Saintly Saturday: St. Alexis the Metropolitan of Moscow and Wonderworker of All Russia

I must admit, this is not the Feast of St. Alexis the Metropolitan of Moscow and Wonderworker of All Russia. HIs main feast is on February 12th and the Uncovering of his Relics is celebrated on May 20th (aka two weeks ago). I had been thinking of getting back into writing Saintly Saturdays because of St. Alexis, but life happened. So, today I will pretend I was on top of things and write a little about St. Alexis.

By a little, I really mean a little because there are tons of stories I could tell but don’t have the time or space for so I want to actually tell the story of how I met St. Alexis because not only is the experience ripe for inspiration with RPGs but it is an experience that you can have yourself.

I have spent a lot of time in hospitals the last several years having nothing to do but wait. So I searched far and wide for things that would not only pass the time, but do so in a way that would not sicken or depress me. One of the movies I found was call The Horde.



This is a Russian-made film based on an event that actually happened to St. Alexis when he personally went to placate The Horde, aka the Mongolian Empire. The film is gorgeous, haunting and fascinating. I particularly love two aspects of it:

• Unlike so much of the stuff being made for American screens both big and small it is sympathetic to a Christian world view.
• The narrative is written primarily from the perspective of the Mongolians. The crisis is theirs, not St. Alexis’. Their solution to the problem involves summoning the Sorcerer of Moscow.

While watching the movie, I didn’t realize it was a movie about an actual saint. It wasn’t until the movie was over that I went scrambling across the interwebs to find the life of St. Alexis and realized that this movie pulled a moment of his life to put on film. A rare thing and well worth your time.

From an RPG perspective, it paints the cleric as a sorcerer and presents an alien and frightening world that St. Alexis must enter. I might add, that despite the weirdness of the world presented, the fundamental humanity of it all is never lost. There a ton of ideas and images to be lifted from this movie that can translate wonderfully into an RPG world. For example, just the image of the painted faces of some of the Mongols. How cool would it be to integrate that kind of face painting into a fantasy culture?

So, see the movie. Encounter St. Alexis. Be inspired.