Read the famous | Chi Zijian: The light is in the moment of bowing its head

"People" Mao Dun Literature Award-winning writer Chi Zijian (Part 2)

The light was bowing its head for a moment

Text / Chi Zijian

There are as many churches in Russia as there are statues of figures everywhere on the streets. The statues are mostly great figures from all walks of life in the history of this nation. The marble, bronze, and plaster are all carved with the posture of the human body, and their sounds and smiles bloom like flowers in various materials. As for where the soul in this shell went, only God knows.

To the southeast of Moscow, there is a small city surrounded by forests and steppes——— Vladimir, and on the edge of the city there is a church with frescoes by the great Russian painter Andrei Rublev. Not many people visited the church, and I craned my neck to see the paintings left by Andrei Rublev on the vault. The same painting of Christ, his color is simple, ochre occupies most of the space, as if the old and old sunset light is diffuse. The figure stands upright like a knife, and its solemnity is unobstructed, which is the leader of religious murals.

The moment I retracted my gaze and bowed my head with emotion, I was struck by another picture: an old woman in a turban, quietly cleaning the candle oil that had condensed under the altar!

She was at least sixty years old, and her waist was rickety when she swept the candle oil, and her waist was still rickety when she straightened up, which showed that she had endured the vicissitudes and burdens of the years. Dressed in a gray-blue robe and a blue dark flower turban, she held a small shovel in one hand, a broom in the other, and a handful of candle oil at her feet, meticulously cleaning the candle oil. She looked like a devout believer, with a pale face, deep sunken eye sockets, two deep half-moon wrinkles on her cheeks, and a slight sip of her mouth, with a calm expression. Occasionally, tourists passed by in the church, and she never looked at it, but patiently and meticulously shoveled candle oil, and when they had gathered to a certain extent, she swept it into the shovel with a broom and poured it into the picket. She was so religious in her work that the tools in her hands did not make a piercing noise, probably afraid of disturbing God.

I stood quietly on the side of the old woman, looking at the altar, looking at her under the altar. At her age, she was still doing cleaning in the church, and her family was about poor. There is only one God, but there are countless worshippers, so there are countless wax torches on the altar. When they sow light, they also shed tears. The tears of candles that splashed down from the altar like butterflies finally condensed together and merged into one piece, moist as milk and transparent as amber, like the broken wings of an angel. What the old woman cleaned was both the voice of human prayer and the nectar of God's appeasement of the suffering on earth.

Such an old woman who swept candle oil made Vladimir's trip meaningful. Her image is not known to the world, and she will never be remembered and worshipped like the statues of celebrities standing on the streets of Moscow. But her image is deeply engraved in my heart! The statue engraved in the heart should not disappear easily, right?

I really like Dante's poems in Heaven in the Divine Comedy, which shine like stars in the final "The Last Illusion":

O magnanimous grace, because of you

I dare to look up to the eternal light for a long time,

Until my eyesight runs out on top of that!

The old woman who swept the candle oil may have seen this eternal light, so her labor was safe. And from her, I saw another eternal light:

The attainment of light is not in the moment of looking up, but in the moment of looking down!

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