Письма матери

Christ is among us! I wish you peace and joy, dear mother! I send you monastic greetings, now I am already a prisoner, and, I would like to say, a prisoner of Christ, for although I am a sinner, in this case I am completely innocent, as it seems to me. I am sitting in prison without any guilt being brought against me and, apparently, only because I am a monk, that I worked for the monastery. May the will of God be done, good and perfect! I bless the Lord, I place my hope and trust in the Lord, I find my delight in the Lord. On September 17, having prayed during the liturgy and after it served a prayer service for your health and my other loved ones, I returned to my cell and was arrested and sent to the city of Kozelsk, to prison, where I am now. With me are four other people of clergy, the same prisoners of Christ, and therefore the environment in which I find myself does not burden me, I am even content. But, always expecting death, I decided on my birthday to turn to you, my dear mother, with perhaps my last word and greetings. God bless you! As a priest, I invoke God’s blessing on you and pray to the Lord: may He reward you with His eternal mercies and eternal bliss for all the good that I received from you. May your parental blessing rest upon me, which I earnestly ask of you. I remember you, and here, in conclusion, I offer God my prayer for you, although weak, due to my weakness. I commend myself and our dear abode, you and everyone, to the Lord my God, Creator and Provider, for He cares for everyone and does what is necessary and useful to us. I earnestly ask for your holy prayers for me, a sinner, for the salvation of my sinful soul - the goal of earthly life. And what would I need more if I achieved this desired goal? Therefore, I ask for prayers for my salvation. I firmly believe that everything is in God’s hands, and I am calm. Tea for the life of the next century, amen. I ask you to convey God’s blessing from me to my godmother (I ask for her holy prayers and blessings), sister and brothers and all other relatives and friends; I always prayed for all of them. May the Lord bless and save them! I ask forgiveness from everyone, and especially from you, for I acknowledge my mistakes. Sorry. May the Lord be with us all! September 26, 1919 Kozelsk, prison. Christ is among us, dear mother! I earnestly wish you peace and joy in the Lord Jesus and ask for your holy prayers and parental blessings! What should I write about myself? I'm alive and well. I don’t have any special needs, I get everything I need, I work a little in writing, I am a lot busy with various matters related to our common life in general, I sing in the choir and, finally, I serve, standing before the throne of God in the holy altar. As for my inner life - both in my cell and in my soul - not everyone can know this. My cell is 5 arshins long, 3 arshins 6 arshins wide, with one window; The cell is dearer to me than any magnificent houses and palaces. As for the conditions of our common life, this matter is complex and at the same time very simple. Complex, because it is difficult to put on paper everything that we experience and undertake, simple, for “unless the Lord builds a house, those who build in vain labor” (Ps. 127:1). Yes, one must take possible measures, prompted by common sense, and reject those contrary to the spirit of Christian and monastic life, but in accepting them, one must expect success entirely from the hand of the Lord. Human pride says: “We will do it, we will achieve it,” and we begin to build the Tower of Babel, we demand from God an account of His actions, we want to be stewards of the universe, we dream of thrones beyond the clouds. But no one and nothing obeys pride, and man’s powerlessness is clearly proven by bitter experience. Observing this experience from history and ancient bygone days, and modern ones, I come to the conclusion that the ways of God’s Providence are incomprehensible to us, we cannot understand them, and therefore it is necessary to surrender to the will of God with all humility. This is the first. Then the second. No one and nothing can harm a person if he does not harm himself, but on the contrary, whoever does not shy away from sin, even a thousand saving means will not help him. Therefore, the only evil is sin. Judas fell while with the Savior, and righteous Lot was saved while living in Sodom. These and similar thoughts come to me when I study in reading the Holy Fathers and when I look mentally at my surroundings. “What will happen? How will it be? And when?.. If this and that happens, where should I turn? If this and that happens, where can I find reinforcement and spiritual consolation? Oh Lord, Lord!” “A fierce bewilderment grips the soul when you want to foresee everything with your mind, to penetrate into the mystery of the future, unknown to us, but for some reason terrible.” The mind is exhausted: its plans, the means it invents - a childhood dream, a pleasant dream: a man woke up - and everything disappeared, faced with harsh reality; all plans collapse. Where is the hope? Hope in God: “The Lord is my hope and my refuge!” (Ps. 17:3). By surrendering all of myself to the will of God, peace is achieved in my soul, and it, the will of God, is always good and perfect. If I am God’s, then the Lord will protect and comfort me. If any temptation is sent to me for my benefit, blessed is the Lord who builds my salvation. Even with the influx of sorrows, the Lord is able to provide great and glorious consolation. This is how I think, this is how I feel, this is how I observe and this is how I believe. Do not think from this that I have experienced many sorrows and trials, no, it seems to me that I have not yet seen sorrows. Even if I had experiences that, from a superficial glance at them, seemed to be something regrettable, they did not cause me severe heartache, did not cause me grief, and therefore I do not dare to call them sorrows. But I do not close my eyes to what is happening and to what is to come, in order to prepare my soul for temptation, so that I can say in the words of the Psalm: “Let us be prepared and not be troubled” (Ps. 119:60). I informed you that we had an investigation: the affairs of our Partnership were audited. This investigation is not over yet, there has not been a trial yet. When the trial will take place and how it will end, God knows, but, undoubtedly, without the will of God, nothing can happen to me, in particular, or to us in general, and therefore I am calm. And when your soul is calm, then what else should you look for? Now I have come from the all-night vigil. Lord, what happiness, what wonderful verbs are spoken to us in the church! Peace and silence. The spirit of the shrine is palpably felt in the church. The service of God ends, everyone goes to their homes. I leave the church too. Wonderful night, light frost. The moon bathes our quiet corner with silver light. I go to the graves of the deceased elders, bow to them, ask for their prayerful help, and for them I ask the Lord for eternal bliss in heaven. These graves speak a lot to our mind and heart; these cold tombstones exude warmth. Wonderful images of deceased giants of the spirit appear before the mental gaze of the mind. These days I have repeatedly remembered Father Fr. Barsanuphia. I remembered the words of his instruction, given to me once, and perhaps more than once. He told me: “The Apostle commands: “Test...yourselves, whether you are in the faith” (2 Cor. 13:5), - and continued, - look what the same Apostle says: “I have finished my course, I have kept the faith; but now there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness” (2 Tim. 4:7, 8). Yes, it is a great thing to preserve, to keep the faith. Therefore, I tell you: test yourself to see if you are in the faith. If you keep the faith, you can have good faith about your fate.” When the deceased elder told me all this (he spoke well, with enthusiasm; as far as I remember, in the evening, in the quiet light of a lamp in his dear, cozy old man’s cell), I felt that he was saying something wondrous, lofty, spiritual. The mind and heart greedily grasped his words. I had heard this apostolic saying before, but it did not produce such an effect on me, such an impression. It seemed to me: what’s special, keeping the faith? I believe, and I believe in the Orthodox way, I have no doubts about my faith. But here I felt, I won’t say that I understood, but rather I felt that this saying contained something great, truly great: despite all the temptations, all the experiences of life, all the temptations, to keep in your heart the fire of holy faith unquenchable even until death, for it is said “I have finished my course,” that is, earthly life has already been lived, ended, the path that had to be walked has already been passed. I am already on the verge of earthly life; another life is already beginning behind the grave, which I have observed. “I completed my course, I kept my faith.” Now, when the foundations of the Russian Orthodox Church have been shaken, I see how precious the elder’s instruction is. Now it’s as if the time has come to test whether we are in the faith. After all, you also need to know that faith can be maintained by someone who ardently and sincerely believes, to whom God is dearer than anything else, and the latter can only be achieved by someone who keeps himself from all sin, who preserves his morality. Oh, Lord, keep me in faith by Your grace! After all, the idea of ​​​​the possibility of preserving the faith only with good morality is not mine - this is the teaching of the Gospel and the Patrists. This is what the Holy Gospel of John says: “light has come into the world; but people loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil; For everyone who does evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds be exposed, because they are evil, but he who does righteousness comes to the light, so that his deeds may be revealed, because they are done in God” (John 3:19-21). Here Christ calls Himself Light. He convinced the Jews of his time to abandon the search for glory from men, in which the search for glory from the One God is impossible, in which man is incapable of faith. They just laughed. “How can you believe when you receive glory from one another, but do not seek the glory that is from the One God?” (John 5:44). And Bishop Ignatius (Brianchaninov) says that “like other passions, the passion of vanity destroys faith in the human heart, like them, it makes the human heart incapable of faith in Christ, of confessing Christ.” Therefore, I earnestly ask for your holy prayers, that the Lord protect me from all evil, that is, sin in all its forms, then no external situation can harm me. I just wanted to briefly inform you that I am healthy and alive, and more than any hope, I have become interested in writing. While writing this letter, I barely had time to follow the thought and write down what it dictated to me. All this somehow involuntarily poured out from my pen and is my deep conviction. May the Lord bless you all! I ask all the holy prayers, and to the best of my weak strength, I always remember prayerfully for everyone. Sorry. The grace of our Lord and God Jesus Christ and the love of God and the Father and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all! Amen. November 15–16 (it’s already two o’clock in the morning), 1922. Optina Pustyn. You might be interested in: