An American Glimpse of Holy Rus' (Shorter Version)

I departed as a pilgrim, hoping to come into contact -into communion- with the heart of "Holy Rus'," a term I'd never understood.

Introduction

It was a strange time to visit Siberia, everybody told me. For one thing, it was the end of December. For another thing, there were already rumors of war brooding. But this is exactly why I went when I did. Given that I was to sojourn to Siberia, I thought, I may as well go at the Siberia-est time to go: the winter is what makes Siberia Siberia. Nobody travels to Siberia to get a tan. And God willing, I could slip back to America before war brought down a new type of iron curtain.

My friend Josh, a parishioner at my church, a weightlifting buddy, and my graduate school advisor, was working in Siberia for the academic year with his wife and six children. I was going to visit him and his family in Orthodox Russia, for Russian Orthodox Christmas.

I was never much of a Russophile. I have long loved Dostoyevsky and have enjoyed many good sweats in the Russian Banya in my hometown. But for years, that was the extent of my fascination. Then almost two years ago, I became a Theist, I became overwhelmed by Christian Truth, and I joined the Orthodox Church nearest to my home. It happened to be Russian. For months, I considered that Russian-ness to be little more than incidental to the Faith. And in a way, it is. The same dogma is found in Greek, Serbian, Romanian, and Antiochian (Syrian) Churches. But I gradually became aware of Russian history, geography, and its unique status as “both and neither” European and Asian. This uniqueness inflects our church’s hymnody and our festal traditions, and these Russian influences are absolutely beautiful. They inspired a curiosity about what sort of Christianity, exactly, could be found in Russia. So, I departed as a pilgrim, hoping to come into contact – into communion – with the heart of “Holy Rus’,” a term I never understood.

I suppose I should say something about the war. The first thing to say is a prayer for peace in The Ukraine. Many innocents live there, including many of my brothers and sisters in Christ. Two of the Bishops under whom I worship are from The Ukraine. The most renowned modern saint for us west-coast American Orthodox Christians, St. John of San Francisco, is from the Kharkov province.

Holy Father John, pray to God to have mercy and grant peace to Ukraine and to the world.

This piece isn’t geopolitics. It’s a story of my spiritual reflections. This piece is about the possibility of truly communing in a foreign land, and about how the hidden mysteries of Holiness and resurrection can suffuse living history.

New Year vs. Nativity

Even before my flight to Moscow departed from LAX on the afternoon of December 29, I became aware of a unique type of foreignness. Aeroflot used a boarding procedure I had never seen before: they divided the passengers into groups, each of which lined up behind a flight attendant. Soon the lines filled up the hall of the terminal. The first group to board was at the back of the plane, the next group sat in front of them, and so on.

We boarded so quickly that I thought at first that this system must be more efficient. But once the plane pushed back from the departure gate, I realized that our boarding speed was probably due to vacancy. I was the only one in my row of seats. All around me, passengers laid down across their whole rows to sleep. I guess there weren’t many of us going to Moscow, that winter day.

I passed the time watching a two-part documentary about the roots of Russia’s February 1917 revolution, hosted by an Orthodox priest. Much of the movie was an encomium to Tsar Nicholas II and his family – the rest was a castigation of capricious aristocrats who cooperated with cunning British and Germanic espionage that undermined the Tsar and the Empire. I wondered how many Russians watched this documentary, and how seriously they took this post-Bolshevik historical revision.

At the Moscow airport, I had seven more sleepless hours until my connection to Tyumen, and I watched people move around me. Women were uncommonly beautiful. Men less so. Not ugly, but not striking, as the women were. How had this come to be? One theory, passed along from a Siberian woman, postulated that this beauty imbalance was caused by the wars and the gulags. All the best (or at least best-looking) men died, while women were less affected. That’s one theory. A new Russian friend would tell me an alternate theory ten days later, over lunch near Red Square.

New Years is a big deal in Russia — much bigger than it is in the USA, and it’s also a bigger deal, culturally, than Christmas, there. People like to talk about how the holiday of Nativity (Christmas) simply repurposed pagan celebrations of the solstice. But the coincidence actually makes sense: God timed His Incarnation to take place around the time of the solstice, because the solstice is, like everything in nature, a symbol that points to a spiritual reality: the reality that the Savior’s birth was the beginning of an upswing, an obscure harbinger of rising light. A beautiful divine gift for us, as we grapple with winter’s dark.

