Galina Chumak

Galina Chumak sits in the tiny Annunciation Cathedral library, bantering softly to a friend about the role of the Jews as the chosen people and their rejection of Christ.

Rosy, bescarved and unshakably enthusiastic, Galina is one of the gentle, devout new faces of Orthodoxy in Russia, eagerly absorbing the Gospel at her Sunday School classes at Murom’s Spiritual Educational Center.

She comes from a mildly religious background. Her parents believed in God, but her mother, a teacher, refused to christen her publicly, fearing dire consequences at work.

“In the first period of my life, I always lived with God, but not of my own will,” explained Chumak. “I was too little to understand, but sometimes I would wake up at night and in my head were the words ‘Lord save me.’ I didn’t know who I was talking to, I just knew the name ‘God.’”

She only really found her true faith two years ago. She undertook several pilgrimages to Russia’s holy places, including Diveyevo, the final resting place of one of Russia’s most revered saints, Serafim of Sarova. She described the visit:

“We went at Easter, there was still snow and it was cold. We were walking the five kilometers to the holy spring. It was very cold and we were worried. We desperately wanted to bathe in the spring, but you can imagine what it would be like there with the cold and ice. We walked in silence, all concerned about how we could bathe. Then the snow stopped, the sun peeped out, and it became so warm, like in summer. We stripped down to our T-shirts, got to the spring, prayed, then bathed three times. It was as if batyushka Serafim had made this weather for us. We had dinner and went back, and the snow started again... He must have noticed our mood and...helped us.”

Chumak works as a music teacher in a kindergarten, where she is now allowed to take religious classes as well. At first her colleagues regarded her with suspicion, but gradually they came to share her faith. She describes how one day she brought incense to her office. A colleague sniffed it, fell flat on the floor, and stopped breathing.

Chumak explained what happened after the woman recovered: “she said, ‘what did you do to me? It was as if someone departed from me, like a snake.’ It was as if God had shown them Ñ ‘you didn’t believe, so there’s a miracle for you.’”

After a week off work, the woman came to Galina to ask for crosses for all her family.

Chumak’s enthusiasm at times seems to go beyond the bounds of the reasonable. “As for other faiths, I don’t attach any meaning to them, maybe that sounds ignorant, but they don’t interest me. It seems to me that this is my faith, the truest, the most right, I don’t need anything else.”

No doubt she will find out more about other faiths in the course of her studies. As she says herself: “We’re still just starting to learn, come and see us in a year!”