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God! I thank You with all my heart for all Your powers, which have now been revealed to me, a sinner, many times: 1) in the morning at home, 2) outside the house in the gymnasium during two classes (fourth and sixth), 3) again at home in the fourth and fifth hours, 4) outside the city and behind the cemetery in the tavern before baptism, 5) in the city at Mr. Bieber’s house twice and 6) again at home at the evening table. Glory to Your great-saving name, Lord! God! Give me the grace to exchange all earthly things, all sweets, all treasures for the dust that is under my feet, and to cleave to You alone, and to rely on You alone with all my heart. See, tell your heart, earthly sweets and jewels and beauties distract you from Christ the Giver of Life, cut off the life of your heart, plunge your soul into sorrow, oppression, darkness and slavery - how do you cleave to them and love them? How jealous are you of people who walk in the pleasures of life? How do you value them, respect them, caress them, draw them closer to you for the sake of voluptuousness? How do you please them? Why did I forget the words of the Apostle: If I still pleased people, I would not be a servant of Christ [Gal. 1, 10 ]? Do not be afraid, you will not offend Christ the Lord if you show some coldness towards them, as if they live unrighteously and fearlessly violate the commandments of Christ and the Church. This is the majestic, unprecedented work God has done for people on earth - the incarnation of the Son of God, wandering, preaching the word of God, miracles, prophecies, suffering, burial, death, resurrection and ascension to heaven - a work for which humanity has been prepared for 5,508 years. What kind of conformity does it require of us? Why did the Son of God come down from heaven, teach, work miracles, suffer, die and rise again? To change us, renew us, elevate us to heaven, to His eternal Kingdom. Do you change for the better as a Christian through repentance and tears and increased diligence towards virtue? Are you renewed by God's grace through the Sacraments? Do you strive for grief? Aren't you living carelessly, in sins? Is the old man alive in you? Aren't all passions alive in you? Have you stuck to the ground? If so, woe to you, ungrateful, cold, malicious: you trample on the Son of God and the covenant blood. But be afraid of falling into the hands of the living God. Lutherans, with all their church practice, prove that their church is not a church, because 1) they have broken the connection and unity with the Apostolic Church, separated from it and do not have a divinely established priesthood, which primarily constitutes the Church; 2) they broke the connection with the heavenly Church, not honoring the saints and not calling them, after God, to help as intercessors and prayer books for us; 3) they have broken off contact with the dead, they do not pray for them, for the repose of their souls, and 4) they do not pray for the living, considering prayer for others useless. Thus, they themselves prove that their church is not a church, but an illegal gathering that has no spiritual organization. These are schismatics 61 in the proper sense. The Lutherans rejected apostolic grace, or the church hierarchy, and set up an arbitrary pastorate for themselves, about which we must say the same thing that the Holy Spirit once said about the false prophets: I did not send these prophets, but they themselves fled; I did not tell them, but they prophesied [Jer. 23, 21]. What can we say about the Lutheran Church? This is not the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, but an independent gathering, not organized on the rules of the apostles and patrists, but on the basis of its own wisdom. For Lutherans, the words of the Apostle about the Savior after the resurrection mean nothing: for forty days he appeared to them and spoke about the Kingdom of God [Acts. 1, 3]. The apostles could not and did not have the need to put everything in writing, but they conveyed much orally to their disciples and successors from what the Savior told them, including, among other things, about the structure of the church hierarchy, the way of performing divine services and the Sacraments. But the Lutherans rejected Tradition. Since Orthodox Christians live in union with Lutherans, we must show them the difference between our religion and the Lutheran one and the great difference and advantage of our religion from the Lutheran one. Pastors call themselves priests, but they are not - they lie. Who dedicated them? Who brought down the apostolic grace on them? Who ordained them? - Are their bishops, who themselves have not been ordained? Therefore, it is a sin to say: the Lutheran faith and the Orthodox faith are one and the same; just as earth is not heaven, and heaven is not earth, so the Lutheran faith is not the same as the Orthodox; Luther's faith is earthly, because it was not formed by God-sent men, but by apostates, according to their earthly wisdom. Amen to her. Marina Ivanovna is pious. Readers of the Holy God in Three Persons - Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Orthodox Christians! Live holy! Readers and confessors of the God of love, live in love! Confessors of our meek and humble-hearted Lord Jesus Christ, be meek and humble towards everyone! Readers and confessors of the Generous One, be sociable and generous to each other; lovers of the True and Faithful, be faithful and true in speech, rejecting falsehood, speaking the truth every one to his neighbor, for we are members of one another [Eph. 4, 25]. Readers of our long-suffering and long-suffering Lord Jesus Christ, who endured us for the sake (not for Himself - for our redemption and for the sake of setting an example for us) reproach, spitting, strangulation, beating, death on the cross - be patient in sorrows, in troubles, misfortunes, in poverty and poverty, in suffering for the truth; honorers and confessors of the Lord Jesus Christ reigning with the Father and the Holy Spirit, philosophize on high, set your hearts on high, undertake all your labors for the heavenly Kingdom, diligently perform all the virtues, so that you may be counted worthy of the heavenly Kingdom and be counted among the firstborn, written in heaven in our Lord Jesus Christ [Heb. 12, 23]. That's all - do not weaken in your zeal; be on fire in spirit; Serve the Lord [Rom. 12, 11]. Let us put aside pride, malice, envy, covetousness, and excessive gluttony. Lord Jesus Christ, help us! Protect Your body - Your Holy Church from the passions of dishonor through the prayers of our Most Holy and Most Blessed Lady Theotokos, Your Most Pure Mother, the holy Angels, the Archangels and all the heavenly powers and all the saints. Amen. Restless pity (sting) for sweets, money, clothes, shelter for one’s neighbor is an encouragement, a pretext for the devil to be angry with one’s neighbor and humiliate him. Have an ear to hear and let him hear [Rev. 2:17] and let him beware of lawless pity: he has subdued everything, it is said, under his nose [Ps. 8, 7]. If God has put everything under man's feet, how will we deprive him of what is rightfully his; if God is generous, why should we be stingy? The fruits of gluttony are fornication, anger, irritability, envy, stinginess, greed, laziness, cooling towards God and neighbor. I thank You, the Word of God, for with my inner word and the prayer of faith you sovereignly and quickly saved me as I walked from the gymnasium to my home; I thank You, for You have pacified me and You have given me inner freedom with space in my heart. Do not deprive me of Your peace and Your freedom forever, my Lord, Lord! November 4th day, 1865. Imagine the countless number of members of the heavenly Church of God: a) Angels and b) humans, and earthly - how many are on earth in different countries members of the Church, hierarchical and worldly, or the flock, how many are our members in the underworld - and then, having imagined all this, imagine what we mean among all these members, and humble yourself deep in your soul before the Lord God, before the Lady, before the Angels, so perfect, so luminous because of the inner radiance of their shrine, virtue, both before the holy people of God, and before all members of the earthly Church. Arrange your actions, your morals, not in the likeness of people living in this world and guided by the spirit, customs, rules of this world, but in the likeness of holy people who pleased God, be guided by their spirit, their life, rules, and for this, do not read secular books filled with descriptions of a vain, sinful life, in which the characters with a smug look, laughingly often talk about the most with their sinful actions, habits, customs, they instill in others similar actions, rules, habits and captivate many with their flattery, their idle talk, pouring into their readers the voluptuous spirit of this world, pride, contempt, envy, the vanity of this world. Yes, Christian, you should read more often descriptions of the lives of true Christians who have already passed the field of this life, glorified by God and rejoicing in eternal life before the throne of God. Read their biographies, learn from them how you can live worthy of the calling to which you are called, how to put off the old man and put on the new man, created according to God, in righteousness and honor of the truth [Eph. 4, 24], and achieve a blessed refuge in God; how to fight passions, how to overcome the world, its corrupt customs and rules, for love for this world is enmity against God [Jas. 4, 4]. Especially, you should read more often the holy Gospel of our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ - this true wisdom, true light, this book of books, which alone can make us wise enough for salvation. Before people - male and female, the devil tempts with vile thoughts and feelings, passions, malice, contempt, envy, hypocrisy, fear, servility, loss of sight of sweets during tea and coffee; at dinner he tempts, torments with addiction to sweets, pity for them, severity and grief towards our neighbors who eat with us, despondency if we are the masters of the table. We must recognize his machinations and impute them to nothing. Sometimes we notice and feel with horror that we become embittered with those closest, dearest and most venerable or briefly known to us, we despise them internally for no reason or for some reason, not wanting it ourselves, or [we feel] that we regret sweets, money, etc., for those closest to us, or our servants, or the poor, and are irritated against them in our souls, sometimes apparently, because they feed from us, it’s painful, and weary, and we feel ashamed of ourselves, and we become despondent and faint-hearted, because we are such scoundrels and scoundrels, and we want to get rid of all these and similar crazy passions; sometimes through the prayer of faith we get rid of them for a while, but then soon we fall into the same passions again. What is it that happens to us and what should we do? These are the machinations of the enemy, the devil, over us, and we must fight against them with all measures. How to fight? Constantly and diligently calling on the Lord Jesus Christ for help and firmly believing that both hatred of our neighbor and addiction to earthly goods are the work of the enemy of our salvation, who directs all his machinations to tie our hearts to earthly goods and occupy us with collecting them, so that we enjoy only earthly goods, and moreover, as much as possible and only [them alone], so that we do not even think about heavenly ones and so that we constantly violate the commandment Our Lord Jesus Christ about love for our neighbor, so that we live in pride, mutual contempt, malice, envy, stinginess, resentment, disobedience, gluttony, drunkenness, fornication, laziness and other sins. We should not be surprised or disheartened by the fact that we, despite ourselves, become very embittered against those closest and most respected to us, or feel sorry for them with earthly blessings, or that nasty, most vile thoughts and feelings burst into our hearts, burst into them with impudence, or even blasphemy against the holy and great God, the Most Pure Mother of God and the holy Angels and holy people of God - these are all intrigues enemies, this is all the stench from the hellish abyss; stand in faith, fight courageously against your enemies, repeating one thing - that all this is the dream of fallen, evil, vile and disgusting spirits, do not deign for a moment to their suggestions and thoughts. Carry 62 constantly the name of the Lord Jesus in your heart, and they, like arrows, will rebound from you with shame. Stand, having girded your loins with truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and having put on your shoes for the preparation of the gospel of peace... taking up the shield of faith, in which we will be able to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one: and we have taken the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God [Eph. 6, 14–17], with which our Lord Jesus Christ defeated the tempter in the desert. The impudence and persistence of the enemy do not terrify you: he cannot help but be what he is, he is always equal to himself - insolent, vile, angry, strong in case of our mistake, impudent, blasphemous, blasphemous, vigilant. Lord Jesus, help us! Behold, we are counted as sheep of the slaughter every day [Ps. 43, 23 ]; Behold, our rapist daily struggles with us with many different passions, forcing us incessantly to do his absurd, dreamy, insane, painful, hellish will. Intercede, save, have mercy and protect us, O God, with Your grace. But glory to You, Lord Jesus! We confess with gratitude to You that in Your all-saving and all-powerful name we often defeat our fiercest enemies through faith in You and hope in Your mercy and power. Savior! Until our last breath, help us, deliver us and save us! Wake up! November 5th day, 1865. With students, and with everyone in general, when they are given a lot to read or read a lot themselves, but they do not reflect and, so to speak, do not chew on what they read, what happens is similar to what happens to people who do not take food and drink in moderation every day, that is, satiety with the sciences and an aversion to them occurs. And our educational institutions suffer from multi-subject and multi-lesson teaching. In order to avoid harm from our educational institutions, on which so much state money is spent and in which so many young people are educated, serious attention must be paid to teaching. What happens to people who lead a chaste and pious life is that their bodily needs become more and more limited. This should be considered a gift from God, and yet, due to human weakness, some of these people who have wealth sometimes seem to regret that they need very little food and drink, and continue to eat and drink as before, using the same amount. Such people harm themselves and resist the Holy Spirit, Who wants to make them His vessels, for man will not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God [Matt. 4, 4]. And they also develop satiety with both earthly and spiritual goods, for satiety in bodily goods produces an aversion to spiritual ones. Man is a mirror and some personification of the infinite wisdom, goodness and omnipotence, the greatness and beauty of God, for from the earth, from which the remains of coal are erupted by man every day, the Lord created such a beautiful body, having such a wise internal and external structure and such a beautiful appearance: this is a magnificent, wonderful, artistic sculpture, the most beautiful work of the highest good, wise and omnipotent Artist - The Lord God, a work that must be revered, which must be revered as a shrine, as the church of God, according to the Scripture: Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit living in you, which you have from God, for man is the image of God and the church of the living God (1 Cor. 6:19). Internal bitterness and irritation against someone is an internal murder that is not accomplished by deed, but has already been accomplished in the soul, therefore one must in every possible way avoid the most internal thoughts or feelings of dissatisfaction with something towards others and try to endure in meekness and kindness everything that is unpleasant for the flesh and for the feeling, done by others, considering it as nothing. In general, despise your pampered and demanding flesh and honor in every possible way man as the image of God, especially your parents. The devil daily puts murderous thoughts into our hearts, daily through us he kills our neighbor internally. The enemy daily sharpens our inner eye and our outer eyes in order to see the speck in the eye of our brother or father and, because of the sinful bitch, to hate and despise him - but to regard our own sins, although there are an abyss of them, as nothing and to prosper even worse! Oh, damnation, oh, our blindness! Bride Unbride! The Bride is called the Most Holy Virgin Mary because She, as a bride to her husband, was adorned with all spiritual beauties, all virtues. A non-bride is one who has not been discouraged by her husband, who has not known her husband. Do not desire very fine vestments in sacred service, lest your heart cleave to earthly splendor and be torn away from God. All glory to the queen's daughter within [Ps. 44, 14]. Take into account that with the desire for earthly splendor Satan seduces us and darkens us, clouds the eye of our heart and draws us into anger and irritability and into disobedience, when serving in brilliant vestments depends not on us, but on the ruler in the church. Let your inner life be pure and bright; Present to the gaze of God, the Most Pure Virgin Mary, holy Angels and holy people your bright soul, free from filth or stain of sin. Look at every sinful thought, every sinful feeling as if it were the devil himself, and hate every sinful thought, every passion of the heart. Be zealous for abstinence, then the flesh will not be so enraged by passions, but the more we feed it and please it, the more strongly it fights against us. It is necessary to positively humble your soul by fasting, to feed it as little and as simply as possible, otherwise the satiated and delighted flesh strongly resists the spirit of Christ - the spirit of meekness, humility, kindness, patience, obedience; she can be proud, disdainful, angry, rude, irritable, and disobedient. Satiety and delicacy are the devil’s strong battering weapons, with which he destroys the walls of the soul and impudently breaks into this mental city. Strange thing! To that which stands as a core in us, goring the soul and wounding, a wall separating between God and us, between us and people, that is death for the soul (I mean sweets, money) and that must be despised and only used when necessary, we cling to that, because of that we become irritated, embittered at each other. For there is no other way to love our neighbor as ourselves if we regard all earthly goods as nothing but rubbish; otherwise, we will always have reasons for anger and hostility towards our neighbor. You cannot love God with all your heart without rejecting from your heart the love for earthly pleasures, for the honor and wealth of this world. One must hate this age and all its blessings as lovely, in order to love with all one’s heart that age, true and abiding, unceasing. The slightest coldness, dislike for one's neighbor is already a demonic lie, service to the devil - what can we say about internal hatred for one's neighbor because of sweets, money, resentment, or his faults? The slightest love, addiction to sensual goods is a sin - what can we say about the constant desire to multiply them by various means? Hitherto, accursed, I have not acquired self-sacrifice, non-covetousness, fasting, meekness, humility and patience in order to love God with all my heart and my neighbor as myself. God! Apply faith and humility! Let me remember that I am here a fighter for the Kingdom for the sake of the Heavenly, a stranger. Give the one who strives to abstain from everything, so that I may receive an incorruptible crown (1 Cor. 9:25). Let me count everything earthly as dust, sand, decay, dreams, dreams. On November 7, 1865, on Sunday, from satiety the day before with milk and black bread, the troubles of hell surrounded me, cramped conditions, sorrow, fire, anger at my father and family for sweets: why do they eat and drink when I don’t eat or drink, although eating and drinking is a need indicated by God like air, and the Heavenly Father gives food and drink to all creatures, especially to people? Through excess in food and drink, the devil builds a nest for himself in the heart of a glutton, and the more we eat and drink, that is, we become satiated and drunk, the larger the nest, the stronger the enemy’s net. Through satiety, a person loses his heartfelt respect for the sacred, for God Himself, his neighbor, internal adultery, greed, stinginess, envy, petrified insensibility, unrepentance, malice, pride, irritability, and rebellion become irritated and intensified. Thank You, Lord, for the successful celebration of the Liturgy on November 7, 1865. The royal house spoke slowly, all of them; he said the sermon well. About the Holy Spirit. How I insult the Holy Spirit, the life-giving Lord, who gives life to me and everyone, by relying on decay - on food and drink, on money, etc. Food and drink are rubbish, the earth is like the body, and man is the image of God. How to compare dust with the image of God, how to spare dust for the image of God? How can you avoid communicating with people because of ashes? How else could one not connect and get closer to people through communication on the estate? He who gives alms to his neighbor or treats guests whom he himself does not have or rarely has, sows to the spirit, but he who spends everything on himself, lives for his own pleasure, sows to the flesh and from the flesh will reap corruption - and he who sows to the Spirit will from the spirit reap eternal life [Gal. 6, 8]. In every possible way we must humble ourselves before our neighbors as before the images of God. We must serve them in every possible way as images of God and verbal members of Christ. Always have hope in the simple Belly, Hypostatic and infinite, providential, loving - in the Lord God, the Father, the Nourisher of every creature, especially people, His most beloved creatures, His images. Man is the image of God, the Creator of everything: can anything be higher and more precious on earth than man? What honor should be given to a person? But our habit of him, and our carnal pride, make him an ordinary creature: because of money, because of sweets, we are ready to despise and often despise him. To despise the flesh and everything carnal and belonging to the flesh. Look at the body as an organized earth, as a plant that must be destroyed, and as a church of the immortal human spirit and the church of God, for the Spirit of God lives in us. I suffer from greed for food. Have mercy on me, God! If we must tolerate the love of people who have passions: pride, malice, envy, stinginess, greed, etc., then should we not tolerate those who have carnal lusts: smoking, drinking tea and coffee, drinking beer, etc.? And is it because of these corruptible things that we will reject from our hearts those created in the image of God and members of the body of Christ, although weak? Shouldn't the smoke they make by smoking be tolerated? Let us remember how much the Lord puts up with us, what the stench of passions, what the fumes, the smoke of the passions of hell: malice, pride, envy, etc. Let us also tolerate and despise our flesh or tell our guests with meekness that we do not tolerate tobacco. But we will not hate and despise people for smoking tobacco. It’s better to be sorry and pray. Our flesh wants to turn everything into a reason for anger. Well, if you yourself are sinless, then do not tolerate fellow sinners, and if you yourself are sinners and sinners, then tolerate sinners yourself. God is all-holy and tolerates us sinners - God, for whom sin is infinitely vile, as for the most perfect holiness, for whom even an unrighteous thought is an abomination - how can we, sinners ourselves, not tolerate sinners? Where does this pride and impatience come from in us? – From ignorance of one’s sinfulness and common weakness. Humanity is a living book of God, in which the introduction is the creation of the world, the beginning is the creation of man and the first people are Adam and Eve; periods - the fall, the promise of the Savior, corruption, the flood, the origin of nations from the sons of Noah, the calling of Abraham, the Jewish people... Heads - different nations... words - individuals. Who can read this book? Other, secular sciences speak about the earthly and perishable, about past peoples and kingdoms, or about past persons who acted in the civil field and accomplished certain earthly deeds, but the Law of God speaks about heavenly things and about man as a heavenly citizen, about eternal life, about the eternal God, about His laws, the fulfillment of which gives man happiness here and bliss there, about people who have committed great virtues and achieved holiness, which is the goal of human earthly life. The peasants are plywood makers 63, need is their persecutor, the rich are their comforters. Do not be tempted by your appetite and do not satisfy it completely, but much sooner than you satisfy it, stop eating. Otherwise, the next day you will bitterly repent of your recklessness. This refers to eating at night. During lunch, you can eat more and satisfy your desire (appetite), because after lunch comes movement and work. Especially do not eat a lot of black bread, and especially soft bread: it falls like a stone on the heart. And how easy it is for someone who fasts! Before our eyes, the sacrament of redemption and the New Covenant of the blood of the Lord are being accomplished or, as it were, continuing every day. This happens during the Divine Liturgy. Old Testament history also repeats itself daily in us - these are the passions of the old man: the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life (1 John 2:16). The old man is strong in us. New Testament history is also written in us with heavenly thoughts, feelings, aspirations, virtues - meekness, humility, kindness, obedience, abstinence, purity, simplicity, lack of covetousness, contentment with little things, contempt for the world and all its charm and soul-spirited beauty, inner and unceasing prayer, sobriety and vigilance, courage in the fight against enemies of salvation, hope. All ascetics (and we are ascetics) abstain from everything (1 Cor. 9:25), that is, from what is allowed and given by God for our benefit, from tasty and even at certain times simple food, strong or sweet drinks, wine, beer, sweet tea, from smart clothes, from various acquisitions: good and expensive dishes, expensive household utensils - chairs, sofas, tables, cabinets, etc. Because the wanderer has no reason to stock up on all this in excess: he you only need what is necessary. He knows that his flesh is also a snare of the enemy-suppressor, and all his worldly things are snares. The gods cursed them 64. Our gods are self-love, pride, malice, envy, stinginess, sweets, money, beauty, perseverance and laziness, doubt in the truth of God, passion for word dispute and the like. Scold them, despise them in yourself when you feel them approaching you, and do not let them into your heart: it is the church of the living God. Without breaking down, greet and say goodbye with all your heart and talk with your father and sister-in-law, not considering this a favor for them on your part, but considering it a favor on their part that they are talking with you. Master Lord Almighty, I thank You that through my prayer You have vouchsafed me to overcome the passion of voluptuousness and greed twice during the proskomedia and liturgy, for the sake of the merits of our Lord Jesus Christ, having taken away my sins by Your Holy Spirit, and You have vouchsafed me to perform the Divine Liturgy with all my soul, loudly, without stumbling, and to receive communion, just as I did consume the Divine Mysteries without judgment, into the world of spiritual powers. I thank You, for You granted me comfortably passage to two grades (seventh and fifth) with blessing, and for all day long You had mercy on me through my prayer, when I fell at Your throne in the church and at home bowed my knee before You, asking for Your mercy. Glory to Your love for mankind, Lord! November 8th, 1865. With the measure you use, it will be measured to you [Matt. 7, 2]: you yourself are kind to others - and they will be kind to you; you yourself are generous - and they will be generous to you. If some people are unkind to you, then you should always be kind, because although a person may be bad due to weakness or passion, he still wants to see in you the opposite of his state of mind, namely: he wants to see virtue in you: meekness, humility, affection, goodwill, not conquering his evil with evil, but conquering his evil with good - and if you act so wisely with him, he will soon love you from the bottom of his heart as a true one. your friend and your spiritual physician: as you want people to do to you, so do you to them [Lk. 6, 31]. Those who behave more proudly and fearfully before us, we forgive much, much more than others, the meek and humble and quiet, or those who have already become accustomed to us, we do not forgive or we grumble to ourselves and grow cold towards them internally. This is where you need to catch yourself. Why do we respect some and forgive their weaknesses? Why partiality? Why do we not attack those who know how and have the strength to defend themselves, but attack those who do not know how and trample on them? Leave from us this old charm of sin, which battles us daily. Grant us to listen to ourselves, Lord, unceasingly! There is a proverb: don’t open your mouth to someone else’s loaf, but get up earlier and start your own. A fair proverb! Greed with satiety for the good of others cools our soul towards God and our neighbor, introduces pride and contempt into us, that is, the proud man himself - the devil, and then it is necessary to fight for a long time with the enemy, established through gluttony in the womb, in order to again receive the former grace of the Lord. The enemy, entrenched in the womb through gluttony, treacherously deceives us when we pray, confuses and confuses us in public prayer, weakens us, binds us. Oh, how carefully you need to eat and drink! Having experienced the actions of gluttony that are so harmful to the soul, we are all the more convinced that our true food and drink is the most pure Body and the most pure Blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, which cleanses, revitalizes and strengthens the soul and body, gives peace and freedom to the soul, boldness, joy, clarity and strength. Meanwhile, after gluttony and even some satiety, you immediately feel in your soul a lack of true life, warmth, light, peace, lightness, freedom, joy, boldness. As long as you are fighting the stomach, the enemy is against us, bothering you, forcing you to gluttony, and as soon as a person begins to please the stomach, the devil stops tempting, and it becomes easy for the glutton - but this is a deceptive ease: the devil pretends to be for a while and seems to leave, pretending, however, to have left so that a person can freely please the stomach, without sorrow, and then, when the time comes, when we need God’s gracious help, he lays claim to us, emerges like a beast from some den, and begins to torment us, and the more we serve him in gluttony or another passion, the more powerfully. The people of this world, who do not fight the flesh and the devil, do not notice how the enemy moves into their hearts and how they, without noticing it, serve him daily. But the enemy acts, lives and reigns in their hearts through gluttony and covetousness, and this is how his presence and action are revealed in them: gluttons are usually proud, pompous, and malicious towards the poor and beggars when they have to deal with these latter, for example, meeting them in the church, when it is necessary to give alms, etc.; they are cold towards God, towards divine services and often do not pray either in the morning or in the evening, they stand in church absent-mindedly; they are very prone to prodigal thoughts and feelings, are insincere in dealing with their family and are cold towards them, angry, irritable. Thus, they are daily obsessed with the serpent’s flattery and serve, without noticing it, the enemy of God and man. However, those who are attentive to themselves can always notice the machinations of the enemy in themselves. You need to eat a variety of foods, especially raw and indigestible ones, or fish and meats, as well as sweet foods. This is how the devil kills people both spiritually and physically through gluttony and drunkenness! You heard what the woman said about her sister, how she got drunk, how she was defiled by adultery, how she didn’t go to confession for several years and God’s grace abandoned her! What gluttony! Behold [death] from gluttony! And you, priest, are a communicant of the Body and Blood of Christ, and you are gluttonous and greedy for food, drink, sweets, tea, etc. Why don’t you visit your parishioners, especially the poor and those living in basements, how do they live? - Isn’t it because of your negligence that many die? Lest their blood be exacted from you! Instruct, Lord! Let me do Your will! Give me the belly to despise! Oh, how we all please the belly. Fight firmly against the spirits of malice and pride, instilling malice and contempt against your neighbor in your heart, and love your neighbor at all times; If he sins in any way, errs, admonish him with meekness in deed or word, or pray for him to the One who created him. How does it happen with us? We quarrel with our neighbor for no apparent reason, often just because we are not in the mood or, as they say, out of our element. We are one body, enfeebled by sins and passions, and therefore we must have condescension towards each other and feel even more sorry for each other, the more we see each other subject to fierce and intractable passions and vices. If we are lenient with ourselves, we must be lenient with others. We should not have evil suspicion in order to see a lot of evil in others, which in fact is often not in our neighbor, and consider ourselves better than others, when in fact we are worse than others. And how often it happens that we confuse others because they have certain weaknesses, for example those who have smoking cigars or cigarettes in their mouths, which we ourselves do not use only because they are harmful to us, while we allow ourselves to become satiated and, perhaps, drunk. What goes into the mouth does not defile, for it does not enter the heart, but goes into the mouth and comes out through the mouth... In order not to have evil suspicion towards others, one must more often talk with others from the heart as fellow humans, members of a single body, about common human needs, infirmities, weaknesses, shortcomings and about the means to correct them. If we talk to each other, then everything is somehow not about what we should be talking about, but everything is about external objects that have little or no bearing on our universal, internal needs. We slide everything on the surface or on extraneous things. We are as if in a dream, in delirium, not in reality, although apparently we are awake. The devil, like our soul, created in the image of God, is threefold: he has a mind and acts on our mind; has a heart and acts on our heart with wishes, passions; has a will and acts forcibly by inciting our free power. Let us guard our mind, heart and will, and let us constantly exercise them in the law of the Lord. Holy men of God, while still living on earth, saw the thoughts and hearts of men - how much more do they see our hearts in God after death, how much more does the Mother of God constantly see all our thoughts in every place, as well as the holy apostles, prophets, saints, martyrs, saints and all the saints! After all, they are in God and God is in them. How we need to sincerely pray to the Mother of God and the saints, with what faith, hope, and fear! The Lord knows our daily passion and the fact that we must 65 diligently think about the evil one, 66 and therefore is patient with us and patiently awaits our correction and accepts our prayers of repentance daily, and has given us the very prayers with which we can propitiate Him, the Lover of mankind. You sin every day - do not be discouraged, do not despair: whenever you fall in days or nights, rise in repentance and be saved. I thank You, Master Lord, my quick to obey, for you have saved me several times from the abomination of the enemy and from the malice of the enemy and mine, and from oppression and shame you have saved me. I thank You, all-merciful Lady, for you have now clearly saved me twice through my prayer, morning and evening, from embarrassment and fear of Satan, and have granted me the ability to calmly pronounce the entire royal house by name at the Great Litany. I thank You, most merciful Lord, for yesterday you were my shield and protection from sins and from the arrows of the enemy, and saved me many times through my prayer. I thank You, most swift Intercessor, Most Holy Lady, for through my prayer you interceded for me and helped me during the morning and midday services. November 14. Morning. I thank You, Lord, for the completed ten years of marriage with my wife, which You have granted to me. November 14. Pupils in the first grade from the Old Testament history receive knowledge about God, the Creator of the world and man, about His eternity, wisdom, omnipotence, goodness, justice, omnipresence, omnipotence, immutability; about the fall of man through pride, pride and ingratitude; about God’s promises to restore the fallen human race through the Redeemer and about preparing or raising people for Christ; also about the prophets and that God always rewards those who lead and fear and love Him, and punishes and uproots those who do not fear and hate Him. From New Testament history they learn about the fulfillment of God's merciful promises to people, their deliverance from sin and from all its troubles through the coming to earth of the promised Savior, the Only Begotten Son of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, about His miraculous birth and the circumstances of His infant life and adolescence, about His appearance to the world, about His fulfillment of the righteousness of God, which man did not fulfill - in circumcision, baptism, fasting and prayer. and temptation; about His Divine teaching, full of light, power, life, peace, sweetness; about His Divine manifold miracles, which revealed in Him the true God, the Creator of the world and man, the Giver of Life, the Savior from sins and the Physician of all infirmities and the terrible Lord and Judge of all evil spirits; about the necessity of the cross and self-sacrifice for every person and the fulfillment of His divine commandments; about the need to unite with Him through the Sacrament of Communion; about the need for meekness, humility, obedience, mercy, purity of heart, peacefulness, love of truth, patience with human injustices; about the suffering of the Savior, His shameful and painful execution on the cross and death for the human race, His resurrection and multiple appearances after the resurrection with the most obvious evidence and ascension into heaven. From the Catechism they learn faith, hope and love for God and love for neighbor, having learned in advance from the history of the Old Testament about the basis of love for God as the Creator, Savior, Benefactor and for neighbors, as coming from the same blood with them, as the image of God, although they bear the wounds of sins. From the science of worship, students learn to talk like children with the God whom they have come to know (to talk in church services and understand the language of the Church), and in fact they see the greatest sacrament of our salvation in the most holy Eucharist, or in the Sacrament of Communion of the Body and Blood of Christ; they see how Christ, the Lamb of God, is devoured, sacrificed for the sins of the world, how He laid down His life for the life of the world, and they come into contact with Him in the most living, intimate way. They will also learn in the Sacrament of Baptism how they were reborn into a new life and became children of God, how in Confirmation they were sealed by the Holy Spirit, how in Repentance the Lord heals them from sins, in the Priesthood - how he leads them to eternal life, in Marriage - how the human race multiplies, how holy the union of husband and wife should be as the image of Christ with the Church; in the Blessing of Unction - how the Lord, the almighty physician, heals bodily infirmities. In the history of the church, students learn about the beginning and spread of the Church of Christ and about all its improvement - hierarchical, liturgical, ritual, legislative or leadership; they will learn the truth of their faith, the steadfastness of the Church, insurmountable by the gates of hell; about how, in case of need, one must suffer for one’s faith, how to take care of the priceless treasure of true and saving faith; how our faith gave birth to many children of God living a blessed life in heaven; how holy and venerable and venerable our hierarchy is, how holy and life-giving is divine service, how sacred is the veneration of holy relics, icons, how just it is to keep fasts, etc.; how firmly one must hold on to one’s only saving faith, which continually saves its members who faithfully adhere to its teachings; how sanctifying and saving grace has dried up in other religious societies. From the history of the Church, they will learn about those saints who decorate our churches with their faces, they will recognize their valor, their selflessness for Christ and for their neighbors. “But all this multitude of educational material must be reduced to unity, united by a common idea and goal. The sciences must be a single, harmonious body, that is, consisting entirely of many members (just as people are one body), and their spiritual life must be a single body. Show the wisdom, expediency, and strength of the building of our faith and the Church! I still philosophize on earth: I still value sweets, I still quarrel because of sweets, I’m proud, I despise. Those who have sinned, Lord, have mercy on me! And I love sweets myself. Why do I envy and feel sorry for others? And others should envy me, pity me. Do I want this? - No. And don’t wish or do anything to anyone else. Humanity, especially Christianity, has been immeasurably exalted, sanctified, and deified by the God-man Jesus Christ. The devil, envious and angry at such exaltation and deification of humanity, uses his intrigues every day, hour, minute so that we mutually despise each other, become embittered with each other, offend each other, be stingy for each other, be unkind to each other, or malicious and malicious and malicious, or think something low and vile about each other. Hence the duty of every person, especially a Christian, to pay attention to himself, to his thoughts, words, to every glance on a person’s face, to every action of his, and to protect himself in every possible way from pride, contempt, malice, resentment, stinginess, ill will, malice, malice and gloating and nasty thoughts and movements of the heart, and to love and respect every person as himself, and more - as the image of God, as a member of Christ, deified in Christ, and about remember the sins of our neighbor in such a way that his sins were taken by Christ, the Lamb of God, and nailed to the cross, that we do not care about his sins, because there are many of our own and we need to cleanse our own. The soul must be fruitful during prayer, giving birth to holy thoughts and feelings and aspirations for every good deed. The feeling of disgust, alienation from the shrine, from God, the Mother of God, Angels, saints, from the church, worship - comes from the devil. We must love everything holy as close to us and shun carnal, worldly, sinful life. This feeling of rejection and alienation also happens to me, as the most sinful of every person, and it, as far as I know, is the darkness of unclean and evil and proud spirits, a darkness that disappears as we diligently pray. In fact, you come to church and often feel neither the disposition to pray nor the love for God and His saints, but you are cold, insensitive, and tied up internally. And then, when you begin to think about where you have come, who is here and what is happening here, who I am, what kind of sinner I am, how close I am to hell, how weak I am, how many times the Lord has had mercy on me, forgiven and cleansed my sins, how hitherto he has been a strong and unceasing helper, etc. - then fervent prayer will appear. There are embarrassments in front of people - they are from the devil: one must, in the hope of God, fight in the name of Christ in the heart. The devil has the custom of inciting sin with charming fear or delightful sweetness and strongly attracts us to it and, having deceived and confused us, puts in us irritation, scorching, darkness, crampedness, powerlessness, cowardice and despondency. But all his machinations must be considered a dream (and the stumbling or fall in the heart, thought, feeling and word) and not lose heart, asking God for mercy, cleansing, peace and salvation. Tea relaxes the body and lulls the soul and betrays it to the devil. Blessed is the Kingdom of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. God is a King, eternal in His essence, for He created everything and gave laws to everything. When the Kingdom of the Most Holy Trinity is proclaimed, this instills in us the obligation and duty to obey the Holy Trinity in all our lives and fulfill Its Divine laws, and since God is love and reigns with love and peace in human hearts, then to strive for mutual love and peace, and especially to acquire ardent love for God. But Satan also reigns in human hearts and constantly strives to fulfill his will and to remove the will of God and resist it; If Satan casts out Satan, then he is divided with himself: how can his kingdom stand? [Matt. 12:26], says the Savior. These words show that Satan and his minions seek in every possible way to reign and reign over people through various passions and lusts of the flesh, and that we must resist in every possible way the enemy working in us to disobey the will of God. We should be pleased when we are surrounded with love by children, especially Christian children, images of God, members of Christ (Christ is all and in all [Col. 3:11]), and even more so it should be pleasant to be a father-nurse for them and give them alms, but we, on the contrary, get irritated when they surround us and demand alms from us, as if we ourselves do not have everything from the grace of God. Where is our faith? Oh, everywhere there is self-love, addiction to earthly goods, everywhere disdain for the image of God and, therefore, God Himself! This and that one, we say, is cold towards me - why? Because you are cold. With the same measure you use, it will be measured to you. You expect that others were ardent towards you in advance - in vain: you need to do this first, you must set an example of humility in order to teach others by example what you want from them regarding yourself. Love and humility towards others is their best teacher. A reed shaken by the wind [Matt. 11, 7] - a person wavered and confused by the spirits of evil. Does a demonic dream confuse you, man? For all evil is a dream and only good is truth. Confirm your heart in the truth, that is, in the Lord, and the dream and evil will disappear. Thousands of experiences have convinced you that every evil, every sin, confusion is a demonic dream, demonic malice, smoke - and you still hesitate, you are still indignant at the attacks of evil spirits! Count them for nothing in the might of the might of the Lord. A simple soul can immediately guess that the devil has attacked her. Reflect it in the name of the Lord. But remember that he often attacks others, even when you don’t think so. Make progress in love and conquer evil with love, and love is long-suffering, merciful... does not become irritated, does not think evil... never falls away (1 Cor. 13:4-8). I thank You, Lord Jesus Christ, my God, for You heard my prayer to deliver me from the snare of the enemy and from my malice and quickly interceded for me and had mercy on me with Your grace. Morning of November 14, 1865. Resurrection. Through our mutual communication and conversation (with good people), the machinations of the enemy are destroyed, passions are healed, the gift of speech is improved - this greatest and noblest gift of the Creator, knowledge is increased or already acquired is enlivened, mutual love is strengthened, bad habits are corrected. Therefore, a person living in society should not avoid society and be confined within the walls. Because of what is pleasant to the flesh, the old man becomes embittered with his neighbor, because he either envies him, pities him, or is stingy for him, and because of what is unpleasant, he becomes embittered with him, because he does not tolerate the unpleasant, being pampered by the pleasant; while the unpleasant is useful for the flesh, humbling it and taking away its sinful delicacy. Oh, how capricious, evil, whimsical, absurd my flesh is! So sometimes she doesn’t like much of the smoking of incense in church, and sometimes she doesn’t like anything at all: when she thinks about it, feels it, sometimes she goes crazy for no reason at all. Oh, what skill does it take to control this horse or what am I saying? - this many-headed, many-spirited beast! The Lord serves you with His sun, illuminating your day, with His moon and stars, illuminating your night, with His fire, illuminating your home in the evening, with His air, giving light breath to your inner bellows, with His wheat, rye, barley and other grains, giving food to your body; With His many different grape juices, giving you nutrition, with many different fruits delighting your taste, With Your mulberry and plant threads, With Your gold, silver, copper, iron, lead, tin. - How do you serve Him? Master, Lord our God, whether we sin, whether we stand in Thy holiness with mind and heart - we are all Thy servants, and Thou art our Master, long-suffering, abundantly merciful and true; have mercy on us, Lord, have mercy on us and cleanse our sins in the name of your only begotten Son. We must acquire a firm conviction and feeling that God constantly sees all our thoughts, feelings, desires, passions, and, standing in prayer, pray from the soul, with reverence and feeling, and spend all other time carefully, observing holiness in all our behavior and raking ourselves from carnal lusts that war on the soul; also always having the commandments of the Lord in the heart and keeping them with all my heart, for there is nothing more precious than the law of the Lord, which is our highest good and bliss and our irrevocable duty. We are all servants of the Lord, having been created by the Lord. I'll die! But I know what power and what boldness the Church’s prayer for the dead has before God, and I firmly hope in her all-powerful prayers and intercession before her immortal Bridegroom, who acquired her with His blood and acquired herself for Him with her blood, her sweat, and the labors of her whole life. I also hope that the Lord, through my prayer, or even more so through the prayer of the Church: Jesus, You are alive after my death, 68 will also be my life after death, for I am by the grace of my Lord, who, having loved His own who are in the world, loved them to the end [Jn. 13:1], I hope to die in peace with God and with the Church and with myself. Wake up! I thank You, Lord Jesus Christ, my God, the most ready and quick Savior, for through my prayer you have now quickly saved me many times over from my sins and from my distress. Why don’t you allow your vile, accursed, godless flesh to endure bitterness, even from your father’s tobacco, and insult your father, the elder, with your offensive, angry remark? Why are you upsetting him? Why are you breaking love? What is more important and dearer to love? What should you not endure out of love for your neighbor? What bitterness, what burden cannot be endured? On the other hand, what is more worthless, more despicable than sinful flesh, which is earth and dust? And what another! - Stinking because of the sins she and she constantly commit. Let her, the vile one, endure all bitterness - and it serves her right. Whom we respect and value, we endure a lot from him if he does something unpleasant for us, and we seem to not notice him, covering him with condescension. Why do you value and respect your father so little? What is more important than the person of the father? You have sinned - repent. Tell me again: why do you place your flesh high? Why do you please her and, for the sake of pleasing, insult your father’s person? If in fact he does [harmful to the flesh] for you, tell him meekly, humbly, kindly, without bitterness, without bitterness, without the intention of upsetting or humiliating him in the eyes of others. It is bearable to remark one on one or in front of one person, but it is unbearable in front of others, especially in front of strangers, and one must endure the father’s weaknesses and bear his burdens. One must have constant respect and reverence for the person of the father and firmly preserve it in accordance with the Divine commandment. The father in the family is a kind of god, king, judge: his name is sacred, his rights, his power, given to him by God himself, confirmed to him. Let him who curses his father or mother die by death [Matt. 15, 4]. Do you notice your father's sins? - It’s none of your business, it’s not your business - he sins against God; know your sins, mourn, cleanse, fight your passions. And God is his Judge. Before his Lord he stands, or he falls. The Lord Himself is strong to inspire him to repentance, God is strong to restore him [Rom. 14, 4]. Love your neighbor as yourself: by loving him, you love yourself, you do good to your soul. Do not upset him with your malice: by grieving him without love, not with good intentions, not for correction, but to hurt him, you upset yourself and hurt yourself. Remember that a spirit of infinite dignity lives in a person compared to the visible world - be lenient and patient with him when you see him sinning in anything carnal, counting everything carnal as rubbish, and do not make a quarrel over rubbish. Tolerate in silence what is unpleasant to the flesh. But if [he] errs and behaves outrageously, rebuke him with meekness: do not reproach the elder, but admonish him as a father; younger ones, like brothers; old women as mothers; young as sisters, with all purity (1 Tim. 5:1-2). Let everything with you be done with love (1 Cor. 16:14), for we are all one body and are all prone to falls of various kinds. Remember the rule: despise the flesh, it passes away, but be diligent about the soul, both your own and your neighbor, the most immortal thing. Do not wish for your neighbor what you do not wish for yourself; for example, do not wish for him death, which you yourself are afraid of and do not wish for. Looking at the most pure image of the Savior, think: this is the image of the highest, most pure, all-good, wise and omnipotent Artist of the world and all the creatures that inhabit it, this is the Creator of great minds, lights, fires, goodness, Heavenly Forces - that is, Angels, or six-winged Seraphim, Powers, Dominions, Powers, Principalities, Archangels and Angels, for the essence of all of them is mind, light, fire, goodness, strength. This is the Creator and Artist of the human race. For this reason, think: may I look with all purity, with all reverence, gratitude, love at everything, especially reasonable, venerable in the image and likeness of its Creator, God’s creation, may I not use any of God’s creations for evil, and may I use everything in this world with moderation and in accordance with the purpose, firstly, of myself, and secondly, in accordance with the purpose of things. May there be in me one spiritual eye - the eye of holiness, love, fear of God, thanksgiving to God for His many many gifts. Also, looking at the image of the Savior, think: this is the image of our Divine Savior, who laid down His soul for us, endured the cross and death for us, in order to grant us freedom from fierce passions and deliver us from the eternal flame in hell - may I obey Him until my last breath, may I lay down my soul for the people of God, may I thirst for their salvation, as He thirsted, may I pray for them with fervor love, like Moses, like Paul in new grace, like the indescribable lover and lover of mankind, the Lord Jesus Christ; may I wish for them what He wished for them, may I care for them as His children, as His treasure, purchased by His blood. But give, O Lord, shepherds according to Thy heart and Thy sheep according to Thy spirit. Intending to speak a word to you, I must pray to the Lord in advance that He will grant you the ear of the heart, so that you can fruitfully listen to the word that is offered, for not everyone has a pure and open ear of the heart, as the Lord said: whoever has ears to hear, let him hear [Matt. 11, 15], - this means that some, and very many, do not hear as they should hear. When I vividly imagine and feel my damnation, or many sins, many passions and inclination to all passions and vices, powerlessness for any virtue, for example, for sincere love for God and neighbor, for sympathy for my neighbor in his grief, misfortune, poverty, poverty and blindness and the nakedness of my soul, and I remember vividly that my Savior Jesus Christ so often saved me from my repentance, from my sins and passions and from a bad inclination towards them, and that He can accomplish in me and through me every virtue, can be my cover and vestment and, therefore, can cover my sinful nakedness with the robe of His truth, His virtues - then I am filled with joy and trustworthiness, I rise from despondency and am filled with a sense of my dignity; I will then know that my Savior is for me and all people a priceless treasure, our highest nobility, wealth, light, clothing - everything, every good. Oh, how great is my spiritual poverty and misery! I cry and sob when I recognize and feel it, especially when I feel that I myself, of my own free will, have fallen into such poverty and misery and am falling incessantly. How can we, the poor, not sympathize with those who are poor in body and in bodily needs when we think that we are so poor spiritually? Rich in bodily goods, but poor in soul, give alms, so that the generous Lord of souls and bodies will have mercy on you and cleanse your sins and enrich you with the incorruptible wealth of His grace. [...]. Our Lady, the Most Holy Theotokos, whether we stand in holiness by the grace of God, whether we sin through a natural inclination towards evil, through inattention, or through infatuation with the example of others, or through oblivion, or through violence and temptation from the enemy, we are always Your servants, and You are our Most Pure Lady, and do You know no other Lady; have mercy on us, Lady, have mercy on us, and do not reject us for our sins as evil, and do not deprive us of Your all-powerful intercession before Your Son and God. By humbling yourself before a person, you will humble yourself before God, and if you do not humble yourself before people, you will not be sincerely humble before God. Small ones must start small and gradually reach great things. Let us honor the living image of God, as man is, and then we will honor God. Is it in vain, in vain, that Scripture says that man is the image and likeness of God [Gen. 1, 26 ]? But do not be tempted by his mistakes: these are ulcers laid on him by the robber devil, in them he only deserves greater regret and long-suffering love, and not bitterness. You are greedy and stingy and angry at those who eat you, as it seems to you. Always read the Gospel before meals with diligence and meditation, and you will have neither greed, nor stinginess, nor malice - the word of God will dispel the delusion and darkness of passions. Nourish your soul first, then your body. Just as someone who is stained with uncleanliness that emits a stench seems to think that not only he, but everyone who deals with him is infected with the same stench, although they are completely clean, so to a sinner, imbued with fetid passions, carrying within himself a vile heart, it seems that not only all people on earth, but also the sky itself is unclean, although it is as pure as the sun. God's gifts to humanity according to the canons and akathists to the Savior and the Mother of God and humanity (its greatness) according to these canons and akathists are depicted in detail. Then - a person according to the canon of the Guardian Angel and the good deeds of the Guardian Angel. The one who fasts has tears of repentance, but the one who does not fast has no tears. Meanwhile, the life of a Christian should be spent in repentance. Repent [Matt. 3, 2]. How necessary is fasting for a Christian! And Christ showed by example the need for fasting. But Christians do not fast, contrary to church regulations. Two grave sins: disobedience and intemperance. I am someone who struggles with sin, who endures, who calls on God for help, and who gives thanks after winning victory over sin. Therefore, a certain share of feats belongs to me, because without struggle on my part, without patience in the fight against temptations, without calling on God for help, I would fall incessantly. God! I thank You for your merciful, sovereign, all-powerful benefit to me in the service of Matins and the early Liturgy. I saw, Lord, I saw Your all-good and strong hand in removing me from the evils that beset me, I also saw the terrible machinations of the angel of the abyss over me, how he wanted to devour me, now with an addiction to earthly splendor, now with anger at my neighbor, now with the very satiety of my flesh, in which he, like a beetle in dung, settled - but You, Lord, through my prayer and intercession Mistress, he overthrew all the machinations of the enemy in me, forgave all my sins and covered them for the sake of my hope in Thee, and made me victorious. I praise Your goodness, Your long-suffering, Your invincible power, Your glorious victory! And I spoke well to the royal house, and at the prayer service I also read the water blessing prayer well, with feeling and strength. On the evening before this day, during prayer there were abundant tears by the grace of the Lord. And for this I thank the Lord. A state of passion, for example, irritation, envy, stinginess, love of money, etc., is a) a state of intoxication, b) a state of illness, c) a state of darkness, d) a state of bondage and slavery, cramped conditions, and e) a state of free madness. Therefore, one must a) always be sober, b) try to have a sound spirit, c) through reflection on everything, have an intelligent light in the soul, d) always control oneself and subdue the mind’s passions, and e) be wise about Christ. From here also follows our duty towards our neighbor who is subject to passion - to treat him meekly, calmly, judiciously, condescendingly, sensibly, freely, wisely. If another, if my brother is sick, why should I myself be voluntarily sick; if my brother is drunk, should I be drunk too; if he is in spiritual darkness, should I also be in darkness, etc.? Obviously not. November 22. I thank Thee, Lord my God, for Thou art even now for me a shield against the abominations of demons, deliverance and cleansing, and peace and light to the eyes of my heart, and freedom and space of the heart, and boldness. If you want the blessings of this world to be useful and pleasant for you, always use them moderately, impartially, without greed. The vessel of my heart, vile and full of holes, cannot contain holy love for God and neighbor under the conditions under which I live. I need solitude, self-absorption, contemplation, meditation, reading the word of God, unceasing prayer. When we upset the Lord God with our bitter, bitter iniquities - malice, pride, contempt, discontent, impatience, disobedience, envy, stinginess, covetousness (and not God's covetousness), then it is as if it was nothing - God have mercy on us, but if they upset us a little in word or deed, or with a look, or at least let out a little bitterness for our sinful, multi-passionate, unclean flesh - trouble, and we indulge in impatience, irritability, bitterness - for example, because of the bitter smoke we are ready to wipe off the face of the earth the culprit or the one who takes and spoils ours, stains, disfigures, breaks. We forget the words of the Lord's Prayer: as we also leave our debtors [Matt. 6, 12]. I thank You, my Savior, for you have now been a shield for me against the abominations of the enemy, a Helper and a Savior. God! My dearest Savior! How many mercies You show on me and on these children, whom You have given to me. To the Accomplisher! Complete us! God! They are the children of my prayers: complete them, teach them, make them wise, establish them, be honest with Thy Church, show them! Just as the devil deceived Eve and Adam with the fruits of the tree, so he thought to tempt the God-man with bread: command that these stones become bread [Matt. 4, 3]. But we do not understand what the devil tempts us with most - food and drink, sweets, and, careless, we always serve him, the accursed one, with delicacy, greed, intemperance, immoderation, often carried away, like dumb people, by the appetite for food and drink. We rejoice that the feast of the Nativity of Christ, or Easter, or the Dormition of the Theotokos, or Peter and Paul is coming soon, and let us not ask ourselves whether we have prepared ourselves to meet these holidays with abstinence and fasting and spiritual sobriety, with a pure heart. So on Christian holidays we rejoice more at the holiday of our flesh. But we rejoice in vain if we have not become sober mentally. The devil constantly causes inner grief to us through excess in food and drink, but we, crazy people, allow ourselves excess. The devil's mirage: when anger against our neighbor is aroused in our hearts, then we should become embittered at the devil who acts in us, embittering us against our neighbor, and at ourselves, for allowing ourselves to ally ourselves with the enemy against our neighbor, who is the image of God, - and we become embittered at the neighbor himself and, in his person, at God Himself. I thank Thee, Lord my God, for Thou hast vouchsafed me to perform the Divine Liturgy, and