Father Alexei Mechev: Memoirs (Part Five)

N.A. Struve

Translated from
ОТЕЦ АЛЕКСЕЙ МЕЧЕВ: Воспоминания, Письма, Проповеди.
Редакция, примечания и предисловие Н. А. Струве.
YMCA-PRESS, ПАРИЖ. 1970.

Part One: https://www.chansonetoiles.com/p/father-alexei-mechev-memoirs-part
Part Two: https://www.chansonetoiles.com/p/father-alexei-mechev-memoirs-part-fa4
Part Three: https://www.chansonetoiles.com/p/father-alexei-mechev-memoirs-part-605
Part Four: https://www.chansonetoiles.com/p/father-alexei-mechev-memoirs-part-a07

IN MEMORY OF FATHER ALEXEI
By An Anonymous Spiritual Son

Much can be said about Father Alexei, and everyone who knew him will tell his own story — for Father Alexei related to each person in his own way. This special personal connection, which singled out each individual from the crowd of those who came to him, and made him feel his unique form of personal loving attention, was one of Father Alexei’s most compelling qualities. It formed his strength, creating unforgettable relationships.

This exceptional personal connection reached such a level that everyone felt “Father Alexei loves me more than anyone else,” no matter how reason might protest against this notion.

For people came to him in times of need, sorrow, and sin, when these reached their peak and became unbearable, when no refuge remained — and suddenly a miracle would occur and he, with his aching heart, gasping for breath, would unexpectedly become that singular rock of faith against which all attacks of manifold evil shattered, where a narrow path of hope appeared and his boundless love triumphed.

A difficult period in life brought me to him.

The swirling whirlpool of passions gradually overtook me and made me a complete slave to sin.

I, a prisoner of sin, experienced the entire bitter path of submission to passions, so finely and precisely described in the works of the holy fathers. I languished and suffered, lacking the strength to break free, falling again and again into a vicious, shameful circle that threatened madness or crime.

Again and again “like a dog returning to its vomit” I went back to my falls, and my soul decomposed, grew cold; life lost all joy, and the unsatisfied thirst for vivid and strong feelings drew me repeatedly toward ever sharper and burning temptations, so that the old ones lost their edge, while the force of habit prevented me from breaking free.

This is how I came to Father Alexei.

A little chapel on the second floor, unremarkable among the row of houses, surprised me with its inconspicuousness.

In 1918, Father Alexei’s apartment was located on the second floor of a small dilapidated house that stood in the depths of a paved but grass-overgrown courtyard, and as soon as I turned the corner and saw the entrance, I was amazed by the crowd of people at the stairwell entrance — this was the end of a queue stretching from Father Alexei’s single-panel apartment door.

There were about 80 people waiting for a chance to see Father. Although women predominated, there were men in the crowd too, including some intellectuals, and occasionally even non-Russian words could be heard.

Since I didn’t expect to be seen that day, I learned when visiting hours began, and came earlier on following days, but was still eighth or ninth in line.

I stood on the step and began observing those who came, listening to conversations revolving around Father’s personality.

Women in headscarves who came “for advice” about their family and life matters; the sorrowful figures and faces of people in white; and young men surrounded me with their touching confusion, and unexpectedly I heard the voice of a foreigner speaking Russian who, as I learned by chance later, had converted to Orthodoxy under Father’s influence.

A small door opened and Father’s small, thin figure appeared on the threshold with a penetrating gaze, surveying those waiting.

Everyone froze and turned toward him, while he looked and seemed to select those most in need, penetrating into hearts, firm and resolute in his choice.

Some, agitated, left quite quickly, and time dragged on waiting for others to exit and Father to reappear.

My turn came too — after receiving three or four people, Father suddenly turned to me.

With a troubled heart, I passed through the small, dim anteroom into a tiny study.

Father seated me on a couch and sat beside me.

Only then did I look around — at first I saw only Father’s eyes, now radiantly kind and joyful, now intensely penetrating, as if peering into the heart and revealing its secrets — and the feeling of complete openness of your soul for the priest, a feeling that sometimes found confirmation in his accidentally expressed characterization of your spiritual state, created an exceptional closeness that went beyond human relationships.

My confession lasted a long time (I cannot call it anything else, though outwardly it wasn’t expressed as such), and when some decisive moment came, the priest quickly stood up, hurried to the icons in the front corner and led me after him.

A fresh, life-giving stream seemed to pour over me, and cleansing tears of repentance and thirst for new life, thirst for liberation and heavenly lightness filled my entire being.

With some amazing tangibility, my sinfulness, my opposition to the heavenly, was felt — all the weight of sin, and at the same time, joy and lightness of life in the Spirit, the happiness of innocence, were perceived in an unusually uplifting form.

When, finishing the prayer, the priest blessed me and began to speak, I listened with my whole heart, and could not find words for that unusual and new thing that was being born in my soul in his presence — that renewed me, regenerated me, made me strong.

After calming down a bit, I began to understand him, and he, with an unusually joyful expression turning to me, began to offer encouragement, playfully adding “well, father” after my name (which was his habit, but even this warmed despite its strangeness), showing amazing tenderness, telling about himself (“God gave me a gentle heart”), telling stories about his meetings with people, and through these stories imperceptibly leading to what only the person himself can understand to find the way he needs.

This amazing, painstaking approach to the human soul was extremely characteristic of Fr. Alexei.

He never moralized, never spoke abstractly — always only through living examples of human errors and delusions, in which the person had to discover for himself what applied to him.

Sometimes these examples at first glance seemed to have no relation to you, sometimes you even thought: “Why is the priest telling me this?” — and only later, thinking over his words and looking deep into your soul, it became it became clear what direct relationship his story had to you, what new path he was marking out in your life.

During the prolonged conversation, Father would occasionally step out to those waiting and leave me alone. Here I only looked around and saw a shelf filled with spiritual books, icons, images of Father Ambrose, and a portrait of that Optina elder, along with photographs of the entire spiritual genealogical tree of Optina eldership in portraits of its representatives.

With some new strength, I carefully preserved the image I received from Father Alexei and fled from worldly vanity like azure smoke toward heaven.

I felt ashamed to come to him without absolute necessity — too great was the sea of spiritual suffering that he eased and comforted.

Only new falls or the need to resolve fundamental life questions brought me to him, and each time, the sensation of descending light and love was so amazingly strong that tears would burst forth from my soul, renewing and granting new strength.

Leaving him once, I overheard two elderly women discussing Father Alexei, and the voice of one of them, which has stayed with me my whole life, reached my ears:

“One must constantly come to the elders,” she said with conviction, and the power of these words, born from the experience of “coming” to a living bearer of grace, grew deeper with each meeting with Father Alexei.

Being extraordinarily humble and outwardly just an utterly simple rural priest, Father Alexei carefully concealed his insight, trying to make its manifestation as natural as possible. Nevertheless, it would often break through in conversations or in descriptions of my spiritual states that I hadn’t told him about, or in surprisingly accurate characterizations of people close to me whom he had never seen and whom I hadn’t described to him.

This simplicity of Father Alexei was especially striking in its contrast with the richness of his spiritual life and his direct, immediate spiritual perception.

Indeed, he was not a man of words, but of spirit and strength, and this gave him that exceptional influence that he had on everyone, from illiterate but warm-hearted old women to professors and even communists.

Everyone was drawn in and departed with peaceful hearts, having received strength.

In his guidance given to me, Father Alexei tried to draw attention to the works and lives of holy fathers — Abba Dorotheus, Macarius of Egypt, and the ancient Paterikon, but at the same time he constantly used examples to point out the necessity of attending to family life, the impossibility of abandoning it in the name of public interests, and the temptation of those who go to monasteries — in short, he tried to push toward applying the Fathers’ experience to life in the world.

He remains in my memory as a touching figure during his final “cell-bound” year, when health and circumstances no longer allowed him to receive people as he had done all his life, and he had to spend much time in bed due to heart disease.

Joyful, in a white cassock, in a small light-gray bedroom, he appears to me surrounded by icons and books, with radiant blue eyes and a crown of gray hair, and this sublime living image stands in memory like an eternal, unfading sign, promising a blessed meeting with him beyond the threshold of this world.

N. N.