Half the Congregation: The Volorskys, St. Nicholas Cathedral, and the Lupenite at Prayer

Part of the Anthropomorphic Writing Series

On Sunday morning, the Volorsky family arrives at St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Brooklyn the way they arrive everywhere — all of them, at once, filling the doorway in a way that makes the doorway briefly seem undersized.

Boris leads. He is wearing a suit. Behind him comes Larissa, and behind her come the sons: Dimitri, Vladimir, Eugeni, Arseny, and Ilariy, each of them in a suit — except for Ilariy, whose cross necklace is visible above a collar that is doing its best, and who has eyeliner on, and who is arguably the most theologically literate person in the building under the age of sixty. The family moves through the narthex with the easy familiarity of people who have been coming to the same place for a very long time, who know where they are going and have never once considered not going.

They take up a considerable portion of the pew.

Sergei, who is old enough to notice things like this, has been known to remark — with the particular affection of someone who grew up in a family that constitutes an event — that the Volorsky clan accounts for roughly half the congregation. He is not entirely joking.

The Structure That Fits

There is a reason the Apostolic traditions — Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, the ancient churches in their various forms — feel different to Lupenites than they do to some other species. Not because every Lupenite is Orthodox, or because a Lupenite who is Protestant is doing something wrong, or because faith follows species the way ethnicity follows geography. That is not how it works. The Volorskys are Russian Orthodox because they are Russian, the same way that an Italian Lupenite family might be Traditional Catholic and an Ethiopian Lupenite family might belong to the ancient Coptic tradition. The faith travels with the culture. It does not stamp itself onto the coat.

But there is still something worth examining in why a Lupenite who finds themselves inside an Apostolic tradition tends to settle into it the way a person settles into a chair built for their dimensions. The fit is not accidental.

The Apostolic churches are hierarchical at their foundation. There is a structure of legitimate authority that runs from God downward — through bishops and priests and deacons and into the gathered community — and the community's relationship to that structure is one of willing submission to something genuinely above it. Not servile submission, not the collapse of a broken will, but the free and chosen acknowledgment that some things are larger than oneself, and that placing oneself in right relation to those things is not a diminishment but a completion.

A Lupenite understands this at a level below words.

The pack has always required a structure of legitimate authority. The Alpha principle in a healthy Lupenite family is not domination — it is the organized direction of a collective toward something worth moving toward. What the pack instinct seeks, in its best and most redirected form, is not merely someone to follow but something worthy of following — a hierarchy that earns its position by pointing toward something real and true. The Apostolic church offers exactly that: a chain of authority that does not originate in the person at the top of it but passes through them from something infinitely larger. The priest is not the point. The priest is a window.

Lupenites, who have been navigating the difference between legitimate hierarchy and mere dominance for their entire civilizational history, tend to recognize that distinction with particular clarity.

There is also the matter of the gathered community itself. Orthodoxy is not a faith you practice alone. The Liturgy requires the Body — the assembled people, present in a specific place, doing the specific things together that have been done for seventeen centuries. The Divine Liturgy is not primarily an interior experience. It is a communal one: the physical gathering of the faithful in a space that has been set apart, the singing together, the prostrations, the shared fast, the common cup. The faith is embodied, communal, and located in a specific place that belongs to the people who gather there.

This is not foreign to a Lupenite. This is Tuesday.

A Lupenite family gathers. It has a place. It moves together through shared practices that reinforce the bonds between its members. The Orthodox parish is not the same as a Lupenite family — it would be wrong to collapse them into each other — but the instinct that makes a Lupenite thrive inside a family structure is the same instinct that makes a Lupenite feel, standing in the nave among the icons and the incense, that they are in exactly the kind of place they were built to inhabit.

Boris at Eighteen

Boris Volorsky was not always the man who leads his family through a doorway in a suit on Sunday morning.

He was born in Moscow in 1970 and raised in the faith the way Russian children of his generation were raised in the faith — present, accustomed, connected to something ancient that ran beneath the surface of ordinary life without demanding constant attention. He knew the prayers. He knew the smell of incense and the weight of liturgical Slavonic and the icons in his grandmother's apartment. The faith was in him the way the Russian language was in him: thoroughly, before he had words for it.

And then he started bodybuilding, and people began to see him.

What they saw was not Boris. What they saw was the size, the build, the particular physical presence that a young Lupenite at the height of his physical development projects when he decides to become very serious about his body. The attention that followed — the groupies, the social fame of someone who had become very good at being enormous and visibly muscular — produced a specific kind of loneliness that Boris would spend the rest of his life understanding more clearly with each passing year. He slept with women who wanted what he looked like. He found that the more of them there were, the more alone he became. The promiscuity was not the problem. It was the symptom: a man being seen as a body rather than a person, responding to that loneliness in the only language his circumstances were offering him.

He was eighteen when Larissa Sivy looked at him and saw Boris.

Larissa — whose silver fur gave her family their name, the Sivy, from the Russian word for silver — was the first person in a long time to look past the very impressive surface and see the man underneath it: the one who was shy, actually, and funny, and lonelier than anyone around him seemed to realize, and in need of something he hadn't been able to name. The loneliness ended. The cycle it had been producing ended with it. Boris and Larissa were married the same year they met, and Boris has been faithful to her in the decades since with the completeness of a man who understands, from specific personal experience, exactly what infidelity costs.

His faith deepened in the years that followed, and the reason it deepened is not complicated: Boris had lived, in concentrated form, the experience of what it costs to have your Imago Dei ignored. He knew what it felt like to be reduced to a body — to be wanted for everything except the part of him that was actually him. When the Church said that every person is made in the Image of God and is therefore irreducible to their appearance or their usefulness or their desirability, Boris did not receive this as a theological abstraction. He had already learned it the hard way. The faith gave language and structure to something he already knew in his bones.

He is not shy about his faith. He is also not aggressive with it. He simply carries it the way he carries everything: visibly, consistently, without performance. He goes to Mass as often as he can. He fasts. He is on the Men's Committee. He has been going to the same cathedral since he arrived in Brooklyn in 1996, and the priest who serves that parish is the same priest who served the Moscow congregation Boris attended as a boy — now older, still very much present, who greets Boris on Sunday mornings with the warmth of a man who has watched someone grow up and does not take that for granted.

What Boris Built

He has eight children.

The five older sons — Dimitri, Vladimir, and the triplets, Eugeni, Arseny, and Ilariy — are grown men now, and all of them go to church. Not occasionally. Regularly. Weekly at minimum, and several of them more often than that. Between the triplets and the youngest of the family is Natasha, twenty, and Alisa, eighteen — the two daughters, who are very much present in the pew and have their own place in the Volorsky religious life. All eight children attend. The focus here stays on the five older sons because their stories are the ones most fully developed; not because the daughters matter less, but because their chapter hasn't been written yet. They go in suits, or in the best version of dressed-up that the individual and the occasion permit. They go without being asked, because at some point in their upbringing it became the kind of thing that simply happens, like eating and sleeping, like movement toward a center of gravity that has always been there.

Each of them shows up differently.

Dimitri arrives the way he does everything: precisely. His suits are tailored to a degree that his brothers find excessive and that he finds simply correct. His hair is perfect. He is the one who has organized the coffee-and-doughnuts hour after the service — knowing which parishioners prefer what, ensuring the table is set and the coffee is hot, attending to the small logistics that most people never notice until they go wrong. Dimitri notices. Dimitri has always noticed. His is the faith of a man who loves order and has found that the Church, with its ancient rhythms and its attention to getting every detail of the Liturgy exactly right, is the most ordered thing in the world. His girlfriend — the daughter of a family Boris and Larissa knew back in Moscow, who happens to be the cousin of Vladimir's girlfriend, and who also happens to attend St. Nicholas Cathedral — has observed that watching Dimitri organize a coffee hour is the closest thing to a religious experience she has witnessed outside of the Liturgy itself.

Vladimir is a different matter entirely.

He is the most openly imperfect of the five sons by any conventional measure — aggressive, quick-tempered, profane in a way that his family has accepted as simply the condition of being near him. He swears more than anyone else in the family, by a considerable margin, with a preference for a particular word and all its grammatical relatives that recurs throughout his speech with the frequency and variety of a seasoned practitioner. He is open about the fact that he sleeps with his girlfriend. He smokes. He drinks. He is, in the summary of anyone who knew only these facts about him, not someone you would expect to pause before a meal and deliver a long, carefully considered, theologically informed prayer over the food — and then do the same thing on the sideline before Sergei's football team takes the field, in the capacity of a coach who has decided that his players are going out with a blessing whether they asked for one or not.

