Quite contrary to you, I was very much rejoicing over this Epistle; and let me explain why.
The spirit of this Epistle shows that our Church still adheres to the guidelines, set by blessed Metropolitan Philaret, and is not willing to compromize its standing in Truth in favor of ecumenical unity and false love. In the same time, it soberly re-estimates the situation in the modern world of apostasy, pointing out the problems to be overcome by Russian People in the homeland. God help us all to overcome this heritage (or, rather, garbage) left to us by those faith-compromising bishops, apostatic priests and godless authorities which did so much damage to the spirituality of our people...
Now the times changed, and so did the devil's devices. There are very few priests and bishops now who are working part-time as government security officers, but it doesn't mean that the situation improved. Now, the main thing is worldwide, and at first sight inexplicable, craze for unification. It can be seen everywhere — smaller corporations are aquired by bigger ones, huge ones merge together, Europe unites into one state, Catholics and protestants have almost sorted out their theological differences and are ready to enter into communion with each other, and so on. There must be some very powerful spirit which is pushing everybody together. And all this is accompanied by increasing lukewarmness of faith, disasterous decline in piety, dechristianization and paganization of modern society (those who live in large cities can see that especially clearly). But the worst of all, even many of local Orthodox Churches were carried away with this «wind of change».
And this is why I approve of the stand of our Bishops who're not in the rush to any kind of unification, which would be based not on EDINOMYSLIJE, but on «negotiations» and compromises.
When we will have EDINONYSLIJE — there will be no need to negotiate, work out documents and social concepts — suddenly, we'll just realize, that we're together, even if we were to resist this unification with all our efforts.
And I do believe it will happen.
But I also believe it has not happened yet.
Having written all this, I'm already prepared to be called fanatic, zealot, and narrow-minded sectarian by the liberal orthodox, who're dreaming about and meditating on world peace, unity and other ruses of antichrist's spirit set up for us, lukewarm Christians of last times, by devil... And one of his most efficient counter-measures against this kind of messages is ridicule, scornful pride, and branding of those who're not afraid to voice them as narrow-minded fanatics, or (which is a more recent invention) zealots devoid of brotherly love.
God help us all, and especially those of us, who're earnestly searching for Truth — both here in diaspora and in our blessed Homeland.
To forum Administration: I want to apologize for writing in English; believe me, if I were allowed to install russian support on my computer, I would write in normal language ... But since the original letter was in English, so is the answer to it.
