![]() In about 1994 a global crisis happened in my life: first of all a creative one-I couldn’t paint pictures second, the object of my love left me, slamming the door loudly third, I nearly stopped breathing from asthma. This was God’s will, and it has its prehistory. Did iconography come as one of the facets of your profession? The next day I went to be baptized without any doubts. I reached out with the palm of my hand, and when they placed that cross in it, I immediately returned to reality. Then out of the haze enshrouding the entire area a hand stretched toward me holding a cross on a chain. Well, it was insanely beautiful, absolutely incomprehensible, and my feelings were like what a child must feel at his mother’s bosom-protection and love. ![]() It was the black that you see in the mandorla on the Novgorod icon, “Descent into hades.” For a long time I could not understand why the space was dark and only a few years later I read in the writings of Dionysios the Aeropagite that people see Divine uncreated light as darkness. There was no floor, no ceiling, and nothing at all however it was not emptiness but a thick dark blueness, almost blackness. Suddenly the space around me changed-everything disappeared. Xenia of Petersburg, leaning on the column. ![]() There were two hours yet before the beginning of services, not many people present, and I stood in the side church of St. And one day I came to church on the Smolenka. I only asked the Lord to give me a clear and comprehensible sign so that I could understand whether it was His will that I be baptized. I understood that this would be a blow to my parents, and I feared for their health. After all, it is a serious step to change your faith. By that time I had read the Gospels and went to church regularly, but I did not have the resolve to be baptized. For some strange reason I had so much trust in an Orthodox saint whom I did not even know that when I came home that evening I wasn’t even surprised to see my grandmother walking around the apartment, and that she had begun to feel better at precisely four o’clock. I prayed from the heart, asking Xenia to help my grandmother and ease her suffering. When we arrived he showed me where to buy a candle and where to place it. He offered to take me to Blessed Xenia, whose chapel was not far away in the Smolensk cemetery, because Xenia helps everyone. Then I had a purely coincidental conversation with my teacher while I was sketching on the banks of the Smolenka River, and told him how my grandmother has been near death for over two weeks, and the doctors said she would not live. In 1987 my grandmother became sick with cancer and by autumn she was bedridden, worrying above all about how she would most likely die in winter and they would bury her in the cold ground. It was then that I began to read the Gospels, and I put them under my pillow at night, because only then could I sleep peacefully without them I was wracked with nightmares. It was all flavored with an Islamic sauce and peppered with a vague idea of Christianity. Andrei Kuryaev, the Russian intelligentsia’s favorite dish-a casserole of Buddhism, esotericism, and theosophy. But my path to Him would be very thorny: At the end of the 1980s, against the background of a general interest in all things paranormal, certain “abilities” opened up in me and for several years I was stuck in the mire of esotericism, then acquiring a mass of various phobias. The last of these nudged me toward Christ. But I did not find the answers to my questions in that wise book and so began reading various philosophers: Marxists, idealists, and then Soloviev, Berdyaev, and Rozanov. After completing school I continued with determination to search for the meaning of life, beginning with the entire Koran. As I can remember I searched for a conscious faith, and that is why a trusting relationship with God never came together then. Grandmother did not know the translation. Unfortunately the prayers did not touch me because I was repeating them in Arabic, which I did not understand. My father’s mother was particularly pious-she prayed several times a day according to the Muslim custom, and she taught me the Muslim prayers. Both of my grandmothers were believers and prayed the namaz. What happened to turn the wheel of your family history around so sharply? Few Muslims, especially Muslim women, resolve to change their religion against their family’s wishes. Nevertheless, her soul found its home in Orthodox Christianity. Petersburg, then learning iconography in the “School of Ecclesiastical Arts” in Tver-if it hadn’t been for one thing: Alfia (as her parents named her) grew up in a Muslim family, who held the traditions of their ancestors sacred. ![]() Xenia is a patron of our family, so I am always happy to share good news concerning her help to others!Įverything came together in Alla Mescherova’s life seemingly as it should: auditing classes in the Repin Academy of Arts in St.
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