Life of Prayer and Worship
at the Church of Our Lady of the Angels

We are a Western Rite Religious Community of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, which is a semi-autonomous jurisdiction of the Russian Orthodox Church. We follow the calendar of the Russian Orthodox Church, the Julian Calendar, and administer her sacred mysteries. This means that our lives are lived in the same calendar that the Lord Jesus used and which the English-speaking Church used until the mid-eighteenth century. As a Western Rite Community, we have generously been granted the privilege of celebrating the rites of the Western Church, which for us means the Orthodox worship of the British Isles — from the Celtic saints until the conquest of Britain by Norman troops under the banner of the Pope of the Roman Patriarchate, Alexander II.

In practical terms, if you are an Anglo-Catholic or a Roman Catholic familiar with the Latin Mass, you will instantly recognize our daily Eucharist. Our Mass is celebrated in dignified English with sung Latin Mass settings. If you have prayed Evensong among Catholic-minded Anglicans or have visited an English Cathedral, then you have experienced the atmosphere of our Divine Office.

Members and friends of our Community gather several times a day before a consecrated Altar for worship. We are deeply humbled as this has lately become a burying "ground" (through Antimins) for a small part of the sacred remains of Queen Victoria's granddaughter, the Grand Duchess Elizabeth. This saint had sold all that she had following her husband's death, entered religious life as an Orthodox nun, and established the Martha and Mary Home to give succor to orphans and the poor of Moscow, which eventually would house the Sisters of Love and Mercy, which she established. During the atheistic chaos of the Bolshevik Revolution, St. Elizabeth, along with other holy people of twentieth-century White Russia, was pushed into an abandoned mineshaft into which hand grenades were thrown. An eyewitness described her humility and meekness as she sought to bandage others who were injured before her own violent death. The life of St. Elizabeth the New Martyr is well attested and edifies all who learn about her.

The privilege of being an interment site for Elizabeth (however humbly) is a gift from our Primate and Metropolitan Hilarion. For St. Elizabth the New Martyr was grandaughter of the Head of the Anglican Communion, Queen Victoria. The prayers prayed by that household came down to Anglicans from the Orthodox saints of modern-day Atlantic Coast Ireland and Scotland, though filtered and revised through missionaries of the Roman Communion. These prayers continue to be offered here.

Like St. Elizabeth the New Martyr, we are converts to Orthodoxy. While our commitments to the whole Catholic Church, the Undivided Church of the first thousand years, go back decades, this past year has opened new dimensions of spiritual insight that have taken us beyond anything we could have pictured or undestood. We have reached a high point in our spiritual development that lay passive with us, yet familiar when it became more evident. Praying with St. Elizabeth each day, who is present to us with her heroic past, her illumined present, and guiding us to the bright world, the Kingdom of Heaven, we are reminded that the Holy Spirit beckons to all of us in our own time to live the fullness of life in Christ. Pray for us, O holy Saint Elizabeth, for you are us, and we seek to be more like you!

Our history has been Roman Catholic, Anglo-Catholic, and by that fact historically tied to Russian Orthodoxy. Our priest was raised in an Anglo-Catholic family of several generations. Together our two conventual Sisters have offered 150 years of faithful life and devotion to the Roman Church. Our priest served the Roman Communion for ten years following the widespread secularization of the Episcopal Church. Upon our departure from the Roman Church, our religious community was received into a historic Anglo-Catholic diocese in the care of a great bishop of that tradition. This three-year journey through Anglo-Catholic tradition pointed the Hermitage into the way of Orthodoxy, for Anglo-Catholicism has always been the "middle way" between West and East. In the early twentieth century, the future St. Tikhon had forged bonds of close friendship with the Anglo-Catholic bishops of the Great Lakes area, where our priest had been ordained in an Anglo-Catholic diocese. We now see that this part of our pilgrimage, our journey to a deeper and more widely dimensioned Catholic Church, has always been our future. Through all of it, our growth and illumination has always been Catholic, ever more purely and deeply Catholic, leading the Hermitage all the way back to the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, which Jesus founded and which we affirm each day in the Creeds.

It is that wholeness and these spiritual riches which we seek to offer to the community round us, to our neighbors and friends and future friends. Our prayers are similar to what you might find at an Episcopal Church, yet they are more ancient and would remind a Roman Catholic of the experience of a Roman Mass before Vatican II. Studying the history of Eucharistic worship, we have learned that by the eleventh century, worship in the West was nearly identical to worship in the East both in its prayers and sacred space.

