Floating Churches

Increasingly, the Orthodox Church is using itinerant churches to feed the spiritual needs of Russians living in distant regions and not otherwise served by parish churches. Three floating churches are active in the Volgograd eparchy. One of them, named St. Innokenty, has been plying the Don for eight years.

I.

Donskaya stanitsa* is submerged in a deep, post-prandial dream. It is so hot that not a soul is wandering the streets. Even the chickens are hiding in the shade. I peer into fenced yards for quite awhile, trying to find someone who might be able to point me toward the missing church. I finally find a grey-haired old fellow sitting on a bench.

“Excuse me sir, they say that a church is sometimes tied up around here. Have you not seen it?”

“Nah, what’m I gonna do there? I’m too old for such nonsense. Lived my whole life without priests, why start now…? Why don’cha ask at the store? Maybe somebody there knows.”

A handwritten notice hangs on the iron doors of the store: “The floating church has arrived. It is moored at the pumping station.” I ask a young guy in an overstretched muscle shirt for directions.

“Somewhere over thattaway,” he answers. “Haven’t seen it myself. Nut’n for me there, I was baptized ages ago.”

Circling around the brick buildings of the pumping station, I emerge near the shore of the Don and immediately spot the sparkling silver cross of St. Innokenty. It is an ordinary barge with an iron cupola on the roof; in the stern hangs a row of copper bells. Before the church stretches a small sandy beach, where the locals are relaxing. Young pioneer-aged girls are belting out a song: “Tonight will be so easy, I love you so sweetly.” Nearby, three guys are boozing it up and I catch a fragment of their conversation.

“Tolya, don’t you say nothing about my mama, that’s sacred.”

“Sacred is floating over there, and, as for your mama…”

II.

I board the St. Innokenty by a wooden gangplank. A lock hangs on the doors of the church, with a note warning: “No smoking, swimming or fishing on board the church.” Powerful snoring emanates from a round porthole. I knock on the window: “Is Father Gennady at home?” The snoring stops abruptly and a cry rings out: “Team, get up, guests have arrived!”

The sleep-heavy crew of the floating sanctuary appears through the rear doors of the barge: the priest (and captain) Gennady Khanykin, sexton Sergei, sailor Andrei and his son, the ship’s boy Sasha. The sailor, if truth be told, was in a bad way and smelled of smoke. He moaned something incomprehensible and collapsed back onto his bunk. Father Gennady stroked his beard, put on sunglasses and commented in an official tone: “Yesterday we had a bit of bad luck. Andrei went up on deck last night and the locals saw him. They were celebrating someone’s birthday on shore, invited our comrade to their table, and filled him up with 25-ruble vodka. He’s really hurting now.”

We sit down at a table in the refectory (a ward room, actually) and discuss the evening’s schedule. Services are not planned for today – owing to the small number of visitors, services are only held on holidays and Sundays. There are no plans to set sail in the coming days either, as the ship is immobilized. A week before, the St. Innokenty stumbled into a storm on Tsimlyansky Reservoir. The waves dashed the church’s tug onto the rocks and it had to be sent for repairs.

“So what exactly will you do?” I ask the priest.

“We’ll fish a bit in the morning, then swim and sleep again. There is really nothing else you can do in heat like this. In the evening, when it gets dark, we’ll have a procession of the cross on deck. We do that all the time, without outsiders, for our own peace of mind. We are, after all, travelers.”

Father Gennady has been plying the Don since 1998, when he purchased a used barge from a river construction crew with money provided by the international aid fund, “Church in Trouble.” At one point he was abbot of all the Don’s floating churches, but the work became too demanding, so he gave it up. Father Gennady has lived in Moscow, Lipetsk and Volgograd – all “ant-hills,” he says. Apparently his soul was meant for the slower-paced life of a floating priest. His annual travels along the Don begin in the spring and continue until the end of the navigation season. In the winter, the church is tied up at a small village, acting as a regular parish church, with a priest from Volgograd serving on weekends.

“My whole family has served the Church,” Father Gennady says. “My great-grandfather was a hermit, leading the life of a recluse in a forest hut near Tobolsk. There’s plenty of seclusion here as well, because of the surprising peace and quiet on the river. But, in general, I have to do missionary work, to awaken the people. For without churches it is impossible to show people what is good in faith. Only in confession, in the liturgy, do people understand what this is all about. Therefore, we bring our church here, to the countryside, where there weren’t even churches before the revolution – to show people how to live another life, to commune with God. We try to show how good it is to be with God: just ask Him and He will always help. When we do, people begin to see how their prayers create their world. 

