RUSSIAN ORTHODOX EASTER IN MOSCOW

At the Kram (Temple) Khristos Spacitel' (Christ the Savior) in Moscow. Stalin had it torn down after the Great Patriotic War (WWII) and built a huge outdoor swimming pool there. One of the first Soviets I met in the fall of '77 was the head of the Dept of Geothermodynamics at Moscow State University. He was one of the IREX Exchange professors at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign during my student teaching semester at Uni High. Along with two other professors, a doctor of radio physics from Kharkov, Ukraine and another one . . . I met them because the head of the Slavic Languages Dept had invited the Soviet poet Andrei Vosnesensky to read his poetry on campus.

During the eight weeks of student teaching I was only getting about 2-4 hours a night. Krista was in kindergarten for half a day and during the other half was in day care with Tommy who had just turned three. They were in the loving wonderful environment at our home church day care center -- First UMC in Champaign, where we had been married, also.

After her morning in day care and her afternoon in kindergarten, she walked home with some neighbors and played in their house until I got home.

My kids' dad brought them to church in the morning and drove Krista from day care to kindergarten after lunch.

I had a rule never to do homework when the kids were awake and had only had three full-time semesters of college before Krista was born. I was out of school until she was eighteen months old and then took one or two classes a semester. I missed the fall semester of 1974 when Tommy was born, and by the time it was the '77-'78 school year I had to student teach and it made more sense to try to do those last two semesters with full-time course work.

We had lived in the Orchard Apartments -- Married Student Housing (AKA Orchard Downs) from Oct 1971-May 1975. Then we bought a little three bedroom ranch house with a fenced in yard on the edge of the corn fields and soy bean fields of the very eastern part of Urbana. Krista would have had a long walk along some other fields between housing developments, so in May of 1977 we bought a little salt box house in the western part of Champaign, with a huge back yard in a neighborhood with big stately oak and elm and ash and willow and many other kinds of deciduous trees . . . And pine trees and snowball bushes and lilac hedges and . . . parks.

The house was across the street from an elementary school and the big windows of the kindergarten room faced our front yard. And then it turned out that Krista's kindergarten teacher had grown up in our new house. Her father had built it. The lot was 90' x 180' and the house sat close to the street with a big elm tree in the front yard.

We called the huge back yard "Brown Park," and the kids had so much fun playing there . . . and we were blessed to have picnics and cookouts, including when several aunts and uncles, cousins, neighbors and friends helped us celebrate my graduation from UIUC in June of '78.

My kids' dad and I had met during Freshman Week in September of 1970, but didn't really start dating regularly until after January of '71. He graduated on time in June of '74 and then did five years of research in Nutritioonal Sciences studying the etiology of multiple sclerosis while he worked at the local city hospital as a toxicologist and clinical chemist.

Even though professors in the Slavic Languages Department and my advisor were surprised over and over when I was back and forth to classes, taking time out when my babies were born. Was blessed to be a member of several babysitting co-ops and the Urbana Co-operative Nursery School where we all made wonderful friends with kids from all over the world. I happened to be in class with a very imposing professor from Moscow both times that it was the last semester before having a baby.

When I turned in my final test paper the second time, several months before Tommy was due, she looked at me sternly and said, "You are having another child??! Why can't you just get a dog or a cat?"

I think the answer was beyond my capacity for my Russian vocabulary at the time. So I just shrugged, shook my head and smiled as I walked out of the classroom.

We had a very full rich life with many cultural and learning opportunities and wonderful places to play and to celebrate holidays at the university, in the cities and at church. God is so good and so faithful.

In the summer after my kids' dad got his MS in Nutritional Sciences, it looked like I might be offered a position flying for the Illinois Air National Guard. So he decided to go to US Air Force Officer Training School and was commissioned a 2nd lieutenant on our son's fifth birthday in September of '79.

In April of 1980, the flying opportunity had fallen through. I had asked Senator Stevenson to appeal that decision, but his staffer said that there were too few places for women pilots and navigators. I was told that the "needs of the Air Force" were such that the B.A. In Russian I had earned was more useful in intelligence work. I was given the opportunity to go to Officer Training School for a slot in that career field.

I was told that it was possible I could apply for pilot training after I was commissioned, but that never worked out and I settled for taking private pilot lessons.

Truly, we were blessed during our lives on active duty, though as all kids of military members know, there were hardships, too. In most of my assignments I would have paid them to do what I did.

We were involved in support of the Eastern Space and Missile Center and Kennedy Space Center operations during the first five Space Shuttle launches. Then we worked for the Alaskan Air Command supporting the pilots who flew to protect Alaska from Soviet bombers and other missions.

Strangely enough, I never went to the Soviet Union for the US Government, and it wasn't until 25 years after I fist began to learn the language when I was fifteen years old and a Junior in high school that I first went to Moscow.

It was December 27, 1993, not long after the second coup attempt in October of '93, during the turmoil of the Glasnost' and Perestroika and the on-going break-up of the Soviet Union. I joined a group of college students and their United Methodist chaplain from Evansville University in southern Indiana. I was blessed to escort-interpret for them.

We had an exchange with college-aged and high school aged youth in a city called Obninsk, about 230 miles southwest of Moscow. Our hosts were participants in many kinds of clubs, so we had a lot of fun sharing with them. We were also very interested to find out that Obninsk is the location of the first Soviet nuclear reactor -- one of six built because of the plans that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were accused of helping to get for the Soviets.

We brought in the New Year Russian style, listening to the radio as the clock tower of the Moscow Kremlin Wall struck twelve for each time zone across the breadth of the Eurasian continent. After much too little sleep, we found ourselves rousted out of bed to take part in a "Siberian Picnic" complete with horseback rides and three-legged soccer games and wonderful pilmeni soup . . . hot chocolate and hot spiced cider.

On January 2nd we were treated to a field trip to Moscow and had lunch in the second McDonald's Restaurant in Russia. The most polite teenagers we had ever seen served us. And we were delighted to note similarities and difference on the menu between the food and drinks we knew well from home.

The most interesting part were the extravagant, fancifully decorated ice cream treats. However, we were amused about the vagaries of languages in translation again when we learned that those ice cream desserts were called "coktails"!

We also visited a town called Zagorsk northeast of Moscow. There was Soviet university where students studied to be film makers there, among other things. In the Tsarist era the town was called "Sergeev Posad" because the heritage of one of the most beloved Russian Orthodox saints, St. Sergei of Radonezh is there. The old name has been restored and the monastery and all the churches within are now open once again. This is a photo of the outside walls of the monastery from the late spring of 2010 when I went there with some Methodist seminary student friends.

Wow . . . all I was trying to do was share a video of the Russian Orthodox Easter liturgy in Moscow. Here it is:

Easter Liturgy at Kristy's Spacitel' Kram in Moscow (Christ the Saviour Temple)

(The service was recorded on April 11, 2015)

Khristos voskres. Istinno on voskres!!!

Christ Jesus is risen. He is risen indeed!!

Alleluia! Glory to God.

❤️❤️❤️