COMMUNING WITH THE RUTHENIANS
I hear the tale of the divine life and the bloody death of the
beautiful God, the Christ.--WALT WHITMAN.
This is my first visit to Mundare, on the Canadian Northern Railway,
and to the Ruthenian Church--the church with glittering domes, the
foundation stone of which was laid by the great Laurier himself. "Who
is this Sir Laurier?" I ask. "Ach! I cannot tell you. He a great man
is," says Michael Veranki, "his hair is like to the wild cotton in
August, and his face is beautiful, even like the face of the great
Archbishop Syptikyi, who is a soldier and a prince, and the like of
whom there never was. Believe me, Messus, he has seven feet high and
has seven tongues wherein to speak."
"About this Laurier? Ya! Ya! almost I forget. He the stone of the
church placed in the corner, and we drew him in a wagon with six
bullocks. He the King's man is, and a smile in his eyes there comes,
quick, quick, like the wind comes on the wheat. Ya! Ya! we much like
this King's man."
Nearly all the people are gone into the church and I follow. There are
no seats, so all of us stand, the sexes separated like the sheep from
the goats.
One's eyes become riveted on the large globe of cut crystals that hangs
from the ceiling near the centre of the church, and the hard white
lights from it strike sharply on my eyeballs like dagger points. All
the people are making reverences and placing something on their
foreheads like oil, but it may be holy water. Know all men by these
presents that I, even I, am the poor ignorant wife of a Protestant
person, and understand not the meaning of these obeisances, nor of this
beautiful fete to which all the Austrian folk of the countryside have
come with not so much as one mouthful of bread to break their fast.
Neither shall one drop of liquid moisten their parched lips for these
three hours unless--Holy Mother and all the Blessed Saints, pray for
our presumption--unless indeed, it might fall to the lot of a woman to
take into her lips the sacred blood from the golden spoon which the
priest dips into the chalice, the holy chalice that is surmounted with
something dazzling like a star, so that no woman may even look thereon.
Feeling all the while like wild oats amid the wheat, I take my stand by
a pillar close to the door and pretend not to stare. Ere long, a young
girl touches me and tells me she is inquested to bring me to the
sisters. I follow her through the church and into the vestry where a
little nun presses my hands and calls me by name. Once, she was my
escort through the Monastery at St. Albert, over by the Sturgeon River.
Of course I remember her. She is the china shepherdess in black who
says "Please" instead of "What?" and who comes from Mon'real. Also she
lisps, but what odds? Plutarch tells us that Alcibiades lisped and
that it gave a grace and persuasiveness to his discourse.
She presents me to the other sisters, none of whom speak English, and
invites me out to the monastery to visit. All of the sisters look
middling healthy, not having the parchment-like pallor of the city nuns.
The service, she explains, is the Finding of the Holy Cross. I must
not think it idolatry when they do veneration, indeed, I must not.
"Eet is what you call--Ah, Madame! I cannot find the word--eet is what
you call--" "A Symbol," I ask. "Oui, Oui, a symbol!"
With many gesticulations and no small difficulty she tells me how the
Empress Helena, mother of the great Constantine, once had a heavenly
dream which enabled her to discover the very piece of ground wherein
the holy cross was hidden away. It lay under two temples where
heathens prayed to Jupiter and Venus instead of to Jehovah. She caused
these temples to be torn down so as not one stone was left, and
underneath were found three crosses. Being doubtful as to which was
the cross of the Lord Christ, the Empress had all three applied to the
body of a dying woman. The first two crosses had no effect (it was the
good Bishop Macarius, you must know, who helped her), but, at the touch
of the third, the dying woman rose up perfectly whole.
This is a story worth lingering on, and the little nun would tell me
more about it, only the celebrant priest has come into the vestry and
talks with us before he goes to the basement to change his vestments.
They are impressive garments which he wears, but one might imagine
their proving correspondingly oppressive. Kryzanowski is the wretched
name of him. He is a large, fair man, this priest, in the full force
of life, with an unmistakable air of distinction. On a snap judgment,
I should place to his credit the ability to deal with a supreme
situation. He is a priest of the Uniat Church, which church, so far as
I may understand, is a compromise between the Greek Orthodox and the
Roman Catholic, the compromise consisting of a prayer for the Pope
instead of for the Czar.
In our White Alberta much antipathy exists between the Orthodox Greek
Church and the Uniats, and several years ago they had a lawsuit which
they took to the Privy Council in England, and which drove to insanity
one of our cleverest barristers. They are bonny fighters, these
Ruthenians from Galicia, and if they cannot "have the law" on one
another, they may always have the consolation of fisticuffs. And what,
pray, are muscles hard for and skulls thick, except to fight? Riddle
me that!
Presently, when we shall have tied down and diverted their tremendous
fighting energy into what is usually described as civilization, we
shall, of a surety, find a human voltage here which will send these
Slavic peasants high up the scale where well-conceived and successful
endeavour is weighed and appraised. At present, ah, well! they are
young and positive and he is the best man who survives.
The little sister brings me back into the church, where she places a
chair for me close beside the altar facing the congregation, an act and
fact which cause me not a little amazement and considerable
trepidation. Will the priest permit an unhallowed woman of lean and
meagre accomplishments--and she a Protestant--to sit so close to the
holy of holies? Will he?
He does not even appear to see me and swings the censor close, close to
my head, over and over again, with the same free-handed gesture of
Millet's sower. He swings it out and about, hither and yon, till all
my garments smell of myrrh and aloes and cassia; until, like Solomon's
spouse, my hands dropped myrrh.
Sometimes it is a rude Slavic peasant who swings the censer or lays the
spice on the live coals--a rough-necked man with red-brown hands and
face. He wears a caftan, or long cloak of skin, upon which red leather
is cunningly appliqued in pleasing designs. I doubt not he is from
Bukowina, or "the beech-woods," for the women of that province are
skilled craftswomen. He swings the censer with such deftness, that
were I not benumbed by the languourous odour of the smoke-thick air, I
would be wondering how this queer shock-headed acolyte with his bovine
stolidity came to acquire the revolver wrist in such a high state of
development. Surely it is well I am stupefied, for it might be
irreverent so to wonder.
But for that matter, all this service belongs to the people and not to
any stilted crucifers or superior choristers smacking of professional
piety. As occasion may demand, an older woman comes forward and snuffs
a candle with her fingers and replaces it with a fresh one. The women
even carry the candles through the church when the ritual so requires
it. They do not appear to have any self-consciousness, but perform
their part gladly and naturally. This may arise from the fact that
they have been accustomed in Austria to taking part in religious dramas
such as The Nativity, which drama they once staged at Edmonton. I did
not see it, but Sister Josephat at the Ruthenian Monastery gave me a
picture of the _dramatis personae_ taken during a rehearsal.
"See! See! Madame Lady. See! See!" said Sister Josephat. "Et ees
ver' fonny. _De tree wise men are womens_, womens I tell you. Yes!
the black one too! She is Alma Knapf."
This drama was vastly appreciated, especially by the younger fry of the
community, who enjoyed seeing the devil carry a Jew off the scene with
a pitchfork and cast him into hell with certitude and great vigour.
The older folk considered this treatment unduly drastic and an
unwarranted loss of useful material. Here in the North, we do not
believe in killing Jews--no, nor even bank-managers--where we are not
infrequently pared to the quick to provide money for real-estate
payments or to margin up against the bad news the ticker-tape has
spelled out. Yes! it would be highly unreasonable to allow the
Ruthenian folk to kill off the Jews and bankers and it would make us
uncommonly sorry.
... I like to watch these farmer-women carry the tall, white candles
under the dome. It seems like a vision picture or some sense memory
that has filtered down to me through the ages, but what the memory is I
cannot say. Indeed, once I read of a strange country where men used to
run races with lighted candles, and the victor was he whose flame was
found burning at the goal.
I think the memory which troubles me must be of Jacob's rods which he
made into "white strakes." He performed his rite under the _libneh_,
or white poplar-tree, even as we perform them under the white poplars
of Alberta.
And while the women march, they chant a weird harmony, the men's voices
coming in at intervals like pedal points. There is no organ, or any
tyrannous baton, but only, "They sang one to another," as the Jews did
at the building of their temple.
I am strangely, inexpressibly moved by this tone-sweetness. Sometimes
it is massive, triumphal, and inspiring as though the singers carried
naked swords in their upraised hands; or again, it seems to be the
sullen angry diapason of distant thunder in the hills.
But mostly they sing a paean or lamentation of the cross, heavy with
unspeakable weariness and the ache of unshed tears. Surely this is the
strangest story ever told. It is as though they sing to a dead god in
a dead world.
And, sometimes, sight and sound become blended into one, and the sound
is the sobbing urge of the pines ... the people as they rise and fall
to the floor are the trees swayed by the wind. The cross they are
lifting is wondrous heavy, so that it takes four strong fellows. It is
built of oak beams and the figure of the Nazarene is of bronze. As the
lights fall from the windows on the outstretched body, with its pierced
hands and thorn-stung brow, it seems as though the tragedy of Golgotha
is being re-enacted before my very eyes, here on this far-away edge of
the world. The thing is ghastly in its awful realism, so that I am
crushed and confounded. It falls like flakes of fire on my brain, till
my mind's ear catches again and again that most horrifying cry of the
ages, "My God! My God! why hast Thou forsaken me?"
But I cannot tell you more of this story of the Lord Christ who was
crucified, except that in some way it has become a personal thing to
these worshippers, and, maybe, a joyful one. It must be joyful, for,
at last, they hang a garland of flowers over the upright beams of the
cross and from it draw long, long ribbons of scarlet and white and
blue; which the women carry to the ends of the church like floating
streams of light, and between which the men and children stand to sing
_Alleluia_ and _Alleluia_.
I know not why the priest stoops to the ground and touches it with
fingers or his lips. Sometime the little sister from Mon'real will
tell me.
Henry Ryecroft, in his _Secret Papers_, recounts how he used to do this
same thing. "Amid things eternal," he says, "I touch the familiar and
kindly earth." It was in the silent solitude of the night when he
walked through the heart of the land he loved.
I have always desired to see the mysterious sacrifice known as the
elevation of the host, but, now that I am an arm's stretch from the
altar, I do not look but cover my face with my hands. Only I see that
a dull red flames behind the man's ear when he takes the white wafer,
and the veins of his neck swell as if they hurt.
But I look into the faces of the women and the men in the front line
who receive the sacred essence from the golden cup and golden spoon,
and almost I can hear what their eyes are saying. What odds about low
foreheads, thick lips, and necks brown like the brown earth when each
has the god within? The Ruthenians--or Galicians, if you like the name
better--may be a sullen folk of unstable and misanthropical temper;
they may be uncouth of manner, and uncleanly of morals, but I shall
always think of them, as on this day, when I saw the strange glamour on
their faces that cannot be described except that it came from a
marvellous song hidden in their hearts.
There are no seats in the church, and while the sermon is being
preached the people stand--all except the mothers with babies, who sit
on the floor. These babies have pressed their mouths to the sacred
ikon the same as the older folk, and, doubtless, some gracious kindly
angel will guard them ever hereafter. Indeed, I hope so, and that she
will give unto them those things I most crave for myself.
Father Kryzanowski delivers the sermon in the Ruthenian language. I am
glad, for I am tired of hearing I should be a different person. I
don't want to be, except to have hands of healing and a heart that is
always young. Yes! these are the things I most crave for myself.
.... Good gentlefolk! will you be pleased to stay and eat brown bread
with us at the wagons, and cheese and hard-cooked eggs? We shall not
give you meat, for we would discourage the beef-trust, and, besides,
this is fast day.... But you shall eat your food off flaxen towels
which we spun and wove with our own hands. Yes! and we have wrought
northern flowers and prairie roses into them.
And further, believe us, Sirs and Mesdames, we sent five towels like
unto these to Mary, the English Queen, that she might know that we are
now Canadians and no Ruthenians.
And Michael Laskowicz shall take your picture, Lady, with his picture
box, and you may have Hanka's necklace like as if you belonged to us,
and Anna's head'kerchief which is always in this year's style.... and
we shall clap our hands and laugh and say, "There! There! she belongs
to us, this Mees Janey Canuck, now and without end." ... They are
engaging, these beechwood folk from Austria, and their loving kindness
is like honey to my mouth.
If it were more genteel, I would like to speak them fair, and to write
books about them, but I have set my face against authorship. I will
not go into the writing business, for I do greatly prefer wealth and
honour, and to have my picture taken on a verandah with my arm around a
pillar as an exampler of a three years of successful life in Alberta
the Sunny.