Safe Haven: A Moscow Church Reclaims its Mission

It is a frosty, dark and cold Saturday evening in late fall. Inside Moscow’s Church of St. Dmitry, parishioners are commemorating the eighth anniversary of the church’s reconsecration by Patriarch Aleksei in 1990. They are also dedicating a new icon, Mother of God Enthroned. There is pomp and ceremony; the glow of evening candlelight is as welcoming as the incense is intoxicating.

Yet St. Dmitry’s lustrous appearance is deceptive. Neglected for seven decades, the church has only recently smelled of incense and candle wax. It has only recently begun to reclaim its important history, while continuing an important humanitarian mission.

The Sisterhood

At the end of 1990, the state returned the hospital’s Church of St. Dmitry to the Russian Orthodox Church. The church immediately became a spiritual center, particularly for those with a calling for helping the sick and suffering.

In 1991, with the blessings of the Patriarch Aleksei II, the Sisterhood of St. Dmitry the Prince was founded under the auspices of the church. The Sisterhood is a religious organization governed by its own rules and by a council elected in community meetings. For a woman to become a member of the Sisterhood, she not only must have deep religious convictions, she also must serve for a year as a novitiate, caring for the sick in the hospital or in homes, helping serve at daily free food distributions or working in the church’s foster home. Yet, while there is a small dormitory for those seeking a more sequestered life, the Sisterhood is not a celibate or cloistered community. Many members have families, some with many children.

Soon after the Sisterhood’s founding, a nursing college for young women was opened under the auspices of the church. The core curriculum consists of traditional medical courses and basic religious instruction.

With help from the Sisterhood and the nursing college, the neighboring Gorodskaya Hospital #1 has been able staff seven departments. Recruitment and staffing is still underway for the remaining twenty. Parishoners also often lend a hand at the hospital. For those unable to do medical work, there are a variety of other tasks: reading to the sick and bedridden or simply talking to and comforting patients and families.

The spiritual and physical center of St. Dmitry’s church and mission – to build a safe haven for those in need of healing – is Father Arkady. Middle aged, with a steadfast gaze and soft speech, he gives the impression of a very powerful, spiritual person. People come to him for blessings, advice, help and simply to talk. Somehow he manages to find time for everything: the nursing college, the foster home, the visiting nurse service and the daily food distribution (to say nothing of proselytizing, working with prisoners and, of course, the large number of church services). Father Arkady is absolutely dedicated to his mission, which started eight years ago with nothing but a dilapidated church. Now, not only is the church rebuilt, but there is a thriving sense of community, of a people devoted to the idea of helping others.

Out Visiting

Olga, a middle-aged nurse, is dressed in black and wears a white kerchief embroidered with a red cross. She is in charge of all of the church’s home care services: visiting patients who need long long-term or hospice care. This morning she is visiting two families in one of Moscow’s bedroom communities.

Larisa, a young, raven-haired girl with dark expressive eyes, opens the door. Olga’s first patient is Larisa’s grandmother, Mirra Semenovna, a ninety-four-year-old woman who several years ago fell and broke her leg. Semenovna has been bedridden since her accident, but she sits up in bed and tells her amazing story, a story of this century.

In the early 1920’s Mirra was a young student at a music conservatory in Moscow. There she met her husband, Dmitry Gachev, a Bulgarian. They were young and happy and together dreamed of music and revolution. They had a son. But, by the end of the 1930s, their happy existence was wrenched from its foundation. Her husband was arrested and sent to the gulag. For ten years they wrote letters full of love and caring for each other and their son. Unfortunately, Dmitry never saw his son grow up. He died in the camps after ten years of hard labor. Mirra spent the rest of her life, loyal to his memory, raising their son and teaching in one of Moscow’s best musical colleges. Now she regales visitors with stories of Isadora Duncan or Tsar Nicholas, while proferring old photographs. Her granddaughter Larisa, an artist, is her connection to St. Dmitry’s. Larisa created beautiful paintings for the Sisterhood’s chapel.

“People come to our attention in different ways,” Olga says en route to her second appointment, joined by Nadezhda, who she met up with at Semenovna’s apartment. “Sometimes they are patients in our hospital and after that become our clients. Sometimes members of our parish let us know that others need help. Sometimes they just come to church and leave a note in a special book we have for such requests.” The family she will visit next left just such a note.

