Russia is "Ark of Salvation", says Popular Russian Priest - Families Moving from America to Russia (Tkachev, Gleason, Eng Subs)
"If you want to live in God's way, it will be difficult, but you will be with God."
One of Russia's most popular priests, with videos often garnering a million views or more, Fr. Andrey Tkachev is also a writer, journalist, TV presenter, and missionary. He has more than 1.4 million subscribers on his YouTube channel, over 120,000 subscribers on his Telegram channel, and there is a good selection online of his homilies translated into English.
In response to a recent hour-long documentary (in Russian) about Fr. Joseph Gleason's move from America to Russia, Fr. Andrei released the following video, commenting on the trend of Americans and western Europeans leaving their home countries, bringing their families to live in Russia. This video has English subtitles. A full transcript is included below.
TRANSCRIPT
Hello, brothers and sisters.
People travel here and there. Sometimes just for sunshine, for new experiences, for ski resorts, or something else. Sometimes they have a deeper quest of some kind. Well, let's say some poor Africans flock to Europe for a better life. And people with money in their pockets, an empty head, and a greedy heart, go to Tibet, for example, looking for Shambhala. They have some kind of spiritual quest. Somebody leaves Russia and goes to America, dreaming of a land where money grows on trees.
But some are leaving America and coming here to Russia. Maybe not so many, but they come for truth and for a normal life. I'd like to tell you about one such person today. I encountered the person in our story through a famous journalist of ours, Arkady Mamontov. He made a film about this man. But even before that, there were articles about him on Orthodox resources, such as Pravoslavie.ru. On RT, in Russian, there was an article saying, "This is a good place." These are his own words. This is Joseph Gleason, a priest who has come a very long way.
First of all, he is interesting as a man who found Orthodoxy. Formerly a Protestant, a Calvinist by denominational affiliation, he was the son of an American minister. His father was a preacher. They had the sort of life where they traveled all over America, having the opportunity to see all sorts of different churches. At some point, people have a longing for what they don't have. They start looking for other forms of spirituality.
So he met someone who had converted from Protestantism to Catholicism, someone who wanted to be part of an apostolic church, and belong to an apostolic community. The Russian church has the tradition of Apostolic succession, and of course Catholicism has a similar tradition. He investigated Catholicism too. He was interested in books of the biblical canon, such as Tobit, the Wisdom of Solomon, and many others. There's mysticism, mysticism in the Bible. And then he wondered about the baptism of children. He wanted to baptize his children, but in this type of Protestantism, there was no such custom.
He had married, and had become a father, and thus he had become interested in children. Children generally tend to change people quite a bit, simply by their presence. There's a concern for others that gradually arises.
And so in the midst of all this, he became interested in Orthodoxy, where he found infant baptism, the proper education of children, and the writings of the Holy Fathers, with apostolic roots going back to Christ's disciples themselves. When all was said and done, he converted to Orthodoxy. All this happened while he was still living in America.
Now, it turns out that a few years ago he moved here from America, to the Yaroslavl region. He serves in a parish there. People there are still getting used to him serving part of the liturgy in English, since he's not fluent in Russian yet. But in time, without a doubt, everything will come together. They are getting used to it little by little, because this is a normal, bearded, Orthodox guy; he just speaks differently than we do. It's still hard for him to preach in Russian, but he is easily able to serve the Liturgy.
And so Mamontov made a whole film about him. You can find it online, and he's out there describing it all. If you want to live (kind of) well, if you like dough, if you like dollars, then stay in America, or go there. Good riddance. But if you want to live a normal life, in Russia, it's going to be hard.
If you want to live in God's way, it will be difficult, but you will be with God. You won't have to be afraid that your children will be taught to put on a condom in kindergarten, or that anyone will be encouraging your children in first grade to have a sex change. If you don't want all that, then you'd better go somewhere else. It's the formerly-blessed and by now incomprehensible America.
So he made his choice. And he's not the only one who did. If you count all the countries, the fingers on one hand are not enough, because people are coming here from France, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, America, and more. If people leave Russia, usually they are going for the "good sausage", for the pool in the yard, for two cars in the garage, for some palm trees in Florida, etc. Well, those sorts of superficial choices are made by people looking for the so-called "good life".
But there are also people leaving other countries and coming here. They're not after rich food and swimming pools. And not for this tinsel that a grown man gets tired of, but for truth, and for the desire to let children live as human beings, having the opportunity to live without violence to their souls, body, and conscience.
And all the other possibilities are there: You can be an engineer, a doctor, a scientist, a writer, a philosopher, or whatever you want. Russia gives every opportunity for the younger generation. We need to save the children.
And one of the people coming here is Joseph Gleason — that's the name of this blessed father. As I have pointed out, quite an assortment of publications have written about him. All in all, it's a pretty striking phenomena in the modern world when people come here to be with us. I personally know families from France
who moved here just for the children. They have five or six children, and they want to live here because it's dangerous for the children in France.
It might not be as dangerous for an adult, if his head is all right, and he has a compass in his hands. He knows that Christ is risen. It might be somewhat less difficult for him, but it still won't be easy.
For children, on the other hand, it's not at all easy. And for the sake of children, people leave their comfortable places. They even leave their homeland, where as children they had heard a lullaby. And they come here, to Russia. This has meaning for Russian civilization.
There, in the background, everything else is Sodom. It's Sodom, spreading like a cancer. It is the worldview of a mystical Sodom, with such an aggressive hatred toward God and toward all that is holy.
Russia is turning into the ark of salvation, as it has always felt itself to be. But today it's just brightly delineated. And that's where all sorts of people will come back. We just need to set up favorable conditions, making it easy for them to come back, get their papers, integrate into our society, and serve where they belong.
A priest can serve as a priest, a doctor as a doctor, an engineer as an engineer, and a theater worker as a theater worker. These are all people who will be coming back. May God grant more people, may God grant things to be better, and may God grant favor to the Russian society and the Russian state.
So that's what I have for you today, sharing all of this about Joseph Gleason, an Orthodox priest with many children, with a wife, with a guitar in the kitchen, in a village out in the Yaroslavl region, being a pastor for our grandmothers. So there you have it.
'Till we meet again!
This article was first published at Global Orthodox.
some of us prayed for the conversion of russia.
now we need to pray for the conversion of usa.
prayers are answered.