Social Ministry
Let us again pause for a moment before Nesterov’s striking mural of Holy Rus’ in Moscow’s Martha and Mary Monastery. Russia’s poor and sick, maimed and elderly walk across a landscape of gently rolling hills. It is a cool summer day; the unspoiled beauty of the Russian countryside enfolds human suffering in its embrace. Orthodox Sisters of Mercy accompany and guide the pilgrims, keeping them from stumbling and falling. Jesus waits with his arms outstretched. His body is radiant with light. He promises that time will be transfigured by eternity, human longing transformed by divine presence.
The Orthodox Church brings its values into society not only as it educates Russians about their religious heritage but also as it reaches out to individuals who have material, physical, or emotional needs. Since the collapse of Communism, the Church has developed an impressive number and range of social ministries. Orthodox hospitals, hospices, orphanages, feeding and housing programs, and drug and alcohol rehabilitation centers—in these and many other initiatives, the Church has taken a leading role in caring for Russia’s poor and needy.1 The Church’s work has been all the more important in view of the fact that government-sponsored social work has lagged even as Russia has experienced new and pressing social problems. In some areas of social service, such as drug rehabilitation work, the Church has pioneered models of effective treatment and stimulated government efforts to respond more adequately.
From many years of observation and conversation, I have come to the conclusion that the Church’s social programs aim first of all at helping people in need, not making them churchgoers. The Church believes that its social work should be an expression of Christian love that expects nothing in return. At the same time, the Church hopes that these initiatives will open up space for people to enter into its life. As people experience the Church’s love, they will perhaps be moved to know more about the Orthodox faith. Physical and emotional healing will be a prelude to spiritual healing, which from an Orthodox perspective can be found only within the Church’s worship and sacraments. While faithfully attending to people’s this-worldly needs, the Church prays that people will ultimately concern themselves with eternal questions—how to turn away from temptation and sin and find a trusting relationship with the divine source of life that Christians call God. Perhaps more than any of its other initiatives, the Church’s social work has helped make the Church and its life more widely known and accessible to Russians.
Drug addiction began to emerge as a major problem in Russian society in the late 1980s as national borders became more porous and as social, economic, and political instability increased. By the mid-1990s, drug abuse had become epidemic. According to 2010 U.N. statistics, 1.64 percent of Russians between the ages of fifteen and sixty-four were addicted to narcotics, double the rate of the rest of eastern Europe. Of these 2.5 million addicts, 90 percent were using heroin, 90 percent were suffering from hepatitis, and 60 percent had HIV/AIDS. Drug addiction shaves as much as 2–3 percent off the nation’s GNP.2
A small, rural Orthodox parish has pioneered Russia’s new drug rehabilitation work. St. George’s Parish is located three hundred miles to the northeast of Moscow, along the banks of Russia’s mother river, the Volga. One January I rode a local train through the night from Moscow to the town of Kineshma, where one of the monks, Father Amvrosii (Mikhailov), met me and several other pilgrims. It was a cold winter day; the sky was steel gray, the ground piled high with snow. Father Amvrosii loaded us into a Gazelle (the Russian name for a small passenger van) and drove out of town to the banks of the Volga, where he announced, “We will walk from here.”
It is possible to take a road from Kineshma over a bridge to St. George’s, but the way is long and indirect and sometimes impassable in winter. As we stepped onto the frozen river, a small sign with carefully stenciled black letters warned, “Danger: Do Not Cross.” Father Amvrosii nevertheless led the way. With each step we sank into a foot of snow. Beneath the snow we encountered a thin layer of water over the ice. That made us nervous. Was the river really frozen hard? It was. Two hours and one and a half miles later, we arrived safely on the other side, where a second monk, Father Pavel (Shvets), met us in an old work truck and drove us down a snow-packed dirt road to the parish.
St. George’s consists of a small compound of wooden houses surrounded by a low stone wall. Just outside the wall stands the parish church with its bell tower and glistening silver steeple, and next to the church lies the parish cemetery. Nearby is the village of George, a collection of ramshackle, tilting wooden huts. On the other side of the parish, an even smaller cluster of houses, comprising the village of Zarinov, hugs the bank above the mighty river.
St. George’s was one of the few churches in Russia that remained open throughout the Soviet era, although a priest was not always available to serve.3 In the late 1980s, the local bishop appointed Father Mefodii (Kondrat’ev) to head the parish. Father Mefodii soon established a small community of monks who maintained a monastic discipline while renewing parish life. The challenges were formidable. The agricultural economy of the area had collapsed after the fall of Communism. Young people were moving to the cities; only the poor and elderly remained.
In 1991, several people from St. Petersburg who were involved in drug rehabilitation work bought abandoned houses nearby and renovated them as dachas. Father Mefodii soon drew them into the parish’s life, and they told him about their work with drug addicts. In 1993, another event further impelled the monks to think about drug rehabilitation. A young addict came to the parish desperately seeking help with recovery, and the monks allowed him to live with them for several months. As they got to know him, they were horrified to learn about the terrible crimes to which addiction had once driven him. But they also saw a person who otherwise was not much different from other young unchurched Russians. And the encounter with Church life seemed to be healing to him.4
Group therapy session, St. George’s Parish, Ivanovo Region (with
permission of St. George’s Parish)
The monks eventually came to believe that God was asking them to establish a special ministry to drug addicts. In coordination with Father Mefodii’s spiritual children from St. Petersburg, the brothers began accepting up to eight young men at one time to live in the parish for a year or more. All of the addicts have completed a first stage of rehabilitation; many see St. George’s as a last opportunity to change their lives. The recovery program includes physical exercise and religious observance as well as both individual treatment and group therapy based on widely known secular models, such as the twelve-step program. The young men also receive “film therapy,” which consists of watching and discussing popular movies in which they become more aware of the emotional dynamics that motivate good or destructive behavior—and thereby get in touch with their own emotional life, which, according to Father Mefodii, has often been stunted. “The young men will seem normal to you,” he told me, “but in fact they are very ill.”
The natural landscape around St. George’s is remarkably beautiful and tranquil. City life with its endless overstimulation of people’s senses and desires seems far away. In summer one can walk alone for hours through abandoned fields and forests. In winter the landscape becomes a vast frozen expanse, and the silence is deafening. This wondrous setting has given Father Mefodii time and space to reflect deeply on questions of religion and culture. He believes that drug addiction is more than a matter of personal weakness; it has profound social dimensions. Post-Communist Russian society lost its moral and spiritual foundations in Orthodox Christianity. Secular Western values, especially evident in contemporary youth culture, are shaping people’s lives instead. The consequences have been disastrous.5 People have become egotistical and deeply alienated from one another. They no longer ask fundamental questions about the meaning of life but rather succumb to consumerism, materialism, and a cult of pleasure.6
According to Father Mefodii, these new social forces have seriously undermined family life. Many addicts come from broken homes in which parents have placed pursuit of personal interest and pleasure above care for their children. The pain of emotional neglect and sometimes physical abuse leads these children to drugs, which seem to promise ecstasy, creativity, and an escape from personal problems. Narcotics use, however, inevitably harms a person’s health, ensnares him in criminal activity, and impedes his ability to establish healthy relationships with others.
