This excerpt is from “A Call From the Holy Mountain” by Elder Ephraim, written in 1974 (based on the text) and published in English in 1991. Elder Ephraim covers many aspects of the life of the Church, speaking to both monks and laymen. These words may be difficult to hear; they are written by the greatest missionary to America of our times. Let us take heed to stand firm on the teachings of our holy Elder Ephraim lest we fall away from the narrow path.
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“Christ's Church is Catholic in the sense that it possesses the entire fullness of the truth and the grace to illuminate and redeem the world; it is, moreover, Catholic in the sense that it tends not to conquer but to sanctify the world. The Head of the Church is Christ and we are members of it connected by the common faith in conjunction with love.” “The history of the Church is the story of its struggle to sanctify its faithful.”
“…mere knowledge of things divine cannot save us; it is the taste, indeed, the experience of a life in Christ that will do so. And this is so because Christian truth is not an intellectual affair but a living experience of the dogmatic and moral doctrines of the faith and a mysterious and mystic communication between the faithful and its Founder.” “In cases of deliberate or indeliberate deviation from tradition, judgement has always been, is and shall be pronounced by the sound public opinion of the Church which by right intervenes and restores peace in the Church; peace not truth, for the grace and the truth never abandon the Divine Body of the Church. It abandons those who in wavering ‘concerning faith have made shipwreck, and betray the birthright of the common heritage of those ‘taxed’ in the heavens.”
“Satan did his best to snatch away countless men from the bosom of the Church and to present it before the world as being divided and weak. Now he is again doing his best to unite it into a peculiar union of his own inspiration, using as leaven the formula of ‘love.’ Such has been the plethoric use and abuse of this ‘love’ by so many that others neither wish to hear nor talk about love.”
“The rule is that where much is being said about a virtue, that virtue is not to be found there. The voice raised in favor of that virtue is the cry of its absence. This is the case with the ‘love’ of all those who believe that they should contribute towards the realization of the Lord's wish ‘that they all may be one.’ Let us be more specific. They say that we Orthodox should unite with the Roman Catholics and then with the Protestants and with all the known and unknown heresies conceived by the Devil in the name of Christianity. After all Christians without exception unite, they should then unite with the Mohammedans, the Jews, and in extension with the Buddhists, Brahmins, Shintoists and with all the religions of the universe in general. This pan-heretical alchemy is being inspired through the so-called World Council of Churches. We think that the term is not true to the fact, for it does not concern a World Council of Churches but a World Council of Will Worship.”
“The strong position taken up by Father George Florovsky that ‘Orthodoxy's mission is to be a martyr and ‘bear witness unto the truth'’ may be fulfilled only with an Orthodox Ecumenism described by Father Spyridon Bilialis in his book, Orthodoxy and Papism. ‘We believe that it is high time that the Orthodox Church came forth united before the world and promoted its own Orthodox Ecumenism by setting up purely orthodox ecumenical rostrums where from in loud voices it would proclaim 'urbi et orbi' that Orthodoxy alone is today the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church of Christ.’”
“We feel no animosity against any men because of their heresy or their faithlessness, but we shall never come to love faithlessness or heresy for the sake of men, because if we do we shall be alienated from God.” “Christianity is the soul, the life and the hope of the world.” “There have always been laymen with hearts of monks; and there have always been monks with hearts of laymen. It is not the place but the means that makes the man. Repentance, my brethren and Fathers in Christ, as Saint John of Sinai says, is a renewal of Baptism; it is the greatest source of redemption following Baptism Let us remember the steadfast knock of repentance on the gates of the Kingdom. ‘Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.’”
Read the full text here.
