Autobiographical sketch

How I became an Orthodox shepherd and about my shepherding in the Russian student Christian movement. (Provided with minor abbreviations) Life and work of Fr. Sergius is inextricably linked with the Russian emigration and, more specifically, with the Russian Student Christian Movement, of which he was a shepherd for many years. In Finland the Movement also had many supporters and Fr. Sergius often visited here - either on business related to his spiritual nourishment of youth, or simply on vacation in the wonderful Valaam Monastery. During the four war years, he served in the St. Nicholas Church in Helsinki as a priest, since travel to Slovakia, where his family remained, was difficult. Below we place his autobiographical essay, written for the 50th anniversary of his acceptance of the priesthood, and two of his short articles, written more than half a century ago, but which have not lost their relevance today. Having learned that my brothers-co-pastors, my spiritual friends and children want to organize a meeting on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of my priesthood, they want to gather for a common prayer about my unworthiness and about each other, I was very happy and I want, albeit in absentia, to respond to this prayer meeting and, together with my friends and those who love me, experience this memorable anniversary for me. Only now am I beginning to understand that surviving 50 years of priesthood is no joke. Until now I did not understand this and did not think about it. Only now I feel that I have climbed to the top of some huge mountain, the ascent of which happened completely unnoticed for me, like an ordinary everyday thing, in fact, far from it. And now I feel like that commander who, having climbed to the top of an impregnable fortress, said to his friends and comrades: “Look, brothers, where we have climbed! To the very throne of God! How did we do this! What heights, what strongholds we have overcome!” And how everything seemed to happen unnoticed! I went to classes, served mass and all-night vigils, and suddenly found myself before the throne of God and had to look God in the eyes! “It’s scary to fall into the hands of God Zhivago”! How much have I thought about this?! What shall we say now? What report will we give? After all, we have reached the very throne of God! What shall we say? Lord, forgive me? Lord have mercy? But is this not enough? But they walked day after day, as if on level ground, not noticing anything... Day after day, day after day... Was this enough?! Lord, forgive and have mercy... ...Brothers and co-shepherds! Do you have a clear, conscious awareness of your situation? Where do you stand? In front of whom? What are you doing? What awaits you? I'm happy if you give. But I, a sinner, do not give it away. “It is terrible to fall into the hands of the Living God,” said even the great Apostle of Languages. But I never told myself this. He may have spoken the words, but he did not experience them as he should. And now, from the height of 50 years of my priesthood, the entire path of my priesthood is revealed to me. And not only the path of the priesthood, but also the path by which I came to the priesthood, not belonging to the clergy by origin. I come from a poor and deeply religious merchant family of a small provincial town. And then I remember an indelible picture. My mother lies in a coffin in our small thatched house of three small rooms. Her coffin stands in the holy corner under the icons and is surrounded by a crowd of weeping women. I, a two-year-old child, in the arms of some woman, see the figure of my mother lying in a coffin and understand that this is a mother, but I don’t understand why she is lying on the table in a coffin. I remember another moment in the same small house. Lots of fun guests. A young, beautiful, well-dressed lady enters the room from the yard, comes up to me and with a friendly smile hands me a large, beautiful apple. I turn away from her and hide behind the chest. Since then, the image of my deceased mother has been forever associated for me with the image of the Mother of God, and the image of Jesus Christ with the image of my younger brother, from whose birth my mother died, who himself soon died. The beautiful lady who gave me the apple turned out to be my stepmother, with whom we were later very friendly, on whose lap I fell asleep at the tea table, who took care of me in my frequent illnesses and became almost my own mother. My father taught me to pray, to love church and church singing. Thanks to my father, church and holidays, especially Christmas and Easter, occupied a central place in our home life and were its main content and educational element. Every Saturday I went with my father to the all-night vigil and fell in love with church singing. Without instructions and teachings, the church took possession of my soul. My older sister taught me to read and write. The old landlady, with whom we later lived in an apartment, taught me to read to her and love Ushinsky’s “Native Word”. Christmastide and Easter were joyful and fun. Christoslavs were received with love and hospitality, were rewarded generously and were the favorite and only Christmas entertainment. At the age of seven I was sent to school with an old Nikolaev soldier, Pavel Danilovich. At nine years old, they sent me to the preparatory class of the Theological School, not because they wanted to make me a priest, but because there was no other school in our city at that time. When three years later we opened a pro-gymnasium, I was accepted into the second grade without exams. The preparatory class teacher will forever remain in my memory as my favorite teacher. He devoted himself entirely to working with us. He had a well-stocked classroom library and guided our reading. His oddity was that he smoked in class. The outbreak of the Russian-Turkish war captured all our attention. We were all great patriots and Slavophiles. Generals Gurko, Skobelev and others delighted us. Emperor Alexander II was our idol. We accompanied parties of soldiers leaving our city to the front, carried gifts to the wounded - tobacco pouches and cigarettes, looked at the captured Turks, whom our market traders compassionately fed with bread and watermelons... ...The terrible year of 1981 has arrived. I was in 3rd grade. On Sunday, March 1, at 4 o'clock the school guard comes. Crying. What's happened? - The Tsar was killed in St. Petersburg. - What, the Tsar, the liberator of peasants and Slavs? I ran to the cathedral, which was next to our apartment. The cathedral is crowded with people. They're crying. The archpriest speaks a sermon and cries himself. It became creepy. The high school students stand in their place. That same autumn there was a literary evening at the gymnasium dedicated to the Tsar-Liberator. I was assigned to read, in front of the emperor’s portrait, an introductory poem from some newspaper dedicated to the murdered emperor. This event cast a heavy color on the whole year. In the summer we caught butterflies, on the wings of which the numbers were clearly visible on the underside: on one wing - 18, on the other - 81. The butterflies were of different species, but the numbers were the same and completely distinct. The following year I graduated from high school. On the act, they gave me the collected works of Lermontov. The first student was given the collected works of Pushkin. I fell in love with Lermontov very much and became closely related to him. But he brought me more harm than good, which especially affected me already in the senior classes of the gymnasium: 6th, 7th and 8th... ...He corrupted my soul. And I had a hard time getting rid of what he put into it. In Taganrog I experienced the most difficult years of my life, my faith faded away, my mental and physical purity was lost. There was no support from anywhere. I began to come to life and be reborn only from the 7th grade of the gymnasium, when my summer trips to Crimea began to visit my married sister. Two young girls, teachers, with whom I met and became very friendly, also came there. With their purity and friendship they warmed and cleansed my soul. There was nothing romantic between us. We rode a boat, walked around the outskirts of Sevastopol, walked along the highway along the southern coast to Yalta... This pure friendship, which lasted for several years, revived, cleansed, warmed and resurrected my soul. The Taganrog experiences were forgotten, died, and a new, pure, bright, spiritual life began. Tolstoy passed by my soul without touching it, although I re-read all his forbidden things. His psychology did not correspond to my spiritual make-up. I was inclined not to a rational life, but to a life of spirit and feeling. When, after our trip to Kyiv and the Crimea, we returned to Moscow, I felt that I needed to take some decisive step, otherwise I would reach the Khitrov market, the refuge of the Moscow glutton, among whom there were many “fellow students”, bitter drunkards... And I decided to go to the Sergius Lavra to consult with the young new rector of the Theological Academy, Archimandrite Anthony, whose fame was already resounding throughout the world. Moscow, and whose articles about Tolstoy and Solovyov were already known to me. He immediately captivated me with his warmth, simplicity and bright, shining face. Our conversation lasted two hours. He advised me to go to the Academy and continue my education, but not to go “into life”; supplied me with books and ordered me to come next year in August for the entrance exam to the Academy. I worked hard all winter and summer. In August, 80 people came to take the exam, the best graduates of the seminary, perfectly prepared, and I also came with my home preparation. Of the 80 people, only the first 30 who passed the exam could count on government support. I passed the exam 30th on the list and was accepted for a scholarship by the teacher. Sergius. There were four such Lavra scholarships at the Academy, one for each year... ...With admission to the Theological Academy, the period of my wanderings ended. I found my way and calmed down. Listening to lectures by professors, I at the same time spent all my time among a crowd of pilgrims from all over Russia - in the Trinity Cathedral at the relics of St. Sergius and Rev. Nikon, in the chapel on the site of the monk’s cell, where the Mother of God appeared to him and where every Friday at two o’clock in the morning, in memory of this prayer, a prayer service to the Mother of God was served with an akathist while the full choir of Lavra singers sang; in the Gethsemane monastery with the confessor Elder Herman; in the monastery of the Chernigov Icon of the Mother of God with the confessor of Elder Varnava, who was my confessor. I entered a new life, joyful and peaceful, full of scientific theological work, which completely captured my soul and completely satisfied me. The feelings and freshness of my childhood returned to me. Four years later I completed a course at the Academy and immediately became a priest in the Holy Cross Labor Brotherhood, which arose at agricultural schools, male and female, founded by the Chernigov landowner N. N. Neplyuev. The next place of my pastorate was the famous Pyatnitskaya Church of the 12th century in Chernigov, and then my teaching began in the Saratov Second Gymnasium, in the Saratov Diocesan School and in the Poltava Petrovsky Cadet Corps, where it lasted 12 years until the evacuation from Russia along with the Corps in 1919. In exile, I was still a teacher of the law in the Corps for some time, but due to a nervous breakdown I left teaching the law and moved to the Serbian rural parish, and then to Bratislava, where I laid the foundation of the Bratislava Parish of the Exaltation of the Cross. Four years later, he was moved by Metropolitan Evlogii to Paris as a priest of the Russian Student Christian Movement and founded there the Movement Church in the name of the Entry into the Church of the Mother of God. The best years of my emigrant pastorate began and they lasted ten years. They cannot be discussed briefly. To such an extent they were full of deep content, they gave me so many deep and touching experiences both in Paris and at summer conventions in all parts of Europe - from France to Finland, in the South and in the North. I formed enormous spiritual connections with both youth and adult members of the Movement, a huge correspondence. The coming ten years were the best years not only of my emigrant life, but also of my entire 50-year pastoral life. The center of this life and activity was Paris, its organs were congresses and partly camps. Along the way there is a huge correspondence. It felt like we all carried each other in prayer in our hearts. And there was nothing artificial, feigned, or feigned about it. There was a natural, spiritual, prayerful common life with Christ, completely sincere, with the absence of any pretense and hypocrisy, at least that’s how I perceived it. This 10-year prayer life of ours in Christ was God’s true mercy to us, at least that’s how I perceived it. And God gave me the strength to endure it. Thank God for everything... You might be interested in: