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 governed the lifeworld of the Lord Jesus and which the English-speaking Church used until the mid-eighteenth century.

We offer the prayers of Matins, Eucharistic worship, and Vespers each day other than Wednesdays and Fridays. Our Divine Liturgy has been that of St. Germanus of Paris, which is the only Western Liturgy to be approved by the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church and by the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia. Closer to home, our Liturgy was blessed by St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco (our Diocese), who served it himself.

Recently, we have begun to serve Eastern Rite liturgies.

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 founded. Soon, she would be arrested along with her fellows. They were pushed into an abandoned mineshaft into which hand grenades were then thrown. An eyewitness described her humility and meekness as she sought to bandage others who were injured prior to her own violent death. Hymns could be heard arising from the shaft.

Like St. Elisabeth 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, Anglican priests who converted to the Russian Orthodox Church were simply "clothed" as Orthodox priests and their Orders received. By contrast, Roman Catholic priests who converted were asked to begin with baptism and chrismation and then ordained. 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. (For the record, he requested baptism and chrismation prior to his ordination to Minor Orders.)

Yet, following the Great Schism, the Western Church departed radically from the East in its ecclesial structure, social norms, and theological beliefs. 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 worship space was conceived in the West with sight lines of tragedy converging at a High Altar where the dead, limp body of the Lord Jesus was offered.

We reject this radical departure from historical Christian belief. Our Eucharistic worship focuses upon the incommensurable and life-giving Life of our Creator-God, receiving the mindbending mystery 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 inviting to greet and venerate "family," the Communion of Saints. The saints welcome you into an experience not bounded by time or space. They invite you into their love if your heart is 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 in this place beyond human reason. Mystery and spiritual fellowship has supplanted it. 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, a secret place, a mysterious place was concealed by the iconostasis, which seemed no different than any other wall, though this one is made of a great cloud of witnesses. Withal, it is their embrace, an endlessly deep embrace, which gives way to power and grace and intimacy of God. 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.

This is not a place where you sit and watch as an onlooker or a passerby. There are no pews nor divisions among the people living and once-living, among angels and saints. This is a Divine space which is part of you, and you are part of it. It is a space built of living stones unto a spiritual temple (1 Peter 2:5). Our spiritual ideal for this place of mystery where we welcome our Lord and God and where He stoops to grace us with His Presence is the little, otherworldly castle set within the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow (seen on our webpage "Jurisdiction"). The Royal Doors open, and He is there in our midst.

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, subject to the approval of His Eminence Kyrill, Archbishop of San Francisco and the Western American Diocese. Meantime, our Altar continues to be the center of our humble lives of worship at Our Lady of the Angels Hermitage. As befits our poverty, we worship in a small space with a kitchen to one side and a storage area on the other as we continue to live as refugees. We see only the radiance of the saints and angels and archangels and all the company of Heaven. We see the Gate of Heaven and are not distracted by lesser things. Soon He is among us. He gives us life, and He will receive our deaths.

Still, we labor day by day steadily advancing to the glorious time when we shall construct our Katholicon (monastric church), not as a building to welcome the world, but as a place completely consecrated to God. There we may set about the solemn work of praying for those who have asked for our prayers and to intercede with the angels and saints for a world that is lost and in need of the light and grace.

We are monastics living in silence and meditative worship. We do not invite the world into this sacred space, but we push the things of the world out beyond our fenced perimeter that the Kingdom of God may live and breathe and have its Being. Here, the ones who love God, who have picked up their crosses and followed Him with single-minded devotion, may live His kind of life, in His Presence, without distraction.

Visitors we welcome by means of the Web who may read our reflections or listen to our Podcasts.

May God bless you and protect you as you continue your journey in a diseased and infectious world. His desire is that you come to to His sheepfold. He will guide you. There the sheep know His voice, "yet they will by no means follow a stranger, but will flee from him, for they do not know the voice of strangers" (Jn 10:5). But the Good Shepherd you must seek with your whole heart. He has little patience for the half-hearted. There is no half-way with God (Rev 3:16).

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