Слово 73

(1) That we should willingly obey our elders, not forget our vows to God, and not grumble because of church services. 1. Remember, my brothers, the commandment of God, which says: do not judge and you will not be judged - and do not at all be curious about what one is doing and what another is doing. Regarding the priests of God and your spiritual fathers, you must act in such a way that what they tell you to do, but do not act on their deeds (if they are not in order), as Christ the Lord said (about the Jewish priests): whatever they tell you to keep, observe and do; but do not do them by deeds: they say and do not do them (Matthew 23:3). Therefore, as servants of Christ, listen to me, unworthy; do not look at my cowardice and negligence, but, I ask you, take care of your souls, striving willingly to fulfill God’s commandments, and do not grumble at me that you have to get up at midnight for services, remembering David, who says: at midnight I will confess to You about the judgments of Your righteousness (Ps. 119:62), but above all thank God and the one who awakens you to glorifying Him, rejoicing and rejoicing that you are privileged to glorify God together with the Angels. He who grumbles during ordinary services, is burdened by them, and does not observe zeal for them throughout the continuation of the praise of God, truly has not known how much sweet the words of God are in the throats of those who love God, and how much sweeter they are than honey and honeycomb in the mouths of those who have come to know Him; the blessings that God has given us; All God's deeds seem bitter to him and he does not know properly what to eat: taste and see that the Lord is good (Ps. 33:9). He who does not know this is a stranger to the love and sweetness of Christ. Anyone who has not experienced the love and sweetness of God (woe is me! this is my own grief, because I have a commandment to consider what belongs to others as our own), he is an enemy of God and a stranger to the kingdom of heaven. For who else can he hope for? Or to acquire someone else’s love in order to find consolation in it, in the present or in the future life? So, whoever contradicts, murmurs and curses those who force him to sing and praise God, what kind of justification will he find on the day of judgment, having become a destructive temptation both for himself and for others? Believe me, my spiritual brothers, that when I hear this and see one of you indignant for this, I grieve so much and am so amazed in my heart that it seems to me as if I am in hell - I no longer feel any other joy in the world, but I am burdened by life itself, I cry and sob, as if I myself were subject to the final sentence of condemnation; and meanwhile, when I beg you, you don’t listen to me, when I reproach you, you turn away, when I reproach you, you hate me, when I punish you, you persecute me like an enemy, and by doing this, I can’t find any peace for myself. Sometimes I think: I’ll stop doing this and start looking only at my own sins; but as soon as I want to do this, it’s like a fire ignites in my heart, and I again find myself in the same sorrowful state, your sins again sadden me more than how much everyone’s own sins sadden them - and I burn like on fire because of you, considering my life most miserable. I am surprised how we have reached such insensibility that we do all these things that destroy souls: we dance and rejoice over our own destruction and rejoice that we tie our souls tightly with terrible sins; We devour those who are trying to free us from these bonds, and if anyone prevents us from doing anything to the detriment of our souls, we bark at him like angry dogs, and we revile him, and we do not rest until we complete the planned evil deed and destroy our souls. Then, over time, having become accustomed to such bad deeds, we become in some way naturally evil and no longer have the desire for the darkness that has covered us to be dispelled and for us to come to our senses. And it happens as a result of this that in words we are monks, but in deeds we have become worse than all the laity: we promised to hunger and thirst and subject ourselves to regrettable deprivations to others, and yet we are not ashamed to shout and scold over a piece of bread, which we may not demand at the designated time for eating; We entered the monastery in the form of renunciation of everything in the world, from parents, brothers and friends, and meanwhile we do not cease to take care of feeding them, and, moreover, with monastic bread; we have fled from the world as from an enemy, and yet we love the worldly and worldly things more than our own souls. I ask you, brother, tell me, when you came to the monastery, did you believe that there is a resurrection, judgment and reward for the deeds of everyone? Did you confess that there is a God who has to reward everyone according to his deeds? Or did you keep none of this in your mind? Tell me, when you became a monk and stood in front of so many witnesses, did you intend to fulfill the promises you made then and the agreements you entered into with Christ? Or did you do it with slyness, pretending that you wanted to serve the monastery, work for the brethren, with the intention only of eating and drinking plenty, pleasing the peace of the flesh in every possible way and leading a carefree and effortless life? If you came in order to be a servant of Christ and a brother to us, then, I ask you, keep the commandments of Christ, being zealous to work for Him with all diligence, in order to show through your deeds that you are a true Christian, and be a God-loving brother to us, trying