Prayer and Counsel in Moscow

In the Moscow years (c. 1925–1952) the Life portrays St. Matrona at the center of a daily household of prayer and counsel: a steady reception of those who came in need, the Church’s own prayers read aloud over them, blessed water given to take away, long nights of prayer, and spiritual daughters who tended her and managed the flow. The governing note, in the Life’s telling, is her insistence that God — not she — was the one who helped. This file gathers the texture of that prayer and counsel as it ran at the scale of the capital, pins it to the late Life, and shows how it continued the pattern already set in the village of Sebino.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1999/2004)

The Daily Reception

The Moscow years are, in the Life’s portrait, above all a ministry of reception. From her arrival in the city Matrona is said to have lived in the midst of people who came to her — the Life reports a flow of as many as roughly forty a day — and to have spent her days answering them: the sick seeking healing, families seeking the return of an arrested son or the safety of one at the front, men and women seeking a decision they could not make alone, the frightened seeking simply to be told what to do (Zhdanova, Skazanie o zhitii blazhennoy startsy Matrony, 1993, azbyka.ru; the canonical Life, Pokrovsky Convent, “The Moscow period,” pokrov-monastir.ru; OrthoChristian, “The Life of Blessed Matrona of Moscow,” orthochristian.com/79033.html). It is reported here, per METHODOLOGY §3.5, as what the named sources attest; the collection does not certify the daily number, only that the Life presents her Moscow life as one of constant, crowded reception rather than withdrawal.

What gives the reception its particular character is the setting in which it happened: not a monastery parlor or a parish, but the cramped rooms of an unregistered life. Matrona, blind from birth and by now wholly immobile, received her visitors from where she lay or sat, in the borrowed and shifting lodgings through which she moved (see Homeless in the Capital and Paralysis and Wandering). The danger that surrounded all of this — the receiving of religious crowds while unregistered, in the years of the terror and the war — belongs to the companion file Ministry Through the Terror and War; the present file concerns what the reception consisted of: the prayer, and the counsel.

“Only God Helps”

The Life is emphatic that Matrona refused the role of wonder-worker, and the refusal is the hinge on which everything else in her counsel turns. She is reported to have rebuffed any suggestion that she healed or answered by her own power, returning again and again to the formula remembered as her watchword — “Only God helps!” — and insisting that she did nothing but pray, that it was God who healed and God who answered (Zhdanova, Skazanie, azbyka.ru; Pokrovsky Convent, pokrov-monastir.ru; OrthoChristian, orthochristian.com/79033.html). This is the same governing principle the companion section on the manner of her counsel sets out in full (see The Manner of Her Counsel); in the Moscow years it is the frame within which the whole daily reception is to be read. Whatever a visitor brought, the Life’s Matrona did not present herself as its remedy but turned the need toward God and the Church — and the collection reports this, as throughout, as the Life’s affirmed portrait of her manner, not as a certification that any particular healing or answer came about.

The Prayers Read Aloud, and the Blessed Water

The Life is specific about the form Matrona’s prayer over people took, and the specifics matter, because they are unambiguously the Church’s own prayers rather than incantations. She is said to have read prayers aloud over those who came to her — naming, in the tradition, the “Our Father”; Psalm 90 (in the Slavonic numbering, “He that dwelleth in the help of the Most High,” the psalm read over the sick and the endangered throughout Orthodox practice); and the resurrectional prayer “Let God arise” (Da voskresnet Bog, the verses against the demonic that open the prayer to the Cross) — and to have given people water she had prayed over (blessed water) to take away and use (Zhdanova, Skazanie, azbyka.ru; Pokrovsky Convent, pokrov-monastir.ru; OrthoChristian, orthochristian.com/79033.html). Each of these is a standing element of ordinary Orthodox piety: the Lord’s Prayer, the two best-known protective texts of the Slavonic Psalter and prayer book, and the use of holy water. The Life thus presents her prayer in Moscow not as private spell-work but as the recitation of the Church’s texts over the suffering — the practice of any praying layperson, done with unusual constancy.

That constancy is itself a thread the Life dwells on. Beyond the prayers read over visitors, Matrona is portrayed as a woman of continual prayer, given to long nights of prayer, praying through the hours when the household slept (Zhdanova, Skazanie, azbyka.ru; OrthoChristian, orthochristian.com/79033.html). The reception by day and the vigil by night are, in the Life’s telling, a single life: the prayer she read aloud over the forty who came was drawn from the same well as the prayer she kept alone in the dark. It is on this prayer that the Life rests its account of her as a person of God rather than a folk healer — the blind immobile woman whose chief and constant activity was prayer.

The Spiritual Daughters

Matrona did not live or minister alone. The Life portrays her surrounded by spiritual daughters — the kelейницы or cell-attendants — who cared for her helpless body, carried her between lodgings, regulated the flow of those who came, and shared her hidden life (Zhdanova, Skazanie, azbyka.ru; OrthoChristian, orthochristian.com/79033.html). Theirs was the labor that made the daily reception possible at all: an immobile woman could keep a crowded household of prayer only through the hands of those who tended her. The spiritual daughters are also, in the structure of the sources, the channel through which the Moscow accounts came down — it is largely their memory, gathered above all through Zinaida Zhdanova, that the late Life preserves (see The Zhdanova Life and Its Corrections). The texture of the Moscow prayer and counsel reaches us, in other words, through the very circle that lived inside it.

The Kind of Help Sought and Given

The needs brought to Matrona in Moscow were the ordinary catastrophes of Soviet life, raised to constancy by the scale of the city and the harshness of the years. The Life shows people coming for healing in illness, for help in family trouble, for guidance in decisions that could not be made, for relief in the fear and grief that the period generated without end (Zhdanova, Skazanie, azbyka.ru; Pokrovsky Convent, pokrov-monastir.ru; OrthoChristian, orthochristian.com/79033.html). To these the Life’s Matrona answered, characteristically, with short, practical, concrete counsel — a plain instruction, a direction, an admonition to patience — and, above all, by urging people toward faith and the Church: to wear the cross many had abandoned under Soviet pressure, to go to church where one could still be found, to confess and receive Communion, to pray (Zhdanova, Skazanie, azbyka.ru; OrthoChristian, orthochristian.com/79033.html; and see The Manner of Her Counsel for the full account of these requirements). In the Moscow of the militant-atheist state this counsel was costly: to send a frightened stranger to the sacraments was to press a dangerous fidelity. The Life’s portrait, taken whole, is of a lay confessor more than a healer — a woman who met every need by turning it back toward God and the Church, never presenting herself as the source of the help.

Continuing the Sebino Pattern

None of this began in Moscow. The Life is clear that the Moscow ministry continued, at the scale of the capital, the pattern Matrona had already kept in the village of Sebino — the steady stream of visitors, the prayer over those who came, the deflection of all power onto God, the requirements of cross and church and sacrament. The village healer and counselor and the Moscow eldress are, in the sources, one continuous figure; what changed with the move was the setting and the scale, not the manner. The same prayers, the same blessed water, the same short practical word, the same “only God helps,” now carried into the cramped and hunted rooms of a city under terror and war. To read the Moscow prayer and counsel rightly is to see it as the Sebino pattern grown to its full extent — and to keep it, as the Life keeps it, in the churchly register the canonization commission affirmed, rather than the folk-magical one it corrected away (see The Manner of Her Counsel on that distinction).

References

Zhdanova, Zinaida V. Skazanie o zhitii blazhennoy startsy Matrony [The Tale of the Life of the Blessed Eldress Matrona]. Moscow, 1993; many later printings. Text at azbyka.ru/fiction/skazanie-o-zhitii-blazhennoj-staricy-matrony. (The principal late source for the Moscow prayer and counsel: the daily reception, “only God helps,” the prayers read aloud and the blessed water, the long nights of prayer, and the spiritual daughters.)
Pokrovsky Stavropegic Convent. “The Moscow period,” in “The life of the Blessed Matrona.” pokrov-monastir.ru. (The canonical, corrected Life as disseminated by the convent that holds the relics; the Moscow reception and the churchly counsel.)
“The Life of Blessed Matrona of Moscow.” OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/79033.html). (The canonical Life in English; the prayers read aloud, the spiritual daughters, and the kind of help sought and given.)
On the Soviet persecution of the Church see the Orthodoxy guide, Russian Orthodox Tradition. (The documented backdrop of militant atheism against which pressing cross, church, and sacrament on Moscow visitors was a costly fidelity.)