SAINT LUKE OF CRIMEA

In the vision of the prophet Isaiah, the heavenly hosts surrounding the divine throne cry out: “Holy, Holy, Holy!” The threefold repetition of the word “Holy” symbolizes the highest degree of praise and splendor inherent in the one God. We call the righteous, glorified by the Church, saints. Human holiness is not absolute; it is a reflection of divine holiness. Beautiful, but fragmentary. It is necessary to strive to comprehend it in order to understand it; and it is necessary to understand the holiness of each saint in order to properly follow his example.

I once invited a professor to the Divine Liturgy. It was in the university chapel, which was not Orthodox. We had neither choir nor altar boys, and, as is customary in the Diaspora, very few parishioners came. The professor, who lived in the 1970s and 1980s, when Western Christians were often invited to socialist countries for solemn Orthodox services, was very surprised. “I liked it very much,” he said, “but this liturgy is devoid of glory. And I saw this for the first time. I have never seen this in Orthodoxy.”

It seems that such a “liturgy of inglory” was the life of St. Luke in the last years of his life. He did not practice medicine at all. He was blind. He could only serve from memory. He lived far from the political and church centers of that time. He surrounded himself with his family and was simply an old man, very kind and very religious. As the Bible says about the righteous, Luke was very old and very weak, and he was “full of days.”

That day he died. It was 1961. Three months before that, Gagarin flew into space. On the day of Luke’s death, the Church celebrated the second week after Pentecost, that is, the feast of All Saints who shone forth in the Russian Land. The ancient Christians called the days of the death of the righteous “anniversaries.” But the contemporaries and relatives of Saint Luke remembered little about this tradition. Probably, many thought: “Here, the old man died.” There was too little glory in all this.

But it turned out, and very quickly, since the atheistic state had only three decades left to live, that in this “liturgy of infamy,” into which the last years of Luke’s life ceased to be transformed, holiness lived. It, like the biblical wisdom of the Books of Solomon, had already built a house for itself. It was the smile of God, fully, finally and irrevocably revealed in His Son Jesus Christ, which continues to appear in history again and again, in the righteous people of God, in His saints.

In these sad and melancholy times of the last days, the Church, this Society of Believers, making a pilgrimage through history on the way to healing, thanks God for his blessing in the person of Saint Luke and prays for the intercession of this saint, a doctor and confessor of the faith, in the Heavenly Homeland, to which he returned 64 years ago. There, in the Kingdom of the Father, in this Kingdom to come, he is comforted and happy, he is very young and full of the Holy Spirit. He gives us his healing blessing and awaits us all.

In a children’s fairy tale by the Russian writer Andrei Platonov, a flower grows in a vacant lot. One fine day, pioneers come to improve this place. The vacant lot is gone, a bench and asphalt have appeared. The following year, they discover that the flower, the very one they noticed the year before and wanted to help with their work, has disappeared. They search, but cannot find it. And suddenly, not far away, they see another flower growing, not the same, but almost the same. “This is the grandson of this flower,” Platonov sums up. A fairy tale is also a parable, and a parable is also a fairy tale. There is an allegory here. The flower is the saint himself. The decoration is his glory here on earth, after canonization by the Church. The little new flowers are us, the spiritual grandchildren of Saint Luke.