Paraskeva Matieshina

Holy Venerable Confessor Paraskeva Matieshina, a nun, was born on 28 October 1888 in the village of Peschanoe in the Kamenets-⁠Podolsk district of Podolia, into a pious peasant family, that of Feodor and Matrona Matieshin. She is venerated as a nun, a deaconess and a teacher of church singing to children, and as a confessor in the time of persecution.

Childhood and calling

The family spent its evenings reading Holy Scripture or lives of saints. At three, when she began to be taught fasting, she fell ill after asking for milk in Great Lent and understood that fasting is a serious matter; then she promised God never to drink milk in fasting periods. At about the same age her love of services and church singing appeared: after hearing the Alleluia sung in Lent she wept, and later sang it to her mother from memory. Her grandfather Ambrose taught her to read from the Bible. She loved above all the epistles of the apostles and the Gospel of John.

At eight her mother died, then her grandfather and a younger sister, and after her father she became the chief worker of the house. On the way to work they sang psalms. The wish for monastic life appeared early; her grandmother would not hear of it. A young man who wished to marry her learned from her that she meant to enter a monastery and went to Athos, where he became a monk. To prepare for hardships Paraskeva fasted much and even put splinters in her shoes. In the end her grandmother let her go.

In 1907, learning of a missionary monastery that took novices without a donation, she left home with a friend and, almost penniless, after many hardships, they reached the Transfiguration Monastery at Teolin, twenty-⁠five versts from Grodno station, where they were received as novices. Before entering a monastery she had asked God to show her where to go and had seen in a dream an icon of the Mother of God, shining, standing slantwise on the solea, wrapped in a blue ribbon with the inscription: In this monastery you will live. At Teolin she found nothing of the kind. After some years she set out for home and stopped, ill with exhaustion, at the Turkovichi Monastery in the Warsaw-⁠Kholm diocese, where there was a wonderworking icon of the Mother of God. When the icon was moved to the winter church and placed slantwise on the solea, Paraskeva recognized what she had seen in the dream. In 1912 she was accepted among the sisters of Turkovichi.

Dmitrov and Bishop Seraphim

In 1914 the monastery withdrew to Moscow, then to Dmitrov, and in 1918 returned to Turkovichi; Paraskeva stayed to send on the monastery's belongings, but the monastery ceased to exist and she stayed in Dmitrov, in rented rooms in the village of Podlipichye, serving at the church of the Kazan Icon. At a peasant's request she taught his daughter church singing, and the girls' choir grew to sixty members, in two choirs. She taught them also the Law of God and how to live as Christians. She seemed somewhat stern, but she loved them like her own daughters.

In 1920 she met Bishop Seraphim Zvezdinsky of Dmitrov and became his spiritual daughter. In 1921 he tonsured her a rasophore, without changing her name, and sent her to the Saviour-⁠Vlakherna Monastery. The faithful of Podlipichye asked for her back, to teach their children reading and singing, and on 25 July 1921 the bishop decided she be released from the monastery for missionary work while remaining among the sisters of Saviour-⁠Vlakherna. On 27 November 1921 she was consecrated deaconess, by the ancient rite, for service at the altar. In 1924 the OGPU summoned her and ordered her to stop her lessons, but she continued to care for the girls and lead the choir. In 1928 the Saviour-⁠Vlakherna Monastery was closed, but her life did not change. On Great Friday, 20 April 1929, she spent the night in prayer, reading the Our Father one hundred and fifty times as she had been blessed, and understood for the first time that she had been bought with a price.

Arrest and exile

On 27 May 1931 she was arrested. On 28 June the OGPU sentenced her to five years of exile in Kazakhstan. Before leaving she had a vision of the apostles Peter and Paul, who blessed her. In Alma-⁠Ata she worked as a cook for a team of exiles, who called her their sister for her care. She was then moved into the city, where she met Bishop Seraphim, exiled there in August 1932; for three months they prayed and took counsel together. Later she was moved to Barabinsk. She lived mostly on flat cakes made from flour ground from ears of grain gathered in the fields after harvest.

Return and last years

The exile ended in 1935. Weakened and ill, she settled in Astrakhan, then in Kirsanov in Tambov province, and her pupils called her back to Dmitrov. There the war and famine found her, she fell ill with a lung abscess and suffered much. Ready for death, one night she was visited a second time by the apostles Peter and Paul. Peter promised her recovery and, handing her the keys he held, said: With these keys you will still open the doors of the church at Podlipichye. From that day she began to recover. She went to Ukraine to relatives, then returned to Dmitrov, where she unlocked the church in the morning, read, sang and led her choir. She listened patiently to everyone who came to her and then gave an answer.

Later the illness returned: lung abscess, arthritis, boils. She lost her lodging in the city, moved to the village of Birlovo, was paralysed and became helpless, in great pain. She fell asleep in the Lord on 4 December 1953, on the feast of the Entry of the Mother of God into the Temple, and was buried in the cemetery of Dmitrov. She lived what she taught everyone: Be humble, like Christ the Saviour. On 11 September 2001 her relics were found, and on 30 September they were moved from the Boris and Gleb Monastery in Dmitrov to the Saviour-⁠Vlakherna convent at Dedenevo.

She is commemorated on 5 December, on 7 February (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church and on 5 September (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow, in the new style.