Everyday Saints

The Scriptorium, Book Two

Pskov Caves Monastery, Russia

In this world the help of the Lord would always come when it was truly needed. In this world, wealth was ridiculous, and glamour and ostentatiousness absurd, while modesty and humility were beautiful and becoming. Here great and just souls truly judged themselves to be lesser and worse than any other man. Here the most respected were those who had fled from worldly glory. And here the most powerful were those who with all their hearts had recognised the powerlessness of their own unaided humanity.

Here the true power was hidden with frail elders, and it was understood that sometimes it was better to be old and ill than to be young and healthy. Here the youthful would leave behind the usual pleasures of their friends and mates in the normal world, and do so with no regrets, as long as they would not have to leave this special world without which they could no longer live. Here the death of each became a lesson to all, and the end of earthly life was just the beginning.

Everyday Saints is nearly five hundred pages long, but this one paragraph, squirrelled away near the end, is not only the ideal summary of the book, but it also seemed to sum up for me the reasons I became an Orthodox Christian. This was the the world, and the worldview, that pulled me in. I had begun to taste it myself on my tentative early visits to the Divine Liturgy on Sundays, and to hear about from other Orthodox people. I saw it – I still see it – in priests and nuns I come across. It was, on the one hand, a world completely alien to my own experience in the spiritual void we call ‘the West’. And yet on the other hand, somehow it was something I instinctively understood. I didn’t know why. I still don’t.

There is a Greek word you will often hear if you start speaking to people about Orthodox Christianity. The word is phronema. There is no direct translation into English, but it is most commonly translated as something like ‘worldview.’ It’s not quite this, though: it is more of an orientation of the heart. You can read for years about Orthodox theology, you can attend liturgies and learn to cross yourself and perform your metanoias perfectly. You can even grow an epic beard. But without the phronema, which can only be attained through immersion, you will not really be Orthodox. For those of us who come in from the West, it can be hard even to grasp, let alone to attain, this. The only way to attain it, I have concluded, is to relax and stop thinking about it. Give it twenty years and then see how other people think it’s going for you.

What I appreciate about this book is the way that the Orthodox phronema is revealed through stories. In my last Scriptorium review, of the old Russian classic The Way of a Pilgrim, I lamented nostalgically that a world in which it made sense to wander the roads empty handed, praying and talking about God, was long gone, probably even in the Russia in which that book was set. Now, as if in rebuke, comes a book which reveals that even in the depths of the Soviet winter, at the hands of a regime more brutally, Satanically anti-religious than any in history, it was still possible to live a life guided by that phronema.

Perhaps I should get my caveats in early, because I loved this book. I can see why it became a best-seller in Russia. It made me want to flee immediately to a monastery, just as The Way of a Pilgrim made me immediately want to take to the road with my prayer rope in my hand. Books often have this kind of effect on me, which is where the caveat comes in. It would be possible to read this book Romantically, and I think that would be a mistake. As I was sternly admonished myself once by a monk on Mount Athos: ‘Romanticism is not Christian.’ I didn’t understand that ticking-off at the time, but I think I do now.

Orthodox Christianity can lend itself, more than any other branch of the faith, to potential Romanticisation. The sheer beauty of the Orthodox Church, and the otherworldliness of its true practitioners, can lead us, especially if we come from the Western Void, to see it as something other-worldly, without troubles or corruption. In fact, I think that the true power of Orthodoxy is that despite the very human corruption which troubles it, as it troubles any human thing, and despite the fact that it is very much a thing of this world, the attainment of that phronema can still enable its practitioners to ascend to the heights which they seek.

‘Life without God had become meaningless,’ writes Archimandrite Tikhon of his younger self, the suddenly-Christian young man named Georgiy who left the Soviet world for the Pskov Caves Monastery, virtually the only monastery left in the entire USSR. It’s a sentence that many people will recognise. After his first monastic retreat - initially reluctant, then suddenly and strangely transformative - he describes how he felt when he found himself outside the monastery gates again. There was ‘a growing understanding that I lived now in a completely different world, not at all the world I had left ten days before.’ Then he writes a sentence that I find, still slightly to my own astonishment, I could easily write in Ireland in 2024: ‘Now the only place where I felt normal was in church.’

The varied cast of this book, despite the terrible privations of Soviet communism, despite the punishments it meted out to them, and despite the incomprehension or sometimes mockery of their peers and family, felt the same. ‘I understood that I had completely changed, and that in fact I was now hopelessly lost to this world that had once been so dear to me’, writes Tikhon. He and his young comrades, many of whom had had successful lives ‘in the world’, all fled it. He explains why simply and inarguably:

We also had run away from a world that had become meaningless to us in order to find God, who had opened Himself to us – and we had run away in much the same away that some kids would run away to sea, to go voyaging to distant lands. But the call of God was incomparably more powerful. We had no way of overcoming it. To be more precise, we could feel unmistakeably that if we did not follow His call, if we did not leave everything behind to follow Him, then we would irretrievably lose our own selves. And even if were to gain the entire rest of the world, with all its joys and pleasures, we wouldn’t need it and we would have no joy in it.