Father Mefodii also draws on Orthodox notions of sin and salvation to understand drug addiction. While agreeing that addiction has characteristics of a physical or emotional illness, Father Mefodii insists that it implicates, above all, the individual’s sinful will. Social and familial factors may contribute to drug abuse, but the individual remains responsible for his behavior. He has chosen to use drugs, and “with God’s help he can choose at any stage of his addiction to quit. And if he refuses, he is just further implicating himself in sin.”7 In contrast to those Protestant traditions that emphasize “by [God’s] grace alone,” Father Mefodii follows Orthodox teaching that humans must work at overcoming sin. But if salvation is not in the hands of God alone, neither is it a divine reward for extraordinary human efforts, a position that Orthodoxy typically ascribes to Roman Catholicism. Rather, humans must cooperate with God to achieve salvation. The key factor in drug rehabilitation is a person’s desire to change—and therefore only individuals with strong motivation are admitted into St. George’s program.
Because addiction is at its heart a spiritual problem, humans need spiritual resources to combat it. While Father Mefodii recognizes a social dimension to addiction, he does not focus on measures that the state should take to restore Russia’s moral and spiritual foundations but rather emphasizes the Church’s care for individuals. The process of personal spiritual reformation has two major dimensions.8 First, St. George’s introduces the young men to the great achievements of human culture, especially Russian culture. Because, in the Church’s view, Russian culture necessarily transmits Orthodox values, a person who becomes “cultured” is also reshaped spiritually. Cultured people have an appreciation of beauty and transcendent values. Culture, therefore, opens them to the divine.
Acquiring “culture” has several aspects. At St. George’s, it begins with practicing simple, everyday good manners. The young men are expected to speak “normal Russian” and to forswear the slang and profanity that typically characterize their speech. They are also expected to practice basic etiquette, such as waiting to eat until the priest has blessed the meal. Appreciating great music is another component of being cultured. Father Mefodii argues that “it is necessary strictly to prohibit listening to hard rock, rap, psychedelic music, and other styles . . . that exercise a destructive influence on the psyche.” Those in recovery should listen rather to Church music and classical music, or should even learn to enjoy silence—although Father Mefodii acknowledges that changing a person’s musical tastes is not easy and that compromise with people in recovery will often be necessary. Father Mefodii further recommends introducing recovering addicts to Orthodoxy’s great spiritual writings and to classic works of world and Russian literature. Exposure to the natural world is equally important. Father Mefodii notes that “some [of the young men] notice sunrises and sunsets for the first time since childhood.” Recovery from addiction depends on renewing a person’s ability to find joy in everyday existence.
The second dimension of personal spiritual reformation revolves around the experience of genuine loving community. People in recovery need to live and work with emotionally and spiritually healthy people. In studying secular rehabilitation programs Father Mefodii has become especially interested in the notion of a “therapeutic community” in which counselors and patients relate to each other with love and respect. He believes that this kind of approach is deeply Christian in its affirmation of the value of every human person. Father Mefodii, however, asks the Church to go even further in its understanding and formation of community. In his experience, individuals have the best shot of overcoming addiction if they become fully integrated into the life of the Church. Father Mefodii argues that parishes and monasteries, rather than freestanding rehabilitation centers, are therefore the best places for drug rehabilitation. What recovering addicts need, above all, is incorporation into the life of the Church.
In-churching has several facets. As the young men participate in community worship and receive the sacraments, they experience a transcendent dimension of existence that they perhaps never knew before. Further, the monks encourage the young men to work with a skilled spiritual father who can help them recognize, confess, and battle their destructive impulses. For many of the young men, the time at St. George’s will offer them the first opportunity in their lives to establish a trusting relationship with a person who is morally grounded and spiritually wise.
For Father Mefodii, the Church’s ascetical traditions play an especially important role in spiritual reformation of the self. They help people overcome the tyranny of selfish desires so that they are able to give themselves in service to others. The program at St. George’s asks the young men to discipline themselves in prayer, fasting (including a six-week Advent fast and an eight-week Lenten fast, both of which ask Orthodox believers to remove all animal products from their diet), and “obediences”—menial and sometimes unpleasant tasks that the monks ask the young men to do for the sake of the community’s well-being, such as cleaning out the chicken coops, tending the vegetable gardens, catching fish, chopping wood, helping with meal preparation and cleanup, or undertaking maintenance and construction projects.
In recent years, Father Mefodii has also given more attention to the role of religious education in assisting spiritual reformation. In the hope that the young men will participate with greater understanding in the parish’s worship and service, the monks provide basic instruction in Scripture, liturgics, and “the law of God.” Those members of the community who learn Church Slavonic join the monks in chanting prayers and hymns in the times of worship.
Separation from the world in order to be able eventually to live in but not of the world—such is the goal of the program at St. George’s. For the few months they live at St. George’s, the young men immerse themselves in a world that offers an alternative to the chaos that afflicted them as addicts. Everyday life at St. George’s is marked by beauty, harmony, and peace, although here, too, conflicts can arise and on occasion a young man must be asked to leave. Most of the young men, however, catch at least a glimpse of what all faithful Orthodox believers strive to see: heaven on earth.
The challenge then becomes how to keep the young men morally upright and spiritually focused when they leave St. George’s. St. George’s works closely with its partners in St. Petersburg to integrate the young men into parish life when they return. Participation in the liturgy, sacraments, and life in Christian community should sustain them as much back home as it did at St. George’s. Some of the young men, however, fear falling back into their old habits. I remember a young man with tattooed arms who baked the community’s daily bread. His time at St. George’s would soon end, but he told me that he longed to remain in its enchanted world.
St. George’s claims a success rate of approximately 60 percent; the general remission rate for drug addiction programs in Russia is only 3–5 percent.9 Because of the expertise he has developed, Father Mefodii now heads up a new patriarchal department for drug rehabilitation work and in 2014 was appointed bishop of Kamen’ and Alapaev. He travels throughout the country to introduce his model of rehabilitation to parishes and monasteries that are considering such work.
Weekday mornings at St. George’s begin with the hours of prayer. The young men, the monks, and any pilgrims gather at 6 a.m. in a church that for much of the year is still dark and illuminated only by a few candles. I have stood with them in a circle as each person went forward to venerate the icon of the Mother of God and then embraced the other members of the community one by one. It seemed to me for a passing moment that the promise of healing, forgiveness, and reconciliation—and the hope that mortal life will be transfigured by eternity—took away any difference between therapist and patient, healthy personality and addicted psyche, or monk and layperson. In the words of the Apostle Paul, “All are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28).
