Ноябрь 1868 г.

November 20. Evening. I thank You, prosperous, most merciful Heavenly Father, for You have heard my prayer for the reconciliation of my wife and You have granted me peace. (I wrote this when my wife was at the all-night vigil. When she came home, she was extremely kind and helpful to me: so the Lord favored her heart through my prayer. Glory to the all-acting Lord and Provider of our life.) In the gymnasium in the classroom there is suddenly an extraordinary silence when I raise my gaze of faith and prayer to the Lord and His Most Pure Mother, depicted on the icons in the classroom. Wonderful is the name of the Lord! Wonderful is the effect of inner prayer! Like sparkling lightning it acts on me and on those with me, suddenly illuminating everyone, penetrating, pacifying, ennobling. Glory to Thee, incomprehensible Lord! What does the movement of the index finger towards the students produce? That finger that we, priests, extend to bread and wine, saying: And make this Bread the Honest Body of Thy Christ, and so on? As a symbol of the finger of God - the Spirit of God, omnipotent and sovereign, it produces a sovereign effect, destroying all confusion in the disciples and establishing deep peace and silence in them. Glory to Thee, Holy Soul, sovereign, everywhere and fulfilling everything, and resting in the priests, whom You have sanctified to perform all the Mysteries of our all-saving faith! The Church is an earthly paradise. Whoever goes to church shows that he is looking for paradise, lost through sin; and whoever does not go, thereby proves that he does not think of looking for the lost paradise. When studying scientific lessons, study primarily the lesson of the gospel life; just as through labor and diligence you achieve the study of sciences, so with God’s help you can, through labor and diligence, achieve the study of the lesson of the Gospel - and this is the essence of everything, all wisdom, the whole life of a Christian. How difficult it is for you to receive the spiritual word: learn to highly value the spiritual words of the Church - the words of prayers and chants, the inspired words of the Gospel and psalms and all Scripture: the Old Testament and its New Testament, the words of all the holy fathers in their God-wise writings. What rages against the beggars? - Saturation. You are fed up, and therefore you are angry with the poor, who come to you in large numbers for alms. The abstinent person is ready to give everything willingly, for he knows that the more he takes from the flesh, the more he gives to the spirit; he considers rage a wordless act. I thank You, Holy Father, for You have not disgraced me from the hope of Your mercy and have granted me the grace to perform the Divine Liturgy with many tears and to partake of the Divine Mysteries without condemnation. I thank You, my Joy, for You have granted Your morning service to be performed without stumbling. I thank You, for I dare in You, I am at peace in You. November 24th, 1868 How do you look at the priest in the church when he stands before the throne of God? Look at him as a representative angel, an earthly angel, a heavenly man. Decorate me with beauty like a bride [Isa. 61, 10]. Indeed, my soul is the bride of Christ when I serve the liturgy, and Christ God is my husband, my groom. The Sacrament of Communion, the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ is the sacrament of the marriage of the Royal Son, at which He becomes engaged to the souls of His brothers. If you are disinclined and cold towards guests and family members who smoke tobacco, then the question is: why don’t you change your disposition towards your comrades and bosses, who also smoke tobacco? Is it because they are the powerful of this world, and you depend on them, and they are not at all afraid of you, as your equals, and you yourself curry their favor towards you - and the guests at home or who often visit you depend on you for a piece of bread, and you become arrogant with them, putting them at nothing? - Reckless. We must condescend to them, and endure them with love or admonish them with meekness. Every Sunday reminds us of immortal life, teaches us to live worthy of resurrection and immortality and to stock up on immortal deeds, for example, joyfully doing deeds of mercy in the hope of reward from the righteous Giver. Brother Alexey is the only one of your wife's relatives left to support you. Do not forget that you received the real place from his father, and be content with him as a father. Who do you want to feed and water the beggars besides your household? But you can’t feed or give water to all the beggars. Leave them to the city dwellers; and you are obliged to feed and water your poor relatives according to both Divine and human law. Beware at home from the evil, envious and contemptuous eye, remembering the words of David: I walked in the midst of my house in the gentleness of my heart... with a proud eye and an insatiable heart, I did not eat with my neighbor [Ps. 100, 2, 5]. Remember that everyone will eat as much as his nature usually requires every day, and he will not eat any more, just like you. In this regard, be calm and cast your sorrow on God, who gives everything abundantly; seek the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of Heaven, the Kingdom of Christ, the Kingdom of peace, love, unanimity - and all earthly things will be added to you from His inexhaustible bounties, for His gifts are endless, and over the course of seven thousand years they have not become scarce, but continually flow and multiply and will not cease to multiply. Try to increase love, meekness, humility, kindness in yourself and spread contentment and abundance in your family and do not look with an evil eye on your abundance. As a priest of the Lord Jesus Christ, put aside all worldly cares and philosophize on high: look upon foods as rubbish and do not value them, do not spare them for anyone, for to spare them means to be chained to the earth and not to know the spirit of the Christian faith. This is Satan’s intention and his daily effort - to nail us to perishing sweets and to kindle in us hatred, enmity towards our neighbors, and mainly because of sweets. A true Christian is one who does not attach his heart to anything earthly, but to the one God, for whom everything earthly is nothing, but everything is God: life, food, clothing, air, light, and power - in a word, everything. Attachment to earthly goods is the spirit and intention of the devil. Woe to those who think longer and do not think about things above: they are caught alive in the will of the devil [2 Tim. 2, 26]. For this reason, the high God descended to earth, so that he would raise us to heaven 30. The love of voluptuousness, the love of money, the love of clothing - in a word, the love of things steals from the heart love for God and neighbor, and a person becomes entirely earthly, material and careless about pleasing God, does not strive for future benefits and does not think about self-sacrifice for the sake of God and his neighbor, in order to leave his vicious inclinations and change himself for a new life, no matter how difficult it may be, in order to serve his neighbor with selflessness; his soul, intoxicated with earthly things, seems to be sleeping in a deep sleep. If you had to give your outer clothing to the poor for the sake of Christ and for the sake of the fact that they are your members and members of His, the Lord, then even then you should not be angry at all, but with joy give them your property in their need and deny yourself for the sake of Christ in favor of them, as Christ gave Himself for you: if they scolded you - and then you should not be angry with them, much less shake them, beat them, pull their hair, but with all treat them with gentleness. Do not raise your hand against anyone in anger - you raise it on yourself: the harm caused to another will be returned to you tenfold; be gentle and patient and deny yourself. Why are priests, deacons, and readers in a hurry during divine services? Because the spirit of the devil operates in them - haste, negligence and human fear: we do not fear God, but we fear people, so as not to bore them with prayers, we please people, not God. The spirit of earthly, material, sinful lust (instead of heavenly, spiritual, holy) is also strongly active in Christians; the spirit of covetousness (instead of acquiring and multiplying spiritual treasures, or heavenly virtues); the spirit of lust (instead of love for everything spiritual, heavenly, incorruptible, eternal) of earthly things (gold, silver, expensive fabrics), lust and ambition (instead of striving for the honor of a heavenly title), - in general, the spirit of love of earth. In a house of prayer, or in a church, this spirit strongly attacks a Christian who begins to work for the Lord and seek His Heavenly Kingdom. The spirit of pity for consumed and used things still prevails in us, especially sweet foods, expensive clothes, wax candles, incense, wood oil, when they are used in large quantities in church or at home during prayer and at the icons of saints; We, poor-memory and short-sighted, forget that our God is the Creator and the Multiplier and the Transformer and the Provider. God! Thou who brought into being all creation and containing all that exists with Thy infinite power, goodness and wisdom, glory to Thee! He who saves us continually, glory to Thee! You have promised us eternal salvation, glory to You! A lesson given to me by temptation during the cathedral liturgy on St. Andrew’s Day. Retired commissar Pavel Alexandrovich, to whom I had lent ten rubles and previously served prosphora during the liturgy, came to mass and stood at the altar. What then? I despised and hated him in my soul through the work of the devil; the enemy hurt me extremely, confused me, weakened me, captivated me with contempt and hatred; I was in his clutches and could barely get rid of his jaws with the most intense prayer to God. Oh, senseless womb! Oh, stupid covetousness! Is it because of you, stinking belly that is about to be emptied, is it because of you, choked pieces of silver, that I despise and hate the member of Christ God, created in the image of God, a citizen of heaven! Oh, what cunning, what cunning of the devil is revealed in a person’s attachment to sweets and money: nailing a person’s thoughts, heart and will through his attachment to sweets and money, to earth and tearing his eyes away completely from heaven, through them he also implants in his heart hatred of his neighbor, who uses these sweets and money from us. What to do after this? – Completely neglect money and belly and diligently love your neighbor from a pure heart. Oh, vile heart, oh, vile flesh, prodigal, greedy, voluptuous! Just as she is greedy for tasty foods and drinks, so greedy for the beautiful faces of women and men, and just as she is greedy to eat and drink herself, and if at home, then without the participation of others, because stinginess is added to greed, so she greedily gazes at good faces, wanting, as it were, to be satisfied with the kindness of the face or to use them to satisfy lust. Oh, possessed, prodigal flesh! Oh, how necessary it is to kill you with meager and harsh food, vigil, prayer, labor, kneeling, thinking about death, about Judgment, about the fire of Gehenna! On St. Andrew’s day (when he preached the sermon) during mass, the devil exposed me completely to the grace of God and clothed me in his devilish malice, in his contempt for the commissar Pavel Andreevich, introducing into my heart greed for the prosphora and contempt 31 with malice towards this man, standing at the altar and extending his views to them. Oh, what a sin! The Lord gives you His Body and Blood for food and drink, but you feel sorry for your neighbor, and a pious old man at that, to give prosphora once or twice a week. Give, give willingly and with love, and do not regret the gift of God: let the servants of God eat them with reverence and sweetness. Be glad that you have the opportunity to give to someone who cannot repay [Lk. 14, 13–14]. Otherwise we are always chasing retribution. Why do we use the fragrance of incense in church? To signify the spiritual fragrance, which, by the grace of the Holy Spirit, the saints were made and which we should be, and to constantly remind us that we free and cleanse ourselves in every possible way from the stench of passions, for just as the fragrance of incense means the fragrance of shrines and Christian virtues, which the Lord smells as pleasant incense, so the stench means passion and our sins, from which the Lord disgusted. You have experienced a thousand times how great and life-giving the sweetness of communion with God is; why do you still dream on your bed about the sweetness of communion with women? Why do you give free rein to your imagination? Why these paintings? Or have you become tired, thickened, enlarged and forgotten God, who saves you? 32 But do not forget what the Apostle says: If anyone destroys the church of God, God will punish him [1 Cor. 3, 17]. At every moment, be devoted with all your heart to the Lord Jesus Christ and His Most Pure Mother - whether at home, in church, or while performing a public duty; this devotion is the source of purification, holiness, peace, freedom from sin, heart space, spiritual light, strength in the performance of official duties. The Holy Church daily excites us to this devotion, proclaiming every day: let us commend our whole life to Christ our God. The cab drivers shout: watch out, turn to the right! And the priests in the church should say to the laity: beware (of the aphids of sin), and: to the right, that is, go the right path, leaving the left. You feel sorry for your brother to eat enough food for him to be satisfied - why do you regret it? You say it's expensive. Why this crafty idea about high prices? Why do you value this food, this rubbish, and not value your brother? What is food and what is brother? That one is rubbish, and this one is the king and owner of the whole earth. Don’t feel sorry for him, otherwise you’ll feel sorry for yourself, and if you don’t feel sorry for yourself, then don’t feel sorry for him either. The fall of humanity was profound: it was necessary to recreate, transform, renew it. Who could do this except the God-man? Glory to Thee, O Lord, as neither an intercessor nor an Angel, but Himself, O Lord, became incarnate, and saved me as a whole man 33 . The absurdity of carnal passions: a glutton, being full and satiated, still looks greedily to see if there is something better on the table for him to eat, and sometimes looks angrily (if he is the owner of the table) at those who compete with him in eating and drinking. Oh, absurdity, oh, madness in a rational being created in the image and likeness of God, arbitrarily allowed due to addiction to earthly sweets. A money lover, having many thousands of pieces of silver, still cannot satisfy his soul with them, considers himself poor and needy, envies others, even those who have much less than him, loses his temper when he sees or hears that someone is encroaching on his income: his enemy is the one who asks him for money, even if the applicant is the poorest person; Working for the demon of the love of money, which is also the father of lies, the lover of money often resorts to lies and deception and thus is often internally robbed from the enemy. The soul of a money-lover is insatiable, just like the soul of a sensualist. Voluptuous and money-loving people are hard-hearted towards the poor, the sick, the mourning and those who have fallen into various troubles and misfortunes; They are disgusting both for God and for people, although people for the most part do not see all their ugliness and respect, bow down, and subserviently to them. (I am the first of sinners.) Do your best to restrain your anger towards faulty and rude servants or households in general, for we, feeling our power over them and their dependence on us in everyday needs, consider ourselves as if we have the right to reveal our anger and rage towards them in strong affects, although both we and they are God’s servants and even God’s children, and if we want others to act with us meekly, nobly, condescendingly, then, of course, we must do the same with them same. If you do not like reproof and do not accept it from me, who was appointed to reprove, God is with you. But how will you be healed from your spiritual illnesses, from your spiritual blindness? Pathetic! After all, you will perish in your pride, in your stubbornness, in your vices - you will perish precisely because there was no healer, no denouncer. Forgive me for telling you: you remind me of that wicked man for whom reproof is wounds: reproof of the wicked is his wound [Prov. 9, 7]. The people of this world do not like reproof and persecute those who reprove with blasphemy, slander, and actual expulsion. I myself, the accursed one, do not like reproof and am offended by those who reprove - I am so proud and proud! Heal, O Lord, Physician of our souls and bodies, the ulcers of my soul, fierce and incurable! Tempt me as silver is tempted, so that you will separate from me every sinful admixture, as foreign impurities are separated from silver and gold; Cleanse away the old leaven in me, that I may be a new mixture [1 Cor. 5, 7 – 8]. I thank You, Most Holy Lady, for You, the most merciful and quick Intercessor, saved me through my prayer from cramped conditions, sorrow and the storm of sin, and I soon felt sweet peace and spiritual freedom. Teach, O Most Merciful One, the Christian race to call upon You with all its soul in all misfortunes and sorrows, so that by thus calling upon You, the Most Merciful and All-Powerful One, they will be delivered from many troubles. Teach them to avoid the flattery of sin and avoid the many different intrigues of the enemy! I thank You, Lord, who interceded me from the violence of the passion of voluptuousness and avarice, or from sparing my brother of sweets. What do I regret? That which must be despised and towards which one must have complete indifference, like dust, like feces, precisely because it harms the soul so much and passes away like a shadow, like smoke or steam or a disappearing ghost. When his sweets are taken from a voluptuous person, it is as if his soul is being pulled, as if his life is being taken away from him, and he becomes an enemy and a hater of those who share the sweets with him at his meal, he cannot speak peacefully with them, he is embarrassed, darkened, oppressed in his soul and for many years he remains cold and insensitive, if not outright hostile, to those who often share his meal with him, whereas, according to the apostolic commandment, he must love another diligently from a pure heart [1 Pet. 1:22] as a co-member, as a member of Christ, as redeemed by the blood of Christ, as a child of God. This is what a sin is, what an absurdity is lust, what terrible consequences come from it: the constant violation of the entire law of God, the essence of which is: love your neighbor... as yourself [Lev. 19, 18; Matt. 19, 19]. So, it’s time to neglect sweets and acquisitions! My God! How terribly rampant is voluptuousness and, in general, love of earth and unbrotherly love in me! With what strength and audacity do the carnal passions want to establish their dominion in me! What a struggle within me between evil and good! How every evil intensifies and strengthens itself in me! How zealously one must constantly struggle with oneself in order, with the help of God’s grace, to defeat evil and reign in goodness, to cast out the devil and bring in Christ, making one’s heart from the work of the devil into a temple of the Holy Spirit! God! Thank You for the gift of prayer with the faithful! In this prayer with them, I myself am cleansed from the stench of passions, and the souls of those who pray are cleansed! You feel and notice that some of those praying are not spiritually disposed towards you, and you yourself are carried away by a restless feeling of enmity towards them! Let it not be, do not do the will of the devil: he attracts you to sin with deception, but you overcome the attraction, overcome evil with good [Rom. 12:21], but do not repay evil for evil. Bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who harm you [Matt. 5, 44], may you be a true disciple of Jesus Christ! The more voluptuous and well-fed a person is, the angrier and stingier he is. Brother Konstantin came and began to take a lot of sugar - and it was a pity, and annoyance, and anger. What a cheerful, clear, free, calm, concentrated, contemplative spirit our sublime and saving faith requires! Oh, to what, to what heights has the Lord raised us, the fallen, by raising us to heaven and deifying our nature, and how little we think about it and how little we appreciate it! How devoted we are to earthly things—to earthly sweets, to earthly splendor, to earthly glory, like smoke! Others say: there are many fasts in the Orthodox Church. How? Many? - Few. Those honored by the disembodied by the calling to heavenly citizenship should not please the belly, because of which so much sin and so much trouble has entered the world - they most of all need to think about pleasing their God and Savior and about the heavenly Kingdom to which they are called, and diligently practice Christian virtues that lead there; sweets, and earthly splendor, and wealth, and glory are given to those who wish, or to the pagans who place their lives and their happiness in this vanity, who are alien from the covenant of promise, who do not know the promises of our faith and do not have participation with us in our worship, in our Sacraments. Through the blessing of the priest, the Lord Himself blesses immediately. Let them call on My name on the children of Israel, and I [the Lord] will bless them (Numbers 6:27). With what reverence and with what zeal one must accept the blessing from the priest! With what attention and reverence priests should bless people! Today I showed great cowardice and impatience when there was a stabbing and severe pain at the end of my left leg: I tossed about, groaned, roared! What am I good for after this? Having received so many good things from the Lord, will I not endure the evil ones? [Job. 2, 10]. How flattering all sins are! They come to us under the guise of our friends and well-wishers, especially for our flesh, promising us pleasure and bliss, contentment and well-being (gluttony, covetousness, bribery, lust, ambition and others). And many, many, who have no concept of true good, who love their sin-loving and voluptuous flesh, addicted to tickling it, conveniently succumb to sin, seduced by its momentary sweetness, which after a few minutes becomes deadly bitterness. Brethren, seduced by the deadly sweetness of sin! Remember the teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ and His apostles and holy fathers that for the sake of the eternal good of the soul we must deny ourselves, not allow mental foxes to approach us, fight them, drive them away - crucify the flesh with its passions and lusts [Gal. 5:24], to love work, vigil, abstinence, non-covetousness, contemplation of God, prayer and endure carnal suffering, for all this suppresses, cleanses and destroys sin. You are offended by me because I tell you the truth to your face, exposing your lies. Ah, if it were not for the eternal truth of God, reigning there over us forever and ever and having to punish with eternal fire unrepentant and bitter untruth, I would not have convicted you of untruth, I would have left you to yourselves: live as you have accepted to live, do what you are accustomed to do; but now I am forced to use eternal truth itself to expose human untruths in order to snatch people away from the eternal fire. People have fallen in love with untruth, become akin to their fallen being, and they do not love the truth, do not tolerate accusers, are at enmity against them, persecute them - but this is their illness, madness: just as doctors suffer a lot from the insane, but do not leave their care for them, so we, preachers of the eternal truth of God, must suffer from people suffering from the madness of passions. Sooner or later, perhaps, they will be healed: their minds will clear up, the clouds of passions will dissipate, and they themselves will be grateful to their patient doctors; and if they don’t, then they’ve done their job. Only in this way - the sacrament of the incarnation, suffering and death on the cross of the Son of God - was it possible to pluck you from the eternal wrath of God and eternal fire; only by faith in the Son of God and obedience to Him can you avoid the terrible Gehenna; Only through the Sacraments of the Holy Church can you free yourself from the leaven of sin and bring Divine sanctity into your being and, so to speak, be grafted into your Life-Giver, like a rod into a vine - and without this you will perish forever. So, speed up with heartfelt faith in the Lord and obedience to His holy commandments. We stand with our hearts in virtue to the extent that the Lord strengthens us with His grace: if the Lord leaves us for a moment, for a minute, we slip, we fall, and we can only get up only if we are strengthened by Divine grace. This is how weak we are, how impoverished we are! And if only we would realize and always remember that we are weak, and would constantly turn to the Lord and attribute all good things to Him! No, we forget, we think that we are strong, and perfect, and better than others, and that some good deeds are our property! We dare to be proud, being nothing, being filled with all kinds of sins! How seductive sin is with its temporary sweetness! A person stands in prayer at home or in church - and imperceptibly from prayer he is carried away by earthly thoughts, for example, to the thought of an earthly reward awaiting him, or about the monetary profit that we have received or are planning to receive, or about the clothes that are being sewn for us, or we remember pleasant or unpleasant, friendly or hostile relations with one of our relatives, acquaintances, neighbors, comrades - and thus we stealthily steal away from our enemy salvation, which, occupying us with earthly, vain things, wants and intensifies to deprive us of heavenly and eternal blessings, and we do not do the work for which we came to the church of God or at home in front of the holy icons. We must be wise as serpents and gentle as doves [Matt. 10, 16]... We must have a constant struggle with the thoughts and movements of our multi-passionate flesh. I thank the Lord, who strengthened my spirit yesterday (December 5th) to perform the all-night vigil in the Duma church without stumbling. Strengthen, O Lord, for the sake of Your mercy this day too - for I am weak, and You know this. Not frightening us with ghosts... 34 The kingdom of ghosts has passed - now the truth reigns: preach it firmly. The enemy strongly tempted us today during mass with anger at the new cleric of Kamenogradsky, who sang impetuously and carelessly; and after mass he meekly told me in response to my remark that he tried to sing smoothly. Everyone has their own manners - but in church one must abandon one’s own manners, especially strange ones, and not heed the devil’s malice for a moment. At Yakovleva’s boarding house, the demon of fornication attacked me and gave me an extreme cold, disgracing my face and not allowing me to speak freely. Akathist to the Sweetest Jesus, Kontakion 8. Contempt (Church Glorious) – contempt, arrogance. Wed: uty, thicker, wider: and leave God (Russian: fat, fat and fat; and he left God) (Deut. 32:15). Irmos of the 4th song of the canon from the Follow-up to Holy Communion. For this reason, ecu (Jesus Christ) came in the form of a slave, not frightening us as a ghost, but giving true health to the body (prayer from the follow-up of the small consecration of water). You might be interested in: