In my unworthiness, please allow me to share a passage with you from, “Beginning to Pray,” by Metropolitan Anthony Bloom: “In the years of the [Russian] Civil War when the opposing armies were contending for power, conquering and losing ground in the course of three years, a small town fell into the hands of the Red army which had been held by the remnants of the Imperial troops. A woman found herself there with her two small children, four and five years of age, in danger of death because her husband belonged to the opposite camp. She hid in an abandoned house hoping that the time would come when she would be able to escape.
“One evening a young woman of her own age, in the early twenties, knocked at the door and asked her whether she was so-and-so.When the mother said she was, the young woman warned her that she had been discovered and would be fetched that very night in order to be shot.The young woman added, ‘You must escape at once.’
“The mother looked at the children and said, ‘How could I?’
