Our God is a calling and sending God. Words essential to Christian life are journey, voyage, apostle. I need scarcely say this to the Sisters sitting before me, whose lives have been offered journeying towards God and from all over the world. Our faith originally was known as the Way, you see, a road. No one has found the historical boundaries of a far-off land called Eden. This is fitting and right, for the voyage to Eden is an inner, spiritual journey. Eden is everywhere, wherever we are .... however deeply hidden beyond the mists of our sins. In that sense, God is always calling us to our true selves, enjoining us to reject whatever is false within us. You know what false is. False always leads in the wrong direction. Where is the wrong direction? Wherever and whatever might lead away from God. And our true selves, our purest selves, are being prepared for union with Him, a most high love declared in the First Great Commandment.

Then, there is God's Second Great Commandment, which sends apostles to stir the hearts of God's people unto God. The Sacred Scriptures might be styled as a collection of travel logs concerning these apostolic journeys.

In a marvelous voyage, more fantastic than anything found in Homer's Odyssey, Noah voyages from a whole world that is vanishing and to a new world yet to be revealed. He travels with seven other human companions, who in turn contain the seed of all future humanity as well as their freight, the seed corn for all Creation. The story of Noah depicts history's first world travelers.

Abraham is called out of Ur of the Chaldees and then sent into a series of wildernesses, whose destination was simply departure — departure away from the world and its cities, underlined by his avoidance of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Moses was called out of luxurious Egypt into the wilderness of Midian and thence into the Sinai wilderness to be the leader of God's people. Moses could have been seen as the first apostle. He was sent. He preached. He converted. He gathered God's wayward people and led them on a path toward union with God.

But no apostolic voyage before the Acts of the Apostles tells of greater breadth than does the story of Jonah. His map is the scope of the known world — from the Pillars of Hercules in the Iberian peninsula in the furthest West to the Fertile Crescent where the Tigris runs parallel to the Euphrates in the far East. And we cannot say he did not convert hearts in these far-flung places, for the drama aboard ship and his calamity with a sea monster stand out in the imagination as few other scenes in Scripture. He is still converting hearts and souls from that far-flung spot. Our icon of Noah emerging from the great fish right here. Reflecting on his map, we need hardly say that Jonah prefigures the Apostle Paul, whose intention was to fulfill that earlier voyage from Arabia (Gal 1:17) to Spain (Rom 15:28).

Roughly eight centuries after Jonah, another Jonah had two sons — the Apostles Andrew-bar-Jonah and Simon-bar-Jonah, who would fulfill and surpass the promise of their father's great predecessor and eponym. Leading apostolates from the far coasts of the Black Sea in the East, St. Andrew would become the great Apostle to modern-day Eastern Europe and Asia. Meantime, his brother, St. Peter, would become the great Apostle to the Western Mediterranean, to Britain, and, by that route, to the New World.

It is conventional to picture this on an East-West grid: the Eastern Church and the Western Church. But the details tell a different story. How is it, for example, that the national flag of Scotland in the West should display St. Andrew's Cross? How is it that the Union Jack of Britain should also feature St. Andrew's Cross superimposed on the flag of St. George? The finer-grain story is fascinating and will help us better to understand the growth and nature of the Eastern and Western Churches.

Even during the first century, Rome was seen to be a tired and wheezing city that had run its course — stooped under the weight of bureaucracies growing out of control, hobbled by corruption, and beset by grave economic woes. Its infrastructure, much of it built of timber, was rotting — a motive for the Great Fire of Rome in July of 64 A.D. Beyond its aging walls, formidable enemies, especially from the north, raided and peppered its territories burning and pillaging. The Empire's future was seen to lie in the East. Over time, the Emperors shifted the center of governance from Rome to Byzantium, that glittering city whose very name continues to cast a spell even to our own time, calling to mind a perfection of culture, learning, arts, and philosophy. The poet W.B. Yeats imagined a Byzantine bird ingeniously fashioned by Greek artisans "Of a hammered gold and gold enamelling ... set upon a golden bough to sing" ("Sailing to Byzantium," 1926).

By the 330s, Byzantium supplanted Rome as the residence of the Emperor and became the new center of power, to be renamed Constantinople following the death of Constantine. By stark contrast, Rome was seen to be a cultural backwater, over-burdened within and under-protected from without.

The structure of the Church — for there was One Church until the eleventh century — reflected this imperial reality:

Byzantium / Constantinople was situated most favorably, standing on the threshold between Europe and Asia — the Bosporus strait linking the Black Sea to the Aegean Sea and thence to the Mediterranean. In terms of trade, geopolitical significance, and rich cultural influences, it was the ideal site for the Empire's new capital.

