Russians tell the story of how the pagan ruler of Kiev, King Vladimir, desired to learn which of all the world’s religions was the one revealed from heaven.
His emissaries traveled to the far corners of the known world to learn how different people believed and worshiped God. They observed Jews pray in their synagogues and Moslem Bulgars along the Volga prostrate themselves in their mosques, but they had to report to Vladimir that these religions were unsatisfactory in their worship. Traveling then to the Byzantine capitol of Constantinople, the emissaries attended the Divine Liturgy in the Church of the Holy Wisdom and were awestruck by what they found.
“We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth,” they reported, “for surely there is no such splendor or beauty anywhere upon earth. We cannot describe it to you. Only this we know, that God dwells there among men and that their service surpasses the worship of all other places. We cannot forget that beauty.” With the conversion of King Vladimir in 987, the Christian faith would henceforth reign supreme among the Russian people despite oppression from Mongols and Communists.
The story may be apocryphal, but it serves to highlight an essential truth: The worship of God is not something arbitrary, something we can concoct any way we please. It is something based upon the heavenly model. As Germanus, patriarch of Constantinople (715-730), wrote in his commentary on the liturgy, “The church is an earthly heaven in which the celestial God dwells and moves.”
Excerpt taken from The Mass, the Temple, and Loraine Boettner
By T.L. Frazier,
in This Rock, January 1993 issue