The Soviets recognized the need for a celebration at this dark and cold time of year, but they also wanted to erase all traces of Christ from Russian culture. So Christmas was cancelled, and New Year became the holiday of Union. Blue string lights and stars, stores and restaurants closed, and apparently thousands of drunk Russians in Moscow’s Red Square (which I missed on purpose, delaying my days in Moscow until the end of the trip). I’ve always thought of New Years as the most arbitrary of holidays, because it’s a pure abstraction. January 1 isn’t a change in season, or a change in the spiritual state of the world. It’s just a change of numbers written on a calendar. 12/31 becomes 1/1. There is no meaning in it, no depth. In this sense, it’s a fitting holiday for the Soviet project of imposing ideological abstractions over the natural and human realms.

Daytime in Tyumen, where I was staying with Josh and his family, brought sunshine but no warmth. Josh’s six kids, aged 2-11, didn’t seem to mind the cold; the littlest ones needed help when their mittens fell off, but they never complained. So, I tried not to, either. But my nose stung. We walked to Znamensky Cathedral, and inside, amid the lush, western-influenced iconography, I found a hand-painted icon of St. John of Tobolsk, one of the early evangelists of Siberia, distant relative of St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco. There was a relic embossed into the icon’s surface. I bent to kiss it; under its glass cover I could see dark blue spots on the surface of the paint. As I stood up, I was filled with the aroma of myrrh. I wondered if the icon’s spots were myrrh, emerging out of the surface. A small miracle? Many Orthodox icons are known to exude myrrh, and are rightly celebrated around the world. What about this one? What holiness were people accustomed to, if they didn’t publicize and celebrate something like this?

Josh and I spent the evening of New Years Day in an American-style brewpub eating pizza, drinking Russian ale, and discussing the rootlessness of America. Interestingly, the timeline of Russian settlement of Siberia and European settlement of America was quite similar. But the attitudes of these settlements were almost precisely opposite: In America, our forebears were escaping from and rebelling against the Church and state of the European homelands. The Anglos that wrote the U.S. Constitution were mostly litigious, acquisitive enlightenment rebels. In Russia, the vanguard of Siberian expansion contained many monks: industrious, obedient to Church and empire, and fastidiously selfless. As a result, Siberia is much more Russian than America is European. It has some roots that have survived, it seems, the storm of Bolshevism. Whether the roots will survive the flood of American pizza and beer is still in question.

Pilgrimage I: Tobolsk

The diocese of Tyumen and Tobolsk was organizing two pilgrimages, during the week leading up to Nativity – one to Tobolsk, to the north, and one to Yekaterinburg, to the west.

At the Tobolsk Kremlin (a kremlin is a fortified district – often the original core of a Russian city), the snow whipped across the walled plateau, piercing my wool scarf and my gloves, freezing my moustache after four breaths. The cathedral dominated the square: high arch-topped white walls, blue, starry dome above each corner, high central golden double-dome in the center. We marched towards the front door. “Imagine marching to war in this weather,” said Josh. I could imagine such a trial about as much as I could feel my fingers, which is to say not really at all. I’m soft from comfort. I guess I have also been starved for beauty, because nothing had prepared me for the vault of glory that we walked into.

Dusky iconography, filigreed and fringed in gold, climbed up an intricate wood-carved frame before the altar; all the other high walls were alive with enormous, colorful cosmic stories, rising, rising, calling the eyes up to a heavenly panorama. My mouth hung open, as I turned in a circle. I understood a glimmer of what was felt by St. Vladimir’s envoys when they attended Liturgy at Hagia Sophia in the 10th-century; was this heaven or earth? I also began to understand, on a level beneath rational analysis, the epithet “Holy Russia.” In one upper corner, the woman with an issue of blood, from the Gospels, reached plaintively for the Lord’s robe. The image extended across the corner to the next wall, from which the Lord reached back towards her in blessing.

This cathedral has been decrepit during the Soviet times, and only recently restored. The Metropolitan (the ruling Bishop of the region) had wanted all the new icons to be made by local artists from the seminary, but he found that this would have taken too long – decades. So, he brought in masters from Moscow, where the iconographic tradition had somehow persisted, despite Soviet dominion, or returned from exile. On feast days, the cathedral hosted four choirs. Bowled over as I was by the beauty, I was almost grateful that there weren’t choirs, there on that day – I’m not ready for that much beauty, I would be left behind, below, as the music rose up on wafting incense to the top of the dome and beyond.

