Smolensk Cemetery, Saint Petersburg
Just as a miraculous icon chooses its own path — one we may sometimes trace through history into the present moment, without knowing where it will end in the future — so it happens that saints find their way to us.
Even when we think there is no path left.
These encounters are deeply personal, not predetermined by inherited reverence for local or ancestral saints. Which, of course, can also be a beautiful spiritual experience if embraced as such — but here, it is a relationship between two. Whoever has lived through something similar will understand it without words. Whoever has not may find it amusing.
Alas, man is a foolish creature whose destiny and fate are often such that he laughs at what he does not understand, or does not approve of, or does not love.
Saint Xenia of St. Petersburg is a saint who, one might say “by chance,” entered the lives of many. The exact date of her birth and death are unknown; it is only known that by 1806 she was no longer alive. About a century later, a chapel was erected on her grave at Smolensk Cemetery.
In front of the chapel, there is always someone waiting. Old, young, locals, foreigners, conservatives, liberals, rich, poor — there are no rules, but there is order. If anyone speaks, it is only to quietly share the miracle that happened to them. Without excitement, without exaltation.
Miracles here, you see, are normal.
Gratitude, too.
The silence of Smolensk Cemetery is magnificent. Perfectly harmonious, with no emptiness in it. You know you are not alone. That you will never again be alone in your life. That you will leave changed.
Not better, not worse — but changed.
If you ever go there, I wish you to experience a spiritual shipwreck. And I wish you the same even if you never go. For as Berdyaev said: “Life experience and spiritual struggles shape the human face.”
And also the other: passerby, friend, enemy, parent, child, husband, wife, sister, brother…
In the end — is there any holiness without the other?
In this chapel is buried the servant of God, Blessed Xenia Grigoryevna, wife of chanter Andrei Fyodorovich… She bequeathed her estate to the Pokrovsky church and the poor. She wandered the streets of Saint Petersburg, dressed in a skirt and the military uniform of her late husband.
“Whoever knew me, may remember my soul for the salvation of their own.”