As the New Year approaches, we survey in our mind's eye those 12 months, which are now disappearing into eternity, and with hope and some misgivings we look to the unknown future. Each year, we greet each other with wishes for a Happy New Year and new happiness for our friends and family. But this year, the year of the Jubilee, we also congratulate each other on the millennium of Russia's baptism.
What feelings are aroused in a believer by the approaching New Year, the Jubilee Year at that? First of all, there are the feelings of gratitude to God Who gave us life and Who, a thousand years ago, made His image appear to our forefathers as the ever-living Source of joy afforded by the communion with God. Because only the possibility of communing with God through prayer and through the life of the Orthodox Church can give us the true joy of living and make us free of sadness and fears inherent in a senseless existence. To a believer are revealed both the origin and the final destination of his earthly journey. The knowledge that one is, in the words of St. Paul, "God's collaborator," one of the participants in and builders of that work of God which He began by His act of creation, nourishes the believer and inspires him to continue his creative efforts.
In addition, the beginning of each New Year confronts the consciousness of a believer with a question: with what qualitative content did he, or she, fill the confines of their lives. If life is a gift, a gift received by us from God, than the principal duty to which we are called in this world could be termed the sanctification of time. Each minute, each hour and each day lived by us, either bring us closer to God or take us further away from Him. Are we the builders of ourselves and of the world that surrounds us or are we the destroyers of that world and of ourselves? The building takes place in prayer and in all forms of man's creativity - from the most lowly service we render to our neighbors to the creation of great works of art and scientific achievements. The destruction, on the other hand, consists in our indifference to our spiritual state and fate, in the indifference to the fate of our neighbors who are just as called to be immortal as we are. The destruction consists in our refusal to make sacrifices, in our denial of the spirit of obedience.
As we approach the New Year, we believers assess and soberly weigh ourselves before the face of God. This assessment is not likely to be favorable as there is no upper limit to spiritual improvement or the perfecting of man, complacency is not consistent with being a true Christian.
Time is the vestment of eternity. Time can be compared with a river which empties into the ocean of eternity. For a believer, eternity is the revelation of the Kingdom of God, of that perfect state which is inaccessible to intellectual understanding but can be revealed only through the feat of faith. In the final analysis, the entire Revelation of the New Testament speaks of one thing only: it speaks of that heavenly fatherland which awaits us beyond the bourn of our earthly journey. Without that image of the Heavenly Kingdom the New Testament would lose its meaning. That first moment, which marks the beginning of the New Year, brings to mind that other mysterious moment of time when-all creation and each human being with his or her unique fate, having received in God their beginning, will find the crown of eternity also in Him.
Starting with Saint Vladimir, this fact has been commemorated by our ancestors for the past thousand years. It should be remembered by us also. We prepare assiduously for secular festivities and we honor the persons to whom these festivities are dedicated. Similarly, we should all fuse into a single force, and our spirits uplifted, cleave to the holy orthodoxy and be worthy of the memory of the Holy Enlightener of Russia, Prince Vladimir with the host of other Russian saints.
In 1988, the Church calls us to intensified prayer, to the performance of good deeds and, particularly, to repentance. Our First Hierarch, Metropolitan Vitaly, wrote recently about this in his 'Prejubilee Epistle." In the same spirit, Cyril Golovin, that very astute Russian, writes about the celebration of the millennium of the baptism of Russia.
'The Russian Church will celebrate the millennium of Russia's baptism not with splendid imperial magnificence, as was the case with the preceding celebration, but rather in the cathartic "Babylonian captivity" filled not only with sorrows but also with the great glory of the host of new martyrs and confessors. What other Church has suffered for Christ as much as ours has in this century? What other people has shown such devotion to Our Saviour as ours has in these times of horror and hardship? But let every Orthodox Russian greet the coming jubilee not in the spirit of gaudy triumph but meekly praying that the long suffering motherland may be forgiven her sins which have brought upon her God's just wrath and that God in His mercy may finally heal her from her grievous sickness which is sapping the strength of her people. ("Griadet den"' [The Day is Coming, Russkoye Vozrozhdenie, 1987.)
My fervent hope is that we shall thus "with one heart" celebrate the glorious millennium of Russia's baptism.
Archpriest Victor Potapov
January, 1988