in Alla Mescherova’s life seemingly as it should: auditing classes in the Repin Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, then learning iconography in the School of Ecclesiastical Arts in Tver... if it hadn’t been for one thing: Alfia [as her parents named her] grew up in a Muslim family, who held the traditions of their ancestors sacred. Nevertheless, her soul found its home in Orthodox Christianity.
I was born to a Muslim family.
Both of my grandmothers were believers and prayed the namaz. My father’s mother was particularly pious - she prayed several times a day according to the Muslim custom, and she taught me the Muslim prayers.
Unfortunately the prayers did not touch me because I was repeating them in Arabic, which I did not understand. Grandmother did not know the translation. As I can remember, I searched for a conscious faith, and that is why a trusting relationship with God never came together then.
When did it begin to come together?
After completing school, I continued with determination to search for the meaning of life, beginning with the entire Koran. But I did not find the answers to my questions in that wise book, and so began reading various philosophers: Marxists, idealists, and then Soloviev, Berdyaev, and Rozanov. The last of these nudged me toward Christ. But my path to Him would be very thorny.
At the end of the 1980s, against the background of a general interest in all things paranormal, certain ´abilities´ opened up in me, and for several years I was stuck in the mire of esotericism, then acquiring a mass of various phobias. In my head then was, in the words of Fr. Andrei Kuryaev, the Russian intelligentsia’s favorite dish: a casserole of Buddhism, esotericism, and theosophy. It was all flavored with an Islamic sauce, and peppered with a vague idea of Christianity.
It was then that I began to read the Gospels...
and I put them under my pillow at night...
because only then could I sleep peacefully...
without them I was wracked with nightmares.
In 1987, my grandmother became sick with cancer, and by autumn she was bedridden, worrying above all about how she would most likely die in winter, and they would bury her in the cold ground.
Then I had a purely coincidental conversation with my teacher, while I was sketching on the banks of the Smolenka River, and told him how my grandmother has been near death for over two weeks, and the doctors said she would not live.
He offered to take me to Blessed Xenia, whose chapel was not far away in the Smolensk cemetery, because Xenia helps everyone... When we arrived, he showed me where to buy a candle, and where to place it. This was at about four o’clock.
I prayed from the heart, asking Xenia to help my grandmother and ease her suffering. For some strange reason, I had so much trust in the Orthodox saint whom I did not even know, that when I came home that evening I wasn’t even surprised, to see my grandmother walking around the apartment, and that she had begun to feel better, at precisely four o’clock...
~bron~
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