MOSCOW (Reuters) 6 December, 2008 — Russians prayed for Patriarch Alexei II at services across the country on Saturday as the ruling body of the Russian Orthodox Church prepared to select an interim leader after his death.
The man at the opposite end of the massive 10-foot-long table was a study in inscrutability. Thick, neatly-trimmed facial hair and the extraordinary headgear worn by Orthodox clergy of his rank would have rendered his face expressionless were it not for his eyes and mouth. He smiled with both, giving him warmth that made our conversation a relaxed, pleasant experience.
Alexei II, Patriarch of all Russia, was hosting a meeting of the Episcopal-Russian Orthodox Joint Commission, to which I had been invited. My mind formed a variation of Alice’s observation in Wonderland, “We’re not in Kansas anymore”; I had come a fur piece from the Alabama country Baptist church where I was ordained a half century before.
Dostoevsky wrote, "The most basic, most rudimentary spiritual need of the Russian people is the need for suffering.” Another of their scholars wrote, “The Russian soul is imponderable even to Russians.” As much as I have come to love the Russian soul it certainly is imponderable to me.
I sipped vodka from his private stock and talked with the man who is, by title, responsible for the spiritual and temporal well-being of the 140 million Russian souls spread across 11 time zones.
The history of the Russian Orthodox Church is a thousand years of spirit-soaring godliness and sickening savagery, both served up by servants of the Lord. The bones of thousands of simple, saintly priests lie in frozen Siberian tundra where they were executed for the crime of baptizing an infant brought surreptitiously in the middle of the night by a daring babushka. Spiritual valor beyond comprehension was commonplace among clergy who took their vows seriously and performed them heroically.
Like the Reverend Alexander Men, whose widow told me of finding her priest-husband’s body lying near his parish church with a hatchet buried in his skull, implanted there, she says, by a fellow priest on orders of his ecclesiastical superiors to silence Fr. Men’s voice and prevent his hand from penning admonitions for his beloved Church to enter the 20th century. No one knows how many clergy were dispatched to their Maker violently, for Jesus’ sake.
That is a topic one does not raise with the Patriarch of all Russia.
At the time of our visit the Russian parliament was preparing legislation that would cripplingly restrict the activities of any religious body seeking to establish ministry within Alexei’s jurisdiction of Mother Russia. He asked what opinion U.S. Christians might have of this.
Our candid reply was that it would never fly in Peoria, and would certainly cast a large shadow over American’s view of the Russian Orthodox church, whose heavy-handed repression of non-Orthodox bodies grew from the melding of Church and State so teachings were considered heretical were, ergo, treasonous.
At that point the Patriarch twitched a finger and one of his ubiquitous aides emerged from the shadows. Our host hastily wrote on a piece of paper, gave it to the man, and resumed the conversation. The man soon reappeared and spoke a few words to his boss.
Of course we had no idea what that was all about, but three days after our meeting, the International Herald Tribune newspaper announced the Duma had significantly softened the most stringent parts of the bill, which Parliament passed like a breeze.
A man who can by a word, a note, a silent sign accomplish that is a far cry from the One who said, “I come among you not to be served, but to serve.”
Alexei Mikhailovich Ridiger, Alexei II, rest in peace.
Editor's note: W. Jackson "Jack" Wilson is a psychologist, an Episcopal priest, a sometime academic and a writer living in Colorado. He writes with humor, whimsy, passion and penetrating insight into the human condition. And in Pushkin, Russia, a toilet is named in his honor.
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