Father Leonid and Mimi Kishkovsky on Mother’s Day, 2021. Photo by Sophia Kishkovsky.
On August 3, 2021, Father Leonid Kishkovsky, the longtime Chair of the Department of External Affairs of the Orthodox Church in America, fell asleep in the Lord. We are offering a personal reflection by his lifelong spiritual daughter and friend Matushka Olga Meerson.
Father Leonid was the true helmsman of the Orthodox Church in America. Politically he defended its independence, primarily from the Moscow Patriarchate, during the entire Soviet period of his activity as the permanent head of the OCA Department of External Affairs. And as he was unwavering jurisdictionally even from the late 50s, he also defended it from zarubezhniki[i] who until 1991 simply did not want to know us, anathemizing us for the fact that we “received autocephaly from the hands of Moscow”—until they themselves merged with the Russian Orthodox Church in ecstasy, to the point of being indistinguishable. In short, storms raged around him “more slobbering and shittier than Russian atheism and Orthodoxy,”[ii] but regardless of whether it was atheism or Orthodoxy at any given moment, Father Leonid was firm in faith, calm in convictions, and skeptical in the face of various temptations and religious miasmas . Because of his duties, he constantly had to deal with officials from Moscow’s Department for External Church Relations and with obscurantists. He dealt with them all, both when the officials hounded the “obscurantists” and when they themselves turned into them. All this was extremely important for him in communication with my husband.[iii] They sometimes even consulted each other pastorally, in confidence. But personally, he was a confessor for both of us. Therefore, I experienced the touch of his sobering coolness on my own soul, and it supports me and pulls me out of darkness even now.
About his loved ones. Both in her convictions and her understanding of the situation balancing on the edge, it seems to me that his daughter Sonya is the closest to him. Humanly, Mimi and both daughters are. As a shepherd, he was known to everyone from a different side, as is always the case. Therefore, all the memories, including those of our common parishioners and friends, will be extremely interesting, and each will be unique.
In his early years (I have known him since the late 1970s), many were supported and consoled by his sobriety and openness—unusual for the priests of that time—and by his understanding of the Russian situation. He had that constant desire to understand what he had not yet understood and to comprehend it soberly and critically—but often not in a political, but rather a pastoral manner. Therefore, he knew how to talk with officials, as the Lord did with Pilate, but he himself did not become a zealot of the exodus of zarubezhniki, and strongly resisted the harassment of church politics. And this was despite having many of Mimi’s and his own relatives and close friends among the zarubezhniki. Father Leonid understood that the differences between the ROC and the ROCOR were purely political, and that both were theologically primitive and united in their hatred, for example, towards Father Sergei Bulgakov, and indeed toward everything living. And he understood that because of that, the zarubezhniki would fall at the feet of Moscow as soon as the MP seduced them. He understood that as early as the 1970s, as did Father Alexander Schmemann, Father John Meyendorff, and my husband. At that time, average American priests were simply not interested in this, even as many enthusiastic zarubezhniki and OCA members who considered themselves Russian were partly seduced. And I mean specific people, hierarchs—at least one already in the twenty-first century, an American neophyte, and another who lived through almost the entire terrible twentieth century. There were others. Ever since the days of Prince Vladimir’s ambassadors to Constantinople, Orthodoxy has captivated Russians aesthetically, through delight and ecstasy, thereby dragging in a great deal of politics as a dogma and as part of a complete religious package. There was no variety of speculative theology, in contrast to the early church fathers. Whether theology itself even existed apart from the wonderful liturgical poetics, which gradually turned into a pious hum for the Russian ear (this is Schmemann’s expression, not mine) is also a question. Few distinguished between liturgical poetics and dogma. Father Leonid distinguished both in practice and pastorally, and this was like a breath of fresh air for the Russians who came to him and communicated with him, and for some it was painful, like treatment in alcohol or drug rehab. In the pastoral sense, this task, especially in those years, between Father Leonid and my husband, Father Mikhail, was a shared one, on a daily basis. Neither one nor the other encouraged fatuity. Many Russian parishioners, the neophitic newcomers to New York, left for the ROCOR, unable to withstand the test of sobriety. There they quickly acquired an ideology—which almost invariably included aggressive anti-Semitism, by the way—and many then went crazy literally, without any metaphors. I am speaking about the Russian emigration of our time, the third wave. Many of these new anti-Semites were Jews themselves, by the way. After all, obscurantism, like any obsession, is primarily a crisis of self-consciousness.
In those years and then even more in the 1980s, those who continued to be interested in Russia but did not go to the ROCOR had to deal with all this in our church. By that time in our parts, in New York and nearby, there were two such priests (now there are more), with neophytes from the USSR constantly coming to them. They were Father Leonid and my husband. Their roles and pastoral behavior were different, but this powerful test brought them closer together as friends. There was a lot they could talk about only with each other. To the others, their tasks and their crosses were simply incomprehensible. None of this can be expressed now; that is how it is with the invisible part of any cross, but above all the pastoral. They understood each other without words.
I would like to note one more thing that made Father Leonid unique even among his own people. In everyday dealings in his Russian colony in Sea Cliff, he calmly and non-aggressively cooperated with the ROCOR parish and its priest, and Mimi, in that parish, was even the chairperson of the parent committee of the Russian school when the girls studied there. And in general, in everything that did not include political and jurisdictional disagreements with the ROCOR—for example, in personal communications or in everyday ministry—he was calm, benevolent and open. But unlike my husband, he was a great diplomat. This means that, even as he was open to the alien, he was unshakably self-possessed. This applied to both the ROC and the ROCOR in equal measure, although at different times and in different ways. After all, he had relatives and close friends in both jurisdictions.
He was personally close to both of us in almost everything, but he had a unique quality which to us—Russian intellectuals and neurasthenics, to a large extent both Jewish—was alien and unattainable: an iron inner core. Even among the people of his circle and blood, I have not met people with such a core, not only in the loose first and not very literate second immigration in general, but even Schmemann and Meyendorff. Father Leonid was a kind of Bismarck in church matters that were important from his point of view. And it was absolutely impossible to bring him down—neither flattery, nor receptions with caviar and champagne, nor external piety, nor Grabbe, nor Kuroyedov, nor Nikodim, nor Pimen, nor the current one, nor the berserks, nor the atheists, nor in Russian, nor in English…
[i] Adherents of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR)
[ii] Cosma Prutkov, aka Alexei K. Tolstoy.
[iii] Father Michael Meerson