Ukraine: demographic decline, spiritual renewal.

“Driving through the countryside I see decayed villages surrounding a church with a newly gilded dome.”

I blame it on Tolstoy.

One summer holiday in the 1970s I read Anna Karenina and that’s where it began. I became a Slavophile. Not that I had much opportunity to indulge it. There were other things to do. But my distant admiration for the “Slavic soul” did not fade.

Then, in the late 1980s, before the partial restoration of the traditional Latin Mass by Pope John Paul II, I took refuge from the Roman Church’s liturgical chaos with the Ukrainian Greek-rite Catholics: not a long-term home, but a temporary shelter in which I made contact, for the first time, with the Slavs at prayer.

In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed; no one in Australia, outside of the Ukrainian diaspora, could have been happier than I. I felt, I suppose, what a troubadour might feel when his lady was rescued from her high tower: he rejoices, but she does not — she cannot — reciprocate; and, like the troubadour, I followed from afar with anxious eyes every move in her subsequent story.

Our lives took their separate paths.

Then in August 2010 I found myself on a business trip in Kiev.

Kiev? Ukraine?

Yes. That’s the one: the door through which Christianity passed in 988 to the people of “Rus”. But what that statement meant, I did not understand when I arrived. It was bookish knowledge about a dead past … or so I thought.

City of dust

In the centre of Ukraine, Orthodox Metropolitan Yefrim rules over the diocese of Kryvyi Rih and Nikopol. It encompasses perhaps the ugliest city in Ukraine — Kryvyi Rih (in Ukrainian) or Krivoy Rog (in Russian) — a 100 kilometre sprawl of mines and steelworks and factories and dilapidated apartment blocks … and dust.

In this industrial wasteland Metropolitan Yefrim’s glorious new cathedral appears like a beautiful ring on a rough and dirty hand. Inside it glints with gold and silver from a maze of icons facing the church’s three iconostases. A wonder to behold, the craftsmanship makes the visitor gape: beside the icons themselves, there’s the carpentry, joinery and wood carving, and gilding that is needed to build and decorate a church in the classic Orthodox style.

It’s a weekday. There are people in the cathedral, and not just the party of babushki who combine the roles of sacristans and church wardens. The liturgy is rolling on as it does every day — not for an economical 30 minutes or so, but for what gives a very good impression of being eternity itself. It’s all sung, backed by a mini choir of two practised, if aged, female voices. People file in and out, joining and leaving the liturgy. The hardier souls, mostly youngish women, stand erect throughout the entire service, bowing and crossing in striking gestures of disarming simplicity and grace. A knot of young toughs in semi-military clothing stand at the front of the congregation directly before the holy doors and do not even shift from one leg to the next as the liturgy rolls on and on. Meanwhile, another stream of people passes silently around the interior reverencing the icons with a devotion moving to see. Around they go: crossing, bowing, kissing, resting their foreheads on the icons, kissing, retreating, crossing, bowing and passing on to the next one. It’s like a complex dance: the formal liturgy before and behind the iconostasis, and the popular cult of the icons, each weaving in and out of the other with effortless timing.

The priest and deacons celebrating the liturgy are young men — mid 30s at most. After it’s all done (yes, eternity does come to an end), the toughs fall into conversation with one of the priests. He has long hair and matching long thin face and hands as if he had stepped out of one of the icons. His clerical confrère is built more like one of the lads: broad shoulders and bull neck. He does not fit any modern western clerical stereotype. He looks neither theologian nor liturgist, but like the kind of man who could bear the weight of the cathedral on his shoulders if commanded to carry it. But the young men seem captivated by their living icon, and they stand around him taking in his every word; he makes little gestures as he speaks, like Christ blessing his disciples. Eventually they head off in a huddle toward the bus stop and the knot re-forms in the back of a bus, and the little Sermon on the Mount fades out of sight against a back drop of distant grey apartment towers.

Iron monks

Departing from the same stop beside the cathedral I found, with the help of a colleague, a couple of monasteries.

Along a winding, dusty, stony road with trucks occasionally roaring up and down, and rusted ironmongery towering over mine heads never far out of sight, the monks have set themselves up in an abandoned sanatorium circled by trees and fronted by a garden. The monks get a lot of attention from the bishop, who celebrates the liturgy with them once a week. More young men are in evidence and a piece of ground has been marked out for a new monastic church. It’s a relief to sit, even in the oppressive heat, and close the city out of your mind, but the grounds are tatty.

“Not like the French Benedictines,” I think to myself.

Then came the corrective, prompted perhaps by the guardian angel of the place.

“Slavs don’t make contact with landscape as something that must be manicured.”

“Uh-ha.”

A visit to the temporary monastic chapel — a refectory chapel, in fact — revealed an icon representing the royal family: the Romanov martyrs. There are tender kisses for them too.

Back tracking toward Metropolitan Yefrim’s cathedral, I am led to a convent of nuns. This time the place is manicured. Women at work. The liturgy has recommenced and nuns sing lessons in front of the iconostasis, and two young laywomen with perfect voices sing the responses from the choir stalls at the back of the chapel. Lay people, young and old, trickle in and trickle out. They attend very devoutly to the liturgy in the 35⁰ C heat. Outside a vast basilica is rising. The sight of it makes me gasp – or is it the heat? A thunderstorm mercifully breaks over the convent. Straight down pours the torrent, red-grey in the late afternoon light. After the storm, a damp rusty smell pervades everything — monastic life in a factory.

On Sundays, Yefrim’s parish churches seem to be bulging. In one place, in appalling heat, the people crowd into and around a semi-roofless church undergoing renovations. The congregation seems surprisingly young. Of course there are old people. But not so many as I expected. Perhaps it is the demographic reality. Life is much shorter in Ukraine than in the West, especially for men; to be 40 is to be “middle aged”. But demography aside, in the West the 15 to 40 year olds are missing. In Ukraine they are manifestly represented.

Widow’s mite

Driving through the countryside I see decayed villages surrounding a church with a newly gilded dome. Rural Ukraine is in sharp demographic decline; people are flowing to the cities. But country churches are being repaired and restored rather than closed by their impoverished parishioners.

Now I am in Kiev and I expect to see much less religiosity. I am mistaken. Yes, it’s a city of the political class, of bureaucrats and of oligarchs. There is a trendy middle class, or something that aspires to it. People dress better. They dine out more. In the churches on weekdays there are more people at all hours than I had seen elsewhere. The liturgy is celebrated by young men. The choirs are younger and more accomplished; their singing is easy and robust. All ages visit the churches and famous monasteries of the city – St Volodymyr’s, the Mikhailovsky, and the Pechersk Lavra stand out.

The restored Mikhailovsky Cathedral, Kiev

The dominant age group doing the rounds appears to be in the range of 20 to 45 years. There are even teenagers, apparently at ease with the rituals and the company of parents. Here is a group of people transfixed by the liturgy; there, others pass silently by the icons. If anything the prayers are more intense. People linger intimately over the icons; they rest themselves against them. The faith and love is palpable: the impetus behind the extensive church building and repairs. From the widow and her mite to the oligarch and his millions, giving to church projects is a mass phenomenon.

(Back home in Australia a Ukrainian acquaintance, also returned from a visit, is perplexed and slightly disapproving of the way people “have taken to religion”. It is a search for identity and a sign of desperation: it’s an anti-communist statement; it’s the economic crisis; it’s the uncertain nature of the national character; it’s the collapse of the Orange Revolution.

“People feel helpless.”

“Maybe so,” I think. “Here in Australia people, evidently, don’t feel helpless enough.”

Yes, the Ukrainian Orthodox, and Greek-Rite Catholics too, inhabit a universe quite different from our own.)

Sunday faraway

“OK, on Sunday I need to get to a Catholic church.”

“No problem. We have found one. I will take you. Otherwise you will get lost. And, when you do get lost, you will not be able to ask the way. Your accent is terrible!”, so volunteered my realist colleague. “But you must show me what to do when we are in church.”

“There’ll be no difficulties. ” I reply. “The liturgy is the same as for you, only it’s in Ukrainian.”

Come Sunday morning, we took a stifling mini-bus and rattled and bounced our way to Mass. Eventually, through the dirty windows, a church appeared. But there were no golden domes, and only very slowly (as usual) did I wake to what had happened.

Apparently to the Orthodox, Greek Rite Catholics are, as Tsar Paul I put it back in the 18^th century, ni miaso, ni ryba: literally, “neither meat nor fish”. So if you ask for a Catholic church you get a Roman Catholic one.

“Lord, have mercy.”

As we enter the austerely appointed OMI mission church, I said, “Well, this is not what I was expecting; you’d better just follow whatever I do.”

Before Mass, a charming, fully accoutred young nun, with joy streaming from her face, served as sacristan. Meanwhile, priests (plural) heard confessions. They were young men and ardent. For Mass, a great team of acolytes appeared – not a girl among them. The sermon was very serious. Later, Communion was on the tongue. Still, the celebration of liturgy, though piously executed, was marked by a rubrical style unavoidable in the Novus Ordo, as if the human body were an untidy obstacle to ritual. And there was the overhead projector, the folksy hymns bracketing a Kyrie and a Sanctus, and a single, loud female voice leading them all. At the end of Mass, after a hearty Salve Regina (Ukrainians can sing!), most people stayed on their knees in the church and prayed. Silence reigned. Despite the jarring signs of new-paradigm normalcy, I sighed with relief and admiration. If only it was easier to find in my own country a parish so regular, so well ordered, so patently devout, and so demographically well-structured as this one.

Thoughout Mass, I was only faintly aware of my guide as a hazy outline and a slightly uncomfortable presence to my right. When it was all done, caught up in my own thoughts, I sat musing to myself; then my Orthodox friend, whom I’d almost forgotten, leaned toward me in a move that hinted of suppressed anxiety and alarm, and whispered.

“Gary, is this a Lutheran church?”