Before the canonization of the Optina Elders, I was given an obedience: to collect information about miracles that occurred by their prayers in our own days. “Oh, there are so many of those miracles,” Tatiana the tour guide told me, “that I don’t even use books to find them. I just tell people about what has happened in our own groups, before everyone’s eyes. Just a week ago there was one incident.”
And Tatiana told me the story of one elderly lady, handmaiden of God Galina. This Galina was once a famous, record-breaking weaver, because she was fast with her feet from an early age, and she put her heart and soul into it. But then what happens to everyone happened to fast-footed Galina—her youth left her without saying good-bye, and old age came without saying hello. Granny Galya’s legs were now covered with lumps from varicose veins and would get so swollen that the only shoes she could wear were house slippers.
One day the former weaver went to the shoe store to find some new shoes. It seemed she tried on every pair, but they all made her feet hurt.
“Try these,” the saleswoman said, offering her a pair of boots made of soft leather lined with gentle sheep’s fleece.
The grandma tried them on and couldn’t believe how soft, comfortable, and warm they were.
“Wrap them up, I’ll take them,” she said, verily melting with joy.
But then she looked at the price tag and understood that these boots did not belong to her twilight life of pensioner, but to that of, say, Princess Diana. That was when the temptation arose for the former hero of communist labor to swear to do whatever it takes to buy those boots. She then began a life of hunger, pinching every penny. She also got a job as a concierge in a house of the Russian nouveau riche, where she was given lavish tips for such services as, for example, dragging a plastered teenager to the elevator and cleaning up her vomit. Once she’d sobered up, the young lady would shove dollars at the concierge, and after a few expletives would promise to bust her head should she ever inform her parents of her perambulations.
The bread and butter of a lackey was bitter, but she was able to buy the boots. Handmaiden of God Galina came to Optina Monastery for a pilgrimage tour in those very boots and flew as if on wings of happiness. But, before she left the monastery, the boots disappeared. It happened like this: In those days the pilgrims spent the nights packed into a room like herrings in a barrel—three-level bunks, with piles of shoes and other belongings in the narrow corridors. The pilgrims would pour in while it was still dark outside in order to hurry to church and then go to other monasteries after the services. The first to wake up that morning was a student from Vologda, who in her drowsiness put her feet into granny’s boots instead of her own, and then ran off to catch the bus, or perhaps to church. In a word, the pensioner ended up with the student’s shoes, which were the very same Italian brand only a few sizes smaller. How she squeezed her aching feet into those shoes and ambled moaning to the bus, it’s better not to say. But in the bus, she cried so bitterly that Tatiana the tour guide postponed the departure and told Galina to go to the relics of St. Ambrose of Optina to ask for his help.
“Batiushka Ambrose always helps,” she assured the sobbing pilgrimess. “We know it from experience.”
“But how should I ask so that he’ll help me?” she inquired timidly.
“Like usual. First repentance, and then the request.”
At the relics of St. Ambrose of Optina they were serving a moleben. The elderly lady fell down before the relics with the desire to repent, but then suddenly boiled over with anger. So—someone has stolen your boots and you’re supposed to repent? Does anyone know the price I paid in humiliation in order to get those boots? And then she remembered in all clarity how she helped that teenage girl in a torn dress into the elevator; that girl was crying so desperately that it was obvious she’d been defiled. She should have had pity on that girl or thrown herself at her parent’s feet, begging them to protect their child! But she just indulged that fall in silence, when the girl drank herself unconscious right before her eyes.
The old lady was now burning with shame, horrified by such madness, when a pair of boots and those cursed dollars became more precious to her than honor and God. She no longer regretted the loss of those boots. But she felt so sorry for that reckless teenager that she was now praying for her. Absolutely broken in heart, she made a prostration before the relics and discovered that a young student was praying right next to her… in her boots.
Of course we know what happened after that. When pilgrimess Galina returned to the bus in her soft, comfy boots, everyone was so happy about this speedy help from the wondrous Elder Ambrose that they all began singing in unison: “Rejoice O Saint Ambrose, godly-wise teacher of faith and piety!”
“Boots ain’t nothin’,” a shaven-headed young guy interrupted the tour guide. “I had a real miracle happen to me. Listen you all. I answer for my words!”
“Don’t listen to him. He’s a bandit!” said a stern pilgrimess, the bandit’s aunt.
“He’s not a son but a spawn of hell,” the story-teller’s mother said in support of the aunt.
“But mom, I promised to quit,” the bandit whined.
Well anyway, here’s the story. Nicholas, as the “bandit” was named, grew up in that doubly female environment, where his aunt and mother kept strict fasts, prayed for long periods, and even tried to outdo their own parish priest. When he was little the two women called their Nicholenka an angel and took him often to church. But when he grew up he lost his faith, and categorically refused to go to church.
Unfortunately such stories are not a rarity, and here is one example: An elderly nun brought up an orphan, her nephew. The boy was raised as a meek church-goer and stayed away from everything worldly, for his aunt had told him, “The world lies in evil”. Basically, he was always in church, but would sometimes ask, bemused:
“Aunty, why is there life all around, but with us it’s just sin and more sin?”
The boy grew up and started into drinking, forgetting all about God. Something similar probably happened with Nicholas. True, he didn’t drink; but he started hanging around with the wrong kind and ended up in a criminal business, living like a Mafiosi. All attempts to bring the apostate to reason brought the same result—a scandal.
But every dark cloud has a silver lining. Nicholas caught a cold and lost his hearing, running from room to room like an animal from the unbearable pain in his ears. The women pronounced the illness a punishment for his sins, and called him to repentance. The doctor in the clinic told him to have an operation in order to remove the accumulated pus from his ear. And then our macho bandit got so scared that he decided to choose the lesser of two evils: It would be better to go to church for repentance than to face the scalpel. So, his family took their “bandit” to holy places in hopes of healing for his soul and body. First they went to Diveyevo to St. Seraphim of Sarov. Then they visited the Kiev Caves Lavra, and from there they made their way to Valaam. By the time they finally delivered Nicholas to Optina Monastery, he was so exhausted that he just numbly sat down on the steps of the church and moaned from pain.
“What’s wrong?” a passing hieromonk asked him.
“Batiushka, I’m a spawn of hell, but my ears hurt a lot.”
“God is merciful,” said the hieromonk and led him to the relics of St. Barsanuphius.
The church was empty, and even the hieromonk had disappeared somewhere. Nicholas stood alone before the relics, looking over the fresco with a depiction of a deaf man being healed through St. Barsanuphius’s prayers. He believed that such a miracle happened because before, people loved God, and the Lord always helped them. But who needs God, he thought, in today’s world, where you have to be a scoundrel in order to get ahead? From somewhere in his childhood he suddenly remembered the Gospel words about the loneliness of Jesus Christ, when He had no place to lay His head. And Nicholas started weeping, repeating to himself, “Lord, You had nowhere to lay Your head, and there’s no place for You now on earth. What kind of life is this, if we don’t need God? And for all Your mercy, Jesus, they’ll only crucify You again out of malice.” He himself didn’t know why he was crying. But then it all came together at once: the unbearable pain in his ears, the anguish from his meaningless life, and the bitterness of having lost God.
A tour group entered the church and headed for the relics. Nicholas hastily wiped away his tears and then discovered that not only were his cheeks wet, but also his neck and shoulders. It was the pus from his ears that had drained; the pain was gone and his hearing had returned.
But where sin abounded, grace did much more abound (Rom. 5:20). And the healing of the much-sinful Nicholas is once again testimony to this.
***
Nevertheless, Nicholas’s story troubled me. Of course, he promised to “quit”, but would he keep his promise? Well, anything can happen. I remember how ten years ago a racketeer would come often to Optina in his jeep. There was a pipe welded to the front of his jeep, which as it turned out played the role of a battering ram. This was how the racketeer battered the shops of those merchants who dared to oppose the criminals, refusing to pay them tribute money. He was a strange pilgrim—he would stay for a long time in the monastery and tearfully repent here, and then return to the world and resume his banditry. The story ended with this strange man giving away all his possessions and leaving forever to a remote monastery in the north.
In any case, the Optina monastery fathers have the tendency to regard miracles with caution. You’d tell them exaltingly:
“Batiushka, Igor has changed so much since the miracle he experienced.”
But batiushka would sigh, “Did he change for long?”
Unfortunately, I myself have seen how a miracle that would seem to be life-changing evoked no more than a temporary high. Then the same routine of life where the soul had merged with sin would again pull people back. What was written in the gospels turns out to be about us—in some cases the seed falls on a rock, while in another it falls on good ground, and then the soul carries out its labor. This is why I am going to tell you the story of the conversion of Svetlana, who grew up outside the Church and didn’t even have any religious friends who could have coached her a little.
Here is how Svetlana and I met. One day in a church that had emptied after the service, a pilgrimess came in who looked very young. As it turned out she was the wife of an army officer.
“I’m the representative of a military division,” she said sternly. “Our battalion died in Chechnya. Could you tell me where to ask for prayers for the reposed?”
Hierodeacon Iliodor led the pilgrimess to the candle desk, and there she tried to hand over not a prayer list but a large paper sheet with a list of the dead, stamped with the division’s official seal.