Yet, following the Great Schism, the Roman Church departed radically from the East in terms of ecclesial structure, of social norms among religious and clergy, and theologically. In the area of the Atonement, which for a thousand years had focused on the the life-giving energies of the Creator of Life, a new theory was proposed by an Italian monk named Anselmo. His preoccupation was death. Consequently, a new, linear style of worship developed in the West with sight lines of tragedy converging at a High Altar where the body of the Jesus, the Propitiation, was laid.

While we continue the prayers of the West in our Orthodox worship, we cannot accept this radical departure from the beliefs of the Undivided Church. Our Eucharistic worship focuses upon life, understanding that the One Who was offered as a ransom for many (Mark 10:45) shattered the House of Death and offered life now and forever to all who would receive it. In this goodly spirit, our worship space is Orthodox, non-linear, "circular" in its feel and character. What is Orthodox worship like? Imagine entering a Divine Liturgy after worship has begun. Soon you may wonder, "Where is this place? How did I get here? I am not sure of the way out." It seems to be circular, but even that is not quite right. At the door, one encounters holy icons and stops to greet and venerate "family," the Communion of Saints. The saints greet you and welcome you into an experience not bounded by time or space. They invite you into their love if your heart be right. They offer to guide you on a path leading to holiness ... where they are. Soon this mysterious place begins to fill with incense. Bells are sounding from .... one knows not where. Chanting is heard wafting through the air it seems from all directions. Sacred ministers roam about (it seems) in no certain direction. No one is seated; in fact, no geometry of chairs or groups can be discerned. Geometry and logic seem to have been suspended. The experience is of mystery and spiritual fellowship. Even the boundaries separating this life and the greater life seem to have collapsed. Soon the Most Beloved will appear. He is among us! We know that He loves all and each of us, for that is His Nature. How did this happen? Where did he come from? We do not know. For a hidden place is concealed by the iconostasis, which seems no different than any other wall ... if you can call crowds of saints "a wall." For it is really an embrace, an endlessly deep embrace. And, then, one considers that ancient phrase, "a great cloud of witnesses" ... and begins to understand it even through the prism of the five senses. Over time as you advance more deeply into that embrace, you begin to wonder if this so-called church building is not something else, like the manger that surrounded the Christ child, infinitely bigger on the inside than on the outside.

We have chosen a building site and have purchased the lumber for the Church of Our Lady of the Angels, Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, Western Rite. Our first church building is modeled after the historic Russian Orthodox Church at Fort Ross California, following a smaller replica built in Calistoga, California at Holy Assumption Monastery (OCA). Meantime, our Altar continues to be the center of our lives at Na Pua Li'i Hermitage. As befits our poverty, we worship in a small space that is literally in the middle of our lives, with a kitchen to one side and our living room to the other. We pray that we will construct our church building before 2020 ends.

As we are vowed religious living in silence and meditative worship, we welcome like-minded people, who seek a silent, holy atmosphere to join us in our spiritual home. We pray that you will find rest unto your very souls (Mt 11:29).

Great Lent

Great Pascha

The word Easter contains within it a tiny poem of rebirth. It is not merely East, which is the horizon of the sun's rising. It is East-er than that, to the land where all sun's rise, to the place of eternal resurrection. For this reason, the ancient Church dated Easter in the spirit of this rebirth within rebirth within rebirth: it is the first Sunday, the Eighth Day (the First Day of the Age of Grace) following the first Full Moon (the rebirth of the lunar cycle) following the Vernal Equinox (the rebirth of the ancient world in the Northern Hemisphere). And this formula sets the date of Easter for all Christians.

Since the Vernal Equinox is the same all over the earth, no matter how you keep your calendar, shouldn't Easter, both in the West and the East, fall on the same date? Not necessarily. We Russian Orthodox Christians live according to the Julian Calendar (lagging the Gregorian Calendar by thirteen days during the present historical era). Julian days-of-the-week do not align with the Gregorian Calendar days. As Easter must be celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Vernal Equinox, we must take into the account that Julian Sundays and Gregorian Sundays will not coincide, so Easter will not coincide, not during this era. Moreover, boundaries of moon cycles and occurrences of Sundays following the Vernal Equinox can cause Easter to be pushed into the next week for observing the Julian Calendar. All our Pre-Lent and Lenten observances are determined by this all-important date for Great Pasha, or Easter. In 2019, Great Pascha occurs on April 15th in the Gregorian Calendar, which is April 28th in the Julian Calendar.

Please follow our liturgical year and regular meditations on Facebook or on our website at Spiritual Conferences. Please join us for prayer and worship! You can email us at NPLH@pualii.org or telephone us at 808-339-1955 for directions.

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