Part of the Anthropomorphic Writing Series
The Volorsky family has been making this trip for seventeen years.
Brighton Beach to the Upper East Side of Manhattan: one train, the Q, forty-five minutes if you catch it right. Boris and Larissa made it with two infants the first time. They have made it every Sunday since, through eight children, through every combination of weather and school schedules and the particular logistical complexity of moving a large family across a borough on a Sunday morning. The older kids — Dimitri and Vladimir, twenty-five now; Eugeni, Arseny, Ilariy at twenty-four — were children the first time they made this trip. They are adults now, with jobs and girlfriends and opinions of their own about everything including which subway car to board, and they still make it every Sunday. Natasha at twenty. Alisa at eighteen. Sergei, thirteen, the youngest, who has been making this journey since before he was old enough to understand where he was going.
The destination is St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Cathedral, at 15 East 97th Street in Manhattan. It is theirs. Not in any technical sense — it belongs to the Church, to the parish, to the congregation of people who have been coming here since the building was completed in 1902. It is theirs in the sense that matters more than any deed: they chose it, they have kept choosing it for seventeen years, and at this point the choice is past explaining. It is simply where they go.
Boris is the last one through the door of the apartment. He always is.
The Building
The first thing you see, coming up from the 96th Street station and turning west toward Fifth Avenue, is the building itself — and it is not what you expect to find between the tall apartment blocks of the Upper East Side. The Messenger, the Russian Orthodox journal that covered the Cathedral's consecration in 1902, described it as "a ray of sun on a cloudy day," which is exactly right and exactly why the phrase has been quoted ever since.
St. Nicholas Cathedral is Moscow Baroque — which is to say it is an argument, made in stone and brick and majolica and gilded copper, for a certain understanding of beauty. The facade is gray stone, carved finely, wrapped in garlands of colored brick and terra-cotta and majolica in hues that have no exact parallel in American architecture. There is a blue and gold diamond-patterned band across the facade at the roof line. There are pendant arches over the main entrance, with cherubim heads in the spandrels — the small angels that appear in the stonework above the doorway, white against blue and gold, watching everyone who walks in. The roof is green slate. Rising from the building are five cupolas, each crowned by a gilded cross, visible from the street against whatever sky the morning has decided on.
The building was designed by John Bergesen, a New York architect of Russian origin, and the cornerstone was laid on May 22, 1901 — the Feast of the Translation of the Relics of St. Nicholas, a date chosen deliberately. The building fund was seeded by Czar Nicholas II. The first consecration ceremony was celebrated by Bishop Tikhon, who would later become Patriarch of Moscow and is now venerated as a saint. The Cathedral was elevated to its current status in December 1903. It has been a New York City landmark since 1973.
The sanctuary seats nine hundred people.
Inside: the iconostasis fills the front of the nave, the great screen of icons that stands between the congregation and the sanctuary where the altar is. At the center of the iconostasis are the Royal Doors — and above them, hanging in a place of honor, is the Pochaev Icon of the Mother of God, a gift from Patriarch Saint Tikhon to the parish. On the back of the icon, in Russian: In blessing to the Russian Orthodox people of Brooklyn.
The Volorsky family has a pew. The same pew, seventeen years. Not assigned — assigned pews are not an Orthodox custom — but theirs in the way that anything becomes yours over enough Sundays of showing up.
The pew fits them. This is not a coincidence and it is not a recent adjustment. The pews at St. Nicholas were built to fit whoever walked in, because whoever has walked in through those doors since 1902 has included every size of person the world contains, and a house of God cannot very well turn away a person because the bench isn't the right width. The hymnals in the rack in front of them — in three sizes, same as in every pew, same as they have always been — say the same thing in a smaller register: the book is the right size for the person holding it. Everyone in this room is here on the same terms. The building was built to say that, and it has been saying it without interruption for more than a century.
The Liturgy
The Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom runs ninety minutes at St. Nicholas on a regular Sunday — on the shorter end for a Russian Orthodox parish, because the rector moves at a considered pace and the choir has been together long enough to know where it is going.
There is no organ. There is no piano, no guitar, no instrument of any kind. In Orthodox worship there are only voices — the voices of the clergy, chanting their parts; the voices of the congregation, making their responses; and the voices of the choir, which is where the acoustic mathematics of a nine-species world becomes something else entirely.
A multi-species choir singing Byzantine chant sounds, if you have not heard it before, like a demonstration of what music is actually for. A Leonite bass does not simply hold the low note — it holds it at a frequency that you feel in your chest before you hear it with your ears, a physical fact that the entire building organizes itself around. Below the melody and above the bass, the middle voices: the Ursinian harmony, warm in the way Ursinian voices are always warm, carrying the chord with a fullness that Ursinians produce without apparent effort. The Lupenite tenors in the upper-middle register, clear and steady. And at the top of all of it, the Vulpen sopranos, in a register above what most species can reach, giving the whole structure its brightness.
Sergei sings the Lupenite tenor line. He has been singing it since he was old enough to stand in the choir loft with the older members. By eighth grade he knows his part the way he knows the trip on the Q: so completely that it no longer requires thought. It is simply what his voice does on Sunday mornings.
The Cherubic Hymn comes during the Great Entrance, the procession in which the priest and deacon carry the prepared gifts through the nave. The text invites the congregation to set aside all earthly cares — to put down the concerns of the week and be present for what is happening in the room. A multi-species choir singing this text makes the invitation feel accurate. The sound fills the full range of what human voices can produce in this world, and the fullness of it carries the argument more directly than any commentary could. You are invited to set aside your earthly cares. The music gives you something to put in their place.
The deacon moves through the nave with the censer during the censing, the incense rising from the thurible in the traditional pattern. He adjusts without thought for the height of each person he passes — this is not a special accommodation, it is simply how you cense a congregation, and he has been doing it long enough that the adjustment is invisible even to himself. Several of the older Volorsky boys, Vladimir especially at just over seven feet, require a somewhat longer arc than the deacon gives most of the nave. The deacon gives it without comment.
The Liturgy of the Catechumens concludes with the traditional dismissal. The Liturgy of the Faithful follows. At the end of the service, the priest distributes antidoron — blessed bread, offered to all who come forward — and after seventeen years, he knows his congregation. He knows the Volorsky children by name, from oldest to youngest. He has known Boris his whole adult life: they came from the same Moscow congregation, and when Boris and Larissa came to New York, the parish that was already theirs in spirit simply transferred itself to this address.
The priest gives Sergei his antidoron with the particular look that long-acquainted priests give to children they have watched grow up. Sergei receives it with the particular combination of awareness and diffidence that thirteen-year-old boys manage when they know they are being regarded.
Why the Church Got There First
It would be easy to look at the three sizes of hymnals in every pew and conclude that the Church had made a practical accommodation — that at some point someone reviewed the needs of a multi-species congregation and arranged for the appropriate sizes to be ordered. This is not what happened.
The Imago Dei is the Church's founding premise, not a recent addition to it. The Church has held, from the beginning, that every person who walks through its doors is made in the image of God — not metaphorically, not in a qualified sense, but as a statement of ontological fact about what a person is. This claim has consequences, and one of them is architectural.
You cannot build a section of the church for Small Grade people and a different section for Giant Grade people without making a statement about those people that contradicts the premise you built the church on. A "Vulpen side" and a "Leonite side" is not a seating arrangement — it is a theological position, and it is not one the Church can hold without abandoning the thing it has always said. So it never held it. The three sizes of hymnals were ordered because the building that gathers the image of God was always going to need to fit the image of God in all the forms it arrives in. This is not a recent position. It predates any modern conversation about accommodation or inclusion by the entire length of the Church's history.
The Church got there first — not because it was ahead of its time, but because its own doctrine gave it no other option.
Other institutions arrived at similar conclusions through other routes: architectural review, policy change, the slow pressure of a world that had finally become impossible to build for only some of its people. They arrived where the Church had been from the beginning. The pews at St. Nicholas were built wide in 1901. The hymnals have come in three sizes since before anyone was alive who could remember them being otherwise.
The three sizes of hymnals are a theological statement. They say: everyone in this room is here on the same terms. The building has been saying it for over a century. It does not need to say it again. It simply keeps being true.
The Coffee Hour
After the final blessing, the congregation files out of the nave and into the parish hall.
Dimitri has organized the coffee hour. Dimitri organizes it every week, with the precise, slightly bossy efficiency that he brings to everything he does at work and home and, apparently, in the parish hall. The tables are correct. The urns are full. At the end of the refreshment table, the cups: three sizes, stacked in their respective columns, same configuration every Sunday. The food reflects who brought what, which at St. Nicholas means more food than can plausibly be consumed, from more national traditions than most restaurants manage, because this is a Russian Orthodox parish in New York and the people in it cook in approximately six different directions and all of them are generous.
Vera — Veronica, formally, though no one calls her that — is there, Dimitri's girlfriend, daughter of a Moscow family that Boris and Larissa have known since before the immigration. Tracy is also there, Vladimir's girlfriend and Vera's cousin, which means that the two eldest Volorsky sons are at Sunday Liturgy alongside their parents and the two women who are, in some sense, Boris's own doing: he introduced them. He knows both families from Moscow. He made the connections with the same deliberate precision he brings to everything, and now he attends coffee hour every Sunday in the company of two women whose continued presence in his sons' lives he considers both a personal success and a lingering obligation not yet fulfilled. Boris has thoughts about the pace at which this situation is developing toward its logical conclusion, which he has expressed. Vladimir has responded to Boris's thoughts in the manner for which Vladimir is known, which is to say directly, briefly, and with a word count that skews heavily toward one particular word, which has not changed Boris's thoughts.
Feodore Darvorsy finds Boris near the urns. He always does. They are colleagues at Brooklyn College through the week — Feodore as security liaison, Boris as the biology chair — but at St. Nicholas they are something else. Parishioners. The word is technically correct and somehow insufficient. They have been in this building together for a long time, and what accumulates over a long time in the same building is not easily named. Feodore's wife Daria and Larissa are already in conversation near the far table; they serve on the Women's Committee together, which means they have parish business to discuss, which means the conversation will last until well after the urns have been refilled.
Iggy Darvorsy and Sergei Volorsky are in the parish hall at the same time. This is, at this point, unremarkable. What was unremarkable before the corridor incident has remained unremarkable afterward, which is what happens when a friendship settles in and stops requiring maintenance — it simply continues. Iggy still goes up on his tiptoes when something in the room catches his interest. Sergei has long since stopped commenting on it.
The Organic Plushie Effect runs in the parish hall the way it runs everywhere: unedited, unselfconscious, in a room full of people who have known each other long enough to stop performing. A Giant Grade parishioner near the door has drifted, without noticing it, into a position where he is making room for the people moving around him. Two Small Grade children who are not his grandchildren are near him for no particular reason. The room is comfortable in the way a room is comfortable when the people in it have been here together for a long time — when the configuration of who stands near whom is not random but is not quite chosen either, just the shape of all these Sundays accumulated.
What the Parish Is
There is a way to describe what a parish is in functional terms: a worshipping community that gathers weekly in a shared physical space for corporate prayer and the sacraments. This description is accurate and almost entirely misses the point.
What a parish is, experientially, is the place where you see the same people every week for the rest of your life.
Work gives you colleagues — people assembled around you by organizational decisions and job postings and the geography of your industry. School gives you classmates, assembled by birth year and school district. The neighborhood gives you neighbors, assembled by lease and proximity. All of these are relationships that arrived without your having chosen them. They can become genuine and lasting. But the category they occupy is given.
The parish is different. You go to the parish because you choose to go. You keep going because you keep choosing to go. The people who are also there — who keep also choosing to go, week after week, year after year — become something that has no precise name. They are not family, though after enough years they are coded something like it. They are not colleagues. They are not neighbors exactly, even when they live nearby. They are parishioners, which sounds administrative and contains everything.
Feodore Darvorsy has known Boris Volorsky at the college for years. Their professional relationship is collegial and genuine. At St. Nicholas it is something else — a relationship that existed before the professional one, that will outlast whatever happens in either of their careers, that contains the knowledge that comes only from seventeen years of the same building: the way a person looks on a Sunday when the week behind them was a hard one, the way they sing, the way they move through the coffee hour, the way their children have grown. You do not know someone that way from the college hallway. You know them that way from the parish hall.
The priest who served Boris's congregation in Moscow now serves this one in Manhattan. He has known Boris his whole adult life. He has known Larissa since the marriage. He has known each of the children since their births and baptisms, watched them through catechumen instruction, seen them received into the Church. He has known them all. At St. Nicholas Cathedral, at the end of the service, when he gives Sergei his antidoron — the blessed bread, the small piece of the loaf for the smallest member of the Volorsky family — he gives it with the weight of seventeen years of Sundays behind it.
This is what a parish is. The continuity of a life, witnessed weekly, by people who chose to be there.
A Note on the Books
Every denomination manages the practical details the same way: three sizes of hymnals, three sizes of missals, three sizes of whatever the tradition uses in the pew. This is not denominational policy. It is simply what a worship space is — a space built for whoever worships, in the sizes they actually come in — and the answer has never varied.
Marcelo Garcia's Roman Catholic parish has three sizes of missals. The Protestant congregation where another family in this world worships has three sizes of hymnals. The liturgy differs. The theology differs, in some cases significantly. The sizes do not differ, because sizing is not a theological question. It is an architectural one, and the architecture gives the same answer everywhere: the book fits the hand that holds it. The pew fits the person who sits in it. The room was built for whoever walks through the door.
At St. Nicholas Cathedral, this has been true since 1901, when the cornerstone was laid on the feast day of the saint whose name the building carries, with a gilded cross being set into the gray stone by the congregation that would spend the next century filling the pews that were built, from the beginning, to fit all of them.
On the thousandth Sunday, as on the first, the Volorsky family files in from the 96th Street station, crosses Fifth Avenue, and walks through the door under the cherubim in the spandrels and the blue and gold of the diamond band and the five gilded crosses on the five cupolas above.
The pew is there. The hymnal is the right size. The service begins.
The building is still saying what it has always been saying.
— Eric Flegal
Part of the Anthropomorphic Writing Series
What does the multi-species parish look like in your world? Tell me in the comments.
