Episode Description
In a Soviet interrogation room in the early 1950s, a priest walked in to face the man who had betrayed him --- and threw his arms around him. Father John Krestiankin had survived the Gulag, had his fingers broken one by one, and emerged from five years in the labor camps entirely himself. This episode follows his life from a traditional Orthodox childhood in Oryol through Stalin's repressions to the ancient Pskov Caves Monastery, where he became one of the most beloved spiritual elders of twentieth-century Russia. But the deeper story is about what his life means for all of us standing downstream of histories we did not choose --- and what it looks like to build a future together out of hope and fellowship rather than anger and guilt.