Speech of His Beatitude Metropolitan Epiphanius of
Kyiv and All Ukraine at the assembly on the occasion of the first anniversary
of His enthronement. The solemn event was held on February 3, 2020 at the Kiev
International Conference Center "Park", where more than 600 highly
respected guests gathered to greet the Primate of the Orthodox Church of
Ukraine. They include representatives of the clergy, the Ukrainian political
parties, the diplomatic corps, the art elite and business.
***
Glory to Jesus Christ,
dear brothers and sisters! Good evening! And, this evening is truly “good”! I
am touched that so many people responded and came here to our meeting to speak
together about our Church, its future and Ukraine. About the things that the
Christian love and service to our neighbors inspire us to do.
We are all different in
this room. That’s because each human being is created by God as a unique
personality. For this very reason we can differ in our views and beliefs, our
tastes, our interests, our attitude to politics and many other things. God has
endowed us with different talents that we apply in different areas. But at the
same time, we are all one, as the children of God; we are brothers and sisters
to each other; we are one human family. Also, all of us, regardless of our
place of birth or whether we live here or thousands of kilometers away, are
united by our love for Ukraine, our regard for its present and future.
In our shared history,
everything happened as it did. There are pages of sufferings and triumphs,
terrible hardships and martyrdom, separations and confrontations, but also
pages of unity and progress, glorious accomplishments and heroism. There were
sad and joyful moments. Even if we wanted to, we wouldn’t be able to
change what had already happened, we can influence the way we go forward. And
I want to say that we are building a Church that accepts people as they are, to
give everyone an opportunity and resources to be better. A Church that creates
no obstacles on the road to God but invites everyone to step over the threshold
of the house of God. The Church that is being built upon love.
The Orthodox Church of
Ukraine is open to all. And this is our main point of difference.
The Church must be and
wants to be where it is needed. In the center of a prosperous city such
as Kyiv and in a poor neighborhood of a small town. On a bustling street of a
metropolis and in a small rural community. In the Donbass and Galicia, over the
Dnipro river and in Crimea, in Zakarpattia and in Odesa, where I was born, as
well as in Bukovina, where I grew up. Among the rich and the poor. Among those
who dial a phone number by pressing buttons, those who swipe a glass screen, or
even those who rotate a dial. Wherever there is faith and wherever there are
people who identify themselves with the Orthodox Church of Ukraine.
Today, we are in a
situation where sociological surveys show that there are more people, belonging
to the Local Church of Ukraine, than there are our parishes, which they may
join. Most barriers are artificial ones. They are designed to provoke
conflicts and divide people. We see how skillfully these traps are placed. In
our service we cannot respond to force by force, to hatred with hatred. Our
path is not the path of injuria; it is a way of forgiveness and building trust.
It is a long journey that for the Local Church of Ukraine may take longer than
the lifetime of each of us, but it is the way that our Lord Jesus Christ has
showed to us and with which He has blessed us.
A year ago, we regained
our unity and continued our progress. This is the course, which was started
exactly on those Dnipro hills, where we are now with you, by Saint Volodymyr
the Great over a thousand years ago. The course that was interrupted but was
never terminated.
Although I was elected
in council as the first Primate of the universally proclaimed, recognized
autocephalous Orthodox Church of Ukraine, but there were more than one hundred
hierarchs of Kyiv sat on this throne before me. A year ago, our
Orthodox Church took its place in the Diptychs, as an autocephalous one, and we
are therefore now responsible for our works and our decisions. These
decisions go far beyond the temples in terms of their influence and
consequences. The Church is a part of the society backbone of Ukraine. An
autocephalous Ukrainian Church has never been a threat to Ukrainian society,
but the Church, which was losing both its Kyiv centralism and Ukrainian
identity, was being transformed into an instrument of the imperial state.
Ukraine is compelled to
protect itself from aggression. Hundreds of chaplains from the Orthodox
Church of Ukraine serve among the Ukrainian military, defending Ukraine. Our
priests are where there is pain, where there is challenge, where there is a
need for charity or mercy. They share anxious and joyful moments with society.
They should be integrated into peoples’ lives and understand them in all their
diversity.
How to start a happy and
strong family, find your vocation and build a career, deal with an
apartment building co-owners association, what to do with the land market, to
keep a family budget, pay taxes, serve in the army, prepare for an independent
external evaluation (ZNO), travel for work as migrant laborer and return home?
These are all issues that concern Ukrainians. The Church cannot and should not
substitute their decisions and cannot be an expert in every question. But the
Church can and should always be close by, as a counselor, as a
friend, as a mentor, and as a shepherd.
Our mission is to
spiritually educate a person, to purify a human soul through the
Sacraments, to assist in embodying the Law of God in a person’s own life. Not
through fear, by order, or by force, but by the enhanced spiritual experience
and knowledge persons and society can find right answers to the questions of
concern.
In the history of
Ukraine, it is difficult to find an institution more attuned to the Ukrainian
people than the autocephalous Ukrainian Church. And as a loving mother, it
opens its arms to all its children.
However, the Church is
relevant not only in the context of tradition. The Church has been and can be
the meeting point for geographies, times and worlds. The
Orthodox Church of Ukraine provides an opportunity to interact with brothers
from other Orthodox Churches, because we are a local part of the One Church of
Christ. The word “Eucharist” is translated from the Greek “thanksgiving,”
defining the principles of common worship, of communion among the Churches in
unity of faith and sacraments.
Today, we express our gratitude
first to our Mother Church of Constantinople, to the second in honor
Alexandrian Patriarchate, to the Church of Greece, to the Mount Athos
monasteries for this unity and support. Within the past year, the OCU believers
have made many pilgrimage trips.
This is the renewal of
the connections which, in the times of the Holy Princes Volodymyr the Great and
Yaroslav the Wise, revealed to our ancestors the treasures of the spiritual and
material culture of the Greco-Roman world. The connections that continued
through fraternal schools, through the Academies, founded by the saint Prince
Kostiantyn of Ostroh and Metropolitan Petro Mohyla.
The church was the
backbone of international relations long before the word “globalization” was
coined. The recognition of OCU is today an ongoing process, which was
fruitful last year – both before and after the political elections, – and is in
progress now. It is a spiritual process and not a political one, although it
also has a political dimension for Ukraine, asserting its identity.
It is just the
beginning. Last autumn I visited the United States of America to receive the
Patriarch Athenagoras Human Rights Award. The media, professional and political
interest which the Orthodox Church of Ukraine was welcomed with in the United
States of America, show an understanding of the importance of our Church’s role
in the lives of Ukrainians, and therefore for the future of Ukraine and of
Europe.
In Washington, and then
again a few days ago in Kyiv, we met with the US Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo, and spoke about the rights of those who are under the oppression of
occupation in Crimea and the Donbas, about the rights of all people, not just
those who would worship in our churches. We can call it other open doors of the
Church, including for the complex processes of peace-making, for the release of
and prisoners of war from captivity, for an end to occupation and for
reintegration.
The Orthodox Church of
Ukraine is a Church, which goes through all the challenges together
with its nation, the Church, which at the moment when our country is in
trouble, should be and IS with its people. And a high level
of confidence in the Church also means a high level of responsibility. The
Church shares the dream of every Ukrainian and of previous generations – to see
Ukraine be a place where all may enjoy a decent and happy life.
The path to this dream
lies through our daily work, through, as Winston Churchill put it, our “blood,
labor, tears and sweat.” For although he said this about the war with an
external enemy 80 years ago, such a vision is always relevant to the
Church, since our struggle against evil in ourselves and in the world
around us is our daily work.
The Church should ask
questions: how does the content of our souls affect the way we work with our
hands or heads? How honest and conscientious are we? How
productive are we? Can we do better? Are we capable of more? Can we reach the
heights not by heroic effort but by planned daily work? The Church has
an influence on how behavior culture is shaped in all spheres of life and must
be more active in this area.
After many decades and
even centuries of despair, looting, and rights unprotected, we should start to
learn to investing the long term, be more strategic, to do better work, and to
plan for eventual results. Our doors are open also for difficult
discussions about ourselves, about how to overcome the inertia of
suffering, acceptance of pain, long-standing trauma, and the expectation of
betrayal.
One of the most
difficult discourses that we have now and that is ahead of us is the discourse
about family values. I hear many appeals for the protection of family values and they resonate in my heart. At the same
time, we have to understand that values are not created as a directive and are not
protected only by regulation. They should be cultivated and lived through as an
experience. If a person was abused in the family, it will be difficult to talk
to him/her only about making strengthening of the family a priority value.
We need to understand
how to protect love and dignity inside a family. How not to neglect
the sacrament of marriage, how to help families strengthen the foundation of
their safety. Demographic scientists alert us that the crisis of low birth
rates and high mortality in Ukraine has become a challenge for the Ukrainian
state itself. There are no longer 52 million of us. Exact number cannot
be known, but we must end the imperial Russian and Soviet heritage of treating
human life as an expendable material.
Every life is a gift of
God and its appearance and growth in peace and grace is possible when there is
love. A strong family also means a respect for one another, continuous concern
about the well-being of each another, for emotional health, physical state, and
freedom from addictions and abuse. We should and must talk about the
family in the context of a modern society. Then, it will become clear where
migration is truly for wotk, and where it is an attempt to escape from
oneself. What can we do so that children didn’t grow up without
parental care? What can we do so that parents were not afraid to have children?
So that they were not afraid to lose themselves in household worries, not
afraid they will lose the quality of life or afraid of responsibility and not
only in family matters?
Having its own voice and
opinion, the Church is open for a dialogue and exchange of views.
The dreams of many
Ukrainians for rapid prosperity are often a reaction to the fear of poverty.
Within recent decades millions of Ukrainians have, certainly, improved their
living conditions, although by many indicators we are still far behind the most
developed nations of the world. Communal apartments, the lack of and
inaccessibility of basic household goods, the coequality in poverty, in which
millions of Ukrainians lived only two or three generations ago, has now pass
into history, just as has hand laundering or unavailability of radios,
televisions or telephones. Today most Ukrainians wear shoes and clothes which
the previous generations could only dream of, eat foods, which their ancestors
never tasted.
Ukrainians tell
sociologists that they are becoming wealthier, but also they believe their
condition is socially vulnerable. We must start speaking about how to
accept changes that are taking place inside and around us; how to stop
mindlessly accumulating; how not to become dependent on status
attributes; how to be more self-sufficient and be able
to feel joy from simple things; how not to despise love by choosing
bright packaging over substance.
Our Church is open for
dialogue with wounded souls, so that with the help of God, every person could
find themselves, nurture the good, and fight with the bad.
The flipside of
vulnerability is striving to protect oneself through status and the
aspiration to gain power through any means necessary is often a
reaction to vulnerability. Then power is not perceived as taught by
the Lord, but meaning that it becomes a tool of domination rather than service.
And, this is not confined to some individual cases, but it’s a generalized
challenge which affects the whole complexity of relations between a state and
its citizens. Power as domination, despotism, instead of leadership,
have no hope of a different reaction from the people than the revolutionary
resistance, the Maidan. Our society today is in a state in which it, when it
cannot afford new shocks, new victims, and new forceful confrontations without
fatal consequences, even if they result from good intentions.
It is the high time to
that we recast leadership as service, as a means for contributing to a common
goal. What can we do to make serving easier for those who seek to serve?
What can we do to protect leadership without disrespecting those who cannot or
do not wish to lead? How do we remain alert to outrage and prevent it from
becoming a threat? Here, too, Church is open for dialogue and for seeking the
best answers.
These are some of the
challenges we face, but others will follow. What will happen with the climate
and environment? How can we conserve energy? How can we learn not to hurt the
environment, how to preserve resources? That is, how can we fulfill our
obligation given to us by the Creator to be stewards of nature, taking
advantage of its riches, while not devastating or destroying it? How should we think
about sustainability, look ahead into the years ahead, and consider our next
steps? These are common concerns of young people who are in fear that they will
have to deal with the consequences of decisions made by previous generations.
Ukraine with its
picturesque four seasons, plentiful land, clean water, forests and steppes is a little
paradise compared to many countries in the world. What should we do
not to ruin it all, not to lose fertility, beauty and diversity? What should we
do not to lose your land but let the land deliver? How smaller communities will
survive in a more urbanized environment?
The Church is not an
expert in ecology or economics, and does not wish to become one. But, the
Church sees the importance of those issues, their moral dimension, which is
within its area of responsibility, and therefore it is open to being a meeting
place for experts, entrepreneurs, farmers, and local citizens, who seek
answers.
These and other problems
concern anyone who reflects about how they affect our lives.
What is the role of the
Church in solving these problems?
Attempts to politicize
or use the Church to accomplish some ephemeral tasks, trying only to take
advantage of the Church’s authority and capabilities, while not heading the
Church or its teachings, narrow religious life to something private, and leave
society isolated and in peril.
We need a different
Church, a Church, which plays an important and unique role in the life of
society, while remaining a spiritual rather than a political power, beyond
ideological constraints, free from political fights or business interests. It is a
Church with an active parish life, these being both the basic element and the
public face of the life of the Church.
This is the Church,
which is a place of sincere prayer. It is a Church with monasteries, with
modern Orthodox educational institutions and foundations, which strengthen the
Church and help it be a part of a public dialogue. This is the Church, where
honest and frank conversations take place. It is the Church, which elevates
itself and the world around it. It is the Local Church that loves and teaches
to love its homeland. It is the Church that both preaches love in words and
exemplifies love in its real life.
It is the Church, which
has a voice and calls out, “Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is
merciful” (Luke 6:36), “be then complete in righteousness, even as your Father
in heaven is complete” (Matt. 5:48). It is not by our own effort that we can
accomplish this, but, as the Holy Scripture says, “The things which are
impossible with men are possible with God” (Luke 18:27).
To Him be glory for ever
and ever!
Source: pomisna.info,
pomisna.info
