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Letter #37, 2018: Flowers on a grave[2018-07-19][Engleză]Wednesday, July 18, 2018Always be guided by your heart rather than by your head, and your life will be transformed. Happiness does not consist in living in a palace or enjoying a large fortune; these can be lost. True happiness is something that neither men nor events can take from you. You will find it in Faith, in Hope and in Charity. Try to make those around you happy, and you will be happy yourself. Grand Duchess Elizabeth Fedorovna of Russia (photo). Born in Germany, she was the daughter of Princess Alice of England and the granddaughter of Queen Victoria. She was the sister of the Tsarina Alexandra (executed 100 years ago yesterday, with her husband Nicholas II and her five children). Elizabeth was killed the day after her sister, on July 18, 1918, that is, 100 years ago today. She was thrown alive down a mine shaft in Alapayevsk, a tiny village about two hours drive northeast of Ekaterinburg, Russia. She was 53. For the Russian Orthodox Church, she is St. Elizabeth Fedorovna. English was her first language. Later in life, she would tell a friend that, within her family, she and her siblings spoke English to their mother and German to their father. For me, she is the last and greatest flower of the pre-modern Christian culture which nourished Europe and the West for many centuries, then perished 100 years ago in the cataclysm of the First World War. I traveled today to the place of St. Elizabeth's cruel execution, 100 years after her passing. There, like other pilgrims, I threw a white rose down the green embankment above the place where she so tragically died. ====================== (Below, a view this afternoon of the grass above the mineshaft down which Grand Duchess Elizabeth was thrown with her faithful friend and fellow nun, Sister Barbara, and several others, on July 18, 1918. Some hundreds of Russian believers came to venerate icons of St. Elizabeth and St. Barbara and then to throw roses on their grave. We were told we were the only Americans, and the only Catholics, to come to the remote grave site, two hours drive from Ekaterinburg. The roses fell down the green slope as did the bodies of the condemned a century ago, fluttering downward, drawn by gravity) Some things cannot be explained fully. Words fail. The story of Ella is like that. So what follows is just a sketch, an attempt... I call her Ella because that is how I first came to know her. The letters "E L L A" were inscribed in cursive script in a childlike scrawl on the black enamel of a piano in a convent residence in Moscow that I visited while tiny flakes of snow swirled downward on a December day in 2001, 17 yeas ago. It had been Elizabeth's piano, and as a child in Germany she had carved her own nickname in the enamel: "Ella." I ran the tips of my fingers along the ridges of the carved letters, and felt the tragedy of that child's life and hopes, which ended in a mineshaft near the Ural Mountains, on the edge of western Siberia. In that moment, my heart went out to her, though at that moment I knew little about her, or her life. Such is the force of the most slender of physical connections with a another human being, even a century-old scratch on the enamel of a piano. The piano was in the residence of the head of the Order of Martha and Mary, an order of Orthodox nuns founded by Grand Duchess Elizabeth Fedorovna in 1905 the year her husband, Grand Duke Serge, was killed by an assassin's bomb in his carriage outside their home on the Bolshaya Ordinka, a street not far from the Kremlin. The piano had been brought to Russia from Germany, and is still preserved in Moscow today. Elizabeth heard the bomb blast, rushed out of her house, found the ruined body of her husband, gathered parts of the body that had been scattered by the force of the blast, brought the pieces into her chapel, closed the door, asked not to be disturbed, grieved all night, and emerged the next morning to begin the life of a widow in mourning. Five years later, she left the life of high society completely, and became a nun. Until 1918 she cared for the children and sick and miserable, becoming known as the "Great Mother" of Russia, though she had no children of her own. And other women followed her, joining her order, which was the first in Russian Orthodoxy to combine charitable action with meditative contemplation. After the Bolshevik takeover of Russia in October 1917, soldiers came to her convent door in early July, 1918, and told her she had 20 minutes to pack for a journey to Siberia, and that she could bring one nun with her. Sister Barbara did not need to volunteer to go with her, but went of her own free will, telling her superior that she would never leave her side. And she never did... On July 18, 1918, the two nuns and several noblemen connected with the Romanov family who might have been possible candidates for a restoration of the monarchy, were brought to Alapayesk. There they began to be struck on the chest and head with a hammer. But one nobleman rushed to interpose himself before the blow struck the head of Elizabeth, and she was struck only on the chest. So she was certainly alive, and still conscious, when she was thrown down the mineshaft. The assassins dropped a grenade or two down the hole, and then went away. Peasants of the area later recounted that for three days they heard the low sound of psalms and spiritual hymns being sung from deep in the earth, and then there was silence. Men descended the mineshaft to recover the bodies. They found that Elizabeth had torn off strips of cloth from the hem of her white nun's gown and bandaged the wounds of every one of the other victims. To the very end, her life was a proclamation of love and charity for others, having suffered great loss herself. Her body was taken from the mineshaft, along with the other bodies, and put on a train which traveled all the way across Russia to Harbin, China. S he was then put on a boat and brought by sea to Palestine, and then to Jerusalem, where she was buried in the Garden of Gethsemane. She remained there until 2004 when her body returned to Russia, where it is today, again on the Bolshaya Ordinka. She struggled mightily before she converted, against her father's wishes, from Lutheranism to Orthodoxy, making the decision after much prayer and study. Her diary and correspondence reveals a woman who lived her life in search of God's will, and tried to follow it, acting with great tenderness toward many. In these writings, she speaks of long periods of intense prayer to know God's will for her life. Elizabeth, with her Catholic ancestors, her Anglican grandmother, her Lutheran father and her embrace of the Orthodox faith, a type of sign for our possible unity. She is the confluence in a single person of the broken strands of Christendom. And so, on the 100th anniversary of the moment when she was thrown down the mineshaft, I traveled to Alapayevsk, and cast a rose onto the green embankment down which she was thrown in the 53rd year of her inspiring life. (Here below, two Russian Orthodox priest, Father Seraphim and Father Moses, both of whom live in a monastery at Alapayevsk, chanted in memory of Elizabeth today by the site of the mineshaft where she was thrown) ====================== The following biography of Elizabeth was written just 5 years after her death, in 1923. What is most moving is the account of her meeting in prison with the killer of her husband, whom she forgave, toward the end of this piece. Sursa: www.InsideTheVatican.com Contor Accesări: 965, Ultimul acces: 2025-11-11 14:22:39
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