Rafail Ogorodnikov Biography

The first athlete among high school students, in addition to cycling, was also fond of car races, participated in competitions. He carried the fascination with speed through his whole life. After graduating from 9 classes, he worked at the Chistopol factory Tokar, then went into the army and heroically served all three years by a border guard on the island of Damansky in the midst of a bloody conflict with China.

He entered the Moscow Theological Seminary, but was not accepted on that basis purely formal that he was not officially expelled from the ranks of the Komsomol. In the same year, the governor of the Pskov-Pechersky Monastery Archimandrite Alipius was admitted to the fraternity. In the year, Metropolitan of Pskov and Porkhovsky John Razumov was ordained in the rank of hierodeacon, and a year later in Hieromonk.

He became the spiritual child of Archimandrite John the Peasant. Father Raphael was repeatedly interrogated by the KGB organs in the case of his brother Alexander Ogorodnikov, and for refusing to testify in the year expelled from the monastery. At one time he had no arrival and practically wandered around the country, which did not prevent him from continuing the service wherever the opportunity fell out.

Since the year he served in the church of John the Baptist of the city of Porhov, the Pskov region. I always walked in a cassock. Bulat Okudzhava gave him a car, and he came on it to small towns, where there were no temples: the wife of Bulat Shalvovich Olga was one of the spiritual children of Rafail's father. Later, having sold a foreign tape recorder that his brother gave him before the next arrest, he bought a car of Zaporozhets brand for his earned money.

He had a lot of spiritual children among the Moscow intelligentsia, and among hippies, and among workers and employees. As the archimandrite of Metropolitan Tikhon Shevkunov wrote about him in the book “The Non -Saints”: “What was the secret of such an unusual impact of Rafail's hearts in the hearts of people? What did he do in addition to the usual church priest on holidays and Sundays?

It is not difficult to answer this question. Those who were familiar with him will say that Father Raphael was mainly engaged only in drinking tea. With everyone who came to him. And that's it. Although no! Now everything is really! From the point of view of the outside world, it was a real loafer. Some called it that. But, apparently, the father of Rafail had some special agreement with the Lord God.

Since everyone with whom he drank tea became Orthodox Christians. All without exception! From a fierce atheist or managed to be completely disappointed in the church life of the intellectual to a focused criminal. I don’t know a single person who, having met Father Rafail, after that would not have been revived in the most decisive way to spiritual life.

” Father Raphael foresaw an imminent death. A year before everything happened, he hung a burial cover over his bed. And since then he has become somehow more serious, silent. Many noticed this. Although the stream of people in his house in Porkhov, where he served the last three years, not only did not decrease, but increased markedly. There is such a law in spiritual life: a monk as, in principle, and any other Christian in truth!

In no case. It does not matter what: scholarship, bishop, health, some material thing will come, if there is the will of God. Father Rafail, of course, knew this very well. He rushed on his black "Zaporozhets" on the Pskov roads with such a rapture that he probably experienced some special feeling of freedom. Father John the Kentankin, meeting him, warned each time: “Be careful!

Do not get carried away with your car! In the early morning of November 18, he got into the car of his dreams. He rushed to his parish and crashed by four hundred and fifteenth kilometer of the Leningrad highway near Novgorod.

Rafail's father was buried, as expected, after three days. There was a day of his birthday - the holiday of the Archangel of Michael and all angels and archangels. But I want to cry in silence and go out into the world with bright eyes. Those who rushed along the earth with lightning, he is clothed under heaven.