To the Reader:
I heard this young lady speak at the USCC Youth Spring Festival May 21, 2016. The moment she said her first words, she held the audience spell bound.
Her message can apply to just about every Religion and or Church as there are difficulties for Youth to understand what the Adult has accepted over the years. Sometimes without questioning in the way Natasha has.
She travelled many paths to come to these conclusions.
One has to read carefully and think about what she says in this speech.
by Natasha Jmieff
Hi everyone. My name is Natasha Jmieff, and I’m going to talk to you about my perspective on the Doukhobor life concept. Over the years, I’ve read a lot of history and done a lot of soul-searching—I’ll tell you about some of that in a minute—and I’ve come up with five ideas that I think are at the core of this culture. They’re ideas that Doukhobors have lived by for the last two hundred years, but that doesn’t make them outdated—in fact, it makes them more necessary than ever, and some of them are becoming mainstream and being talked about everywhere.
So, here are the five ideas:
We are all part of God.
We honour the spirit of God in each other.
We are pacifists.
We are communitarians.
Together, we can change the world.
Before I go on to explain these ideas, I want to tell you about my own spiritual journey, and how I came to be standing here on stage today. As glad as I am to have all of you for an audience, in some ways, this speech is meant to reach the people who aren’t here, who aren’t participating—because for years, I was one of them.
In 1975, the year I was born, my parents joined the Slocan Valley Choir—which you’ll see behind me as soon as the curtain opens. I grew up going to choir with them, sitting on a little carpet in the corner of Slocan Park hall with my toys and colouring books, or else playing—and fighting a little—with the other kids outside.
I hated it. I resented so many things about growing up in the USCC, and I used to complain about it. “Mom, my platok is itchy. Why do I have to wear it at all? Dad, why do we always go to prayer meetings on Sundays? Can’t I stay home and watch TV?” I whined a lot. I don’t know how my loving parents put up with me. But I did what they said because I was a kid and, well, I didn’t have a choice.
But underneath the whining and childish resistance, a much deeper resistance—a kind of rebellion—was happening. As I grew up, I distanced myself more and more from the culture, inside.
Although my parents encouraged me to speak Russian at home, most of the time I spoke and thought in English. None of the songs we sang in Sunday school made sense to me, and we never discussed or tried to understand their meanings. What I absorbed from my family and the culture around me was a sense of anxiety, of always being judged—by the people around me and by God. I absorbed a sense of being burdened by duty and obligation to the community and its leaders. Of constant guilt and inadequacy, and a sense of suffering that our people almost rejoiced in, as if suffering made a person righteous.
I know this isn’t what many of you want to hear, but it was my experience. I didn’t want to be a Doukhobor.
At the same time, I was on a spiritual journey. I was looking for something, though I didn’t know what.
When I was eighteen, I moved to Vancouver to go to UBC. I was a shy, sheltered girl from “the valley,” but I thrived at university. I absorbed new ideas, new ways of living, and tried them out in my own life. Whatever inspired me, whatever opened me up, I followed—it didn’t matter which religion or culture it came from.
For a while I tried being an atheist, but it didn’t work for me. My heart had faith—and longed for—a connection with something or someone much larger than me, a presence I couldn’t see, but somehow knew was there—awake, alive, all the time, everywhere.
I really liked Buddhism. A Zen master came to one of my lectures once. He made two hundred of us sit still for ten minutes without talking. We were supposed to watch our breath come in and out and keep our minds still. It felt impossible. But I remembered that moment.
And later, I learned how to meditate with this same teacher—Eshin Godfrey—at the Vancouver Zen Centre. We sat on black cushions on the floor, for half an hour at a time, and got up between sessions to walk slowly around the room and chant in Japanese. The practice was strange to me, and difficult to do, but during the brief time I spent going to Zen Centre, something opened in me. One day, my mind settled down and a beautiful clarity arose. I could hear a robin chirping in a tree outside, and the skytrain rattling by—we were near a station—and everything I thought or worried about disappeared. For a minute there was just clarity, presence and peace.
The Zen master was the happiest person I had ever met—he radiated happiness—and I wanted what he had.
But the spiritual journey moves at its own pace, in its own way. Soon after that beautiful opening, I left Vancouver. I graduated from UBC with a degree in English and, instead of staying in the city, I moved home—back to the valley, back to the heart of this culture I’d been avoiding for years.
I’m going to read you a passage by the native American writer Linda Hogan that explains what drew me back toward Doukhoborism. In her memoir, The Woman Who Watched Over the World, she writes: “My tribal identity has always been chasing after me, to keep its claims on my body and heart. I can’t escape from my culture and be whole and real.”
