St Macarius of Egypt writes that any evil passion must be transfigured to a higher stirring of the soul and directed toward service to God. Fiery zeal may be converted to burning love, salacity to an expectancy of heavenly consolation, jealousy to ardor for God.
And only a cold-hearted person cannot make use of their senseless and vain heart either for the presence of God or for godly work.
“A Little Piece of Wood”
It was the 1960s. The writer Vladimir Soloukhin, who collected icons from all the villages he visited, gave my father one of these, as he called them, “little pieces of wood.” The icon was in terrible condition—first of all, it had fallen apart into three pieces, and secondly, it was impossible to tell what was depicted on it. Wrapped in a cloth, this icon was kept by my parents in a safe place for many years.
But the time came for my husband and me to obtain it and take it to a restorer that we knew, Andrei Vitte. A few months later, we received it back in all of its former glory. It was an icon of the Joy of All Who Sorrow—the Mother of God with Her Child surrounded by a host of archangels and saints: the apostles Peter and Paul, Saints Basil, John, and Gregory, St Nicholas, the Martyr Tatiana, and other lesser known holy men and women. The icon itself was special somehow—if you would simply stand before it with a helpless and contrite heart, you would feel your heart slowly become filled—completely saturated—with peace and joy.
“This is an unusual icon,” said the restorer. “I finished it a long time ago, but held onto it, because I didn’t want to part with it. And then—it’s not that old, it’s from the nineteenth century, but I saw signs of a previous restoration on it. This is strange if you consider that such icons weren’t restored at that time—it was cheaper to paint a new one. It suggests that this icon was very important to someone. And then—all the saints assembled on it seem to be the patron saints of some large family. Well, let them be the patron saints of your family now …”
The icon belonged to my parents, but when they moved to their dacha [summer cottage] in Peredelkino, my brother and his family moved in to their apartment, and so the icon remained with them. We had almost no access to it, and my brother was not a praying man. I entreated the Mother of God to arrange for the icon to find its way back to my parents, so that I might visit them and pray before Her.
Then my mother called me and said:
“Please bring me my icon, right away. I really need it.”
“All right, I’ll do it tomorrow …”
“No, it has to be today! Immediately!”
If you hadn’t known that I had tearfully entreated the Mother of God for access to Her icon, this would have seemed not only strange, but unbelievable—such insistence on the part of my mother, who also, honestly speaking, looked at it as an object of art rather than a living image.
I took the icon from my brother, wrapped it in a large clean towel given to us by a Ukrainian priest, and, pressing it to my chest, went outside to catch a taxi: I didn’t have a car then, and it seemed like blasphemy to take the icon onto the subway or commuter train, especially during rush hour. Moreover, it was large, and heavy.
As soon as I left the entryway, I saw a taxicab with a green light driving right in our courtyard. He had a sign on his windshield saying “To the park,” and underneath, “Metro Ryzhskaia taxi parking lot,” which was one stop from the house, then: “Shift over at 5:00.” It was already after five.
Nevertheless, the cab driver immediately stopped:
“Where are you going?”
“To Peredelkino.”
“Take a seat.”
And so we went. I had the icon in the towel on my lap. While we were driving, the cab driver kept grumbling:
“Why did I pick you up? I don’t understand it! It was like someone told me to stop! My shift was already over.”
Then we got stuck in traffic. Again he began:
“Why did I pick you up?”
On top of it all, the bridge over the Moscow Ring Road was under construction, and we were forced to make a detour around it on a one-lane road. We dragged along slowly or stood at a complete standstill. By that point, he had begun to hit the steering wheel in despair:
“Why did I pick you up? I was two minutes from my taxi lot. When am I going to get home now?”
“All right,” I said. “I will explain to you why you stopped and took me. Here,” and I unwrapped the towel, showing him the icon. “It was the Mother of God who put the thought in your head to stop, otherwise I wouldn’t have reached my destination with this icon.”
He was silent. And then he said:
“I also have a connection to the Church. Yes! I was drafted into the army, and they sent me to war in Afghanistan … My mother went to Elder Kirill in the Holy Trinity Lavra of St Sergius and asked him to pray for me. And he told her: ‘Don’t cry, your son will return alive and unharmed—you just pray for him every day. I will pray, too, but when he returns, he must come and see me.’
“And so my mother prayed for me. I felt that some power was protecting me—everyone in my unit had been killed or wounded, I alone remained unharmed; I even felt guilty about it: not a scratch on me, everything had passed me by.”
“I came home, and my mother told me about the elder, saying that I must without fail visit him and thank him. But soon she passed away, and I got caught up in all my worries and cares, in my work, and this Lavra was so far away—how was I supposed to find it? So I never made it, to this day …”
“Well, do you know why else the Lord arranged for you to drive me?” I asked him, wrapping the icon back in its towel, as my parents’ dacha came into view. You picked me up because right there, after the turn in the road, is the Church of the Transfiguration. That Fr Kirill, whom for so many years you couldn’t manage to visit, is there now. Go into the church courtyard, he’s seeing people to the left in the baptistery, until eight o’clock exactly. You have another half hour.”
He let me out and flew down the road, leaving a cloud of dust behind him.
What became of him—only God knows … But it’s possible that if he made it to Elder Kirill, he understood to Whom he must offer prayers of gratitude for his miraculous preservation. It’s even possible that he became that hieromonk from a distant monastery of whom some monks that I knew told me recently:
“By God’s miraculous providence, our Fr N. came out of the very thick of the Afghan War without a single scratch.”
I, in the meantime, brought the icon to my mother, and she greeted it like the living image it was. Later, when my husband was ordained a priest, she gave the icon to us.
The Gypsy
My friend’s mother died, and he asked me to take his sister Anna, who was my neighbor, to the funeral.
My husband and I picked her up and set off on our sad journey.
His sister and I knew each other from childhood—we were at summer camp together and had been fast friends there: we would run away together and climb into people’s dacha gardens, stealing unripe apples.
Later, when she matured into a young adult, I heard that she had fallen in love with a famous poet who was much older than she and who lived here in our little writer’s town, and whose attention she fought to obtain with all her power. She spied on him at his gate when he would return home late at night, kept watch at his door when he would set off to Moscow in the morning, and once even sneaked into his house in his absence and hid in his closet. He came home, opened his closet, and there she was!
But she—alas—never managed to conquer his heart. Moreover, at the mere mention of her name he would start to yell and curse, remembering how she had frightened him that time. So she fell into a terrible melancholy. It was even suspected that she was ill.
And so we were driving to Moscow, getting stuck in traffic, fretting about being late, and suddenly she said to my husband:
“I remember, Fr Vladimir, how one Gypsy predicted that you would be a priest!”
“What?” My husband said, surprised,
“What Gypsy? I don’t remember any such thing!”
It’s doubtful, I thought: even before he started attending church, he had always preserved a purity in connection with the metaphysical. He was never interested in extraterrestrials, or fortunetelling, or spiritualism; even when someone would tell him excitedly about what a mess the evil spirits had caused … And yet, I now began to dimly recollect something …
“You told me about it when you were reading my coffee grinds,” Anna said humbly. “And it all came true!”
And suddenly I saw it all before my eyes as if I was there, everything that had happened then, many-many years ago, before we were even baptized …
Anna had once come to us—acting strange, as if she were in a fog, all melancholy, and spoke to us through her fog, staring with an unfocused gaze, looking straight through us, and we felt very sorry for her. We had already been informed by the famous poet about the closet. I brewed some coffee, and my husband decided to conduct a psychotherapeutic séance with her:
“Anna, do you want me to read your fortune in your coffee grinds?”
Of course, he had no idea how this was done. He just took the cup from which she had been drinking, and began to tell her, borrowing from her situation, what his good sense suggested to him:
“Anna, you suffer much and are wasting too much spiritual strength on this, but it means nothing to the person you are thinking about. You must give away this love to other people who are in need of it—the sick, the lonely, the miserable. You have enough love and compassion for them all. People like you become nurses, comfort the fatally ill who have been abandoned by even their family, or raise orphans …”
My husband said some other encouraging and spiritually beneficial words to her then, in order to distract her from her obsession with that useless famous poet.
“Actually,” suddenly he started to backtrack, “don’t listen to me! I was once told by a Gypsy that I would become a priest!”
“You—a priest?” she laughed.
I laughed too. And my husband laughed. So strange, unlikely, impossible it seemed then …
And now Anna, having herself become a nurse in a sisterhood of Orthodox nurses, reminded us of this.
“Yes, yes,” she said as we drove up to the church where the funeral was being held, “you told me about that Gypsy yourself! Well, do you remember now?” And she climbed out of the car, slamming the door behind her.
What difference does it make, I thought, if a Gypsy actually told him that or not—he just made it all up at the time. And that means that some mysterious premonition had whispered to him of the impossible, and he had said aloud: “I will become a priest!”
And those words came true! For a priest he truly became.
Martyr Tryphon
I had heard many stories about the miraculous aid of the Martyr Tryphon, but some things I can add from my own experience. We had an icon with a piece of his miracle-working relics in our Church of the Mother of God of the Sign, near Ryzhskaia metro, where we had been going for many years with our children until we moved to the other end of Moscow. For all those years, we prayed before that icon of St Tryphon.
In fact, the Martyr Tryphon was a Greek saint. He was famous for healing people, driving out demons, performing many miracles, and suffering terrible torments and death for his missionary work. In Russia, he became especially revered after he had saved one Tryphon, who was Tsar Ivan the Terrible’s hawker. This hawker had released the tsar’s favorite hawk and couldn’t find him, for which offense he faced the tsar’s anger and a terrible death. But he saw a vision of his holy protector, Tryphon, on whose shoulder sat that very same imperial hawk …
The akathist1 to the Martyr Tryphon includes his words encouraging people to pray to him for help with cares and illnesses and promising to come to their immediate aid. And in truth, he really does immediately respond to a person’s plea.
Usually people pray to him in cases of illness, asking for healing; often they ask him to help a lonely man find a kind wife, or to send a young girl or lonely woman a good husband, but neither does he forsake those who turn to him on regular matters.
They ask him to help with household and life problems, to destroy harmful pests in the crops, and finally, remembering how he found the lost hawk, they ask his help in finding and returning lost items.
I, too, once requested a moleben and akathist to the saint, asking him to help me join a writer’s union. My case had already reached the Selections Committee, where I heard I had influential ill-wishers. On the other hand, all official indicators pointed to my acceptance: after all, in spite of my young twenty-five years, I had a book of poems published in the prestigious Sovetskii pisatel’, I had publications in Novyi mir and Den’ poezii, I had positive reviews and criticism of my poetry … I was almost certain that everything would be all right, but it never hurts to pray …
And so I prayed at this moleben on the very day of the meeting of the Selections Committee; I came home, my husband had already bought a little cake to celebrate, my friends came over, it would seem that we were already celebrating my victory … and then, the phone rang.
“Olesia, you were voted down.”
“What do you mean, voted down?”
“Well, they didn’t accept you!”
“Why?”
“Just like that. They didn’t take you, and that’s that! They said that you were the daughter of a writer …”
I was dumbfounded. Honestly speaking, this was a huge shock to me. Being accepted into a writer’s union in those days meant roughly the same as receiving a noble title in imperial times. It meant social status. Moreover, for my struggling family, with two children already, it would have given us the chance to emerge from long-lasting poverty. Compensation and fees for lecturing were twice as high for union members as for mere mortals who happened to write something. I could have traveled for free once a year to a boarding house for artists—in Koktebel or Yalta, in Pitsunda or Dubulti, in Maleevka or Peredelkino—and pay close to nothing or nothing at all for a day’s stay. Every year, I could have written for the Writer’s Sanitorium Bulletin and made good money on this three-month assignment. I could have gone on a writer’s business trip wherever I wanted—Georgia, Estonia, Lake Baikal—and not have to answer to anyone for what I did there or if I wrote anything while I was there …
In short, the benefits were many, and I had already been mentally preparing to make use of them: the travel, the business trip, the newsletter, the doubled salary … and now this shock. I even took my complaints to St Tryphon—not to say that I was upset with him, but I did ask him, what did he mean by it? I had small children, no money, my clothes were shabby, my shoes were old, we had junk for furniture …
Then I received a phone call from the Bureau for the Advocacy of Literature and was given an offer to read poetry to the town of Shebekino in Belgorod Region. I, of course, agreed: no doubled salary here, but it was a chance to earn a little money.
It was when I was returning from Shebekino with a bouquet of calla lilies in my arms that I miraculously ended up going to see Elder Seraphim (Tiapochkin). After that, I forgot about the writer’s union completely because my life and that of my family took a turn in an entirely different direction—monasteries, monastic sketes, holy springs, elders, miracles, midnight liturgies, fasts and prayers, monks, holy fools and fools-for-Christ …
On more than one occasion, I thought about what a good thing Martyr Tryphon did for me, leading me away from a dubious path. For if they had accepted me at that time into the writer’s union, I would never have gone to Shebekino, I would not have seen the elder, I wouldn’t have met my father confessor or my spiritual father or the miracle-working lowly Monk Leonid. In a word, I wouldn’t have known any of those precious people who surrounded the elder and with whom the Lord then gave us such a strong connection; I would have taken on that three-month bulletin, the three-day trips to Koktebel, a business trip to Georgia to my friends. I would have demanded a
good apartment for myself and would have acted how a young wife with two children and a husband with the reputation of a doer and a dissident was expected to act: i.e., support their well-being and progress in the world.
I would have continued to go rarely to church, taking my children to communion and thinking that these Church Mysteries2 were for simpletons, and that for enlightened and creative types like me other mysteries of the spirit existed: the mystery of inspiration and the tabernacle of the spirit. Just like that, I had seen something of that nature in the writings of the Russian religious philosophers Berdyaev, Merezhkovsky, Solovyev … Who knows where that path would have led me …
Thus, the Martyr Tryphon did not let me go to the writer’s union at that time in my life and did not allow me to make use of all its privileges. When I finally realized that this was a GOOD thing, I began to turn to him often in dubious situations, and I always received his help. Several times, in dramatic and extreme cases, I asked him to find some item of considerable importance. I would like to tell you about one of these instances.
While my husband and I sat in the admitting room of the hospital, waiting for him to be checked in, Nastia called me in tears and told me that she was not being allowed to take her exam because she had forgotten her exam sheet at the dacha. This was at the time of day when the commuter trains didn’t run, and going to Peredelkino on other forms of public transportation would be a long and uncertain journey. And so I left my husband at the hospital, and rushed off in the car to find her exam sheet on my own.
This was the end of July, and there was terrible traffic leaving Moscow. The cars moved inch by inch. Finally, I reached the house and rushed into Nastia’s room, which should rather be called a den—it was so small, low, and dark even in the light of the bright sun, which was blocked by the thick crowns of trees. And to my dismay, the whole community had no working electricity.
Ordinary Wonders Page 5
