A penknife in the saint's hands and our excuses
We wait for ideal conditions for life and work. Saint Luke operated with locksmith pliers in a freezing hut and did not consider it a feat.
I don't feel like working today. I sat down at my desk, looked at the screen and thought: the wrong day. I didn't sleep enough, my head feels heavy, it's gray outside the window, and in general – I'm not in the mood. I'd prefer something simpler, shorter, just to "get by." A familiar situation: to really get down to business, we need the right morning to come, the right coffee to be brewed, the right number of likes to appear under yesterday's social media post. We wait for conditions like waiting for a favorable wind, and wonder why the ship stands still.
But then a memory of Saint Luke of Crimea's life path comes to mind. And I feel very ashamed of my laziness.
A knife, cotton wool and mercury chloride solution
Saint Luke is a professor of surgery, a doctor of medicine, and an archbishop. The winner of the Stalin Prize and three times exiled. A man capable of performing brain surgery with jeweler’s precision — yet history repeatedly replaced the operating theater with a peasant’s hut, and the scalpel with a simple pocketknife.
When I open his autobiography "I Came to Love Suffering," the first question that comes to mind is: why? Why did a man with such credentials and golden hands go to the rural backwoods.
– Your Grace, your classmates didn't understand your choice, did they?
– When I answered that I intended to be a zemstvo doctor, they said with wide-open eyes: "What, you are going to be a zemstvo doctor?! But you are a scholar by calling!" I was offended that they didn't understand me at all, because I studied medicine with the exclusive purpose of being a village, peasant doctor all my life, to help poor people.
Everything that follows begins with that choice. After it came the village of Verkhny Lyubazh in Kursk Province: a hospital with ten beds, epidemics of typhus and measles – and one day, a girl who ran into the school carrying a child in her arms, gasping for breath. He had choked on a lump of sugar. There was no scalpel. No tracheotomy tube. The schoolteacher whom the saint had asked to assist shut her eyes at the very first incision and ran away.
– Your Grace, what did you have at hand at that moment?
– I only had a penknife, some cotton wool and some mercury chloride solution. Nevertheless, I decided to perform a tracheotomy. And I did it. I inserted a goose feather into the cut throat instead of a tube. The child began to breathe.
Remembering this episode, I think not about courage – everyone will speak about that anyway. I think about the fact that he didn't wait. Before him lay a suffocating child, and in his pocket – a penknife. And this turned out to be enough to immediately save a life.
Pliers from a locksmith's workshop
Years passed. Priest Luke became a bishop, was arrested and exiled to Yeniseysk. It was 1924. In the entire district, there was one doctor and twenty-two paramedics, and here arrives an exiled hierarch who, incidentally, was also one of the best surgeons in the country. In Yeniseisk, Saint Luke restored the sight of three brothers born blind by performing a jewel-like operation on their congenital cataracts. But another episode strikes me even more. When the saint was heading into exile, in a village lay a man with osteomyelitis. His bone was rotting alive. And again the holy doctor came to the rescue.
– Your Grace, how did you operate without instruments?
– I asked them to find locksmith's pliers and with them, without any difficulty, extracted a huge sequestrum.
So simply, without any difficulty. This just doesn't fit in one's head!
He removed the dead bone with pliers from a locksmith's workshop and wrote about it as if it were something ordinary.
For him it was ordinary because the hands were the same: knowing anatomy as a musician knows his instrument, not from a book, but blindly, by finger memory. And these hands made no distinction whether they held a Vienna speculum or rusty pliers. Before him was a person in pain.
Huts with icy windows
The Chekists offered him a way out: defrock, renounce and get a chair in Moscow, real laboratories, ideal conditions. The bishop chose to remain a bishop and operate in the taiga. From Yeniseysk he was exiled to the village of Khaya, then to Turukhansk, then to the village of Plakhino – beyond the Arctic Circle. In Plakhino the window frames gaped with cracks through which snow blew in, and instead of a second pane there were flat slabs of ice frozen into the frame.
Soon he was sent back to Turukhansk for the following reason: a peasant who needed surgery badly died in the hospital. Without the exiled surgeon, there was no one to perform it. The local villagers came with pitchforks and axes to smash the village council, demanding that Bishop Luke be returned.
– Your Grace, didn't you become embittered? Didn't you break? You could have done incomparably more if they had simply not interfered with you.
– I came to love suffering, so amazingly purifying to the soul.
These words are from a letter to his son, from Krasnoyarsk. He came to love suffering. Not "endured," not "survived," not "accepted as inevitable" – loved!
There will be no ideal conditions
The Apostle Paul wrote: "And whatever you do, do it heartily, as to the Lord and not to men" (Col. 3:23). We read and nod because it's right. And then we go check our email and complain that the Internet is slow.
Saint Luke's entire life is an extended commentary on these words, written not with ink, but with a scalpel, and where there was no scalpel – with a penknife.
He did not wait for the right conditions. When a suffering person stood before him, the question of whether the proper instrument was available simply never arose. There was only one question: what can I do right now? And there was only one answer: everything within my power. With locksmith’s pliers, a woman’s hair instead of surgical thread, by the light of a kerosene lamp, in a hut where water froze in the buckets.
I return to my morning. To the heavy head, the grayness outside the window and the desire to do everything just to "get by." And I feel ashamed – the way one feels ashamed before a person who silently does his work beside you while you list the excuses why you can't get out of bed.
There's no need to wait for special conditions. There will be no ideal morning. There will be no right instrument. There will only be what there is: this day, these hands, and this knife in the pocket. And someone nearby who needs help – not when the stars align, but right now.
