Magyar Egyház, 1974 (53. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

1974-04-01 / 4. szám

8

MAGYAR EGYHÁZ

5. Talking to God in our private prayer, it is absolutely impossible to ridicule, to abuse or to hurt our fellowmen. When I say in my prayer, my Father, it strikes my mind that God is also the Father of all my fellowmen. And this feeling urges me to love all men, to help them to overcome their faults and ask God to forgive them and help them ... as I ask Him to forgive me and help me in my struggle against my own sins and faults.

6. Talking to God in your private prayer, you feel like a child whom his parents hold in their arms. You feel secure. You are not alone, God is with you.

This short article is based upon this part of the Bible:

Jesus said: “When you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.” Matt. 6.

Maybe you are very angry, depressed, sorrowful, complaining and unhappy right now.... if you just could bow your head and say: “My Father... Try it today. Rev. Stephen Kovács

Guard at the Sepulcher

I was a Roman soldier in my prime;

Now age is on me, and the yoke of time.

I saw your Risen Christ, for I am he Who reached the hyssop to Him on the tree,

And I am one of two who watched beside The sepulcher of Him we crucified.

All that last night I watched with sleepless eyes; Great stars arose and crept across the skies.

The world was all too still for mortal rest,

For pitiless thoughts were busy in the breast.

The night was long, so long it seemed at last I had grown old and a long life had passed.

Far off, the hills of Moab, touched with light,

Were swimming in the hallow of the night.

I saw Jerusalem all wrapped in cloud,

Stretched like a dead thing folded in a shroud.

Once in the pauses of our whispered talk I heard a something on the garden walk.

Perhaps it was a crisp leaf lightly stirred —

Perhaps the dream-note of a waking bird.

Then suddenly an angel, burning white,

Came down with earthquake in the breaking light, And rolled the great stone from the sepulcher, Mixing the morning with a scent of myrrh.

And lo, the Dead had risen with the day:

The Man of Mystery had gone His way!

Years have I wandered, carrying my shame;

Now let the tooth of time eat out my name.

For we, who all the wonder might have told,

Kept silence, for our mouths were stopt with gold.

The letter below, photographically reproduced from The Lutheran, April 3, 1974, was written by Solzhenitsyn and appeared in Russian in the Eastern Churches Review. For years Solzhenitsyn has taken a strong stand against the church’s accommodation to the Communist government.

Your pastoral letter said that parents should inculcate in their children, along with a love for their native land, a love for the church (and presumably for the faith itself?) and that they should reinforce this love by their own good example.

As I heard this there rose up before me my own childhood, the many church services I attended, and the impression they made on me, singular in freshness and purity, which no personal suffering and no intellectual theories were able later to erase.

But why did you address this honest appeal only to Russian emigres? What about our children— should we inspire in them a love of the church or not?

We are robbing our children when we deprive them of something they can never experience again —the pure angelic perception of worship. Yet the ways of bringing them up in the faith are totally barred to them. The right to continue the faith of their fathers is annulled, as is the right of parents to bring up their children in their own outlook on life— while you, hierarchs of the church, have accommodated yourselves to this, even abetting it and finding in it a true sign of freedom of religion.

A state of affairs, that is, in which we have to hand over our defenseless children into the domain of atheist propaganda of the most primitive and dishonest kind.

A situation in which our young people who have been snatched away from the Christian faith—lest they should be infected by it—are left for their moral upbringing only the abyss between the propagandist’s notebook and the criminal code.

We have lost the radiant ethical atmosphere of Christianity in which for a milleniuin our morals were grounded. We have forfeited our way of life, our outlook on the world, our folklore, even the very name by which the Russian peasant was known (krestianin, that is Christian). We are losing the last features and marks of a Christian people. Can this really not be the principal concern of the Russian patriarch?

The Russian church expresses its concern about any evil in distant Asia or Africa. It never has any