I’ve just come across a news item here.

It describes how a new Russian nuclear submarine, the Saint Aleksandr Nevsky, will be fitted with an Orthodox chapel as soon as it completes its sea trials. This will be the sixth consecrated military chapel in the Russian Navy. That would have been inconceivable twenty years ago, and for the previous seventy.

Years back, I met one of the original Soviet nuclear sub designers, George Svyatov, who was living in Bethesda, Maryland at the time. It goes without saying that the submarines George designed in the 1950s would never have including a religious chapel, but they may very well have included a Red Corner, with pictures and memorabilia of Lenin, if there had been the room to include it.

The story about the Saint Aleksandr Nevsky also made me recall the sinking of the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk, in August of 2000. All hands were lost in that disaster. US submariners knew how the sinking of the Kursk would have affected the families of the deceased, and as I remember they subscribed to a collection for the families.

I don’t know if the Kursk had a chapel on board. But in those last hours, before they perished, perhaps each man retired into the chapel of the soul, and there met the One whose presence in the tabernacle sanctifies both the Orthodox and Catholic faiths. I believe that each one of us will enter that chapel when our last moment in this life has come. There we will meet Jesus Christ, the Lord of Life, who is everywhere, even under the sea.