It was an overnight trip by train from Moscow to the town of Pechory near the Estonian Border. The year was 1998 and I was traveling with three seminarians from Holy Trinity - St. Sergius Lavra named Denis, Kyril, and Demetrios. I was a 29 year old stranger in a strange land who through a serendipitous sequence of events found myself in the heart of Russia.
On the train it turned out that my companions’ berth was in one car and my berth was in another because as a foreigner I had had to buy my ticket at a special counter for such things. I hung out with them for awhile and we shared some food and conversation until it was time to settle in for the night and try to get some sleep. I walked back through a few train cars and found some middle-aged Russians sitting in my place. I was very tired and wanted to lie down and sleep on my bench. I pointed to the bench and indicated I wanted to lie down. They talked to me in Russian and I kept telling them in English, “I don’t speak Russian.” Their tone became a bit more impassioned as the impasse lengthened, like if they put more emphasis on their words I would find a way to understand what they were trying to tell me.
I finally gave up trying to obtain my spot. Behind me on the opposite side of the train corridor from the berth was a kind of hanging ledge about two feet in width and at about eye level. There were folded blankets stacked on one side of it. I hoisted up my backpack, scrambled onto the ledge, and laid out as best I could to try and get some sleep. This elicited a kind of bemused consternation from the people I’d been trying to talk to and they indicated by their tone and gestures that I was not supposed to be doing what I was doing. I was so exhausted I ignored them and rolled over to face the wall to try and get some sleep.
Soon thereafter someone tapped on my back and I turned to find a train employee in uniform indicating he wanted to see my ticket. When I showed it to him he indicated I should follow him and we went to the end of the next car where I recognized some young people who I’d seen earlier in the evening when we’d first gotten onto the train and realized I’d been at the wrong berth. But here at the right spot one of the young men had set himself up with his blanket and was lying on my bench. I pointed at the bench and he feigned confusion and then he pointed to the lofted bench above him. My ticket was specific to his spot and I stood my ground until he finally moved and I quickly laid down on his bedding and fell asleep.
***
The rolling and swaying of the train made for strange dreams. My sleeping form was being transported in a North-westerly direction from Moscow towards Russia’s border with Estonia, floating along like a Russian peasant in a Marc Chagall painting. In the early morning hours I was awakened by the slowing of the train, tired and groggy from too little sleep, too much walking, and too little access to the kind of food I was used to. But I was young and seemingly could function fully despite all of that. I threw on my Army surplus backpack and made my way forward through the train cars to find my fellow travelers.
***
“Fellow travelers” seems apropos here. In my extensive reading of Cold War history (novels, memoirs, creative non-fiction a la Solzhenitsyn, etc) through my late teens and early twenties there was this concept of “fellow travelers” that kept popping up. It was a description used of people from the Western world who were not themselves communist but had sympathies with their aims and policies. In my case it would describe my spiritual journey in cohort with these seminarians to visit the ancient monastery in Pechory known as the Pskov Caves Holy Dormition Monastery. They were the tried and true Orthodox believers who had chosen to immerse themselves in the faith of their ancestors despite the resistance applied by the communist government that had attempted to eradicate the one thousand year history of Christianity in Russia in the 20th century but had ultimately failed.
I was the odd convert who had found my way into the Orthodox Church at 25 years of age in Southern Indiana of all places. I’d recently graduated from Indiana Wesleyan University as a young disaffected Evangelical who was finding it increasingly difficult to follow the faith of my upbringing. A vacuum was forming inside of me and “nature abhors a vacuum” as Aristotle would have it. I visited my friend, Brian Oh, at IWU who had yet to graduate and at some point he mentioned the peculiar incident of another IWU student and former roommate of his who had transferred to Wheaton College. This friend of his subsequently became Orthodox with a handful of other Wheaton students. It had caused quite a stir at this famous Evangelical institute of higher learning. He had given Brian a publication put together by Franky Schaeffer and Jim Buchfuehrer called “The Christian Activist.”
I remember sitting at the communal table of his house with that distinctive smell of college rentals hanging in the air which I would describe as a kind of musty dirty-laundry meets carpets-have-never-been-vacuumed odor. The article that caught my eye was “Flowers on Sartre’s Grave.” Its literary and intellectual notes sang out to me from the page and the fact it was in a Christian periodical had me triply intrigued. I found its Orthodox perspective oddly intoxicating and I drank in some more articles before spying an advertisement for a book, “Becoming Orthodox : a Journey to the Ancient Christian Faith.” I don’t remember if I asked permission or not, but I ended up snipping that advert with its order form and mailing it in the same day. When it arrived a week or two later at my parent’s house I devoured it in one sitting.
***
In retrospect, I’m reminded of Gandalf and his traveling companions standing at the Door of Durin in “The Hobbit.” They have come a long way on their journey and find themselves staring at the face of a cliff that has a mysterious elven door carved into it that glows in the moonlight. They cannot figure out how to open it and are stuck in this dark and dank place with no option to turn back but seemingly no way forward. The inscription on the door is in an elven language and says “speak friend and enter.” Gandalf tries several things that don’t work and it is looking hopeless until he thinks more simply. He says the elven word for “friend” and the door opens. That periodical and the book I purchased from its pages was the door that opened for me in my journey to becoming Orthodox a year or so later and solved the quandary of my spiritual impasse. Brian Oh, whether he knows it or not, was that “friend.”
***
So I found my friends in the dimly lit passenger car where the windows remained black from the lack of a sun in the sky. I’m guessing it was about five in the morning. My traveling companions found a driver to take us in a very small car to the monastery gates.
The town of Pechory was pitch black with no lights of any kind and this guy was speeding over pothole-filled roads with only the brief warning of the ten foot reach of his headlights, swerving in, out, and around whatever obstacles might present themselves. It was an exercise in faith; faith that he knew what he was doing and that I would not die or be seriously injured in this small Russian town in the wee hours of the morning.
We stopped in front of a church which I could only just make out due to the faint silhouette of a bell tower against an ever-so-subtle lightening of the sky. It was strange to walk along following my friends with little to navigate by but noises and the brush of bushes. We heard some movement and soft murmurings ahead to let us know that other people were milling about in the darkness. It was a handful of other pilgrims and townsfolk outside the monastery gates in a courtyard who, like us, were there waiting for the prescribed time for the gates to open.
In the stillness I found myself in a kind of hushed anticipation as we waited for the gates to open or the sun to show up, whichever would come first. And after a time the twilight signaled both as I could just start to see the others even as the gates creaked open and a monk greeted those who would enter.
As we entered the monastery grounds I could see we were headed for a church straight in front of us. To our left the land fell away down a path through trees to some lower area, but the church remained level and appeared perched above the valley below. We entered into a vast darkness with a single flickering lamp before a bejeweled icon of the Virgin Mary and Christ Child. The space was large enough that I couldn’t really see to the opposite side or the dome above us. My friends led me to a wooden bench behind a pillar where we sat and waited, propping each other up shoulder to shoulder.
I found myself falling in and out of a light sleep until some movement drew my attention to the front of the church. Two monks were beginning to light the icon lamps and islands of light were slowly multiplying and beginning to merge as more lamps were lit around us. The singing was soon to follow in filling that sacred space combining heaven and earth with us floating somewhere in between, like a wakeful dream.
***
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