to compose and pronounce the word, and to accept and consume the Divine Food without condemnation. November 28, 1865 Love every person; If any of them does anything unpleasant for you or sins against you and against God, be patient. Forbearing one another in love [Eph. 4, 2], - endure, and do not be embittered with him, do not despise him, as happens to you. Remember that man is the image of God, although he bears the wounds of sins. Pray for those who sin. Money, food, drink, clothing, tobacco smoke, etc. - all this is an empty demonic excuse for bitterness towards one’s neighbor, which should not be paid attention to, just as in church the devil often makes incense smoke a pretext for bitterness. Man is the image of God, a verbal being, the crown of God's creation, the beauty of creation, the king of nature, the child of God, the heir of God, the joint heir of Christ. Don’t be angry with the beggars: has God given you many beggars? And how gentle they are! You ruffle their hair and ears, but they still caress and don’t become embittered in the least. These are gentle angels. And their need, need! If it weren't for her, would they have followed you? Tolerate them, do not shun them. They follow you - let them: it is the angels who follow you. How many people smoke tobacco who are ready to sacrifice themselves for the benefit of their neighbors? Therefore, do not judge smokers. What goes into the mouth does not defile a person, but what comes out of the mouth [Matt. 15, 17–20]. Pay attention to yourself, O non-smoker, are you not worse than a smoker? If evil thoughts come from your heart: murder, blasphemy - then all this will greatly defile a person. Hold on to love and sacred things as much as possible. Why did the Lord say to Peter the Apostle: You are Peter, and on this rock I will build My Church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it [Matt. 16, 18], and not to another apostle? Firstly, because he was the most likely to be illuminated by faith in the Savior, secondly, because he had an ardent love for the Savior and, thirdly, because he was married and for the sake of Christ left his wife. Marriage means the union of Christ with the Church. But the other apostles did not have such a living faith until their time and were almost all virgins. When the devil in your heart blasphemes the Lord or the Most Pure Mother of God, can you really blaspheme too? Shouldn’t we hate with all the strength of our souls this blasphemy and this blasphemer of the shrine of God? In the same way, if you feel in your heart embitterment towards your neighbor, or bad thoughts, or stinginess, or covetousness, etc., should you really become embittered towards your neighbor, harbor bad thoughts, stinginess, covetousness? Shouldn’t these passions also be hated by the devil who is responsible for them? – So, you should hate passions and the devil, and not be embittered towards your neighbors. We must be filled with gratitude to the Lord in our hearts that He has revealed to us the greatest mystery of the Trinity of Persons of the Divine and always pronounce this name with reverence. The same is true about the name of the Mother of God. Cherish the treasure of the Orthodox faith - it is priceless, unspeakably great. December 2, 1865 Master, Lover of Mankind, Lord Jesus Christ, I thank You, for even now You have preserved me from vile sins and vile spirits and have protected me. Do not forsake me, Lord, even in the first place. 71 Relaxation of the spirit and body during prayer and dullness of prayer are from the devil nesting in the heart; If we intensify our prayers sincerely, then with effort and sincerity our insides will be enlivened and strengthened. The devil enters us through excess in food and drink, smoking tobacco and other carnal pleasures, also through dancing, through theaters, and masquerades. There is no need to smoke - it is lust. Be filled with the Spirit [Eph. 5, 18 ], and not smoke. Until now I am bound by covetousness and malice, I still do not love my neighbor as myself, and I do not love the image of God in my neighbor, I am not long-suffering towards my neighbor, I despise the poor, who often ask me for alms. I have sinned, I have sinned to the Lord: have mercy on me, Lord! I should rejoice that I serve the Lord in the person of the poor, fulfilling His commandment to distribute property to the poor and needy, but I, the accursed one, often grieve that, willy-nilly, I must give alms to the poor, especially to some of them. But all are members of Christ, although they bear the wounds of sins. Why have I not yet fulfilled the words of my Savior as I should? Why don’t I deny myself for the good of my neighbors? Why am I selfish when I know that selfishness is sin and death? Why do I value this monetary rubbish highly? Why do I have love and addiction for him? I am heavenly on earth, I am called a child of God, nourished by the Divine Blood! I, to whom honorable 72 and great promises were given, that for these sakes I may be a partaker of the Divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust (2 Pet. 1:4)! Why, when giving alms, do I not adhere to the holy simplicity with which the Apostle commands to give alms? Give, he says, in simplicity... have mercy, with good will [Rom. 12:8], God loves a good giver (2 Cor. 9:7). Why don’t I like to be on the street talking with the poor, with the lesser brethren of Christ, and don’t understand their needs and satisfy them as best I can? Why am I rushing home? Why do I love the peace of the flesh? The flesh wants and seeks many, many material goods, so that, having them, it can say to itself: soul! you have a lot of good things lying around for many years: rest, eat, drink, be merry, so that you no longer rely on God, but on wealth [Lk. 12, 19 ]; but the spirit says: I only need daily daily bread to strengthen the body associated with me, and so that, out of desire for much, my heart will not be alienated from the Lord and from my neighbor, for covetousness is the enemy of love for God and neighbor. True. And this is because you cannot serve two masters: Christ and Belial, God and wealth. We must despise wealth as rubbish, we must certainly regard it as rubbish, but we fully and unceasingly value as we should the priceless Bridegroom of our souls - the Lord and neighbor, the image of His glory. December 4, 1865 Lord! I thank You, for You have solemnly and graciously delivered me from the oppression of anger during the all-night service against a fellow deacon and then in the widow’s apartment from the oppression of stinginess, or stinging the silver ruble I donated to her for her poverty. Everywhere and in every possible way You save me, Lord! About this, for You are my Father and Provider and Savior. Don’t wish for a peaceful life - you will fall asleep spiritually. Love labors, sorrows, dangers. God! I thank You, for You saved me from many troubles, and You granted me to safely celebrate the Divine Liturgy alone without a deacon, and to receive Communion without condemnation, and to consume Your Holy Spirit into the world of spiritual strength. December 6th, 1865. God! I saw how the spiritual lion roared to devour me, how he already held me in his paws! Until now, I, damned one, have not learned the Christian alphabet - to love God and neighbor; Until now I have not been convinced that every person, like me, wants to eat and drink and is looking for it, and that a hungry person should be sympathized with and helped, and not be embittered with him, not despise him. Phew, what darkness, what recklessness! What lawlessness! Until now I have not learned to honor my father from the heart and I treat him with some kind of arrogance, sometimes bitterness! How long do we not imitate the spirit of Christ, His life, the spirit of the Mother of God, Her life, the spirit and life of God’s holy men? How long do we not seek first of all the Kingdom of God and its righteousness in the firm confidence that all earthly blessings will be given to us from the Lord without our care? May we be concerned about pleasing the Lord, and may the Lord take care of this unimportant body of ours. If there were Christian love between us, then there would not be that disorder between us, that while another is rich, another is completely poor, another is satiated, another is hungry, another is drunk, another is thirsty, another has many changes of lower and upper clothes, and another has only one and that thin one; some have many houses or many rooms, while others do not have a place to lay their head, or are forced to buy shelter for themselves at an expensive price due to their poverty; if there was Christian love between us, it would not allow such inequality: the rich would share with the poor, they would not become satiated at the thought that there are many hungry, and would begin to share their goods with the poor, they would begin to make their meals less luxurious; if there were Christian love, it would force us to give up these ruinous excesses in the decoration of the home, in the table, in clothing, in the carriage, in empty pleasures, for which they do not spare a lot of money, while the poor are spared a few kopecks, etc. Look at the affairs of the world - it destroys the work of Jesus Christ, the work of His redemption, the work of raising the human race to heaven, the work of its purification and renewal. The world chains people to the earth, plunges them into all sorts of vices through luxury, temptations, etc., through books, through theaters, clubs, etc., even through its schools. In the Mother of God is all the joy, all the hope of Christians after the Lord God - that is why we often cry to Her: Rejoice! For a person to feel sorry for something means to feel sorry for God, because in the person of Jesus Christ the Divinity united with humanity and people became members of Christ, temples of the Holy Spirit, the abode of the Holy Trinity. You say: I visited St. Alexander of Svirsky, St. Zosima and Savvaty of Solovetsky, and Varlaam of Khutyn. Fine. But do you imitate their faith, their life, impartiality or dispassion for earthly acquisitions, for the sweets of this world, for the honor of this world? If not, then there is no benefit to you from all your visits to various shrines. When visiting the tombs of the saints of God, the heavenly ones who philosophized on earth, philosophize the heavenly ones yourself, remember more often that you are a stranger and a stranger on earth, like all your fathers, and do not be seduced by the corruptible beauties of this world. If you want to constantly have the peace of God in your heart, love the Lord God unceasingly with all your heart and all your soul, seek with all your might His Kingdom and His righteousness; love your neighbor as yourself, never be angry with him for any reason, even in your heart, do not despise anyone with your heart; Don’t envy anyone anything, don’t offend anyone in any way, don’t feel sorry for anyone for anything necessary, ordinary or commonplace, be kind to everyone, straightforward, sincere, truthful. And in order for you to have all this, unceasingly carry Jesus Christ and His commandments in your heart, unceasingly ask Him to make you wise and strengthen you to walk the path of His commandments and to cut off your corrupted will, and to submit whole-heartedly to His holy will. Do not have any attachment to earthly things, for because of the heart’s attachment to earthly things, the Lord God, our Creator, Provider and Savior and His living image on earth - man, are constantly offended, and the partial one insults himself first of all, he gives himself over to the power of the dark enemy, into his clutches, into his mouth, he himself is exposed to sorrow, cramped conditions, darkness, humiliation, he is alienated from God and the Most Pure Mother The Lord Jesus Christ, the holy Angels of God and holy men and all fellow men living with him, and is combined with the devil and his angels. Remember: although you are on earth, you are a heavenly man, called to the Kingdom of Heaven, to a co-kingdom with Christ. The sufferings of this present time are not worth anything in comparison with the glory that will be revealed in us [Rom. 8, 18]. Remember your calling and election. Do you not know that you are the church of God, and the Spirit of God lives in you? (1 Cor. 3:16). For as many as are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God [Rom. 8, 14]. Our residence is in heaven, from where we await the Savior, our Lord Jesus Christ [Phil. 3, 20]. Away with the old charm - earthly goods and enmity towards one's neighbor! Let's love each other. Be gone, old charmer! Why I hate secular theaters and magazines is because they never hear the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, they never talk about the great work of our redemption from sin, damnation and death, but everything is just secular vanity, secular idle talk. Friday. How much bitterness my Lord Jesus Christ has now endured for me in order to deliver me from eternal torment! How do I thank Him for this? Do I grieve my flesh, which is adulterous, evil, envious, stingy, wayward, and proud? No, I delight you, damned one: I eat and drink with honey, sugar. O sensualist! O deceiver, charming Satan! He inspires me to envy my neighbor, his contentment, well-being, or to be stingy towards him, or to be embittered towards him, or to be proud of him, to despise him, and in all these cases he himself mocks me, torments me, torments me above all! Oh, deceiver, oh, charming one! Aren't we all humans one flesh and blood? Isn't it the whole body of Christ? Are not all Christ's? God! I thank You for the brief visit that left my sorrows and for Your great mercy, for the horse did not hit me in the eye with its shaft, but in the flesh of my face. Oh, how wonderfully You have preserved me, Lord! How close I was to danger! I thank You, Lord, giver of life, my guardian! God! Grant me to always be with You, one with You, and not with the blessings of this world, not with the people of this world! December 11, 1865 I thank you, Lord my God, for yesterday you delivered me through my prayer from the fierce passions that tormented me when I had the maiden Marya from outside the city, from the almshouse. You pacified me, a stranger to the world, when I bowed my knees before You in prayer. Chasing after sensual sweets, we lose spiritual sweetness - Christ, the source of all pure sweets, and we taste spiritual, hellish sorrow, we are suppressed by the heaviness of our souls, hellish. With everyday things, such as money, sweets, clothes, etc., the enemy daily tempts our faith, hope and love for God and neighbor and daily finds us naked of living faith and hope in God and love for God and love for neighbor. You cannot be constantly, invariably affectionate towards every person, but you also need to be strict: constant affection relaxes the soul and makes it pampered and impatient and even angry, for it often happens that the more affectionate someone is to us, the more he pleases us, and in the event of his slightest mistake, we are the more unforgiving and angry, even if only for a minute. Strictness, on the contrary, strengthens the soul and instills in it due respect for the dignity of man in general and that in particular against whom we sin, and respect for law and order. Therefore, not only children, but also adults must be kept in strictness with mercy, especially those in whom the consciousness and sense of duty towards God, neighbors and themselves are poorly developed. I have sinned, Lord, by impatience and bitterness towards my wife: have mercy on me. And when did you sin? Then, when she served me, she pleased me. Again I pray to Thee: have mercy on me! After all, she is Your creation, Your child, Your member, Lord Jesus, the image of Your Church! How pampered I am! I can’t stand the slightest pain, I don’t want to endure one extra minute! I have sinned! Lord, have mercy on me, much-merciful, long-suffering Lord, who endured terrible passions for our sake! No, whatever you say, there is no time for entertainment, no time for luxury, when many, many of our brothers, who are no worse than us, have nothing to eat, nothing to wear, nowhere to live. To feel sorry for a person, not to spare anything necessary for a person, for everything is for a person. Away with the charm of earthly goods! Everything is earth, everything is from the earth and everything is into the earth! The Lord is our life. Because of addiction to earthly goods, because of pity for them, the heart falls away from love for God and neighbor and is negligent about the salvation of one’s soul and spiritual gifts and exploits and about the acquisition of heavenly incorruptible and eternal blessings, for which we were created, and born, and live, and called. Set your mind on things above [Col. 3, 2]. Walk in the Spirit and do not commit carnal lusts. There are two lives for us: one is temporary and perishable, the other is eternal and incorruptible: to the latter, the first is the path and preparation. Let us always remember this and let us be carefree regarding earthly life. Seek first the Kingdom of God and its righteousness (be wise), and all these things will be added to you [Matt. 6, 33]. Please note that excessive care for earthly things is the spirit of the devil, the machinations of the devil, our enemy. At every moment of life, our heart must be established in the Lord. If for a moment you feel sorry for something earthly for your neighbor - you see, the evil one has climbed into the heart, and like a spider a fly, he will begin to entangle the soul and fasten it to himself, so that it does not leave, does not escape. Oh, spider, damned all-destroyer! Lord Jesus, help us and save us! You see all the webs of the hellish spider, you see how blind we are, greedy like flies for sweets. When breaking up your bread, your grub among your friends and servants or the poor, remember that they are your equal brothers and sisters and have the same rights as you to the gifts of God's goodness and generosity - therefore, let not the evil eye, and let not your brother or sister's piece seem large to you, and do not envy the lot of your neighbor, for the evil and envious eye is an abomination to the Lord. Whether your neighbor eats or does not eat his share, it is his share, and may it always be good and woven and shaken and flowing, like your own, and may the Lord send you the same, for with what measure you use, it will be measured to you with the same [Lk. 6, 38]. Through empty, insignificant everyday things, the enemy tempts our love for God and neighbor every day, and because of these empty things - bread and various foodstuffs, also because of money, dishes, furniture, clothing, various household items, we daily violate our love for God and neighbor, our hearts change for the worse, we become angry, proud and disdainful, envious and stingy, and all the more sensitive We offend the All-Good and Most Generous Master of our Lord God in Three Persons, who created us all in His image and likeness and commanded us in His word to be good, merciful, generous, meek, humble, forgiving one another, just as God in Christ forgave us [Eph. 4, 32]. Lord, have mercy on us. This alone we cry to You: we are perplexed by every answer, 73 without an answer in our hearts, we anger the being. What if it weren’t for Your many mercies, O Lord, the mercies of forgiving my sins and transgressions? I would not know peace in all my life, I would be exhausted in my cramped conditions, my stomach would be unbearable for me. Glory to Your bounty, Lord! What should be more natural, more common and easier than leaving each other’s sins, guilts, mistakes, insults, etc.? More natural, I say, more common and easier, because we ourselves constantly sin against God and our neighbors and constantly flow to God with prayer for the forgiveness of our sins and always receive forgiveness of our sins from the long-suffering and merciful Lover of Mankind? How can we not abandon our malice at the sight of such infinite goodness that constantly has mercy on us? But pride, but our pride! ABOUT! That's the trouble! We sin – nothing, our neighbor sins – it’s a disaster, how can this be? We don’t see a log at our place, but at our neighbor’s we see a twig. When will we finally recognize our blindness, our madness? Every day, Lord, You betroth us to Your mercies. Long-suffering and abundantly merciful, the only lover of mankind, glory to You! December 14th, 1865 We are all infected with the poison of sin, and the antidote to sin, and the antidote to sin is prayer. How necessary is it for everyone to acquire true prayer! The unanimity of family members is very often violated by the stinginess of one of them, for example, if one of them is very stingy with sweets, but the other is not and uses them in abundance - that’s the problem, and envy, hatred, and stinginess have set in. But one must despise sweets in order to maintain God-loving unanimity. The Lord will add and not take away earthly blessings. Treat those who have lived with you for a long time as you would treat some high-ranking person who came to you today, to whom you are trying to show every unfeigned respect and service. For the person who lives with us is always the same person, the same highly venerable image of God and the king of the earth, and the child of God, and a member of Christ, etc. Do not get used to a person in a bad way, but in a good way, that is, love him more day by day. Honor the earthly Father as the Heavenly Father, for the whole fatherland in heaven and on earth is called unworthy [Eph. 3:15], and God is all in all (1 Cor. 15:28). For we are all from nothing and nothing is all God. Treat everyone with reverence and love, both rich and poor, noble and ignorant, superiors, equals and subordinates. Lord Jesus, help! Regarding earthly blessings, rely in everything on the common Trustee of all, the Heavenly Father! Do not have an addiction to silver, to sweets, clothes, or anything earthly - cleave to the Father, the only Heavenly Father, with all your heart. It’s enough to wander away from Him, enough to cleave to creatures: I’ve experienced what it’s like, I’ve suffered, I’m tired of my soul. Take into account the character of the person with whom you live and deal, remember how difficult it is to change the natural character, and by paying attention to a person’s weaknesses and his nature of sinfulness, be lenient with him, forgive him as a slave, as a sick person, for you also want all kinds of leniency for yourself, you yourself feel like a slave and bound - just as you feel sorry for yourself, so do you feel sorry for others. In a doctor, respect the gift of God, bestowed for your physical good, and do not be stingy in your strength to reward him for his work, for his knowledge, his art, which he acquired through long-term and arduous study, with the loss of mental energy and physical health. To be grateful to a doctor means to be grateful, as it were, to God Himself, the Physician of all and the creator of skillful doctors. There are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit; and the services are different, but the Lord is the same; and the actions are different, but God is one and the same, producing everything in everyone. But to each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the benefit... to others the gifts of healings, by the same Spirit... Yet all this is done by one and the same Spirit, distributing to each individual separately, as He pleases (1 Cor. 12:4-11). Remember that we are all one body, although we have many members (1 Cor. 10:17). Should your member feel sorry for something, or your body? We are one body of humanity. Let there be no strife in the body, but let the people care for each other equally (1 Cor. 12:25). We do not spare much on food and drink, but on restoring health we spare little, whereas once it is restored, it may not be necessary to restore it for a long time. But don’t you know that the Lord Himself builds everything, that He specifically builds or allows you to get sick and call a doctor and give him a certain amount of money, just as the Lord builds, that in your parishioners He arouses the desire to fulfill a certain requirement and give you or receive a certain amount of money. The Lord divides His gifts among people as He pleases. But take note of yourself: you are a carnal man and do not walk according to the spirit, and you have no trust in God, in God, who said to you: I will never leave you nor forsake you [Heb. 13:5], or: Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap, nor gather into barns; and your Father in heaven feeds them. Aren't you much better than them? [Matt. 6, 26]. Don’t look around: you have nothing to do with it, look behind you and in front of you. This means: do not notice the weaknesses of others and do not focus your attention on them, but pay attention to your thoughts, your heart, what is happening in it, and to the law of God, presented before you by the One who created you, in order to keep it sacred. And speaking of physical health, don’t look around either, but look ahead of yourself, at what you should be looking at, otherwise you’ll either stumble, or the horse will hurt you, or something else unpleasant might happen. Meekly, with the spirit of love, we must express the truth to the people to whom we are obliged by our rank to express it, otherwise we will all become entrenched in untruth - both teachers and those being taught. Due to the flattery of the devil, we must consider all earthly blessings as rubbish, trampled under foot, which we do not regret at all, and part with it indifferently. How much willfulness and whims of the devil sometimes happen because of some empty thing! How many insults to God, insults, mutual grief! This is how the enemy turns our hearts because of our attachment to empty things. Ah, the less of this sweet dust, this shiny dust, shiny clothes, beautiful things, the better. And we want to have and use more. A sick person is happy to give everything to someone who would make him healthy, just like you don’t spare the doctor money if he successfully treats you. Possession of earthly goods. We, the damned ones, are really raging because of them - so much cramping, irritability, darkness, powerlessness of soul and body! The first scoundrel is you, my enemy, the devil; the second scoundrel is me. But I want, Lord Jesus, to be pleasing to You and suitable for You: make me, by Your mercy, pleasing and suitable, and may I not be covetous and worthless to strangers: O Savior, be generous to me. Holy Father! For the sake of Your beloved Son, You have now, with great mercy, had mercy on me, taking away my sins and protecting my soul, which had no peace, with peace; I thank You, O Lord my God, because You have mercy on me, not worthy of mercy, because of Your ineffable love for mankind. But establish me in You, O God! Mercy, my joy, my quick to obey, Lord! I thank You, for You heard me soon and You breathed the filth, as we prayed to You, and You enlightened Your Face upon us. God! I confess to You that it is just as convenient for You to make a change in the nature that surrounds us, as in our souls, for You are the Almighty and omnipotent, and the universe is like nothing before You, and the human soul before You is greater than the world, for what good does it benefit a man if he gains the whole world, but loses his own soul? [Matt. 16, 26]. What madness it is to be indignant and embittered against a doctor because he often visits us, gives us the greatest benefit - health, corrects damage in our body, and for this, at the greatest price, receives a somewhat generous reward from us! I'm so crazy! Oh, how reckless I am! How the passion of love of money darkens me! Let’s assume that I am not rich, but wouldn’t I be just as cowardly because of the doctor’s frequent visits even when I was rich? Let's assume that the disease was not dangerous - a bruise on the face from the shaft of a running horse! But if the doctor had not used it, perhaps it would have become dangerous, and only he averted the danger with skillful treatment! After all, he studied for this for several years! God! How little we value Your gifts, for a skillful physician is Your gift invaluable! Gifts of healing are given to others... but the Lord is one and the same (1 Cor. 12:5-9)! Forgive my sin, Lord! We value our works highly, but there are no other people who are educated and noble like us! Blind pride! If you lie on your side, then no temptation will befall you, you will be calm, contented, perhaps, cheerful - and as you strive for useful and saving activity, then every temptation will meet you: anxiety, and irritability with anger at your neighbor, and stinginess and envy, and coldness towards the Lord God, etc., etc. At every step you will need to fight with yourself, with opposing forces and with the adulterous and sinful world, this nest of the devil. If you begin to pray, you must fight laziness, coldness, petrified insensibility, hypocrisy, so as to pray not only with your lips and not with cold, dull, lifeless thoughts, but with a vigorous heart, with a clear understanding and feeling of what is being read, sincerely, unhypocritically; If you begin to read God’s word, you must again overcome reluctance, aversion, dullness of thought, coldness and aversion of the heart from the living words of God, in order to read willingly, with thirst, with great pleasure and joy, with humility, reverence and gratitude, with the thought: who am I, the reader? - an insignificant worm! Who is the speaker in the word of God? – God is infinite, omnipotent, who created everything with His word, who adopted us as His sons in Christ, His Son; you need to deal with your neighbors differently - pride, contempt, bitterness, envy, stinginess, carnal impurity and all the hordes of passions rise up against them in your heart for no apparent reason - again fight them with all your might, so as not to be completely enveloped by their unclean flame, to love and respect everyone from the heart, as we wish this for ourselves from others, to respect in everyone the dignity of man, the image of the all-holy, all-good and Almighty God, unity of blood and origin, a member of one’s own and a member of Christ, and to love everyone as oneself. Do not despise anyone, do not be angry with anyone, do not envy anyone in anything, for we are all one and Christ is in all of us - inexhaustible and glorious wealth; not to spare anyone anything necessary and to share our goods to the best of our ability, willingly, with meekness and humility, as if we were not the givers, but the receivers ourselves; Do not think unclean, carnal, voluptuous thoughts about anyone, for we are all the work of God’s most pure hands. Why does it happen that he who does not do not endure temptations, but he who does does endures? Because he does not go against the dark kingdom of the devil, and the demons leave him alone, but this one goes against him, contrary to him, that is, with the dark kingdom of spirits - so they are against him, attack him, torment him, fight him: stop resisting us, that is, sins, and we will not bother you. Hence the obvious need to fight with all our might against all sin and to conquer for ourselves all virtues, the totality of which, constituting the bright image and likeness of God, we lost in paradise. We would have a lot of things, but others would have little - that’s how proud and unkind we are! We have a lot - good, others have a lot, especially our brothers - a disaster. Isn't it the opposite? - the trouble is that we have a lot, while others have little, because with much we become self-loving, filled with all sorts of passions, and those who have little suffer from our hardness of heart! This is how sin perverted the moral order, drying up brotherly love and turning us away from God through what should have brought us closer to Him with feelings of love and gratitude. When at enmity, be at enmity against every passionate thought and feeling, as against the devil himself, and not against your neighbor, towards whom the evil one arouses sinful passion, for example, envy of his wealth or bitterness, stinginess, impurity, etc.; also be at enmity with him when he produces in you a vague greed for food and drink, and try to eat calmly, with the memory of God, without haste, without wanting to eat or drink too much, in moderation in food and drink. With sounds, knocks, words, coughs, looks, touches, the devil rushes into our thoughts and hearts and often, through our oversight and foolishness, upsets our peace of heart, because he is simple and strikes the heart like an arrow, like lightning. We must listen to our hearts and take care of them; we must always carry Christ in our hearts. I myself eat and drink with pleasure and greed - nothing, okay; others eat and drink with me with pleasure and greed from what I think is my table—a disaster. But why doesn’t my wife regret anything and asks me to eat both of them, which is better, but I regret it and don’t ask for it? Because she is kinder than me, loves me sincerely, and I am worse than her, proud and selfish. These are the little things that reveal a person! God! Have mercy on me! Fix me, renew me! Everything is possible for you. Lord Jesus Christ, I thank You for Your fivefold, obvious, all-powerful salvation of me, a sinner, from my vile sins and from vile spirits, also from the demons of stinginess and irritability. I thank You, my strength, my unashamed hope (sixth and fifth grades). December 16, 1865 Began going to class after illness - a horse bruise. The day is clear and beautiful. Previously there were cloudy and rainy days. Glory to You, Lord, who created me from clay and gave me a rational soul! Glory to You, who put me on the narrow path and who gives me the knowledge of what sin is and what is virtue, who shows me the truth and eternity of it, who exposes the flattery and darkness and destruction of sin and, as much as I can bear it, punishes me for each of my sins, so that my sins may be completely erased and sanctified me: for you are able and willing. this is precisely 74 because I want and act in a manner pleasing to You. But teach me humility and patience and strengthen me in these. Behold, before Your face I say, O Lord, the great, all-holy and all-powerful name - and Your ear hears my words and Your bright eye sees all that is hidden in my soul. Do it, O Lord, according to Thy mercy and according to Thy righteousness and according to Thy infinite power: for I am Thine creation and redemption. Amen. December 17th, 1865 How to break the connection with earthly things, with earthly goods? It is very strong, but the grace of God is strong enough to tear it apart. How to love your neighbor, everyone and always, as yourself? – It is difficult for the old man: every day I break this commandment and because of empty things every day I betray my Lord, betraying Him. But all things are possible with the Lord. Help, Lord! Guide, Lord! I have no disposition towards my neighbor, and my neighbor is cold towards me: I measure less, it is measured to me [Matt. 7, 2]. Sweets have a morally destructive, detrimental effect on the heart: they intensify passions, destroy the soul, and arm one against God and one’s neighbor, His image. Oh, how close to God is man as His image, how close to God’s heart is the insult inflicted on His image! Do our sweets separate us from God? Is our flesh sinful, corrupt, voluptuous, money-loving, covetous? Therefore, crucify the flesh with passions, despise sweets, money, clothes! Be content with your daily needs! Be content with the day: you don’t know what will happen to you and your neighbor tomorrow. Every day, every hour, at all times, be at peace with everyone, especially with God. A person subject to passions is truly spiritually sick. We must treat him carefully, with love, and he himself, as a spiritually sick, darkened, insane, unfree person, should not trust himself in this state and treat others carefully. Oh, how heavy is the burden of worldly passions and addictions - addiction to carnal sweets: honey, jam, sugar, cakes, etc., to money, to clothing! how it suppresses, crushes, humiliates, oppresses the soul! But how good is the yoke of the Lord when the Lord is in our hearts, how light is His burden! Oh, how easy it is! Why, it seems, not to be with Him always? Why not consider everything earthly as rubbish? For before Him all is worthless rubbish. Make us wise and strengthen us in You, Lord! O damned flesh! How, to our misfortune, we have pampered you, spoiled you, pampered you and pampered you! Because of you, we despise the dignity of man, the image of God, we regard man as nothing, we despise, we hate. Oh, how you, nasty one, have turned out to be vile and voluptuous from your very youth! Although now it is necessary to oppress you with fasting and inconsistency in order to render due love to the Lord and your neighbor. God and man! Soul! This is where your responsibilities lie. In view of sweets and people who use sweets, despise sweets as rubbish and respect man, the image of God, to whom they have been placed under his feet; When you feel passion, despise passion and its culprits - the devil and your flesh - and treat your neighbors with all purity and peace, at whom passion, flesh, and the devil direct their arrows. Despise the devil, sweets, money, the flesh - not your neighbor. Always love your neighbor. Sitting at your table with others, relatives or those belonging to you, as well as with strangers, be unanimous with them, have in your heart the humble conviction that the gifts of God - food, drink, sweets - are a common property, and not just yours, for you get for easy and for yourself life-giving and necessary work. Make it an indispensable rule for yourself to sit at meals with a happy and cheerful face, and not gloomy, bitter, dissatisfied, for this is a satanic dream and an abomination to the Lord. Do not let your eyes, the eye of your heart, ripen evilly. Let everyone have power in the form of eating and drinking, for they themselves are men equal to you. I saw the Reverend Father Evgraf, meek, humble, kind, wise, simple-hearted, verbal, and I was surprised at his spiritual kindness. How well he spoke about repentance, about this urgent, everyday need of ours: wisely and simply, clearly and powerfully. Consciousness of sins is not yet repentance, he said, but if you confessed to sin and then abandoned it, that’s repentance. Sincerely repenting, he also said, is a difficult matter, requiring great skill. So, approximately, if you previously looked unkindly at one of your household and treated him unkindly, coldly, contemptuously, sparing him your good, and then you left it and began to look at him and treat him humbly and kindly, sincerely, and you do not spare anything necessary for him, as for yourself, then you have truly repented. For to repent means to leave sin, to cut it off, to break off all connection with it. God! Through the prayers of Father Evgraf, have mercy on me. December 18th, 1865. The Monk Evgraf also spoke about accepting the prophet in the name of the prophet [Matt. 10, 41], about the faith with which one must look at a person, or accept a person as the image of God, as a member of Christ. We must always respect the image of God in man, his equality and equality of honor with us, and never be embittered against him for anything, even if we have to endure something unpleasant because of him, willingly endure labor, stress, shocks, exhaustion of the flesh, even insults and losses because of him. How does it happen with us? I had to suffer a little bit of unpleasantness because of my neighbor - now there is grief, anger towards him, grumbling, perhaps, scolding, quarrel - so that man, this majestic image of the Lord God on earth, wise, free, verbose, is pushed around in nothing because of some trifle. Love your neighbor as yourself. Lord, forgive my sin! My wife said: we must love, take care of, and caress our family first of all, and then others; love your neighbor as yourself, first of all in your home, in this small church. When you learn to love and respect your family without fail, then you will love and respect every person. Because of delicacy and satiety, a person conveniently falls into caprice, self-will, pride, contempt, coldness towards his neighbor, into coldness towards God. We must remember the words of the Apostle: I pacify and enslave my body, so that, while preaching to others, I myself may not remain unworthy (1 Cor. 9:27). The pleasures of the womb must certainly be discarded, only used rarely and a little. For the flesh, pleased with delicacy, is pampered and becomes receptive to every sin, to every passion: malice, self-will, disobedience, pride, contempt, envy, stinginess, fornication, wickedness, unbelief, hypocrisy. The glutton has nothing to do with the word of God - he either does not listen or read it, or he cunningly interprets it, applying it to his passions. God! Behold, I weep over my dead soul, like Martha and Mary over Lazarus. Resurrect my soul, killed by sins, calling: Hallelujah! God! I have always praised You for Your salvation. Have mercy on me now, and again I will glorify You. God! You have the power and authority to resurrect souls that have died by sins, You have the power to leave sins - resurrect my soul, forgive my sins, so that I will not be covetous, nor will I be a stranger. I thank You, Lord Jesus, for on the 18th day of December several times through my prayer You saved me from sin, especially lustful thoughts. He who eats and drinks selected foods and drinks gazes at the chosen, beautiful faces and is often in lust. The devil rules over us through carnal lusts; his kingdom is in the flesh, while the Lord reigns in the spirit, that is, in a spiritual life alien to carnal lusts. Whoever eats sweets will face misfortune. He who eats sweet things has a bad heart. Delicacies are sweet in the mouth, but bitter in the belly and heart. It's just simple bread and simple stew! Do not be irritated with the poor: they portray us as poor in good deeds and constantly asking the Lord for mercy. Have constant respect for the dignity of the human person. Piano is paganism, dancing too, theater too, card games too, dinner parties too, magazines, secular novels too, secular gymnasium education too, lack of fasting too. Father Evgraf. Glory to Thee, Lord Jesus, for Thou hast renewed me with Divine communion, and Thou hast crushed my powerful enemies and provided Thy Divine peace. December 19, 1865. The enemy is persecuting you because you are persecuting the Lord in yourself and in your neighbor, for Christ is all in all, that is, it should be so, in part He is and in many He is truly all. Do not persecute the Lord either in yourself or in your neighbors, and the enemy will not do anything to you. Saul, Saul! Why are you persecuting Me? [Acts. 9:4 ], for if you are proud, angry, quarrel, envious, covetous, feasting, caring for the assembly for the sake of earthly possessions, overeating, getting drunk, committing adultery, deceiving, kidnapping, giving yourself over to a riotous life, idleness or freethinking, blasphemy and similar sins - are you not persecuting Christ? What am I saying? -Are you not crucifying Christ again? Aren't you persecuting yourself too? Hey, you persecute yourself, your soul, you persecute her, the bride of God, from God, for the Lord Jesus Christ is the Bridegroom of our souls, who betrothed us to Himself by His incarnation, His suffering, death and resurrection, holy baptism and especially the communion of His most pure Body and Blood. That is why the Christian faith itself is called marriage or is likened to the marriage of the king’s son, the Lord Jesus Christ, with believers. Poor people make excuses for their frequent requests and say: money is like water. My brothers! If we shared our surpluses (that is, each of us) with the poor, then there would be no poor among us; if you didn’t sew luxurious dresses for yourself, but simple ones, and if you didn’t smoke tobacco, which is completely unnecessary for you, didn’t buy this and that and the third and the tenth, which you could easily do without, then you would have a fair amount of money left over for the poor; or if you did not have rich horses, a rich carriage and various things, then you had a lot, a lot of money in abundance. And now everything goes to you: you adorn yourself like some pagan idol, instead of, remembering the sin that gave birth to clothing, as a cover for natural modesty and as a remedy against the hostile action of the elements, you dress simply, as required by necessity, decency and rank - meanwhile you are wearing silk, and velvet, and a lot of gold and silver, and all this is expensive, expensive - and when will this be? When before your eyes there are so many poor people demanding your help. Abandon vanity and addiction to corruption and engage in works of mercy. Those who are merciful... will receive mercy [Matt. 5, 7], and the Lord will have mercy on you and will not punish you for your former luxury, for your former foolishness and other sins. Remember that we are Christians, children of Christ, members of the body of Christ, even non-Orthodox Christians (we must also feel sorry for them, and especially since they do not belong to our Holy Orthodox Church by birth), and we should also show mercy to them. The devil takes advantage of the time of eating and drinking and the time of sleep, when our flesh rests and tastes pleasure, and the spirit ceases to fight and watch over itself, and enters into us, unless we earnestly pray before food and drink and sleep, and are strengthened in us. And then, in the case of prayer or a good deed, it fights within us, relaxes, inflames, confuses, oppresses, darkens. We make sins for the sake of new sins, damned ones: we spare our neighbors sweets, so that we ourselves can greedily devour them and become satiated with them. But the neighbor is a priceless image of God, and sweets and the body are earth, rubbish. You are the earth, and you will go back to the earth [Gen. 3, 19]. Your salary is increasing, but your servants are not, and they need some encouragement and increase. You don’t give Anyuta a salary, and she doesn’t want it, and she doesn’t need it. Give her what she likes from food and drink, but it doesn’t work for you. Remember that every person is a lord, the king of the earth and everything that is on it, therefore to spare anything necessary for a person is madness, insolence before the Lord God, a blood offense to our neighbor, our fellow member. How crazy and proud we are: we ourselves want to dominate everything, but at least we would not give anything to our neighbor, or we would dominate them at will, while he is the only being with the same rights and equal rights to us. Earthly rubbish - earthly sweets; We value the splendor of the earth, but we do not value our neighbor—the image of God on earth, the owner of all the earth—and often regard it as nothing. Oh madness! Oh, vanity! Keep to the rules of the times of the Apostolic Church, when everything was common and no one called anything his own [Acts. 4:32], and also remember that with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you. Do not spare anything for anyone, for everything for man is given from God Himself - with a spacious, joyful heart and a cheerful face, give what your neighbor needs. Judge for yourself: what you want from others, try to do for your neighbor. If you like, for example, to eat and drink better and sweeter, do not regret it for your neighbor, for he and we have common needs and infirmities; you love that others are generous and hospitable to you - and be like that yourself towards your neighbors who come to you; If you want others not to spare anything for you, don’t spare anything for anyone, but consider everyone to have the same rights as you to the gifts of the Lord, to have full power and freedom to dispose of them. Always treat every person with great respect, look with great respect at every person of man, the image of God, despising everything earthly as rubbish, as we should and are taught from Scripture, for only in this case, when we consider everything earthly as rubbish, will we be constant, unchanging and firm in love for God and neighbor, because it is impossible to work for God and earthly sweets, or his flesh. Any addiction to earthly goods is from the devil and is contrary to the Spirit of Christ; a Christian must be a heavenly citizen on earth, with heavenly thoughts, morals, customs, and affections. Christ draws grief - the devil down to the earth. O evil one! Christ draws us to the love of God - true, peaceful, life-giving, enlightening, eternal, and to the love of our neighbor, our fellow member and the member of Christ; the devil - to the love of this world, to earthly love, to false, perverted, languid love, deadening the soul and body, darkening the thoughts of the mind and the eyes of the heart, drowning out the hearing of the heart with which we hear the word of God, to love that passes away along with the decay or loss of beloved things or with the death of the corruptible body. These are the kinds of troubles we are constantly surrounded by! God! Grant us to cleave to You with all our hearts and to love Your heavenly blessings with all our hearts, to philosophize about them and strive for them with all our might. Eternal King! For eternal life and for the enjoyment of eternal and spiritual blessings in unity with You, Who created us with ineffable light and infinite sweetness, make us wise to always look to You alone, and to You alone to cleave with all our hearts, and to glorify You forever with the Father and the Holy Spirit. Wake up! What a priceless, majestic creation man is and how few earthly goods are needed for his existence! Having food and clothing, it is said, we will be content (1 Tim. 6:8). Therefore, with joy, self-satisfaction and self-sacrifice, let us give our neighbors everything they need. Let us remember that for a person the whole earth is the whole earth, no matter how large it is and how rich it is in various products; for man - heaven with eternal blessings; For man, the Lord became incarnate and laid down His life as Man - for man He gave Himself as food and drink. Why would anyone after this seem to dare to spare anything for a person? - but no, taught by the devil, the original envier of man, people spare for their neighbors what they do not spare for themselves, what their neighbors need and what those who spare themselves have in abundance. But man was created for bliss, for enjoying the endless blessings of the Lord and, by the way, for enjoying earthly blessings. Who are you, resisting God Himself and sparing His image, His child, His goodness? For nothing is yours, not a hair, not a speck of dust. Come to your senses, you madman! Joyfully give what a person needs, saying: take this, you, priceless creation of God, child of God, purchased by the blood of God and nourished by the Flesh and Blood of the Divine Son, just as a mother nourishes the fruit of her womb with her breasts! He who succeeds in voluptuousness succeeds in murder. Whoever comforts the belly spoils the matter. What's the matter? The greatest thing is the salvation of the soul. He who is addicted to sweets is an enemy of the Spirit of God, for he places his life in sweets, and not in the Life-Giving Spirit, who created many different sweets and revives and delights everyone in truth, and sows to the flesh, and not to the spirit, and is flesh, and not spirit. You should completely stop eating meat, butter, and milk. Strong swearing because of them. Who has what kind of bodily need regarding food and drink: some have more, others have less; one wants to eat more, another wants to eat less, depending on the body, and everyone eats as much as he wants, everyone in this regard is his own king and disposes of food and drink with full authority, spontaneously, if he is of age - just like I eat and drink as much as I want and what and how I want, for my neighbor has equal rights with me. God! See my extreme corruption - renew me with Your omnipotent power, wisdom and goodness. When the gifts of God, various sweets, reach their destination - they are used by people, then one must rejoice or be pleased that the people of God are well-fed, satisfied and joyful. Only the devil tends to envy human contentment and well-being. True love rejoices that it can delight and satisfy its beloved with something, not to his detriment, but to his benefit; rejoices in the fact that although she herself sometimes suffers deprivation and even suffering, her beloved will be calm, contented, safe, happy and prosperous. But the misanthrope, the covetous, the greedy, whose God is his belly, grieves that his companion enjoys his meal more than the Lord’s, from the good things of the Lord, and his meal becomes a snare for him, and a trap, and a temptation, and a reward for him [Ps. 68, 23]. He forgets, unfortunate one, that we are all one body and that the Creator, who placed in us the need for food and drink and the food-receiving and digestive organs, Himself prescribed food and drink to us all, indicating to everyone His measure of eating and drinking, by violating which we violate both His written law and the law of nature and harm ourselves, upsetting the harmony of body and soul and the harmony of bodily forces. We must look at everything with a simple eye and we must respect every person as ourselves, or as we want others to respect us. You are a priceless being - man: the whole earth, like matter, as temporary, perishable, is nothing in comparison with you, for you are the image of the incorruptible, immortal God, you were bought at an immeasurable, infinite price - the blood and death of the Son of God. What is very harmful to me (like sweets, because of which there is so much passion, sorrow, crampedness), I love, I consume greedily, I try to eat and drink more of it. And these are the ones that need to be despised, they are the ones that need to be used less, used as little as possible or not used at all. Reject the sweets because of which the enemy daily raises such a war against God and man, His beloved creation, purchased with His blood. In order to be in a prayerful mood of spirit and read the word of God fruitfully, for this you need to leave tasty food. Some have long ago completed their education course, but have not yet learned how and how much to eat and drink, how to sit at the table, how to treat their neighbors: he is greedy, and intemperate, and somehow sits proudly at the table, and, if he is the master of the house, he eats with his family with an unfed heart and a proud eye, and he is wild, rude, unsociable, unkind, and suspicious. This takes a long time to learn. The more someone pleases me, the greater the love I have for him, although, perhaps, sometimes selfishly, for his goodness - but, however, more true than selfish, for the soul is captivated by the sincere love of one’s neighbor. So you know that the more you please any reasonable person, the more you deserve his love for you. – Now, what kind of love will you earn from God if you begin to please Him in everything with heartfelt faith and love? But if you please God, please your neighbor for good, His image, His beloved creation, His child, and you will please God. Schadenfreude, for example, is rejoicing when another is angry and deliberately making him angry; when you see a drunk, when you see a quarrel, a fight and you rejoice at it and say: well done, well done; when you see a fire and are happy and say: oh, how good; when you hear that another is being scolded, and you rejoice that they are scolding, saying: that’s what he needs, or: good for him; when you see someone’s failure, grief, misfortune and rejoice. This is all the devil’s gloating: only the devil, in his most evil nature, is capable of rejoicing in our grief. And we - brothers, all of the same blood, all children of the Heavenly Father - must grieve, sympathize with our neighbors in misfortune, rejoice in sorrow. If one member suffers, all members suffer with it (1 Cor. 12:26). Why do I so please, nourish, satiate my belly, which so strongly resists the love of God? Verily, the womb is the dwelling of Belial, the center of the old man. - Despise him, show complete disdain for him. The enemy inflames in us a greed for sweets, because sweets make a strong war in our affairs [Jas. 4:1] and tear us away from love for God and neighbor; in fact, because of his own sweet piece [which must be given to those who come], a person often, very often falls away in heart from God and is ready to hate and does hate his neighbor, who often comes to him to eat and drink or, while living with him, eats and drinks sweetly. Hence - to hate sweets in order to love God and neighbor, to despise sweets so as not to envy your neighbor. Love is long-suffering, merciful, does not envy, does not become arrogant, is not irritated, is not angry, and does not think evil (1 Cor. 13:4-5). We strive for everything in life that we consider necessary, useful, pleasant for ourselves: money, and abundance in the table, and in clothes, and in books, and wealth and diversity in knowledge and honor in society - but we do not try, we are not jealous of the ardent, true love for God and among ourselves and we pay the lightest attention to this infinitely important subject, or else, perhaps, we do not pay attention at all and in this case we surrender, as it were, to the arbitrariness of the blowing winds. But there is nothing more valuable than love and humility. If I have everything, all knowledge, but do not have love, I am nothing, according to the Apostle (1 Cor. 13:1-3). What awaits many, many so-called Orthodox Christians, that is, in the name of Orthodox Christians, but in reality they are not? - A terrible misfortune, trouble or some terrible expectation of judgment and the fury of fire, ready to devour opponents [Heb. 10, 27 ]! For what? Because they violated the economy of Christ’s salvation, because they abandoned the Gospel and do not read it, but became attached to only secular books, and to theaters, and to clubs, and to idle evenings. Because they despised the writings of the holy fathers and praise their own vain writings, because they not only read them themselves, but also turn the people away from them. They themselves have become blind, and they want to blind others, they have prepared themselves for eternal torment, like dry brushwood, and they want to drag others into the same thing. I thank You, Lord Jesus Christ, my God, for You constantly, daily showed me miracles of Your goodness and mercy and righteousness, on me, the accursed one, punishing me with justice for the evil aspirations of my heart and correcting these aspirations, these passions of dishonor. Oh, how omnipotent and good You are, Lord, in healing my passions, omnipotent, because you turned me, evil, into good, proud and contemptuous into humble, covetous into non-covetous, malicious into benevolent; malicious - into one who rejoices only in goodness and truth, envious and sad about the well-being of others into one who rejoices in the well-being of his neighbor; the stingy into the generous, the irritable into the meek, like a lamb; the cold, vile, unclean adulterer - into a vessel of purity and holiness, the greedy and satiated into the abstinent and despising the brutally perishing; impatient, not tolerant of a single touch or glance of others unfavorable - into patient, rebellious, not tolerant of a single touch or glance of others unfavorable - into patient, rebellious into obedient; from a person of little faith and doubting - into a firm believer and not wavering in any way, from someone cold towards God - into an ardent lover; from the evil and double-minded to the simple-hearted and, in a word, - from a beast you make me a lamb, from a fallen man, defiled by countless sins, - a kind of angel in the flesh, from the old man, the devil - a new one, Christ. These are the miracles of transformations You do with me, my Savior, my Redeemer, my Creator, every day. You are all-good, Lord, with Your omnipotence and with Your truth, because, allowing me to be wounded, to be indignant and to be scorched by my passions, as from Gehenna, You save me daily and repeatedly, not worthy of Your salvation, me, so evil-willed, so fickle in virtue, or, better yet, without any virtue. I thank You, my Savior, for the daily and repeated miracles of Your omnipotence and Your goodness on me, a sinner, for You daily transform, transform, as at the wedding in Cana of Galilee, water into wine, not water into wine, but my soul, corrupted by sins, into a sound, strong and grace-filled Soul of Yours. Who will proclaim the mighty powers of the Lord? [Ps. 105, 2]. Sinners like me! Are you calling on the Savior, or what am I saying? - we must say in advance: do you sincerely believe in Him, as if seeing Him before your eyes? If not, quickly get to know Him and then always call on Him. November 14th, 1865. Morning, two o'clock. November 14th day. God! I thank You, for You have now granted me the grace to perform the Divine Liturgy and receive communion and consume the Divine Mysteries without condemnation. God! I saw inwardly how You defeated the spiritual Amalek who had taken possession of me and crushed his fortress and gave me a euphonious and strong voice. But what peace I tasted after receiving communion and especially after consuming the Divine Mysteries - a peace that truly surpasses any mind! And how healthy, cheerful, and light I became! Soon, however, precisely after leaving the church, I lost the peace of God by becoming angry with the beggars, who persistently asked me for alms when they had already been given. There is no need to be irritated by anyone or anything, or to be indifferent to evil. And during mass, the enemy entered into me through what? Because I felt sorry for the skufia, lest it be smoked with incense, I was indignant at the fact that a lot of incense was put in the censer. It’s through what little things and how powerfully the enemy can defeat us! There is no need to be partial to anything, especially during mass, to look at everything as smoke, as fading brilliance, or as fading and disappearing beauty. We cannot ascend to heaven without fasting, and this is very simple to prove: sit in a cart in large numbers or put a lot of weight in the cart - the horse will not lift it up the mountain. So it is here: the soul cannot fly away from grief, burdened with the sweets and riches of this world. Understand Your commandments - for example, the commandment to love your enemies, to be friendly even to ill-wishers, as to the mentally ill, and to help them without expecting retribution or gratitude. Do Thy will 75, all the will of God, especially His will for our salvation in Christ, working out our salvation with fear and trembling. My flesh, or my old heart, is cold and often blasphemous before God; before my neighbor it is cold, contemptuous, hateful, abusive, evil, envious, stingy - but what after that? We must despise, hate ourselves, our old man, and love our neighbor, especially to be always ardent in love for the Lord God; it is necessary, we absolutely must deny ourselves and live not according to our own will, but according to the will of God, although often God’s will is contrary to ours. And you need to have this in your thoughts and in your heart every day: as you get up from sleep, think about it, how to fulfill this will of God and how to throw away your leper, sinful, evil will. Remember constantly that you carry within you a damned heart and a mind darkened by sin, and do not trust your heart too much, do not follow its sinful movements, but, on the contrary, condemn and eradicate them, acting contrary to them. Hold on to the Word of God: there is shown to you the road to follow. In the person of your father-in-law, honor the man of Christ and the member of the Church, who is the body of Christ God, and the elder, for it is said: Stand before the gray head and honor the elder, and fear the Lord your God [Lev. 19, 32]. After all, he is a king, I thought about the beggar, walking from the gymnasium and seeing him walking ahead of me, a king, although he has nothing, because it is said: Let us make man, and let him have the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, and the beasts and cattle, and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth, and all the earth [Gen. 1, 26 – 28], – and the beggar is a man. But what brought him, the king of the earth, the image and likeness of God, to poverty? Sins: they made us poor. We are poor in spirit - but what? When we are poor in spirit, we often and very often dream that we are rich and enriched and do not demand anything. For this reason blessed are the poor in spirit [Matt. 5, 3], it is said, because they truly think of themselves as having nothing of their own and being unable to do anything truly good with their own strength. So, every man, even a beggar, is a king, and moreover, the image of God. Honor the image of God and royal dignity in man: in this way you will honor God. An ordinary measure of food and drink is required daily by my father, a measure indicated by God, just as I require a certain insignificant measure. But food and drink, like clothing and shelter, and we are all God’s, not ours, and we are not ours, but God’s. Why will we feel sorry for each other, when the Lord God did not spare Himself for us, why will we envy each other? How can we be angry with each other, despise each other, and even the younger ones, the older ones? Let us walk with a renewed heart, meek and humble. In damp weather, it’s good to drink lingonberry juice with tea, generally a vegetable acid, and in dry weather it’s not bad. But milk should not be allowed as a medicine during fasting: it is heavy. In addition, you can find health benefits from lean foods. You love the light here so much - think what it will be like for you in the pitch darkness, eternal. You love fun here so much, noisy, riotous fun - think what it will be like there, where there will be crying and gnashing of teeth, eternal crying, eternal gnashing. You are told, sons of this world, sons of fun and joy! (7) December 1865 Lord! I thank you, for even now you have been my strong helper and my most merciful and most ready deliverer, despite my damnation. Everything that I now have and that I am, I owe, after the Lord God and my good bosses and mentors, to my father-in-law, father Konstantin Petrovich Nesvitsky; For this I must respect him, honor him, thank him, love him, give him. There are, indeed, such proud people who, when you eat or drink with them, think in their hearts about you: you owe me every sweet sip - although you owe it to the Lord, and not to them, for everything is the gift of the Lord, not deserved by us. This is how we, indecent ones, rise above each other, and the young above the old, and the elderly above the young, and children above their fathers! Oh, our damnation! God! Have mercy on us! You involuntarily remember the forefather David, who said: with a proud eye and an unsatisfied heart, I do not eat with this [Ps. 100, 5], - only he did not eat with a proud eye and an insatiable heart, but we constantly eat and drink, devouring each other internally. How kindly, generously, and unceasingly the Lord has provided for us until now! And shouldn’t we live in love with all our neighbors, not being angry with them for their visits, but rejoicing in them, without fear of deprivation of earthly blessings? And what is their excess for? We are wanderers and strangers, not today or tomorrow we will have to part with this perishable life, and what have we prepared, who will get it? Isn’t it often true for people who are unworthy? If your heart yearns to be angry with someone, or to feel sorry for someone, or to envy, or to envy, or to be unclean with someone, immediately remember and imagine more vividly that he or she is a member of Christ, call on the name of the Lord Jesus, ask Him for salvation, and your passion will cease. Experience. We are exposed to passions from the darkening of the heart, from forgetting that we are brothers and sisters, children of the Heavenly, holy, blessed Father, and members of the body of Christ. Having remembered and vividly imagined this, we immediately sober up, come to our senses and correct ourselves. For pray tell: will we fight against ourselves, against our own flesh and blood, or against Christ, our Lord, our Savior and Benefactor? Should I defile my flesh? Are you a member of Christ? Mighty, all-powerful Corrector of human hearts, Lord Jesus, correct human hearts and strengthen them, just as you correct and strengthen my heart through my prayer. Correct and confirm, for without You, Lord Jesus, we cannot, as You have declared and as we ourselves know from experience, do anything [John. 15, 5]. Be, Lord Jesus! Wanting to pray as befits the Creator of all things, let us free our hearts from creation. We must greatly value the fact that we are given the honor of conversing with the Creator, as created in His image and likeness and redeemed by the honest blood of His Son, for the sake of us who was once man and remains forever God-man. We must thank the Lord for the fact that He has given us the honor of conversing with Him, and has taught and is teaching us to pray worthy of Him, and He Himself gave us prayer, and by the Holy Spirit taught us to compose the prayers of the holy apostles and our God-bearing fathers. I pray - the Lord listens to me, you pray - and he also listens to you if you pray with attention; they pray, thousands, millions pray with you and me at the same time - and the Lord hears them just as much as you and me; Councils of angels and holy men pray to Him for us and glorify Him unceasingly - and He listens to them with fatherly love and benevolence - isn’t it clear from here that we all have one Father - God, who created everyone, loves everyone and cares for everyone as His children, and we are all in Him? Isn’t it clear that we are all one by origin from one Creator, God, by the pledge of His image and likeness in us, by origin from one blood - Adam’s, especially by the redemption of us all by the most pure blood of the Lamb of God the Lord Jesus Christ and by the birth of 76 water and the Spirit in the baptismal font and sealing from the Holy Spirit, especially by the reception of the Body and Blood of Christ God? This last advantage, however, applies to Christians. Is not God all in all, is not Christ all in all? Oh, if only God and the Lord Jesus Christ were in everything! Syi! 77 Everything is possible for You! Go, all of you, to the Father. Jesus, Son of God, by Your Holy Spirit lead everyone to the Father, for without You we cannot take a step to Your Father and our Father, and to Your God and our God [Jn. 20, 17]. Behold, Lord Jesus, we have all wandered away, scattered from the Father, whoever wanted, we are lost, we are perishing - gather us, save and have mercy on us. Amen. Send, O Lord, shepherds after Thy heart, that they may feed Thy sheep with understanding, and teachers, and may they be brought into the sheepfold. Behold, the wolf has plundered and scattered 78 of Your sheep. But the hirelings of Your sheep flee, for they are hirelings and do not care about the sheep [Jn. 10, 12–13]. But let them be few, few or none at all, and let good shepherds feed Your sheep in Your image. My father in the flesh and in his wife, both himself and in my wife, serves me most diligently to this day, for he gave everything to me - how can I not serve him, not honor him, not love him as a wife? How not to humiliate yourself, not to humble yourself, not to belittle yourself before your sister-in-law and not to teach her humility by example of humility? I became all things to everyone, so that I could save at least some (1 Cor. 9:22). The Son of God reduced Himself to the likeness of a human, created image - but what about us? Who are we? We exalt ourselves before our equals, although we are all brothers among ourselves. Arm yourself against sin within yourself, and not against the person against whom sin arms you; against the devil, and not against God, not against His law, for the law of God leads you to holiness, to perfection, to the Kingdom. Let your wife express her love for you and don’t be upset, don’t be irritated, don’t be angry with her because the actions of this love are sometimes unreasonable, annoying, annoying: respect your wife’s intention to show you love. Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them [Col. 3, 19]. Do not neglect love, do not insult it with whims: neglected love is jealous, vengeful, like a bear, enraged at the deprivation of her children. Thank God for your wife’s love and pray to Him that He will strengthen her and make her reasonable and pleasing to God. Oh, what a most cunning and evil creature man is and, to be honest, that’s what I am! When the most tender care is taken about him, about his health, when they caress him most sincerely, serve him most diligently, he even then becomes embittered at the tenderly loving one, if he does something that is not according to him, and is ready to quarrel over the very affections, because of love itself! Oh, the most crafty and evil creature - man, oh, the most crafty and evil creature I am! But transform and create me into a new creature, O Lover of Mankind, and do not let me become satiated with the man who loves me and his love! Conquer this absurd passion - greed, stinginess, pride, envy and with a cheerful face always sit down to your own or a common meal, especially God's, and sit during it also with a cheerful face, not considering those sitting at the meal to be indebted to you, but yourself indebted to them for eating from a meal prepared from your labor, and perhaps from idleness, laziness or untruth obtained money, for what greater honor could there be than to nourish the fellow members and members of Christ created in the image and likeness, to continually show to them the love commanded by Christ, our Savior, who laid down His life for us, and like Him in some way to lay down His soul for His sheep? However, those who feed from our table must be considered equally worthy of the gifts of God's goodness and mercy, just like us - even more worthy than us, for perhaps they are more worthy than us, vessels of God, and consider our meal as God's pasture, God's table, for we are all people of His pasture and the sheep of His hand, and the Lord's earth, and the fulfillment of it [Ps. 94, 7; 23, 1]. It is time for us, with the assistance of God’s grace, to cast aside the wildness of our hearts, the wildness of self-love, and to appropriate the gifts of God for ourselves alone; It’s time to stop being beasts and look askance at those who eat and drink ours. There will be food and drink for everyone from the Heavenly Father, only let us live in love and unanimity, honoring everyone, considering everyone as one with ourselves. Let everything with you be done with love (1 Cor. 16:14). The deceptions of demons are known a thousandfold: why else should one be deceived, wounded, oppressed, or hostile? Dream for dream, wind for wind, and always accept it - why accept the dreams of evil spirits as reality? Why internally drive out your family? Saul, Saul! Why are you persecuting Me? [Acts. 9, 4]. In fact, you are persecuting Christ Himself among your own household or among the poor, and this is terrible ingratitude and ill-will and petrified insensibility and an insane addiction to the dust of the earth - dust, do you hear? Yes, I repeat, to dust. December 17. I thank You, Lord, my helper and my deliverer, for you have saved me many times now from my sins and my passions and have pacified me. My body, my temporary blessings are the leaves, and my life, the root of the tree, are the Lord Jesus Christ and His Spirit and my good deeds; the leaves will fall off, but my Lord and the Holy Spirit will be my life forever, and my good deeds will follow me and will not leave me. I feed the hungry, I show hospitality - my external benefits are spent, pass away, but the virtue of mercy and hospitality increases and will be with me forever and will seek mercy for me at the Last Judgment of God. Is it bad to spend your wealth on the people of God - on the hungry, thirsty, naked, etc.? But how many understand the bliss of giving? Don’t they even more so covet gifts from others, love gifts and pursue bribes [Isa. 1, 23 ]? Take every Christian, everyone who bears this name, be it a Catholic, a Lutheran, an Englishman, much less an Orthodox Christian, as a member of Christ and treat him by faith, as a member of Christ, with all love, meekness, humility, respect (give due importance), Christian obedience. In people subject to demons, demons remain calm and do not disturb the possessed until chance or need brings them to church for the liturgy or to holy relics: then the demons, driven by Divine power, begin to greatly confuse, beat and torment those in whom they are found. But everyone who is devoted to any passions is more susceptible to demonic possession, and while they are only at home or go out into the world and indulge in its pleasures, until then the passions, or the demons nesting in them, are calm, do not disturb them, because they are satisfied with the behavior of those people, as their zealous servants - but when these people come to the church of God and begin to pray to God, then suddenly they feel an evil force in themselves that opposes their desire to sincerely pray to the Creator and to their Lord, they feel that they do not have heartfelt faith, warmth of soul, and in their hearts there is a predominance of aversion to the church, worship and prayer itself, coldness, deceit and hypocrisy, lack of faith, unbelief, addiction to earthly pleasures; they feel bad and blasphemous thoughts in themselves and, in a word, feel that they seem to have entered the wrong place, but something completely alien to their inner mood: something inside them is forcing them to leave the church as soon as possible, just as the possessed are forced to leave the church as soon as possible by the demons living in them, and that is why many leave the church without waiting for the end of the service, before the sermon or during the sermon, or stand in the church carelessly, inattentively, talking, laughing. When you see such people, know that these are slaves of the evil one, voluntary or involuntary, slaves in whose hearts their father the devil reigns or who have temporarily, through passion, inattention and absent-mindedness, fallen into his captivity. Such people are worthy of pity, because they are on a dangerous path: their souls are entangled in the networks of the enemy, and hellish darkness rushes through them. He who is cold towards the Church is cold towards God. And to be cold towards God, who has benefited us so much, what ingratitude! To treat coldly the Sacrament of Communion of the Body and Blood of the Lord, performed during the liturgy, the Sacrament of God’s endless love for people, whom He saved from eternal death - what ingratitude, what incomprehensible meanness, what senselessness, madness, insolence! And this insolence, this madness and senselessness is revealed by everyone who carelessly stands in church during the liturgy or does not go to it at all or very rarely. The habit, say, of worship, weakens, dulls feeling and meaning? What's the use of reason? Reflect as often as possible on the greatest work of our redemption through the suffering and death of the Son of God for us, on the fact that with His body and blood the Lord wants to renew our nature, corrupted by sin, ponder, educated and uneducated, on this mystery of God’s love for people, and you will not stand in church indifferently, absent-mindedly, carelessly - then, on the contrary, many of you will have a deep sigh from your soul about your distance from God, oh the multitude of your sins, about your ingratitude, absent-mindedness, inattention to your greatest task of salvation, while the Lord has shown us and constantly shows such attention; then many will shed tears of tenderness at the sight of such a terrible self-sacrifice of the Son of God for our salvation, such strong fatherly love for us. Then, after the liturgy, you would leave the church as people changed for the good, as new people. So, let's leave our free rage. The humble constantly magnify the Lord, and the Lord lifts them up to the heights of greatness. My soul magnifies... [Lk. 1, 46]. Create power with Your arm: squander the proud thoughts of their hearts [Lk. 1, 51]. Who are these proud-thought hearts? First of all, Satan and his servants are demons; then proud people - high priests, scribes, Pharisees, elders of the Jews. Destroy the mighty from the throne [Lk. 1, 52]. Who are these mighty ones who sat like kings on thrones? Satan and his angels; Satan reigned in hell and on earth and was deposed by the One who suffered on the cross, died and was resurrected. Exalt the humble [Lk. 1, 52]. Who are these humble ones? Christians, meek and humble. Their proud persecutors - kings and proconsuls - were all dethroned and perished, and humble Christians - apostles, saints, martyrs, saints, unmercenaries - were exalted and glorified. Fill those who hunger with good things - those who hunger for righteousness, and those who are rich let go of their vanity [Lk. 1, 53] - the proud scribes, Pharisees, high priests and elders, and all those arrogant in worldly education, worldly wealth, worldly nobility and nobility, worldly affairs and successes, are again becoming rich. Aren't you one of the rich? Don’t you say in your soul: I am rich, I have become wealthy, and I need nothing; but you do not know that you are miserable, and pitiful, and poor, and blind, and naked [Rev. 3, 17 ]! God! teach me to magnify You with my deeds, not just with words and with my writing hand! Why are sorrows necessary for us? Because an unsorrowful soul and an unpunished body are prodigal and generally subject to many passions, and sorrows drive away carnal passions. With bold speech, accuse the vices of your family, do not be afraid, do not be afraid, like a trumpet, raise your voice, despite the pride and whims and malice of those exposed; If you are silent and cowardly, the weeds of the house will grow stronger, and the Lord will punish you for your cowardly silence, for your negligence about His laws. Help, Lord! Buy spiritual pieces for playing the piano. The world, or society, by the very education of its children serves the devil, forming them in the spirit of the world, in vain customs, for example, in playing the piano, in dancing, etc. I thank You, Lord, with all my heart, for You have granted me, after grief and through my prayer, the grace to perform the Divine Liturgy without stumbling and to partake without condemnation of Your Divine Mysteries into the world of spiritual strength and the health of the body. I thank You, for in the classroom You have kept me from mental defilement by sins and You have made me majestic and blessed. I thank You, for You have made the disciples peaceful. I thank You, for You saved me from my sins several times through my prayer, while due to the action of the enemy it was difficult, very difficult to find a way out of them. I thank You for everything, my great Savior! December 20, 1865. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, I thank You with all my heart for Your Divine Mysteries, for in them You have granted me countless benefits! How I will sing the greatness of this gift to us, the unworthy, its glorious actions in our souls and bodies, its cleansing, its salvation, its strength, peace, life-giving, sweetness, its space in us. Glory to Thee, Lord, glory to Thee! Everything must be done with reasoning: praying with reasoning, and reading the word of God, living with people and having conversations with others, walking, sitting, standing, eating and drinking, dressing - every task, great and small, must be done with reasoning: if we judged ourselves, we would not be judged (1 Cor. 11:31). Your neighbor’s pride with humility, anger with kindness, slander and untruth with blessing and truthfulness, lies and deceit with truth, rudeness with affection, gloominess with a kind face, neediness with kind-hearted courtesy. Lord Jesus! Yesterday You gave me the grace not to be irritated with Your poor people; I thank You for this gift! Confirm this which you have done in me. Teach me, teach me not to be irritated with my household when they sin or insult me ​​unrighteously! Through gluttony we give room to the devil within ourselves. Didn't he destroy us through gluttony? Therefore, a true Christian strictly adheres to fasting, keeping in mind the example of the Savior Christ, who fasted for us for forty days and nights. How did the Most Pure Mother of God appear to the people of God, in what light? And not only She, Her very icons, for example Tikhvin? O Mother of Light, truly You are all indescribable light: how can the Mother of Light not be light? But enlighten us, O Most Immaculate Lady, from Your ineffable light, take away from our hearts the darkness of passions and thoughts of vain, nasty, crafty and blasphemous and evil lusts. All you can, Most Pure, All Immaculate! December 21st, 1865 Every creation of God is good, and nothing is reprehensible if it is received with thanksgiving (1 Tim. 4:4), but everything must be used impartially, so that otherwise, through addiction to earthly things, our hearts do not fall away from God and fall into hatred and contempt for our neighbors who take advantage of our acquisitions, for it often happens that even children are alienated from their parents and are burdened precisely because of the passion for earthly things. property or because of covetousness. But since there is nothing in the world more precious than love for God and neighbor, while acquisitions or earthly blessings: money, sweets, clothing, earthly honors constitute a huge obstacle to this love, then we must despise earthly blessings, not have the slightest partiality towards them, treat them completely indifferently and consider them nothing relative to the soul, no better than rubbish, dust, daily trampled under our feet, even that which is so strongly despised by everyone and what everyone abhors so much, and to use everything as dust for the sake of necessity. I count everything as rubbish, says the Apostle, in order to gain Christ [Phil. 3, 8]. You cannot serve God and mammon [Matt. 6, 24]. If hatred for someone is born in your heart, immediately force yourself to pray for him from the bottom of your heart to God, so that the Lord will have mercy and save him, and humble yourself before him, saying in your soul to the Lord: Lord! through the prayers of such and such Thy servant, Thy member, have mercy on me, a sinner; consider yourself worse than him, below him (unworthy of him in all respects) and not worthy of any gifts of God. Do not for a moment indulge in sin, for example, lust or envy, malice, stinginess, love of money, voluptuousness and lust, but fight immediately, calling on the Lord Jesus Christ for help, and do not cease to overcome sinful attraction until you overcome it and until peace and silence, clarity and freedom are restored in your soul. Remember that the saints were also people subservient to us, but by the power of faith they overcame their sinful attractions, conquered the sin that acted in them, and became saints by Divine grace. But shrine is also required of you. Be holy, for holy am I the Lord your God [Lev. 19, 2]. All sins are the dream of the enemy of the devil, such as: fornication, impurity, pride, self-will, stubbornness, malice, envy, greed, stinginess, love of money, lust... and every sin must be hated as the devil himself, the enemy of God and ours, and when there is an action of sin in the heart, one must immediately excite and force the heart to the opposite virtue of this sin, for example, if it acts malice, to arouse in oneself goodness and courtesy, if pride - humility, if irritability - patience, if stinginess - contempt for earthly goods (for there are heavenly ones), if self-will - obedience to the will of those in authority and the direct will of God, if fornication - to arouse love for purity and chastity and abstinence in food and drink, especially in sweets. How much we are mistaken, we are mistaken in life, following the attraction of our passions and not immediately acting against them, considering dreams, malice, pride, the impurity of the devil as something true, real! It usually happens with us that a dream drives a dream: a brother or sister gets angry with me, and I, seeing this, become angry with him; my brother is proud in front of me - I am in front of him. Oh, how we dream! But I say to you, says the Lord, do not resist evil and: love your enemies (considering their malice as nothing), bless those who curse (scold) you [Matt. 5: 39, 44 ], because a brother is subject, willy-nilly or involuntarily, to a demonic dream when passion, sin operates in him: the dream, the darkness, the storm will pass - and he himself mostly sees that his anger, pride, impurity, love of money, voluptuousness, stinginess were dreams, trifles, water bubbles, rubbish. And so that we do not become defiled by unclean dreams, fornication or malice, pride and other passions at night, we must pray fervently the day before and not eat or drink much, not eat or drink only sweets, but eat salty or unsweetened food together, and not sleep in a warm room or under a warm blanket, otherwise fornication will occur at night. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness [Matt. 5, 6], that is, righteousness, correction, life according to the commandments of Christ and the very justification of Christ, justification by His blood, imputation of the righteousness of Christ to oneself. The words truth and justification are also accepted in the sense of law, charter, as in the words “Russian Truth” of Yaroslav the Great 79. Instill in the students that they cannot work for two masters: Jesus Christ God and Pushkin, Belinsky, etc. The wisdom of this world is wild 80 with God: what you admire in the works of secular writers is the madness and impurity and pride of this world before God, the [great] Creator, Lord and Judge, and for every idle word the Lord will demand an account from you at the Last Judgment vaunted secular writers. And in the most secular sciences there is a lot of unnecessary things, for example, when studying Latin, you read pagan authors, not Christian writers. This is paganism, not Christianity. Blessed Jerome of Stridon was severely punished by God in a dream for his addiction to Ciceronian writings. I must instill in you what use you should make of other sciences, what goal to achieve through studying them, what materials to take from them, what examples for science to follow. Your heads are often filled with rubbish. You need to throw it away and put in a valuable, useful [...] instead. When you see that someone has become embittered against you, or is jealous, or is stingy, or is burning with carnal passion, consider him a captive of Satan and feel sorry for him, as for your brother or your sister, pray to God for him, and do not respond to passion with passion, or madness with madness. Or when you feel blasphemy in your heart against someone’s shrine, know again that the devil is attacking you and the shrine of this person, and arm yourself against him immediately with glorification, or heartfelt praise of the shrine of this person. My infinite mercy, Lord, I thank Thee, for Thou hast saved me from many sins and hardships now during the Liturgy, and cleansed my sins in the communion of Thy Divine Mysteries, which were not worthy of communion, and Thou hast pacified my soul, and Thou hast placed my soul in the depths [Ps. 30:9], and You have delighted me with Your ineffable sweetness. I glorify the greatness of Your bounty upon me, the accursed and the fornicated, for You did not deal with me according to my iniquities, You repaid me according to my sins. God! Just as you have mercy on me, so have mercy on all who fear You; just as You taught me to believe in You and trust in You and with the prayer of faith and hope to call on You and with faith and hope to call on You and all Your people. God! I broke the fast before Your glorious and all-honorable Nativity in the flesh - have mercy on me, Lord, and cleanse the sin of us all and admonish us to always do everything pleasing to You. December 22, 1865. Lunch day in honor of Konstantin Afanasievich Skvortsov, former gymnasium inspector. What will I bring to You or what will I reward You, O Lord, since You have given me, a sinner, prayer, with which I can bend You to mercy on me? How can I sing of Your great mercies, O Lord? For here I, a great sinner, prayed to You from a sincere heart with tears, and You again poured out grace into my heart and said: You are mine. Just as another disease is resolved by the fact that an abscess breaks through and malignant rotten matter flows out, so the disease of the soul - its sin - is resolved by the fact that, as it were, a sinful abscess of the heart breaks through and tears of repentance and tenderness flow from the heart. The Lord God is my heart, the Lady Theotokos is my heart (Her heart is the Lord God), all the holy Angels and holy men are each my heart (their heart is the Lord); All Christians of truth on earth are my heart (their heart is again the Lord). Don't you see that in God everything is one and God is all things in everyone? Hence, the invocation of God and His saints in prayer should be sincere, heartfelt, undoubting, as if seeing God and His saints, talk with them with a pure heart, as if thinking about them - such God and they in God are close to us, who pray with faith from a pure heart. Do not cleave at all to the creature, cleave to the Creator; don’t love the splendor here, love the splendor there, in the next century; do not love the glory here, love the glory there - eternal, true; do not love the perishing waste 82, love the incorruptible, spiritual - the Body and Blood of Christ God, the word of God and prayer; do not love a church made with hands, perishable - love one not made with hands, eternal in heaven. Whoever clings with his heart to the blessings here turns away from those there. Do not love wealth, for it is cursed by God and righteous people and the poor because it turns human hearts to stone, unsympathetic to the needs and misfortunes of mankind, proud and disdainful. Poor means pitiable. Indeed, the poor are worthy of pity: they do not have daily food, do not have decent, durable clothing to protect themselves from the cold, and are in danger of catching a cold and even dying from a cold; they have no shelter of their own and must pay a high price for a cramped, damp and dirty corner; they are worthy of regret especially because almost everyone despises them, sometimes scolds them, beats them for nothing - except for the fact that they are poor and unrequited, and to the grief of poverty they add a new grief - contempt and abuse. Meanwhile, the poor are the beloved of Christ God, Who Himself became poor, so that through His poverty we may be enriched, for He was born in a den, and then in a stranger’s, He was laid in a manger, and then in strangers’. Having put off the old man with his deeds and put on the new man, who is renewed in knowledge after the image of Him who created him [Col. 3, 9–10]. On New Year's Day. We must thank the Giver for gifts and cleave to Him all the more, the more He gives us spiritual and material blessings. But the Lord gives us many blessings every day - do we cling to Him with all our hearts? Instead of the Benefactor, are we not clinging to His gifts? He gives us sweet [...] and drinks - don’t we cleave to them, instead of [cleaning] to Him, don’t we indulge in satiety and delicacy? He sends money to purchase material needs - aren’t we clinging to money, to silver and gold? The devil and the flesh have such cunning as to tie us with strong ties to His gifts instead of the Giver of goods and leave us with the heart of the Giver Himself; [attach] to temporary goods and despise eternal ones, to insignificant and fleeting things and despise great ones that do not pass away forever. But this gluttony and love of money, and also the love of clothing and love for earthly differences, deprive our hearts and our thoughts of clarity and sobriety, and we live for the most part in some kind of intoxication and darkness. If you have become proud before someone, immediately ask mentally for forgiveness from the Heavenly Father, forgiveness and humility - do the same with all passion. Serving the Lord is a great reward, therefore the Lord gives me all material gifts in abundance and completely tuna. The place in which I am now, and the benefits associated with it, are the merit of the elder, my father - father-in-law. He is the master of the house, master, and I am a guest, servant, stranger. If someone does not praise you for your service, do not hate him, but love him because he speaks the truth, for we serve the Lord unworthily; Meanwhile, our pride says: we serve well. God! Test hearts and wombs! You know how we serve You, you know our spiritual weakness, impurity, passion, confusion, doubt! Please us to serve You worthily! What countless rays come out of the sun and scatter throughout the sunflower, and they are all from the sun and into the sun, and they all return to the sun. So our souls are from the mental Sun - God: everything is in this mental Sun and everyone will return to this mental Sun. Our soul is an eye. We must remember that people are all creatures with equal rights to us, as created in the image and likeness of God, and not to be irritated with them, not to become embittered, not to feel sorry for them. If you love yourself, a sinner, love every person, although everyone is a sinner, a sinner, because everyone came from Adam; love everyone, because everyone is from Adam; love everyone, because hatred comes from the devil, because the devil uses every sin, real or imaginary, as a reason for our anger towards our neighbor. Let your eye be simple, the eye of the soul [Matt. 6, 22]. When you see a beggar, do not shun him, but remember us for the sake of Him who was impoverished in the den, who reclined in the manger and did not have where to bow his head; remember the Lord of heaven and earth, who chose the poor Virgin as His Mother, because faith, purity and humility, so pleasing to Him, are the lot of poverty, and wealth darkens the spiritual eye and is the cause of pride and many sins. Remember also your extreme, most pitiful spiritual poverty and nakedness, and that the Lord Jesus Christ constitutes your spiritual wealth, and if you are rich in material goods and material wealth and have known your terrible sinful poverty, do not be disgusted by the sight of a beggar in appearance, who is in every way a person similar to you and is worthy of pity simply because he is daily persecuted by a cruel tyrant - need, or his body, the hungry and the thirsty, the naked or the sick. Do you fight with yourself, with your belly, with greed, gluttony, fornication, with malice, envy, self-will, disobedience, coldness towards God and neighbor, hypocrisy, pride, contempt, irritability? - Constantly be at enmity with yourself, that is, with the passions, or the old man. If you don’t know how to treat people sincerely, how will you treat God with a true heart? He who does not love his brother whom he sees, how can he love God whom he does not see? And we have this commandment from Him, that he who loves God should also love his brother (1 John 4:20-21). December 26, 1865 I thank You, Lord, for the Divine Liturgy, for celebrating it and for Your Divine Mysteries, as you revived me with them and gave me a peaceful day for their sake. Glory to You! My Savior, I thank You, for in the crampedness of my passion during the table, you inwardly saved me from this passion and confusion into peace, cramped space into space, and transformed fire into cool dew. And I was sick with the sting of my sweets (sugar on top). December 27, 1865. Love not only those who give you, but also those who take what you have; not those who honor you, but also those who despise you; not those who caress, but also those who offend, not those who help, but also those who impose burdens; not those who are fair to you, but also those who are unjust. Always honor in man the image of God and the child of God in Christ, although he bears the wounds of sins, and look at his sins as something accidental, as a dream, as a demonic lie. Смотри, любишь ли ты ближнего: вот к тебе приходят гости – как ты их принимаешь, с каким расположением сердца, добрым или нет, с радушием или скорбью о том, что они пришли есть-пить у тебя, хотя они и не для того, быть может, пришли. Отбрось лукавство и, вовсе не думая о пище-питье, лакомствах, смотри гостям открыто в глаза и неизменно уважай в них человеческое достоинство, равные с тобою права их на уважение к ним всякого человека, также уважай в них членов Христовых; пришел кто к тебе – мгновенно представь себе, что он – христианин, то есть Христов член, и сообразно с этим высоким званием всячески почти его, и если особенно он и нравы, христианину свойственные, показывает. Иже аще напоит вы чашею студены во имя Мое, яко Христови есте... [ Мф. 10, 42]. Look also at how and with what disposition of spirit you give to the poor: whether willingly, or with faith that they are members of Christ, the least brethren of Christ. Just as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me [Matt. 25, 40]. Everything must be done with faith and love, as Christ Himself, for Christ is in all things and in all [Col. 3, 11]. And since money and sweets are the enemies of Christian faith and love, we must despise money and sweets, count them as nothing, as dust, as dung, and worse than dung, because they infect the inner blessed air in the church of the soul not made by hands with a shameful spiritual stench, and desecrate the temple of the Holy Spirit. Like a baby in the womb, so all those who fear God are in God, and He is in them; like chicks under the wing of a kokosh 83, so are the God-fearing under the shelter of God. Christ Himself comes to me in His members, eats and drinks from me, and because of this I am alienated from Him, while everything that is mine is His gifts, while so little is needed for His members! Alas for me, alas for me! And all because he himself is greedy. But let me renounce everything that opposes the love of God and my neighbor, let me renounce my possessions, let me place my hope in God alone - just as He has generously and unceasingly provided for me so far, so He will continue to provide for me in the future, for He is unchangeable: He is always the same all-good, generous and all-powerful Father! If after the bread and salt you forgot to thank your father and then it came to your mind that you didn’t thank him, then right now, that very minute in the simplicity of your heart, thank him and don’t hesitate for a minute and don’t say in your heart: you can stay like this, not thank him - there’s nothing for it: I feed him and give him water - for this is pride and ingratitude, and malice and service to the devil, who tempts you and teaches you to do his will. You owe great love and ardent gratitude to your wife’s father, who raised and gave her for you, unworthy, and who gave you his place and apartment and property, although small, you are all around in his favor. The first is God's mercy, the second is his. Do not have the slightest, not the slightest moment of obstinacy before anyone, not the slightest resistance to what is due, do not serve the devil even for a moment. God! Help, make wise, approve! December 28, 1865. Walk with kindness in your heart in the midst of your home [Ps. 100, 2]. This is a sacrifice pleasing to God. Change your heart, be renewed in Christ, for whoever is in Christ is a new creation (2 Cor. 5:17). What a wonderful word - thank you! What humility, what kindness, clarity, health of soul it presupposes in a person who expresses it sincerely and from the heart. How long will a sweet piece in the hands of a neighbor seem large? How long is envy? How long will stinginess, greed, avarice, addiction to land last? How long will there be no hope in the Lord, no living in the Lord, no clinging to the only Lord? God! Life and our hope, have mercy on us who are in error at every hour. I thank You, priceless to the Savior, merciful to the Savior, for You have had mercy on the one who called to You for mercy and You have granted Your salvation. Let me cling to You always. God! Dana will never be my portion, the portion of my heart. What is the comparison between food and drink or money with a person for whom everything is ordained by God to be used as rubbish? And how can one, because of this rubbish, be at enmity against man - the king of the earth, created in the image of God, as we often do! Compare your condition with the condition of the poor and you will see a huge difference between you and them. Every day you feast and are satisfied - they eat rough food, whatever God sends, and then only a little; you have a lot of money - they don’t have it; you live in spacious, clean rooms, decorated with elegant furniture - he barely has a place to lay his head, and then in a cramped, damp, stuffy, unclean corner, and for a certain amount of money, which he gets with great difficulty; you dress in warm, comfortable, beautiful and expensive clothes - the beggar in coarse, cold, ugly and the cheapest; you often have the consolation of visiting and enjoying someone else’s very pleasant treats of food and drink - they do not have this pleasure and lead a monotonous and boring life. They are true Christians, that is, many of them, they are strangers and strangers, they have nowhere to lay their heads, and we need to learn a lot from them, especially our spiritual poverty, and we must be gracious towards them, not be irritated, not embittered at them, but honor them with compassion. Be strong, unshakable, always abound in the work of the Lord, knowing that your labor is not in vain in the Lord (1 Cor. 15:58). In what work of the Lord? In love for one's neighbor, in showing him hospitality, affection, help, alms, condescension, in giving advice. We must always remember that our neighbor is weak, sinful, just like us, and can sin, be mistaken, offend - therefore, endure his weaknesses, shortcomings and patiently and with meekness, if necessary, admonish him, or even leave him to think about what he is doing, that is, about his mistakes, errors, insults. Look with your heart at future eternal blessings, and it will not cling to the present - temporary, perishing, that the whole essence is corrupted by use [ Col. 2, 22]. It is better to live in smoke than in a quarrel, and, therefore, it is better to endure the smoke than to start a quarrel over it. If anyone makes any mistake, accept it as if you had made it yourself, and treat the person who has sinned meekly, condescendingly, as you wish for yourself from others when you yourself sin. Let everything with you be done with love (1 Cor. 16:14). Our love for God and neighbor is daily tempted by the enemy, and every day we find ourselves deficient in love, we quarrel over the little things in life: someone broke something, or got dirty, or spilled something, or tore it up, or smelled it, or did something else that was unpleasant - and let us get excited, angry, lose our temper, and all are empty things. You need patience and kindness. Truly speaking, one should remain calm and self-satisfied at the sight of the impermanence of earthly goods and ascend mentally to the heavenly, enduring blessings. When you see someone who is irritated, angry, spiteful, or subject to any other passion, take pity on him and pray for him, because the flames of Gehenna have engulfed him and he is in trouble. If you yourself are angry, pray now. The life of the soul and body is the Lord, endless life, and food, drink, money, clothing, housing, things in the home are like earth, dust, ashes, water, air, fire, as something completely alien and extraneous to us, trash. So let it always be in practice. All the powers, actions, and benefits of things are the Lord, acting entirely in everyone, just as He produces different powers in people, imparts different gifts: the gift of wisdom, strength, prophecy, healing, etc. Because of yesterday's drunkenness and satiety, idle talk at a party and a carnal view of the kindness of the 84 sister-in-law, the temptation to commit adultery occurred in a dream. Drink wine and eat with extreme moderation, do not chat, run from carnal views, so that we do not anger the Lord, the Creator and Lawgiver of all. I was visiting and drank three glasses of sweet tea, drank a glass of vodka, two glasses of wine - sherry and malaga; ate game, bread and butter; I drank a glass of milk at home. That is why there was a prodigal temptation at night. Everything earthly is one sin, because the heart is more or less attached to everything earthly. Everything heavenly is good, because in everything heavenly there is God and everything heavenly is in God, while through everything earthly the devil tempts and, so to speak, in everything earthly the devil: in food, drink, sweets, money, clothes. Laugh at people's stupidity, or what am I saying? - mourn them before God, especially your sins. Addiction to money, sweets, clothes, housing, jewelry - all the thorns that destroy the soul, depriving it of peace, freedom, space and life. We must remember that all human bodies will be dust, and not care about them, not understanding, however, negligence in the sense of carelessness and carelessness about oneself. We still need to remember our high calling - where are we called? To heavenly residence and cohabitation with God, the Mother of God, Angels and holy people of God, which will continue forever; We must value everything earthly and despise it, but let us love what is heavenly, for it is impossible for two masters to work—God and serve mammon [Matt. 6, 24]: our heart is simple and united. We must work for the one Lord. Obnosti (Church Glav.) – to carry around, to distribute. Irmos of the 7th song of the canon of succession to holy communion. Nalezhati (Church Glav.) – to oppress, to crush with one’s weight. Prayer to the Great and Most High God... from following the Sacrament of Unction. Elizhda (Church Glorious) - whenever. Ikos 5th Akathist to the Sweetest Jesus. Ouds (Church Slavic) – members of the body. Wordless (church-glory) - that is, animals that do not have the gift of speech, devoid of spiritual understanding. Prednyaya (Church Slavic) – future. Honest (church glory) – precious, dear. That is, we do not find any justification. Tochiyu (Church Glav.) – only. Prayer Having risen from sleep, I thank You, Holy Trinity... from the sequence of morning prayers. Rebirth (Church Glav.) – rebirth, new birth. Sy is one of the names of God, truly (really) existing, abiding, eternal. Raspuditi (Church Glav.) – to disperse, to scare away. “Russian Truth” is a code of ancient Russian law, which is based primarily on the legal customs of the 10th – 11th centuries and princely judicial practice. It regulated the violation of property rights, debt relations, self-harm, the right of inheritance, family relations, legal proceedings, the procedure for criminal investigation - inquiry (code) and hearing of witnesses (vidakov). Riot (church glory) – stupidity, madness. Kiyzhdo (Church Glav.) – everyone, everyone. Perishing (Church Glorious) – temporary. Kindness (church glory) – beauty. You might be interested in: