On Saturday
night (March 15, 2008) I got home from choir practice rather late, and stayed
up much later than normal as I had a very late dinner. I had finished eating
and was reading a book at about 11:30 p.m. when my roommate came in and asked
if I knew why the Cathedral bells were ringing. He had been in his bedroom,
which like mine faces the street and has a view of the Cathedral a block away.
In the kitchen, a couple of rooms away, I couldn't hear the bells, but I agreed
that it seemed strange for them to be ringing at that time of night. I went to
bed about a half hour later and thought nothing more about it. At church on
Sunday, we were all shocked to hear that Metropolitan Laurus, the leader of the
Russian Church Outside Russia, had reposed. Our priest got a telephone call
from a former parishioner just before the service started at 9.00 a.m.
We heard
about the chronology of events later on Sunday from the matushka of one of the
Cathedral priests, whose son is at the Seminary in NY. Sometime on Sunday
morning, when Metropolitan Laurus was noticed to be absent, someone went to his
house and discovered that he had reposed in his sleep. The police were called
etc., and people there began notifying the rest of the world. No one here in SF
knew about it until 8.00 or so on Sunday morning (11.00 a.m. New York time). As
the day went on, word about his death continued to spread. People here were
discussing going to the funeral in NY on Friday.
As we talked
about these events, the issue of the bells came up.! Others living near the
Cathedral had heard the bells ringing late on Saturday night. When they came to
the early service at the Cathedral (it starts at 7.30 a.m.), they found the
bells tied up in the normal way, which seemed puzzling. Someone had to have
gotten into the locked place where the bells are untied them, rung them (very
beautifully, my roommate said), and tied them back up, all in the darkness of
near midnight. No one in the group I was talking to, which included the wives
of both Cathedral priests, knew who could have done it. But then as we were
talking, we also learned that the NY police estimated that Metropolitan Laurus
had died between 2.00 and 3.00 a.m. That's between 11.00 p.m. and 12.00
midnight here. And then everything seemed obvious.
"I
attest that I had just begun reading the pre-communion canons when I heard
bells....Orthodox Bells...ringing with the melodies familiar to us at the
Cathedral. I first thought it was my CD player...when I checked, I found that
it was off. David was reading in the kitchen and I went and asked him if he was
playing music. We weren't. Others in the vicinity heard the bells at the same
time, roughly the time when Vladyka Metropolitan passed away."(Note the bells are behind two locked security gates and everyone who has access and who knows how to properly ring the bells have all sworn that they did not ring them).
His Eminence
Archbishop Kyrill told us that the bells had been rung by the angels.
Eternal Memory!
Written by Mr David Jepson,
Dean of the St John's Orthodox Academy in San Francisco
Source: https://www.stgeorgehermitage.org/modernmiracles.html
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