Vladimir also never leaves the house without a rosary in his pocket.

He doesn't know the difference between a rosary and prayer beads. He has never quite gotten around to learning the formal practice. What he knows is that the object is holy — that it is a sacramental, something that belongs to the Church and carries the weight of what the Church is — and that this means it deserves to be treated with respect. So he keeps it on his person, always, because he is going out into the world and he wants to carry something holy with him. The logic is simple enough to be almost childlike, and also more theologically coherent than it first appears.

When Sergei once complained about having to wear a suit to church — in the specific way that younger brothers complain about things older brothers have long since stopped questioning — it was Vladimir who answered him. "You know how we dress up when we visit Uncle Leo at the Imperial Palace? We do that to show respect for his office and his authority — because the Emperor deserves that. So when we go to God's house — how much more should we look good?" Sergei, who could not immediately find a counter-argument to this, put on the suit.

For readers who have followed this series: Leo Amerigo — the Leonite patriarch whose family Boris has known for years, whom the Volorsky sons have grown up calling Uncle Leo — is the Emperor of the United States. The Imperial Palace, where the family visits on occasion, is a building whose scale has been compared to the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. Vladimir has visited it enough times to find it normal. He still dresses up for it. And he understands, in the instinctive way that a Lupenite understands legitimate authority, exactly why.

Vladimir goes to Mass every Sunday. He often goes Friday or Saturday evening as well.

The triplets — Eugeni, Arseny, and Ilariy — divide the ministry of presence among them in ways that reflect who they are.

Eugeni is the one who shows up when something heavy needs to be moved or something broken needs to be fixed. He is a carpenter by trade, as are Arseny and Ilariy, and in a parish community there is always something that needs a carpenter, always a parishioner with a porch that has gone soft or a door that no longer closes right, and Eugeni's presence — three hundred and forty pounds of quiet helpfulness with a skill set and a willingness to use it — has become one of the reliable facts of the St. Nicholas community. He lifts things. He repairs things. He shows up. His faith is expressed almost entirely in his hands.

Arseny is quieter than his brothers, more introverted, given to mumbling in a way that can make him seem more distant than he is. What Arseny has is music. At any parish event where a piano is involved — youth gatherings, seasonal celebrations, the occasions that call for someone who actually knows what they're doing — Arseny is the one who gets asked, and the one who sits down at the instrument and plays with a fluency that catches people off guard until they've seen it enough times to expect it. His faith shows up where it always has: in the specific gift he offers when the occasion calls for it, without announcement.

And then there is Ilariy.

Before getting to him specifically, one more thing about all five of them together, because it is the thing that makes everything else make sense.

They go to Confession. Regularly, and often. The sins they bring to it are not mysteries — they are unmarried young men in relationships, and none of them have hidden that fact, and Boris has made his peace with nudging rather than commanding when it comes to the question of marriage, which he is doing with increasing frequency. The pattern, for each of them, runs roughly the same way. A choice gets made. And somewhere in the hours afterward comes a feeling that is hard to translate but that any practicing Christian will recognize immediately: aww, shit. The specific, non-agonized recognition that something wasn't right. Not a crisis. Not a collapse. Just honesty. They bring it to Confession. They receive absolution. They try again. And then, often enough, they fall again. And they come back.

There is no despair in this. There is no existential crisis, no tortured renegotiation with faith, no period of questioning whether the whole structure still applies to them. The fall happens, the recognition happens, the getting-up happens. This is the cycle — not as a failure of the spiritual life but as the actual shape of it, practiced honestly by people who understand they are not saints and have no illusions about becoming one by next Tuesday. Boris, who has his own history with falling and rising, did not raise sons who confuse struggling with failing. He raised sons who know that the family does not abandon one of its own for stumbling. You get back up. You try again. The family holds.

Ilariy

There is a running joke in the Volorsky family about Ilariy.

