under the Soviet system, people found themselves defined in terms of their social function...

...Mail is lost, packages rifled and stolen, telegrams paid for but never delivered, dry-cleaning lifted...

...In the former, pre-glasnost order, seminaries were far more likely to admit pliant village boys from the Ukraine than troublesome urban intellectuals...

...TV hypnotists, UFO reports, and New Age ideas have invaded Soviet popular culture...

...Like those Old English poems which lament the passing of a Roman-Celtic civilization that the Anglo-Saxons themselves had destroyed, a similar lament has seized the Slavs in the USSR for the spirit of Christian Rus' which the secular powers have almost crushed in their people...

...That lament leads directly to the second, compelling theme: that of a "lost faith...

...Always intellectually engaged with the West, and always suffering under the Russian Orthodox impulse to reject all Western influence, the Orthodox church in the Ukraine seeks not only national or political independence but the respiritualization of personhood...

...My project in Leningrad concentrated on analyzing the growing influence of the church in secular society-the arts, literature, and popular culture...

...The Orthodox tradition in Russia, Byelorussia, and the Ukraine-and I include the Eastern Rite or "Uniate" Catholics as a part of that tradition-is now reawakening within this atmosphere of lost faith and lamentation...

...Bone-weary and with fallen arches, most Russians are far removed from power and its sources in Moscow, as far removed as most of our sources of information about the USSR...

...All sense of an ethos has dissipated any consensus on values, and in that gaping black hole the Soviet system seems to be falling in on itself...