Поучение в 9-ю неделю. Бог – помощник человека в скорбях его

The Holy Apostle Peter, as we heard today in the Gospel (Matthew 14:22-34), having once seen the Lord walking on the troubled sea, asked Him for a command to come to Him on the waters. “Command me,” said Peter, “to come to You on the waters.” Having received a command from the almighty Lord, Peter disembarked from the boat and walked on the waters, which seemed to have solidified under his feet. As long as Peter believed the command of the Lord, as long as he had this command in mind, until then he walked through the wet elements as if on dry land. But the wind was very strong and the waves rose high. Peter noticed this, allowed fear into himself, which at a superficial glance could be called natural and fundamental, and began to drown. Then he cried out to the Lord: “Lord, save me.” The Lord stretched out his hand to him and delivered him from drowning, saying: “Faith of little faith! Why did you doubt?” We all walk on the unsteady waves of the sea of ​​life, rocked and disturbed by various vicissitudes. We all walk on the waves of the sea of ​​life, we follow them to the gates of death, to the judgment of God. What an unfaithful element is under our feet! We cannot know what will happen to us in the shortest possible time. The most powerful transformations in our lives occur unexpectedly, suddenly. More than one death creeps up like a thief: almost all misfortunes creep up like this. The sea is stormed and stormed by strong winds rising from different sides for some unknown reason; and our life is subject to various attacks from evil spirits and the people led by them; We are exposed to various misfortunes due to unexpected events, due to some mysterious coincidence of circumstances. It is impossible to foresee and foreknow what anger will come up with, what will serve as the reason and means for misfortune, where temptation will arise. For the most part, it is impossible to prevent or ward them off. And another sea, an invisible sea, is under our mental feet. Other winds blow and disturb this sea. The sea is our heart, where many different sensations are combined. Fallen man's senses are contaminated with sin and therefore, for the most part, act incorrectly. Rarely can an old man, not renewed by God's grace, act, and then with violence to himself and with significant omissions in fulfillment, according to the instructions of the Gospel commandment. The wrong action of feelings sickened by sin is the most biased, often passionate. When mental illness acts moderately, then sensations are imprinted by moderate irregularities, called addictions; when the illness acts in all its development, then sensations turn into passions. Our sensations are influenced by thoughts that arise in ourselves and are brought to us by the spirits of evil, the enemies of the human race. Sometimes we are overwhelmed by sadness, sometimes we are outraged by anger, sometimes we are carried away by voluptuousness, sometimes we are delighted by vanity and pride. This wind - the pressure of thoughts - is often so strong that we do not find the means to resist it, we get lost, become despondent, despair, and approach destruction. What can I say as a consolation to anyone who understands that he walks on the waves of the sea with both his outer life and the life of his spirit? Let's say that he walks according to the command of his God. According to this commandment, Saint Peter walked, for our instruction, and did not drown until that time, until which he firmly believed that he was acting according to the command of God. Let us also believe that God has called us from insignificance into existence, that He has given and destined for us a field of earthly life, commanding us to do His will in this field and promising to vigilantly watch over His providence over His faithful servants. Let us believe that we, His creatures, are completely in His will, that without the wave of this almighty and all-holy will nothing happens to us. Guided by this thought, we will freely and boldly make our procession across the sea. “Are not two birds,” the Lord said to His disciples, “valued by a single assar, and not a single one of them will fall to the earth, without your Father: and for you also the chief powers have been counted. Fear not, for ye are better than many birds” (Matthew 10:29–31). Humans are weak. To console and teach the weak, Saint Peter was allowed to waver in his faith and expose himself to danger. When faith in God is replaced by human considerations, then man suffers in the waves of the sea of ​​life. He's in poverty! He does not see human ways to get out of difficult circumstances, and the memory of God is stolen away by incomprehensible oblivion. The Apostle Peter, beginning to drown, cried out to the Lord; and we, from the midst of the oppressive circumstances surrounding us everywhere, will force ourselves to remember God, and turn to God with the most earnest prayer for deliverance. The deliverance will not be slow. It will come, and everyone, seeing it, will hear in their conscience the meek voice of reproof: “You have little faith! Why did you doubt?” Temptations are necessary for us. They are allowed to us by the Providence of God, so that we, oppressed by them, may resort to the God we have forgotten and come to know Him experientially. “Call Me in the day of your sorrow,” God exhorts the mourner, “and destroy you and glorify Me” (Ps. 49:15). “Glorify Me,” that is, you will know Me experientially, with living knowledge, and you will believe in Me with living faith. To dead knowledge, literally, I seem to be non-existent.” The Lord gave his hand to drowning Peter to save him; To get us out of a difficult situation, the action of God’s Providence is especially clear and tangible. The shock of sorrows is insignificant compared to the knowledge of God they provide. Languishing in sorrows is short-lived; essential knowledge of God, combined with assimilation to Him, is an eternal treasure, the guarantee of all eternal blessings. The same should be done when a spiritual storm arises, when the peace of the heart is disturbed and disturbed by sinful thoughts. These thoughts are clothed most in righteousness, trying in every possible way to seduce a person; but they are recognized by the confusion they produce, by their taking away the peace of the heart. The storm of passions is terrible, more terrible than all external disasters. An internal disaster is more dangerous than an external one. During a visible storm the sun is darkened by clouds; The mind, covered by a thick cloud of thoughts, becomes darkened during a heart storm. The instructions of the Holy Scriptures and the Holy Fathers are forgotten; the boat of the soul is flooded with waves (Matthew 8:24) of various passionate sensations. Neither conversation with friends nor soul-edifying reading have any beneficial effect. The soul, overflowing with muddy moisture, does not accept anything into itself. The only means of salvation remains intense prayer. Like the Apostle Peter, we must cry out to the Lord with all our soul. “He will call to Me,” says the Lord, “and I will hear him: I am with him in tribulation, I will destroy him, and I will glorify him, I will fill him with long days, and I will show him My salvation” (Ps. 91:15–16). What a comforting promise! What a multitude of comforting promises! The promise is given to hear those who cry to God. God, who foresees the future, declares that He, by Divine Providence, is already with those who call upon Him. Next, a promise is given to take the caller out of sorrow and glorify him, glorify him with the gift of Divine grace. The promises are crowned with the promise of a blessed eternity and the manifestation of salvation in the soul, through the establishment of the heavenly kingdom in it - the guarantee of a blessed eternity. The Savior of the world gave His hand to drowning Peter to save him from drowning; He sends down Divine grace to His servants, with it He touches their spirit and saves those drowning and perishing from the storm of agitated passions. When the Lord calmed the storm, “then he who was in the ships came and worshiped Him, saying: Truly you are the Son of God.” When the storm of the heart from calling on the Lord calms down and the winds that stirred it up - demonic thoughts - recede, then the thoughts of the soul worship the Son of God, worship in spirit, and confess Him because of the received conviction about the Son of God and God, the Savior of the world, because of the received conviction in the very treasury of the soul. External temptations bring knowledge of God through the manifestation of His Providence for us, bring faith in God’s Providence, instill in the heart the fear of God and reverence for God as the One who sees and is visible, inclines a person to live according to God’s commandments, to evade sin, which angers God. Temptations of the soul bring deeper knowledge. And those servants of God who have completely devoted themselves to serving God and are engaged in silent mental prayer, which reveals his soul to a person, are most and almost exclusively exposed to these temptations, to active teaching and admonition by them. “He who descends into the sea of ​​the heart in ships, that is, under the guidance of the Word of God and Church Tradition, not by any means through arbitrary thinking and asceticism, doing work in many waters, in the thoughts and sensations of the heart, seeing the works of God and his miracles in the depths of the heart. In all-wise and all-good forms, God allows a person to have an internal struggle: speech, and the spirit is stormy, and its rising waves rise to the heavens and descend to the abyss. From the terrible agitation of feelings produced by demonic thoughts - this stormy spirit - the soul of the ascetics melts into evil: they are confused, moved, and all their wisdom is quickly swallowed up because of the darkness caused by the storm, because of the invasion of many heavy thoughts, because of terrible confusion, because of perplexities insoluble by the human mind. And I cried out to the Lord, without ever afflicting them, and I delivered them from their needs. And he commanded the storm, and arose into silence, and silenced its waves. After an internal struggle, spiritual consolation is usually given: and rejoice, as if silent, and guide them into the refuge of Your will. Those trained by internal warfare acquire knowledge of the all-holy will of God, and little by little they learn to abide in it. Knowledge of the will of God and submission to it serve as a refuge for the soul: the soul finds in this refuge peace and notification of its salvation. Secretly taught by the Lord the knowledge of good and evil, from the experienced sensation in themselves of sinful action and the action of grace, by which the sinful action is destroyed, they will confess the Lord’s mercy in their prayers, filled with thanksgiving and glorification, they will confess His miracles to the sons of man, their brethren, in soul-helping conversations. They will lift Him up in the church of men, and in the seats of the elders they will praise Him” (Ps. 106:23-33). “To those who love God,” said the apostle, “everything will work for good” (Rom. 8:28), not only external sorrows and misfortunes, but also sorrows caused by rebellion and a storm of passions. They reveal his fall before a person, bringing him down from the heights of arrogance and conceit to a state of self-knowledge and humility, they reveal the complete need for a Redeemer, and cast him in self-sacrifice at the feet of the Redeemer. Let us not be embarrassed when we see a rebellion of passions in ourselves, as self-ignorance is usually embarrassed by this. We are damaged by sin, and passions have become natural to us, just as its various manifestations are natural to an illness. When passions arise, one must immediately resort to God through prayer and weeping, resist the passions with firmness and wait patiently for intercession from God. Passions chill not only those people who are in their power, but also those who have succeeded in virtue. This is done by God’s permission, so that the very existence of virtue does not serve for a weak person as a reason for exaltation and pride 118. Often, after a long period of peace, a terrible storm arises; those who thought they were in a safe haven suddenly find themselves on the open sea, boiling with waves. Human dispassion can then be considered safe when the body goes into the coffin and the soul leaves this world filled with seduction, temptations, and deception. “Save us, Lord: we are perishing!” (Matt. 8:25) the disciples of the Savior cried out to the Savior of the world during another voyage on the sea, waking Him up when a great storm arose on the sea, when the boat was flooded with waves, and the Savior was resting in sleep. The Savior's dream depicts our oblivion of God. Oblivion is destroyed by temptation. Remembered and called to help, God “rebukes the winds and the sea. All-merciful and Almighty, He brings great peace” (Matthew 8:26) to everyone who remembers and calls upon Him for help in times of sorrow. Amen. Rev. Nil Sorsky. Word 3 You might be interested in: