ZLO (THE EVIL) STORIES FOR THE DEFENCE OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH

The patriarch came out to bless patriarchal beards with their episcopal ornaments, rich pluvial capes embroidered with gold that contrast a little with the poverty of life of this holy man who lives in Moscow in a humble rented apartment where he has received death threats and has suffered the annoyances of the neighbor upstairs who flooded the rooms with dust and flooded his library.

The luxury and pomp of the Holy Orthodox Church is reserved for its ministers to adorn the “splendor of their house.” The fragile and weak figure of His Beatitude reveals the austerity of life of the monk who was, I do not know if in the monastery of Valaam, famous fountain of orthodoxy, or in one of the many convents that surround the Russian capital and that are called The Golden Ring as one of the main bastions that Christianity has today in the world.

He came out to bless and blessed in the traditional manner with both hands joining the index, thumb and middle fingers of the right and left hands to an excited crowd of about fifty thousand people who gathered at the doors of the Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer, luxuriously decorated and consecrated after having served for several decades as a museum of atheism.

In his final address he encouraged believers to persist in defending the faith, arguing that one of the objectives of the Russian church is the struggle against evil (zlo, a very important concept in Eastern theology that has little to do with secularity and intellectual disquisitions in use in the Latin church), against dark forces and the propagation of charity and forgiveness. That Christians must not take justice into their own hands or respond to provocation.

And on the holy night of Easter, on the feast of the resurrection, a real sacrilegious provocation had taken place, while the clergy were singing the traditional Te Deum of the liturgy of this day (molobien) when the choirs sang the stanza “Your resurrection, Christ God, the angels in heaven and earth sing, for descending into the tomb you rescued us from death” a mob of naked women from an English group calling itself Pussy Riot (literally, the doormat revolution) arose, waving banners offensive to religion, throwing cans of tar on the chasubles of the priests, stopping traffic and placing silicone on the doors of buses to make them useless, preventing the return of the congregants who would return home after the celebration of the vigil.

As a reader of Russian authors for almost fifty years, there are incessant allusions to this moment when the people return to their daily chores transfigured after the divine services of the Resurrection. Russia must not be forgotten as the country of the Resurrection, since when it seems dead and crushed or trampled, it rises again to the dismay of its enemies.

A character of Chekhov, after greeting all the passers-by with the traditional kiss (three kisses to the cry of Christ is risen, to which the person being honored answers with a truly resurrected) says to his wife:

-It is three in the morning and in Vladivostok they will be preparing to go to midnight mass, Irina Petrovna

-That's right, Alexei Ivanovich. As always. The years go by, we grow old. But Christ is resurrected every spring.

-That is the hope, - says Alexei melancholically, who must have been a reflection of Anton Chekhov himself, who was the son of a deacon and who always remembered the long and extensive ceremony, sometimes to the point of exhaustion, since the mass was followed for more than two hours standing, when he was a child in Tula.

The sacrilege committed by the "pussys" with their moustaches and indecent faces on the steps of the great Moscow cathedral has deeply moved Russian society. You have to be Russian to read Pushkin, you have to be Russian to understand what the glow of the holy night represents for their idiosyncrasy, sacred light adorned with painted eggs, the triple kiss and the greetings of the Boskresenia. It is the holiday among holidays when enmities are put aside, the hatchet of war is buried and in the times of the Tsars sacred truces were declared because the Gospel commands to forgive enemies.

Kuprin has a beautiful story in which he tells how the guests of a boarding house in kyiv celebrate the night and eat Easter cake in the room of a poor woman who worked as a prostitute. They are all losers, people sunk by fate and who life had dealt many blows but who at that moment recover their lost innocence and return with nostalgia to the purity of childhood to the cry of Christ is risen; the true Christ is risen. The story borders on the ineffable.

Fifty thousand people crowded the square, most of them young people, and nearly seven thousand policemen kept watch, but no militiaman dared to intervene to charge against the Pussy Riot rioters in front of the square.