As important as in-churching is to the program at St. George’s, Father Mefodii is careful to acknowledge that rehabilitation, in the narrower sense of quitting drugs, can happen without incorporation into Church life. Not all recovery programs have to be based in a parish or monastery, and the Church can support rehabilitation centers that use secular methods alone. As Father Mefodii notes, the young men who come to St. George’s are motivated, first of all, not by what the Church considers central—to know God and the meaning of life before God—but rather a personal desire to resolve a practical problem that has made their everyday lives unbearable.10 A person does not have to become a Christian in order to quit drugs, and the drug rehabilitation program at St. George’s seeks first and foremost to make the young men productive members of society.
There is a second reason to distinguish in-churching from addiction recovery. According to Orthodoxy teaching, a person can pursue salvation only freely and not under compulsion. As in matters of religious education in the public schools, Church social ministry will have integrity only as it respects a line between making people aware of Orthodoxy, on the one hand, and integrating them into Church life, on the other. Father Mefodii argues that those who enter a Church rehabilitation program must be willing to receive instruction in the Orthodox faith and attend Orthodox worship services. But they remain free to decide for themselves whether or not to pray, receive the sacraments, or make confession of sin before a priest.11 Most, but not all, of the young men at St. George’s do participate.
It is not easy, however, to know just where to draw the line between familiarizing people with the Church and integrating them into Church life. The program at St. George’s operates with the same assumptions as Andrei Kuraev’s textbook The Foundations of Orthodox Culture, namely, that people can be drawn into a new way of life just by becoming aware of the great achievements of Russian culture as shaped by Orthodoxy. Father Mefodii observes that “not all of those going through rehabilitation in a Church setting will become active Church participants, but the majority of them will change their moral orientation.”12 And if the young men do enter more fully into the Church’s life, they will be more likely, the monks believe, to overcome the inner emptiness that drove them to drugs in the first place. Dealing with drug addiction can become the occasion for discovering, as Orthodoxy calls it, “life in God.” The monks cannot choose salvation for the young men, but the monks will never stop reminding them not only that they can be healed physically but also that they can be transfigured spiritually.
The question of what it means to become “Orthodox” is complicated, and “entering into the Church’s life” has various gradations. To belong to the Church in the fullest sense is to participate regularly in its liturgical and sacramental life and to live according to its moral dictates—and not out of sheer habit or social pressure but rather with the desire for salvation. But to the way of thinking that I have been sketching out, even those persons, such as the young men at St. George’s, who are still developing a sensitivity to transcendent beauty and just beginning to become “cultured” are somehow already within the Orthodox world, whether they know it or not. As they become aware of what is great in their Russian heritage, they implicitly “hear” Orthodoxy’s call to self-transformation, and to the extent that they embrace their nation’s “traditional values,” they are given an impulse to reorient their lives toward God. At St. George’s, as elsewhere, the Church hopes that its social outreach will touch people with a divine love that will draw them into a vision of heaven on earth. Deification is a long and gradual process, but it sometimes begins when a person in need experiences, for the first time in his or her life, the love, awe, and wonder that the Church cultivates.
St. George’s sees itself as a model for other parishes, especially in rural areas. The fact that it is staffed by four monks, however, is significant. Monasteries are playing a leading role in renewing the Church’s social ministries today, in part because monasteries often command resources that parishes do not have. Monasteries can assign social work to their members, while parishes depend on volunteers. And monasteries often have more space and funding for social ministries.
In the Orthodox tradition, the monastic emphasis on personal salvation has never justified neglecting people in need, whether in or beyond the monastic community. Monasteries have long been concerned to care for people who have come to their doors, whether as pilgrims or people in search of material assistance. And while the monastic life has always required separation from the world for the sake of prayer and ascetic discipline, some monasteries have long traditions of social ministry.13 A key figure in Russian Orthodox history is St. Joseph of Volokolamsk, who in the early sixteenth century argued that monasteries needed to accumulate wealth in order to provide social services. His own monastery developed a home for the elderly, a hospital, and programs for children.14
Nevertheless, the degree to which almost all monasteries today are involved in social outreach is striking. Service to the needy is a spiritual discipline that is as important as prayer or fasting. And as in the past, women’s monasteries, such as the Martha and Mary Monastery, are in the movement’s forefront.15 Prior to the October Revolution, Elizabeth and her Sisters of Mercy regularly visited Moscow’s poorest neighborhoods; offered medical care, financial assistance, and spiritual counsel; established a home with rooms for young village women who had moved to the city to work in factories; and founded another home, for women with tuberculosis.16 When I visited almost a century later, the reestablished community consisted of fifteen sisters, sixty professional employees (all of whom were active Orthodox believers), and a large sisterhood of lay volunteers. In contrast to the practice in Elizabeth’s community, five of the fifteen sisters, including the abbess, Mother Elisaveta (Pozdniakova), had been tonsured. These “black sisters” observed a stricter monastic regime than the others, thereby helping to keep prayer and worship at the center of the community’s life. The “white sisters” had special medical training and took the lead in the monastery’s social work.17
Today the community sponsors concerts and lectures, maintains Elizabeth’s living quarters as a museum, operates a dormitory and school for young orphaned girls, runs a summer camp for invalid children, and offers cutting-edge social service programs, such as classes for parents with autistic children or for people caring for aging and ailing relatives. The monastery also sponsors a parish that has a regular cycle of worship services open to the public and a small Sunday school.18
Mother Elisaveta’s youthful energy is infectious. For her and the sisters, the basic spiritual disciplines of monastic life help them meet the demands of social service. The day begins at 5:30 a.m. with prayer and the Divine Liturgy. On Mondays the sisters set aside time for spiritual conversation. In the weeks prior to the Great Lent, they discuss controlling the passions; during Lent, the meaning of the liturgy. On Thursdays a professor, often from St. Tikhon’s University, presents a lecture on a theological topic. Each of the sisters has a spiritual father before whom she regularly makes confession of sin, and Bishop Panteleimon, head of the patriarchal department for social ministry, provides spiritual oversight of the community as a whole.19
As at St. George’s, the social ministries at the Martha and Mary Monastery draw people out of an everyday world of suffering and pain into an extraordinary world of divine beauty and harmony. Here the Church’s commitment to helping people in physical and emotional need extends to recognizing their need for spiritual rest and healing. Not all who come to the Martha and Mary Monastery will depart with a new sense of the meaning of life. Not all will choose to participate more actively in Church life. But few will fail to sense the extraordinary love and care that the monastery offers to people in need and how the sisters seek to renew Russian culture and tradition.
I have gotten to know another St. Elizabeth’s Monastery, this one in Minsk, Belarus. While not formally affiliated with the Martha and Mary Monastery in Moscow, St. Elizabeth’s in Minsk has the same commitments to prayer and social service. It reaches out to people in desperate need and invites them into new life in the Church. The story of its founding is no less extraordinary than that of the Martha and Mary community.20
In 1996, the metropolitan of the Moscow Patriarchate churches in Belarus, Filaret (Vakhromeev), gave his blessing for the organization of a sisterhood in Minsk dedicated to the memory of St. Elizabeth. At that time, the sisters’ principal service was to men in a psychiatric hospital, one of Europe’s largest, on the edge of town. The sisters dreamed of establishing a monastery nearby to anchor their ministry spiritually, and as men were released from the hospital, they offered, as a gesture of thanks, to help the women construct a church.
The sisters and their spiritual father, Andrei Lemeshonok, are quick to mention Nikolai Gur’ianov, the famous holy elder and Father Andrei’s own spiritual father. In late 1997, when public opposition and lack of funding threatened completion of the church, Father Andrei traveled to Nikolai on his remote island. As they spoke, Nikolai pulled out a 5-ruble note, handed it to Father Andrei, and assured him that donors would soon step forward. Moreover, declared Nikolai, the sisters would become “white nuns.” In 1999, his predictions came true. Metropolitan Filaret approved establishment of a women’s monastery dedicated to St. Elizabeth, and soon afterward the lower part of the church, in honor of St. Nicholas, was completed.
As other men were released from the hospital or simply came looking for work, the sisters trained them in various church arts and crafts. Workshops for iconography, church furniture and implements, ironwork, and liturgical garments soon opened. To provide additional work, the monastery established a skete about 20 miles away on 300 acres of land near the village of Lysaia Gora. Here, men in especially desperate straits—homeless, unemployed—could help raise animals, till crops, and construct buildings.
Today the monastery has ninety sisters (both “black” and “white”) assisted by a small brotherhood, two hundred members of a lay sisterhood, and several hundred craftsmen and farm workers.21 The monastery complex includes two major churches and three smaller ones. A four-story building houses forty workshops. A bakery and a cheese factory are in operation. New construction includes a hostel for pilgrims and a cultural-educational center with a meeting room for five thousand people. The monastery has become a large economic enterprise; its sisters regularly travel to Orthodox exhibitions hundreds of miles away—Moscow, Kiev, even New York City and Pittsburgh—to sell their products.
As at the Martha and Mary Monastery, the sisters believe that spiritual disciplines ground social ministry. Prayer, worship, and spiritual reflection lie at the heart of their communal life. Even the iconostasis in the monastery Church of St. Elizabeth communicates the close relationship between prayer and service. The first row includes the icons of Elizabeth and Barbara. In the third row are icons of Patriarch Tikhon (who, as we have seen, faithfully led the Church through the first years of Bolshevik persecution), John of Kronstadt (who as a parish priest developed an impressive array of social ministries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), Aleksei Mechev (the parish priest in Moscow who promoted an active laity), and Veniamin of Petrograd (who in the early 1920s headed Church efforts to gather money for Russians suffering from famine even as he resisted Bolshevik confiscation of Church treasures, for which he was martyred in 1922).
Father Andrei has given especially eloquent expression to the relationship of prayer and service. Nikolai Gur’ianov taught him that a monastery should provide everything: “work, prayer, and relaxation—and bread and sugar.” St. Elizabeth’s turns no one away. It even has an arrangement with the police to deliver newly released prisoners to its farm, where they can live and work until they transition back into society. Some of these men have a history of drug abuse, crime, and even murder. Often they have no legal documents or money. Many see the monastery as their last chance to make good.
The experience of Christian community is as important here as at St. George’s. The men at the monastery farm are in constant contact with each other, Father Andrei, and the sisters. According to Father Andrei, “We have constructed everything for dialogue . . . so that people will talk, not isolate themselves, but rather speak out and build trust. If this will happen, there will be a kind of unity . . . like a family. . . . Conversation is an essential element of our life here, as well as confession and, thus, revealing one’s thoughts. When we speak aloud the things that are bothering us, it helps everyone. . . . So, as far as I am concerned, there is only confession and conversation. And the liturgy.”22
Father Andrei wants each man to have the opportunity to come to God. Each must see himself as he really is: a sinner who is nevertheless loved by God and others. Father Andrei tries to keep even the troublemakers in this circle of love. Some, of course, will choose to leave rather than to live in a community shaped by the seasons of the Church year, daily prayer and worship, and Orthodox moral and spiritual values. But others will discover the ability to love, even as they have been loved. Father Andrei speaks proudly of the six rehabilitated men who recently became monks.
The social ministries at St. George’s, the Martha and Mary Monastery, and St. Elizabeth’s in Minsk all draw a close connection between healing human brokenness and educating people in religious faith. The Church believes that as people come to know and practice the Orthodox faith, they will experience spiritual well-being and deal more effectively with physical and emotional problems. Where their own sinfulness has contributed to their problems, they learn to purify themselves. Where they suffer at the hands of forces of evil that they cannot control, they find new strength to endure patiently.
The relationship between healing and education is especially evident in the social ministries of the Iosif-Volokolamsk Monastery, an hour outside Moscow. The monastery’s great sixteenth-century leader, St. Joseph, not only founded a school for children but also fed children who were suffering hunger at a time of famine.23 The monastery’s special connection to children in need continued during the Soviet era. Although the Communists closed the monastery in 1922, they housed a public school and later an orphanage in the monks’ living quarters. Today the monastery again sponsors social and educational work with children and teenagers, including an innovative Scouting program.
Of special interest is the work of Father Moisei (Semiannikov), the monastery’s business manager. Father Moisei is an energetic young monk with a thick black beard and twinkling brown eyes. He regularly visits two nearby villages that have government-sponsored social rehabilitation centers for delinquent children and teaches a class, the foundations of secular ethics, in an elementary school in a third village. In each place, he combines deep compassion for children with basic instruction in Orthodox values.
Father Moisei has learned that establishing a trusting relationship with the children is the most important factor in promoting their spiritual reformation. Only when solid human relationships are in place can the children begin to imagine a trusting relationship with a divine power. When Father Moisei visits the social rehabilitation centers, he does not discuss faith in a theoretical way but rather introduces the children to basic spiritual practices that, he believes, will strengthen them. Today when he stands before an icon and asks the children who among them wants to pray with him, he hears, “I do, I do, I do . . .”
Father Moisei tells of one boy who decided to leave home because his parents were deeply troubled and even abusive. Because the boy knew and trusted Father Moisei, he chose not to look for a secular job or turn to petty crime but rather to live and work at the monastery. Today the boy continues to attend school while participating in the monastery’s life of prayer.
Father Moisei has also won over most of the pupils in his class on secular ethics. While the director of the school has forbidden him to talk directly about God or faith, the children respond positively to Father Moisei’s confidence that they can resist using alcohol and drugs or deceiving and lying to others. Many class sessions end with lively debates about moral integrity.24 Even the few children who are openly hostile to his ideas are touched by his patience and joy.
In my observation, religious education and social ministry support each other. Religious education never remains abstract knowledge; rather, it aims at spiritual reformation. And social ministry does not limit itself to helping people with their immediate worldly needs; rather, it invites people to learn and practice a living faith in God. Religious education and social ministry work together to strengthen both historic Russian culture and Orthodox faith. The Church, it seems to me, wants people who will benefit society even while they attend to their eternal destiny. Religious education and social ministry are further interconnected by virtue of the fact that both sets of initiatives depend on teachers and caregivers who establish a deep level of trust with those whom they serve. Whether we speak of St. George’s, the Martha and Mary Monastery, St. Elizabeth’s in Minsk, or Father Moisei in Volokolamsk—the Church strives to shape communities of mutual care and accountability.
However, one dimension of the Church’s initiatives in religious education and social ministry is noticeably missing, at least from a Western perspective. The Russian Orthodox Church still gives little attention to unjust social structures that contribute to poverty, broken families, social delinquency, drug and alcohol abuse, and other social crises. The Church’s criticism of Western ideologies of success and consumption has not yet yielded to closer analysis of state and social policies and arrangements in Russia that undermine the moral and spiritual foundations of Russian society.25
The religious vision of culture that shapes the Church’s social work today is deeply rooted in the Church’s past. Like Christians of other traditions, Orthodox believers have long believed that they must fulfill Christ’s command to care for the poor and the stranger, the hungry and the suffering. In the nineteenth century, problems related to growing industrialization and urbanization demanded a more systematically organized response. John of Kronstadt founded a settlement house in St. Petersburg in which migrants from the countryside to the city could learn practical work skills.26 Wealthy businessmen—among whom Old Believers played an important role—endowed hospitals, orphanages, and other charitable institutions. Lay sisterhoods helped care for soldiers wounded in war.27
The Church’s Holy Synod called for establishment of new monasteries that would coordinate “monastic life with charitable or educational work.” By the late nineteenth century, at least forty-seven such monasteries had appeared. Social ministry also became a priority for parishes, which by 1889 were operating 660 homes for the elderly and 480 hospitals. Some parishes became especially well known for their work with alcoholics or prisoners. And not only did the Church operate its own institutions, it also supported various municipal and private initiatives. But after 1917, the Bolsheviks closed or nationalized the Church’s organized charitable work. Lay brotherhoods or sisterhoods involved in social ministries were abolished. The state alone was to provide social services. While Orthodox believers never ceased to help each other in their times of need, officially organized Church social work could not resume until the end of the Soviet era.28
Lay sisterhoods, such as at Moscow’s Martha and Mary Monastery or Minsk’s St. Elizabeth’s, have played a prominent role in renewing the Church’s social ministries. Among the first and most important of these groups in Russia is the Sisterhood of St. Dmitrii in Moscow. Dynamics that we have observed at St. Elizabeth’s are also evident here: the leadership of a strong spiritual father, the blessing of a holy elder, a reestablished connection to prerevolutionary traditions of Church social work, efforts to ground service in prayer, and a desire to combine social outreach to the needy with an invitation to them to enter into the Church’s liturgical and sacramental life.
The Sisterhood of St. Dmitrii is associated with what has traditionally been one of Moscow’s largest hospital complexes, now known as the First City Hospital.29 At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Dmitrii Golitsyn, a wealthy Orthodox businessman, endowed the first part of this complex, including not only a hospital that would treat patients free of charge but also magnificent grounds with ponds, an orangery, and an art gallery. In the very center of the hospital building was a church into which patients could directly walk or be wheeled from their rooms. The church was dedicated to the donor’s namesake, the Tsarevich Dmitrii, who had died under suspicious circumstances in 1591 in the midst of a political power struggle after the death of Dmitrii’s father, Ivan the Terrible. Dmitrii was canonized in 1606 as a “passion bearer,” one who faced suffering and death with Christian equanimity and faith.
The church was closed in 1922 and during the Soviet period served as a canteen and smoking area. In 1990, a reclusive holy elder, Pavel (Troitskii), who had become a spiritual father to several of Moscow’s leading Orthodox priests, blessed efforts to recover the church from the state. In May of that year, for the first time since the Communists had closed the church, Father Arkadii (Shatov), one of Pavel’s spiritual children, was allowed to offer ministerial services in the hospital. The number of patients wishing to receive Communion exceeded all expectations. At about the same time, volunteer Orthodox Sisters of Mercy were allowed to assist with basic tasks in the hospital, such as mopping floors, changing sheets, and washing patients.
In July 1990, Father Arkadii’s wife died after a prolonged illness. She had predicted that the hospital church would be returned to the Church after her death. About the same time, the holy elder Pavel made a similar prediction: Father Arkadii would soon be appointed priest of the hospital church. A few months later, hospital administrators indeed transferred the hospital church into the hands of the Church. Patriarch Aleksii II reconsecrated it, and Father Arkadii became its priest.
Father Arkadii and some of his spiritual children from other churches soon organized a parish in the hospital church. Parishioners regularly joined the Sisters of Mercy in visiting patients after worship services. Among those in attendance was Agrippina Istniuk, who earlier in the century had been trained at Moscow’s Martha and Mary Monastery and had personally known St. Elizabeth. Agrippina later served as an assistant to the holy elder Pavel and to Father Vladimir Vorob’ev, himself one of Pavel’s spiritual children and head of the Church of St. Nicholas in Novokuznetsakh.
In 1991, the Sisterhood of St. Dmitrii was formally organized under the spiritual leadership of Father Vorob’ev. The work of the sisterhood has steadily expanded ever since. Besides its work in the hospital, the Sisterhood of St. Dmitrii gives special attention to homebound patients and assists in many of the parish’s social projects, which now include several orphanages, a home for juvenile delinquents, an assisted living center for elderly people, an Orthodox elementary school, a Sunday school, and summer camps for children and young people. In 1992, the hospital agreed to give the Church space for a school, now licensed by the state, to train Sisters of Mercy. The school, the only one of its kind in Russia, offers high-quality medical education as well as classes in theology, liturgics, and Church Slavonic. Graduates serve not only at the First City Hospital but also in hospitals and charitable institutions in other parts of Russia.
Members of the sisterhood recall that in the early 1990s, hospital doctors and administrators were deeply ambivalent about the sisterhood.30 On the one hand, the hospital staff welcomed the sisters’ practical assistance at a time when the hospital was greatly underfunded and understaffed. On the other, few of the doctors and administrators were Orthodox believers, and they did not want the sisters speaking about religious faith with the patients. Today the place of the sisterhood in the hospital is secure. While most of the hospital staff remains uninvolved in Church life, some doctors and administrators do identify themselves as Orthodox and regularly attend prayer services and liturgies in the hospital church. And the sisters have learned to discuss religious questions only at a patient’s request. The position that the Church has taken in other areas of social work applies here: the Church should be free to touch people with its love in the hope that they will want to enter into Church life, but no one should feel coercion.
The Church’s comprehensive presence in post-Communist Russian society is represented by the unhindered access that the Church has to patients in the First City Hospital. In early January, on the Orthodox holy day of Kreshchenie (Theophany, associated with the baptism of Christ and the revelation of the Trinity), Father Arkadii (now Bishop Panteleimon) or another priest processes through the hospital halls and rooms and sprinkles them and the patients with holy water. Similarly, the sisters are permitted to work in every ward. While all of them are ready to answer basic spiritual questions, several with advanced theological training have been designated to assist patients who express interest in being baptized, making confession, or receiving the Eucharist.
Leaders of the parish and the sisterhood emphasize that most patients value the Church’s presence and therefore the Church’s implicit invitation to enter into its life. Especially important has been the sisters’ service in the hospital’s center for cardiovascular surgery, which brings patients and their families to Moscow from all parts of Russia, including many areas without an Orthodox church. Every week several baptisms take place, and twenty to sixty people receive Communion.31
Public response to the Church and its ministry has also been positive in the Hospital of St. Aleksii, just a few minutes away from the First City Hospital.32 Like the First City Hospital, the Hospital of St. Aleksii was founded and endowed prior to the revolution by wealthy Orthodox businessmen. Like the First City Hospital, St. Aleksii’s claims a connection to great Church figures of the past: St. Elizabeth (Romanova) and her husband, Sergei, were present for its opening in 1903. And both hospitals treat patients from all religious backgrounds free of charge.
St. Aleksii’s is different, however, insofar as it is operated today by the Church, not the state. Not only patients but also hospital personnel attend services in the hospital church. Icon corners have been set up in each ward. During seasons of fasting, the hospital cafeteria prepares special food for those whom the doctors permit to observe the fast. A brochure about the hospital notes that “many people entering the hospital, even at age sixty to seventy, participate for the first time in their lives in the sacrament of confession, many others are baptized—approximately sixty adults every year.”33
At both the First City Hospital and St. Aleksii’s, the Church points with pride to its success in in-churching Russians. The loving service of the Sisterhood of St. Dmitrii has introduced many patients to Church life. Or, stated alternatively, many Russians who in times of personal crisis have been touched by the Church’s ministry have reclaimed Orthodoxy as part of their personal identity. They have found spiritual and emotional strength in returning to what they understand to be their nation’s ancient religious traditions.
It is important, however, not to exaggerate the Church’s place in Russian society. While St. George’s (four monks), the Martha and Mary Monastery (fifteen nuns), St. Elizabeth’s in Minsk (ninety nuns and two hundred members of a sisterhood), and the Sisterhood of St. Dmitrii (seventy members, fifty of whom focus on help to homebound patients) are accomplishing impressive work, they hardly make a dent in Russia’s vast social problems. Only thirteen sisterhoods exist in Moscow, a city of at least 12 million; approximately seventy sisterhoods exist in Russia as a whole.34 Volunteerism is still a new concept in Russian society and the Church. While the patriarchal department for social work is rapidly expanding its initiatives, department representatives told me in 2012 that they had a network of approximately one thousand volunteers for all of Moscow. While the Church is rapidly expanding its drug rehabilitation programs, they are still counted by the dozens rather than the hundreds, and they face competition from programs run by the government and private organizations; conservative Protestant groups, such as Seventh-day Adventists, have been especially active in this work. Orthodox parish-based social ministries in Russia are still in their infancy. Nevertheless, there is every reason to believe that Church social work will continue to grow and touch more Russians.
As we have seen, a religious vision of society guides these efforts. Many Church leaders believe that when people in physical or emotional need encounter the Church’s love and care, they become aware of their need for spiritual healing as well. People discover how the Church’s moral and spiritual orientation can strengthen both their personal lives and Russian society as a whole. As they come closer to the Church, they learn to overcome selfish, sinful desires in order to give their lives in love to others. They begin the way of deification.
Although key ideas about Church and society, body and spirit, and illness and healing implicitly guide the Church’s social ministries in post-Communist Russia, few Church thinkers have given these ideas explicit attention. Theological reflection on the Church’s outreach will perhaps develop more fully as Church social work expands. Some Orthodox believers doubt, however, that the Church needs grand theological theories about social service. The people who serve in these ministries typically speak of simply trying to obey Christ’s command to love your neighbor as yourself.
Perhaps for this reason, the Patriarchate’s official document “The Principles of Organization of Social Work in the Russian Orthodox Church” focuses not on a theoretical justification for social ministry but rather on the kinds of social services that the Church should be developing. The document also emphasizes that the responsibility for social work lies with all the Church’s constituent parts—individual believers, parishes, dioceses, and monasteries alike. The opening section of the work consists largely of references to Old and New Testament passages about love of neighbor: first of all, love of those in one’s religious community, and then of those on the outside as well.35
Some Church leaders are now calling for thinking through more carefully the purpose and motivation for social ministry, as at a roundtable discussion in January 2012 sponsored by the synodal department for charitable work. Chairing the event was Father Arkadii (Shatov), who in 2010 was elevated to the rank of bishop and assumed the name Panteleimon, in honor of the fourth-century saint-martyr who had served as a physician to the suffering and needy in Asia Minor. Deacon Oleg Vyshinskii, a lecturer in social work at Moscow’s St. Tikhon’s University, noted that Russian Orthodoxy has a less well-developed understanding of social ministry than Catholic and Protestant churches in the West.36 In the Catholicism that emerged after the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century, social ministry was impelled by the idea that good works contribute to a person’s salvation. Calvinist Protestantism, of course, rejected this idea. God’s mercy in Christ alone, not good works, brings about salvation. Nevertheless, Calvinist Protestantism emphasized that those who trust in God do good works as a divine calling that confirms their salvation. Orthodoxy, in contrast, has been more cautious than either Catholicism or Reformation Protestantism about social ministry. According to Vyshinskii, good works have been regarded as only one dimension of life before God, and believers should be careful not to see people in need as a means for selfishly working out their own salvation.
Vyshinskii also noted historical factors specific to Russia that have hindered development of social ministries. Social activism has often been associated with Protestants sects or the Renovationists, those Orthodox priests and believers who at the time of the October Revolution supported radical social change, allied themselves with the Bolsheviks, and attempted to remove Patriarch Tikhon from office. Other observers have argued that state suppression of the Church and its social ministries under Communism caused Russian Orthodoxy to focus almost exclusively on individual salvation.37 The Church survived by turning inward and leaving social work to the state. Even today it is not unusual to meet priests and monks in Russia who oppose the Church’s new post-Communist emphasis on social ministry. To them, the Church should focus on people’s eternal salvation while demanding that the state fulfill its obligations to society, including care of the poor and needy.38
In his presentation, Vyshinskii concluded that the Orthodox Church will be able to justify its social ministries only if it demonstrates how they contribute to people’s salvation and deification. Bishop Panteleimon did not respond directly to Vyshinskii’s challenge, but in other venues he has argued that people are indeed spiritually transformed as they engage in social ministry. While the Church calls on the state to fulfill its responsibilities to society, a commitment to social ministry is also essential to Church life. To be sure, the Church’s document “Principles of Social Work” warns monks and nuns that social ministry should not undermine their principal calling to prayer and ascetic practice.39 Correspondingly, social work should not divert any member of the Church from pursuing deification. But overall the post-Communist Church has taken Bishop Panteleimon’s position that the spiritual life goes together with social service.
Symphonia, especially during the synodal and Communist periods, often restricted the Church to a spiritual sphere of influence. Bishop Panteleimon has compared the Church of that era to a man who has a heavy rock on his chest and nearly suffocates. After Communism, the Church can again breathe deeply and devote itself to the two tasks that should always lie at the heart of its life: love of God and love of neighbor. Panteleimon notes that the Church often delivers higher-quality social services than does the state. Even though social work places providers in situations of extreme human need that can easily overwhelm them, their spiritual resources will sustain them. And although most Church social workers receive a lower salary than state providers or even serve as volunteers, many Russians, noticing their good-hearted motivations and the high quality of their work, prefer the Church’s social services to the state’s. Panteleimon therefore has called on the state to support the Church’s social initiatives, and he welcomes new laws that have made the Church eligible to receive government funding for social ministry.40
In the preceding analysis, I have emphasized how Church social work is an important means for inviting people into the Church’s liturgical and sacramental life. Social ministry is closely related to in-churching. The Church, however, often stresses a different but no less significant dimension to its social work: service to people in physical need also draws providers more deeply into the Church and the Christian life. To answer Vyshinskii’s question from this angle, social ministry is essentially related to salvation because through service to others, one grows in deification.
Bishop Panteleimon notes that many Christians have difficulty with an intellectual approach to the faith, such as studying the gospel or thinking about the meaning of life. It may be, rather, the act of participating in social ministry that first opens them to a deeper relationship with God. Panteleimon speaks of his own life experience. After the premature death of his wife threw him into deep grief, he came to understand that the only way ahead was to help others who were suffering. The opportunity to minister in the First City Hospital saved his life.41
This theme often repeated itself in my visits to Church social service projects. In St. Petersburg, a member of the Sisterhood of the Great Martyr Anastasia Uzoreshitelnitsa, the city’s most prominent sisterhood, told me that many sisters had been drawn more deeply into Church life through social service.42 Work in a hospital inevitably confronts one with desperate situations of human suffering and death that can easily trigger a personal spiritual crisis. A sister who for the first time is asked to change a patient’s Pampers may be so repulsed by the experience that she resolves to leave the sisterhood. But with the loving support of the other sisters, she may find that such an experience actually becomes a profound moment of personal spiritual growth.
Father Andrei Lemeshonok at Minsk’s St. Elizabeth Monastery makes a similar point about social service and the spiritual life. The spiritual solitude that, according to Orthodox teaching, should characterize a monk’s life is a matter not of withdrawing from society but rather of living prayerfully. Care for people in need draws the monk into deeper prayer, and prayer brings peace with God. The true monastic does not allow him- or herself to become obsessively despondent about his or her sinfulness. Rather, one learns that in giving one’s life to others one is spiritually transformed and filled with light. Father Andrei points to the examples of the holy elders Ioann (Krest’iankin) and Nikolai (Gur’ianov), who despite their deep suffering under Communism became renowned for their deep peacefulness and joy.43 The document “Principles of Social Work” further notes that service to others can help a believer grow in Christian virtues of love, self-denial, humility, patience, and wisdom.44 Another Church paper speaks similarly of how serving the ill can teach the server greater compassion toward others and greater faith in God’s provision.45
Because service to people in need is a spiritual exercise, it requires personal discipline and communal support. Members of Moscow’s Sisterhood of St. Dmitrii meet once a week for the Divine Liturgy, often celebrated by Bishop Panteleimon. Once a year, the sisters make pilgrimage to the famous women’s monastery at Diveevo, where the relics of one of Russia’s greatest saints, Seraphim of Sarov, repose.46 Members of the sisterhood in St. Petersburg speak of the extraordinary Christian fellowship that they forge among themselves.47 Both the Sisterhood of St. Dmitrii and the Sisterhood of the Great Martyr Anastasia Uzoreshitelnitsa regularly meet with a spiritual father for prayer and counsel.
A recent Church document on combating drug addiction offers a helpful summation of the Church’s understanding of social ministry. According to the authors, Russian Orthodoxy teaches that illness is an opportunity for a person to grow spiritually. Regardless of one’s level of faith, illness (and presumably other hardships) invites one to seek “that fullness of being, which is possible only in unity and communion with God as Creator of the world and Savior. . . . Illness frequently becomes a moment of divine visitation.”48 The experience of sickness or disability may help a person find new strength to repent of sin—and especially any sins that have contributed to the person’s difficult situation. At the same time, the Church calls on its children to show love and solidarity with those who suffer, and especially with other members of the Church. In reaching out to those who are ill, Christians grow in compassion and faith.
The document applies these insights specifically to people with HIV/AIDS. In an introductory essay, Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeev), head of the Church’s Department of External Church Relations, argues that HIV/AIDS offers the sufferer an opportunity to reexamine his life and free himself from sinful passions (5). The Church, however, refuses to condemn people with HIV/AIDS; on the contrary, it lovingly accepts all who turn to it out of their neediness. Illness not only challenges the sufferer to repent but also spurs members of the Church to learn greater compassion. Just as Father Mefodii regards drug addiction as ultimately indicting all of society, Metropolitan Hilarion sees HIV/AIDS as a result of social disorder, not merely personal failure: “Neglect of moral norms and principles, growth of spiritual emptiness, [and] loss of the sense and purpose of life” are the fundamental causes of the HIV/AIDS crisis (5). Like Father Mefodii, Metropolitan Hilarion repeats the accusation that the West and liberal democracy have infected Russia with the moral relativism and spiritual decay that contribute to drug use. Not only those individuals who suffer but also the nation as a whole should repent of sin and recover the moral values that Russia’s traditional religious communities—and especially the Orthodox Church—have taught and guarded. Of central importance for renewing society, Orthodox believers typically say, are social measures for strengthening families, which have historically preserved and transmitted the nation’s foundational values. And the Church further believes that if people enter into its life, their moral orientation will be firmer and therefore the nation will be stronger.
