Russian literature has a long history of dealing with Church
themes. Pushkin, Leskov and Chekhov come to mind at once. However, these themes
are also central in Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and more recently in Pasternak and
Soloukhin, and in fact they are present in all Russian literature, as an
underpinning and uniting background of spiritual and cultural values.
What is original about this book is that the author is not just
a very talented writer with a sensitive artist’s heart, but he is also a monk,
priest and senior archimandrite in Moscow, the Superior of Sretensky Monastery,
Fr Tikhon Shevkunov. And, above all, what is original is that this book has
been written now, as a monument to what has risen a generation after the death
of three generations of forced – and failed – State atheism.
In other words, this book breathes Resurrection.
A spiritual child of the ever-memorable Elder Ioann Krestyankin
of the Pskov Caves Monastery, Fr Tikhon has made his historic, central Moscow
Monastery into a bastion of genuine Orthodoxy, with one of the best choirs in Russia.
There is to be found a prominent seminary, with several
international students, the best Orthodox bookshop in Moscow and probably the
best and biggest Orthodox website in Russia (www.pravoslavie.ru),
which also has an English-language section.
Apart from being a gifted
writer, Fr Tikhon is also a film-maker (‘A Byzantine Lesson’), runs the anti-alcohol
campaign in the Russian Federation, is responsible for Church-cultural
relations, and is a great friend of the Church Outside Russia – we see him
regularly.
His book, Everyday Saints, is being
translated into ten languages, the Greek edition having already appeared. Now
we have the English edition of ‘Nesvyatye Svyatye’ (literally, ‘Unholy
Saints’).
This is a bestseller in Russia, having sold the unprecedented
number of 1,100,000 paper copies and millions of electronic copies since it
appeared one year ago.
It has been read by all, believer and atheist alike, has changed
lives, and really is unputdownable, as I know myself when I read it in one more
or less continuous eighteen-hour sitting in September 2011. Little wonder that
in Moscow it has been awarded the ‘Book of the Year’ prize for 2012.
At 490 pages long, the book is divided into 60 chapters, often
but not always sketches of people, often but not always clerics, but all known
to the author. Amusing and sad and edifying in turn, they are all profoundly
human, but also profoundly touched by the Divine.
These are the lives of Orthodox clerics and laypeople, a few of
them known to the author of this review, like Bishop Basil (Rodzianko). You
feel the author’s compassion, his total lack of any judgement about his
subjects. Well, he is right to do this – we all have our weaknesses.
As the translator notes in his preface:
‘Ultimately, though it may
take a while, love and light and compassion conquer hatred and darkness and
indifference’.
This book is a compendium of lives of Church people who lived in
recent years. He describes how, despite their obvious weaknesses, their lives
were transformed by the grace of the Holy Spirit, which, in the words of St
Seraphim of Sarov, we are called on to acquire. Probably many Orthodox clergy know
enough stories to write such a book – but we do not because we cannot. But Fr
Tikhon does because he can.
As a Russian, Fr Tikhon is no hypocrite and has no time for that
sugary pietism which so mars the lives of Western clericalism and turns people
away from Christ. The author pulls no punches and tells the truth: saints are
not born, they started off like us, but they became saints. All of us are
spoiled by our sins and weaknesses, however, as the Apostle Paul said to the
Orthodox in Corinth, ‘My strength is made perfect in weakness’.
As Orthodox life is patterned by prayer, conversation with the
Living God, it consists of what the world calls ‘coincidences’, that is,
‘God-incidences’. These are the generous and loving and providential
interventions of God in our everyday life,
showing to us the presence of saints in
our midst. This is made clear in another remarkable Church classic of Russian
literature, Heavenly
Paths,by Shmelyov.
But this is also clear in Fr Tikhon’s work before us.
Let us take just one short example of his content and style, his
description of the saintly old nuns of St Seraphim’s Diveyevo, who had been
captives of the Soviet regime for over 70 years, but had kept the faith:
‘In a ramshackle little hut
on the outskirts of Diveyevo I saw something that I could never have imagined
in my most radiant dreams. I saw alive the Church Radiant, invincible and
indefatigable, youthful and joyful in the consciousness of its God, our
Shepherd and Savior…There is no way to capture the sublimity of this service in
words…These incredible nuns sang the entire service virtually by heart…they had
risked death or punishment saying this service in concentration camps and
prisons and places of exile..They said it even now even after all their
sufferings, here in Diveyevo, settling into their wretched hovels on the
outskirts of the town. For them it was nothing unusual, and yet for me I could
scarcely understand whether I was in Heaven or on earth.
These aged nuns were
possessed of such incredible spiritual strength…that it was then that I
understood that they with their faith would triumph over everything – over our
godless government despite all its power, over the faithlessness of this world,
and over death itself, of which they had absolutely no fear’.
‘The reign of the Children of
Ham has ended’.
Our life is indeed ‘a patchwork of God’s compassion’.
In an excellent translation by Julian Henry Lowenfeld, the book
is priced at only $23.00 and ordering information is available from
Everyday-Saints.com. The profits from this book are going towards building a
Cathedral Church of the New Martyrs and Confessors at the Lubyanka in central
Moscow (where the Soviet Secret Police Headquarters were located – the very
site where so many confessed Orthodoxy and were martyred only a few decades
ago).
The new Church is to be completed in 2017 and will contain a
museum of the New Martyrs in its basement (you can read and see this spectacular cathedral, already
constructed, here -RF ed). Here is a
most worthy cause. Here is a most worthy book. It is warmly recommended. But I
warn you now – once you have started reading it, you will not be able to put it
down.
Originally appeared at Orthodox Christianity