Слово на поминовение («Да не смущается сердце ваше и да не устрашается и прочее. Если бы вы любили Меня, то возрадовались бы, что Я сказал: иду к Отцу» (Ин. 14:27–28))

Great sadness, confusion and contrition of the heart occur when lovers are separated. As hard as it is for the soul to be separated from the body, so it is for the beloved to be separated from the lover, for, according to general understanding, the soul lives better where it loves than where it gives life. Intending to leave Ephesus for Jerusalem, Saint Paul convened a sacred council of bishops, priests and other church officials and, after a lengthy soul-searching conversation, said to them: “And now, behold, I know that all of you will no longer see my face, among whom I went preaching the kingdom of God” (Acts 20:25). After these words, “there was considerable weeping among all, and, falling on Paul’s neck, they kissed him, grieving especially at the word he had spoken, that they would no longer see his face” (Acts 20:37–38). Sad and tearful separation occurs between those who love each other, especially when this separation is such that it is no longer possible for them to see each other. Tobit once sent his son Tobias the Younger to the Median city of Ragi to Gabael for silver, given on loan, and when the sent son, having lingered there, did not return on the appointed day, he began to grieve greatly, and Anna, his wife, as the Divine Scripture tells, cried inconsolable tears, saying: “Woe is me, my son, why did we send you on a long journey! O light of our eyes and the rod of our old age, the consolation of our life and the hope of our inheritance! Having everything in you alone, we should not have let you go!” And not finding consolation in anything, she walked every day, looking around, and bypassed all the paths along which he could return, in order to see his approach from afar (see Comrade 9–10 chapters). The separation from her son brought such great, inconsolable sadness, if not forever, then for a long time. The same sadness is produced by any separation of lovers, and most of all by death. For death is nothing other than the separation of the soul from the body, from friends and from everyone with whom it is in communication. Oh, how much suffering mortal separation brings to those who love! When the brothers sold Joseph to Egypt and, having anointed his clothes with the blood of a kid, sent them to Jacob, his father, falsely saying that he had been eaten by a fierce beast, Jacob, recognizing his son’s clothes and thinking that he had really been kidnapped by the beast, tore his robe, put on a hair shirt and mourned his son for many days. How great is the sorrow and sadness! His sons and daughters consoled him, but he did not want, could not be consoled and said: “I will go down to my son, lamenting, into hell” (Gen. 37:33–35). They told David that his son, the evil and rebellious Absalom, was killed in the battle that he wickedly waged against his father. Anyone would think that David would rejoice at the death of his enemy rather than his son. But here, too, mortal separation brought bitter weeping. “And the King was troubled,” says the Divine Scripture, “and entering the palace chamber, he wept bitterly for Absalom, and cried out in his weeping: “My son Absalom, my son Absalom, who will give me death in your place” (2 Samuel 18:33)! Although you raised an uprising, you were my blood, and I cannot calmly endure mortal separation from you! It would be better for me to die than to be separated from you by death! “A voice is heard in Rama, weeping and wailing and great crying.” What is this great lamentation that fills the whole world about? Is it about lost wealth, or about deprivation of honor? No! About mortal separation. Rachel loved her crying children “and does not want to be comforted, for they are not” (Matthew 2:18). Not only that. The time had come for our Savior to be separated by death from the apostles who loved Him, and He announced this to the apostles, saying: “I will not be with you for a long time; you will seek Me and will not find me; and where I am, you cannot come” (John 7:33–34). What about the apostles? They were filled with such indescribable sadness that they could not answer a single word. The Savior Himself notices this: “Now I go to Him who sent Me, and none of you asks Me: Where are you going? But because I told you this, your heart was filled with sorrow” (John 16:5–6). Truly, the separation of a loved one from a lover, especially mortal separation, produces great sadness in people: the separation of friends from friend, brothers from brother, children from parents never happens without crying and much sobbing. But does it have to be this way? I will ask about this in new grace and will find the answer to those who mourn in the Divine Scripture, from our Savior Himself. Tell us, our Savior, is it proper to lament immeasurably when someone we love, by Your will, is separated from us by temporary death? Our Savior answers us the same way that he answered the grieving apostles: “Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid” (John 14:27). But how was it possible for the apostles not to grieve? After all, You left them who loved You! He left them orphans, was separated from them by death, and by the shameful death of