Event: 30 April 1989
Updated: 18 Dec 2017
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| Russian Orthodox Church |
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| Mormon Church |
In early April 1989, just before the fall of the Soviet
Union, my [then] wife Barbara and I received a telephone call from Marina in Moscow.
Marina was the young woman who had been our tour guide the previous January on
our good will trip to the USSR. Marina had just received permission to leave
the Soviet Union for the first time and wanted to stay a few days with us on
her first trip to America. She came with her best friend, Lena. Our home was
their first stop outside their own country. We learned that both young women
were members of the Russian Orthodox Church. They had scheduled to be in our
home during Russian Easter (April 30).
As many of you may know, Easter, for Russians, is their most
important holy day. So, to help them celebrate such a special day, we went to
the closest Russian Orthodox Church for services. This occurred at midnight on Easter
morning.
Later on that same Russian Easter Sunday, out of interest
and curiosity, both Marina and Lena came with my family and me to experience a
typical Mormon sacrament meeting. As the bread tray was being passed along to
those sitting on that hard wood pew in Long Beach Third Ward, Marina (on my
right) leaned over to me and whispered, “Is it permitted? We are not members of
your church.” She was clearly absorbed in the service and hanging on every
word.
Without thinking, I replied spontaneously, “Of course, we
are all Christians and believers here.” With that explanation, the three of us
took the bread together.
Shortly after that moment I began to realize that I had just
take the sacrament for the first time in a way different than I’d ever taken it
before. Now, together with these two eager, enthusiastic and sincere believers,
albeit from an old, alien and ailing culture, we took the sacrament as fellow
believers! All distinctions between us disappeared. And in some mysteriously
new and wonderful way, I experienced that ordinance of eating that broken bread
together as something more transcendent than at any time previous. With our
Russian friends, I realized that I was more than a member of the Mormon Church.
With that realization, I began to experience an
extraordinary sense of freedom to participate with any other believer in any
other worship setting. The setting, itself, became insignificant. The
institution became insignificant. It no longer mattered whether it was formal
or informal. What became significant was acknowledging membership in a community of believers. By that simple act of taking bread together
distinctions were obliterated, and I realized I had joined a far more
fundamental and universal spiritual community. Several days later the deeper
irony of that unplanned moment began to dawn on me. As I have said before, up
until then I had been preoccupied with and focused on a Mormon Mission to
Moscow. I had invested over thirty years of preparation into a completely
Mormon-centered enterprise. Now, in one spontaneous moment of providential good
humor, I experienced a Moscow Mission to Mormons! I felt my thirty year
preoccupation transform in a moment—as if in a twinkling of an eye. In that
moment I felt open to whole new universes of Good News! In that moment a new
understanding of a universal law began to awaken in my consciousness. And it
has taken time to begin to apply this new understanding—this subtle but major
shift in my personal values—to practical reality.
Russian Easter
“Is
it permitted?”
Inquire
our two Moscow guests
On
a Long Beach bench
As
sacred emblems pass our way,
“We
are not members
Of
your church.”
“Yes,”
I whisper,
“All
are Christians
And
believers here.”
Then
we three as one
With
tear-stained smiles
And
Slavic souls communing
Thus
took the broken loaf
And
through the Ancient Date
The
Mystery rose to fuse
The
Awful Fission.
Eugene Kovalenko
Long Beach
30 Apr 89
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