After ringing the bells, Vanya had to hurry off to a choir rehearsal for his church. While he considered himself primarily a bell-ringer, it was not the sole way that he served the church. In the meantime, Miron offered to drive me to visit a few churches that were a little bit outside the city.
The first church we visited was one of those church “centers” that was far from being simply a church on the corner. Next to the quaint, wooden church, was another 2-story wooden building that housed the full-time elementary school, and the lending library that was available seven days a week for the parish. On the grounds in front of the church were small gardens not simply filled with flowers, but seemed to be a community vegetable and herb garden. Behind the church was a small pond, and two small chapels that stood atop the springs which had supplied the pond with its waters for many years.
This parish had been one of the first parishes that Miron had started attending, and one that had become a home for him as he began to be more interested in Orthodoxy. Even after years away from the parish, as he attended the seminary in Tobolsk, and while other responsibilities even now kept him at other parishes in the city, Miron clearly enjoyed coming back to the place which had embraced him when he had been searching.
We then drove to another church nearby, which, like St. Sergius’s parish, was set amidst a set of 5-story apartment buildings. Had I not known that were going to visit another church, I might have mistaken the building for something else. A large silver cupola stood at the end of a long, warehouse-like building, as if it had been a granary or storage silo at some point. The building itself was in poor condition, and the grounds around the building reminded me of a neglected vacant lot.
Miron told me that up until the 1920’s this entire property, including the land on which the apartment buildings stood, had belonged to a small monastery, which possessed a humble church and living quarters for the monks. In the 1920’s, the monastery had been seized by the authorities, blown up, and the bricks had been used to build the buildings that now stood in its place. The House of God replaced by houses for the super-men.
In recent years, they had renovated one of the warehouses on the property, and established a parish on the grounds of the former monastery. This was not necessarily the “feel-good” restoration event that one might imagine. Miron reminded me of the difficulties of navigating the city government bureaucracy, of overcoming the NIMBY opposition from neighbors fearful that the entire property would be returned to the church, and even the extreme cases of violence. Apparently, a few years prior, a beloved pastor in the Irkutsk oblast had been randomly targeted and murdered by a Hari Krishna cultist. The brutal murder had taken place during a service.
Yet, even through all this adversity and difficulty, the exploitations of human weakness by the Evil One, the church steadily grows. A small parish on the outskirts of the city continued to flourish and lead young people like Miron back to God. A former rocker had discovered the beauty of church bells, and started a school for young bell-ringers to rediscover this ancient tradition. The church before me had literally risen from the ashes of its former monastery. And all the while behind the parish by the pond, the springs continue to flow.
