It was Sunday, but the church in my remote Siberian town was empty because a horrible storm had rolled in the night before. Through the windows of the church I could barely see the small clump of houses that stretched down the solitary road. Beyond these houses I couldn’t see anything, the small farm plots were nothing more than images of swirling snow and the forest beyond them was a wall of white. I was reworking the sermon I had planed for that Sunday when I heard the first scream, a scream that to this day still haunts my thoughts. I peered out the window, my breath immediately fogging it, in the middle of the road stood what appeared to be an ordinary man but the snow around him had melted and a trail of steaming footprints extended behind him. At his feet there were two members of my congregation, their ribs jabbing out of their blood stained clothes and their faces distorted into looks of horror. He darted away in a blur of snow and I swore I saw his eyes burn like the embers of a fire. My teeth began to chatter, my brow broke into a heavy sweat, and I vomited. When I brought my eyes to the window again he was there ripping the intestines out of an elderly women. He turned his head toward me and smiled. At this point my legs gave way and I blacked out. I awoke much later after the storm had cleared. I walked through town and found that every member of my congregation, every man, women, and child of my town, everyone I had ever loved and cared for had been torn from their homes taken to the middle of the street and murdered in the most wicked way. I knelled before their bodies and wept. I then spent the rest of the day burying their bodies and the rest of the evening praying God to allow their souls to transcend into heaven. I also prayed for that man, no he was no man, that demon to be swept from the earth and damned to the prison of flames that he had been spawned from. Later I reported what had happened to the bishop of my diocese and he informed me that I was to never speak of this and that he would go about assigning me to a pirhod(parish). I went above him and reported what had happened to the Metropolitan Archbishop and he told me that I was to be “removed” from my position in the Russian Orthodox Church and sent to the United States where the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia would assign me to a new diocese and thus a new pirhod. I was violently opposed to this but with my town destroyed and my only contacts outside of the town forcing me out of the country I had no option. Only months after this I found myself in the United States acting as the Archpriest of the Church of St Theodore the Sykeote.