I know the feeling. Again, the lure of Romance can be dangerous if you’re not careful, but I appreciated, on that score, the dry realism of many of this books’ stories. This is no Orthobro paean to an uncomplicated ‘Holy Russia.’ In fact, much of Russia comes across as distinctly unholy in many of the tales, which only makes the commitment of the monks more impressive. We hear of whole villages where no-one bothers with the Church unless they want a christening or a wedding, and we hear a whole lot worse than this. There is, for instance, the heartbreaking story of the elder Father Dositheus, ‘last of the great Russian hermits’, who used to curl up and pray inside a hollow tree trunk he had transported into his cell for that purpose, and who would canoe up the freezing river each morning to attend the liturgy, even when he had been fasting for weeks. He died when, canoeing back home one day, a gang of drunks in a speedboat decided it would be fun to capsize him with their wake.

After reading this, you warm to the story of how a group of monks, including the author, were harassed while walking through a city by another gang of drunks, who threw wood and rocks at them and threatened their lives. It was only when they began blaspheming Christ and His Mother, though, that Father Alexander, a black belt in karate, threw off his robe like some Orthodox Gandalf and administered them a beating they would never forget. This is not, of course, very Christian behaviour. Still, I wonder what state the Church of England would be in today if the Archbishop of Canterbury occasionally behaved like this.

It’s impossible, of course, to recall all of the stories in this book. It seems likely that different tales will stick in the mind of different readers for different reasons. Perhaps the people we remember are the ones who have something to teach us. One of the people who stood out for me was not a monk, a priest or a bishop, but an old grandmother named Lyubov Timofeyevna Cheredova. Never married, and possibly a ‘secret nun’ of the kind that was not uncommon in the Soviet era, Lyubov was a spiritual child of the late Archbishop Hilarion, who had been martyred by the communists, and she was determined not to die until she had seen him canonised. All her life she prayed for this. All her life she kept vigil. Her story is only spread across three pages, but the strength of her simple faith – fulfilled in the end – pricked me as I read it, and even in the tiny little photo, you can see the joy in her eyes. This is what a Christian looks like, I scribbled in the margins.

There are plenty of other stories I could choose. Car-loving Father Raphael, secret nun Mother Frosnya, mysterious and intimidating Father Nathaniel, thieving Yaroslav and his almost-repentance, and, maybe most memorable of them all, the almost unbelievable tale of the imposter monk Augustine. Underneath them all runs some strain that is not of this world, and it is that strain that keeps the book from being simply an amusing collection of ‘a funny thing happened on the way to the monastery’-style anecdotes. All of these stories have a purpose. They aim high. They aim, in the end, to show what can be done when everything is put aside for God.

This morning, before sitting down to write this review, I happened to be reading the Gospel of St John, where, in Chapter 12 verse 23, we come across these famous lines, spoken by Jesus as he is about to go to his torture and death. He is telling his followers how God wants them to live. It is not, on the surface, an immediately joyful message:

Most assuredly I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies it produces much grain. He who loves his life will lose it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. If anyone serves Me, let him follow Me; and where I am, there my servant will be also. If anyone serves Me, him My Father will honour.

‘Where I am’, in this instance, is nailed to a cross. ‘Where I am’ is in a place of suffering. This is not only an explanation of why a person would flee the world for a monastery, but it is also, it seems to me, an explanation for the continuing strength of Orthodox monasticism, and perhaps of the collapse of its Western counterparts.

Leave aside the theological questions for a moment, and ask yourself what the Russians and the Romanians and the Ukrainians and the Georgians have that we in the West do not? The answer, or one of them, is that they have a very recent experience of great suffering. Of terrible and real persecution, which renders all Romanticism redundant. The glory and the paradox of this – explained perfectly by Christ’s teaching here – is that Christianity in those places was strengthened by its ordeals. Now, I think, it has something to teach us. Books like this can help that process.

And what of those who brutalised and persecuted these men and women, in the name of their perfect human society? Unloved and unmourned, they are gone on the wind, and they will never be coming back. Even as they killed priests and bulldozed monasteries, those of the Orthodox phronema, not quite of this world, saw another story in play:

On the other hand, in some way, the government really didn’t exist for us at all. We simply lived our own lives, not paying any attention to it. Thus we didn’t quite understand, for instance, those religious dissidents whose main purpose in life was the struggle with Soviet authority. For us it was somehow completely obvious that Soviet authority would someday live itself out and collapse with a magnificent crash. That is not to say, of course, that it could not seriously ruin our lives, putting some of us in jail, for example, or into insane asylums, or subjecting us to all kinds of persecution, or even getting us killed. But we believed that unless it was the will of God, nothing of the sort could happen anyway. In the words of the ancient ascetic Abba Forstus: “If God wishes me to live, He knows how to make this happen. But if God does not wish me to live, then why should I live?”

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AND OUR NEXT BOOK IS …

For our next book, we’re taking a break from Orthodox Russia and visiting the England of 1925, for a dose of G. K. Chesterton. GKC is my country’s premier proponent of what these days might be called ‘Catholic social teaching’, though his thought, like the man himself, is considerably more idiosyncratic than any box that could be constructed for it. It’s been a long time since I read anything by GKC, who I first discovered in my early twenties, and I’ve never read this one at all, so I don’t know what to expect.

I’ll be reviewing Chesterton’s book The Everlasting Man, which C. S. Lewis described as ‘the best popular defence of the full Christian faith’ that he had come across. Its publisher tells us that within these pages Chesterton ‘delightfully overthrows social Darwinism, cultural relativism and religious scepticism’ in his search for what makes human beings uniquely human. Whatever you think of Gilbert, he was never boring, so I’m hoping this book will live up to the claims made for it.

I’m not setting a date yet for my review, because I’ll be taking some time off over the summer, as well as spending more time on the final edit of my Machine book. I will decide in August when my review will appear, and announce it here then. For now, you have a headstart on your summer reading.