Fr. Joseph Gleason's Christmas Speech in Moscow

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Americans Living in Russia recently hosted a traditional family Christmas party in snow covered central Moscow. Western and Russian families from many countries came together, about 100 guests, including 20 children, to celebrate the birth of Christ, music, Christmas cheer, and friendship. An American Orthodox priest, Fr. Joseph Gleason, gave a moving speech, and the highlight of the evening was a rousing Christmas carol singalong.

Here is an audio recording of the full speech.

And here is a full transcript:

Good evening. Merry Christmas to everyone. Two weeks early, but Merry Christmas!

So, my family and I have come a long way. On January 1st, 2017, my wife and eight children and I got on a plane in America and flew across the ocean to Moscow. And so for the past six years, we've been living in Russia.

And, you know, people ask, “What made you make this journey? Why did you come so far?” I don't have a Russian wife. People say, “Do you have any Russian relatives at all?” And I looked and I looked and I looked. And this is the closest that I could get: I had to go several hundred years back to the 15th century. There was a knight in England named Michael de la Pole, and he was in a family that built a great church there in England in the early 1400s.

He and his wife had two daughters. And one of the daughters, if you trace her genealogy 18 generations down, led directly to me. So some of her descendants went to Germany, and then finally to America, and then finally became my ancestors.

Her sister — after several generations, her children went to Germany, and then they came to Russia, and so 17 generations later came to Tsar Nicholas the second.

And so, it's interesting to see this family in England — some of them moved to Germany and some of them moved to Russia.

Some of them moved to Germany and some of them moved to America. And then finally my family and I moved to Russia. So really, we all were on the same trip. It just took me 500 years to get here.

But why would we do this? Why would we leave America? I had a perfectly good job there. I worked with computers. I was in the I.T. field. I also was already an Orthodox priest in America. So why would ten Americans get in a plane and fly to Russia?

For years I had noticed that the morals were really going down in America. I noticed that they were doing a lot of things that we didn't agree with. My family got to the point that we did not feel as safe in America as I thought that we wanted to be. And I didn't agree with America sending its military out to try to push around and control countries all over the world. I didn't think that was right. And then the last straw was in 2015, when the Supreme Court of the United States shoved down the throat of every man, woman, and child in America, forcing this idea of homosexual “marriage”, which was an attack on the family itself.

I believe that society itself, a nation itself, is founded on its belief in God and its understanding of the family. So if you attack those who believe in God, and if you attack the family itself, you're pulling the carpet out from under that very civilization, and it will fall. And I don't want to be there when it falls.

Meanwhile, I looked over here at Russia and I said, here is a country that's returning to God. Here's a country that respects the traditional family. Here's a country where they do not have homosexual “marriage”. They do not have civil unions. They still recognize that marriage is between one man and one woman. And I said, “This is where I want to raise my children.”

No, I did not have any Russian relatives. I did not have a Russian wife. I didn't speak any Russian at all. But the ten of us got on an airplane and we moved here.

And now, for the past six years, when I'm not serving the liturgy, I'm also doing journalism. And we record many videos, and we've been on TV a number of times. We've written thousands of articles. And I'm constantly telling people back in America and England and Canada and Australia and Brazil and multiple other countries about what a fantastic place Russia is.

Now, immediately people think, “Oh, this is propaganda. Russia is not heaven. Russia is not a paradise.” And I agree with them. Do any of you think Russia is paradise? That Russia is perfect? Of course not. But here's what Russia is — Unlike America, unlike Canada, unlike Australia, unlike Western Europe, Russia is normal. Russia is a place where you can have a Christian father, a Christian mother, their Christian children, and they'll just be left alone.

They can live in peace. Sure, there's a lot of problems here. Sure, there's a lot of difficulties. Sure, there's a lot of hardship. Tell me where there isn't. But here you can be normal. Here you can be a traditional family and be left alone. And that's what I want for my family.

I'm not looking for paradise until we enter heaven. I'm looking for normal. And Russia has normal. It's maybe the last country on earth that still has normal. And I think that's a powerful thing that we need to be telling the world. And I'm trying to do that. There's multiple websites. I've worked on multiple videos. But just recently, just to give you an idea of how much interest there is in America. About three months ago, I started a new blog. It's on Substack, called Moving to Russia. And already there's 11,000 subscribers reading this in English.

Now, not all 11,000 have asked to move here yet, but many of them have. And they're asking for advice. How do we move there? How do we handle immigration? How do we learn the language? And there's just massive interest. There are a lot of traditional Christians, a lot of normal families in America that have more in common with Russians than they have with their own government. You know, America is not the problem. It's the government. And the same government that is saying bad things about Russia is oppressing and persecuting its own people.

And this is our chance to try to bring the two countries together to tell the truth about why Russia is a good place, about why traditional Christianity and the family are good things, and not only publish these things in Russian, but publish them in English and tell all these people that are normal in America that there is a normal place on earth and that they should not give up hope.

This is billed as a Christmas party. And being a priest, I would be remiss if I didn't say something about Christmas. And so 2000 years ago, before the Son of God took on human flesh and was born in Bethlehem, you had nations warring against each other. You had people fighting against each other. One nation speaks one language, another speaks another language. They have this culture here and this culture there. And so what do they do? They try to kill each other and take over each other's land. And there is nothing stopping this war, fight, bloodshed, me versus you. And then Christ came.

Now, why did he come? First of all, he came to save us from our sins. But he does more than that. Christianity is not just a ticket to heaven. It says in Holy Scripture that Christ came to redeem the entire universe. That includes the world that you're in right now, the floor that you're standing on right now, the country that you're in right now. He came to redeem everything. And I think that includes relations between America and Russia.

You know, he didn't come here so that we could kill each other and then go to heaven. That wouldn’t make any sense. He came to bring peace, but not peace at the cost of truth. You can't sell a lie and have peace. But if you're willing to embrace Him as the Son of God, if you're willing to recognize that His way is the only good way, if you repent of your sins, if you humble yourself, then suddenly it doesn't matter anymore whether your parents were Russian or whether your parents were American or whether they were Brazilian or Saudi Arabian or German — it doesn't matter.

If you're looking for peace, if you're looking for unity, you need to look for it — not in government decrees, not in diplomacy and international negotiations — you need to look for it in Christ. And so it's fitting that you would have Americans and Russians at peace with one another, not tomorrow, not after the next negotiation between two governments, but today, on this day in 2022. You have a room full of Russians and Americans who are already at peace. And why? Well, because we're here for a Christmas party. We're here to celebrate Christ. What Christ came to do is already working, and we're a part of it.

Americans Living in Russia on Telegram: https://t.me/AmericanCommunityinRussia

Source: Fr. Joe’s Newsletter - Moving to Russia

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We are also on Facebook and Instagram which have been designated terrorist organizations by the Russian government.  ; - )