There are fences that don't reach the sky

Soviet Union, 1980s. Father Aleksandr Men' is heard told by a young parishioner who is attending Baptist assemblies that he wants to become a Baptist. Father Men' reminds him that he may very well remain Orthodox, but open to all other confessions. «Too uncomfortable!», replies the boy. He's going to be a Baptist.
“He needed an enemy and a small fortress to hide behind.
Or be a Baptist who does not recognize the Orthodox or an Orthodox who does not recognize the Baptists», commented Father Men'. “There is a psychic disease called agoraphobia. Tsar Peter the Great suffered from this: he had small houses built, smaller and smaller rooms. Well, this disease also exists in the history of religions!».

Religious agoraphobia was one of the fronts on which Father Aleksandr Men' fought throughout his life. “If Christians are divided it is because of their narrow-mindedness. Thank God our fences don't reach the sky! he said. He was born a Jew, his mother had wanted to baptize him and little Alik had taken his first steps as a Christian in one of the catacomb communities of Russia, when the Church was not even allowed to elect a patriarch. In his early teens he had felt a strong call to the priesthood. He had married, had two children, had not been able to complete his biology studies due to his "licence" as a Jew.
Writer of unforgettable books, charming preacher, his life as a parish priest was marked by spies, KGB interrogations, suspicions about the small living communities that gathered around him. On the morning of September 9, 1990, while he was going to celebrate mass, he had been cut down with an ax. Gorbachev was right in full swing, when Soviet air was becoming more breathable. His killer? Never identified.
Exactly 32 years after the murder of Men', at the VII World Congress of leaders of world and traditional religions in Kazakhstan, the Russian Orthodox patriarch Kirill is the great absentee while Pope Francis says, like Men': «No one is a foreigner in the Church, we are one family."

Father Men' deeply loved his Church, Russian culture, Russian holiness, icons, Russian philosophers and Vladimir Solov'ëv above all, but also the cinema and profane literature of every culture, because "any creative work is the extension of the divine work". He thought that his belonging to the Jewish people was "an undeserved gift".
"For a Christian Jew, blood kinship with the prophets, the apostles, the Virgin Mary and the Savior himself is a great honor and a double responsibility." A Christian Jew does not stop being a Jew, he is more deeply aware of the spiritual vocation of his people than he is.
Israel was born more as a religious community than as a nation and Christianity has expanded the borders of this community, to let all peoples in. Therefore a Christian "does not live in the heat", he is a witness who does everything to ensure that nothing and no one stays out of what belongs to God from all eternity. All in God. All in the divine humanity of Christ.

Flaminia Morandi
NP November 2022