Overexposed as we have been to the ongoing, screaming idiocy of politicians, media, and so many others, I occasionally retreat into a more sane world by turning to books I have particularly enjoyed. Is it an escape from reality? Maybe. Okay, probably. But not a very effective one, because the world and its evils seem to worm their way into the quiet of my life regardless of my efforts to create barriers.
But today, as we approach the end of the Christmas Season, and as we begin to turn our thoughts to Lent and Easter, I thought I’d simply repeat what Baring had to say about Holy Week and Easter as celebrated in Moscow in the Spring of 1906. Although Baring later converted to Catholicism, at the time he was an Anglican, but, one senses, a man searching for truth. I found the following passage fascinating, but keep in mind everything he described took place in the midst of the political and social unrest, and the violence, of a revolution. Of course the services described are Russian Orthodox as conducted in what was then Imperial Russia.
The passage is quite long, but well worth reading, and leaves the reader with a sense that perhaps we modern day Christians have lost some of the glorious wonder of these holiest of days in our liturgical calendar. Of course for those Russians described by Baring, something far greater was lost when the Bolsheviks upended Russia just a decade later and created their atheistic, communist, slave state.
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There is a church almost in every street, and the Kremlin is a citadel of cathedrals. During Holy Week, towards the end of which the evidences of the fasting season grow more and more obvious by the closing of restaurants and the impossibility of buying any wine and spirits, there were, of course, services every day. During the first three days of Holy Week there was a curious ceremony to be seen in the Kremlin, which was held every two years. There was the preparation of the chrism or holy oil. While it was slowly stirred and churned in great cauldrons, filling the room with hot fragrance, a deacon read the Gospel without ceasing (he was relieved at intervals by others), and this lasted day and night for three days. On Maundy Thursday the chrism was removed in silver vessels to the Cathedral. The supply had to last the whole of Russia for two years. I went to the morning service in the Cathedral of the Assumption on Maundy Thursday. The church was crowded to suffocation. Everybody stood up, as there was no room to kneel. The church was lit with countless small wax tapers. The priests were clothed in white and silver. The singing of the noble plain chant without any accompaniment ebbed and flowed in perfect discipline; the bass voices were unequaled in the world. Every class of the population was represented in the church. There were no seats, no pews, no precedence nor privilege. There was the smell of incense and a still stronger smell of poor people, without which, someone said, a church is not a church. On Good Friday there was the service of the Holy Shroud, and besides this a later service in which the Gospel was read out in fourteen different languages, and finally a service beginning at one o’clock in the morning and ending at four, to commemorate the Burial of Our Lord. How the priests endured the strain of these many and exceedingly long services was a thing to be wondered at; for the fast which was kept strictly during all this period, precluded butter, eggs, and milk, in addition to all the more solid forms of nourishment, and the services were about six times as long as those of the Catholic or other churches.
The most solemn service of the year took place at midnight on Saturday in Easter week. From eight until ten o’clock the town, which during the day had been crowded with people buying provisions and presents and Easter eggs, seemed to be asleep and dead. At about ten people began to stream towards the Kremlin. At eleven o’clock there was already a dense crowd, many of the people holding lighted tapers, waiting outside in the square, between the Cathedral of the Assumption and that of Ivan Veliki [great St. John]. A little before twelve the cathedrals and palaces on the Kremlin were all lighted up with ribbons of various colored lights. Twelve o’clock struck, and then the bell of Ivan Veliki began to boom: a beautiful, full-voiced, immense volume of sound — a sound which Clara Schumann said was the most beautiful she had ever heard. It was answered by other bells, and a little later all the bells of the churches in Moscow were ringing together. Then from the Cathedral came the procession: first, the singers in crimson and gold; the bearers of the gilt banners; the Metropolitan, also in stiff vestments of crimson and gold; and after him the officials in their uniforms. They walked around the Cathedral to look for the Body of Our Lord, and returned to the Cathedral to tell the news that He was risen. The guns went off, rockets were fired, and illuminations were seen across the river, lighting up the distant cupola of the great Church of the Savior with a cloud of fire.
The crowd began to disperse and to pour into the various churches. I went to the Manège — an enormous riding school in which the Ekaterinoslav Regiment had its church. Half the building looks like a fair. Long tables, twinkling with hundreds of wax tapers, were loaded with the three articles of food which were eaten at Easter — a huge cake called kulich; a kind of sweet cream made of curds and eggs, cream and sugar, called Paskha (Easter); and Easter eggs, dipped and dyed in many colors. They were waiting to be blessed. The church itself was a tiny little recess on one side of the building. There the priests were officiating, and down below in the center of the building the whole regiment was drawn up. There were two services — a service which began at midnight and lasted about half an hour; and Mass, which followed immediately after it, lasting till about three in the morning. At the end of the first service, when the words, “Christ is risen,” were sung, the priest kissed the deacon three times, and then the members of the congregation kissed each other, one person saying, “Christ is risen,” and the other answering, “He is risen, indeed.” The colonel kissed the sergeant; the sergeant kissed all the men one after another. While this ceremony was proceeding, I left and went to the Church of the Savior, where the first service was not yet over. Here the crowd was so dense that it was almost impossible to get into the church, although it was immense. The singing in the church was ineffable. I waited until the end of the first service, and then I was borne by the crowd to one of the narrow entrances and hurled through the doorway outside. The crowd was not rough; they were just jostling one another, but with cheerful carelessness people dived into it as you would dive into a scrimmage at football, and propelled the unresisting herd towards the entrance, the result being, of course, that a mass of people got wedged into the doorway, and the process of getting out took longer than it need have done; and had there been a panic, nothing could have prevented people being crushed to death. After this I went to a friend’s house to break the fast and eat kulich, Paskha, and Easter eggs, and finally returned home when the dawn was faintly shining on the dark waters of the Moscow River, whence the ice had only lately disappeared.
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As one Moscow cabman, speaking of the violence of the revolution, said to Baring just days before Easter: “There is an illness abroad — we are sick; it will pass — but God remains.”
Yes, indeed, He is risen and remains with us always.
