The vestments of the priests astonish one. They are gorgeous past belief. Whence comes that gold brocade? It was cut in another world. At least, that is its intention, that is what it would signify. Who are they in white robes? Why do the priests at the altar walk so stately? What is that new tempo to which they have learned to move and to swing the censer?
And the voice of the clergy, that unearthly bass, that profound groaning and seeking of notes that man does not utter, that voice as of Jesus commanding the soul of the dead Lazarus to return to the awful and dreadful corpse? The service in the Slavonic tongue, not in the everyday tongue....
All these things bear witness unto the Truth and are the emblems of our allegiance to the kingdom of Christ, marks of our other citizenship, the visible emblems and symbols of our hope, our love and passion. Hence it is possible to sing with angels and archangels. Failure in the work of Martha loses significance as failure. Failure is even good, it is one more sign, an involuntary ritual, telling of our truer destiny.
So though the way of Mary is consummated in the desert, in the cell, in giving up the world, in pilgrimaging, praying, fasting, and only a few can necessarily take to that way, yet it is that way which speaks triumphantly in the Church. The great majority of human beings must always remain behind “cumbered about with many things,” though loved by the Master they will not be able to sell everything, take up the Cross and follow to the place of the Skull. They will keep the commandments of Christ and enter on set occasions the temples we have set up. They will receive confirmation in their life and in the love of the Lord, they will pray for what they will, and confess themselves. They will praise and be in communion. They will recognise that they belong to another kingdom, and their hearts will swell with the triumphant and passionate affirmation of the Godhead which each finds in his poor conditional existence as man. The way of Martha and the way of Mary.
XIII
THE FESTIVAL OF THE DEAD
At Easter I was at my old home, Vladikavkaz, and on the second Tuesday after Easter Sunday went through one of the most characteristic of Russian holidays—Krasnagorka. It is half-Christian, half-pagan—a festival of spring and of new life, but celebrated almost entirely in graveyards and cemeteries. At Krasnagorka almost the whole population of the town goes on an outing or a picnic—to the cemetery.
Early in the morning I received a message from a Russian friend, “Come to our church; you’ll see an interesting sight.” The church was crowded, but I got in, for nobody objects to your pushing. It was an unusual service. The whole centre of the floor of the church, a space of some twenty feet by seven, was covered with napkins in which lay lumps of cake, brightly coloured eggs, basins of rice and strawberry jam, basins of rice and raisins. In each basin, and there were some hundreds of them, a lighted wax candle was stuck in the rice and gave a little flame, and beside each lay the little red book in which the peasant records the names of his relatives as they die.
“What is it all for?” I asked. “It is the food for the dead,” my friend answered.
A priest and a deacon were standing at the near end of the spread of illuminated food, and they read aloud from sheaves of papers the names of dead persons whom members of the church had wished to have remembered. Each person who had brought in food for sanctification brought also a slip of paper with the names of his dead. It took hours to read them all out, and when at last the task was finished, the deacon took a smoking censer, and walking round the feast flung incense over it, the chains of the censer rattling as he made the Sign of the Cross. We sang once more the festal hymn of Easter, Christos voskrese iz mertvikh—“Christ is risen from the dead,”—sung at every service until Ascension, and then, after kissing the cross in the priest’s hand, each person sought out his special basin of rice and pieces of cake and bowl of coloured eggs and moved out of the church.
At the door of the church stood many beggars, six or seven bearded, tattered, and dirty old men, and a score or so of women and children. All the old men had their mouths open, and each worshipper, as he made his exit, helped a beggar liberally to rice and jam, scooping out great spoonfuls with wooden spoons and poking them into the open, waiting mouths. Many beggars had cotton bags hanging from their necks, and into these were promiscuously flung spoonfuls of rice and raisins, eggs, biscuit, cake. The beggars were told to eat what was given them in the name of the dead. My friend fed at least ten beggars before she left the church, and gave eggs and bits of cake, but she did not give all that she had. A great quantity was reserved for a spread in the graveyard.