Let the West Cross Itself
Salt from the bottom up.
Below is a timely word from St. Nikolia Velimirovich. This prophetic call of his to European peoples is recorded by St. Justin Popovich in his book entitled, “The Orthodox Church and Ecumenism.” St. Nikolia's word is equally applicable to the United States of America. Moreover, the spirit that he addresses is not one contingent upon “race.” It is a world-view that now may be embraced and promoted, regardless of ethnic origins. Yet, its birthplace is indisputably European.
The heart of man has been flattened and confined in the horizontal realm of materialism. Here it withers and dies. Out of this, death and chaos ensue; this is why “modernity” can only offer chaos. Its energy is death-bearing, and so it cannibalistically consumes itself in a frantic desire for more death and chaos. Not satisfied with its own flesh, it then turns to consume others in chaos. Currently, tuning into what is commonly called “the news” exemplifies this state. Not only does this spirit abide in chaos and death, but it seeks to drag all of humanity into chaos and death. It then utilizes fear to blind humanity to its prison of chaos. This fruit speaks clearly that the tree is demonic. Framed in this context, the root of the “endless wars” of the West becomes clear. The constant “threat” of some enemy, somewhere, in some manifestation –a person, a nation, an unseen illness– reveals the spirit of fear that is at the heart of “European” power, in which I include America. It is not an authentic power because it must use fear and death to exercise control over those it desires to subjugate. Possibility, it itself dwells in a constant fear of losing its perceived “power.”
Simply, the answer is a true repentance and turning to Jesus Christ. In these consistently unstable times, unstable because they are energizing death, chaos, and fear, all demonic energies, the only factor that could possibly stabilize the “West” once again is a return to authentic Truth, the Lord Jesus Christ. It is written that the Truth, Jesus Christ, will set you free. “If the Son set s you free, you are truly free,” (Jn. 8:36), and then “Perfect love casts our fear” (cf. 1 Jn. 4:18). In a world enslaved to chaos and fear, it is the vocation of Christians to rise as free children of the Living God. It falls to Christians to be the salt of the earth; salt is a curative element and aids in preservation
The governmental leadership of the West is too consumed by the spirit of the times. Thus, there is no hope with them. They have no salt and are rotting and putrid corpses. Yet, if the people energize the Life of Christ Jesus, there will be hope. This will inevitably lead to a breaking of the “power” that currently rules. Similar to early Christian times, Rome was not transformed from the top down but from the bottom up. Pagan Rome was transformed and overcome because Christians had some salt. The salt rose, and Rome became in large part Christianized. So my brothers and sisters, this is our time, by God's grace, to be salt and light to the earth.
Begin the words of St. Nikolai -
“If Europe had remained Christian, it would have been praising Christ and not 'culture.' Even the great people of Asia, unbaptized yet spiritually well-disposed, would understand this. For those peoples also take pride in their faiths, their deities and their religious writings: some of them in the Koran, some in Vedas, or others. They do not boast of the works of their hands, their culture, but by something that they regard as higher than themselves, in fact the highest in the world. Only European peoples do not praise Christ or Christ's Gospel, but boast by their dangerous machines and cheap products, i.e. their culture.
In its Christian period, when the West was Orthodox, it saw by the spirit and observed by the mind. But the further it went from Christian truth and virtues, the shorter its spiritual sight became, until in the twentieth century it became altogether darkened. It now has only corporeal eyes left for sensual perception. It has equipped its physical eyes with many formidable devices in order to observe the physical world better and more precisely: its shape, color, number, measure and distance. It looks through a microscope and sees tiny worms and microbes as they were never seen before. It looks through a telescope and sees stars as if they were just above the chimneys, as no man has seen them before. And that is as far as it goes. As far as mental sight and spiritual insight into the hidden essences of things and the sense and the meaning of creation in the vast cosmos surrounding us goes, oh my brethren, European humanity is today more blind than Muslim Arabia, Hindu India, Buddhist Tibet and spiritist China.
What the Apostle Paul was criticizing about the baptized Galatians could be equally said today of the senile West. He wrote thus to the Galatians, 'O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that you should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth, crucified among you? … Are you so foolish? Having begun in the Spirit, are you now made perfect by the flesh?' (Gal. 3:1-3). Europe had also once begun in the Spirit, but is now being made perfect by the flesh: by physical sight, physical judgment, physical desire and physical conquests. What bewitchment! All its life in our day takes place in two dimensions, breadth and length. It knows nothing of either depth or height. For this reason, it fights for land, for space, for expansion. For space, only for space!
Hence one war follows another, one terror follows another. God has not created man to be just a spatial animal, but to plumb the depths of secrets with his mind and to rise to divine heights by his heart. War for land is a war against truth. And war against truth is a war against divine and human nature.
Oh the bitterness, more bitter than wormwood! How many people parish, suffer and sacrifice for the ephemeral and deceptive earthly kingdom! If only they would endure only a hundredth of these sufferings and sacrifices for the Kingdom of Heaven, wars on earth would become ridiculous to them. They can hardly part with two mites for Christ, but they give all their possessions and all their children to the temple of Mars, the devil.
Let Europe (and America and Canada, my note) cross itself and return to Christ. Let it remember the most holy Mother of God and the twelve great Apostles, and the scales will fall away from its eyes.”
The West is not dying, it is being hollowed out. What we mistake for decay is in fact a kind of spiritual anorexia, a starving soul growing thinner and more translucent until it becomes, at last, a perfect vessel… either for divine light or for darker fires. In channeling St. Nikolai’s prophetic voice, you diagnose our condition with unsettling precision. We have traded depth for surface, eternity for immediacy, the vertical for the horizontal. We have become flatlanders in a three-dimensional universe, proudly mapping our two-dimensional kingdoms while the heavens weep above us.
But here is the mystic’s secret: a hollowed thing is not a ruined thing. It is, rather, a thing prepared. The very emptiness that terrifies us, the god-shaped hole at the center of Western civilization, is the precondition for renewal. When St. Nikolai calls the West to "cross itself”, he is not invoking nostalgia for some imagined Christian past. He is speaking of death and resurrection. The cross was never a symbol of cultural dominance, but of scandalous surrender… the ultimate repudiation of horizontal power in favor of vertical love.
This is why the transformation must come "from the bottom up.” The Kingdom of God has always been an underground movement, a conspiracy of salt and light working silently in the wounds of the world. The early Christians did not convert Rome by seizing the levers of power, but by becoming the kind of people for whom power was meaningless. They understood what we have forgotten: that true revolution begins not in the halls of government, but in the human heart, that tiny, infinite space where fear and divinity compete for occupancy.
The West’s crisis, as I see it, is not political or even cultural, but mystical. We have not lost our way, we have lost our wonder. We have traded the pearl of great price for the false glitter of our own inventions, and now we stand bewildered in the marketplace, clutching our trinkets and wondering why we feel so poor. The solution is not another program, another war, another ideology. It is the ancient, foolish, impossible solution of the saints: to love God and love our neighbor, and to do so not as abstract principles, but as a fire in the bones, a madness in the blood, a cross on the heart.
Let the West cross itself indeed… not as a gesture of empty piety, but as an act of radical reorientation. Let it turn from the mirror of its own cleverness to the window of divine mercy. And then, perhaps, it will discover that its long emptiness was not a tomb, but a womb.