“You know, the best time for discussing such things is after evening prayers, in the silence, when we go out onto the deck and chat. We’ll continue this then. Right now we have to go and get some water from the well. Meanwhile, perhaps you could pop into the store and buy a beer for our ailing sailor? It really wouldn’t look right if I went.”

III.

We go down onto dry land, climb into Father Gennady’s Niva jeep and head off to refill the water barrels. As we drive through the stanitsa, it seems larger and less desolate than it felt at midday. Along the way, batyushka describes his complex relationship with the shore-dwelling aborigines.

“The people here are neglectful and lazy. They consider themselves to be Cossacks and therefore feel that their lives should be carefree and stable. The Don gives you everything you need, even if you don’t work at all. Sit for half an hour and you’ll catch a little roach for dinner – you’ll not starve here. They even feed fish to the chickens. The women, meanwhile, are bent over housework without a break.

“A Cossack considers it an insult if he confesses – he is his own god. They often say to me, ‘Come by here again and I’ll punch your face in.’ It’s 70 kilometers to the nearest church, but if 12 people attend service, that’s not a bad turnout. Refugees from Asia attend more often than locals. Yet, of course it’s not a question of quantity. Once I baptized a person not far from here, knowing full well that he was a criminal. Then, six years later, he came to me and I am telling you, up ‘til then, I had no idea what a real confession was. How he repented and what he became… he is now an excellent, Orthodox, honest working person. This is of course a rare thing, yet completely true. Miracles like that are what keep you working.”

IV.

Poor Andrei awaits us on board the barge. He hastily seizes the bottle of Baltika, takes a gulp and finally speaks, as if continuing a fragmentary phrase:

“…and they invited me. You refuse, and they’re gonna say, ‘What, are you too good to drink with villagers?’ Well, we had a good time. Ye-e-a-ah, they’re good people. One of them was a bit strange, though, trying to mess with me and pick a fight. But they calmed him down. Seryozha, I’m dying.”

“You’re not dying, but you could have if I hadn’t saved you yesterday,” replies Seryozha, the tow-headed sexton. “Do you remember falling off the gangway?”

“I fell from the gangway? And you pulled me out? Well, what kind of sailor never falls off a gangway!”

“A sober one, Andryush, doesn’t fall off.”

“Nah, Seryozh, that’s not a real sailor.”

“Look, the correspondent is listening to this, and he’s gonna write: ‘How sad, our churches have still not rid themselves of the repulsive vice of drunkenness.’”  

“But I’m not a priest, I’m a sailor! The real thing!”

“People will say, ‘as with the parish, so with the priest.’ If they have drunken sailors sprawled on the church steps, then what do you expect to see in the sanctuary?”

Andrei suddenly let out a loud snigger, remembering something from last night’s binge on shore.

“Get this, one of the local chicks says to me: ‘Are you the one selling the costume jewelry in the church store? Give me a silver necklace and I’ll give you anything you like.’ Right. Crazy people.”

Sergei the sensible sexton heads to the galley. Time to make soup. He peels a potato and tells his story:

“I actually finished seminary. I could serve, but I don’t want to just yet. It’s a big responsibility. I only talk with non-believers now if they are childhood friends. Otherwise, what’s the point? To listen to them swear? To talk about life? As soon as they start talking, everything is clear to me.”

On the door of Sergei’s cell hangs a sheet of paper with a quote copied out in a careful hand: “If someone lives in a place and does not bear fruit which benefits that place, then that place will reject him as something that takes up space and does not bear fruit.”

V.

In the evening, Father Gennady welcomes a treasured guest on board, a middle-aged fellow named Yuri Nikolayevich. A local law enforcement official, he spent three years working as a sheriff in America (prolonging an employment exchange program). Now he teaches at the Volgograd Police Academy. In Donskaya he has a private plot with 15 chickens, a rooster, 10 cats and two dogs. He is one of the region’s most active visitors of St. Innokenty.

A table is pulled out onto the deck. A bucket with boiled crabs appears alongside five bottles of kagor [a red dessert wine]. Batyushka* cheerfully raises his glass.