He is, by most outward measures, the last person you would expect to be the most theologically informed of five brothers. He looks like Larissa — the same face, the same silver fur, the same particular quality of being effortlessly beautiful in a way that generates opinions. He dresses with a flair that his brothers find endlessly amusing: the Hooters tank top, the eyeliner, the cross necklace worn with an outfit that is doing at least three things simultaneously. People who do not know him well sometimes form conclusions about him based on the sum of these data points, and those conclusions are usually wrong in at least two specific ways.

Ilariy is neither closeted nor particularly restrained. He is, in point of fact, the most sexually active of the five sons, a detail his brothers are aware of and will deploy at any available opportunity, and which he receives with the equanimity of a man who knows exactly who he is and finds the gap between his reputation and his reality more amusing than anything else. He keeps that part of his life private. His brothers interpret this as suspicious. It is actually just discretion.

What Ilariy also has — and this is the irony the family has learned to love — is a serious and sustained engagement with the theological tradition he was raised in. He has read things. He knows things. If a question about the faith comes up at the dinner table, the odds are good that Ilariy is the one who can actually answer it, which his brothers acknowledge with a combination of genuine respect and theatrical disbelief, because it seems impossible that this particular person has become the household authority on the subject.

He is no holier than his brothers. He would tell you so himself. He simply finds the faith interesting, which is perhaps its own kind of inheritance — not just the practice Boris passed down, but the curiosity to understand what the practice is for.

He is named after Saint Illarion. Dimitri was named after Dimitri Donskoy, the warrior-prince. Vladimir was named after Saint Vladimir the Great, who baptized the Kievan Rus. The saints their parents chose for them are not accidental. They are a kind of hope, expressed at the beginning of a life, about who a person might become.

The Habit of the Cross

One more thing worth noting, because it is easy to overlook and it carries more weight than it seems.

All five sons cross themselves. Not just at Mass, not just during prayer. Anywhere. Out of habit, out of reflex, out of something that has settled so deeply into the body that it no longer requires a decision. Before food. After a near miss in traffic. When they pass a church. When someone says something that lands wrong. The sign of the cross moves through the gesture before the thought has fully formed.

This is the embodied faith in practice — the Orthodox tradition's insistence that the body is not separate from the spiritual life but is part of it, that the physical gesture is not merely symbolic but is itself a form of prayer. The sons of Boris Volorsky have received this not from theology lectures but from repetition, from watching their father do the same thing, from doing it themselves until it became the kind of thing the body does on its own.

You could watch it and not notice it. Or you could watch it and recognize it for what it is: a species that is physical by nature expressing a faith that insists the physical is holy, in the smallest possible gesture, at irregular intervals, without any fuss at all.

The Parish That Holds Them

Boris's extended family — his siblings, their families, his parents in the years they were alive — has always come to the same church. The parish is not just where the Volorskys go. It is a place shaped by their presence and that shapes them in return: one of the coaches on Sergei's football team is Vladimir, one of the coaches on the school swim team is Eugeni or Arseny, Ilariy helps in the school office, Dimitri has organized approximately every coffee hour in the last several years to his exact specifications. The community reaches beyond the cathedral into the life of the neighborhood, and the family reaches through both.

Sergei's joke — that the Volorsky family accounts for half the congregation — contains the specific warmth of a joke that is also true. Not literally, but true in the way that matters: the family's presence shapes the character of that community in a way felt by everyone in it, and the community's presence shapes the family in return. The Lupenite family and the parish are not the same thing. It would be wrong to collapse them into each other. But they rhyme. They speak the same language about what it means to belong somewhere, to show up, to have a place where your people are and where the thing you are reaching toward is real.

The faith does not make the Volorsky sons simple. It does not resolve the complexity of who they are or transform them into men who have not snuck out a window or dropped a word they shouldn't have or done something that will require a conversation with their confessor. What it does is give the pack instinct — that driving need for structure, community, legitimate authority, and something worth protecting — an orientation that points past the pack itself toward something that will not disappoint.

Boris stands in the nave on Sunday morning, and his sons stand with him, and his extended family fills the pews around him, and the priest who has known him his whole life raises the chalice. The Lupenite in Boris — the one who has always needed a family, a hierarchy, a place to stand and be counted — settles into something it has been reaching toward since before it had words.

This is where the family ends, and what it was always pointing at begins.

— Eric Flegal

Part of the Anthropomorphic Writing Series