Marianna on the kliros (fourth from the left)
I met Marianna when we were working together, helping to restore ruined churches in Russian villages. She’s a simple chanter living in a remote village of the Tver Province. But the path she traveled before she came to God is amazing. While Marianna was telling me about her life, shivers ran down my spine. And the thought swirled through my mind: “Lord, nothing is impossible for You.”
Marianna and her younger sister Viktoria were baptized when they were ten and twelve. The story of their Baptism is amazing. One morning, Viktoria and her mother had the following conversation:
“Mama, is there a church in our town?”
“Yeah, but so what?”
“I want to get baptized.”
A pause.
“Why?”
“Today, instead of the tapestry hanging on the wall, I saw Jesus Christ. He was sitting on a throne in a red robe and crown. He looked like a tsar. I have to get baptized.”
According to Marianna, it was surprising because her family was far from the Church and never even mentioned Christ. Her father was a military man, her mother a jeweler, and the children were ordinary soviet scouts.
“I heard this conversation between my sister and mother and declared that I wanted to be baptized too,” she recalls. “We went to church together. It was Palm Sunday, and they baptized us. The priest told us to learn the Our Father, which we did. And that was the end of our Church formation.”
Over time, the sisters’ paths diverged: Marianna moved to Moscow and Viktoria left for England. They rarely saw each other but always felt a very strong bond.
Marianna’s life was going well: a husband, two sons, a successful career in marketing, world travel, and a spiritual search for truth. She looked for it from philosophers, in various confessions, and got interested in Tarot cards.
“I thought I was standing on top of the world,” says Marianna. “I was in a constant spiritual search and tried almost everything: neopaganism, Krishnaism, Buddhism, yoga. That’s where I landed for a while, by the way. First it was Hatha Yoga, then Kundalini Yoga, then Advaita Yoga. It’s a pseudo-spiritual practice involving going out of the body. And that’s when I started feeling euphoria, a surge of energy, and various ‘special effects.’”
By “euphoria,” she means, among other things, the loss of the fear of death. Riding this wave, the enemy of mankind slipped Marianna a “gift”: she believed she had learned to “hear” people’s thoughts.
Eventually, she and her son moved to the Moscow region, to the house where her parents once lived. And the first thing she did was to hide all the icons and prayer book. That’s all for old grandmas, after all, not for a young girl who’s free from dogma and prejudices. Books from Oriental movements by Blavatsky, Roerich, and other occultists appeared on their shelves.
“Late one evening, I decided to listen to an audiobook of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita,” Marianna recalls. “When I heard how Margarita was flying on a broom, I thought how nice it would be to become a witch! Such power over people!”
Her thoughts were interrupted by a phone called from Vika, her sister in England.
“Marianna, I don’t know what you’re doing there, but … you’re finished. Even the Church can’t save you now.”
“I started trying to calm her down, telling her I was fine, because at that moment I was in euphoria from my experiences outside my body and realizing that there was no death,” Marianna says. “It was already late, so we talked a little more and I went to bed. Then suddenly I felt a panicked, wild fear. I clearly understood: They had come for my soul.”
Some kind of black substance appeared before her eyes, coming straight for her, as if trying to devour her.
“The first thing that came into my mind was: ‘How can I be saved?’ And the answer came by itself: the prayer book.”
Fighting through her fear, Marianna began frantically searching for the prayer book she had tossed somewhere as useless but which was not her only salvation. Opening it to the prayers “for the expulsion of evil spirits and protection from the devil,” she began reading them loudly and realized that the black energy didn’t like it, because it was trying to stop her prayer. Her tongue stopped obeying her, every word came with difficulty, her eyes kept closing. Then she blacked out. But it was even scarier in that state. Horrified, she emerged from a dream and fell into the same nightmare again and started reading prayers. This happened several times, until an angel in blindingly white clothes with a fiery sword appeared between her and that terrifying black void. He pointed his weapon at the blackness and it disappeared.
“Thank you! What’s your name?” Marianna asked, unable to believe her eyes.
The angel turned to her and said: “Michael.”
As she was falling asleep, Marianna begged herself to remember the angel’s name—“Michael, Michael, Misha[1].” And she fell asleep.
In the morning, her son Eric asked at breakfast:
“Mom, why were you yelling and running up and down the stairs half the night?”
“Eric, you might think I’m crazy, but … I saw an angel. He saved me and said his name was Michael. Maybe it was a dream, but I still want to find out about him.”
“Ha, I know—that’s the archangel who slays evil spirits with a flaming sword,” said Eric, who was also far from God and the Church at that time. Apparently he’d seen something about it in a movie.
Church of the Meeting of the Lord
Right after breakfast, they went together to the nearest church, and Marianna experienced another shock there: There at the entrance, looking at her from an icon was her savior—the Archangel Michael with a fiery sword.
“I wept throughout the whole Liturgy. I couldn’t stop; the tears flowed endlessly,” she says. “In the evening, I went to the first confession in my life and also cried the whole time. I realized that throughout my life I hadn’t just committed every mortal sin—I had gleefully reveled in them, all the while considering myself exceptionally enlightened.
That same evening, something happened that determined her future for the next ten years. A priest came up to Marianna right during the service, took her by the hand, and led her to the kliros, saying: “She’s going to sing here now.” It was a miracle, because in the past she had been a vocal soloist, but the priest didn’t know about that…
The Dread Judgment, with the Archangel Michael in the center
Now she’s moved to a remote, abandoned village, living in a house where a priest who was shot during the years of theomachism once lived. Next to her house is the ruined Church of the Meeting of the Lord with three altars. At the entrance is a fresco of the Last Judgment with the Archangel Michael in the center. Marianna is trying to at least “preserve” the holy site, to save it from destruction.
With God’s help, she’ll certainly succeed. After all, the Lord once sent the leader of the Heavenly hosts to save her.