the godfather, by which only robbers and villains usually died! I didn’t die in old age, I died when only You could live! Our Savior answers this: “Let not your heart be troubled,” and so on. But what is the reason why the apostles who love You should not be embarrassed when separated from You? The reason is this, He says, that I “go from this world to the Father,” and therefore those who love Me should rejoice and not weep. “If you loved Me, you would rejoice because I said, “I am going to the Father” (John 14:28). Do not look, as our Savior says, at the fact that I am leaving you, that by death, and a dishonorable death, I am separated from you, that I am dying not in old age, but in thirty years; look at the fact that “I go to the Father” from this life, filled with sorrows, to a life where “there will be no more mourning, no crying, no pain” (Rev. 21:4), but there will be endless life. And what He said to the apostles, He said to all those who believe in Him (cf. John 17:20), so that in sorrows, especially those arising from the separation of a mortal, everyone could have the greatest consolation in the fact that the one who believes in Christ, no matter at what age and no matter what death he dies, passes from this life, full of confusion and sorrow, to the Heavenly Father. This is what I will talk about briefly for the joy of soul and body of all who believe in Jesus. “Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid,” and so on. “If you loved Me, you would rejoice because I said: I am going to the Father.” If it were appropriate to complain immensely about separation from a loved one, then only in that one case when his departure from us would be a deprivation of some good and a transition to evil. But when separation is not a transition from good to evil, but on the contrary, from evil to good, then it is not appropriate for a lover to grieve over such separation. For example, a reason worthy of lamentation is when someone’s friend is absent and by this separation passes from freedom to bondage, from joy to sorrow, from the Fatherland to exile, from honor to dishonor, from life to death. Otherwise, when through this separation he moves from sadness to joy, from bonds and prison to freedom, from captivity to home, from exile to the Fatherland, from death to life, from confusion and adversity to peace, then it is impossible for a friend to grieve about this, otherwise he would not love him with true love, but would love himself most of all, and this would not be love, but disdain. For what does it mean to love someone? It means wishing for his good and doing it whenever possible, as Aristotle says and the Apostle Paul asserts: “Love does not seek its own,” but rather the one it loves (1 Cor. 13:5). An enemy, not a friend, is one who grieves because his friend escaped evil and received good, who in some case and at some time in his life passed from evil to good. And this is exactly what happens during the mortal separation of believers in the name of Jesus. Death for believers in the name of Jesus is nothing more than the separation of the soul from the body, and at the same time the transition from the misfortunes of this world to the blessings of heaven. In order to better verify this, let us consider what is our life or what is a person living in this life? Logic or dialectics answers this as follows: a person in this temporary life is nothing more than a kind of short argument that has nothing in itself except the previous and subsequent, or the beginning and the end, that is, birth and death. Mathematics depicts a person like this: a person is a kind of round figure, that is, a kind of circle, for just as a circle ends where it begins, so in this life a person comes from the earth and returns to the earth. Astronomy, which examines the lunar course, gives the following reasoning about a person who is in temporary life: a person changes like the moon, that is, he never remains in one state, but constantly grows and decreases. Seneca also knew this, although darkened by Hellenic error, who gives such wise reasoning about the impermanence of our life (Seneca, letter 24): every day we die, for every day a part of our life is taken away; and while we grow, life ebbs and flows. First we are deprived of childhood, then infancy, then manhood and the most extreme age. All the time that passes is lost, and every day that we live, we give to death. Let us turn to ourselves, listeners, count our years, and we will see that everyone is approaching death: some have left childhood, others have left blooming youth behind them, everyone has already lost most of their lives, and even this day we have already divided in half with death. Why ask logicians, mathematicians, astrologers and Hellenic sages about human life? Let us ask the Holy Spirit speaking in Scripture and our own experience: what is our life? She is a taste of many disasters in a short time. Righteous Job speaks of her this way: “A man born of a woman lives few years and is filled with anger; like a flower blooms and falls; he will run away like a shadow and will not stand” (Job 14:1–2). The short time of our life is like a flower that blooms in the morning and falls in the evening. “As the morning grass disappears, in the morning it will bloom and fade away; and by evening it will fall off, become hard and wither” (Ps. 89:6). Wanting to depict the brevity of human life, Job says that it passes faster than a running man, than a ship carried by the winds, than a bird flying to feed: “My life is fleeting: I ran and did not see; like the trace of a ship on the sea, or the path of a flying eagle looking for prey? ( Job 9:25–28 ). Human life passes quickly, but in a short time many troubles happen to a person. The wife does not remember the sorrow that she endures when giving birth to a child, she does not remember because of joy the birth of a man into the world (see John 16:21), she rejoices that a man was born, and does not consider whether he was born for joy; forgets that a person also appears in the world for work, for illness, for sorrow, like a bird for flight. Did Moses' mother give birth to joy? To death: he was still in the womb, and his enemies had already prepared a sword for him. “She gave birth,” says Scripture, “to a male child; and seeing that he was very beautiful, she hid him for three months” (Ex. 2:2). What joy was it for Moses to hide from death? But even this deplorable joy did not last long: only for three months. For, unable to hide him any longer, they laid him in an ark on the water. This is the joy of being born: from his mother’s womb - straight into the river for a walk. But we are all born into the same joys of this world, as soon as a person comes out of the mother’s womb, when at the same time he falls into the power of stormy waves, countless disasters of the sea of ​​this world. May God save you, mothers, for such love and joy! Don't believe it! Consider at least some human disasters (for it is impossible to name them all), both mental and physical. Oh, how many calamities the human body has! Firstly, the body itself is perishable, full of stench, corruptible, naked and shameful in appearance, subject to all sorts of infirmities and therefore requires medicine, doctors, sectioning of veins, warm rooms and other things. At times it endures cold, at times it suffers heat, it hungers, it thirsts; when he drinks and eats little, he grumbles, but if he eats a lot, he becomes heavy. Secondly, every age has its own disasters: childhood - weakness, ignorance, fear; youth – inconstancy, recklessness; courage - labors, vanity, persecution, enmity, competition; old age - constant infirmities, loss of memory, humiliation. Thirdly, the feelings themselves torment and destroy a person much more than they bring benefit. How much evil, both our own and others’, we see with our eyes, how much evil, how many reproaches, annoyances, slander we hear with our ears! What can we say about internal, spiritual disasters? The soul is subject to sins and falls in many cases. And therefore, “isn’t human life a temptation on earth?” - as Job says (Job 7:1). For, firstly, it has an internal and inseparable enemy - lust, which draws a person, like a kind of burden, to carnal and bestial lusts, with which he must constantly fight if he does not want to become like cattle and perish. Is it necessary to talk about external mental disasters: envy, hatred and misfortunes that are inflicted either on him by others or by others? We have the most beautiful example of this in Jacob, the great saint of God, who, as soon as he began to become rich in the blessing of God and his labors in the service of Laban, his father-in-law, immediately saw his face turned away from himself, not the same “as it was yesterday and the day before yesterday” (Gen. 31:5). Having then heard envious reproaches from the sons of Laban, allegedly he acquired estates not through his own labors, but from Laban’s property, he was forced to return to his fatherland. And such external disasters happen in every state. Do you have a high position, how many intrigues, envy, vanity, hatred do you have against yourself! Are you in a low and subordinate state, and here you are humiliated and subject to the strongest. Why so much screaming and sighing? Because the one who has a lot desires even more, the one who is placed on high wants to be even higher, and the one who has little or nothing desires possession. Let Ahab tell us where sorrows and sorrows come from. How great sorrow he was filled with, wanting to take away the vineyard from Naboth, and not being able to do this! “And Ahab came home, embarrassed by the insulting words that Jaboth had spoken to him,” and so on. “And the soul of Ahab was troubled, and he covered his face, and did not eat bread” (1 Kings 21:4). Let Haman speak, who, seeing that Mordecai did not bow to him in the king’s court, became so furious and saddened that everything became displeasing to him: neither wealth, nor glory, nor honor, although he was the first after the king, and Mordecai was in the king’s court. Let others also speak, who, having not received what they wanted, were consumed by sadness. Who can count all the disasters that happen in a short-lived human life? But even if they did not exist at all, then one thing would be enough - that death awaits everyone. Because of this evil alone, it would not be worth it for people to desire life and not have any consolation in it. Dionysius, the tyrant of Syracuse, once convened a great feast, invited many to it, and among them Damocles, his table-fellow, over whom he ordered a double-edged sword to be hung by a single thread. At that feast there were many different foods and drinks, a lot of music and singing. But Damocles could not be amused by anything, seeing the sword hanging over his head. In the same way, each of those living on earth, seeing the death scythe hanging over this temporary life, even if he had all the joys, could not rejoice, just as someone condemned to death cannot rejoice when he hears a death sentence. And people, hearing in the Heavenly Court the sentence of God, about which it is written by St. Paul: “It is appointed for men to die once, but after this the judgment” (Heb. 9:27), could they love this life if they remembered it? But this is not the only evil that happens to people in this earthly life: a lot of evil is committed in a short time! Remember the evil of prison, all of it exists in temporary life, for life is a prison. That is why the Psalmist appeals to the Lord: “Bring my soul out of prison” (Ps. 142:8), that is, from this body. Remember the evil that happens to a person in a foreign country, distant from the Fatherland and unfamiliar: and all this happens in this life. For life is a journey, as the Divine Paul says: “By being at home in the body, we are cut off from the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:6). Remember also the evil of those in exile from the city, from home, from the Fatherland: all this is present in this life. For life is exile, exile, as the same apostle says: “We have no permanent city here, but we are looking for the future” (Heb. 13:14). Remember the evil of hunger, thirst and deprivation of everything necessary for existence, and all this is in abundance in this life, which is best seen from the apostolic words: “Even to this day we suffer hunger, and thirst, and nakedness, and beatings, and we wander” (1 Cor. 4:11). For this life does not satiate anyone completely, saturation is only in heaven, as the Psalmist says: “I will be satisfied when Your glory appears to me” (Ps. 16:15). Think what an evil it is to be in captivity, in chains, in death! All this is in life, for life is captivity and death, as the holy Apostle Paul says: “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? (Rom. 7:24). Imagine the fear of those living in a house that threatens to fall: such is our life, for “we know that our earthly house, this hut, will be destroyed” (2 Cor. 5:1). Therefore, the saints of God wished better to die and live with Christ than to continue their days in this life. “I preferred to lie down at the house of my God rather than to live in the houses of sinners,” says David (Ps. 83:11). He wanted to spend time in sorrow, to walk in the clothing of mourning while he lived in this body, for he says: “He tore my sackcloth and girded me with joy” (Ps. 29:12). Our body is rags, clothed in which we walk around lamenting, without joy, but when it is torn by death, we clothe ourselves in joy. “Poor man I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? - St. Paul cried (Rom. 7:24). “For we, being in this tent, groan under the burden, because we do not want to be unclothed, but to be clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up into life” (2 Cor. 5:4). The Savior Himself, despite the fact that He lived a few years, was so disgusted by this life that He voluntarily chose a shameful death at the age of thirty-three, and never hated death as much as this life. He never spoke of death with such anger and reproach as he spoke of life: “Oh, unfaithful and corrupt generation! How long will I be with you? How long will I tolerate you? (Matthew 17:17). Therefore, those people who fulfill their mortal duty in their youth are much happier than those who live for many years. They suffer less physical disasters and do much less spiritual evil, and are more likely to follow Christ to the Heavenly Father for a comfortable and carefree life. But even at a young age, they are in many ways superior to hundred-year-olds, for what matters before God is not the years that have passed since birth, but a good life. “One year of a wise man is not equal to the whole life of a fool,” says the Jew Philo, although not a Christian writer, but classified by Saint Jerome as one of the worthy. “Those,” he continues, “who have lived for many years without virtues should be called adult youths, for they have never achieved a mind worthy of gray hair.” “Let not your anger be disturbed, and let not you be afraid,” parents who lose their children at a young age! If you love them, you better rejoice that, by the will of God, they ascend from this sorrowful life to the Heavenly Father. If your parental love desires an inseparable stay with them, then here it cannot be inseparable. Want him where it is possible to stay together forever, and on earth - as long as God wants. You are not deprived, you do not destroy the deceased, but, on the contrary, you transfer your child from exile to the Fatherland, from captivity and bonds to freedom, from earth to heaven, from death to life, which may the All-Merciful God grant him to receive, and you after this long life to reach there and dwell forever with him and with the Angels and all the saints, glorifying the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit now and forever and ever. Amen.