7. Слово о гласе вопиющаго в пустыни и на воспоминание происшествий 1812 года.

(Said in the Trinity House Church of Prince A.N. Golitsyn, January 18; printed separately and in collections of 1820, 1821, 1844 and 1848) The voice of one crying in the wilderness: prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths right (Mark 1:3) Blessed desert, in which such a longed-for voice is heard! The longed-for voice that announces the approach of the Lord! For if it is commanded to “prepare the way of the Lord, and make his right paths in the wilderness,” then of course the Lord is not far from her and wants to visit her. That is why the Prophet of the Lord greets her with joy and gladness: “Rejoice, thirsty desert, let the desert rejoice, and let it bloom like a tree” (Is. 35:1). What is before this wilderness and its voice, although not so much speaking in the world as “crying out” in trembling reverence - what is before them the rumor and confusion of human societies, what is the noise and dispersion of the city, which is hardly anywhere and at any time better than how the desert-loving king saw it: “I saw lawlessness and discord in the city; he will walk around its walls day and night; lawlessness and labor in the midst of it and unrighteousness; and his hundredfold profit and flattery did not fail" (Ps. 54:10-12). And who would not want to “flee away with David and settle in the wilderness,” so that there they “wait for God” (Ps. 55:8-9)? Who among those who love to find obstacles in the search for God will not at least grieve that he cannot be pulled away from “vanity and ruin of the spirit,” and does not have “wings like the wings of a dove, so that he can fly and rest” (Ps. 54:7)? Oh, if the Lord would grant us now, albeit for a short time, to descend with attentive thought into the “wilderness” that lies before His face, to accept with our hearts the “voice” of His prevenient grace, so that we may be moved in tenderness to “prepare His way”! “The voice of one crying in the wilderness: prepare the way of the Lord; make his paths right.” When the Gospel, in order to turn your eyes to the path of the Lord, announces you with the “voice of the desert,” let none of you Christians imagine that they want to kidnap you without distinction from public life and drag you to John the Baptist in some uninhabited country of Jordan. The prophet, who heard from afar and foretold the “voice crying in the wilderness,” revealed in John, undoubtedly had before his eyes more than just the Jordanian desert. “Every wilderness will be filled, and every mountain and hill will be humbled; and all the stubborn will be right, and the sharp will be smooth in the way, and then the glory of the Lord will appear” (Is. 40: 4-5): this is how Isaiah depicts the transformation of his desert. But the wilderness of John, both at the appearance of the Lord Jesus and after, remained as wild as it was before. What kind of desert was it in which the Prophet heard a voice announcing the approach of the Lord? “We would in vain get lost in the variety of times of irrevocability and places inaccessible for finding it. On the contrary, it is not so much removed as it is not noticed, and is seen through the ascent from the sensory to the spiritual, from the human to the Divine. What is desert in the ordinary human concept, for the sensory eye? - A place uninhabited and uncultivated by people, even if it was full of animals and other living creatures. Hence, let us understand that there is a desert for the spiritual gaze, for the eye of God? – When passions inherent in the nature of animals and bestial desires, having prevailed over a person, remove from him every spiritual thought, every pure desire, every good deed and, so to speak, devastate the highest region of his nature - what then is his soul if not a wild desert? But when the number of such animal people is so great that the entire composition of humanity, according to the Word of God, is “flesh” (Gen. 6:3): perfect spiritual people are rarer on earth than the classes remaining in the reaped field - then what is the whole world in the eyes of the “Father of spirits” (Heb. 12:9), if not a barren desert? Finally, when the very city of God on earth becomes impoverished by the sons of Jerusalem on high, and is trampled underfoot by the pagans; when the Beloved’s chosen heirloom bears thorns instead of clusters; when the Lord’s people “leave the fountain of living water”—the Lord—in order to “dig for themselves broken treasures” (Jer. 2:13), disturb or block the pure flow of heavenly truth, but then melt away with an unquenchable thirst over the bitter streams of earthly wisdom—what then is the Church itself if not a thirsty desert? And is it in these unsettled, abandoned, impassable deserts that the Lord of glory and splendor makes his way? Coming from the blessed villages of heaven and coming to visit the land devastated by sin and curse? Does He leave the sons of His house - pure spirits, feeding on the light of His face, and hastens to find the sheep of His flock that have strayed from Him in the mountains and wilds? So! “The Lord,” Who “inhabits the flood” (Ps. 28:10), does not want to abandon a single corner of his boundless dominion to final desolation; The only begotten Son of God with one hand in the glorious “house” of his Father prepares “mansions” for the rest of those being saved, with the other he builds a “tabernacle in the wilderness” for a saving refuge for those who are perishing. And here the glory of His grace will appear: only let every descent into sensuality be restrained; Let every exaltation of pride be brought down; Let not obscurity in one’s own untruth prevent one from opening up to the truth of God; Let thorns and stones—malice and bitterness not interrupt the peaceful procession of Divine love: “let every wilderness be filled, and every mountain and hill be humbled, and let all the stubborn ones be right, and the sharp paths smooth; and the glory of the Lord will appear." Rise up, therefore, you who work in an ungrateful world, rise up from it in a secret procession, like the ancient Israelites from Egypt; turn and look with the eyes of the spirit on the face of the desert - in you and around you - awaiting its visit and renewal; see her lamenting image; foresee the glory promised to her; and if you hear “the voice of the Lord shaking the wilderness” (Psalm 28:8), “do not harden your hearts” (Psalm 94:8): “make a journey for him who walks in the desert” (Psalm 67:5, 8). But who can say that he has not sometimes heard this terrible, but nonetheless merciful voice? – The voice of John the Baptist, calling for repentance and heralding the approach of the Kingdom of God, is not the only “voice crying in the wilderness,” but a repetition of multiple and continuation of continuous similar voices. Even then, just as man, having heard the “voice of the Lord God walking into paradise” (Gen. 3:8), hid for the first time from his face and thus opened the first “wilderness” in paradise itself, then the first “voice in the wilderness was heard: where are you?” - a voice that, from then on, in countless echoes, rushes through all places and times, and will sweep to eternity, seeking those who are perishing at a distance from the Lord. If the hearts of these people had not grown faint, if they had not heard heavily in their ears and had not closed their eyes, then all their feelings would have been constantly filled with the voice of grace that precedes them and calls them to conversion and salvation: a voice from without - proclaiming in visible nature; a voice from within - coming from the depths of the soul; a voice from above - descending in Divine revelation; a voice down - reflected in the events of the world, moved by the finger of the Lord and the breath of His lips. Voice in nature. If we hear him little, it is because he himself does not cease. The habit of hearing it dulled my attention, and its evenness seemed like silence. The atheist would have confessed God, looking up to heaven and hearing their broadcast, if he had not been born under them; the stony heart would have shattered from the groaning of the earth, cursed in the deeds of man, if its entire being had not been immersed in these groanings before it felt itself. “The heavens,” says one of those who have ears to hear, “the heavens tell the glory of God” in such a way that “they are not speech, lower than words, and their voices are not heard” (Psalm 19:2, 4), that is, there is no language or dialect in which their preaching would not be expressed by itself. Another, among these solemn voices of the creature glorifying the all-wise Creator, reveals the painful sighs of the “creature that has obeyed vanity”: “We know, he says, that all creation groans and suffers even to this day” (Rom 8:20, 22). These collective voices and sighs of creation - the voice from the source of the original good in the world and the sigh from the abyss of the evil that has arisen, the voice of heavenly order and the sigh of earthly disorder, the voice of life and the sigh of death, the voice of universal preservation and the sigh of universal decay - are they not, for those who understand, a certain “voice of one crying in the wilderness,” or the cry of the the universal desert, telling man from everywhere: “Who besides you could bring evil into the creations of the All-Good? Was it not you, having been made their ruler, who became their enslaver? Was it not you who turned the kingdom of splendor into an ugly desert and planted thorns and thistles around the fruits of life? How long will you suffer and leave with you “the whole creation to groan and be sick”? Until you turn with your whole being, so that with you all your dominion will come closer to the One Author of all good and perfection, from Whom you have moved away, but Who is still so visibly approaching you from everywhere with His glory and His bounty? How long do you not “prepare the ways of the Lord, and make His right paths”? - My God! If a single instantaneous sigh of Your entire creature could be measured by external sense, how many storms and thunder it would amount to! But all creation incessantly sighs to our hearts, incessantly cries out to our minds: and we do not hear, and still rejoice in its suffering and destruction! A voice from the depths of the soul. This, perhaps, is even less heard than the voice of external nature, because it requires a more subtle feeling and deeper attention. Although, without a doubt, no one can better “know what is in a person” than “the spirit of a person living in him” (1 Cor. 2:11), but this spirit is often likened to a householder who spends most of his time in the open churches of his house, notices those passing by, receives those who visit, converses, feasts; but he barely visits his secret cell, like a stranger’s inn, he does not know his treasury, and entrusts all the care of housekeeping to slaves and mercenaries. We live for the most part in external feelings; we care about temporary pleasures; the wisdom of the world, passions, wishes govern our activities: meanwhile, we do not know what happens in our soul, what is hidden in the mysterious depths of it, and we try more to know others than ourselves; we open all possible outcomes from ourselves, and not a single entrance into ourselves. Blessed is the one who knows how, following the example of David, to gather all his strength into that unknown country of human nature, which is adjacent to the highest regions of the spiritual and Divine, there “to open his way to the Lord” (Psalm 36:5) and expect his destiny to come from His face: “I will hear what the Lord God says about me!” "(Psalm 85:9) From this incomprehensible height, the most vivid inspirations of grace-filled sensations descend into the believing and loving heart: "For the Lord speaks peace upon His people and upon those who turn their hearts to Him" ​​(Psalm 85:9). But even when this “peace of God, which surpasses all understanding” (Phil. 4:7), has not yet visited us, and then is it not just as convenient, or is it not even more characteristic for the voice of the Lord to reach us by the direct path of spirit and heart, rather than by the surrounding path of feelings and flesh? Haven’t we sometimes already experienced, in a moment of inner silence, when thoughts tired of vanity return from their dispersion, when satiated desires are renounced from their objects, and we accidentally begin to “take heed to ourselves” (1 Tim. 4:16) - haven’t we experienced at such a time a certain emptiness in the spirit, a certain tightness in the heart, in which deep and incessant sighing lurks? Observe this secretive sensation more constantly; shut yourself up more often from the mundane noise that drowns it out, in the inner church of your soul; carefully block all outcomes of dispersion: you will recognize in your inner sighing the very thing for which all creation groans; little by little it will resolve either into a tormenting “roaring” (Psalm 37:9), like a lion, or into a softening groan, like a turtledove; and finally you will hear the true “voice of one crying” in your inner “desert,” proclaiming to you that walking in the obstinate ways of the world and the flesh only hurts and tires your soul; that you are in vain expanding for her the paths of her exile wandering, along which she is only moving further away from the heavenly fatherland; that for her she should look for ways to return to the Heavenly Father and a saving visit from above, “to prepare the way of the Lord, and to make His paths right.” Voice in revelation. Meanwhile, the majority of people, day by day, heard their ears more painfully, so that they would not hear the universal groaning of creation for the freedom of the children of God, and hour by hour their hearts became more and more white, so that they would not understand the words of this very heart, which “seeks Your face, O Lord” (Psalm 26:8), You, who do not want the death of even the hardened sinner and are inexhaustible in the means to His conversion, he himself labored, “that you may be revealed to those who do not seek You, and be found to those who do not ask for You” (Is. 65:1). From time to time, You have opened the ear of Your chosen ones, filled their spirit with Your life-giving word, and made them like the trumpets of Your voice, and the lips of Your speaking to the sons of men in the language of the sons of men. “Thou didst speak in many parts and varied manners as a father in the prophethood; in these last days He spoke to us in the Son" (Heb. 1:1-2), and from now on with new abundance "You poured out Your Spirit" on the Apostles, "Let them prophesy," and through them you continue to pour It out "on all flesh" (Joel 2:28). We don’t know whether we should only glorify Your goodness, boundless and incomprehensible wisdom for the gradual spread of Your visible communications with us, or at the same time we must recognize the increasing inattention in us, and the bitterness that required the extreme efforts of the opposing forces, only the treasure of Your solemn revelations, collected over thousands of years, has never been 84 so open to everyone as in this “last hour” (1 John 2:18). “The Word that Thou hast commanded has been with us” from the ages, and “Thy Spirit,” invested with the Sacred Letter, “is present in the midst of us” (Hag. 2:6): proclaims in churches, converses in homes, and then, as only the poor are called into the ministry of the Word by the gifts of the apostleship, You have placed it in the hearts of those who love You, so that again the Apostles themselves - in their writings - will accompany in cities and villages, in palaces and huts, and thus throughout all space what has been said will be fulfilled: “This gospel of the kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world” (Matthew 24:14). Now a “voice”, or better, a set of voices, from time to time, from place to place, “crying out in the wilderness”, a voice that not only announces, but also reveals Your approach, not only arousing the horror of the desert, but also consoling with the grace of its visit, not only indicating “obstinate and sharp”, but also instructing to “prepare Your way”, “and make Your right paths”, making us “servants waiting for their Lord” (Luke 12:36), and “virgins preparing to meet the Bridegroom” (Matthew 25:1), - this living and life-giving voice is already spreading across the most distant mountains and reaching into the deepest “wilds”. Weigh, Lord, is it not the end of the great, worldwide preaching that we hear: “This gospel of the kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world as a testimony with every tongue, and then the end will come” (Matthew 24:14). You alone see in this gloomy midnight, isn’t it time to “cry: behold, the Bridegroom comes; come ye out to meet Him” (Matthew 25:6)! A Voice in the Incidents of the World. Since every “word of God is living and active” (Heb. 4:12), and everything that exists and acts in the world is “carried by the word of power” of God (Heb. 1:3): then there is no doubt that in all the events of the world, since they are the actions of Providence, the word of God is contained, and especially in the events that act on man, the word of God extends to man. Experience and reverent attention to the works of Providence, or, more precisely, the Provider of the world himself paternally introduces His children into the knowledge of this immutable language of seemingly random events: and the children, who do not reject the Father’s punishment, understand how prosperity is proclaimed to them by the love and mercy of God; temptations and sudden deliverances teach faith and trust in Providence; disasters expose sin and call for repentance; deprivation of temporary goods and external advantages preaches humility and self-sacrifice; obstacles and stumbling blocks in the ways of the world and the flesh call us to the path of the Lord. But if anyone does not yet hear or recognize the quiet voice of God in the adventures of his own life, let him at least not close his ears and hearts from those universal voices of fate that suddenly strike tribes and peoples, fill the eyelids, shake heaven and earth. “Let the earth weep and let the sky be darkened” (Jer. 4:28), God calls out to the Prophet, when all other voices of calling, denunciation, lamentation, and threats could not stop the people of Israel striving for their destruction. So usually “God speaks his judgments” (See Jer. 4:12) to tongues that grieve. He commands this heaven, which will tell His glory, to preach His wrath and wrath with the voice of terrible signs and corrupting influences; He commands this land, which bears His blessing from year to year, to lift up the groans of famine and the noise of disorder; brings down cities and kingdoms in order to awaken with the thunder of their fall those sleeping in senseless oblivion about Him: turns everything into a desert where the “abomination of desolation” (Matthew 24:15) has penetrated to the very sanctuary; but all this is only so that, by destroying the path of the wicked, 85 to cleanse the space, so that “the way of the Lord may be prepared, and His paths may be made right” (Is. 40:3). “The voice of the Lord is in the fortress! The voice of the Lord is in splendor” (Psalm 28:4)! It would seem, Christians, that we cannot rest from the multitude, strength and incessant crying of voices that excite us to turn to God. However, the Gospel marks the time of the touching of the heavenly Bridegroom, during which “I rested all and fell asleep” (Matthew 25:5); and let everyone, having cleared their senses, test with their eyes, ears, and hearts whether everything around us marks this dangerous night of inaction and carelessness. “The God of glory thunders” (Psalm 28:3) now with all the voices of his lips, and trumpets, and thunders. Let’s not talk about the blows with which He “shakes” the entire great “desert” of Western Christianity. Do you hear the “voice” that recently roared and is barely stilling within the boundaries of our own land, in the ruins, “in the desert” of the great city? Is this painful and mortal voice of so many citizens, the voice of the destruction of centuries-old fences, the voice of desecration of churches, only the effect of a random blow? But the hand of Providence does not strike past its mark; and this meta is assigned to wisdom and justice. Is this one defeat for the perpetrators? – Without a doubt, the innocent are not punished by the all-seeing court; but let us not be “judges of evil thoughts” (James 2:4); Let us not condemn our brothers more than ourselves 86. In the general disaster, the guilty were also bound to fall, for whom the continuation of life would only serve to multiply their crimes; but the innocent could have suffered without injustice, whom suffering would have purified more and sealed with martyrdom; an unexpected death only hastened the path to the blissful end of their existence and who, perhaps, were thus saved from the stumbling blocks that threatened them in the calm continuation of their earthly wanderings. - No! those visited by the gravest disasters are not the most guilty of those who have been pardoned, and the blow of fate has not thundered only on those on whom it was brought down. “Neither, I tell you, unless you repent, you will all perish likewise” (Luke 13:3). This is the voice that the Lord himself taught us to hear in every public disaster. And have we heard, understood, accepted this teaching of the Lord in these events? – True, the voice of mercy and favor, which the Lord announced to us before all tongues, testifies to the multitude of those who obediently accepted the voice of His punishment: humility in recognizing His all-operating hand over us, and charity towards our neighbors in need, spread among us by the action of strong examples, reveal in us fruit worthy of repentance. But did the mighty voice of the Lord break our hearts in such a way that “every wilderness was filled, and every mountain and hill was humbled?” Are not the exaltations of property still visible? Do insatiable earthly desires still yawn? By giving to those who demand, do we deny ourselves at least some excesses? Are we too hasty to drown out the crushing, but at the same time edifying, “voice crying in the wilderness” with the noise of splashing and having fun? Haven't many awakened by judgment already fallen asleep again under the shadow of mercy? Let us be careful, O children of mercy, so that by negligence about the riches of God’s goodness and long-suffering, which so often and in many ways calls us to conversion and change of life, we do not again accumulate the wrath of God for ourselves, and do not surrender ourselves to the gravest and final judgment. Let us think: if now, in a favorable time and on the day of salvation, we do not “prepare the way of the Lord, and make His right paths,” then when He Himself appears, “and from His presence” not only mountains and hills, but “heaven and earth will flee,” so that “no place will be found for them” (Rev. 20:11), where will we then be found? - Amen. Christians - In the department. ed. and in collection 1820 and 1821: “Christian citizens...” arranged - In the department. ed. and in collection 1820 and 1821: “arranged...” In the department ed. and in collection 1820 and 1821: further follows: “and only fulfilled and...” In the department ed. and in collection 1820 and 1821 followed by: “expand.” In the department ed.: “But let us not judge our brethren more than ourselves, let us not be bold “judges of evil.” In the department ed. and in collection 1820 and 1821 there is no such word. You might be interested in: