Auguste Renoir, Maternité Often, children who grew up in the faith, who always served in the altar, start to question something; they start to doubt and criticize everything. During our talks, they ask: “What kind of world do we live in? How can the Lord allow so much injustice and cruelty?” Of course, they also go through skepticism about whether there’s a place for miracles in life; everywhere there’s just pragmatism, hard work, and when the wave of teenage denial reaches a high point, they say: “Basically, money decides everything in life. It rules over everything, not goodness.” At this point it does no good to argue—I know from my own experience. But they take personal life stories well and these stories make an impression on them.
This story is about how merciful the Lord is. Moreover, His mercy was shown not just to a non-religious person, but a completely unbaptized person. Many years ago, I worked as an Interfax correspondent. I had a contradictory range of responsibilities—I covered the work of communists from Viktor Anpilov to Gennady Zyuganov, General Alexander Lebed and Sergei Yushenkov, Nazis and anti-fascists, and democrats. Later they added the religious life of the country to my beat, primarily Orthodox.
I was lucky—I met responsive people in the Moscow Patriarchate who explained to me how to address priests, the Patriarch, bishops, what kinds of services the Church has, and so on. They helped me get accreditation for various events and included me in the list of outlets that would fly with His Holiness Patriarch Alexei II and Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad (the current Patriarch) during pastoral visits.
Orthodox life interested me. Of course, no one from any Church circles tried to force me to get baptized—I was planning to become Orthodox myself. But this decision didn’t come right away. Actually, getting acquainted with the faith and Church life wasn’t easy for me. I was young, I loved to get dressed up and stand out. For work, I had to go to services celebrated by His Holiness Patriarch Alexei, and the babushkas would make comments about me, and not always tactfully. Even when I was accompanying the Patriarch as an Interfax correspondent, I managed to get into arguments with some of the local elderly parishioners. For example, I was at the evening service in Vilnius, Lithuania. I went outside to sit down on a bench—I wasn’t used to it and didn’t have a good understanding of the order of the beautiful service, and I got tired. A local woman came up to me: “You need some fabric to sew a longer skirt. What a shame—all the men are looking at your bare knees.” I was tired and didn’t feel like fighting about it, so I didn’t respond. The woman circled and circled and came back to me: “Forgive me, my dear. I had no right to judge. You’re here at church and thank God for that.”
I nodded silently, and this unknown woman kept circling around. “Do you even speak Russian? I’m trying here…” Other parishioners who were sitting near me on the bench answered for me: “Of course, she speaks it just fine…”
I did interviews with the primate of the Russian Orthodox Church, with well-known archbishops, and I was also lucky enough to simply talk with the Patriarch, to ask questions not for publication, but for myself, on the plane while we were flying to Kazan, Vilnius, Odessa, for example. I remember how His Holiness spoke about the Jesus Prayer. My believing grandmother Praskovya also used to tell me that there’s a short but very powerful prayer—just a few words, but such power. Patriarch Alexei said this prayer can be said on the way to work, in a store, before and after any important work, in times of doubt, joy, and sadness. The important thing is that it comes from your heart, not like some chant you’ve simply memorized.
I always remembered what the Patriarch and my grandmother said. One day, my eldest daughter, then four years old, was choking on some hard candy. I’m not talking about this terrible situation to scare anyone, but to show how serious and scary it was. She was laughing and the candy went down the wrong pipe and she started choking. First I hit her on the back, but it didn’t help (later, my second daughter became a pediatrician and told me you should never do this). Then I tried to stick my pinky down her throat and hook that wretched piece of candy to pull it out. I also shook her by the shoulders, tilted her head toward the floor, bent her over… All in vain. I was simply losing my little girl; her eyes were blurred, her skin turned pale; she didn’t fall to the floor only because I was kneeling in front of her, holding her by her fragile shoulders. I got very scared: I was with my daughter, but a few more seconds and she would die, and there was nothing I could do about it. I called the ambulance, but what’s the use? It wouldn’t arrive for ten or fifteen minutes. It’s hard to say how long this lasted—time slowed down, everything became a blur. I was saying something, but I didn’t recognize my own voice.
Suddenly, I shouted loudly and clearly, with tears: “Lord, help me! Lord, help us! Save my daughter,” and I titled her head to the floor. I heard the candy come out of her wrong pipe and fall to the floor. My daughter immediately started crying; she came back to life, her cheeks began to turn pink, and her eyes began to shine. We hugged and cried for several minutes. Later we went to the hospital; we had to take X-rays and do an eye exam to check for brain swelling. She had stopped breathing for a while and there could have been irreversible brain damage. With God’s help, everything was within the norm. (Now my daughter is thirty-two years old, working as a clinical psychologist and raising her own children.)
After this incident, I had no doubts at all about whether or not to get baptized, or rather, I sincerely wanted to get baptized, but I had kept putting it off. I was planning to think it all through once more, weigh everything, examine everything, get some advice.
That’s why I tell children and teenagers that if the Lord heard the prayer of an unbaptized woman, showed so much mercy to her, to her child, saved her little daughter, then what can we say about Christ’s own children? The Lord is always with us, always reaching His hand out to us—it’s we who turn away, waiting for some “signals.” We speak beautifully about justice but forget to ask ourselves if we give love and mercy. Do we ourselves hope and rely on the Lord’s mercy? It would be good to remember more often that God is love.