to be like us in everything and bearing all sorrows and hardships along with the other brethren, as a good warrior of Christ, so that together with them you will be crowned, glorified and rejoiced in eternal glory. If you came with cunning, not to be a true monk, but just to eat and drink, finding all this ready, then listen, and I will tell you what the consequences will be for you from this. Know, firstly - and this is the greatest and most important thing - that you have not become friends with Christ, but you are His enemy and accuser. And how can you not be a slanderer, when you keep one thing in your mind, and promise another with your lips, thinking to hide it from God, from whom nothing can hide? He commands everyone with such decisiveness: do not worry about tomorrow, what to eat, what to drink and what to wear, and for this you become a monk so that you can have money and other things that perhaps you did not have when you were a layman? The Apostle Paul teaches: having food and clothing, we will be content with these (1 Tim. 6:8), but you are not content with what is necessary, but want to have more than that, for which you steal and appropriate monastic things for yourself; Are you lazy to work, and yet in everything that concerns the peace and consolation of the body, do you want to be a brother, equal with all those who have worked hard in the work of the Lord? If you see other brethren struggling with all their souls in fasting, vigils and other physical deprivations, or in crying, in unceasing prayers, in all-night standing, in psalmody and spiritual songs, you say that you cannot do this, you hide and do not even go to ordinary church services, thinking, however, that you are benefiting yourself by doing so? What extreme blindness! What foolishness! What a beauty in your thoughts. And even worse than all this is that if you are faced with the slightest temptation or if the abbot upsets you with something insignificant, wanting to test you, then you are ready to throw off even your monastic clothes, just as I happened to meet quite a few who said: did I really come here to be someone’s slave or to be pushed around here? Oh nonsense! But haven’t you, brother, come to struggle against the invisible enemies of our demons? Have you not come to wage war with your passions? If you don’t want to endure anything and don’t face any hardships, then why did you become a soldier of Christ? Why did you join the brethren, who are all soldiers of Christ? Is it just to get a living, eat and drink, and then lounge around, as if in a tavern, to wallow? If you think so, woe to you on the Day of Judgment, when the righteous Judge comes to reward everyone according to his deeds and to exact from the monks those agreements and promises that were given to Him in the presence of so many witnesses, before the Holy Throne and the Holy Angels. For when the priest asks us: why did you come, brother, falling to the holy altar and this holy fellowship, desiring a monastic image and an angelic life? – what do we answer to this? Don't we say: to her, honest father? And what does the priest say to this again? “Know, brother, that since you have come to be numbered among the servants of the King Christ, then prepare yourself for temptation, because from now on our enemy the devil will begin especially to erect all sorts of intrigues against you.” Why be ready to hunger, thirst, be cold, accept dishonor, spitting, ridicule, strangulation, and endure all the sorrowful things that happen in life according to God. And what do we answer? Don’t we promise to willingly suffer and endure everything? And to every question that the priest asks us, don’t we say: to her, honest father? Do we not confess before the face of God and the holy Angels that we will observe abstinence, vigil, prayer, obedience even to death to the abbot and all the brethren? And now we have reached such a pitiful state and we spend our lives with such fearlessness before God and with such disregard for His commandments, as if there is no one who has to exact from us for such promises that we have given! And we despise not only our brethren, but also our very superiors, and we murmur, and we argue, and we curse, and we do almost everything that God hates and that would greatly plunge our souls into the fire of hell! Have you ever heard of such deceit and malice anywhere? Or what devil can invent another method for the destruction of our souls, which is surer than this? Or is it better to say that something else, worse, the demons themselves can come up with and arrange for our destruction? And the demons, seeing that we are enslaved to the will of the flesh, were alienated from the grace of the Holy Spirit and killed their souls - for the removal of the soul from God is death for it - seeing this, for what other reason will they, on their part, begin to wage war against us? For all the warfare that demons raise against us ends in order to remove the grace of the Holy Spirit from us. But we, as I see, even before they began to fight against us, had already exposed ourselves from such grace of God by the fact that we do not fulfill God’s commandments and do not have the zeal to seek God with all our souls. For if we had sought Him, we would not have spent our lives in such negligence. If we cared about heavenly things, we would not worry so much about earthly things. If we thought about the imperishable, we would not be so attached to the perishable. If we desired the eternal, we would not love so much the temporal. If we carefully tried to create virtues, we would not shun teachers of virtue. If we took up fasting with joy, we would