Unfortunately, I can’t relate all of these personal revelations. But I can tell you of two such instances …
Once, I went to see my father confessor in Pechory. I knew that he was planning to hear confessions during the early Liturgy next to the relics of the holy Martyr Cornelius. I arrived early and was first in line before the analogion. Confession had not yet begun. Suddenly, much to my dismay, an entirely different priest came out to that very analogion holding a cross and Gospel in his hand, and began reading the prayers before confession, and there was no sign of my father confessor. I was hoping to go to communion. So there I stood—again, first in line—before a priest whom I knew well and to whom I had no desire to confess. But it seemed wrong to turn around and walk away; that would be too pointed on my part. So I continued to stand in great doubt and uncertainty.
On the one hand, this priest sometimes started literary conversations with me and even wrote a few poems himself. By doing this he annoyed me and even tempted me with his hopeless literary dullness, and, God forgive me, his dismal lack of talent. What could he tell me during my confession? What spiritual advice could he give me? On the other hand, I thought, he is still a priest and will absolve me from my sins with the words “through the power given to me by Him …”
In the end, I decided to humble myself and go to him for confession.
He approached me after the service and unexpectedly began to speak to me about lying. Yes! This was one sin I knew I was guilty of, but at the same time did not consider to be of great importance, and his speech about this seemed to me to be at an entirely theoretical level.
If I do tell lies, they are, as it were, white lies, without interest or principle, simply in order to avoid giving long explanations or being a pest. Moreover, I didn’t consider that to be my greatest sin, but he gave me an entire sermon on the subject. Inspired and giving way to an internal revelation, he gave me such an explanation of this sin that he literally overturned my perception of myself and of the world.
“The horror of this sin lies in the fact that it devalues words. Words cease to have meaning, they lose their essence and become empty. In addition, according to the law of psychological projection, a person who lies stops believing other people’s words. They stop believing anything. Not believing words, they stop believing the Word. They read the Gospel and don’t believe in Christ. And this is the most terrible thing, because ‘even the demons believe—and tremble!’ (Jas 2:19), while the liar is punished with emptiness. They are surrounded completely by deceit, behind which there is nothing. Even in life they find themselves in hell.”
This explained much to me about the modern world, that lives completely by externals, appearances, pretenses, hypocrisy, and falseness; that wears different masks, lays decoys, tries to mimic, tries to give favors in return for benefits, and carries the punishment for its own deceit: it doesn’t believe in itself, or others, or the Word of God.
As for the poems of this priest, who impressed me for the rest of my life with his instruction, they remained the same—terrible. Literally the following day, meeting me in the monastery, he handed me a large notebook:
“Here you go, read it in your spare time!”
Inside, every poem was creatively formulated in the same way: on the opposite page was glued a postcard from the Soviet times depicting the appropriate season. So, if the poem was about autumn, the postcard showed “golden autumn”; if it was about spring, the postcard showed melting snow and nesting rooks …
Here is another instance that clearly witnesses to the fact that during a Mystery, a priest is guided by the Lord Himself.
I had a classmate at the institute who, having just given birth to a baby at a very young age, grew very ill: she contracted cancer of the brain. She was admitted to the Burdenko Clinic, her head was shaved, and she had a craniotomy in order to extract the tumor. After the surgery, her face was distorted, and her mouth ended up somewhere close to her ear. Her husband left her for another, and she found herself completely alone with a tiny daughter in her arms.
She was a unique woman, though, because not only did she not despair, but on the contrary, she began to assure everyone who tried to empathize and help her that she had it “better than anyone”: she could sit with her daughter at home, she sewed dresses, skirts, and blouses for small change, she had a perfectly clean home with homemade pirozhki, her mouth was returning to its proper place, she was slowly beginning to get out of the house, and so on and so forth …
To be honest, I thought that she was a saint: I had never seen such gentle patience, kindness, generosity, charity, and most importantly, such gratitude to God for everything that destiny sent her way, except in the lives of the saints. The only thing she lacked was to be baptized, but that was taken care of, too. One beautiful day, my husband drove her and her daughter to Fr Valeriian Krechetov in Otradnoe village, and there he celebrated for them the mystery of baptism.
After this, however, her troubles didn’t end—a tumor was again found in her brain and she had another operation, but she still had it “better than anyone”: her daughter was so smart and beautiful, she was growing as fast as a flower in the field, her friends were so wonderful, her orders for dresses and skirts were increasing. The only bad thing was that she hadn’t received holy communion since her baptism. I spoke to her about this several times, offering to bring a priest to her, but she declined.
“No, Lesechka, I’m not ready. And then—what could he tell me? I would have to explain so much to him … No, no, I don’t want to.”
Ten years must have passed. In that time she had another craniotomy, but again she rose up with a bright outlook and a firm resolution in her soul—she did not bend or break, which might have happened with so many others.
Finally, I managed to convince her to go to confession and communion, or perhaps she herself came to that point. Either way, it was clear that the Lord enlightened her. She even desired to come to church and attend a service—I only had to bring her and take her home. She also asked me to choose for her a good priest who would help her discover some new sources of life. I was to go to him first and tell him about her life and situation, so that he would understand the context when she came to him for confession.
I did just that. I went to our Church of the Mother of God of the Sign, and asked the wonderful and discerning priest Fr Vladimir to give a life confession to such and such a servant of God, living in such and such circumstances, keeping in mind that she was confessing for the first time.
Fr Vladimir looked over his schedule and chose a day.
I told her that I had arranged everything with a wonderful, wise priest who would carefully consider her life and help her.
“And you told him everything about me? You warned him?” she grew anxious.
She began to prepare several days ahead of time, fasting and reading the communion rule. I picked her up early in the morning, and we went to the church. We stood at the analogion, waiting, and suddenly …
Someone completely different came out. Now, he was also a good priest. Just simple, what they called “a country priest”: beady eyes, a funny potato nose, a fat belly. Terrible diction—half the prayers he read were not understandable. He was disjointed—when he began his sermon, he would inevitably wander into such a syntactic labyrinth that it was impossible to follow him! But, he was kind and pure at heart. Such spiritual warmth emitted from him that even our literary ladies from the nearby writers’ house—and such ladies!—Bulat Okudzhava’s wife, Oleg Vasilevich Volkov’s wife (he was the author of the famous novel Descent into Darkness) only went to him, a simple man, for confession, despite the fact that there were more intellectual, better-looking, more educated, and much more polished in speech and manners priests at the time in that church.
And so, this father came out and began to drone, swallowing the words of the prayer before confession.
“You’re sure you told him everything about me?” my friend asked one more time.
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nbsp; “Sure, sure,” I said dismissively, frantically trying to think what to do: should I go and look for Fr Vladimir, or should I admit to her that this was SOMEONE ELSE, and still try to convince her to go to him, for chances were that we would not be able to come back for a long time: she lived on the opposite side of Moscow, after all. Or should I say nothing and see what would happen?
Suddenly, this father, having finished reading the prayers, uncharacteristically began to recite a sermon. I listened to him with one ear, as I was being torn apart by a terrible worry for the novice confessee, while some unintelligibly nasal sound reached me from that kind and dear simple priest. But he finished, and my friend stepped toward the anagolion. I walked away so as not to embarrass her, worried that she would discover my lie at any moment: for that priest didn’t know anything about her.
Finally, she came back to me in amazement.
“Did you hear what he said during his sermon? It was like he was speaking directly to me, as if he knew in advance all the questions that I had come with today! That was because you told him everything, right? But he also talked to me about things that you don’t know, he must have been divinely inspired, right? He understood it through the Spirit?”
“Of course,” I sighed with relief. “Of course, through the Spirit!”
While we drove home, my rejoicing communicant couldn’t stop talking from her fullness of heart.
“He is simply spiritually clear-sighted, that priest of yours! Who is he? An elder? A wonderworker? How he saw everything, everything inside me to the very bottom!”
These are the miracles that occur with the priests of our Church. Not in vain did the Lord say: “He who touches you touches the apple of [My] eye” (Zech 2:8).
The Thrill-Seeker
I love monastics in general. Even aesthetically, their manner is appealing to me. Their way of life, allegorical thinking, and style of speaking, which constantly hearkens back to the primary sources—Sacred Scripture and the holy fathers—but which is also alive and full of metaphors and oxymorons, sometimes with features of the holy fool, sometimes with a metaphysical subtext.
In the society of monastics, to which I was occasionally given access, my soul completely blossomed. Sometimes the monastics themselves would grant me their trust and tell me incredible stories from their lives, in which, of course, the leading figure was divine providence.
Here, for example, is how the Lord brought Lesha to monasticism, also known as “Mayonnaise,” and who later became the humble Hieromonk Flavii.
Lesha had the nickname Mayonnaise for a very simple reason: he had a small mayonnaise production business. His two-room apartment served as both his office and his production facility, and there he made his mayonnaise with a single hired worker, who was also his nephew. Lesha himself—the owner of the company—bought all the materials, including packaging, and then distributed his ready-made product to his points of sale. This was all in the early nineties.
One day, he was driving on the highway in his overstuffed pickup truck when it broke down. It was terribly cold—minus twenty-two degrees Fahrenheit, and the fact that the truck had started that day in the first place was both a surprise and a mystery. There stood Lesha in the cold with the car hood open, his teeth chattering, shivering and trying to hitch a ride, but nobody stopped—who would want to—and he felt that just a little longer, and he would freeze to death on that bustling highway like the coachman in the steppe.
It must be said that, in general, Lesha was a thrill-seeker by nature; he would always set out on expeditions not suitable for beginners—either he would climb up Mt Elbrus1 or Communism Peak,2 or he would go out on a catamaran with other like-minded thrill-seekers on all the mountain rivers, or he would go skydiving. And now, stiffening in that frost, his thoughts began to head in the direction of realizing that against all expectations, he had finally achieved his ultimate thrill. In a minute, like General Karbyshev,3 he would turn to ice and would remain a monument on the highway. He chuckled to himself to raise his spirits, but he felt sick at heart. He couldn’t feel his arms or legs, his ears ached, there was sand in his eyes. Oh, he thought, what was the use of standing in the wind like that, let me climb into the car, curl up into a ball, and sleep, and God will take care of the rest. And if I die—then it’s my time.
And that very same instant, as soon as he remembered God, a red Lada pulled over and out came a priest with the face of an angel who went directly over to him. He took him to his car, turned the heater on full blast, drove him to the Holy Trinity Lavra of St Sergius, placed him in the infirmary, and fed him tea with raspberry jam. There Lesha was rubbed from head to toe with alcohol, while one of the Lavra mechanics towed his truck to the garage.
And so, Lesha drank his tea with raspberry jam, was treated with medicinal cognac, and during the interim, his saviour-monk brought him back to life. In the end, Lesha asked to be baptized.
After that, he continued to visit his spiritual father in the monastery—for confession as well as spiritual counsel. Then his life took him for a ride—inspections of his mayonnaise business apartment by the Sanitary-Epidemiological Service, attempted bribes, extortion, etc. He tried to restore his business, the bank gave him credit and then took it away, his business expanded, and all this time he completely stepped away from the Church, only attending on Pascha and Christmas. As soon as he had any free time, off he went to the mountains, or on a kayak to the White Sea, or on a catamaran to the Altai mountain rivers. He even managed to climb Mt Kilimanjaro.
Then he began to feel that God was pushing back. He went skydiving and broke his leg in two places, a compound fracture. As soon as his leg healed, he decided to scale Communism Peak one more time. But at his last mountain encampment before the ascent, a horse stepped on his hand and shattered several fingers. As there were medics present, they immediately attached splints to his fingers and bandaged up his hand. One might think, “Lesha Mayonnaise, it is time for you to go home!” But he was stubborn: I will conquer this peak even with my crushed fingers!
He had the supplies he needed, climbing shoes on his feet, a backpack with provisions on his back; he set out in the morning with his companions, and they began to ascend the mountain recesses. They went on and on, climbed and climbed, the day flew by and still they clambered up; the second day was almost over, night approached, when suddenly—what was this vision?—a girl in red shorts skipped on the rocks past them. Well, Lesha increased his speed to go after her, but she went hop, hop, hopping farther and disappeared. He looked and saw a bouquet of forget-me-nots on a boulder. What was this parable? He was amazed.
Finally, they stopped for the night, when suddenly, a man crawled into their tent, wearing jeans, a light fabric jacket, and plastic sneakers:
“Hey guys, we found some supplies and provisions in the crevice there—are they yours? Ours are all out.”
Who were they? And there was that girl—also not dressed for the weather or the circumstances, as if she was getting ready for a picnic outside the city. Lesha and his friends—tough people, rugged, experienced thrill-seekers—even got worked up a bit. They told them:
“What are you doing, without supplies, dressed like that in plastic shoes?”
They responded:
“What’s it to us, we just wanted to conceive a child on Communism Peak, so we left our car behind there, down—in Krasnodar Region—just before the crossing.”
Such disdain for planning offended Lesha. These places were dangerous, after all, nothing for a frivolous passerby to trifle with. To this day, a story is told about a seventeen-year-old girl who died in a descending avalanche.
Right above our thrill-seekers’ hideout, an enormous glacier stretched up high, and if you looked closely, you could see something black frozen inside, and if you looked closer, you would be able to examine it and see that it was a human—a woman’s, even a young girl’s—foot. It’s very possible that this was the foot of that very girl who had disappeared in the avalanche.
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br /> But those frivolous people were not destined to conceive a baby because a landslide started that night, and everyone began to run to the crevice by the glacier to take shelter there. Someone may have been hit on the head by a ricocheting rock, another’s hand may have been mangled, but as it was, everyone survived. In a day’s time, a rescue helicopter picked them up, and they landed right next to that fateful horse that had crushed Lesha’s fingers.
A group of German tourists, however, were not so lucky. These German tourists had also started their ascent of Communism Peak together with our native thrill-seekers, but under an avalanche they remained.
After that, Lesha went back to his spiritual father at the Lavra.
“Oh,” said the latter, “thank God that everything worked out, but what do you think, Lesha Mayonnaise, why did God save you? He saved you—for Himself. He has not finished taking joy in you, hasn’t rejoiced in you enough yet. You should go on and begin a new life, take communion here with us, and then slowly move here. You don’t have a family, and we need mayonnaise here in the monastery, too.”
Lesha agreed. He stayed there three days or so, and then left, promising to return in a month or two: he would take care of his affairs and give himself over completely to God and the monastery. And then he disappeared for seven months. He didn’t go to church, he didn’t tie up his affairs, and instead he went off for the summer to Pleshcheevo Lake, where his friend had built himself a vacation home and bought a sailboat. At first, Lesha said to him:
“I can’t go, brother, I promised to go to the monastery!”
The friend said:
“What’s all this about a monastery? Do you even know what a church we have there on Pleshcheevo Lake? Well! Your monastery won’t compare! There are such holy places there! You can go pray every day if you want, and in between services we’ll go swimming by the sailboat.”
Ordinary Wonders Page 12