The spiritual journey is a journey toward wholeness and union—but to arrive at that wholeness, we have to do the work—the work of dissolving and healing whatever keeps us feeling separate, contracted, afraid. It’s not easy. It’s gritty, difficult work to face those parts of ourselves.
But after that moment of clarity at the Zen Centre, that’s exactly what I came back to the Kootenays to do—though I didn’t know it at the time.
For ten or fifteen years, I moved toward Doukhoborism, then away. I sang with my parents’ choir for a year or two—then took up dancing with Sufis. I read books on Doukhobor history—then learned how to invoke the spirits of the four directions. I tried working for Iskra—but found myself in a sweat lodge, crammed in the dark and heat with thirty other people. We were all speaking our prayers out loud to the Great Spirit, and I found myself saying: “Please Great Spirit, heal my culture, heal my people.”
I’d never thought of them as “my people” before: the generations of suffering Doukhobors whose pain, sorrow and trauma I had inherited, and was working to heal in myself.
Dear elders, I’m telling you this story because I want you to understand the world your young people live in. This world is open to them. There are a million faiths, and a million paths to wholeness. The spiritual journey is a very individual one, and I believe that if a person is engaged in it, in whatever way, he or she is a spirit wrestler.
That being said, we all need to belong somewhere. We are individuals, each on our own journey through life, but we all need community—the support of other people—to help us on this journey. Right now, the Doukhobor community, what remains of it, is disintegrating. Once the current generation of elders—you beautiful, hard-working people who have done your best for us—once this generation is gone, the particular spiritual path we call Doukhoborism will end. Unless we—and here I’m speaking to people my age and younger, both those who are here and those who are not—unless we do something to renew it.
I don’t know what, exactly, but I have a few ideas. Maybe others of you do too. Maybe some of you, like me, have left the community, but something tugs at you to come back again. I’m here today because I believe that, despite its flaws and dysfunctions, Doukhobor culture, Doukhobor faith, is worth preserving and renewing.
In a letter he wrote to Peter Verigin “Hospodniy,” novelist Leo Tolstoy called the Doukhobors “people of the 25th century.” In eighteenth and nineteenth century Russia, the ideas Doukhobors lived by were heretical—they didn’t belong. But today, many of these ideas are becoming widespread. All over the world, people are waking up—their spirits are waking up—to the very truths our Doukhobor ancestors lived—and died—for.
This brings me back to the five ideas I mentioned at the beginning. I call them Five Ideas the Doukhobors Had That Could Change the World.
1. The wise, awake, loving and all-embracing presence we call God lives inside each person. Its guidance is available to all of us, all the time—all we need to do is ask, and listen.
In other words: We are all part of God.
2. All human hierarchies, divisions and castes are illusions. So are the religious and national boundaries that people fight and die for. Our ancestors believed in a kind of radical equality—that all people are equal, and all of us equally have access to divine wisdom—if we choose to live by it.
In other words: We honour the spirit of God in each other.
3. When we live by divine wisdom, we create a space for peace in our lives, and we start to see how much harm is done by acts of force or violence. Violence arises from fear and ignorance, and is dissipated by their opposites—love and understanding. When we begin to generate love and understanding inside ourselves, we turn away from violence, and toward peace.
In other words: We are pacifists.
4. If all people are equal, everyone matters. Our ancestors believed it was possible for people to live together in community, sharing their resources and labour so that everyone would benefit. This particular idea goes against the mainstream of consumer culture today, but more and more people are realizing the benefits of making do with less and sharing what they have.
In other words: We are communitarians.
5. If we align ourselves, and our community, with the flow of divine wisdom, and allow that wisdom to work through us, we can accomplish great things. I think of the faith that allowed the Doukhobors to resist forced conscription, to survive prison and exile, to migrate to a new country and pioneer on the prairies and in BC—all the things they were able to accomplish because of their faith, and their unity.
Today, we have different issues to tackle, and different goals, but still:
Working together, we can change the world.
So, let me repeat one more time what the Doukhobor life concept means to me:
We are all part of God.
We honour the spirit of God in each other.
We are pacifists.
We are communitarians.
Together, we can change the world.
Thank you very much for your attention and your time today. And my thanks to the people behind me, my parents and the other choir members, for your dedication to your culture and community for so many years. Bless you all.
The above speech was given as part of the performance of the Slocan Valley Choir at the USCC Union of Youth Festival in May, 2016
copyright Natasha Jmieff, 2016
Natasha
I have a blog and I would be honored if I could post it on my blog along with some appropriate remarks
I just think that it is a great story of a young Doukhobor growing up
Elmer
Hi Elmer,
That would be fine. The more people who have access to its message, the better. 🙂
Copyright remains with me.
Have a great day.
Natasha
Posted by Elmer Verigin June 27, 2016, 1010 hours
Elmer Verigin 