The Fragrance of Holiness: Matushka Olga and the Grace That Enchants the World

Lately, it seems everywhere I look on Substack, there’s another picture of Matushka Olga, so I figured it might be time I chimed in considering that her life and profound love and holiness have affected me deeply—forcing me to reflect on many things, but here, particularly, on the nature of enchantment.

For those of you who have not yet heard about Matushka Olga, she was a Native Alaskan recently glorified and canonized in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Born in the Yupik village of Kwethluk on the banks of the Kuskokwim River in 1916, she is a rather contemporary saint. Like many saints, especially lay ones, she was known during her life mostly for her quiet meekness, and few would have guessed the true breadth of her sanctity.

It seems her charisms were kept hidden for the most part, except in her ministering to women she suspected were being abused in the village. She would pull aside the women she could tell were suffering from unspoken wounds and take them to the steam bath, where they could no longer hide the bruises. There, with everything hidden and yet out in the open, she offered healing and consolation with her words and powerful prayer.

Even then, these quiet works of bearing others’ burdens and self-sacrificial love remained largely hidden until after her repose in 1979. While the community had always revered her, the first clear miracle revealing the depth of her sanctity occurred only in the days immediately following her death. Although she passed during a season when travel was nearly impossible, the night after a memorial service was sung beside her body, a strong, warm southerly wind arose. It rapidly melted the November ice and snow, allowing Yup’ik neighbors to journey by boat to Kwethluk—an otherwise unthinkable trip at that time of year.

Other stories are told of miraculous events around that time, but the most extraordinary miracles happened well after her repose, often to people who had never known her, and even some who had never heard her name but had only seen a picture of her. One such story I’ll share here before offering a personal reflection. This story is told by a woman who suffered many years from severe sexual abuse she had experienced as a child:

One day I was deeply at prayer and awake. I had remembered an event that was very scary. My prayer began with my asking the Holy Theotokos for help and mercy. Gradually I was aware of standing in the woods, still feeling a little scared. Soon a gentle wave of tenderness began to sweep through the woods, followed by a fresh garden scent. I saw the Virgin Mary, dressed as she is in an icon, but more natural-looking and brighter, walking toward me. As she came closer, I was aware of someone walking behind her. She stepped aside and gestured to a short, wise-looking woman. I asked her, ‘Who are you?’ and the Virgin Mary answered, ‘St. Olga.’

St. Olga gestured for me to follow her. We walked a long way until there weren’t many trees. We came to a little hill that had a door cut into the side. She gestured for me to sit, and she went inside. After a little while, some smoke came out of the top of the hill. St. Olga came out with some herbal tea. We both sat in silence drinking our tea and feeling the warmth of the sun on our faces. I began to get a pain in my belly, and she led me inside. The door was so low I had to duck, like bowing in prayer.

Inside, the hill was dry, warm, and very quiet. The light was very soft, coming from a shallow bowl and from the open hole on top of the hill. Everything around me felt gentle, especially Mother Olga. The little hill house smelled like wild thyme and white pine warmed by the sun, with roses and violets mixed in. Mother Olga helped me onto a kind of platform bed, like a driftwood box filled with moss and grasses. It was soft and smelled like earth and sea. I was exhausted and lay back. St. Olga went over to the lamp and warmed something, which she rubbed on my belly. I looked five months pregnant (though I was not actually pregnant at that time). I started to labor. I was a little scared. Mother Olga climbed up beside me, gently holding my arm; she pretended to labor with me, showing me what to do and how to breathe. She still hadn’t said anything. She helped me push out something like afterbirth, which soaked into dried moss on the bed. I was very tired and crying a little from relief when it was over.

Up until this she hadn’t spoken, but her eyes spoke with great tenderness and understanding. We both got up and had some tea. As we were drinking it, Holy Mother Olga gradually became the light in the room. Her face looked like there was a strong light bulb or the sun shining under her skin. But I think the whole of her glowed. I was just so connected to her loving gaze that I didn’t pay much attention to anything else. It was the kind of loving gaze from a mother to an infant that connects and welcomes a baby to life. She seemed to pour tenderness into me through her eyes. This wasn’t scary even though, at that time, I didn’t know about people who literally shone with the love of God. (It made more sense after I read about St. Seraphim.) I know now that some very deep wounds were being healed at that time. She gave me

back my own life which had been stolen, a life that is now defined by the beauty and love of God for me, the restored work of His Hands.

After some time I felt like I was filled with wellness and a sense of quiet entered my soul,

as if my soul had been crying like a grief-stricken abandoned infant and now had finally been comforted. Even now as I write [...] the miracle of the peacefulness, and also the zest for life which wellness has brought, causes me to cry with joy and awe.

Only after this did Holy Mother Olga speak. She spoke about God and people who choose to do evil things. She said the people who hurt me thought they could make me carry their evil inside of me by rape. She was very firm when she said, 'That’s a lie. Only God can carry evil away. The only thing they could put inside you was the seed of life which is a creation of God and cannot pollute anyone’. I was never polluted. It just felt that way because of the evil intentions of the people near me. What I had held inside me was the pain, terror, shame, and helplessness I felt. We had labored together and that was all out of me now. She burned some grass over the little flame and the smoke went straight up to God who is both the judge and the forgiver. I understood by the ‘incense’ that it wasn’t my job to carry the sins of people against me either. It was God’s, and what an ever-unfolding richness this taste of salvation is. At the end of this healing time we went outside together. It was not dark in the visioning prayer. There were so many stars stretching to infinity. The sky was all shimmer with a moving veil of light. (I had seen photos of the northern lights but didn’t know that they move.) Either Matushka Olga said, or we both heard in our hearts – I can’t remember which – that the moving curtain of light was to be for us a promise that God can create great beauty from complete desolation and nothingness. For me it was like proof of the healing – great beauty where there had been nothing before but despair hidden by shame and great effort.

Every time I read this letter it makes me cry. I too was visited once—not by Mother Olga—but by Saint Paisios, and the love he had for me washed away the agony of a catatonic and suicidal depression. Just to know such love exists, and that it was for me, was enough to break through my despair, awaken my heart again, and set it aflame with love and life.

Recently I visited a monastery where they had some of Matushka Olga’s relics. The coffin had collapsed once buried, and most of her body mixed with the soil; the monastery had received about a cup or two of this soil. I was blessed when the monks left me alone with the relics, which I took as reason enough to take just a tiny bit of the soil with a bone fragment and put it into a small box they had for such things. At the time I noticed the fragrance of holiness issuing from some myrrh they had from a myrrh-streaming, incorrupt saint from Romania, but it wasn’t until the flight home that I began smelling an otherworldly fragrance sweeter and more wonderful than anything I'd smelled before. It seemed to be coming from the bag holding the relics. I don’t think my wife smelled it, but when I got home and showed the kids the relics they immediately said how wonderful it smelled, confirming I wasn’t suffering from spiritual delusion. Not at the time, but often since, I've wondered what it is about that fragrance that is so wonderful. Perhaps it’s simply because it has no earthly comparison, yet it poured forth literally from the soil. Matushka Olga’s body, through holiness and the Holy Spirit, was still transforming the very earth around it after her death.

The point is, in this age of seeking re-enchantment, everyone longs for a spiritual experience. People want faeries and gods and King Arthur’s Avalon—and while such imagery can help form the iconostasis of the imagination, pointing toward something greater—they will always fall short of the power of sanctity. True holiness quite literally alters the fabric of reality.

This is why, if asked—even having witnessed phenomena that would arrest anyone’s attention—I would still say that the greatest miracles I’ve experienced are not proofs of the supernatural: not the lamp before the icon of the Theotokos swinging during liturgy, nor the fragrance of holiness streaming from a relic. Rather, they are found in things far more mundane: in God breaking through my self-hatred and despair to heal me from crippling depression; in the tangible love of the saints; and most of all, in the grace that has allowed me to recover a level of sobriety I hadn’t known in years.

It is the fact that I am able to be present for my wife and children, and capable of doing the often seemingly banal task of quietly—and, I hope, meekly—showing up day after day, praying with all my strength (and far more of God’s), to grow in sanctification. It is the fact that, at least at times, I might become a place where sin stops and grace enters the world.