Поучение во 2-ю неделю Великого поста. Значение поста для человека

“Take heed to yourselves, lest your hearts be burdened with gluttony and drunkenness” (Luke 21:34). Beloved brothers! It is soul-saving for us during the days of the Holy Pentecost not only to suppress our bodies with fasting, but also to talk about fasting; It is soul-saving for us in the days of Holy Pentecost to pay all due attention to the warning against satiety and satiation made to us by the Lord Himself: “Take heed to yourselves,” He said, “let not your hearts be burdened with gluttony and drunkenness.” The establishment of fasting is God's institution. The first commandment given by God to humanity is the commandment of fasting. It was absolutely necessary for us in paradise, before our fall, and all the more necessary is it after our fall. The commandment to fast was given in paradise and repeated in the Gospel. Let us raise our thoughts to the divine establishment of fasting and by contemplating this establishment we will revive, as if with our soul, the very feat of fasting. The feat of fasting does not belong exclusively to the body; the feat of fasting is useful and necessary not only for the body; it is useful and needed mainly for the mind and heart. “Take heed to yourselves, lest your hearts be burdened with gluttony and drunkenness.” The Savior of the world revealed to us in these words a consequence worthy of special attention from excessive consumption of food and drink, a terrible consequence, a soul-destroying consequence. From pleasing the belly, the heart becomes burdened, coarsened, and hardened; the mind is deprived of its lightness and spirituality; man becomes carnal. What does a carnal man mean? In the name of the carnal, the Holy Scripture marks that unfortunate person who is nailed to the earth, who is incapable of spiritual thoughts and sensations. “My Spirit shall not abide in these men forever, for they are flesh” (Gen. 6:3), God testified. A carnal man is incapable of worshiping God. Even a spiritual person, having undergone saturation, loses his spirituality, loses, as it were, the very ability to know God and serve Him. “Jacob was satisfied,” says the Holy Scripture, calling the true servant of God Jacob, “and the beloved was satisfied and rejected. Become thicker and wider: and forsake God who made him, and depart from God his Savior” (Deut. 32:15). An ascetic comes to this state when he excludes the feat of fasting from his feats. The whiteness and darkness imparted to the body by abundance and indiscriminateness in food are little by little communicated by the body to the heart and the heart to the mind. Then these spiritual eyes, heart and mind, become dull; eternity is hidden from them; earthly life seems endless to the painful eye. The earthly wandering is directed according to concepts and feelings, and the unfortunate blind wanderer, together with the rejected serpent, walks on his belly, and devours the earth all the days of his earthly belly (Gen. 3:14). Violation of fasting threatens a disciple of Christ with falling away from Christ. This influence of immoderate or even imprudent and imprudent consumption of food on a person explains the reason why man, in his very state of innocence, in the midst of the pleasures of paradise, needed the commandment of fasting. It was left to her to preserve the newly created creature, combined from two natures, bodily and spiritual, in a spiritual state; she was given the opportunity to balance the two natures and maintain predominance in the spiritual nature. With its help, a person could constantly stand before God in thought and heart, and could be impregnable to vain thoughts and dreams. All the more necessary is the commandment of fasting for fallen man. An addiction to the earth, to short-term earthly life, to its sweetness, to its great and glorious, the very inclination to sin became characteristic of fallen nature, just as the disordered attractions and sensations it produces are characteristic of illness. We are nailed to the earth, adhered to it with all our souls - not just our bodies; have become completely carnal, deprived of spiritual sensation, incapable of heavenly thoughts. The commandment of fasting is again the first commandment necessary for us. Only through fasting can we tear ourselves away from the earth; only through fasting can we resist the captivating power of earthly pleasures; only through fasting can we break our alliance with sin; only with the help of fasting can our spirit be freed from the heavy shackles of the flesh; Only with the help of fasting can our thoughts arise from the earth and look towards God! As we take upon ourselves the good yoke of fasting, our spirit acquires greater freedom: it rushes into the realm of spirits, which is related to it, and begins to often turn to the contemplation of God, to immerse itself in this immeasurable and wonderful contemplation, and to linger in it. If objects of the material world, illuminated by the rays of the material sun, certainly borrow from it and emit radiance, then how can our spirit not be enlightened when it, having thrown off the rough and thick veil of carnality through fasting, appears directly to the Sun of Truth - God? He is enlightened; he is enlightened and changed! New, divine thoughts arise in him, and mysteries hitherto unknown to him are revealed to him. “The heavens will tell him the glory of God: the firmament will proclaim” the omnipotence of the hand that created it (Ps. 18:2); all creatures, visible and invisible, loudly preach the ineffable mercy of the Creator; he eats spiritually and sees spiritually, “that the Lord is good” (Ps. 33:9). The graceful lightness and subtlety of the spirit are communicated to the body; the body, following the spirit, is drawn to spiritual sensations and prefers incorruptible food, for which it was created, to corruptible food, to which it has fallen. Initially, it is difficult to submit to the healing and violence of fasting; Initially, it is indignant against the establishment of fasting, restores our spirit against it, arms itself against it with various speculations drawn from false reason; but, having been tamed and healed by fasting, it already feels and thinks differently. His attitude towards satiety is the same as the feelings of a recovered person towards the evil foods that he frantically desired during his illness; his relationship to satiety is similar to the relationship to a discovered and already obvious poison, by which the spirit is deprived of dominance over the flesh, by which a person is reduced from the likeness and affinity of an angel to the likeness and affinity of the dumb. Spiritual warriors who have won victory over the flesh through fasting, who have come before the Lord to teach the greatest mysteries and the most sublime virtues, hear from His lips the teaching about the high virtue of fasting and the revelation of the mystery - that state that little by little is formed from satiety and satiety: “take heed to yourselves, lest your hearts be burdened with gluttony and drunkenness.” The winners are reminded to carefully keep with them the weapons used to achieve victory! And victory results, and the spoils acquired by victory are preserved with the same weapon - fasting. The ascetic of Christ, illuminated from Above and taught by his pious experiences, turning to the consideration of the Lenten feat itself, finds it quite necessary not only to abstain from satiety and constant satiety, but also to be strictly selective in food. This legibility seems unnecessary only with a superficial, cursory glance at oneself; but in essence the quality of food is especially important. In paradise the only quality that was forbidden was. In our vale of tears, on earth, we find that indiscriminateness in quality produces much more spiritual disasters than excess in quantity. We should not think that one cluster tends to affect our mind, our soul; Each type of food has its own effect on the blood, on the brain, on the whole body, and through the body - on the spirit. Whoever carefully observes himself, practicing the feat of fasting, will certainly find it necessary to sober up his body and soul from the prolonged consumption of meats and even fish; he will lovingly kiss the statutes of the Holy Church regarding fasting and submit to them. The Holy Fathers called fasting the foundation of all virtues, because fasting preserves our mind in due purity and sobriety, and our heart in due subtlety and spirituality. He who shakes the foundation of virtues shakes the entire edifice of virtues. Brethren! Let us complete the course of holy fasting with zeal and diligence. The deprivations that, at first glance, our body is subjected to according to the rules of fasting are insignificant compared to the spiritual benefits that fasting can bring. Through fasting, let us free our bodies from a luxurious and fat meal, and our hearts from the earth and corruption, from that deep and destructive forgetfulness with which we separate ourselves from the eternity that lies ahead of us and is ready to embrace us. Let us strive both in spirit and body towards God! Let us be afraid of the carnal state produced by breaking fasting; let us be afraid of the complete inability to honor God and know God, which is produced by contempt for fasting. This disastrous inability is the beginning of eternal death. This disastrous inability appears in us when, from neglecting the Divine commandment about fasting, we allow our hearts to be “burdened with overeating and drunkenness.” Amen. You might be interested in: