From the age of seven I assisted at his services and never since have I had the feeling of such perfect mindfulness as by the side of Father Seraphim. Of course, all those priests who did not accept the Soviet regime, who went at that time against the will of the weakened Church, proved spiritually stronger than those who accepted the regime, and they were personally saints, but now when so many years have passed, and after Father Seraphim’s will in which he commanded his spiritual children to rejoin the Church and cease that small schism, only now do I begin to understand how difficult that decision was for him. In that will was his repentance before the Church. All of us who remember him well understand the difference between the authority of the state, the authority of the Church, and the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ, in which alone we place our faith and in which we seek our refuge.
I have allowed my thoughts to wander and have not said what I meant to: before Marfinka’s house was demolished, they reburied our father and again in secret. His remains were transferred to the Alexandrovsky Cemetery, next to the cathedral, where Father S. was the abbot, whom you knew well. The cemetery has long been closed, and it was in one of the sacred graves they placed him, and Father S. conducted the funeral service in the night. He, too, was one of the righteous, a radiant man.
Thank you for Teresa. She is a restive soul, suffering, as you have seen for yourself. As regards your headstrong intuition, I trust it. Efim, her life’s companion, is a very gifted man, but has yet to find his right place. Possibly a publishing house of religious literature would be a good job for him. I, for my part, have written them a letter of recommendation, but I do not know how much weight my word carries.
Your news of Fyodor Krivtsov surprised me greatly. I knew Fyodor ten years or so ago. He is an original person, a seeker after truth. When we came together he had already been a Buddhist but had not found truth with the Buddha. He converted to Orthodoxy fervently and passionately, aspiring to be a monk. I saw him often for two years, and he even moved in with us in Tishkino, but then seduced a girl here and fled. He vanished. I heard he was living as a novice in one of the monasteries in Mordovia, almost as a hermit, so your advice that he had arrived from Mount Athos is complete news to me. We did not become close, you know, I always am a little nervous of people who are too fervent in their faith, and he burned with the fire of the neophyte. I also remember that he was from a Communist Party family. His father was even supposedly some petty Party boss. His parents broke off relations with him and the two sides cursed each other. I had no idea he had made it all the way to Mount Athos. It would be very interesting to contact him again. Please send him my good wishes.
I have one other pleasant piece of news, but it is at the same time a little worrying. Nina is expecting a child. She is in the sixth month and her blood pressure is consistently very high. She has been in the hospital for two weeks. The doctors told her to abort the child, considering that the pregnancy puts her life in danger. She refused and now we are entirely trusting in the Lord. She lies in bed almost never getting up. The girls are behaving with great concern, even selflessly, although they are really quite little. Aunt Pasha is still living with us, doing a lot in the way of housekeeping, but she is already very aged and of course it is hard for her. Those are our circumstances, dear Mother.
I will stop writing. It is past one already and I have to get up at 4:30. My perpetual disorganization—I have no time to do anything. I keep meaning to write you a long and detailed letter, but time, time … I don’t have enough. I send you my love. I send my blessing for the work you have told me about. I look forward to receiving photographs, and I am sending you photographs of Katya and Vera.
Your loving
Mikhail
38. January 1983, Jerusalem
L
ETTER FROM
F
YODOR
K
RIVTSOV TO
F
ATHER
M
IKHAIL IN
T
ISHKINO
Dear Father Mikhail,
I am very glad that Mother has given me your address and told me to write to tell you what I have been up to all this time. It’s a long story, of course, but I will try to keep it short. How many years have passed since I left Moscow? I went first to Mordovia and was a novice there for two years, then went to Valaam Monastery in the North, and from there God helped me make my way to Mount Athos itself. In Thessaloniki I was given a diamontirion, a permit for Athos. There was a Russian consulate there. They supported me. They were instructed not to obstruct me. There are few Russians on Mount Athos now, mainly Bulgarians, Serbs, and Romanians. Greeks, needless to say. There is a lot of Russian territory there, but little in the way of a Russian population. It made no difference to me then, Russians or Greeks. I did not understand, then began to understand that politics is one thing but spiritual works are another, and politics has nothing to do with us.
At the very beginning I found myself in the Karulya hermitage, on the slope of the mountain with the arsanas dock below. People walked with mules along the path up and down, dragging sacks uphill with food and greens. The fishermen sometimes leave fish. I went to Elder Paisius. He asked what I had come for. I said I wanted to live on Mount Athos. He said, “Are you a tourist?” “No, it’s just my visa is a tourist visa,” I told him honestly. He said to me, “We don’t have tourists here, and people do not live here, they save their souls. Are you a monk?” Of course, I was only a novice, not a monk. Perhaps the reason I went all the way to Mount Athos was because I could not make up my mind, but I said nothing, and he said to me, “If somebody has even one percent of doubt, if something is holding them in the world, that percentage will be decisive.” Then he added, “You may stay.”
So I stayed. My work was demanding but very simple. I made incense. The resin of the Cedar of Lebanon is imported to Greece, only not from Lebanon but from Ethiopia. It is brought to Athos and boiled. It is hard work milling this resin. It is not a manual mill but a kind of little cement mixer. Then you add the aromatics, the holy water or anfo oil, and mix everything into a dough. You add a little magnesium, like flour. Then with a rolling pin you roll out the dough into a thick pancake and with a two-handled knife cut it into squares. When the squares have dried the incense is ready. Making it damages your health. We wore breathing masks and gloves. We delivered it to the Panteleimon Monastery. I served three years like that, living not in the monastery but in a cell. There are a lot of cells around the monastery, some hewn out of the mountain, some built of stone. One had been abandoned since the last century and I was allowed to move in there, but rarely allowed to see the elder. I saw him mostly at the services. Occasionally, though, he would call me, tell me something or give me a present. I went to him twice and asked to become a monk, but he kept saying, “One percent!”