PUSTINA THE RUSSIAN MYSTICAL DESERT

 

In a Dostoyevsky novel a character visits a prostitute, when she undresses she observes that on an altar in the room she was flashing the flame of an icon. "Do you believe in God?" the client asks, and the woman answers: "I would be nothing if I didn't believe in Him." The prostitute was a “postenik” who gave up her body not for money but out of compassion and love for her peers. Here is one of the mysteries of the Russian soul. That we westerners would not understand. The flight into the desert is the postina, the estrangement and abandonment of oneself to listen to the voice of God. Christ speaks to men in the silence of the wilderness. That is why in all Russian houses and in the isbas there is a room, even in the isbas of the humblest mujik there is a room with an altar where the images of Our Lord (Spasiteli) and the Virgin (Blogodoritsa) shine together with that of some saint like Saint Nicholas the Merciful. Devotion or Superstition? I would say fervor.

The Russian can be brutal but also deeply religious, attached to tradition. In Russian literature, the “strañik” appears frequently, the pilgrim who distributes his goods among the poor, takes a staff and a bag in which he puts the Bible and sets off on the roads. He becomes a yurodivi in a madman of Christ.

  He is the character that inspired Dostoevsky to write The Idiot. He stays in the villages, sometimes they give him a piece of bread and a bed. If they deny him, he moves on. He sings hymns, fasts and does penance for his sins and those of all mankind. These saints who are the laugh of the people find themselves by following the dictates of the Gospel to the letter. In the Russian Pilgrim Strañik the case of an alcoholic prince who became a POSTAÑIK is narrated. He carries in his saddlebags the gospel of Saint Luke. When he feels like drinking he reads a chapter of the text and so he passes on vodka. He goes to visit the sanctuaries of the steppe walking versts and versts without caring about the snow, the heat or the roads, many reach Jerusalem, it was the case of Rasputin but he was not a pilgrim but a rogue. Russian spirituality is forged in the desert, fleeing from the world, manual labor, few books, long liturgies, all of them standing, and hospitality. Peace to this house. look vsiex. Dominus vobiscum. That is the key. In the west we are full of noise, radio voices that thunder our meninges. The monastic "staretzi" or spiritual fathers of the desert recommend silence because God speaks to souls in silence. From the Syrian Thebaids ´poor Syria how much you suffer, a piece of advice that is the forge and the palenque of all the pro came to the Latin parents:

─Sile et psalle (shut up and sing)

The incessant prayer brings us closer to that divinity whom we reject because of sin.

 

Wednesday, February 8, 2023