We continue to
publish the materials of Spas TV program My Path To God, where Priest George
Maximov interviews people who converted to Orthodoxy. The guest of today’s
program is Archpriest Lev Semyonov. He
was baptized at a mature age, but all the years before his baptism he always
considered himself Christian. After taking interest in their interpretation of
the Bible, he joined the Unification Church … How did he, a Unificationist
preacher and one of the leaders of the Russian division of this sect manage to
separate the truth from lies? Is it difficult to quit a sect and why? What
should you do if your close friend has joined a sect? What are the things you
should never do in this situation? These are the questions that we will be
discussing with Father Lev in today’s program.
Priest George Maximov: Hello! You
are watching My Path To God. The guest of today’s program is Archpriest Lev
Semyonov, Senior Lecturer, Doctoral Candidate of Historical Sciences, and head
of the Spiritual Enlightenment Center of St. Tikhon Orthodox University of
Humanities. I will tell you right away that Father Lev spent several years of
his life in the Unification Church, a religious organization founded by Sun
Myung Moon. Moreover, he held a high-ranking position in this organization,
working as Deputy Chairman of the Council of the Russian Division. We will talk
to him about this, but we should probably start from the very beginning.
As you suggested,
I will briefly tell you about my distant childhood. I was born to a family of
teachers and physicians. At that time, speaking about religion was not
customary; moreover, it could be dangerous. I was an only child, so in a way I
was spoiled. Unfortunately, I did not receive any religious education when I
was a child. Although, a certain inherent affinity for learning about something
empyreal manifested in me in my very early years. Nevertheless, I was ignorant
in the matters of religion. For example, when I was five or six years old, I
was passing by a church and saw a beggar asking for alms and making the sign of the cross. I didn’t know
the meaning of that sign. I wanted to find out what it meant, but since my
parents never talked about the Church, I intuitively would not dare to touch
upon this subject and ask them about it. Instead, this was how I explained it
to myself: This man is asking for alms and probably wants to show that he needs
help, so he uses this gesture to show where it hurts. This story may seem
amusing on one hand, but on the other hand, it is sad as it shows my absolute
ignorance in the matters of faith.
Now let’s talk about the time when I was 17. It
was the spring of 1963. I was looking for something in an old, early twentieth
century oak bookcase. It was huge, and books on the shelves were placed in
three rows. This is very good in terms of capacity, but extremely inconvenient
when you want to get a book from the second or the third row. The advantage of
this bookcase was that it allowed my parents to hide the books that they for
some reason didn’t want to leave in plain sight. Once when I was looking for a
book in the third row on the top shelf, I noticed a book that I never saw my
parents read. It was a very nicely made book in morocco binding with golden
edges and a golden cross embossed on the cover. When I opened the book, I saw that
it was the Gospel.
The text was arranged in two columns: in Church
Slavonic and in Russian. That was the first time I
held the Holy Scripture in my hands. Standing on the stool that I used to get
to the top shelf, I started reading it from the very beginning. As at that time
the questions of faith were quite foreign to me, Jesus Christ’s lineage that is
described in the beginning of the Gospel didn’t seem interesting, but when I
read further, I understood that this wasn’t something you read standing on a
stool, it was something that required your full attention. Thankfully, there was
nobody in the house on that day, so I climbed off the stool and kept reading
until I finished all four Gospels.
Father George: What was your impression?
Father Lev: This was a turning point in my life. It shocked
and amazed me. I was overwhelmed with the knowledge about this new, totally
different way of life! It was a different reality, a different meaning of life.
When my parents came home from work, I was so overwhelmed with juvenile naivety
and enthusiasm that I made them sit on the sofa while I read the Gospel to
them: “Just listen to this!” I kept on reading the book to them throughout the
week until they heard all four Gospels.
Then I said
something that shocked them. Remember, it was the spring of 1963, Khruschev was in power
and persecution of the Church was at its peak. Amid all this, a 17-year old
boy, after reading the Gospel of John, announced to his parents, “I have
decided to become a priest, and so this summer I want to go a seminary to get
proper education…” In response, they launched, so to say, the
counter-propaganda campaign. They explained why I should not be doing this.
Now, half a century later, I can understand my parents’ motives. I was their
only son and, given the existing situation, they wanted a different future for
me. They thought that perhaps I should be involved in some research. They
thought that becoming a priest was dangerous and tried to talk me out of it in
any way they could.
When they
exhausted all their reasoning and saw that I was not giving up, they came up
with their last argument that was irrefutable in my perception. They said, “Ok,
Lev, you are turning a deaf ear to what we’re saying and you don’t care about
your future. But have you thought about us? You are our only son. If you become
a priest, people will wonder how we, a deputy principal at school and a
physician in the hospital, could raise our only son to become a priest?” They
won’t let us work long enough to be eligible to receive pension. We hoped that
when you gain your footing, you’d be helping us and we will have some
sustenance in our old age… If you go ahead with this, we will be blacklisted.”
Under the existing conditions, this forecast was quite realistic. A person
would be better off working as a night guard in a kindergarten, than being a
deputy principal accused of bringing up her son so that he decided to study in
a seminary. Alas, these were the times my generation grew up in. I hope that
today’s youth wouldn’t forget about that period, because there is a lesson to
be learned from those dangerous times and it is important to prevent those
circumstances from happening again.
I couldn’t fend
off this argument, because while I could decide my own destiny, I could not let
my parents down. As a result, I made a decision that seemed a compromise to me:
I decided to study the history of the Church and Christianity at the historical
faculty. And I did.
This story about
my journey is too long, so I’ll skip dozens of years and tell you what happened
when I was 44. It was 1990. I was already a Candidate of Historical Sciences
and a Senior Lecturer. I was delivering lectures at the university on such
subjects as ancient history, the history of the world culture and religious
studies. One day they summoned me to the rector’s office and the first
pro-rector of the university suggested that I should go to some conference. He
said, “Considering the subject of the presentations, this is right up your alley,
something to do with religion.” It was an international conference, by the way,
held in Sofia.
Father George: Father Lev, how did you perceive yourself at
that time? Did you consider
yourself a Christian, a religious person?
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CONVERSATION