The Orthodox liturgical calendar is filled with the names of obscure people we know little or nothing about. Some of those names are composites. They are stereotypes based on real persons, usually confessors or martyrs, whose personal history is lost to us, but who come down to us in the Church’s collective memory as courageous witnesses to the Faith.
Many others, though, and especially more recent figures, have very specific profiles. We know them much as we know our own ancestors, by virtue of their words and the recollections of their contemporaries that have been transmitted to us as part of our liturgical heritage. When we make the effort to “know” these people—to identify in some personal way with them, with their particular struggles and victories—we discover that they are not merely figures of the past. They are a living presence: persons whom we actually experience and with whom we enter into a shared fellowship in Christ. They acquire a “face,” even a personality. When our vision of reality expands enough, we become aware that they constantly accompany us and intercede for us. Then they become more than acquaintances. In the best of cases, they become treasured friends.
Every year around August 9th, pilgrims gather in Kodiak, Alaska, to celebrate the life and ministry of St Herman, America’s first canonized saint. For three years in the mid-70s, my family and I had the privilege of serving in Kodiak at the St Herman’s Seminary. On Thursday evenings, with students and parishioners, we stood around the reliquary containing Father Herman’s relics and sang the akathist hymn. More than the rest of us, the older Native people of the parish knew the Elder personally and intimately. They invoked his name each day, entrusted themselves and their family to his intercession, and talked about him to one another as if he were still living in the dense forest of Spruce Island. They still do so today, just as they recall the healing miracles he accomplished and the kind gestures he so often made, offering cookies to village children and consoling people in distress. Death never dimmed this Northstar of Christ’s Holy Church. It just made all of us look a little farther, a little deeper, to find him very much alive and present in the eternal communion of saints and in the midst of our daily lives.
Thanks to Father Sophrony, we have today a marvelous and deeply moving collection of teachings from the Athonite monk Silouan, as well as Sophrony’s brilliant elaborations of those teachings. We know a great deal about Silouan’s life: his somewhat troubled youth, his extraordinary vision of the living Christ, and his continual struggle toward sanctity. He inspires us because he is so close to us. And we feel close to him because of our own struggles and doubts, together with the small victories that give us hope that we, too, might attain some measure of inner peace and even holiness.
A great many other saints, recently canonized, are known to us in a profoundly personal way, thanks to biographies compiled on the basis of memories preserved by their contemporaries. We think, for example of Mother Elizabeth and her companions, singing hymns from the bottom of the mine shaft into which they were thrown by Communist authorities and which would become their tomb. Or Mother Maria, the “rebel nun,” who spent decades in service to the poor and marginalized in France, then literally laid down her life for a friend in a Nazi concentration camp. Or the not-yet-canonized Father Alexander Men, whose brilliant theological and pastoral writings have touched us as much as the tragic, violent death that made of him, too, a modern martyr.
I can’t help believing, though, that the communion of saints is made up of multitudes of people whose names will never figure on our liturgical calendars. Each of us has memories of “departed” persons who have influenced and blessed our lives in immeasurable ways, because of their faith, their wisdom and their love. Persons who are present with us, not just in memory, but in our immediate, most concrete experience.
I remember especially a beloved Swiss couple who became ersatz grandparents for our children during the years we lived abroad. He was a pastor in the Reformed Church and secretly longed to become Roman Catholic. But God had placed him where he was, and he struggled mightily to remain faithful to that calling. Every morning his wife got up around six and spent an hour or so reading her worn Bible and praying for everyone in her field of spiritual vision. Decades earlier she had lost a lung and a half to TB and could hardly get around. So she spent most of her time each day on the phone, talking to friends and especially to those in physical or spiritual pain. This couple, each in their own way, graced our lives with their welcoming smiles and boundless affection. They prayed for us then, and I’m sure they do so now, just as they offer ceaseless intercession for all those whom God placed on their path during their time on earth.
My Doktorvater (thesis advisor) in Germany was a disciple of Rudolf Bultmann and a scholar through and through. In the lecture hall he was pure historical-criticism, but when he visited a quasi-monastic Lutheran community we knew well, he spoke of angels. As a young soldier in the German army during World War II (and associated with the anti-Nazi Bekennende Kirche), he found himself pinned down on the Russian front, together with a few acquaintances from his days in the theological faculty in Heidelberg. With other soldiers, they were trapped in a pit, certain that the advancing Russian troops would find them and shoot them on the spot. As what they assumed would be their final gesture, they reached into the bottom of the trench and scooped up a little muddy water. This they combined with a few scraps of moldy bread, in order to celebrate together the Lord’s Supper. In their Lutheran tradition they didn’t talk very much about “real presence.” But each one knew that in those simple elements Christ was with them, as nothing less than a living and saving presence. After they were captured and evacuated to Russia, they spent the next four years at hard labor in the gulag. During that time, they took pieces of toilet paper and bits of charcoal, and wrote out as much of the New Testament as they could remember. When these precious manuscripts were found and confiscated, they began again. It preserved their sanity, and it confirmed repeatedly that they were in the very real presence of Christ and the saints. It was there, too, that my mentor discovered that he was visited by angels.
Biographies of saints and of other holy people can mark our lives in very direct and profound ways. They help us to remember—to relive—their witness and to experience their ongoing intercession on our behalf. It is so easy for us to repeat the words of the liturgy in some rote fashion, oblivious to what we are saying. But the living memory of these people, canonized or not, reconfirms for us that we not only “commemorate” but actually summon in our prayer the Holy Mother of God, and with her the entire communion of saints. As Orthodox Christians, our firmest conviction and surest experience is that “God is with us.” But so is she, and so are they.