Matushka Olga - I will NOT call her a saint ! - is enthused over in this interview of the same Meagan Saliashvili who wrote the Texas Monthly article earlier this year.
It's pretty boring, but just to show the sparsity of the information available on the life OR "miracles" of Matushka Olga, I am posting it here.
One also can glimpse Meagan Saliashvili's personality and ideas from her observations.
"Amy Frykholm: Welcome back to Search Of, the podcast where we go in search of voices and ideas that expand and enrich a life of faith. I’m your host, Amy Frykholm, and before we begin today, I want to tell you about a special opportunity for an adventure that I will be leading this summer. Along with pastor and writer Melissa Earley, I will be leading a small retreat in the High Rockies called Discovering Your Spiritual Autobiography. We will be leading retreatants=11pt through exercises designed to reflect on various stages of our spiritual lives, to identify mentors and inspired moments, demarcate chapters, and, in the midst of all of that, we’ll wonder about the future. It’s a writing intensive retreat, but participants will have time to gather as a community, get outdoors in gorgeous, historic Leadville, Colorado, and find renewal in the mountain air.
For today’s episode, we are traveling to rural Alaska to a small fishing village with people from the Yupik tribe. There we will find a woman named Olga Michael, who died in 1979, and has recently been canonized for sainthood in the Orthodox church. Matushka Olga became well known for her wisdom and her healing. I am speaking today with journalist Meagan Saliashvili who has written about Matushka Olga and is going to share more of this remarkable woman’s story.
Welcome to In Search Of Meagan. Thank you so much for joining me.
MS: Thanks for inviting me.
AF: I wonder, we’re talking about a woman that I'm guessing a lot of listeners have not heard of, and I wonder where you encountered her for the first time. Where did you come across this woman and her story?
MS: Well, I first became interested in Matushka Olga when… I learned about her actually for the first time while reporting on evangelical conversions to orthodoxy in Alaska. So I went there to see a particular parish in Eagle River, near Anchorage in Alaska. And then I later spent time at a seminary on Kodiak Island with some native Alaskan seminarians and priests.
And so it was there when I really started learning about the history of Russian orthodoxy and Orthodox Christianity in general in Alaska, and how the native people there actually preserved so much. I mean, some of their languages even were preserved in the Orthodox liturgy. And so a lot of these churches, even churches that are mostly people from the lower 48 who moved to Alaska or you know, non-native Alaskans, they revere Matushka Olga. She's also called Blessed Olga a lot.
And almost every church I went to, I think maybe every church I went to, had an icon of her, even though she hadn't been glorified at that time. I went in 2021 in November. And so she's a big deal there. People really love her and they love her legacy. And they really prayed for many years, I mean, 44 years actually since she passed away, to, for her to be recognized as a saint.
AF: So she's an indigenous woman from an indigenous Alaskan context. Tell us a little bit more of her story. Who was she and why do the people love her so much?
MS: Yeah, Blessed Olga is from the Yupik tribe. These are people who are, you know, believed to be from far East Russia or Siberia. And they're indigenous to Alaska. They live in the southwestern part mostly. It's very rural. And that's where Matushka Olga grew up.
And, you know, she was born in 1916 and she passed away in 1979. So you can imagine that time period already is such a different world then the one we're living in with the internet and so much more globalization.
But she married young, in an arranged marriage actually. We don't know a lot of details about it, but we're told she had a tough marriage at first, but she was a devoted Christian. And maybe because of her prayers, eventually her husband, who had opened the first post office in her village and managed a general store in the village, he eventually became an Orthodox priest. And so she became a priest's wife, and in Russian tradition sometimes that's called Matushka. So that's where her title comes from. It means mother, but also it's used to mean priest's wife.
And so, we have these recollections like from her kids. She had eight children. She actually birthed 13 children, but only eight survived, and she worked as a midwife for other women in her village. And her children say she never raised her voice. She's known above all for her humility.
Yupik culture in general is also known for humility. You know, things like they respect the animals that they depended on for survival. They had a subsistence lifestyle–fishing salmon, hunting seals. And so they had to show, you know, in their culture, a lot of appreciation and respect for all life. And that kind of cultivates this cultural humility. I would say, like every Yupik person I've met has been humble and she's known for that as well.
She lived in like a modest house, like wood burning stove. The Yupik people would leave the village every spring and summer to go hunt, and they would come back in the winter. So she spent her time in the village in the winter. And as you can imagine, the winters are pretty extreme in Alaska, but they just had the wood burning stove and, you know, she's known for knitting a lot of things, for making fur boots, for sharing very generously with other people in her village. Being very hospitable.
And she's also known, maybe most importantly, for healing women from ...abuse. And she would invite women into these traditional Yupik saunas, which were like these wooden structures with benches inside. And they would be rocks and they would pour or splash boiling water on the rocks to create a steam bath... And so some people had those physical bruises and other people maybe just had emotional wounds.
But it was a time when you could… you can imagine, like, there's not a lot of things to do necessarily in the village, and you sit around and you spend time with each other. So in those steam baths, you're staying warm and you're also spending hours in conversation. So she became known for being a good listener and helping heal women from different wounds.
AF: How is she talked about now in the churches and villages that you… what do people say about her, that you visited?
MS: Yeah, so I haven't had the chance to go to a village, to a native village, although I really hope to in the future. But I only went to Kodiak Island and Anchorage. And Kodiak Island has a seminary that's mainly native Alaskan Orthodox people. And so it was there that I met some priests and seminarians who are from her village and actually knew her before she passed away
She's known above all for her humility, and that's a really big thing that they stress. You know, for example, while there are stories of miracles that people will tell, especially after her death, she's kind of known as this example of someone who practiced everyday piety.
So someone who… you know, there's a priest named Father Michael Oleska. He is not a native Alaskan. He came to Alaska from outside, but he married a native Alaskan Yupik woman. And that woman was close with Matushka Olga's family, and he met her in person as well. So he's kind of… he passed away recently, actually, which was very surprising. It was unexpected. But he wrote a book called Orthodox Alaska and he really compiled a lot of history of orthodoxy in Alaska. So he's one of the like primary sources, I guess you could say, who's compiled the primary sources about her life.
And, you know, he was saying, on probably his last public appearance actually, on Orthodox radio. He was saying that she was known even by the bishop who came to visit her husband as such a quiet person that after her death he was trying to remember what she had said to him or some conversations and he was like, you know, she was so quiet, she was always just working behind the scenes.
And that's so interesting because it's so anti-modern. You know, it's not what I think people my age especially would think of as this… you know, she's the first female saint in Orthodoxy in North America. But her example is like not the modern feminist thing you might think of. And I think that's very challenging, to be looking at this example of humility above all is like the most strong case for her sainthood, basically. I just think that's very interesting, the contrast to someone like St. Joan of Arc that I might look at, as well, of completely different kind of, like, outward, showing, hero versus a very quiet, almost invisible, actually, woman in this village who's like a mother, a grandmother, you know, not drawing attention to herself at all.
AF: You can't exactly say that she's an influencer in the sense that we think about it, and yet…
MS: Now she is.
AF: People noticed. So how? How did they notice?
MS: Yeah. Yeah, it's an interesting question. So, you know, what's interesting is that her children and other people who knew her also say that she was one of like eight or a dozen women who, you know, they wake up early in the morning, they say their prayers, they take care of their families. And so what was remarkable about her in particular opposed to the other women and, you know, maybe that's not clear. Maybe they were all remarkable in their holiness.
But what happened is that those other women and the people in her village decided locally that there was something different about Blessed Olga and that she did have a particular holiness and way of being that was different. And so, you know, part of that starts with perhaps her funeral or her memorial service when she passed away. People say that, it was in November in Alaska and usually there are no birds. They leave for the south in like August. And so people say that there was a miracle at her funeral because it was chilly, it was windy and stormy, then they say the wind stopped and this flock of birds appeared and it was very unusual for November in Alaska. And then the birds followed the procession to the church, from the church, I think, to her grave. So people saw that as a miraculous sign.
But there's other stories like that too, that people point to of like… there's a story from Canada of, I think it was about 10 women who all had a miscarriage in the same year from a certain parish. And then, they prayed to Blessed Olga and then they all had children after that. So there's several other stories as well that people point to.
But basically in the Orthodox Church, how–it's called glorification of a saint–works is a little more of a bottom up process, I would say, than the Catholic Church because the Catholic Church needs to have three verified miracles as a part of the process. And you know, the Vatican oversees that. Versus the Orthodox way. First of all, there's not a pope in orthodoxy, so it's more localized in that sense. There's a patriarch over your particular jurisdiction.
But they first look at the local veneration. And so it was really the women in her village who venerated her, the community that was venerating her after her death, and then that spread through the region. Even in Anchorage, people are venerating her. And then that spread further. And other countries, maybe even like in Finland, and Belarus and Russia and Ukraine and other states in the south US, there's people venerating her. And so after a while of that, you know, 44 years, since 1979, she was recognized officially by the church.
And they had been collecting documentation. People had written letters about how they had a dream or a vision of her. One famous instance that people point to was a woman in upstate New York, actually–to bring it home since I'm in New York. She was not Christian at the time. She had suffered pretty severe... abuse as a child and she was seeing a therapist and she had told the therapist, who happened to be a Greek Orthodox priest's wife, that she had this dream. She wasn't sure what it was, but she described the person and, you know, being in an environment where she saw the Northern lights and she went into this… she had Tundra tea, which is the kind of Yupik or like native Alaskan tea, but she didn't even know what it was. But she was describing these things and it just so happened…
Oh, and then she heard a voice. I don't know if I'm getting all the details of this right, but you can look it up and online, in Orthodox Alaska. But she heard a voice and a woman reached out to her and touched her stomach almost as if she was pregnant. And she felt this healing...in this encounter she had in the dream or the vision. And then she heard something she didn't understand, “Olga.”
And so she told her therapist about this and her therapist said, oh, you're probably thinking of St. Olga who was a princess in Kyiv in Ukraine. And she looked at the icon and she was like, that's not who it is. That's not the woman. But that therapist had read this book, Orthodox Alaska, that father Michael Oleska had written, that mentions an account of Matushka Olga. And so she thought of that and mentioned it, and that was who this woman had seen. She confirmed it through some photographs and she could point in a group photo to like, oh, this one is, you know, Blessed Olga. So that's kind of how that was an important story or letter that was in this documentation, to say like, Blessed Olga is still healing women through these spiritual experiences that people are still having after her death.
AF: I think that that's an amazing story and a really fascinating one when we think about… you know, one of the things that I have been wanting to think about in this podcast series is how a woman's story gets told and also how a woman's story gets lost. And here we're talking about an almost contemporary woman who we really have an opportunity to remember and remember well. And in that story that you just told, we see photographs. We connect with her through some contemporary means that we don't have for more ancient women or for women from other periods.
But I wonder, as you reflected on the story of Matushka Olga, what does it mean to you to remember her well? And where do you see the pitfalls or the dangers in trying to hold on to this memory and also, as you've described, this kind of living presence that continues?
MS: Yeah, those are such good questions. I think that things that we should remember her for are a little of what I was saying before of this really challenging idea of humility and what does it mean to be humble today as women, as Christian women in a context where there are a lot of harmful things that are happening to women and women in the church. And so, we have to somehow have humility and also wisdom to know like when to be quiet and when to speak up and what to say and what to do and how to act, how to have kindness and compassion and understanding.
But also have this humility that, in our culture, and I think especially my generation, I don't know, it's just such a challenging idea because it's seen as weakness, I think. A lot of times to be humble is kind of like weak. And as women we wanna be strong and we wanna be like champions of causes that are important. And I think it's a challenging idea to understand how to have that humble piety that's also a strength.
So that's what I think about and I don't really have the answer, but I think part of it is that she was a good listener. And that we have to somehow let go of our desire to talk about ourselves and listen to the person that's in front of us and listen more and kind of lean into like what are other people's needs and trying to be aware of other people's emotional needs and spiritual needs and just be curious about that and try to understand other people more. Because it seems she was very good at that. And, you know, she found ways to be kind and have these acts of service for other people. And she wasn't looking for attention or appreciation for it. She was just doing it so naturally. So those are things I think about. =11ptAnd I think some of the dangers are, well, first of all, this is a really ugly one, but I think some of the dangers are possibly thinking that an abusive marriage is okay. There's no proof whatsoever that she was in an abusive marriage. But we don't know the details. But I think that there is an element of her story that she was this pious woman who prayed for her husband to increase his piety, and then he became a priest. And I think that in the wrong wording or understanding, that could be twisted. And like, people should know that abuse is never okay and you should never stay in a partnership like that.
And I think another pitfall is perhaps thinking that healing from... abuse can be quick and immediate. Of course, maybe for some people that's true. That is part of the story of the woman in upstate New York, and we don't know her name; she wants to stay anonymous. But you know, I think it's probably an educated guess that she still wrestles with spiritual and emotional wounds from... abuse because that is the nature of... abuse.
And I think it's amazing to have this patron of... abuse through Blessed Olga. Or, you know, soon we can call her St. Olga. But, I think we should be careful to think that therapy has no place because therapy does have a place. And in fact, the woman who made Blessed Olga more famous in our lower 48 states, she was seeing a therapist when she encountered Blessed Olga in her vision and experienced that healing presence.
And so I think that's important to remember. Like, all of us hope and pray for miracles probably, but as we know, it's a mystery of when our suffering is taken away from us and when we seem to be continually in that place of suffering, and, and that's something that no one has a clear answer for, but that's our reality
AF: What about ways that we might misunderstand her Alaskan context? Are there things that, like, for example, from where I'm sitting, would be really hard for me to see and understand as I attempt to, in my imagination, place this woman in her own context? What am I gonna, what am I gonna miss?
MS: Well, I think, I mean, it's hard for me to imagine because I didn't live, you know, how she grew up. But we know that it's such a different world than the one we're living in. I mean, she was very connected with nature, for example. The village where she's from, even today, I think it's about 800 people. They do not have a restaurant; they don't have a hotel. We know she probably grew up, you know, just spending lots of time around friends and family and in these community centers that they have where they learn, together, you know, how to tan leather, how to sew, how to weave baskets. And men are learning other things, you know, and they did have like kind of segregated gender roles.
