The
faith.
When he arrived in Simferopol in 1946, Saint Luke had
thought that his knowledge and experience in surgery would be in demand.
However, a month-and-a-half passed before he received official permission to
practice medicine. From 1946 on, he worked as a consultant at the Simferopol
Hospital. He also assisted the Hospital for Invalids of the Great Patriotic
War. Until the end of 1947, he gave reports and lectures to doctors and
operated on patients and the wounded. Zhdanov (the official in charge of
Russian Orthodox Church Affairs) characterized his medical activity as very
active.
Archbishop Luke regularly attended meetings of the
surgeons' association, in which civil doctors and surgeons participated. He
would listen carefully to their reports and speeches and always introduced
necessary corrections. According to Dr. G. F. Pyatidvernaya, during a meeting, one surgeon asked the archbishop: "How can you, such a specialist, a
surgeon, believe in somebody whom you have never seen, in God?"
The professor answered: "Do you believe in
love?" "I do." "Do you believe in reason?" "Yes,
I do." "Have you seen love or reason?" "No." "Neither
have I seen God, but strongly believe in His existence”.
The results of
his latest medical research were published. But the appearance of the professor
who gave his lectures wearing a cassock and Panagia irritated the physicians
to such an extent that a report he was giving in Alushta was obstructed. He was
also prohibited from supervising the work of the outpatient surgical clinics
and from lecturing on his specialty, the surgery of Pyogenic* infections. He
was advised to give reports and lectures on medical themes in civil clothing,
rather than bishop's attire. Archbishop Luke positively refused. After that,
he was not invited to give any more lectures. Professor P. P. Tsarenko, who
had attended the Archbishop’s lectures at Tashkent University and had tried to
outset "the pop" [a pejorative term for clergy] from the auditorium,
redeemed his failure by initiating new persecutions of the Archbishop, this
time in Simferopol Due to Tsarenko's insistence, the authorities of the Crimean
Medical Institute forbade the celebrated professor to give lectures.
The following is a letter in which Saint Luke answered
questions of students of the Medical Institute elaborated by Professor P. P.
Tsarenko:
Dear Pyotr Petrovitch!.
Responding to the bewilderment of your students concerning
my Episcopal service, I suppose that they should know it is very strange to
reject something that they do not know or understand, or to judge religion only
by anti-religious propaganda. For it is very unlikely that even one of them
has read the Holy Scriptures. Our great physiologist and academician, Vladimir
Petrovitch Filatov; the priest Copernicus, who reformed all of astronomy; and
Louis Pasteur could combine their scientific activity with their strong faith.
I have been a strong believer since my childhood and
my faith has not weakened
with my age (I will soon be eighty-two years old). On
the contrary; it has strengthened.
 |
| Saint Luke preaching. |
For the thirty-eight years of my priesthood and
Episcopal service!. Have preached about 1250 sermons. Out of them, 750 were
recorded and compiled in twelve thick volumes of typewritten sheets. The
Council of the Moscow Spiritual Seminary has called them "an exclusive
phenomenon in the modern church and theological life" and "a treasury
of elucidation of the Holy Scriptures," and I was elected an honorary
member of the Academy. As you see, this stands far beyond the primitive
judgments of your students. I wrote my Essays on the Surgery of Pyogenic*
Infections when already a bishop.
Sincerely yours, Archbishop Luke, 1959.
Loving
the Poor.
After the Second World War, economic conditions in the
Crimea were very bad. There were shortages of goods and people went hungry.
The archbishop's small two-room apartment was in an old rundown house. One
room served as a cell, the other as a combined office, reception area, and
refectory. Many other families lived on the same floor. The house was full of
bedbugs. A line would form in the morning at the only faucet which existed in
the house.
The archbishop helped everyone. Food would be prepared
for fifteen to twenty people in his apartment kitchen. The food was sparse, but
it was more than many inhabitants of Simferopol had at the time. The niece of
the archbishop, Vera Prozorovkaya, relates:
Many hungry children, elderly women, and poor people
would come for the food. I would boil food in a huge vat every day, and they
would empty it down to the bottom. At night, my uncle would ask me: "How
many gathered today at the table? Did everyone eat? Was there enough
food?"
The archbishop himself ate very little, just once a
day. If he was served a second plate, he would become upset. His cassocks were
very poor. A teacher from Simferopol, whom the archbishop had given money to
buy a house, recalls: "His Eminence always wore repaired shoes and kept
patched cassocks .... And each time his niece would tell him that she should
buy new clothes, he would respond, 'Patch up, patch up, Vera. The poor are many."
Loving the patients.
The death of patients was always a source of pain and
anguishes for the bishop, for he saw each person as an image of God, unique and
unrepeatable. He wrote to his son:
I suffer very deeply if a patient dies after an
operation. I had three deaths in the operating room and this literally crushed
me. You, as a theoretician, haven't come to know this pain, whereas for me, it
becomes more and more difficult to bear.... I prayed for the dead in my home,
because there is no sacred church in Krasnoyarsk.
When he entered the room of a patient whom he had
operated on two or three days before and saw the bed empty, he would go up to
the second floor and lock himself in his office without offering a word. A
female medical student said that "His Eminence disappeared for entire
hours ... after such an event. Each death caused him deep grief."
The bishop's philanthropic attitude towards the dying
person is rare in our day
and may seem a little unrealistic to the reader. The
great tradition which began with the physician and Evangelist Luke-and was
continued by other holy unmercenary doctors-deeply influenced medical science
in the past.
 |
Painting depicting St. Luke of Simferopol
making rounds with both
his medical robe, and his Panagia.
|
Saint John
Chrysostom describes the attitude of the doctors of his age, which illustrates
how much they loved and suffered with the sick person: "When a doctor
examined a patient and ascertained that there was no hope of recovery ... he
shed tears and thus informed the patient's relatives of the impending
death.":"
Contemporary man, "not having hope" (1
Thess. 4: 13), trembles in the face of death and puts forth particularly great
efforts to deny it, to cast it away and also to hide it from relatives, who are
a step away from their end. But in the Christian tradition, making the
patient aware of impending death gives him the capability of repentance, of
reconciliation, of preparation. Due to Bishop Luke's efforts, there were
many patients who left for the great journey, prepared and reconciled with God
and their neighbor.
* Pyogenic infection:
infection characterized by severe local inflammation, usually with pus
formation, generally caused by one of the Pyogenic bacteria.
Reference:
The Blessed Surgeon. Archdeacon Vasiliy Marushchak.
(2001)