The first week in Lent

I had a dream in which I was talking to my father. When we try and remember dead people they are indistinct. But when we dream about them it is as if they are really present – they are as if alive.

Why is this? Is it because by some trick of the brain, we can delve deep inside, where perfect memory resides? Is it because there is, in fact, no place of perfect recall, but the brain tricks us or is it because the dead person is actively still alive to us? In this fragile conundrum of silence, hypnosis, and faith lies the essence of the religious question. We can only pray.

On Tuesday, the Gospel reading asks us to pray and gives us the Lord’s Prayer. On Wednesday at early Mass I listened to the story of Jonah and his efforts to avoid his fate as we all do. On Thursday, as night was falling, I was in Red Square in Moscow at the end of a tiring day of travel on an electoral monitoring mission. At one end of the square fairground music was booming out for dancers on an ice rink. At the other end, softer chants were coming out of St Basil’s Cathedral.

I went in and immediately was overwhelmed by the total immersion of Orthodoxy in sight, smell, and sound. The interior was dark, lit by candles, packed; chanting alternating with readings. Rationality is not needed here. Russians in their art seem much more conscious of their history intertwining it with religious themes. A typical example is Repin’s The Raising of Jairus’ Daughter – there is some stamp of a nineteenth-century concept of Holy Russia.

On Sunday I called into a brand new Orthodox church on a bleak housing estate. It was packed, and the singing as spirited as any cathedral, indeed there is a vibrancy lacking in museum-like cathedrals like the Cathedral on the Spilled Blood. This profound faith is difficult to understand.