Dear In Communion reader,
The lead article in this issue of In Communion began in an unlikely location – in front of a television screen. A few months ago Nancy and I spent an evening watching Sophie Scholl – The Final Days, an Oscar-nominated movie about a small group of young German anti-Nazi resisters who called themselves the White Rose. All were executed in 1943. The day after seeing the film, I began researching the White Rose. I soon discovered that one of the groups’s co-founders, Alexander Schmorell, was a devout Orthodox Christian who will be canonized as a passion bearer. It has been a blessing learning more about this extraordinary young man.
Doing what we can to make the lives of such modern witnesses better known – St Maria Skobtsova of Paris is another example – has been a major element in the work of the Orthodox Peace Fellowship.
Brandon Frazier shares memories of what it was like to be a foot soldier in Iraq and now having to live with hellish memories of what happens when, with the slightest movement of pressure, a trigger is pulled and someone’s life is cut short.
Two of our authors, Al Raboteau and Eric Simpson, write about the poor, with Al concentrating on writings from the Church Fathers plus several 20th-century Christians, and Eric explaining what Christ meant in saying the always surprising words, “Blessed are you poor.”
Finally Sergei Romanov, an OPF member in Russia who is on the staff of the museum where Leo Tolstoy lived, gives us a glimpse of how the famous author who (using words as weapons) declared war on the Orthodox Church, in fact lived a more Orthodox spiritual life than I, for one, ever imagined.
These are a subjects of significance for all Orthodox Christians, though it is rare to hear about them in other Orthodox journals or to find similar material on other Orthodox web sites.
We cannot carry on our work without the help of our readers. Thank you for whatever you manage to send, even if only once a year. We are deeply grateful to those who manage to make monthly or quarterly donations — such help makes a huge difference.
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In Christ’s peace,
Jim Forest
editor
❖ IN COMMUNION / Feast of St. Ephrem the Syrian / Winter 2011/ Issue 59
No act is more violent than taking another’s life. Four years of my life were defined by training to commit, attempting to commit or committing these very acts of violence. During that period I was one of the unfortunate Marines put into situations where murder seemed to be my only option. For me, this taking of lives was only half of the sad and violent story that was my life from ages 18 to 22. The other half of the story is one that most people do not consider when they sign the military contract that gives away the right to their own lives.
In his book Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire, the historian Peter Brown argues that “a revolution in the social imagination” occurred between 300 and 600 AD and that it was closely associated with “the rise to power of the Christian bishop.” In that three-century period, Brown notes, the Christian bishop was regarded “as the guardian of the poor.” In 362 the last pagan emperor, Julian “the Apostate,” wrote to a pagan priest, “For it is disgraceful that, when no Jew ever has to beg, and the impious Galileans [the Christians] support not only their own poor but ours as well, all men see that our people lack aid from us.”
The special identification of the poor with Christ is stated even more boldly in his sermon “On Almsgiving”:
I once had a job working in an office at a shopping mall and spent most of my time there. After dark, I would turn out all the lights except the desk lamp and sit at my desk and write. Not knowing I was there in the dark, a homeless woman would arrive with a few cardboard boxes, put together a makeshift compartment to sleep in and situate it just outside the office in the cold air in a little cubbyhole that could not be seen from the street. I would sometimes hear her muttering to herself. On some nights when she thought she was alone and did not know that there was someone else on the other side of the stucco wall against which she propped her head, I could hear her softly sobbing to herself as I sat in a comfortable office writing book reviews and other assorted items on a computer screen. Here we were, me in the camp of the “haves” (relatively speaking) and she in the camp of the “have-nots.” We were less than three feet away from each other, separated only by a thin wall, each of us lost in our own universe as if the other were light years away.
The outer aspect of prayer is as necessary as the inner one. Both serve to express a person’s spiritual experience. Christian prayer is traditionally accompanied by visible signs of reverence: bowing one’s head, raising one’s hands to heaven, and kneeling. Movement and gesture add to and deepen the words and assist in inner concentration.
Last June, the Church launched an appeal in favor of severer norms to reduce abortions in the country, in response to worries about the decreasing size of the population. At that time Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin said that “in Soviet times we were accustomed to abortion and to consider it an inevitable part of our legal reality with no way of turning back. But today we see that it is possible to turn back quite a bit.” Even young people without ties to the Church or any other religious institution, he said, wish to see a reduction in the number of abortions.
These are extracts from recent postings to the OPF’s e-mail discussion list. If you are an OPF member and wish to take part, contact Mark Pearson or Jim Forest.
Silent as a Stone
Atheist Delusions
The Isle of Monte Cristo: 