“When I first saw the note,” Olga said, “I mentioned that the family lived right next door to me. I didn’t come right away, because there wasn’t any emergency. The people simply mentioned that they had a sick daughter. But because they were themselves fairly old and sick, and since someone always had to be with the daughter, they didn’t have much opportunity to get out of the house. They seemed to be politely asking for spiritual help more than anything else.”

Feliks and his wife Raisa open the door to their apartment and offer a warm greeting in the hallway. Marina, 18, their only daughter, is in the next room.

Marina suffers from multiple sclerosis. Lying in bed, she seems as if she were a part of the bed. Only her eyes are alive, moving very slowly, as if directed by some internal rhythm.  But she is still a part of the conversation and, obviously, the center of Felix and Raisa’s lives.

As happens with multiple sclerosis, Marina’s illness attacked in stages. At first, only her sight was affected. After that, movement, then speech. There are still rails along the walls of the apartment — aids to walking that her parents built.

Several years ago, Marina’s health took a turn for the worse. She fell into a coma. Emergency medical technicians who arrived on the scene refused to undertake any heroic measures; they tried to convince her parents that Marina’s condition was terminal. Felix and Raisa would have none of it and begged the health workers not to take her away. But they took her anyway. After some time, Felix and Raisa won the right bring her back home.

Three years ago, St. Dmitry’s nurses started coming to visit and Marina was baptized. Immediately thereafter, her speech returned long enough for her to answer her parents’ tortured question: “Marina, are you happy?” “Yes,” she replied. It was more than enough to keep her retired parents’ spirits afloat.

Spirits are one thing, however, and money is another. As Marina became more and more ill, medical care cost more and more. It was about then that Raisa started painting. She doesn’t say if she painted more for her personal release — to somehow make a living — or to have something with which to thank the different people she met during endless medical visits. In any event, her output has been huge; paintings occupy Marina’s room and an entire other room of the apartment. In Raisa’s paintings, there is a hint of the  mother’s grief she will not let show through in person. But it is like a light frost on a windowpane. You can’t see it if you don’t get close.

Fostering Dreams

St. Dmitry’s foster home is located in the southwest of Moscow. Outside, it is a non-descript, two-story building. Inside, it is warm and there is the irresistible smell of blini cooking. The children have just returned from school and are doing their homework. In one room, some girls and their teacher are engaged in the familiar sounds of studying verb conjugations. Off to the side is a small chapel with flickering candles.

Father Alexander oversees this shelter for 32 children aged 2 to 17. Trained as a physicist at one of the finest universities in Moscow, he was baptized at the age of 33. His personal searching brought him to St. Dmitry’s, and eventually led to his becoming the head of the foster home. Later, he completed a theology degree and only recently became a priest.

Most of the children at the home, 90%, come from families with alcohol problems. Some were rescued from the streets or train stations; some ended up here after their parents lost custody rights. Before 1998, the foster home was only allowed to keep children for six months. This created a lot of problems: some of the children simply didn’t have any place to go once their six months were up. So the Sisterhood organized two additional places for the kids to live. They renovated two apartments where 12 girls now live with the sisters.

This year, a reorganization of the city bureaucracy led to a change for the better: the children are allowed to stay in the foster home up to the age of eighteen. And even then, making the transition to a life outside the home can be very difficult, from facing the bureaucratic problems of finding a place to live, to confronting the same problems that forced their parents to abandon them years ago.

The sisters first came here in 1994, merely to assist at the foster home run by the city. But now, five years later, even though the home is technically overseen by the city, which supports it financially, the Sisterhood runs the home, bearing ultimate financial responsibility to see that workers are paid and the children are fed. The children also attend daily mass at a chapel in the home, and participate in meetings and activities at St. Dmitry. Every summer, along with adults and families from the church, the children attend a summer camp on the Volga River, not far from the old Russian city of Tutaev.

Father Alexander dreams of a new, bigger foster home outside Moscow, where the children could live in a less pressured, more rural atmosphere. There, life would be a more family-like. There would be a farm, where the children could grow up learning useful skills that would better prepare them for transition to the outside world.

In fact, this is more than just a dream. The church has already purchased a piece of land; now it is just a matter of time, money and a lot more work. But already, the work St. Dmitry’s has accomplished stands as a powerful testament of hope and tenacity amidst the difficult challenges of Russia’s social transitions.