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

We are a religious house of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, who fled Russia in 1922 principally to the English-speaking world. We follow the calendar of the Russian Orthodox Communion, second largest communion of Christians on earth. In this we follow the 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.

We offer the prayers of Matins, the Eucharistic celebration, and Vespers each day.

We are deeply humbled that our Altar is a burying "ground" (by virtue of their relics) for St. Dionysius the Areopagite; Pope St. Fabian; St. Elisabeth the New Martyr; St. Tikhon, Patriarch of Moscow; and several saints of the Latin West: St. Dominic (founder of the Dominican Order); St. Thomas Aquinas (a doctor of the Roman Church); St. Rose of Lima (Roman Catholic patroness of the Americas). We are also humbled to be a sanctuary for a second-class relic of St. Anne, Holy Mother of the Most Holy Theotokos.

The Russian saints speak powerfully into our situation at this sad point in our own history and cultural decline. Their story is one of furious atheists who suppressed the faith and destroyed places of worship all over the newly conceived Soviet Union. In 1937 and 1938 alone 200,000 members of the clergy were executed. St. Elisabeth, a Lutheran granddaughter of Queen Victoria, 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 also foundered. Soon, she would be arrested along with her fellows. They were 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. Hymns could be heard arising from the shaft.

Like St. Elizabeth the New Martyr, we are converts to Orthodoxy. While our commitments to the original Catholic Church, the Undivided Church of the first thousand years, go back decades, our conversion has opened new dimensions of spiritual insight.

Our personal history has been mostly Roman Catholic, followed by a brief period as guests in an Anglo-Catholic diocese whose historical roots were tied to St. Tikhon. For Anglo-Catholicism has always been the "middle way" between West and East. In the early twentieth century, the future Patriarch and Saint Tikhon had become Bishop of the Aleutian Islands and North America and forged friendships with the Anglo-Catholic bishops of the Great Lakes area, where our Hermitage priest was first ordained.

Our prayers are Orthodox as we recall that a thousand years before the baptism of Rus' in Kiev, Christians from the geographical region of the future Rus' settled into Ireland, Scotland, and eventually spread westward into Anglo-Saxon Britain. The prayers that arose from their sensibilities, so different from the Roman Catholic mind, are the basis for the Western Rite (liturgically speaking). 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 its ecclesial structure, social norms, and theological belief. In the area of the Atonement, which for a thousand years had focused on the the life-giving energies of the Creator, a new theory was proposed by an Italian monk named Anselmo. His preoccupation was with death. Consequently, a new, linear style of worship developed in the West with sight lines of tragedy converging at a High Altar where the dead, limp body of the Jesus was offered.

We reject this this radical departure from historical Christian belief. Our Eucharistic worship focuses upon life, understanding that the One Who was offered as a ransom for many (Mark 10:45) turned out to be the Lord of Life, shattered the House of Death, and indelibly enshrined eternal life into our broken world.

Our worship space is Orthodox, non-linear 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 along 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 have been suspended. The experience is of mystery and spiritual fellowship. Even the boundaries separating this world 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 that made of crowds of saints. Withal, it is an embrace, an endlessly deep embrace, "a great cloud of witnesses." 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 stable surrounding the Christ child, infinitely bigger on the inside than on the outside.

We have purchased a building site and lumber for the Church of Our Lady of the Angels. This building will follow the pattern of the monastery church of Holy Assumption Monastery of the Orthodox Church in America. Meantime, our Altar continues to be the center of our lives at Our Lady of the Angels 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 a storage area on the other as we continue to live as refugees. We pray that we will construct our church building before the end of 2024.

We are monastics living in silence and meditative worship. We welcome like-minded people who seek a silent, holy atmosphere in our spiritual home. We pray that you will find rest unto your very souls (Mt 11:29). Alternatively, you may share in our spirit by reading or listening to our meditations, following our Holy Calendar, on Facebook, Instagram, or our website at Meditations. We welcome those who live on our remote island to join us for prayer and worship! Please email us at OLAH@pualii.org or telephone 808-339-1955 for directions.

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