xenia vii

After this you came to Orthodoxy without any doubts?

It wasn’t all so simple... 

By that time, I had read the Gospels and went to church regularly, but I did not have the resolve to be baptized. After all, it is a serious step to change your faith. I understood that this would be a blow to my parents, and I feared for their health. I only asked the Lord to give me a clear and comprehensible sign, so that I could understand whether it was His will that I be baptized. 

And one day, I came to church on the Smolenka. 

There were, two hours yet before the beginning of services, not many people present, and I stood in the side church, leaning on the column. 

Suddenly, the space around me changed: everything disappeared. There was no floor, no ceiling, and nothing at all. However, it was not emptiness, but a thick dark blueness, almost blackness. It was the black that you see in the mandorla on the Novgorod icon ´Descent into Hades´. 

For a long time, I could not understand why the space was dark. 

And only a few years later, I read in the writings of Dionysios the Aeropagite that people see Divine uncreated light as darkness. Well, it was insanely beautiful... absolutely incomprehensible... and my feelings were like what a child must feel at his mother’s bosom: protection and love. 

Then, out of the haze [nevel] enshrouding the entire area, a hand stretched toward me, holding a cross on a chain. I reached out with the palm of my hand, and when they placed that cross in it, I immediately returned to reality. 

The next day, I went to be baptized without any doubts.


~bron~