Apostles from the past…

“Apostles from all over the world, gathered together here…”: it sounds like a caress grafted with our childhood memories, somewhere in our homeland, in the small picturesque chapel or the peripatetic parish church, but always in the One Church of Christ, the Church of great sacrifices and great miracles. Hymns to the Mother of the Redeemer, the Mother and consolation of the Orthodox of all, the Greeks and those from abroad. The feast of the Assumption is a celebration of the unity of the Church. From these far-off clouds the Apostles were snatched and carried to the humble house of Gethsemane to bury the Virgin Mary. The Virgin Mary of silence, of tears, of pains, of the unjust, of strangers, of slaves, the Terrible Protection of the persecuted, of the afflicted the Paramythia, of Life itself the Great Mother.

Following in the footsteps of the Apostles, we left the ancestral land of our ancestors, “where fescue and wild mint grew and the earth produced its first cyclamen”, bathed in the grace of the Holy Spirit, anchored for two thousand years in faith in the Triune God. And we have come almost to the edge of the world and we send our voice from beyond, a voice of the early Christian voice, the voice of a Church now almost established. We appeal to our blessed brother countrymen, who still speak the language of the ancient philosophers and the Holy Fathers, of that people who first accepted the preaching of Paul the First. The Congo-Brazzaville Co-opted Church knows where it is a word, even if its voice comes from beyond. The Apostles at the Virgin’s bedside offered their presence, and from that bed to Her empty tomb they fell… How could the Mother of Life be defeated by death? Were the conditions of nature truly defeated in Thee, O Virgin of the Undead! In the far reaches of Africa, therefore, this Mother we invoke, this Unity of the Church of Christ we long for. We speak holy to the same Mother, in the same God-given embrace we rest. To Her we turn in sorrows other than those of the homeland, which always remain sorrows, however, in this same Mother we find refuge.

We are walking in a land that does not resemble the blessed land of Greece, but which thirstily accepts the Grace of God, in a land that has learned to worship the True God in recent years and to build churches, sometimes makeshift and sometimes permanent, but it is building them! And in them it worships God, revealed to man in Christ Jesus, and prays in inseparable unity with the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, as expressed around the funereal and vivid bed of the Virgin, where the Apostles came from beyond. We walk in a land where temptations of many shapes and forms and demons are lurking to seize human immortal souls, to tarnish the divine breath that breathed them and to lure them into the dark and irredeemable passages of Hades through magic, sacrifices, idols and infernal rites. Listen to this voice from the past, brothers, and bind yourselves to the Mother of the Orthodox, to consolidate the missionary struggle which was started by Greek priestly fighters before us and which we, obeying the Church, continue. Be, brothers, the bridges so that the “Hail” of the victory of Death may be heard even in the most inaccessible parts of this edge of the equator, so that in the arms of the same Mother “in one mouth and one heart” the Name of the All-God and His mercies may always be “with all of us”.

† Brazzaville and Gabon Panteleimon