April 4, 2004
A most interesting day.
At 8:30 we were served breakfast in the hotel: eggs, a twinky-style donut with coconut on top, a small piece of dark bread with ham and cheese melted on it, a container of yogurt, and extraordinarily hot coffee. The Russian women who served us seemed eager to know whether we liked the food -- a question they communicated by gestures and which we responded to with thumbs up, smiles, nods, and "good-good." Apparently, via our translator, they had wanted to serve us an "American breakfast."
As we had arrived at our hotel, Hotel 59, pretty beat from the long hours of travel, and as the hotel was not lit up at night, we were not able to get a closer look at our accommodations before heading out for our first full day in Russia.
It snowed overnight. This morning the air was quite cold. We had no games or clinics scheduled for Sunday, only church visits, ministry opportunities. The first of these, more of a tourist moment, was a trip to a Russian Orthodox Church, the Assumption Cathedral. We rode the trolly-bus, which was warm and easy transportation, but generally old and dirty outside. A trolly-bus runs without tracks down the center of the street, attached overhead to electrical lines.
The Orthodox Church was packed when we arrived, as one might expect on a Palm Sunday, with a brisk business going on just outside the church doors in pussy willow bundles, as a northern climate substitute for palm branches.
I am not speaking as one who has experience with an Eastern Orthodox form of worship or devotion. Nor can I adequately describe the astonishing architecture. What I say descriptively is that the worship service and the architecture of the cathedral itself are a direct and vital expression of Orthodox theology -- here as it also clearly exists in the Orthodox (Coptic) Church in Egypt.
Shortly after our visit, I made these observations: Huge central supports (columns) blocked access to the sanctuary and our view of priests carrying out the offices of worship. We entered to beautiful singing, a cappella, in harmony. We could not see the singers either although the music was majestic and otherworldly. Or, perhaps, a better word is ethereal. As I think about it in memory I would say the singing seemed to come out of the walls and ceiling. It surrounded us.
I wish I had noted more detail. The outer area where we were permitted as visitors was crowded with devout worshipers, largely but not exclusively old(er) women dressed mostly in black. Every square inch of the interior, as is customary, was "decorated," even the floor and ceiling. Decorations and icons of all sorts: gold work, vividly colored paintings of Biblical figures and stories and saints of the church, flickering lamps, words ( Bible verses?) in cyrillic (Russian) painted on walls, and so forth. As a lifelong protestant from what we might call a "plain" tradition, this attention to detail, to packing every available space with wonder and worship was beyond fascinating.
At the back -- a place for the sale of religious books, relics, religious trinkets. We were not there to engage in the worship service, which I would have welcomed -- but to look around and then leave after our slow walk-through by the door opposite.
We had been warned not to speak -- period -- not to stay long, not to touch anything, to move about patiently, not to disturb worshipers. We learned later that it was impolite to keep your hands in your pockets or to wear a hat, although most of the Russian women wore head scarves and many of the few men present wore hats. Some of the boys enjoyed the novelty of the place a bit too much, I should think. I felt more than one look of what I took to be disapproval.
After our 20 minutes or so inside we regrouped outside for the next part of our day.
Given a choice, I would have stayed in the church to stand quietly at the back and "take in" what I could. I had my fairly primitive disposable camera with me but the thought of taking pictures struck me as falling somewhere between rude and insulting, so I kept it in my pocket. [For the curious, there are many pictures on-line of the Cathedral's interior. Those are clearer, better pictures than I might have taken, but they are not the photographs I would have found most interesting or telling; they would not have followed my curiosities.
Brief as it was, this walk through of an Orthodox Church brought into focus a number of discomforts -- cultural, religious, relational -- that I have felt and reflected on -- and continue to wrestle with. There would be more of these engaging discomforts in the days ahead.
No comments:
Post a Comment