Reading “Everyday Saints”

 

I found two bookmarks in the one book which for me is a rare phenomenon.  Like movies, there are precious few books that I’ve revisited in my lifetime.  Something about those initial reactions that I prize maybe a little too highly.  God knows repeated readings of particular books can yield up varied treasures.

But there it is, maybe a hang up but also not an ironclad principle.  “Everyday Saints” by Archimandrite Tikhon is an exception to this rule.  I read it when it was first published in 2011 over a 3 day period when I was bed bound from a particularly nasty flu.  It was the perfect companion because it made the time flow by with little notice.

The stories are vignettes of varying lengths that claim the Pskov Caves Holy Dormition Monastery in Pechory, Russia as their home base and heart, but spread out over nearly the entirety of that vast country as the author travels hither, thither, and yon.  Each story focuses in on a particular person bringing to light their quirks and foibles in the context of the oftentimes inscrutable workings of Divine grace.  It is cliche, but I don’t know of a book that had me literally LOL’ing, becoming tearful at some particularly poignant moment, or gasping in surprise to the extent this one did.

In my twenties I read an inordinate number of books that explored the impact of Communism on Russia, Eastern Europe, and China.  Many of them were nonfiction like Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago”, Pu Ning’s “Red in Tooth and Claw”, and “The Private Life of Chairman Mao” written by his personal physician.   But there was also fiction in the novels of Milan Kundera and Boris Pasternak.  I seemingly could not get enough of this type of thing, but with “Everyday Saints” I found something even more intriguing.  Instead of unredeemed melancholy (an addiction of mine) I found something healing and life affirming.  

Like the Bible it is a book that can be read for spiritual nourishment, but is also a collection of simply human stories that could be enjoyed by anyone who shares that humanity regardless of their beliefs. 

Metropolitan Kallistos Ware has sagely said: "It is not the task of Christianity to provide easy answers to every question, but to make us progressively aware of a mystery. God is not so much the object of our knowledge as the cause of our wonder."  And this is Everyday Saints in a nutshell.

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