Ekaterina Netchitailova

Echoes of a Multilingual Mind

On Faith

I was baptized in one of the most beautiful places on earth: Sergiev Posad in Russia.

Sergiev Posad is a religious center in Moscow’s region. It belongs to ‘gold ring’ of Russia, a road to travel if you want to see the most amazing old towns in the northeastern Russia.

Sergiev Posad encompasses Lavra, which is a complex of monasteries, built in the 14th century. They offer breathtaking views, with blue and gold domes, and the beauty of it is unmatched. It was there that Andrey Roublev painted his famous icon ‘Troiza’.

I was twelve years old when I went there to receive baptism, dragging with me my two cousins. Christianity was re-emerging in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, I was one of the ‘early’ birds to embrace it. I always believed in something (God), but couldn’t attach to it a definite sense of belonging until I joined my Church.

We went there by train, and the experience was surreal. While I went there consciously, it was also out of curiosity, as all these churches that were more or less closed, became new guidance in a world that was pretty much miserable in Russia then. Oligarchs were about to take all the money from innocent, struggling people, while there was almost no food. We survived on American aid, delivered to schools. Some sausage and dry milk. These packages saved many people then, from hunger. Thank you, America.

It was about an hour of train drive from Sergiev Posad, called Zagorsk till 1991, and all three of us, my cousins and me, were lost in a dream world on our journey back.

I had an amazing scarf on me, that my mum had brought to me from Italy, and because there was literally nothing in the shops then, also for clothes, it was a much loved possession on my part. I really loved that scarf.

I left it behind in the train, and noticed its disappearance only when we reached home.

It was a bad sign for me, the hint that life would become unbearably difficult, where I had to leave Russia due to massive family trauma, and try to make it in a foreign world, where I eventually got a psychosis, and have been struggling with my mental health (and faith) since then.

I am a great believer, and for me, faith holds the key to our survival, despite what has been happening to our humanity in the past four years: Covid pandemic, wars, struggling people, dispersed on earth.

Do you struggle too?

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Ekaterina Netchitailova's avatar

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Ekaterina Netchitailova

I am a Doctor of philosophy, a university lecturer, writer, and a lover of cats, fine wine, books, theatre, and human eccentricity. Despite my last name ‘Netchitailova’ which means ‘unreadable’ in Russian, my greatest passions in life are reading and writing.

7 responses to “On Faith”

  1. lecox Avatar
    lecox

    The “Hershey’s kiss” rooftops of those old buildings are amazing visions!

    For some reason I never felt a great need for faith. I simply wanted to understand things. But when I was a young man I noticed how many people on the planet followed some faith. So I became interested in that fact.

    Faith gives one a level of confidence (Hubbard sometimes called it being “convinced”) about aspects of life that seem inexplicable or out of one’s control. For some reason, I didn’t feel the need for this. But, I did want to understand.

    Some people call my religion a “faith.” In some ways it is. But we call it a “technology.” It consists mostly of instructions on how to handle various different situations. I find it very helpful, even when I have difficulty applying the instructions correctly. It is comforting just to know that they exist.

    These days I usually start with The Way to Happiness. It is an instruction book.

    Reply
    1. Ekaterina Avatar
      Ekaterina

      For me, faith comes from both the exterior (I saw the signs of God) and interior, where the belief in God is overwhelming!

      Reply
  2. Dirtsmith Avatar
    Dirtsmith

    What an incredibly beautiful city!

    When I was very young (until I was 6 years old) my family was non-religious. I had a friend who was catholic, and I was envious of him and his mysterious activities. I knew the terms “catholic” and “Christian,” but didn’t know what they meant, or the difference between the two. I just knew that my friend had an identification with a group, and I was rather envious of that.

    My parents became Christian when I was six or seven. My immoderate father was instantly highly engaged in the little church we attended. Shortly afterwards we started attending a larger, growing church where my dad could apply his excess energy to help develop the organization.

    I became a Christian along with the rest of the family, and began to interpret the world around me through that lens. Church itself quickly lost its appeal though, because it basically ate half of my weekend. My dad is the most absurd workaholic, and the only family time we really had all together had been Sundays when Dad couldn’t work much on the business, so we would could do fun activities all together. Church killed that, because we would be stuck there from early in the morning through at least two services, into the afternoon.

    Even though I resented church, I was a committed Christian. I never really had the “spiritual experience,” so Christianity was mostly a sociological phenomenon for me. I have always been one of those people who needed a framework to refer to in order to know how to live and behave, and Christianity became that for me. I would say “for better or for worse,” but I’m not sure there was much “better” in my case. I still believe that for people like myself Christianity can be a really destructive influence.

    By the time I was twenty-one I was abandoning my faith. The Christianity I had grown up with was quite literal and concrete, so I found a lot of inconsistency between the image of reality that it insisted upon and my own experiences. At the very same time my dad was changing careers and became a pastor.

    In my own immoderate response my pendulum swung to the completely opposite end of the spectrum. I resented it because I disliked the person I was as a Christian, the social positions that strict, literal Christianity had imposed on me. I became quite aggressively anti-Christian for a long time, becoming convinced that Christianity was destroying the world.

    It took about a decade and a half before I was able to come to any peace with it. I don’t hate it anymore. I don’t even oppose it. For the most part I think that the horrifying things that are done in the name of religion, really aren’t; in those instances I think religion is often just a hat that people place atop their actions for justification.

    And of course I realize that there are wonderful people who are Christians (my entire close family for that matter, including my younger brother who never parted with it). And now of course I am convinced that it couldn’t be any other way, so it is only when I see Christians advocating for and praising “monsters” and terrorism that I still lose my cool.

    All that said, I still envy those who have spiritual experiences! I am a ridiculously mental person, so even in my most delusional hypomanic state when I wondered if I was the Anti-Christ it was a mental experience, not an emotional or spiritual one.

    Reply
    1. Ekaterina Avatar
      Ekaterina

      Thank you for sharing such a moving story!
      I struggled with my faith. But indeed I experienced deeply spiritual things during my psychoses’ and it would be self denial for me to disregard it.
      So, after struggling and deliberating I returned to my roots, and go to Russian Orthodox Church. It uplifts me!
      I wish you wonderful 2024!

      Reply
      1. Dirtsmith Avatar
        Dirtsmith

        When I was in Spain in September I had a chance to visit a Russian Orthodox. I had never been inside one. It was very beautiful!

  3. Marten de Wind Avatar
    Marten de Wind

    For me the big question is: how much control do I have over my life or the world or whatever. My conclusion this far is: very little. So that is when faith comes in. In my darkest hour I found that something is carrying me. So if I cannot go on, something else will carry me on. I call that love. But that’s completely beyond my control.

    Reply
    1. Ekaterina Avatar
      Ekaterina

      True,
      Faith is beyond any control. It just reaches you!

      Reply

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About Me

I am a doctor of philosophy, a university lecturer, and a lover of cats, fine wine, dancing, theatre, and human eccentricity. I was born in the Soviet Union (Moscow). I am fluent in four languages, and have spent all my adult life studying (except from 18 to 19) working and living throughout Western Europe. Despite a surname-Netchitailova- that translates from Russian into English as “unreadable”, my greatest passions in life are reading and writing. My personal struggles have made me appreciate the manifestations of weirdness that exist everywhere.

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