“Look around, there is such beauty here, such peace! What more could a man want? Only that this moment would last longer, because it reveals to us the essence of the universe. For now, we are free of all earthly worries, so let’s drink to the hope that, at least for this moment, we all experience the surprising unity of God and man. Yuri Nikolayevich, what would you like? Would you like a sip of wine? Help yourself. Would you like a bit of fish? Help yourself. Or perhaps both, all things are blessed.”

The heat finally subsides. The loud voices on the beach have died down; we hear only the chirping of cicadas and the splashing of fish in the river. The fact that we are not simply on a moored ship, but in a church yard, is as surprising as the fact that this is not simply a church on the water, but a real ship. Yuri Nikolayevich recounts with pleasure the history of his overseas training, expressing his greatest astonishment at the contrasts between the Cossack and American worldviews. 

“I can’t even tell you how hard it was for me at times over there. Of course, everything is upside down. Our day is their night. So I would wake up, as I usually do, at four am and look out the window. But there were these blinking, colored lights. And I would sit, almost crying, thinking: ‘Lord, save my sinful soul! Just let me return, and I will immediately stop being unfaithful to my wife and will completely turn my life around.’ And then I returned. I came out of Sheremetyevo airport and everywhere there was snow, dirt, and greedy taxi drivers. And again I shed tears, thinking, ‘Lord, I must have lost my head. How am I supposed to turn my life around here, when everyone looks at you with crazed eyes and no one ever smiles?’ Back in America, everyone smiles. You step on someone’s foot, and he says ‘Excuse me.’ Only it is all fake. Here, they look at you like wild animals, but at least it’s honest! Later, American sheriffs came to Volgograd on their exchange visit – 50 people from different states. And I welcomed them here, at my place, batyushka, and it was something! They gobbled up caviar by the bucketful, drank, danced – as you would expect. But you know what surprised them most? ‘You have huge liberties here,’ they said, ‘you are a free people!’ In America, if you toss a cigarette butt on the ground, they immediately issue you a fine. But here, toss it wherever you like… you can fall asleep with your face in the salad and no one will say a word! Our Don is a free land.”

“You know, I could sit here with you all night, Yuri Nikolayevich, with pleasure,” batyushka says. “Because life in Christ is sheer joy. I don’t do anything because it is required of me, but only to make myself and others happy. If a person is depressed, it means he is not a complete Christian. And for our part we have nothing to be depressed about: we still have three bottles of wine. I confess, I love this stuff, because I feel wine is bliss. My wife sometimes curses me, but when I arrive home from my travels, I always say as I cross the threshold, ‘Matushka, why are we out of wine?!’ You can’t binge on wine, its purpose is to make a person feel fine, talkative. Yuri Nikolayevich, why have you not emptied your glass? Does that mean you don’t like it? You don’t find it blissful here? Or perhaps you are not accustomed to it?”

“I am accustomed, batyushka, to sleeping at night, as God intended.”

“So-o-o, that means you are not staying? Well, Christ be with you. But let’s at least finish this glass.”

After escorting his guest to land, batyushka returns to the table and pours me and himself full glasses (the rest of the crew have long since gone off to bed).

“And now, Alexander, let’s get to the bottom of things – who are you and what worries your soul?”

VI.

Our conversation drags well past midnight. I should say that batyushka and I did not come to a meeting of the minds on certain issues. That sort of thing happens in even the best of company, often with one’s more elderly acquaintances. The conversation accidentally slips onto a dangerous topic like the nationality question or birth control. And you unexpectedly realize that you and this very nice person not only have different priorities, but entirely different conceptions of good and evil. And you have no idea how to continue the conversation in a civilized manner. Therefore, somewhere during the third bottle batyushka narrows his gaze and says: 

“I have a combative character, everyone here knows that. And now I am going to raise you up and slam you down on the table, to break you of the habit of arguing with this priest!”

Luckily, we agree to find Truth through a bloodless arm wrestling contest. Father Gennady sweeps the dishes from the table with his mighty right arm and utterly destroys me. Then he says:

“There. Tomorrow, you’re not going anywhere. I will give you a severe preaching to. We may even skip the procession of the cross tomorrow as well. Hey, Andryusha, get up, put on the teapot!”

“Oh, what are you doing, batyushka? Have mercy on the sick!”

“Nevermind, it will remind them who is in charge on this ship. Akh, I have to do everything myself.”

Father Gennady heads to the galley. A few minutes later I hear the by now familiar throb of snoring, floating out of his cabin window.  RL