AMERICANS ALL

It was a long time ago that he decided he wouldn't be
a professional wrestler after all, because he didn't like
raw meat. They used to feed them on raw meat and
gunpowder in those days. So he became a priest. But
one night, seeing a new champion strut to an adjoining
table in a restaurant, he wrote him a polite line on the
back of a menu and sent it by the head waiter.
It read, " Come over here and 111 tear you to bits/'
He is a true Man of God, devout and mystical, but
the casual way in which he gives his cross to be kissed,
as if it were a lollypop, gossiping meanwhile about the
North Pole fliers, is reminiscent of the casualness of
that great Early Father of the Church who wrote the
immortal words, " I am God's Honey, and He is mine/'
This true priest is " God's Honey " if any priest ever
was.

I am sure God must smile in the clouds and for*
give him, as He surely did that other priest who was
once invited to a Sunday dinner at an American
farmer's house on Long Island during Russian Lent,
and found on the table a roast sucking pig, of which he
was inordinately fond. He solved his dilemma by
waving his cross over it and saying, " Lord, let it be
salmon!"

New York's Russian Cathedral is down on 105 East
Houston Street, administered by the Metropolitan, the
Most Reverend Archbishop Theophilos, where you can
hear as gorgeous music as anywhere on earth at ten
o'clock every Sunday morning, but not all the glory
down there can dim the light of Father Kourdiumoff
up-town.

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