LIGHT IN THE DARKNESS
We are used to the notion that our saints are separated from us by centuries. There is an exception, Saint Luka, who lived, worked, and suffered in our time.
In the lay world he was known as Valentyn Voino-Yasenetsky. He was born in 1877, in Kerch. His childhood and youth passed in Kyiv. There he graduated with honors from high school and a college of art. He wanted to become an artist, but his desire to help his fellow man was even stronger. In 1903, he received a diploma cum laude from the medical school of Kyiv University as a surgeon. He wanted to practice medicine somewhere in the provinces, but the Russo-Japanese War broke out and he was dispatched to the Far East as a member of a Red Cross detachment from Kyiv.
In Chita, the young graduate showed such medical skill he was immediately appointed head of surgery. He measured up, as all his operations, among them most complicated, proved successful. The young surgeon’s popularity grew so fast that it preceded him. When he and his wife (he had married a nurse from Kyiv while in Chita) moved to a new place of residence patients from other districts, even provinces started coming. And the same thing happened in Ardatov, Liutezh, and Pereyaslav-Zalesky.
Tending patients during the day, Valentyn spent nights working on research papers and a doctorate, summing up his surgical experience. His first book Local Anesthesia was published in 1915. Its impetus was such that Warsaw University awarded the author the Choinacki Prize “as the best work laying a new path in medicine.” The following year Valentyn defended the doctorate and received an MD degree.
In 1917, the Voino-Yasenetskys moved to Tashkent where the gifted surgeon was offered chief physician’s and surgeon’s post at the local hospital.
In Tashkent, already a prominent researcher and the city’s best surgeon, he had much to accomplish. Apart from a multitude of successful operations, he initiated the foundation of a university and proved an excellent lecturer loved by all the students. He also suffered a great deal. He lost his beloved wife and was left with four children. His friends betrayed him, and this bitter disillusionment was aggravated by a local press defamatory campaign [directed by the Bolsheviks], followed by arrests. It was then that he was born again, precisely in 1920 when he was ordained a priest, starting on the road to his Calvary.
How did it happen? Watching his parents suffer day in and day out, surrounded by poverty, epidemics, and hunger, Voino-Yasenetsky realized that his medical skill was far from adequate as a remedy. He saw people give way to despair, become heartless and cruel, and the same was true of all those in power. One had to heal human souls rather than bodies, something medicine was unable to do. At that period clergymen suffered even more than others. They were persecuted, arrested, and sent to prison camps. All this made the learned physician’s determination even stronger. Shortly after he was ordained, Valentyn Voino- Yasenetsky became Archbishop Luka.
He was arrested after the first couple of sermons. Followed numerous interrogations and then exile, his first one, in Yeniseisk on the River Angara, then in Turukhansk. He served his second term near the Arctic Ocean. The authorities hoped the rebellious clergyman would never return. Archbishop Luka spent a total of eleven years in prison and exile, and this was the period in his life generally considered most productive.
There were so many changes ranging from collaboration with counterrevolutionary forces and White Guard Cossacks to sabotage to espionage (the latter in two places at the same time: Caucasus and Central Asia).
His spirit remained strong, despite endless interrogations and torture, inhuman conditions of exile, and heart disease. Wherever he found himself, knowing that there was no medical help available in such godforsaken places, the Archiepiscopal physician began treating people without charge, performing countless gastrointestinal, renal, cardiac, ophthalmic, and brain surgeries. The fame of the magic doctor grew and the local authorities responded by turning his life into a living hell, because he tended patients and conducted divine services in deserted decaying church buildings.
In fact, the officials wanted only but thing of him: to disown his priesthood. Clergymen of weaker spirit did just that, but not Archbishop Luka. “I shall never resign my episcopate!” was his final statement.
The Nazis invaded the Soviet Union just as the curative cleric was on his way to his third exile. At the point of destination, the authorities quickly realized that the inmate could be put to great use and placed him in charge of Evacuation Hospital No. 15-15. He was also made chief consultant of all hospitals in the Krasnoyarsk Territory. Numerous inspections registered that the evacuation hospital showed the best results in treating infected wounds of joints. The professor was conferred a diploma “for meritorious service” and commended by the Military Council of the Siberian Military District.
“For a surgeon, there are no cases but suffering fellow human beings,” Voino-Yasenetsky taught his medical assistants. The professor worked his rich wartime experience into the next book, Studies of Purulent Surgery, which won him a Stalin Prize, First Class, in 1946. Archbishop Luka gave 130,000 rubles out of the 200,000 due him as a laureate to children.
His last term of exile ended in 1942. The hospital was transferred to Tambov. Through with his work at the hospital in 1944, Archbishop Luka decided it was time to dedicate himself entirely to religion. He received the Tambov Diocese and submitted to the Synod (he was by then a member) a program of reviving religious life in the eparchy, converting intellectuals and children, and restoring Sunday schools for adults. His sermons played an extremely important role in uplifting the flock’s religious spirit. He did not lecture, he just talked, using simple and sincere words, reaching the listeners’ innermost recesses. Parishioners wrote down his sermons, made copies and handed them to others. It was then that Archbishop Luka started began his book, The Human Spirit, Soul, and Body, elucidating the Orthodox concept of human nature. Archbishop Luka had an inquisitive researcher’s mind, profound erudition, and boundless devotion to Christ. With his own life he proved how immensely fruitful a harmonious combination of scientific knowledge and faith can be.
In 1946, Archbishop Luka was appointed to head the Crimean Eparchy. On his arrival he found desolate towns and villages, but worst of all desolate souls among his parishioners. With his inherent energy the clergyman set to restoring the latter. As usual, he was faced with numerous bureaucratic restrictions and taboos, especially from the local party functionary in charge of religion. What aggrieved him the most, however, were the self-interested, careless, ill-educated, and greedy parish priests. Ruthlessly he banished them from parishes, condemning them for their conduct, which made people turn away from church and the Lord.
Busy with countless eparchial chores, delivering inspired sermons, Archbishop Luka found time to help the sick with his medical skill. He performed operations and consulted on complicated cases, amazing physicians with his keen professional intuition and infallible diagnosis.
In the twilight of his life, the archbishop and professor of medicine finally answered a question that had haunted him all his previous years: How could he best serve people? As a physician or clergyman? In fact, he found the answer in parishioners’ and patients’ letters. People wrote to say he had brought them back to life and filled their hearts with the light of the true faith, and that his religious activities were more important by far than his medical skill. The archbishop told himself that they were right and that he felt this deep inside. In the last years of life he went blind, but continued to heal people’s souls and bodies.
Archbishop Luka passed away June 11, 1961, and the entire Crimean peninsula seemed to attend the funeral. In 1995, Archbishop Luka of Simferopol and the Crimea was canonized in recognition of his selfless life in the name of the Lord and the people. His remains were interred at the Holy Trinity Cathedral. People say that even after death Saint Luka continues to help the sick and unhappy. June 11 is marked as St. Luka Day in the Orthodox calendar.
In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not (John, I:4-5).