Truly sublime beauty produces a tension that the human mind can barely contain. There in the Tobolsk Cathedral, as in the vicinity of a great natural wonder of creation like the Grand Canyon, I became aware at once of both my puny finitude and the surpassing glory of nature and God. I was humbled, but was also exultant to be included, in some small way, in such glory. Maybe these moments of beauty imprint themselves indelibly into memory as a foretaste and type of eternal heaven. The capacity to induce such moments is a holy gift given only to certain cultures – these cultures must have at least a small minority of people who have become so humble as to tap into deep wells of spirituality. A tree can only grow as high as its roots dig deep.

We venerated many relics in the cathedral, including those of St. Hermogenes. The latter was a 20th-century saint who is renowned for defying the Bolsheviks. In 1918, when the Tsar and his family were taken to Tobolsk after his abdication, they stayed in a house on the plain just below the high Kremlin hill. St. Hermogenes had led a procession around the Kremlin, and in defiance of the communists, had made a blessing in the direction of the house where the royal family was staying. The saint’s martyrdom quickly followed this gesture. He was thrown into the river with stones tied to his feet.

Before getting on the bus to return to Tyumen, we walked to the far wall of the Kremlin. Through ancient crenellations in the high wall, we overlooked the river and plain of Tobolsk, below. A uniform grid of streetlights stretched into the middle distance. I tried to imagine the hordes of Mongols and Tatars that had once swirled beneath arrows shot from this very wall. I tried to imagine the solemn procession of saints honoring the Tsar – the last emperor, a vestige of an elder age. Imagining this, I felt the first inkling of a feeling that would overwhelm me in the days to come: nostalgia for memories of a culture that wasn’t even my own.

Pilgrimage 2: Ganina Yama

Four hours west of Tyumen, over the Ural “Mountains” (which we would call hills, in the Pacific Northwest), our shuttle brought us to a nondescript road in the never-ending birch-pine forest outside of Yekaterinburg. This trip was also offered by the local diocese, and this time the composition of the shuttle was overwhelmingly female: Josh, Andrey, and I, along with seven women, aged about 30 to 70. The shuttle driver, we learned, was the son of the driver of our Tobolsk shuttle. We asked him if he wanted to come to a Church service, and he said no, he was Tatar, he was “Musselman” – Muslim. Every time we returned to our room, on this overnight trip, he was playing Candy Crush on a smartphone on his cot.

The place amidst the woods was called “Ganina Yama” – loosely translated to “Gabriel’s Pit.” There was a high castle gate that opened into a monastery complex, bustling with pilgrims. Past the bronze statues of Tsar Nicholas II and his family, beyond a church with seventeen golden domes, there was the Pit. A covered wooden walkway was constructed to wrap around it, flanked by enormous colorized portraits of the Royal Martyrs: Nicholas, Tsaritsa Alexandra, Olga, Maria, Tatiana, Anastasia, and little Alexei. In the middle, alit night and day, the Pit was a slight depression in the snow. A low point.

After decades of investigation, the Church had identified the Pit as the place where the Royal Martyrs’ bodies were thrown, after their execution in Yekaterinburg. There, the bodies were torched, bombed, utterly destroyed. The Bolsheviks knew the Orthodox belief that physical remains can retain a holy person’s spiritual grace, and they wanted to forestall any veneration of the martyred royal family. This tactic had worked, for a time. But the grace was like a city on a hill, couldn’t be hid, and now a monastery had sprung up on this soil watered by the blood of the martyrs.

The monastery had four churches, a small museum devoted to the Royal Martyrdom, and dozens of invaluable holy relics. A constant stream of pilgrims prayed there and called the Royal Martyrs to heart.  

After fish soup (delicious, redolent with dill) supper at the monastery hostel, Josh and I walked through the frigid early night to the Pit, to pray the order of prayers there, before taking Holy Communion the next morning. In the cold night, we paused after every two or three prayers to make a dozen prostrations, to keep the blood flowing. I imagine this is an ancient Russian tradition. My lips started to go numb, making the prayers came out slowly.

Halfway through the canon, my heart began to hurt. Literally, a physical pain in the left side of my chest. This is not normal, for me. I’m still not sure what was happening. The physical pain was accompanied by a creeping distress.

I think the place held a sadness. The atmosphere was permeated by memory of the terrible sin committed there: the violent, sudden death of an empire and a nation. Somehow that pain, through the prostrations, moved through my soul into my body. The pain sharpened and grew until we finished the prayers and started to walk home, at which point it gradually faded.

But the pain echoed in my mind, and still echoes as I write this. How can such a wound ever be processed, beyond being simply felt? Maybe it shouldn’t ever go away. The pain opens up the essential vulnerability of the, reminding how utterly dependent my body is upon my soul, and how utterly dependent both are upon the mercy of God. Maybe I was given to feel the pain, that night, as a gift for the soft, coddled, shallow American soul that I am. It’s strange, I know, to feel grief and nostalgia over the martyrdom of the royal family of a foreign land. But something else died with the Romanovs, I was sure. I wondered – what was it that died? And could it be resurrected?

The next morning, long before sunrise, Josh and I entered the St. Nicholas church for early Liturgy. A cluster of monks were already there, praying the Matins or First Hour rites, taking turns reciting Psalms, hearing one another’s confessions, and singing an occasional Troparion. Every so often a monk would peel off from the group and take a seat on a little bench beside the Church entrance, stealing a few minutes of sleep between prayers. The others would go on reciting Psalms, and reciting Psalms, and reciting Psalms. All in what I think was Church Slavonic – a type of old Russian of which I know about three words. And they recited Psalms and recited Psalms. Time flickered in the low candlelight and sent pain up from my hips into my lower back, tight from long bus rides. My feet began to sweat in my winter boots. My heart rose when I saw a priest emerge from the Altar – was Liturgy about to start? But he would simply cense the icons and those of us gathered to pray, and then shamble back behind the holy doors. His weariness made me wonder if the monks had been up all night, keeping vigil and psalmody.

This went on for two hours. Josh and I struggled to pray. The language barrier was a challenge. Some of our fellow pilgrims also distracted us. Among the group were two women who wore red fox fur coats, one complete with a white-tipped tail. One of these women was barely five feet high. The other was taller than me. The tall one wore long eyelash makeup and stood front and center, eye-to-eye with the royal doors. During the long morning, Josh and I both noticed a shape on the back of this tall woman’s neck, just above the upper fringe of her fox coat. It was black, it was a tattoo. Each time she crossed herself, bowed, and came back up, the tattoo became slightly more visible, and more perplexing: eventually we saw that it was a pyramid with an eye floating above the top. Like on the dollar bill.

That strange eye, so blatantly out of place at a Liturgy in a monastery in Holy Rus, kept drawing our eyes to it and bringing our minds to all sorts of places other than Christ’s Church. Don’t our minds love to chase shallow curiosity, instead of remaining immersed in deep mystery? That eye was a more formidable enemy of prayer than the early hour, the growing heat in our boots, or the strain in our lower backs.

But other sights around us induced more pious thoughts. On our right, a beautiful jewel-framed icon of St. Nicholas looked over us. Tsar Nicholas himself had owned and venerated this icon. On the left, an astonishing image of the Mother of God, with a double-diamond motif common to icons of the Transfiguration, also coaxed our minds heavenward. But as for myself, my weak focus slipped continually back down to the mundane, until finally the Liturgy began in earnest. The temple had filled with people, now, and thin light dawned outside the windows. The Slavonic took on some familiar melodies, and by the time of Holy Communion, my heart had reached some semblance of repentance.

Pilgrimage 3: Yekaterinburg

There is a vigor to the architecture of the Temple on the Blood. Its domes rise steeply up and evoke a spirit of ascension beyond the physical domes, higher and higher into the blue and beyond. A spirit that is immortal not because it cannot die, but because it resurrects. All of this rises from an enormous square foundation, established at the top of stairs that lead up from the street.

“Temple on the Blood.” What a cinematic name. A name that cuts to the raw and ancient fundamentals of humanity: temples, blood. Our ancestors died for such things for untold millennia. In America, we have no historical events that compare to the martyrdom of a pious emperor, and even if we did, we wouldn’t want to remember it. We would consign it to our intolerant past. We would turn away from any fact of crucifixion and disbelieve in the possibility of resurrection. And in the process, we would shun the possibility of transcendent beauty.

