Схимонахиня Маргарита (Лахтионова)

For many years after the death of St. Seraphim, a story was preserved in Diveyevo about how, on the feast of the Nativity of the Mother of God, Father Seraphim said: “The time will come, and my orphans will pour into the Nativity gate like peas.” – What kind of gate will this be? – the sisters kept asking. In 1927, on our patronal holiday - the Nativity of the Virgin Mary, small vespers began at two o'clock. I was a bell ringer. I went up to the door in the bell tower - someone would grab me from above!.. The red hat is a policeman! "Stop!" – does not allow to open. “How do you say ‘stop’? It's already time for us! “You,” he says, “have time, but we don’t.” Within a week the monastery was closed. And we scattered in all directions. And it was raining!.. People are on us and the Lord is on us! The sisters remembered: “Father Seraphim, here comes the “Christmas Gate”! The authorities offered us: you can stay, but just don’t wear monastic clothes, be like other people. And in the workshop where we work, so that there are no icons, but put Lenin, no one agreed to this. We had one bishop secretly at that time. He said: “They’ll kick you out of the monastery, but take care of your monasticism.” The monastery turned out to be behind the walls of the monastery, behind the groove of St. Seraphim. The sisters settled in the area, gathered secretly for services, and did not abandon the rule of prayer. Occasionally, traveling priests, hieromonks, and even bishops served the Liturgy from home. This went on for ten years, until 1937. And in 1937 the “troika” showed up - a court to judge us. “Did you go to church?” - “We went.” “So they are tramps!” Some were given three years, others ten. Already during the transfer, one priest, also arrested, laughed: “Well, Father Seraphim brought a whole convoy of nuns!” When we were still living in Diveyevo around the monastery, Blessed Maria Ivanovna visited us. She died in front of me, I looked after her. Then we all asked her: “Mama, when will we go back to the monastery?” - “It will be, there will be a monastery for you, the mother-treasurer and I (and the mother-treasurer had already been deceased for five years by that time) will begin to call you to the monastery. Only you will be referred to not by names, but by numbers. “Here you are,” he says, “Frosya, they will call you “three hundred thirty-eight.” So she said: “We will call you with the treasurer: “Three hundred thirty-eight!” I remembered this: And when they took me to prison, they gave me this number. Here's a monastery for you! There were all kinds of guards, some good ones. They took us to Tashkent in carriages. It’s winter, and the guard is upstairs, he’s cold. As soon as the train starts moving, it knocks for us: “Sing ‘lady’.” And what kind of “lady”? We sang “Bless the Lord, my soul,” during the all-night vigil. And in Tashkent others met us. There was a “general inspection”. Everything was filmed there. And when they took off the cross, it felt as if the Lord Himself was crucified before you... How could we do without the cross? We spun on Uzbek spinning wheels, and they have wooden forks, just cut a little and there will be a cross. We made such crosses. And when they went to the bathhouse, they immediately reported to the boss: the nuns were wearing crosses again. But then they left us and didn’t take pictures. I don’t know about people, but the nuns thought so: all this God’s permission is for the sins of the people and the time has come to endure. The monastery existed in the camp until the end of the forties. The deadlines ended, and the sisters gradually gathered around the monastery again. Some got a job on a collective farm, some in Diveevo, which became a regional center. Khrushchev's persecutions began. Gathering together to pray has become completely dangerous. But the Lord did not leave: just at that time the last great Diveyevo blessed Anna Bobkova lived in the city. Old nuns were dying. New ones took their place. Diveyevo’s prayerful life did not stop for a day all these years. In the end, everything returned to normal, to a community similar to the community of the original Mother Alexandra: in the same way, sisters seeking monasticism gather in Diveevo for a joint ascetic life. By the way, another of the prophecies of St. Seraphim about Diveyevo came true. He forbade the sisters to call the Kazan church - the one that was still under him - a parish, although during the life of the reverend, and until its closure in 1927, this church, unlike the monastic ones, was precisely a parish. Father said that this church would be a monastery, and the secular one, also Kazan, would be in another place. And so it happened. In 1988, the Diveyevo executive committee allocated a house for the construction of the church directly above the source of the Kazan Mother of God. The new church was consecrated, of course, in honor of this icon on April 22, Lazarus Saturday, 1989. “Don’t bother, and don’t search, and don’t ask for a monastery,” said St. Seraphim to the first Diveyevo sisters, “the time will come, without any hassle they will order you to become a monastery, then don’t refuse.” This happened this time too. The chairman of the executive committee met the elder's assistant on the street and unexpectedly told the community to prepare to receive the monastery's Trinity Cathedral. She ran to the headman and shouted from the threshold: “Katerina, they gave away the church!” There are now two functioning churches in Diveyevo. On April 30, 1990, on the Praise of the Mother of God, with a huge crowd of pilgrims from all over Rus', Archbishop Nicholas of Nizhny Novgorod and Arzamas consecrated the Trinity Cathedral, and later, on the day of St. Seraphim, August 1, the chapel of Seraphim and the icon of the Mother of God “Tenderness” were consecrated. The Seraphim-Diveevo Monastery is being revived.