“It’s not written according to the proper form. You need to rewrite it,” a novice nun who received the lists told her.
“Their division laid down their lives in Chechnya,” the hierodeacon said to her quietly but threateningly. “So, is the form more important than their souls?”
There were so many dead on the field of battle that there were not enough prosphora to commemorate them all, and Fr. Iliodor went to get more in the altar. But in the meantime, Svetlana told me the story of her life—or more precisely, the story of that great love, where all was simple and pure. She and Sergei had been inseparable from their childhood. And when Sergei graduated from military academy they were married. Svetlana was already getting ready to give birth to her firstborn and was knitting baby booties when Sergei and his battalion where sent to Chechnya. A month later a “black tulip” car brought the first coffins, and Svetlana was taken by ambulance to the maternity ward. While other mothers were shouting with pain, she was shouting from fear for her husband—what if Sergei would be killed, and how would she live without him? This is how her motherhood, and her path to God, began. There wasn’t a single church near their military unit. She and Sergei had gone to the city to be wed—true, most likely out of custom, because “you’re supposed to”, it’s good form, and a civil marriage without a church wedding simply didn’t seem respectable. But they really liked it in church, and as a memento of that bright day, Sergei bought a book on the Optina Elders in the church icon shop. That was all she had, her one and only book, about the great God-pleasers; but with her sensitive heart she could feel a breath of holiness that she had never known before. Day and night, while her infant slept, she tirelessly made prostrations and prayed to the Optina Elders to save, protect, and guard the soldier Sergei from death.
As Svetlana said, she had no idea how to pray. But so great was the love of this young wife that her prayers apparently reached Heaven. His fellow soldiers later related that Sergei really was saved from death by a kind of miracle. The bullets seemed to pass around him, and the missiles exploded in the places he had just left. The soldiers now clung closer to their officer, believing that it was less dangerous near him. This was such an obvious miracle that the division commanders made the decision to send a representative to Optina Monastery to find out what the conditions were for visitation and could the monastery receive them if the entire army unit were to come to pray there. That is how Svetlana had turned up in the monastery, and now she was thanking the Optina Elders with all her heart for miraculously saving her husband.
She did this in her own way: She would kneel on one knee and reverently kiss the icon, as a soldier would kiss his regiment’s flag at his oath-taking. The novice at the candle desk was still worrying about the “form”. But she didn’t dare to utter a reproach, because behind Svetlana’s strange behavior stood the most important thing—an experience of living faith.
Svetlana wanted to stay longer in the monastery, but she was still nursing her infant and had to go.
“Oh!” she suddenly remembered before her departure, “I didn’t venerate the relics in Optina of St. Seraphim of Sarov. I prayed so much to him for Seriozha.”
***
Who would dare insist that soldier Sergei was helped only by the Optina saints, and not St. Seraphim of Sarov? Or how could you disassociate the great grace of Optina if miracles that happened there were preceded by prayer at the holy shrines of Kiev, Valaam, and Diveyevo? These were the questions left at the conclusion of my obedience.
One day I shared my doubts with Hieromonk Mark from the St. Paphnuty of Borov Monastery, and in place of an answer he told me the following story.
One married couple was unable to have children for thirty years, although the doctors assured them that they were healthy. All those years they travelled to holy places to pray for children. They were both no longer young when they came to Optina monastery and prayed fervently here to the Mother of God and the Optina elders. As they left Optina they immersed themselves in the monastery spring of St. Paphnuty of Borov. Nine months after this, a wonderful, healthy son was born to them. And the happy couple believed firmly that their son was given to them by the prayers of St. Paphnuty of Borov. So they went to the St. Paphnuty of Borov Monastery with the request that their child be baptized precisely there.
“At that time, we didn’t perform baptisms in our monastery,” Hieromonk Mark told me. But I gladly baptized that infant. He was truly the child of prayer, whose parents had been praying down for thirty years.
In happiness, old sorrows are forgotten. And the happy parents no longer even remembered those thirty years of praying and sorrowing over their barrenness. Now an infant was smiling at them like the bright sun, and they remembered only the shining waters of the spring with the icon of St. Paphnuty of Borov on the wall.
In fact, the same thing happened on my obedience: People only remembered the “result”—the wondrous help they received through the prayers of the Optina elders. But they forgot the most important thing: how for the sake of healing their souls, the Lord tested them with sorrows, and the miracle was preceded by a long path of repentance and wandering to holy places.
I wrote on that obedience several notebooks, discovering in conclusion that the only purely Optina “little miracle” was the story of the boots. In all the other cases the Optina elders helped people in conjunction with other saints, and this was an unbroken spiritual connection. These stories did not exactly fit for canonization material, and I hid my notes carefully, forgetting about them for a long time. But just recently I read the following from St. Simeon the New Theologian:
“The saints, who come from generation to generation through the work of God’s commandments, join with the saints who went before them in time, are illumined as they were, receiving God’s grace by communion, and becoming literally a certain golden chain in which each one of them is a separate link that unites with the preceding one through faith, deeds, and love, so that they comprise in the one God a single chain, which cannot easily be broken.”
This is truly a golden, unbroken chain. And therefore I’ll tell you several stories from those forgotten notebooks, where the link between the Optina elders and St. Seraphim of Sarov or St. Paphnuty of Borov revealed itself clearly.
One local woman asked me to write down this incident. Her sister’s newborn was dying in the hospital from pneumonia. The doctor was a good one and tried to help, but the baby was fading before their eyes. One day the young mother heard the doctor say to the nurse, “It’s too bad for the little one—he’ll die in an hour or two. The death throes have already begun.”
Then the mother grabbed her child, and running away from the hospital, sped in a taxi to Optina, to the monastery spring of St. Paphnuty of Borov. It was around Theophany, with temperatures outside of -13 C. But she remembered her grandmother’s stories of healings in this spring, and with a prayerful cry for help she immersed her infant in this icy font. Then she wrapped the child in her fur coat and took him home. She thought, let him at least die among family. But the infant slept for almost twenty-four hours and then woke up healthy.
And one acquaintance from my village, the now reposed grandma Ustinia, saw St. Paphnuty of Borov in person. One day, when she was still a little girl, she was too lazy to go to the river to rinse the laundry and decided to rinse it in the spring of St. Paphnuty of Borov. By then the monastery had been ruined and closed, as was the chapel over the spring. And the Pioneer leader in her school had explained that the holy springs were a brazen lie of the priests, because the water in them is just water. But when Ustinia dipped her soapy laundry into the spring, up from the waters emerged St. Paphnuty of Borov—she immediately recognized him from the icons. The monk looked at her so sternly, threatening her with his forefinger, that the girl ran away from the spring in fear, throwing her basket of laundry on the ground.
My acquaintance had a similar experience. After his baptism he lived for a whole summer in Optina Monastery, and went every day to the spring of St. Paphnuty of Borov. One day, after immersing himself in the spring he saw that a clump of dirt had stuck to his shoes, and so he rinsed his shoes in the spring. The water in the spring darkened from the mud, and his eyes darkened also. To his horror he discovered that he was going blind, and could barely distinguish objects. He made his way somehow to my house and said at the doorway “I'm going blind, because I desecrated the holy spring. Now I understand what a sin that is.”
A doctor later said something unintelligible to him about dark water in the eyes. And it took two operations before his vision returned.
***
The naïve stories of how certain pilgrims like Svetlana search in Optina Monastery for St. Seraphim’s relics, considering him to be an Optina elder, are also far from naïve. Here is one such story.
One day a young woman came to Optina monastery and asked to be baptized here.
“Why do you want to be baptized in Optina?” asked Igumen Sergei (Rybko), now the rector of a Moscow church, but then an Optina hieromonk.
“A little old man keeps coming to me to talk me into getting baptized. So, I’ve come to him to be baptized.”
The woman described her “little old man” in such detail that Fr. Sergei began to suspect—what if one of the Optina elders really did appear to her? He showed her some photographs and icons of the Optina elders, but the woman said assuredly, “That’s not him.” But then she suddenly lit up with joy when she saw the icon of St. Seraphim of Sarov.
“There’s my little old man, there he is, my joyful one! He even says, you know, ‘My joy, I ask you to get baptized.”
Great God-pleasers sometimes see saints. But that St. Seraphim would come in our days to an unbaptized person is, you must agree, worthy of amazement. Fr. Sergius started asking the woman, investigating in her what was so special. But there was seemingly nothing special about her life. She lives in a one-room apartment with her husband, son, and paralyzed mother-in-law, and works as a saleswoman. Her wages are more than modest, but she never even allowed the thought of short-changing or swindling someone. She couldn't even imagine quarrelling with her husband, and she didn’t ever quarrel with him. She would have like to have more children besides her son, but the Lord doesn’t give her more children. And far from feeling overburdened with taking care of her paralyzed mother-in-law, the young woman literally cherishes her.
“After all, my husband, son and I hardly ever go out so as not to leave our grandma alone,” she related. “The three of us sit together in the evenings and talk about something, while for some reason my soul feels such joy that I don’t even know how to tell you about it.”
