Meeting at the Lavra
I was on my way to the Lower Lavra, hurrying to keep the appointment with Bishop Pavlo, Abbot of the Kyiv Pecherska Lavra Monastery of the Caves. It was a bright winter day, and a short walk from the bishop’s residence I was stopped by a middle-aged woman. She turned out to be a regular and devout parishioner who had dedicated all her life to the Lavra; here she had been wed and had her children and grandchildren baptized, celebrating all the holidays, never missing a Sunday service. On that particular occasion she wanted to pray for her ailing mother. She could not think of a holier place on earth than the Lavra.
As we talked my new acquaintance amazed me by her quiet and profound piety, obviously part of her inner as well as outer self. A rare phenomenon these days, you will agree. And she was so versed in the Scriptures! In fact, the biblical vocabulary left a noticeable trace on her speech.
All this made me especially pleased to learn that she was also a regular reader of The Day. Quite honestly, she explained, “I first subscribed because it was the cheapest, but then I was happy to realize that it was Ukraine’s best newspaper.” (I beg the skeptical reader’s pardon, I could not but quote her, for such epithets are not heard often nowadays.) Indeed, she was well aware of the newspaper’s topics and authors, particularly those concentrating on religious life (and not only).
It was a meeting and conversation that leaves a journalist filled with optimism, even if for a short while. Judge yourself: a devout Lavra parishioner and The Day subscriber, a newspaper that can hardly expect special favors from the church hierarchs. As it was, my chance acquaintance’s religious life had nothing to do with the politicized church life reflected on newspaper pages and with what was actually happening in church. To her, faith and politics were incompatible; their paths never intersected, for one was for the soul and the other fed one’s natural intellectual curiosity, being “educational,” as the woman put it.
Interestingly, she was totally indifferent to the political-church demagoguery currently read on the pages of Orthodox publications and heard from pulpits. As is the case, for example, with Metropolitan Ahafanhel’s boisterous campaign in his Odesa eparchy, serving what he sees as the lofty and urgent cause, preventing the Roman Pope’s visit to Kyiv and Lviv. Nor was the woman affected by the pseudo-catechism about all those “ungodly,” “uncanonical,” “dissenting,” and “heretical” Ukrainian churches. Perhaps it was because praying was the only reason she went to church.
Being a parishioner of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, Moscow Patriarchate, she made it perfectly clear she did not belong to any “exclusivist Orthodox political club.” She was interested in the life of other Christian churches and she was thrilled by the personality of John Paul II. “What do you know, he so old, yet so very clever!” she exclaimed with a touching naivetО, adding, “God bless him for years to come.” She said she had a clipping from The Day with his portrait and had never regarded him as an enemy (contrary to her bishop’s attitude), but as a world-renowned, interesting individual, a person from a different exotic world. “Why should I hate a total stranger? What for?” she was surprised by my question. “I’m a Christian!” I thought it would be good for John Paul II to meet with this Orthodox Ukrainian woman; I felt sure the two would quickly understand each other.
That sudden meeting at the Lavra (I told Bishop Pavlo about it that same day) once again reminded me that we, all of us, change the meaning of so many notions being of such importance to man’s spiritual life. Let us face it: politicized, militant Orthodoxy (like the Union of Orthodox Brotherhoods of Ukraine) has little if anything to do with Orthodoxy as such. Likewise, a temple turned into an arena of rivalry and hostility, even battlefield, is no longer a house of God. It is rather a coffin rotting apart, the worse so if it becomes a campaign point with the shepherd looking more like Chapayev wielding a sword [i.e., a popular Soviet movie hero of the 1930s, subsequently the main character of countless anecdotes — Ed.] than a humble servant of God.
All through 2000, it seems, the Church in Ukraine gave birth to various heresies distorting the canonical teaching and being ruthlessly uprooted by the Church. Now it appears that we have yet another heresy on hand. Its exponents are openly using the Church to brainwash the faithful, imposing on them certain political views, thus distracting them from serving their Lord (perhaps this heresy should be categorized as politophelitism?). Fortunately, far from all our believers are susceptible to heresy, however tempting, as evidenced by my meeting on the slope overlooking the Lavra.