I had never seen a public structure so ornate and elegant: marble floors led us past the watching eyes of life-sized Russian saints frescoed on either side, back to the lower altars. There were two: a central one arrayed in golden splendor, and a dark altar, off to the right. We venerated ancient relics in the center, and then gradually drifted through clusters of tourists to that altar on the right.

The royal doors were low enough to look over, but the inside was so dim that it took minutes for our eyes to adjust. The darkness forced us to linger. The only light was red, coming from unseen sources, illumining the Holy Table, the ambo, and pillars and walls of raw marble, veined with their subterranean patterns. An icon of the Royal Martyrs was barely visible, in the back, and up above, Christ Pantocrator shone in the daylight let in from a window.

This dark red altar, I learned, was constructed on the exact spot where the royal family had been killed. Five children and their parents, one by one shot to death. Horrific. Visiting the altar sobered our souls with the truth of how cruel people can be, to one another. Such cruelty is just what the demons desire, the same demons that influence us to commit small sins; judging our relatives, telling little lies to make ourselves look better. The Temple on the Blood is meant to remind us that the heinous murder in their history is rooted in the sins of every Russian, even to this day, and indeed every American, every person. You and I, in this sense, killed the Tsar. The red altar is like the reminder of hell. I looked for long enough to take in the details, then I had to turn back to the earthly light of the narthex. And then we went up the stairs to the simulacrum of heaven.

The upper story of the temple was filled with light, and pastel color details danced amid the ascending marble. My head craned back and around, again, unwittingly, until my neck was sore. I venerated the casket of St. Seraphim of Sarov (his other relics are at Diveevo Monastery) and lit a candle. Then I pulled out my phone to try to capture the beauty in a video, because I knew a picture wouldn’t do. An usher immediately appeared at my side and gestured for me to lower my phone, saying something in Russian, pointing to a sign by the door showing a phone with a red line through it. No phones or pictures, here.

My face fell. This was such an astonishing place. Such light, such loft, such intricate color. I wanted to capture a sliver of how it felt to be there. But this was a Holy place, the nave of a church, with real Liturgy and worship. It was not a museum or a gallery. It was a place where people commune with God and experience a glimmer of Heaven. Any picture or video would inevitably sell it short and warp its majesty. I put the phone down. And the rest of what I saw and felt there I won’t describe, because my words are ultimately no better than my pictures. But from there, the day became still more beautiful.

Outside of the Temple on the Blood, the city center of Yekaterinburg rose with clustered buildings of various modernist architectures, rising up at irregular intervals into the blue sky. It was hard to square with the nostalgic, imperial beauty of the temple we had just exited. Which way, Russian city? Is there a limit to how many contradictions can Russia incorporate and juxtapose within itself? Our next visit, also in downtown Yekaterinburg, showed us an example of multiplicity being transfigured into harmony.

I’m not an architecture expert, unfortunately, so I can’t name the various styles combined at the Church at the Alexander Nevsky Women’s Monastery, in downtown Yekaterinburg. The architects must have asked: Do you want a dome or a spire? Marble columns or arched windows? And the answer was “Yes.” But somehow, due to its singular position in a broad courtyard, and the bright blue sky above, and the walls’ white and gold, the structure impressed me. The interior was resplendent, surpassing all of the Churches we had yet seen. I snuck one picture, in the nave, looking up at the underside of the main dome, wherefrom the Pantocrator, suspended in gold, looked down sternly upon us.

The church’s patron saint, Prince Alexander Nevsky, had led the defense of the realm against Teutonic invaders – German Roman Catholics. At the same time, Nevsky had elected not to resist the Mongols’ Golden Horde, deciding instead to pay tribute to them. He couldn’t risk a war on two fronts. This decision is one reason why Nevsky is revered as a saint: the Mongols generally allowed the Russians to continue in Orthodox Christianity, while the Germans were partly waging what they thought was holy war, to convert the east to Roman Catholicism. Some leaders sell their nation’s soul for wealth; Nevsky traded away Russia’s wealth, to preserve its soul. And had he not done so, this magnificent church named for him, filigreed and domed in gold, would not exist.

Many people believe that history spirals often to echo its ancient patterns. Would you sanction such an idea?

Nativity with the Natives

The temple at the women’s monastery was hot, during the midnight Nativity Liturgy. much of the heat in the temple came from candles: everybody lit at least one, and many of the babushkas lit one at each of the candlestands in every corner. Waves of heat rippled the air above the flickering gathered flames.

I had gotten a new prayer rope, with one hundred knots, at the Ganina Yama monastery, and so I prayed in silence as the Liturgy proceeded. After the Gospel reading, intoned in ringing old Slavonic by the baritone deacon, I recognized the melodies for the Creed and the “Our Father,” which the entire congregation chanted together. Not knowing the language, I said these prayers in English in my head, and was surprised when I finished, because the congregation kept on going, around me. The Russian recitation took twice as long as my English version. It seems that Russian requires double the syllables to say just about anything, compared to English. Language like the land: expressive and expansive, complex. English is compact, efficient, precise, and flexible. Reciting a universal prayer in a foreign country is the best inspiration I’ve found for comparing languages. And for transcending them.

That night, the Liturgy became the whole world. The temple was the cosmos. I let the language’s incomprehensibility pull me into the Mystery of the Incarnation. Basking in the sense of sublime and subtle mystery, I approached the Chalice. And at the end of Liturgy, I joined the line of worshippers to ask the priest’s blessing and be sprinkled with holy water. The Russians love holy water, and love to light candles, and love to venerate icons – all the ritualistic and symbolic practices of faith that are heightened by their mystery: How does holy water help us? That’s a mystery. We can’t require a specific answer to that, and the more insistently we ask, the less the holy water can help us.

This piety is a refreshingly honest approach. Most of time, we rely on systems with mechanisms we don’t fully understand, but we act as though we do understand them. Our pretenses are houses of cards. Without God, who has revealed his Energies through the Church, we can’t even know that our senses are trustworthy or that we’re the same person today as we were yesterday. Of course, we can know these things, if we suppose the existence of God. And God has also told us, through his Church, that these blessed practices aid our faith and help to heal our souls.

What a wonderful Christmas gift, from God: a reminder that I can’t know everything, provoked by the the simultaneous Russian complexity of worship and simplicity of faith.

I shuffled forward in the line of Russians until I stood before the priest. He swung his aspergillum, and the holy water hit my face like a gentle slap – “wake up!” I rubbed the water into my beard. I imagined the holy water sprinkling on the soil of my soil, watering the young sapling of faith that grows there. Faith in the water supersedes a material understanding of it.

This is the core of ancient Rus’ as it was, and as it may be, again – an eastern faith, always tempted and threatened by western knowledge. This is the distinction beneath all ethnic and historical contingencies. It was okay that I wasn’t a Russian, could never be Russian – I could share in the faith that had suffused Rus’ of old. The faith by which Rus’, in spite of all her vagaries and contradictions, may find peace. As I walked back to my place, with the altar behind and the shining faces before me, I felt at home.

But that feeling didn’t linger. On the day after Nativity, we attended a Hierarchical Liturgy at Znamensky Cathedral – the first church we had visited, upon my arrival in Tyumen. The place somehow seemed larger, because of the hundreds of Russians crowded in beside us. The Metropolitan, the highest-ranking Churchman in the region, moved between the altar and a gilded throne, flanked by a half-dozen priests. His bulbous mitre glimmered with uncountable jewels. His white beard flowed down past his chest. On either side of the altar were two choirs – young men on the right, young women on the left. At sudden moments during the Liturgy, a third choir up on the balcony behind us would join in with these other two, lifting us up on cresting waves of sound. The deacon who served with the Metropolitan had a voice like a foghorn, filling up the Cathedral’s high nave. That voice summoned our hearts awake, like a preview of the trumpets of the Eschaton.

Despite the beauty of the Liturgical dance and the undeniable grace outflowing from the Metropolitan, or maybe because of this beauty, and the crowd that it summoned, I felt foreign, again. All of the Russians seemed to know what to do, without thinking. As for me, on every level other than the spiritual, I felt like a visitor.

As Liturgy concluded, I found Andrey, a Russian who spoke English and had translated for us during our Tobolsk pilgrimage. I asked him to follow me up to the icon of St. John of Tobolsk, on the right side of the temple, which still smelled like Myrrh. I pointed to the blue spots on the icon. Was the icon exuding myrrh?

Andrey said no, he didn’t think so, it was just a very old icon, and somebody probably came to anoint it, every day, to give it the scent.

