Prologue

OBSERVING THE 800TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE SERBIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH
Living Forever

We had it even when we didn’t have anything – state, cultural space, freedom, name, home. When we were fragmented in enemy empires, slaughtered by foreign borders as if with a knife, it was our foundation and roof. When we were lost in wastelands, it was our path. When we were disappearing in delirium and self-oblivion as if in a tomb, blind and bewildered, it was our memory, our eye and our reason. When each crumb of our souls was sleeping, in a fog, it was our wake. When we gave up on ourselves, it has never given up on us. When catastrophes were waiting on the left and on the right, in the front and in the back, it led us upwards. When we could die between the East and the West, like Buridan’s ass, it placed us above. When we knew just to overtake and escape, it was able to endure in a terrible place instead of us. When everything else was dying away, we had angelic choruses in our hearts and sails through it. When we didn’t know anything else, we knew this: we are, actually, it. The best in us. The most sublime, the most worshipping, the boldest, the most heroic, the most honorable, the purest, the closest.
It’s not just some organization. It’s not just specific people in a directorate, in choirs, in altars, people who are, of course, imperfect and sinful. It is a sacred, holy-salvational unity of God and man, our earthly and our heavenly homeland.
Saint Sava knew all that and endlessly more when he provided canonic independence to the Serbian Church exactly 800 years ago. Will we, people of today, know how to continue the road paved by sacred steps? Will we be worthy of the name we carry?