And so it's a different world that she was from and, you know, I mean, just the fact that she birthed 13 babies. That's a different world than most of us are living from. So I think with every saint, you know, it's not that we should necessarily be trying to do exactly what that saint was doing. It's more that she did what she could. She lived her best life, it seems, in the context that she was born into.
And I think that's the most important point that, you know, anyone can be a saint, is what the church teaches. If you are cultivating your holiness in your everyday life, and God calls us each to different things in different lives, and I see her life as giving us hope and inspiration that… you know, there's all this pressure I feel in our particular culture and for, like, young working professionals like myself to be amazing, to be ambitious, to like crush these goals and like be important and do something really important. And with social media, it's like, you know, the more followers you have, the more influence you have. And it's like, you kind of feel like if you're a normal person with not that many followers with a not exciting job, like maybe you're not making any impact at all. You kind of feel like you're less than sometimes. Or you're not, like, somehow worthy. And that's just not true.
And her story really shows that. I mean, she was, she was humble, quiet mother, grandmother, midwife, sewer, and, now, you know, she's going to be remembered, probably for eternity, for those very simple acts.
AF: =Yeah it kind of changes the whole idea of what it would mean to be important, doesn't it. Like it completely just turns it on its head.
And the other thing I hear in that story as you've told it, is it's just how easy it would be, for me anyway, to miss the value and the importance of community, of these people that she lived her whole life with and around, whose stories she heard in intimate contexts, who she lived alongside while they lived these stories. I mean, it wasn't like these were stories of strangers that she heard, you know, in a strange place. These were her neighbors, her closest associates. It seems like remembering that communal context in which this took place would be vital.
Because if I look around in my own community, I'm like, these are the people who are shaping me. These are the people who are making me who I am, these people that I encounter on a daily or weekly basis. And so what you've described really is gonna bring that alive for me now. When I think of St. Olga, I'm gonna remember this social fabric that allowed her to live as she did. It's pretty cool.
MS: That's so true. Yeah, that's so true. And I think that's another way in which our world is so different because, you know, we're surrounded by materialism, by commercialization. We're siloed, you know, in most of our places, in the suburbs or in the city...I mean, it's so hard for us to cultivate that, and I think it's a goal and a challenge to understand how we can do that when we don't live in a native Alaskan village with the culture of sharing more of our possessions and taking care of other people's kids like they're your own. Like, how can we do that where we live?
AF: Yeah. And then that raises the other pitfall, which is that then we idealize her context, and then we make it as if she's going to… that her context was the ideal place for the production of a saint or something like that, where we then belittle or degrade our own context, which isn't right either, right? Like we can't pretend that she didn't live in poverty and struggle and where just even daily survival… or losing five children, I mean, just those things in and of themselves do not present an ideal context. So it's interesting the kinds of maneuvers you have to make in conceptualizing the life of a woman.
MS: =11ptYou could probably say that the fact that she did know grief so well was one of the ways that she could touch other people so, so well and heal other people as she's credited for. And today the Yupik people have a lot of historical trauma that they live with and that's very real. It manifests itself in very real things like continual poverty for some groups, drug addiction, alcoholism, there's still...abuse, you know, that hasn't gone away. So there are a lot of things, yeah, there are a lot of reasons not to idolize it. But to show that, you know, she was able to cultivate such such a healing presence in that environment.
AF: That’s beautiful. Do you think, I mean, in your exploration of St. Olga, of Matushka Olga, that you have a sense of what she might say to us, what she might offer to the audience for this podcast or to people like yourself or like me in our own contexts. What might she say? =11ptMS: =11ptYeah, well, I would hate to put words in her mouth…
AF: Especially because it sounds like words weren’t really her thing.Words weren't necessarily her thing, so...
MS: That's true. Yeah, that's true. We don't actually have a lot of conversation from her or direct translations written down. But there is an icon that's my favorite of her, and it comes from the woman in upstate New York who had this vision. And she said that Blessed Olga told her that God can create great beauty from complete desolation and I just love that. So I think that's what she's saying to us today.
AF: That’s beautiful. Thank you so much, Meagan. This is a fascinating exploration and I think eyeopening and challenging for many of us and I'm grateful for your time as you draw us into the life of this amazing person.
MS: Thank you so much. Yeah, I love her story. And in November, perhaps this year or next year, it's predicted that's when her final rite of glorification will happen, which will be her formal canonization, when her bones will be exhumed from the grave and she will become like relics in the church there and a pilgrimage destination."
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Vlun2Dh9UKjD0Poc0MIHaZQESNI0WVS7BNnRbhVfC-s/edit
