Ancient Hand inspires Miracles
Luke Nichols
By Anastasiya Lebedev a.le...@imedia.ru
Staff Writer
Thousands of people, many of them old women wearing long skirts and head
scarves, shaded themselves with umbrellas as they waited for hours Wednesday
to see and kiss a chest containing the purported right hand of John the
Baptist.
"It's not every day that they bring something so holy to Moscow," Svetlana
Chausova said, standing near the head of the line at 1 p.m. Chausova, 31,
and most of her family had been waiting to get into Christ the Savior
Cathedral since 6 a.m. Her husband had to give up earlier to go to work.
The relic, on loan from the Serbian Orthodox Church, is in Moscow for nine
days and on Friday will leave for a cross-country tour of eight cities,
including Nizhny Novgorod, Yekaterinburg, Vladikavkaz and St. Petersburg.
After that it will go to Ukraine and Belarus.
The hand is revered as being the one that John the Baptist laid on Jesus'
head while baptizing him 2,000 years ago. As the Church tells it, the
Apostle Luke asked the elders of the village where John the Baptist was
buried for his body but only managed to obtain the hand. The hand was kept
in a church for centuries, seized and moved several times, and then ended up
in Russia in the late 18th century. Fleeing monarchists took it abroad after
the 1917 Revolution.
On display at Christ the Savior Cathedral is an ornate, bejeweled wooden
chest containing a mummified hand with two fingers missing. Orthodox
Christians kiss the box and pray before it, believing the hand has
miraculous powers.
The line of believers on Wednesday went all the way around the park near the
massive cathedral. Every spot in the shade teemed with people trying to get
out of the sun. Fuzz from blooming poplar trees blew through the air.
Well over 10,000 people were expected to try to get into the church
Wednesday. Some 300 people per hour were filing through the church, said
police officer Maria Voyevodina.
The average wait during the day was at least nine hours. People with
children were allowed into a faster line.
Klavdiya Frygina, 87, said she had spent only 90 minutes waiting to get in
because Jesus had helped her. She explained that a church choir singer had
let her cut in line after she had walked to the front to see what was
happening and had collapsed in the heat.
Police officers can go to the front of the line when they get off duty -- a
reward for keeping an eye on the crowd.
The relic was on display from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. when it first arrived. But
the church authorized around-the-clock viewing this week due to the long
line.
Several groups of women in line huddled under umbrellas to sing prayers.
Nuns in long black habits and priests surrounded by their parishioners
waited patiently and spoke of a holy apparition. Father Alexander from
Zvenigorod, near Moscow, said that people waiting in line Friday had seen a
rainbow halo around the sun and that attempts to photograph it resulted in
images of an oil lamp with a blood-red cross over it. Marina, 75, who did
not want to give her last name, said she had seen the rainbow and the
photographs. She said she had seen another holy apparition in her hometown
of Ramenskoye, near Moscow, last month, when a cross appeared in the sky
over her church after a religious service.
Alexei Zagalsky, 13, and Timofei Zholninsky, 14, said they had come with
their families but had managed to wiggle ahead in line. Zholninsky said
praying to the relic would help their future.
"Yeah, when we're dead," Zagalsky quipped, causing his friend to argue that
the prayers might help them with their university entrance exams. "All
right, it could help us earlier than that," Zagalsky conceded.
The metro station exit leading to the cathedral was lined with panhandlers,
apparently counting on the generosity of those going to see the relic. An
ice cream vendor frantically handed out cones to perspiring customers.
Fotina, a 45-year-old nun, walked along the line of waiting believers to
collect donations for the restoration of the 16th-century Poshekhonsky
Convent, 500 kilometers northeast of Moscow in the Yaroslavl region. She
said the convent, where she lives, had sent her to Moscow to collect money
while the relic was in town.
Raisa, 65, who had been waiting since 6:30 a.m., said she had seen many
relics and had been healed by praying to them. She refused to elaborate.
Nikolai, 50, came from the town of Chekhov, near Moscow, to pray for his
wife, who was recovering after surgery.
Standing next to him with a violin case, Alla Kharitonova, 27, said she was
running between the line and concerts scheduled for the day. She wore jeans
but said she had a skirt in her bag to put on once she got inside the
church.
Rimma Golubeva, 70, said she had heard that the hand had healed a man this
week. She herself planned to pray for God to send a tsar to rule Russia.
"Until there is a tsar, Russia won't lift its head," she said.
Sergei Kislitsyn, 27, who got up at 4:30 a.m. to catch a train from the Tver
region, emerged from the church with a bewildered smile at 2:30 p.m. "It was
like being hit over the head, only spiritually," Kislitsyn said.
He said he had seen other relics but had never had such a powerful
experience. Asked what he had prayed for, he said, "To stop smoking. And to
be saved, of course."
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2006/06/15/003.html
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