Not all Russians will ultimately choose to participate in Church life, but the Church hopes that all of them will be educated in Orthodox values and encouraged to live by them. From the Church’s perspective, the nation will be stronger if the state promotes such initiatives as religious education in the public schools and Church social work. And, more generally, the Church believes that the state will benefit Russian society by securing and honoring the place of Orthodoxy, because it helps secure the moral foundations of the nation.
At conferences and in publications, Church leaders affirm Church-state cooperation in social outreach. But behind the scenes, I have often heard Church leaders complain that the state is more concerned to secure its own power than serve society or help the Church. Some point to practical difficulties that the Church has faced in carving out legal space for its work. Often the state imposes conditions, such as licensing of Church-related social programs and certification of Church social workers, that the Church finds overly restrictive. A Soviet mentality still persists among too many Russian bureaucrats. Because they believe that the state should control every area of society, they are reluctant to give the Church more space for its social work, despite the high rates of public approval that the Church enjoys in this area.
Liberal critics of the Church wish that it would speak out publicly against the Putin government’s authoritarian features. But in a highly centralized state such as Russia, the Church knows that it will be able to develop its social ministries only if it maintains a good working relationship with government officials. A policy of quiet but persistent negotiation with the state seems more fruitful than open confrontation, even if such a policy comes at the cost of making the Church seem dependent on and even subservient to the state.
The Church’s social work is complicated not only by Church-state relations but also by deficiencies in the Church’s understanding of culture and society. Russia does not exist today as a nation hermetically sealed off from the rest of the world. Political leaders’ commitment to strong economic development has brought values of the global marketplace into Russian society. The Church cannot simply dismiss consumerism, construction of multiple lifestyle niches, or the drive to enhance personal freedom of choice as alien values imposed by the West. Rather, many Russians themselves freely embrace these values in their aspirations to achieve a Western standard and style of living.
The Church’s understanding of culture and society is deficient from another angle as well. Its “anti-Western secularism” rhetoric fails to offer a nuanced analysis of the strengths of liberal democracies. As I suggested earlier, the Church’s social work would benefit by greater attention to social structures that contribute to such problems as drug addiction and poverty. Thus far, the Church has spoken out about certain broad ideological dimensions to Russia’s social problems and how to minister to individuals who suffer from them, but has done little to examine how state economic policies, population movement from country to city, or a culture of corruption undermine the nation’s life.
The Church’s understanding of human freedom raises additional questions about the Church’s social work. According to traditional Orthodox teaching, humans never lose their freedom to choose God. Even illness and personal hardship need not diminish human freedom; on the contrary, they can activate it. Both the one who is suffering and the one who lovingly reaches out in mercy to the sufferer have the opportunity to grow in religious faith. Human freedom, however, is a complicated matter both theologically and personally. Take the young men at St. George’s. Why have they been able to choose recovery while so many other drug addicts do not? Why do illness and hardship sometimes become the opportunity for a “divine visitation” that positively reorients some people while others lose the moral-spiritual compass that once guided them? And, at St. George’s, how much of the daily regime do the young men really choose for themselves? Do they attend the liturgy because they freely seek God or because everyone else in the community goes? Does in-churching strengthen their freedom to resist drugs, or is the enchanted, holy world of St. George’s only a temporary escape from Russia’s everyday reality? St. George’s claims a high success rate, but in their more reflective moments the monks wonder why some of its young men will nevertheless return to drugs.
The dynamics of human freedom are no less complex for those who serve in Church social ministries. As Vyshinskii noted, social service can be selfishly motivated. Providers can become proud of their good deeds. Has the Orthodox Church developed its social ministries simply out of Christian love for people in need, or has it been motivated by desire to counteract the influence of its religious and secular competitors? And has the Church become so proud of developing its social ministries that it has been willing to compromise itself with an authoritarian state? Do state policies that privilege the Orthodox Church in education and social work—all in the name of promoting “traditional moral values”—respect Russians’ freedom to choose faith for themselves, or do these policies inevitably compromise freedom of conscience? Sorting out true from false freedom may be more difficult than Church statements about social ministry acknowledge.
None of these questions should cast doubt on the genuine good that the Church is doing. Its social ministries make an extraordinarily positive contribution to a Russia that is still finding its way after the collapse of Communism. While the Church’s work is still limited in scope, it touches thousands of lives and offers creative models of treatment and outreach that help orient government and private social service agency efforts. Russia desperately needs the Church’s vision of a Holy Rus’ in which the needy and those who care for them lead all members of society toward the life-giving solidarity represented by Nesterov’s Christ. Even the most cynical critics of Church-state relations can give thanks for the Church’s remarkable social achievements.
The Church’s vision of a better society, however, must not obscure its attention to the profound mystery and sometimes painful tragedy of human freedom. The monks at St. George’s know this lesson well, and that is why they ultimately pray for courage yet humility in the face of disappointment. The lesson came home to me when my family and I traveled to St. George’s for Christmas. Heavy snows were falling around Kineshma, but the Volga was not yet frozen, and the monks had to drive us the long way around to reach the parish. The roads were barely passable, and at one point the Gazelle got stuck by the side of the road. All our efforts to push it back onto the road failed. A car went by but did not stop when Father Pavel, our driver, tried to flag it down. He shrugged his shoulders and said, “Some people hate priests and monks.” We waited another forty-five minutes until a truck driver appeared, took mercy on us, and pulled the Gazelle out of the ditch. When we finally arrived at St. George’s, night was already falling.
Although we were exhausted, the parish seemed more beautiful than ever. Just before midnight, we and other pilgrims gathered in the parish church. The recovering addicts were already there, stoking the old cast-iron furnace with logs until the metal glowed orange and red. Others tended the candles before the icons or chanted the Church’s ancient prayers. When the Divine Liturgy finally ended in the wee hours of Christmas morning, all of us walked over to the parish kitchen and broke the Advent fast with a feast of grilled fish, potato and noodle salads, and chocolate candies. That afternoon, after a few hours of sleep, we gathered again, and the young men put on costumes and presented a humorous skit complete with Ded Moroz and Snegorochka (Russia’s rough equivalent of Santa Claus and his helper).
Among the pilgrims were two very kind and pleasant women from St. Petersburg. A friend later quietly related to us that each of these women had had a son who went through the rehabilitation program at St. George’s. The young men’s days along the Volga had been the best of their lives, but when they returned to St. Petersburg, neither was able to stay clean. Both had later died of an overdose. The mothers had brought their sons back here to be buried in the church cemetery. And every Christmas these two women, now friends in grief, returned to the parish. The monks could no longer do anything for their sons, but the two women wanted very much to do something for the parish. They cooked and washed, decorated and cleaned, attended worship, received the Eucharist, and contributed to the loving, supportive community that makes St. George’s a special place.
Now, as Christmas Day drew to a close and night again fell, each woman would walk to the church cemetery, stand by her son, and do the only thing left to Orthodox believers to do for the dead: kiss the simple metal cross on the grave, look up into the starry heavens, and pray for the Lord to have mercy.