I thanked him, and we moved with the crowd back to the narthex. For a moment I was crestfallen – I guess I hadn’t actually seen a casual miracle. But then my heart told me that I had seen something even more amazing: an icon and a relic of a regional saint from centuries ago, still venerated and still inspiring pious locals to anoint his memory. Faith is the proof of things unseen, and such a scent is a proof of faith that God is with us yet, everywhere. Holy Hierarch Father John, pray to God for us.

Moscow

Red Square was quiet when I arrived. I walked past the misshapen pyramid where Lenin’s body is embalmed to St. Basil’s Cathedral. The iconic temple appeared small and quaint, compared to the Kremlin walls and the shopping malls erected around the square. Inside, brick passageways wound between the various altars, colorful with the iconography of 500 years of worship, and weathered by repeated conquest. Tight spiral staircases led up and down from one labyrinthine floor to the next. Medieval flower patterns crawled across the walls. I lost count of the saints and feasts celebrated by all the altars and iconostases.

Finally, I reached the back of the Cathedral. I stood at the portico looking out over the river.

Suddenly I heard a curious voice speaking Russian behind me. I turned to see a beautiful blonde woman. She was looking at me.

“Uh,” I stammered, “Ya ni punimayo… Ya gavariyo p’angliski.”

“P’angliski?” She said, and then began to speak in accented English:

“So do you know where is the exit, here?”

I did – up towards the front. I could show her. We wove through the huge Cathedral’s tiny catacombs and finally came out an iron door and down the steps to Red Square. Outside in the freezing wind, the woman asked me if I was enjoying my visit. I told her I loved it. She had an enormous ring on her left ring finger.

She lived in Sochi but was visiting Moscow to apply for an American Visa. Her fiancé was a Floridian, and she was planning to move to be with him and, perhaps, to be in Florida. They had met online: apparently there are real websites where Russian women can meet American men. She told me the name of the site, and I immediately forgot it on purpose, I don’t want to know, I shouldn’t know, don’t tell me. Such websites are the stuff of myth and legend. I was talking to a unicorn. Her name was Elizaveta.

But apparently this was common: American men meeting Russian women online, and then said women importing themselves to America. Why? Because, she explained:

“In Russia the men don’t treat women… like women.”

What did she mean by this? I cannot say – this is forbidden knowledge. But it will suffice that there are many, many different ways that women can feel untreated as women, by men. I bet some American women feel such ways, as well. And maybe more American men feel the inverse. I wished Elizaveta Godspeed with her Visa and a safe journey to Florida, and we parted ways.

I walked half a mile along the frozen river until I reached Christ the Savior National Cathedral. I had about half an hour until I was supposed to meet up with Ivan, a friend of a friend of a family friend, who had agreed to show me around the city center.

Christ the Savior is very different from its more famous ancient cousin, St. Basil’s. Where the latter is labyrinthine, full of variegated altars, each one made to feel cloistered from the others, Christ the Savior is a single enormous hall, meant to contain multitudes. The white exterior is decorated with bronze sculptures of Bishops blessing warriors of old, and an enormous statue of Tsar Alexander looks up at the cathedral dome, from the eastern side. Inside, the vaulted dome absorbs and muffles the individual voices of visitors. The iconography was notably different from that of the other Cathedrals I had visited: more vivid and realistic, more dynamic. Above the iconostasis was an image of the Savior, borne on a fleet of angels. One of the angels is foreshortened in wings and head, thus appearing to fly straight out of the painted wall and into the church – to fly right at you. The effect is a bracing immediacy: the angels are here, and they move fast. I venerated uncountable relics, including those of Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow, a brilliant 19th-century hierarch and preacher whose homilies I have read and enjoyed. His incorrupt body was in a silver casket to the right of the Altar.

Ivan met me a block away from the Cathedral, driving a white Nissan. He was the head of marketing for Nissan in Russia. He had been able to take the afternoon mostly off, to show me around as a favor for Gennady. Yet he also seemed, like all of the other Russians I had conversed with, excited to interact with an American. We drove around for a few minutes, past the University where he had studied linguistics. We walked between the massive facades of Stalin-era state housing. These buildings had a grandeur similar to Christ the Savior, with less elegance. Ivan told me that these enormous structures are suspected to contain reinforced, leaden bunkers in their basements, built in case one of their occupants accidentally provoked a nuclear blast.

For late lunch, Ivan had managed to make a reservation at Dr. Zhivago, an upscale restaurant on the ground floor of Hotel Nacional, across the street from the Kremlin. The food was Soviet-style – which is like traditional Russian, but with the pretension for being more “working class.” But the atmosphere of the restaurant cultivated the opposite pretension: I felt underdressed in my button-down flannel. American and European visitors sipped champagne at the tables around us. The waitresses were haughty and cold, and it took them about two hours to bring us our food. Do try the cod liver pâté, if you ever go.

Ivan’s English was great, and we had an intense discussion about the differences between America and Russia, about his relationship with his priest and with God. And then finally I asked him the question. Ivan was a good-looking guy, so I felt that he wouldn’t be offended. Why are Russian women were so much more beautiful than Russian men? Ivan didn’t laugh. He looked up for a moment, and then back into my eyes. His theory was much simpler than “all the good men died in the wars.”

“This is a good question,” he said, when I asked. “Many of us wonder this. I think it’s just a gift from God.”

After our long lunch, we had an hour to walk around before we met another friend for dinner. We passed the Bolshoi Theater, beautifully lit up for the winter. We visited a small statue of Dostoyevsky, sitting on a bench outside of a bookshop near the entrance to the Kremlin. We walked right past Lenin’s library. Everywhere we went, Ivan pointed out museums, churches, government buildings, and walls that had been destroyed and rebuilt. “This was rebuilt in 2007… this one was rebuilt about ten years ago… this one is being rebuilt now.”

Re, re, re. Moscow has survived the Tatars, Napoleon, Bolsheviks, and the 1990s oligarchical plunder. Each of these aggressors caused grave losses, but what was lost was always rebuilt, remodeled, restored. You could almost add the prefix “Re” to the nation’s name, at this point: Re-Russia.

At dinner, I mentioned the incorrigible endurance of Moscow, so many times rebuilt and restored. I wondered how closely the restorations had matched and would match the form and the spirit of the original buildings.

Gennady said he hoped they wouldn’t match the spirit – he hoped that Russia was becoming more democratic. Then he gave us a classic quip coined in Soviet times: “The future is known. It is the past that is uncertain.”

Bearing Myrrh

On the flight back to LAX, I watched Gone With the Wind, that splendid depiction of the uncertain American past, which is malleable for the moment’s politics. Great film, especially to pass a 12-hour flight. At customs, the Fish and Wildlife people confiscated a jar bear meat pâté that I had bought in the Moscow airport. But nobody knew if it was actually okay for me to bring it into the country. So, they took down my address and said that if they discovered that such an import was okay, they would mail it to me, first-class. (The jar arrived at my house two weeks later.)

I walked outside from one terminal to the next, to catch my flight to Oregon, and the warm air smelled like exhaust, plastic, and old beans. I already missed the snow.

Since I returned, more and more people around me have begun to consider Russia to be an enemy. I have stayed in touch with Ivan. We communicate sporadically via WhatsApp, a texting service owned by Meta, the umbrella over Facebook and Instagram. The latter two applications have been banned in Russia after they announced that it was okay to post messages calling for Russians to be killed, on the apps. Ivan is afraid for his job. He doesn’t want war. He considers moving his family to a western country where he will be able to work a similar marketing job to what he has now but worries that he will be hated and shunned by the people there. I don’t know how to help him, beyond the prayers that he asks me to make.

It seems that at least part of the motive for the war is a desire to restore the territory of the Russian empire from before Bolshevik times. Who can say whether this will happen, or whether it would be a net good or bad? I am more curious, myself, about the restoration of the spirituality that flourished in Imperial Rus’.

I recollect standing and bowing in the great rebuilt cathedrals, and of the Russians around us. They were majority women. I think of St. Helen, mother of St. Constantine, who was said to be a Christian before the emperor’s conversion and the Edict of Milan. I think of the Holy Virgin informing Christ that the wedding at Cana had run out of wine. And I think of the eight myrrh-bearing women who visited the tomb on that Paschal Sunday. They were the first to hear the Gospel of Christ’s resurrection – they came bearing myrrh, and left bearing the Gospel back to the apostles, men, who at first did not believe.

I think of Znamensky Cathedral – the gift shop there is open every day, staffed by elderly women. I recollect the scent surrounding that old icon of St. John of Tobolsk, a saint who studied in Kiev and then served in Siberia, and wonder if it is one of those old women who anoints the icon, and I wonder what she is praying for.