Faith is essential part of being Russian

By Andrei Zolotov, Jr.
Originally published at Russia Profile.

On a weekday afternoon in mid-June it took one hour of standing in a quiet line at the Convent of the Protection of Our Lady in east-central Moscow to reach the Russian capital’s most popular shrine—the relics of the Blessed Matrona of Moscow. On weekends and holidays the line may take several hours to get through.

“All, all, come to me, and tell me, as if I were alive, about your sorrows. I will see and hear and help you,” say the golden letters above the silver neo-baroque shrine on the ground floor of the church. Here lies the body of the illiterate clairvoyant Matrona Nikonova, who was born without eyes in 1881 in a peasant family in the Tula region. She started to perform miracles as a girl, had her legs paralyzed at the age of 16 and, from 1925 until her death in 1952, moved from home to home in Moscow while speaking in parables and reportedly healing people and helping them to find spouses, avoid prison or occasionally defend a dissertation.

In 1998, when pilgrimage to her grave became more popular and books were published about her miracles, the church authorities exhumed the body. The following year Matrona was canonized by Patriarch Alexy II on a fast track, despite the timid grumbling of church intellectuals, while particularly dubious, occult-like episodes were edited out of her now official hagiography.

People come here, in thousands, daily, most carrying fresh flowers, as Matrona is believed to have requested. It is enough to look at the line to realize that most are not regular church goers. About four fifths are women, and most of them are wearing pants and ill-fitting headscarves. People make the sign of the cross, kiss the coffin, and get the flowers, now cut in pieces, to take with them. What for? “To put under your pillow, to cure insomnia,” the answer was.

Whether one subscribes or not to the concept of the Russian soul, religiosity, which is considered a substantial element of that soul, is alive and well among Russians. It is largely shaped by the Orthodox Church but not only so, as evident from Russia’s non-Orthodox and non-Christian religions, various “New Age” phenomena, an evident atheistic streak and pagan rudiments scattered all over. “Russia knew neither Reformation nor Counterreformation with their explanations, symbolic interpretations and the uprooting of medieval idol-worshiping,” famous Russian Christian scholar George Fedotov wrote in his 1946 classic “The Russian Religious Mind.” “The Russian peasant, even in the 19th century, lived as if in the Middle Ages. Many foreigners have written that this people is the most religious in Europe. But in essence, it is more about various degrees of maturity rather than about substantial peculiarities of spirit and culture. The same historical factors have preserved the religious perceptiveness of the Russian people in the era of rationalism, while not touching the many pagan customs, cults and even the pagan worldview both within the church and outside it.”

In the 20th century the tragedy of the revolution led to a short-lived religious revival, drowned in the blood of martyrdom on par with the first centuries of Christianity. Religious thought flourished in émigré circles.