I ran across this piece on the Web today:
http://ministryvalues.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1505&Itemid=214
The first paragraph gives the gist of the article:
By Stephen K. Ryan
Vladimir Putin, on Thursday, travelled to the St. Petersburg airport to meet the relic known as the “Belt of the Virgin Mary The relic is a highly revered Orthodox piece of antiquity credited with fertility-boosting powers. Clerics said they hoped the relic would help more Russian women become mothers as the influential Russian Orthodox Church is actively promoting motherhood to help the government curtail a population decline
The article reminded me of a little girl I used to know in Moscow. Her name was Asya, she was nine years old then, and I took her and her Mom to the Baskin & Robbins in a space under the now vanished Rossiya Hotel, just across Red Square from the Kremlin. It was just before the collapse of the Soviet Union, and western retail business were beginning to open. There was one MacDonald’s, there were two Pizza Huts, and there were a novel and enticing 31 flavors of ice cream to explore.
It was a great joy to see Asya enjoy herself. She was learning how to play a bouree by Bach on the piano, and after two scoops of ice cream she imitated a swan in a way that was at once funny and graceful.
Asya is now almost 30 and great changes have happened in the intervening twenty years. Still, the cloud of depression and despair that hung over the Soviet Union has not completely dissipated Russians are not having enough children to maintain the population. If people don’t experience the pure happiness of seeing their kids enjoy life and what it has to give, they can’t really be said to be alive—no, not completely alive.
Let’s hope and pray that the holy relic of the Blessed Virgin will help to give the people of Russia the hope and the desire for large, happy families.
Dear Pavel,
I wish I could remember the name of the Russian revolutionary who visited France toward the end of the nineteenth century in the hope of finding there spirits kindred to his revolutionary thought. It seems that he and his ideological comrades in Russia had long believed that they would find an ally among the intelligentsia of that country (based on the French Revolution?). In a letter written to his comrades back in Moscow, he expressed bitter disappointment in the French, claiming that the revolutionary spirit in France was dead and he had come to believe that “The Revolution” could only happen in Russia. From that point onward, they ceased to search for allies in ideology and concentrated on a revolution in Russia alone.
And from that point onward, in my own reflection on the subject, I have seen the pathos of Icarus in their brave idealism. (I had not seen it before then.) And from that point on, I have had profound respect for the strength and power of the uniquely Russian spirit. I saw it again in Solzhenitsyn. It’s a spirit unlike any other in the world, identifiable as “Russian”, and it still exists. In all the moral and social chaos of the post-cold war era, it’s still there, and if it continues to live, Russia may become the origin of the Christian re-awakening the world is waiting for (hardly what those revolutionaries would have expected!) Indeed, no other nation has the spiritual stamina that such an event would require–least of all, the moribund French. Their deadly disease, which the Russian revolutionary detected, is cynicism. It’s what happens when pride, instead of transforming into humility when self-error is discovered, turns inward instead and metastasizes.