As the Empire was tilted eastward in economic promise and political prestige, so the Five Patriarchates of the Church would follow the same pattern. The prestige of the ancient Patriarchates of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem set a clear contrast to the barbarian West, Britain, Iberia, Gaul, the Germanic tribes, and to outworn Rome.

Theology would also follow this pattern with the Greek Fathers being seen to tower over the Latin Fathers. Theologians to our own time continue to acknowledge this difference. In 1938 the influential theologian Henri Cardinal de Lubac, S.J. (I might say, one of the greatest theologians of the twentieth century) issued a book whose whose meaning and content were announced in its title: Catholisme (Catholicism). What is Catholicism the book boldly asked? This is Catholicism! Its pages shocked the Roman Church, so inured to the hyper-logic-rationalism of the Scholastic philosophers and of Thomas Aquinas. For its table of contents did not list the expected names: Anselm, Duns Scotus, Ockham, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, but rather Hermas, Ignatius of Antioch, Origen, Eusebius of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Severus of Antioch, St. Maximus the Confessor.

It was Constantinople that was seen as "the Eternal City" — far above the foibles and defects of a gritty world — untouchable. Yet, three indiscernible, black clouds, like pinpoints, hung over the Eastern Empire's far horizon, which no one could detect even as late as the sixth century. Eventually they would form a succession of storm centers that would leave this most-prosperous, most-cultured, most-erudite, and well-ordered world in ruins. These were

• the invention of Islam in the seventh century
• the intellectual technology of empiricism and scientism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
• the discovery of the New World

In the year 609, however, all that was to change. A merchant named Mohammad claimed that the God of Abraham had appeared to him. He composed a book entitled the Quran, which he claimed God had inspired. The vision God gave him was one of military conquest and empire. Persuading many others in the city of his birth, Mecca, he set out to conquer the territories around him including Medina. Of greatest importance, the practice of his new religion, to be called Mohammadism or Islam, made imitation of his life essential including military adventurism with an ultimate goal of world domination. Eventually, the Patriarchates of the ancient Church were to fall into a perpetual, Muslim captivity .... all save one, Rome.

Meantime, Rome faced its own marauders. Constantly being invaded by Huns and Goths, the city itself fell the Visigoth king Alaric in 410 eventually plunging Western Europe into a "Dark Ages" — with advances in mathematics, philosophy, and engineering being lost. A great puzzle of the medieval period was how in the world the Romans managed to construct a dome over the Pantheon (which, by the way, remains intact today). King after king attempted it with many lives being lost in the process as dome after dome collapsed on the hapless men who tried to build them.

In time, the Roman Empire would be revived with the rise of the Frankish Kings in the ninth century, forming a new, Holy Roman Empire, which would continue in some form until the nineteenth century. Its religion would eventually become enshrined in a new, independent Church called Roman Catholicism. Its theological trajectory, as we have mentioned, became steeped in the minutely reasoned hyper-logic of medieval philosophy, which set the stage for further refinements, whose great monument would be the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas.

Indeed, this would be the story of the West. Deep structures of rationalist thought eventually expressed in terms of empiricism in the sixteenth century and scientism in the seventeenth century. Soon, optics and other technologies would enable Western scientists to found all knowledges on an entirely new footing: one dedicated to the study of matter, dominating all social institutions and into the twenty-first century.

Discoveries in the Heavens and of New Worlds across the sea were carried out by Roman Catholic scientists and explorers. By the way, it was the Vatican who financed the work of Galileo. Roman Catholicism would become the religion of industrial Europe and the New World while the Patriarchates of the Eastern Church remained in thrall under Islam. They still are today. The result today is a multi-national Roman Communion of 1.2 billion people in the year 2020. The same statistical source (Pew Research Center) fixes the Eastern Church at about 260 million members.

We might conclude our summary here, but there is a deeper story to tell — a story of unexpected spiritual vitality. The Scythians, whom St. Andrew evangelized, migrated westward, skirting Rome and its legions along the northern Mediterranean coast, then sailing along Jonah's route to the "end of the earth" — through the Pillars of Hercules in the Iberian Peninsula on to the Atlantic shores of Western Ireland and Scotland. Along the way they would be evangelized by St. Paul giving rise to the first Book of the New Testament, the Letter to the Galatians (40s A.D.) That's right. The Galatians were the Celts, a migrating tribe temporarily situated in Anatolia, preached and ministered to by St. Paul. Paul wrote that book in the 40s A.D.

This is no myth or pious legend. Their route of migration has been verified linguistically, archaeologically, and genetically with even their Y-chromosomes being mapped from the Black Sea to Ireland and Scotland, explaining St. Andrew's Cross on the Scottish flag and the Union Jack. For it turns out that, among English-speaking people, the great Apostolic patron historically is not St. Peter, but his brother, St. Andrew.

Few say it. But we all know it: Western Christianity is foundering. The mainstream Protestant churches have mostly disappeared. We read in recent news headlines that the Anglican Communion has fallen into general collapse: "Numbers Confirm: Anglican Church of Canada Is Collapsing"; "The Episcopal Church: The Collapse Is Here"; "Massive Collapse in Number of Anglicans in Britain, New Survey Shows". My brothers and sisters, there are more Muslims today in England than Anglicans, once the State Church. And the most popular name chosen for a male child born in England today? Mohammad.

Attempting to trend with the culture as the Anglicans had done, the Roman Communion, tragically, is now descending into a catastrophic spiral. In an interview this past week, former Vatican Treasurer, George Cardinal Pell, described the Vatican as "slowly going broke." Chanceries of countless dioceses throughout the world could make the same statement, racked by law suits in the ruinous train of pedophile priests. You know, I served three dioceses in the Roman Communion and was an "insider" in four others. And in all of them I witnessed an incredible phenomenon: parish churches being closed that had hundreds of members. My spiritual director, a provincial to the Capuchin Friars, said to one bishop, "Don't close historic centers where the faith is vibrantly alive!" The unspoken answer, of course, is "We need the money." Meantime, a lifestyle incompatible with holy ministry has permeated its clerical life to a considerable depth and magnitude. Within the hierarchy, battle lines have been drawn in a growing civil war that is reaching the headlines.

Here at the Hermitage, St. Andrew's apostolate continues to radiate its life-giving vitality .... here and throughout the West. Former Roman Catholics and Anglo-Catholics, such as ourselves, and people simply looking for Christianity give thanks that the Eastern Church, and especially the Russian Orthodox Church (who will be the last to bow to culture), had not been swept up in the materialism and scientism of the West during its formative centuries. As if frozen in amber, its essence and character are of the early Church. Its faith opens the riches of the first Christians to us. The incense from that amber, so to speak, yields a most pleasing fragrance unto Heaven. And St. Andrew, making his way up the coasts of the Black Sea to those Scythians, announced a Good News whose echoes are heard here in Polynesia even this morning.

Vladimir Lossky's classic work Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (1944) begins with the sentence, "In a certain sense all theology is mystical" (p. 7). This is the essence of Christian life: "on earth as it is in Heaven" — not a mere following of rules or a giving up of treats, but a first-hand experience of holiness: experiencing miracles as a common occurrence, as we do here; meeting with saints and wonderworkers, as we have; liberating the active and powerful love within each of us, which I take for granted in this place; in sum, living the life that we read of in the Gospels and in the Acts of the Apsotles .... this is Christian life.

And this is what has been stripped out of Christian religion in the West. The pursuit of holy life reaching unto theosis has been disallowed by rationalism, obscured by materialism, and injured by those who deride spiritual experience and life .... even among the elite priests and bishops of the Western hierarchies. In place of holiness has been set an ever-burgeoning bureaucracy of rules and laws to the point where the faithful look to the Code of Canon Law or "Catholic Answers" in their search for God.

The pure and original Christian faith has been preserved unchanged. Perhaps this is the great contribution of Islam to the West — a furious subjugation of Eastern Christians. And these men and women have rendered their reply: faithfulness. Unflinching and uncompromising faithfulness. This is the gift of tyranny. These people have been the guardians of the Church's mysteries and spiritual riches.

Today we give thanks for the one the Lord Jesus called first, St. Andrew, and for a flag that flies over both Eastern and Western territories (I might say, all over the world during the span of the British Empire) and for an eagle that faces in two directions, both East and West. This was the seal of the Empire of Byzantium / Constantinople, and the symbol of Orthodoxy today, brought to Moscow by the Byzantine Princess Sophia Palaiologina, not long after the fall of Constantinople to the Muslims. She would be grandmother to Russia's first czar.

We hermits, so far from the world in every way, no so long ago found ourselves alone in a spiritual landscape of alienation. We had each other. We had an undying hope. We had the certain knowledge of God's Presence among us. But we lacked the Church and the God Who founded it, to whom we turned our most sincere hearts of longing. But all was not lost. For the Apostolate of St. Andrew radiates still, from the far coasts of the Black Sea to wherever Christians seek the faith, the pure faith, and the riches of the ancient Church. Pray for us, St. Andrew, for you are our great Apostolic Patron! Amen.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.