SAINT ALBAN - By Dr. Augustine Sokolovski

The great saint of the 20th century, Archbishop John of Shanghai (1896–1966), spoke extensively about the need to honor the ancient saints of the Christian West. According to him, invoking the saints and asking for their intercession is a true commandment, a duty, and an obligation. This commemoration of the saints is not only a form of popular piety, but also a virtue that fills the heart of the Orthodox Christian with grace.

Forgetting the saints is not limited to the absence of their names in the church calendar; it means losing the experience of holiness that shone uniquely in every saint of antiquity throughout history. Our world thirsts for holiness. And as Saint John himself believed, world history will not end until the last ancient Orthodox saint of the Christian West is liturgically commemorated.

One of these ancient saints, forgotten in the Orthodox Church during the centuries of mutual isolation between East and West, was the Martyr Alban. In the early Church, he was venerated as the first Christian to suffer for his faith in Christ in what is now England. According to the theology of holiness theology, as the first martyr of his country or nation, Alban should be called the "Protomartyr". Thus, Saint Alban is the English, British, or Great British First Martyr.

In the 3rd century, the British Isles were a remote border region of the empire, where the Roman emperors were only occasionally commemorated. Where there were no Christians, there was no persecution. This unwritten rule holds true to this day.

In the peripheral regions of the empire, there were no visible ecclesiastical structures, but there were itinerant preachers. Ordained as presbyters or bishops, they preached and traveled from place to place according to the word of Christ in the Gospel. Where their word fell on fertile ground, they founded churches.

Alban was an enlightened Roman pagan, possibly a soldier. When the order to arrest Christian preachers was issued, most likely related to the visit of an important imperial figure to the islands, he gave refuge to a wandering priest. When his whereabouts became known, he put on his clothes and posed as a preacher. The power of grace and the personal example of the evangelist he had hidden led Alban to the Christian faith. He converted and was baptized. When the persecutors came to his home, he identified himself as the one they were seeking. Alban was interrogated, and when his deception was exposed, he was beheaded for professing Christianity.

This detail reveals the essence of the New Testament understanding of the commandments. A commandment is not a law or legal regulation, but a prototype and archetype, a part of the overall picture of all that is good, which the God-man Jesus Christ fully revealed on earth. "Why do you call me good?" "No one is good except God alone," Jesus says in the Gospel (Matthew 19:17). Saint Alban's spontaneous, rash, and uncalculated act revealed the meaning of Christ's words: "Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one's life for one's friends" (John 15:13).

Christ not only fulfilled the commandments of the Heavenly Father but also became their living example. Thus, his disciples, the Christians, each in their own way, are called by the gift of grace and the will of God to embody the commandments and thereby make them vivid, beautiful, and attractive.

Many villages and towns in England and France bear the name of Saint Alban. In 1927, the Brotherhood of Saint Alban and Saint Sergius of Radonezh was founded. Its goal was mutual communication and the desire for unity between Orthodox and Anglicans. Its first co-chairman was the founder of the Archdiocese of the Russian Churches in Western Europe, Metropolitan Eulogius (1868-1946).

It is noteworthy that the name of Saint Alban was included in the calendar of the Russian Church by Synodal decision in 2017. This occurred after the reunification of the Russian Church Abroad, to which Saint John of Shanghai also belonged, with the Moscow Patriarchate. Thus, the inclusion of the names of ancient Western saints in the calendar of Orthodox saints clearly followed Saint John's instructions.

The day on which John of Shanghai returned to God, July 2, became his Memorial Day after his canonization. On the third day after this date, as in the mysterious biblical poetics and dogmatic truth of Christ's words about the Resurrection, the Orthodox Church celebrates the historic memory of Saint Alban on the 5th of the same month. To paraphrase the refrain of ZAZ and Till Lindemann’s latest lyrical song “The Garden of Tears”: Saints Alban and John “are now smiling at us rom heaven”.