With Gillian Crow's fine book, This Holy Man, we have at last a biography of a man whom many consider to be a saint.

In a recent talk about “godliness” at St. Michael and All Angels Church, Winnipeg, I used Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom) as an example of a “godly” man in whom we could see and understand the gift of “godliness.” I also suggested that a “godly” man was a man of prayer. After the service, two members of the congregation told me that they had met and heard Metropolitan Anthony and that this was clearly a high point in their lives. This is just one example of how he has influenced people both in person and through his talks and books: Living Prayer, School of Prayer, Courage to Pray, God and Man, Meditations on a Theme and Compendium: The Essence of Prayer.

Metropolitan Anthony was born André Borisovich Bloom on June 19, 1914 in Lausanne, Switzerland, the son of a Russian diplomat, and was baptised in the Russian Orthodox Church there. He grew up in Persia. Following the Bolshevik revolution and the end of the civil wars in Russia, the Blooms left for exile in Western Europe, settling eventually in Paris where there was a large community of Russian émigrés. Most of them were very poor and the Blooms shared their poverty. As a teen-age schoolboy, he experienced the presence of the Risen Christ. This experience, which he described as a conversion, happened in his room while he was alone reading the Gospels and it changed his life.

His life continued. He read sciences at university and qualified as a medical doctor and surgeon while his religious devotion deepened. He found a trusted spiritual father, Father Afanasy Nechaev, and was eventually tonsured as a monk. He took the name Anthony after St. Anthony Pechersky, the reclusive founder of the Monastery of the Caves, Kiev. The Second World War found him in the French Army serving as a medical doctor and surgeon. After the French capitulation in 1940, he returned to Paris where he continued his medical career while serving in the French resistance. Following the war, his religious vocation led to his ordination as deacon and priest and to service as a parish priest in France.

In 1949, he moved himself, his mother, Xenia, and his grandmother, Olga, to London where he accepted a job with the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius, a society which promoted relations between the Church of England and the Orthodox Church. He became associated with the Patriarchal Parish of the Russian Orthodox Church and later became its parish priest. The parish held its services in St. Philip's Church on Buckingham Palace Road, and later in All Saints Church, Ennismore Gardens, which in time they purchased. Both of these were Anglican Churches. He was consecrated bishop in 1957 and became in time Archbishop and Metropolitan. He gained a reputation as a spiritual father and confessor and his books and talks on prayer were well known. He broadcast regularly on the BBC in Russian to Russia where his voice was often the only voice of Orthodoxy for millions of Russians during the Soviet persecutions of the Church. In the United Kingdom, he was a spokesman for Orthodoxy. He enjoyed many friendships notably with Archbishops Michael Ramsey and Rowan Williams, the second of whom gave an address at his funeral.

Under his leadership, his diocese grew steadily. There were the original exiles from Russia, then converts to Orthodoxy and, after the fall of the Communist tyranny, another influx of Russians into Britain. It could not have been an easy task to blend all these into parishes and one diocese. This was the challenge of his old age.  He died on 4 August 2003. “Although there had been tears at the funeral as hundreds of people said goodbye to the man who had been a real father to them, there was also a sense of peace and of completion: Metropolitan Anthony had finished the work given him by Christ, and was entering his rest as a good and faithful servant.”

This is the story that Gillian Crow tells and she tells it well. As she herself says, this is not an exercise in hagiography but rather “the focus of this book is the greatness of the man--in Christian terms the fruits he bore: his vision and preaching of the Gospel; his work as the foremost bringer of Orthodoxy to modern Britain, not only in the building up of his own diocese but in the wider influence of his writing and broadcasting and his ecumenical work; and his immense contribution within the Orthodox Church worldwide, not least in Russia.” She succeeds in her task. In her book, we see the whole man--both the saint who is a channel of God's love and the sinner who is in need of penitence and forgiveness. The man who often did not keep his appointments is also the man who could find unending time for people who needed him. She tells the story of his life with a great and evident affection for him tempered by a deep knowledge of the man as he actually was.

This is not a history of the Russian Orthodox Church in Great Britain but we do learn much about it--especially about the relations of the Patriarchal Church with the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia. It is not a history of Orthodox-Anglican relations but we do learn how a Russian Orthodox Hierarch could have very friendly relations with Anglican Archbishops and how Anglicans could assist the Russian Orthodox Church in Great Britain with the provision of buildings and gifts of money. This book does help us understand how the Russian Orthodox and its Metropolitan Anthony lived as Orthodox Christians in Britain in our times.

Most importantly, her book is an important contribution to our knowledge of a man who has taught us so much about prayer and the Christian life. Bloom wrote: “Interceding does not mean reminding God of things he has forgotten to do. It is placing ourselves at the heart of a troubled situation.” And he prayed: “Lord, make me what I should be. Change me, whatever the cost.” I have read the Metropolitan's books and benefited from them all. I have enjoyed Gillian Crow's book and benefited from it as well. I encourage those who are interested in Orthodoxy and those who are interested in prayer to read this book. They too will benefit from it. 

 

 

The Rev’d  S. C. Sharman oversees three churches and lives in St. Andrew's, Manitoba.