Below we present a story from the popular Everyday Saints and Other Stories by Archimandrite Tikhon (Shevkunov), now the Metropolitan of Simferopol and Crimea, about a young boy whose family suffered greatly because the celebrating priest had omitted certain prayers during the boy’s Baptism. Following the instructions of Elder John (Krestiankin), Fr. Tikhon read the exorcism prayers that had been left out, and the boy and his family began to lead a peaceful life.
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I myself was only once involved in a similar kind of matter (an exorcism—ed.). But, of course, it was not an exorcism, just the continuation of the baptism of a young boy that had not been finished by the unknown priest who had started the procedure.
At that time I was serving in the Donskoy Monastery. I was approached by a man of about forty, a lieutenant colonel of the police named Valery Ivanovich Postoyev. He was a nonbeliever, and had not even been baptized, but he had nowhere to go except the Church. He had an only son also named Valery to whom unthinkable things were happening. In the presence of this boy all kinds of objects started to light on fire—all by themselves. Whenever Valery would appear, everything would start to burn: refrigerators, pillows, tables, beds, chests of drawers... The Postoyev family ceased to pay visits to others, because within twenty minutes of their visiting, fires broke out. For the same reason they could not let their boy go to school.
Valery was looked at by everyone: doctors and psychics and officers of the FSB1 and various other secret organizations of state security—all in vain. Various newspapers ran sensational stories with photographs of the boy and the fires he had caused. But the parents had no desire for such glory. “Just in case, ” they even had had their son baptized. Desperate, the policeman wandered into the Donskoy Monastery. Someone had suggested that he pray at the recently discovered relics of the revered Patriarch Tikhon. That is where I met him.
I couldn’t understand why it was that the fires hadn’t stopped occurring after the baptism. At least, not until I asked the question: how long did the boy’s baptism take? The lieutenant colonel answered that it all had taken less than half an hour.
Normally the baptism of one person takes a lot longer. And so I understood everything: the priest who had performed the sacrament had omitted certain ancient prayers, which in the Church are known as exorcism prayers. There are only four of them, and several of them are quite long. Unfortunately, it does happen that certain priests, especially those who as they would say today are of a “modernistic” bent, omit these prayers, believing them to be unnecessary. Yet it is precisely through these prayers that the Church, by the power given to it by God, asks for the deliverance of the human soul from the ancient evil lurking and nestling within. But our modernists believe all of this to be strange and archaic. They are afraid to seem anachronistic and ridiculous in the eyes of their parishioners—although I have never once noticed that these prayers during baptism raised a hint of a smile even among people who were little connected to the Church.
I wrote to Father John [Krestiankin] about Valery Postoyev, and he answered me that I needed to finish reading the exorcism prayers from the baptismal rite that had been left out by the previous priest. And that is precisely what we did in the Church of the Donskoy Monastery. From that very day the fires ceased. Lieutenant Colonel Valery Ivanovich Postoyev was baptized himself, and all of his family then became our parishioners. The young boy is long since grown up and is now also a police major—in fact, he works as a teacher in the Moscow Police Academy—but keeps the memory of what happened to him in the past through photographs of fires in his family’s apartment.
