Georgy Kalatozishvili, Tbilisi. Exclusively to Vestnik Kavkaza
For several days there has been barely room to move in the ancient capital of Georgia, Mtskheta. It has never seen such an inflow of the religious people.
Hundreds of thousands of them went to the grave of Monk Gabriel to express respect and ask for help. The other day Paraskeva, a nun of a local convent, told journalists that she had a vision that Father Gabriel promised to fulfill two requests of any baptized person who would come to his grave, light a candle and pray.
The result of a short report in the mass media was startling. People drove their own cars, rode buses, and walked all over the country. Some women walked without shoes to their feet for tens of kilometers, hoping that it will make the saint to fulfill their requests first of all. However, to reach the grave, they had to stand in a queue of the faithful.
I can’t bring myself to judge a religious person who uses the last hope for curing a sick child, for instance. However, there were pilgrims who asked for a new car or a house.
Patriarch of the Georgian Orthodox Church kept silence for a few days, but later several priests criticized heavily Paraskeva’s behavior, as she “put it across people.” The last straw was a statement by a local bishop that “due to” Paraskeva’s visions, the monastery where the saint’s grave is situation made $2.5 million in selling candles only in few days. Paraskeva rejects any hints on corruption, threatening accusers with awful punishments. However, it appears the case will be considered by the Holy Synod of GOC in details.
If anything positive is present in “Paraskeva’s vision”, it is recalling a spiritual deed of St. Father Gabriel, a unique person who was a symbol of non-violent resistance to the Communist regime. Archimandrite Gabriel was born in Tbilisi in a family of a dedicated communist. In the 1950s he has built a small church in a yard of his family cottage. The church had been several times destroyed by Komsomol activists, but the saint-to-be always reconstructed it. When he burnt Lenin’s portrait during a 1st May demonstration, he was arrested. It is interesting that KGB officers actually saved his life, as the crowd was ready to kill him for raising a hand on Communist leaders. Father Gabriel wasn’t executed or imprisoned, he was found an insane person. Only after the collapse of the Communist regime, many-sidedness of his spiritual life was revealed. Monk Gabriel was a face of GOC, a symbol of grace and deep religious feelings of the Georgian monkhood. When Gabriel died in 1995, the Holy Synod canonized him.