never grumble because of the scarcity of food and drink. If we labored and abstained from passions, we would not be so enslaved to pleasures. If we had true and firm faith, we would not do the things characteristic of infidels. If we had the fear of God in our hearts, we would not resist the true servants of God in any godly deed. If we had humility, we would not despise the servants of God. If we were worthy to acquire true love, we would come to know God, and for the sake of love for Christ, we would prefer not only to be dishonored, but also to be punished, and unjustified, and insulted, and we would willingly endure every temptation and hardship. But now we are so much enslaved by passions and in such blindness and insensibility that we do not even know to what depths of evil we have fallen, and we do not at all feel our wretched state. We even get to the point that when someone begins to admonish us about some sin, we answer him as if we had never heard the Divine Scriptures, saying: is this really a sin? And why is it called sin? God would grant that we would be protected from great evils, but for these small ones He will not be too exacting! And who says such speeches? Christians, children of Christ, who made such great vows to God when they were baptized - and especially monks who entered into second agreements and covenants with God; those who are clothed in monastic attire instead of virtue and bear the name of a monk instead of holiness - who have entered into an agreement with Christ that they will reject the world and everything in the world, they will reject their parents, relatives, and friends, promised to obey their spiritual fathers as God, and to observe the strictest asceticism and attention, even to the sight of their eyes and idle words, that is, that they will not look disorderly, nor talk idlely, but now they think that it is not a sin to envy, and condemnation, and grumbling, and bickering, and lying speeches, and following one’s will, and deity, and secretly stealing monastic things in order to have them as one’s own, or to give them to others without the knowledge of the abbot, and at the same time they also think that it is not at all a sin to correct one’s monastic obediences in a bad way, that is, when someone is entrusted with any service to the brethren, to correct it with partiality, or with with guile, or with envy, or unscrupulously, or hucksteringly. O man! Don’t you tremble when you hear every day what God says to you: Let not a corrupt word proceed out of your mouth (Eph. 4:29), for I tell you that every idle word that men speak will be given back on the day of judgment (Matt. 12:36), and for a cup of cold water you will receive a reward (Matt. 10:42)? Don’t you hear that God is the judge of the thoughts and thoughts of the heart? Do you not hear what Christ says: everyone who looks at a woman and lusts after her has already committed adultery with her in his heart (Matthew 5:28)? Do you see that the one who lustfully looks at someone’s face is condemned as a fornicator? In the same way, my brother, be sure that the one who lusts for money is condemned as a lover of money, even if he had nothing at all; and the one who lusts for many and varied foods is a glutton, even if he ate only bread and drank only water because of his poverty; and the one who accepts shameful thoughts, holds them in his mind for a long time and becomes defiled by them, is considered a fornicator, even if he has never seen the face of a human being. In the same way, the one who says in his heart: this is bad, this is stupid, or: why was this and that done, and not this and that? - Let him not be deceived into thinking that he does not sin, for he is a clear condemner and, as one who judges, will be condemned, even though he has not uttered a single condemning word from his mouth and no one has heard his voice. Do not be deceived, my brothers. Truly God loves mankind, and is merciful, and gracious. I also confess this and, trusting in His compassion, I have the boldness to hope that I will be saved. However, know that His love for mankind will not in the least benefit those who do not repent and do not keep His commandments with great fear and in all accuracy, but on the contrary, God will punish them even more severely, the wicked and unfaithful. Do not be deceived, my brothers, and do not think that small sins are really small and you can despise them, supposedly not causing great harm to our soul. Good and sincerely God-pleasing servants of God do not believe in any distinction between minor and major sin; but when they sin even by the wave of their eyes, or by a thought, or by a word, they think that they have completely fallen away from the love of God - which, I believe, is truly the case. Whoever thinks about something incongruous with the will of God, even the slightest, and does not repent, immediately driving out the pretext of that thought, but accepts it and retains it within himself, this is counted as sin, although it is thought that this evil occurs in ignorance. For when the law came, that is, the teaching of the Divine Scriptures, then the evil that man had previously done in ignorance, not knowing that it was evil, came to life - that is, he learned from the Scriptures that it was evil - and it turned out that there was sin in him (not recognized as sin), which, however, alienated him from good, and thereby deadened him. Why should we kindly consider and discuss the thoughts that come to our minds, contrasting them with the testimony of the Divine Scriptures and the teachings of the spiritual and holy fathers. If we find that they agree with the Holy Scriptures, then we will undertake the feat of holding them back as long as we can and putting them into action. If those thoughts do not agree with the word of truth, then let us hasten to drive them away from us with anger and hostility, as it is written: be angry and do not sin (Eph. 4:26). We should by no means hold back the passionate thoughts that come into us, but we must immediately repel them, like a stream of infectious air and the sting of death. From this it is clear how necessary it is for us to study the Divine Scriptures with all care and attention. And Christ the Lord, making it clear what great benefit comes from this, said: try the Scriptures (John 5:39). Test and hold with all accuracy and faith what they say, so that in this way you can truly know the will of God and be able to accurately distinguish good from evil, and not believe in every spirit and rush around in a whirlwind of harmful thoughts. Believe me, my brothers, that there is no other, easier way to salvation than to follow the divine commands of Christ. However, we need many tears, and great fear, great patience, and unceasing prayer, so that the power of at least one Master’s word may be revealed to us, so that we may recognize the great mysteries hidden in small words, and give our souls to death for the smallest commandment of Christ. The Word of God is a two-edged sword, which cuts off and separates from the soul all lust and all carnal desire. At the same time, it can also be a fiery flame, igniting spiritual jealousy and making us despise all the sorrows of real life, meet with joy and joy every temptation that comes upon us, and death itself, which is so terrible for other people, is preferably acceptable as life and the source of life. I beg you, my brothers, let us finally awaken from sleep and begin to encourage one another with stimulating words to do good; let us flow with diligence; Let us strive with complete zeal to renounce all attachment to the world; let us humble ourselves as the ancient fathers humbled themselves; Let us put off the old man through cutting off the carnal will and killing earthly wisdom; let us put on the new Adam, that is, our Lord Jesus Christ, with pure and immaterial prayer; Let us cleanse ourselves with constant tears and take care to renew ourselves with repentance every day and every hour, in order to learn how to fight and fight our enemies, the demons, who constantly scheming against us. He who has not yet acquired the spiritual armor we have indicated cannot resist during battle, but suffers defeat every hour. Being naked from such full armor, he cannot lead his life peacefully and freely. For the internal warfare of demons is not similar to external warfare, but is much more terrible than them. In those - people fight with other people, and sometimes they stop it, and, having thrown off their guns, lie down to rest, having seized an hour, eat food; sometimes they lock themselves in a fortress and keep guard, some in one place, others in another place; those captured on it happen to run away from enemies and are saved from any trouble, but those who remain in captivity are not always given over to death, but are turned into slaves; It also happens that a captive slave becomes famous and becomes richer than he was rich when he was free. But this is not the case when fighting demons. This warfare is continuous, and the soldiers of Christ must always carry their weapons within themselves. There is no way to have peace from this battle, either day or night, not for one minute; but when we eat, and when we drink, and when we sleep or do anything else, we can be in the very heat of battle. Our enemies are ethereal and always stand against us, although we do not see them; they stand and with all vigilance look closely to see if any of our members will be naked somewhere, so that they can thrust their arrows into it and kill us. Here it is impossible to take refuge in a fortress and a tower, or sometimes hide somewhere and rest a little. It is also impossible to run away somewhere and get rid of the battle or one to take on the fight for the other, but every person in general needs to wage this battle himself, and - either win and live, or be defeated and die without any doubt. The deadly wound here is any sin that is not mourned in repentance and not confessed, and especially despair if someone falls into it, which, however, is in our power. For if we do not plunge ourselves into the depths of negligence and hopelessness, then the demons cannot do us any harm at all. But even when the wounds are acceptable from them, we can, if we want, become even more courageous and experienced in this battle, through warm repentance. To be defeated and die, and then to rise again and enter into battle, is the work of people of extremely great soul and courage - and it is wondrous and worthy of a great reward. For to be preserved from defeat is not in our power, but to remain in death or not to remain is in our power; because if we do not despair, we will not remain in death and death will not dominate us. We can always get rid of it by resorting with repentance to the almighty and humane God. That is why I excite both myself and all the brethren: let us show every diligence and courage of patience and constancy in fulfilling all the commandments of the Lord with all the zeal of our souls, in order to arrive in the heavenly and eternal abodes filled with the fruits of the Holy Spirit and thus be worthy to stand and worship the one and indivisible Trinity, in Christ our God, to whom be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen. You might be interested in: