In His Image: A Profile

I loiter anxiously in a tidy church foyer on a Sunday afternoon waiting for Pastor Victor. Hours after the service, he finishes his final meeting of the day and catches me hovering by the railing as he descends the office steps. “A profile?” He chuckles. “You’re certain you want it to be about me? Ah, ever the writer,” he winks. “Come on, we’ll lock up together.”

I follow Pastor Victor up an antiquated narrow staircase into his office, where he collapses into a creased chair and rubs his temples. He’s been at the church since dawn, and in ministry for twenty-nine years now. It’s clear he isn’t used to speaking about himself and his accent only complicates matters, so I invite him to switch to his native Russian. He nods absentmindedly and collects the assorted notebooks splayed out upon his desk. His hands are callused, and his index fingernail is blackened from a misfired hammer that hints at his day job.

He catches my gaze – “Jesus, too, was a carpenter,” he says with a smile. The Pastor has never received a salary for his full-time ministry. The church income was limited with the size of the congregation he’s chosen, so he’s worked in construction to make ends meet for his family since his immigration to the United States from Riga, Latvia. In the Soviet Union he was rejected from university because of his Christianity, so he abandoned his dreams of art school and academia long ago. The craft of hard labor was the closest he could get to artistry, and painting walls was the next best thing to canvas. 

“Yes, I gave my heart to Jesus and I’ve never looked back,” he says. “It’s a busy life and my family paid a cost, too, but we’ve found it’s worth it.” He grins as he scratches his gray-speckled head and shuts off an archaic computer. “Nothing else will do, I just want You,” Cody Carnes sings as the HP buffers down.

Last week the two of us spent a rainy Saturday at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, reminiscing on his past and surveying landscape paintings of fertile English fields and French river scenes like John Constable’s Stour Valley and Dedham Church. “This is what I painted,” he tells me, briefly pointing to fleecy clouds and dense foliage, drifting mirrors of breeze in countryside captured by brushwork, before hastening his ascent to the museum’s second floor.

There hangs Bartolomé Esteban Murillo’s Christ after the Flagellation, a 17th-century oil on canvas displayed in a room of crimson velvet, glistening marble, and grandiose finishes. In the midst of paintings measuring up to ten feet, this smaller frame fades into damask shadows but is a notable contrast to the numerous renderings of Christ on the cross. Murillo’s depicts a limp-haired and bent-backed Messiah directly before the crucifixion, his tormentors having left the scene. In this rendition, no disciples crowd his feet, no skies thunder with the fury of Golgotha, no archangel armies with flashing swords hurl dark fiends into the bosom of the only begotten Son of God; only two angels stand relegated to his side in compassionate address as he lies humbly upon the ground, his skin radiant despite the sores.

“Notice the pain isn’t hidden, but it is not the focus,” says Victor.

Wrapped in a white cloth, which Murillo casts in the painting’s center, the Son of God reaches for the dirtied garments discarded by the corner of the canvas. While Christ may seem content with the brightly lit covering, He would prefer the dirtier one.

“I ought to prepare for tomorrow’s service,” Pastor Victor tells me, cutting our museum visit short but suggesting we stop by an adjacent coffee shop – revealing caffeine to be his greatest vice. He sips coffee in his office now, again with wearied but wisdom-filled eyes and a scent of Pine-Sol emanating from his skin, walking me through that day he was rejected from an art university in Ukraine.

He had spent three months perfecting his portfolio and was admitted with the highest exam grades. Yet, when asked if he was a Communist in a follow-up interview, his disclosing he was not and admitting to believing in God prompted the board to declare he either renounce his worldview or be denied entry. Collecting his drawings and documents, he proceeded to apply to a program for low academic performers. Again, he was denied, even for masonry. His name was officially red listed. His final hope, a construction school with a student body constituted mainly of drug addicts and alcoholics, became suspicious of his academic distinctions and made calls to uncover his identity, resulting in a final rejection. The school shut down two weeks later for a lack of students.

“How did you do it?” I ask. “Pay the cost of giving up your dreams?” He’s been facing the stained-glass window by his desk but as he turns in my direction, I detect tears caught in his eyes, though his stoic face conveys no shame for the intimacy.

“Well, it doesn’t make it easy, but love makes it worth it,” he smiles. “My father was the first testimony to what I believed about this world and the one who taught me what it looked like, before I identified it with Jesus.”

He tells me about his father, a pastor in the Soviet Union, and their life as a family of ten in rural Ukraine. He recounts growing up in poverty, sharing clothing to take turns to go to school, and enduring persecution for their Christianity.

Communist teachers forced him and his siblings to the front of the classroom to denounce them as government dissenters and forbid others from speaking to them. “Our mother instructed us to remember our last name and each other’s birthdays, in case the school followed through on their promise to distribute us to different orphanages if our parents were arrested or killed, or if one of us admitted to ‘being told’ to attend church or believe in God.”

Meanwhile, government institutions ensured they received no services, no rations or living quarters, unless they renounced their faith. “My father taught us how to hide our Bibles in grain buckets when the KGB raided our home," he says. "They were desperate to arrest him permanently and he was regularly in and out of custody as it was for holding underground church meetings. My mother kept a purse stocked with warm socks and winter boots in the kitchen, in case he was taken by night for a Siberian prison. Still, he remained the most joyous man I knew.”

One day, his father was caught leading a funeral service and was deprived of his monthly salary. Fortunately, bread was free in their school cafeteria, so Victor and his siblings lined their pockets and gnawed on hunks throughout the day to dull the hunger pains.

Another of his father’s arrests led to Victor’s older brother being denied use of the restroom in school for eight hours, until he urinated in the classroom and was thrown outside into a blizzard, forced to walk two kilometers home and consequently contracting scarlet fever. Their mother attempted to alleviate the hostility by buying Christmas gifts for the class, but the teacher locked him out of the celebration, threw his gift at him, named him a Christian slur, and demanded he clean the mess. He came home joyously, announcing that he had managed to salvage ten candies for himself before his classmates lined their pockets with the rest.

“She cried that day. Then, and when someone mutilated our cow, because she didn’t know what we would eat.”   

His tone is objective as he relates his history, but I cannot bear to bring my eyes to him, choosing instead to look around the 19th-century tower office. My fingers graze a bronze frame displaying a browned slip of paper, once owned by the revivalist Smith Wigglesworth and part of a set he used to memorize scripture each day, gifted to Victor by his youngest daughter. It reads, “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes… – Revelation 21:4.”

He tells me about his great-grandfather, Stradon, who was killed while saving a Jewish boy from Nazis and discarded into a mass grave. Stradon shielded the boy from the gunfire, allowing him to feign death and hide beneath blood and bodies until nightfall, afterwards making his way to Stradon’s wife’s aid.

Pastor Victor’s grandfather was a forced laborer who begged to attend church on Sunday and work a double shift the next day, a request which led to his being shot in the head by a Nazi soldier before the Ukrainian village. He prayed “Our Father who art in heaven” on his knees but never made it to “amen.”

“Then came my father’s time. One day, as he led church Communion and sipped the wine first in commemoration, he collapsed. The autopsy determined that the wine had been poisoned by an ‘unknown poison,’ but the police would not investigate. I was twenty-one then.” The KGB likely succeeded. I pause now and cautiously force my eyes to meet his, which, though introspective, are somehow far from sorrowing.

Pastor Victor followed in those footsteps – upon being denied an education in Ukraine, he left to pursue an education in Latvia and to serve in the army. His reputation followed him, and he was tormented and delegated to dangerous locations for service. There, despite his exemplary service, he was denied medical care after contracting Hepatitis A from the barracks' grueling conditions. He ate bread and water for three months then, in his nauseated condition, and permanently devastated his liver. The adversities did not alleviate when he immigrated to the United States, either.

“Ah, sure. I encountered poverty here too, but never the way it was there. My family didn’t receive government aid here, so working full-time and starting a full-time ministry, raising a church in one city and then another, took a lot out of us. But, still, it wasn’t Riga.”

He’s referring to his being able to afford only three bananas in Latvia, one for each of his daughters, and depending on a basket of food a congregation member left anonymously on the doorstep to carry them through the winter.

 In the United States, there was backbreaking construction work, suffering from medical malpractice but having no language or ability to pursue legal consequence, and helping his wife through college while she suffered from an undiagnosable illness.

There is no underlying current of bitterness, no grand display of misery, simply a matter-of-fact synopsis of a history he recounts with a shrug of his shoulders and a running of his industrious fingers, bruised and so pale they’re almost incandescent, over the black leather of his worn Russian Bible. He tells me how our being in a fallen world means not walking through any less than Christ did.

“Anyway, when you look to those who ran the race before you, paying a cost becomes conceivable. You honor their cross; you learn from the previous generation’s wisdom.” He’s suddenly regarding me intently and leaning towards me from his chair, his voice booming with the passionate inflections of a natural-born orator. He has gone from preaching to thousands in Europe to speaking with a 24-year-old master’s student in his study, yet his devotion is unchanged.

“You humble yourself – never think you can do it without Jesus. It’s all about perspective. My cross does not feel as heavy, especially when I’m with the One who carried it best.”

“But can you honestly say it hasn’t bothered you, having nothing?”

He laughs at my question. The very idea of “nothing” is circumstantial, he tells me. “I prayed for this church building for decades. It was on the market for one million when we had nothing. But when I walked in and saw fallen, filthy Bibles on the floor and heard other buyers were planning to turn it into condominiums, I asked the Lord for it. We bought it for $300,000 and the money showed up right when we needed it, right from where we least expected it. In Boston of all places,” he chuckles. “I never have ‘nothing.’”

He abandons his chair and walks to a clothing rack where he removes his blazer and dons the Boston College sweatshirt I gave him when I was first accepted into the graduate English program. He makes a display of proudly showcasing it with a smile.

I know his answer, but I muster a final, indignant question:

“You’re not outraged? It doesn’t offend you that society would not consider your education or your life as 'successful' today?”

Pastor Victor tells me he refuses to live for people, only for God. Some see lowliness or servility, but Jesus Himself was not one for regalities.

He recognizes the weighty challenge ahead for the next generation, though. “Wearing a cross is easier than carrying one on your back. But if you’re not humbling yourself, not honoring your parents, dismissing the generations before you in exaltation of your own intelligence and successes, placing yourself above God…well, it’s no wonder we need a global reset. But have we changed?”

Pastor Victor beckons me to follow him as he locks his office, picking up aluminum trays collecting rainwater from a leaky roof as we make our descent.

In the foyer he proceeds to execute a routine he evidently has for many years now, gathering a mop and a Pine-Sol bottle I hadn’t noticed and relegating them to a storage closet, then exchanging them for a watering can to tend to the entryway flowers.

I notice him wince as he bends over (the consequence of being a day-laborer, I reason) and his knees buckle. I catch the words “thank you, Jesus” escaping his breath.

As soon as he’s ready, I trail his footsteps out the door, though the act feels sobering now. His massive Slavic build somehow still towers over my 5’9 frame, his military service revealing itself in the rigidity of his gait while the tenderness in his gaze as he turns to assess where I am, the soft lines around his eyes, reveal why you cannot help but look to him.

Pastor Victor locks up, turning the doorknob upwards with force. It sticks otherwise, he tells me. His commanding form takes a moment to assess the rainfall, murmuring something about needing to check on the leaks later. He tilts his head to fix his focus on heaven and catches sunlight peeking through the gray. He smiles at me. “Never mind. We’ll be okay.”

We climb into his 2008 Nissan – it also sticks – and he glances back at the 19th-century stone tower as the engine starts up. He laughs like a child, generating a gleeful squeal in response to the cold, and turns his gaze back towards me. “We’ve got a beautiful church, you know that?”

I smile back, peering out the window. “Yeah. We really do, dad.”