Cathedral Made of People

Monday we went to Christ the Saviour Cathedral.  Stalin destroyed it and wanted to build a pool, but never got the money for it, and the Russian government helped rebuild it post-communism.  I find the cathedrals here very disorienting:  While I know that the iconostasis is similar to the Holy of Holies and is quite beautiful, to me it looks like a big wall between me and God and the Holy people who get to be with him.  Also, many of the most beautiful cathedrals in Moscow were built to give thanks to God for military conquest, and represent a very wealthy, political and selfish church over the years.  For me, one of the most telling moments of Russian church history (and Russian history) was when the Non-Possessor monks were in a great public debate with the possessor monks, who believed that priests and monks should own property (I oversimplify, there were at least four of five major points of contention).  But, as you can imagine, the Possessors had more powerful friends, and so by the time of the Russian Revolution, like a quarter of all Russian lands were owned by the church.  After that, Peter the Great put the church into a government bureau, tying it closely to the tsarist state.  So it's no mystery where the communists got their anti-church ammunition.  Anyway, that's a lot of conflicting emotions right there...knowing the history.  The art was beautiful:  related paintings were found at separate places around the church, getting closer to heaven as you neared the dome with scenes of Pentecost and Jesus' appearing post-resurrection.  And then in the center was a Bearded God with intense whiskers with a baby Jesus on his lap.  The painting was terribly beautiful...and God looked a lot like a Tsar.  I didn't like that God...it made me think of ceiling cat (from the Lolcats bible translation), and I was thinking "God, this is beautiful, but I really hope you're not that God, I want to see the God beyond the ceiling." Someone else mentioned that he looked like the Wizard of Oz...the comparison was sadly resonant.  Most of the pictures were captioned, but the captions were written in Old Church Slavonic, which two of us who have studied Russian made a game of attempting to read...most Russians can't understand it, and many Orthodox services are still done in this language.

But the paintings of Jesus inspired me...the more I saw of him, the more I just marveled and delved into the paintings and remembered the stories of the gospels.  And the place felt holy.  Downstairs there was one wall with a painting full of saints...200 or more...and while you wondered if the bottom row were Russian political heroes beautified for political reasons, the idea of the cloud of witnesses, the stories and miracles of a full 200 saints standing before me made me sad that I didn't know their stories.  As Americans we are often so disconnected with those who have come before.  But it was really encouraging too...that despite the gold and glimmer and all the politics, men of God (didn't see any women...lame) continue to seek him and find him and He continues to show up in amazing ways.