Date: 2026-08-15T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Asceticism & Spirituality; John of Kronstadt; Orthodox spiritual diary; A Living Ear of Wheat; eucharistic realism; the Last Judgment; faith and the Church; Russian Orthodox spirituality; Religion & Spirituality; Christianity / Orthodox; Christian Living / Spiritual Growth
Description: The last book of Saint John of Kronstadt — a sheaf of diary thoughts gathered in 1907 and 1908, each a ripened kernel from a lifetime at the altar. Faith and the Church, the wound of the Fall, the narrow path, and the reckoning before God the righteous Judge run through its pages, with the Divine Liturgy at the centre: the fearful Blood of the Son of God offered daily, tasted by those He heals. A pastor's testament from the threshold of death.

A Living Ear of Wheat

John of Kronstadt

Royal Archives

2026

Copyright

The modern English translation and the cover design are © 2026 Royal Archives. All rights reserved.

The underlying source text is in the public domain.

Published by Royal Archives

First published 2026

Translated by Royal Archives

Source: Живой колос (azbyka.ru; the final diary of St John of Kronstadt, 1907–1908, from the pre-revolutionary Russian edition)

Cover: Reapers by Alexei Venetsianov (Russian, 1780–1847), Wikimedia Commons, which is in the public domain.

Edition identifier: urn:royalarchives:zhivoj-kolos:en:1

Introduction

The Author

Ivan Ilyich Sergiev was born on October 19, 1829, in the village of Sura, in the northern province of Arkhangelsk, where the Russian land thins out toward the White Sea and the tundra. His father, Ilia, was a church reader, and the family was poor enough that the boy’s schooling was a genuine sacrifice. He was, by every account, a weak and sickly child, and his early years at the parish school went badly until—as the accounts he later inspired all tell it—a night of tears and prayer was answered by a sudden clarity of mind. From that point he rose to the top of his class, graduated first from the Arkhangelsk seminary, and completed his studies at the St. Petersburg Theological Academy in 1855.

That same year he was ordained a priest and assigned to the Cathedral of St. Andrew in Kronstadt, the naval fortress-town on an island in the Gulf of Finland that guards the sea approach to the capital. He would serve there for the rest of his life—fifty-three years at a single altar, a fact he returns to again and again in the pages of this book. Kronstadt in his day was a hard place: a garrison town swollen with laborers, sailors, the unemployed, and the destitute, many of them living in dugouts and drink. The young priest walked into their poverty deliberately, giving away his money, his shoes, and his time until his own household sometimes went without. In time this personal charity grew into an institution, the House of Industry, which he founded in the 1870s—a complex of workshops, a dormitory, a dining hall, a clinic, a library, and a school, built on the conviction that the poor needed dignified work more than they needed alms.

He had married Elizabeth, a priest’s daughter, but the marriage was celibate by his own choice; he asked her to live with him as brother and sister so that he might give himself wholly to God and to his parish. His life came to center almost entirely on the Divine Liturgy, which he celebrated daily and spoke of as the very thing that kept him alive. The crowds who came to Kronstadt to confess to him grew so vast that he introduced a practice of general, aloud, public confession, thousands of voices calling out their sins together—an extraordinary departure that the throngs made unavoidable. Reports of healings gathered around him during his lifetime, from Russians and non-Russians alike, and by the 1890s he was known across the empire and beyond as a wonderworker. Alongside all this he kept a spiritual diary, and selections from it, published as My Life in Christ, made him one of the most widely read spiritual writers of the modern Orthodox world.

He died on December 20, 1908, in his eightieth year, having, it is said, foretold the day. An immense crowd attended his burial. The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia glorified him as a saint in 1964, and the Church of Russia, the Moscow Patriarchate, canonized him on June 8, 1990. He is commemorated on the day of his repose and on the day of his birth. Across the Orthodox world he is remembered simply as St. John of Kronstadt—a married parish priest, not a monk or a bishop, raised to the altars from the ordinary work of a city parish.

The Work: Occasion & Purpose

A Living Ear of Wheat — Zhivoj kolos in Russian—is St. John’s last book. It gathers thoughts written in 1907 and 1908, the final two years of his life, from the diary he was still keeping as his strength failed. It is a distinct work from My Life in Christ, and the difference matters. My Life in Christ draws on decades of diary entries from the priest’s mature years and had already circulated for a generation, in Russian and, from E. E. Goulaeff’s 1897 translation, in English. A Living Ear of Wheat is a late and separate harvest: the last diary of a dying man, compact, urgent, and shaped from the beginning as a book of farewell.

The circumstances of its making are unusually well documented within the volume itself, because the original edition opened with an editorial preface by P. Ivanovsky that describes them. When St. John entrusted the editing of these final pages, he gave the new diary its name himself, and, we are told, took a plain and moving delight in the title he had chosen. About a month and a half before his death he asked that the book be finished in time for the feast of the Nativity of Christ, and even near the end he was inquiring after its progress, so eager was he to leave a last word of consolation and blessing while he still lived. He arranged for each copy to carry his portrait, signed twenty days before he died, along with an epigraph of Scripture texts in his own hand, chosen for this edition, and a cover showing an ear of wheat grown, as he put it, in his spiritual field. The book was, in the most literal sense, prepared as a testament.

The title carries the whole intention. An ear of wheat is a gathered thing, not a continuous argument; each entry is a single ripened grain. It is living because its seed is the word of God, and because each grain, received with faith, is meant to begin a new life in the one who takes it. The image also carries the note of harvest and of death that runs through the book—the sheaf is cut from the earth so that it may live in heaven. Written in the unsettled years after the revolution of 1905, when the old order was visibly cracking, the book is heavy with the sense of last things: the nearness of the writer’s own death, and his fear for the soul of Russia. It reads throughout as the concentrated counsel of a pastor speaking from the threshold.

Argument & Structure

The book opens with Ivanovsky’s editorial introduction, which both frames the collection and offers a compact summary of St. John’s teaching—the fall of humanity, its redemption by the Son of God, and the four steps by which a Christian climbs from earth to heaven. After that preface the diary entries themselves follow, arranged not by date but by theme. The original edition sorted them into five movements, and the present edition preserves that architecture, grouping the aphorisms under a handful of large headings, each subdivided into several parts.

The first movement treats faith and the Church. Here St. John writes on the Holy Trinity, on the beauty and order of creation as a testimony to its Maker, on the Creed and the councils that framed it, and on the enemies he saw arrayed against the faith of his people. His polemic is direct and belongs unmistakably to his time and place: he names Leo Tolstoy, then at the height of his influence and recently excommunicated, as the Church’s most dangerous domestic adversary, and he writes sharply of Western confessions. These passages reflect the convictions and controversies of a Russian Orthodox priest at the turn of the twentieth century, and are best read as the record of that setting rather than as verdicts to be pressed on later readers.

The second movement turns to the Fall and its consequences: the free defection of humanity from the love of God, the entry of sin as a poison that spreads through the whole race, and the three great enemies of the soul—the flesh, the world, and the devil, whose devices St. John lays bare at length. This is the diagnostic heart of the book, the dark ground against which its hope is set. Within this movement stands the chapter on Communion, where the aged priest sets down the eucharistic faith of his whole ministry: the bread destined to become the Body of Christ, the Physician who joins Himself to the one He heals and gives His most pure Body and Blood, the fearful Blood of the Son of God offered daily at the altar. Nowhere is the pulse of his lifelong devotion stronger.

The third movement maps the Christian’s earthly path to God—the ascent, in St. John’s recurring figure, by four steps. First comes the recognition of one’s own fall and the honest, even severe, judgment of oneself, spurred by the knowledge that a righteous Judge is watching at every moment and that the end is near. Second comes sincere repentance, grounded in the remembrance of Christ’s sufferings and made possible only by His sacrifice. Third comes the inner struggle against impurity, the recovery of purity of soul and body through fasting, prayer, and the crucifying of the passions. Fourth comes the steady walk in the path of the commandments, whose sum is love—love of God as the first and fundamental law, and love of neighbor as its outworking in practice.

The fourth movement gathers the entries on the Christian’s responsibility before God, pressing the theme of accountability and the coming reckoning. The final movement is the most personal. It includes excerpts St. John selected from his diary bearing on his own life and inner state, and closes with a short homily, “A Discourse,” on preparing here for the eternal kingdom. In these last pages he speaks in his own voice of his longing to see the Artist who made him, his gratitude for seventy-nine years of life and fifty-three of priesthood, his sense of enemies pressing in, and his readiness to depart. “Death is birth into eternal life” is very nearly his last word.

Theological & Spiritual Significance

The theology of A Living Ear of Wheat is not systematic and does not try to be; its force is the force of a pastor’s conviction distilled to a few burning points. Three of these stand out.

The first is its eucharistic realism. For St. John the Liturgy was not one devotion among many but the center of existence, the thing without which he said he could not live, and the Communion chapter of this book gives that conviction its most concentrated late expression. He writes of the change of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ in the strongest terms the tradition allows, and of Communion as a real joining of the Physician to the sick, of God to the one He is healing. The teaching is entirely of a piece with the Church’s ancient faith, but the heat of its statement—daily, personal, offered at the very end of a life spent at the altar—is his own.

The second is the drama of fall and restoration. St. John sees the human condition without flinching: the Fall as a real catastrophe, sin as a spreading poison, the soul beset by flesh, world, and devil. Yet the whole weight of his diagnosis serves the announcement of a cure. The Incarnation, in his telling, answers the Fall point for point—God becomes man because man had lost his likeness to God; Christ obeys because man had disobeyed; Christ suffers because man was to have suffered—so that redemption bestows more grace than was lost. The book’s severity about sin is the necessary shadow of its confidence in salvation.

The third is its eschatological seriousness, its steady awareness of judgment and the life to come. St. John writes as a man who believes, concretely and without irony, that he will soon give an account before a righteous Judge, and he will not let the reader forget it. This is not morbidity but urgency; it is the reason the book exists. Coupled with his repeated turn to the beauty of creation—the pages that overflow with delight in birds and children and blossoming fields as the handiwork of a good Creator—it gives the collection a striking double register: an unblinking realism about sin and death held together with an almost childlike joy in the goodness of God.

The book also carries a historical charge. Written on the eve of the revolution that would sweep away the world it addressed, and shot through with a dying priest’s prayer for a Russia he saw perishing in unbelief, it reads in retrospect as a testament from the threshold of an age about to end. That grief for his country is inseparable from its devotion, and gives the whole a note of prophecy.

Reception & Influence

St. John of Kronstadt was, in the last decades of imperial Russia, among the most venerated figures in the country, sought out by peasants and aristocrats alike, his name known far beyond Orthodox circles. His diary My Life in Christ became one of the most widely read works of modern Orthodox spirituality and remains in print in several languages. A Living Ear of Wheat has lived in that larger shadow; as his final book it has been treasured especially by those already devoted to him, its late and testamentary character giving it a particular intimacy. His veneration only deepened after his death, and it received formal recognition in the glorification by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia in 1964 and the canonization by the Moscow Patriarchate in 1990. Today he is honored throughout the Orthodox world as a model of the married parish priest and of a life organized wholly around the Eucharist, and this last diary stands as the compact summing-up of that life.

The Text & This Edition

This is a fresh, modern English edition of A Living Ear of Wheat, rendered from the public-domain Russian text of the pre-revolutionary edition as preserved at azbyka.ru—the diary St. John of Kronstadt wrote in 1907 and 1908, together with the original editorial preface by P. Ivanovsky that accompanied it. It is an English-only edition, intended to be read on its own; it is not laid out as a parallel or bilingual text against the Russian.

The edition follows the house conventions used across this series. The author is named as the Church has always received him—Saint John of Kronstadt—and those who carried the work into English are credited as translators, never as authors. The English has been modernized for a contemporary reader while keeping the cadence and directness of St. John’s own voice, including the many passages of direct prayer and exclamation that give the diary its character. Scripture and biblical references are cited in the plain modern style, with Arabic numerals throughout (for example, Rom. 7:24 rather than the older Roman forms).

One editorial principle deserves particular note. St. John quotes Scripture constantly, and he does so in the Slavonic and Synodal forms familiar to him, not in any English version. This edition renders his biblical quotations from the Russian as he actually cited them, so that the scriptural texture of his prose matches his own usage rather than importing the wording of an English Bible. In the same spirit, the eucharistic passages at the heart of the book have been translated with full realism and care, preserving the strength of his language about the bread destined to become the Body of Christ, the Physician who unites Himself to the one He heals, and the most pure Body and Blood—the loci in which his lifelong devotion speaks most plainly. Archaic second-person forms in his personal prayers have been brought into natural modern English. The aim throughout has been fidelity to what St. John wrote and meant, in language a reader today can receive without a barrier.

Suggestions for Reading

A newcomer may find it best not to read the book straight through as an argument, but to take it as its title invites—a grain or two at a time. The entries are aphoristic and self-contained, and they reward slow reading and return. Ivanovsky’s opening preface is the natural door: it lays out the fourfold path of the fall, redemption, and ascent that organizes everything after it. From there the reader might turn first to the Communion chapter and the final, personal movement, where the man himself is most audible. The polemical passages against Tolstoy and the Western confessions are best read as belonging to their moment; the enduring heart of the book is elsewhere—in its wonder at creation, its severity toward sin, and its unwavering hope in the God who became man to bring us home.

Introduction (2)

This collection of prayerful and inspired thoughts from Father John comprises his final diary, written in 1907–1908. When entrusting the editing of his diary, Father John named his new diary A Living Ear of Wheat. It is difficult to describe the sincere joy Father John felt about his new publication and his delight in the title he himself had given to the diary. This joy of an earnest laborer in God’s field finds a distant parallel in the joy of a laborer bent over from work, seeing a promising fruit of his unceasing toil. His labor is “a living ear of wheat,” because its seed is “words of eternal life,” God’s word; it is “a living ear of wheat” because each grain, received with faith from this “ear,” will be the beginning of a new life in God. The pure joy of Father John is understandable—he who labored 53 years in prayer and tears over planting and watering the seeds of God and was comforted by the consciousness of the eternity of his labors.

Thoughts about God, faith, the Church, life in Christ, eternal life—which comprise the content of Father John’s diary—these form the atmosphere in which the soul of a believing Christian can and must live. In the present edition, Father John’s thoughts are arranged in five chapters. The first chapter discusses faith and the Orthodox Church, the relationship of contemporary Christians to faith and the Church, those who destroy God’s work (among whom the Church’s bitterest enemy, Tolstoy, holds first place), and the delusions of Catholics. In the three following chapters is depicted the necessary path of the Christian from earth to heaven, the path of liberation from sin and the devil and ascent to God through the fulfillment of Christ’s commandments. Finally, in the last chapter are contained thoughts in which the Rector speaks of his spiritual state, his struggle with the enemy of salvation, his longing for God, his desire to soon “see Him—the desired, all-good, beautiful, all-blessed, immortal Father and Master—and bow before Him personally,” glorify and thank God for 79 years of life and 53 years of priesthood, for sorrows and consolations, for God’s long-suffering and complete forgiveness in repentance, especially for the holiest Mystery of the Body and Blood of Christ, in a word—“to thank God for all, for all!”

This diary constitutes, as it were, a consoling spiritual testament left by the dear Rector to all sincerely believing people who, in faith in God and the holy Church, wish to save their souls. The Rector’s penetrating gaze is focused above all on deepening our understanding of the meaning of humanity’s fall and its redemption by the Son of God: how to become united with Christ and in Him partake of eternal blessed life—this is what Father John teaches in his final work, teaches, of course, according to the teachings of God’s Word and the holy Church, and from his own spiritual endeavor, whose goal was this most blessed union with Christ. In what follows is given a brief exposition of these views as they are revealed in the final precepts of the Rector here being published, which the Rector himself blessed us to understand.

By demonic deception, listening to the devil’s counsel in paradise, humanity fell of its own free will from the love of God and transferred its corrupted love to itself (selfishness) and to earthly things. “To exchange God for creation, love of the Creator for devotion to deceitful creation, the holiest inalienable union with the Creator for an unclean, deceitful, evil, and corruptible union with creatures”—this was an act of utter /madness/. “With fleshly beauty and momentary passion the enemy seduces, but from the Source of spiritual and eternal beauty, from God, he turns away and counts Him as nothing and hurls into death. What madness!” Terrible is humanity’s mad fall with its necessary consequences of sin. The fall was deep, wide, and ruinous. Through sin we became strangers to God, severed from Him, having lost the image of God—His holiness—and drawn near to the devil, the author of sin and evil; sin deprived humanity of freedom in God and made us slaves to insane vanity and decay. Separated from God, the Source of life, humanity inherited the devil’s cunning, his futility, passion for decay, malice, pride, envy, and death. Along with humanity, the entire world created by God from nothing became estranged from God.

But sin, this “poison of Satan,” once received by humanity, infected /all/ humankind. Eve was seduced by the forbidden fruit, and behold, all humanity fell into /spiritual delusion/ and became susceptible to seduction. The fall became permanent and inescapable: no civil laws can prevent humanity from falling; sin is conceived with us in our mother’s womb and in our father’s loins and grows and strengthens with our growth. Each person individually senses their own sinfulness, experiencing themselves in a /state of loss/—a person lost and wandering—and second, experiencing /a compulsive inclination toward evil/, because the evil spirit, from the moment of humanity’s fall, began to rule in us mightily, while good and its Source—God, having withdrawn from the human heart—/does not compel but attracts/ through moral beauty, peace of soul, and promises of eternal life. Sin is torment for humanity, acting /powerfully, insatiably, and ruinously/, killing soul and body forever, yet it draws humanity so powerfully with its “spiritual delusion”; /torment and delusion/—these are the sharp but fundamental properties of sin itself. “Oh sin, sin! How pernicious you are!”

“How many enemies does the fallen human, the captive, have! One’s own treacherous, passion-filled /flesh, the devil/—watchful and plotting our ruin, the /world/—adulterous and sinful, with all its deceitful customs and delusions, with all its futility and instability.” Though people themselves are guilty of their sins, Satan is the cause of an abyss of sin. Warning against the devil and pronouncing upon him “solemn curse” as the first apostate from God, His eternal truth, order, peace, and blessedness, pointing all to him as our enemy, blasphemer, and flatterer, Father John lays bare before us the devil’s schemes and his hideousness. The devil has chosen the world as his instrument of action on humanity, the delusions of the world, over which he has gained power as the “prince of the world,” when humanity, surrendering to the enemy’s flattery, lost dominion over nature (the world) and handed over its authority to the foe. With his all-foul, deadly, and tormenting poison, the devil acts like a pestilence on the weakest sides—that is, on the passions that formed in us after the fall. Relying on human negligence and frivolity, our enemy acts either through unexpected sorrows, wishing to instill despair, or through the delusion of fleshly beauty and momentary pleasure. Since the chief commandment of God is love as the fundamental requirement of blessed life (“if I give all my possessions and surrender my body to be burned, but have no love, it profits me nothing” (1Cor 13:3)), the devil has also appointed love as the fundamental requirement—but not holy love for God and in God’s name, but the love of this world—/adulterous love/ and /love of the world’s honor/. “The devil hastens, hastens beyond measure, catching the human to destroy him forever.” And how many have already become victims of the widely spread nets of the devil, victims of his wide fiery mouth with which he devours the unfaithful. Whoever is overcome and conquered by the devil is subjected to eternal captivity, shame, and torment. “The enemy of our salvation has remained faithful to his crafty destructive system for some eight thousand years.” But the devil hides from humanity, concealing his hideousness and ridiculous appearance so that humanity will not come to hate him and feel revulsion and hatred toward him. “Oh, wretched one, be gone from me, enemy of truth and God’s righteousness!”

The world, over which humanity was established by God as prince and lord, this world, as the instrument of the devil, has also become humanity’s enemy. In order to overcome this enemy, “look upon all as a passing shadow,” says Father John.

Finally, humanity’s own passion-filled flesh has become its enemy. Through a thousand lusts it seeks to separate the soul from God, to weaken it, defile it, and kill it. Therefore, God’s saints throughout their entire lives strove to mortify the flesh or its powerful and destructive action on the soul. Fasting and the sufferings of the flesh (illness)—necessary and saving actions for overcoming this evil household enemy. The saving sufferings of the flesh are sent to us by God Himself, from Whom all goodness proceeds; therefore, not complaint but patience and gratitude to God should the believing soul offer even for the heaviest illnesses. The Rector himself, having suffered greatly in the flesh from his childhood, repeating the words of the Apostle Paul, says: As long as I am with you, “who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Rom 7:24)

In order to reunite humanity with God, restore in us the image of God, and snatch us from destructive spiritual delusion, Christ, the Son of God, appeared on earth. If humanity lost its likeness to God, then God Himself was pleased to become like humanity in the Incarnation; if humanity fell through proud disobedience to the Creator’s commandments, then Christ redeemed us through humble fulfillment of the law; if powerless humanity was to suffer the torments of the devil, then the God-man, saving people from the enemy’s nets, suffered Himself and captured our murderer, the devil. “Christ God, having suffered and died for us and risen, by His grace swallowed up all the transgression of the human race that believes in Him”; therefore, redemption is the bestowal on humanity of a second, /moral/ existence, or, according to Scripture, /a rebirth/. The Incarnation of the Son of God, as a great mercy in which God’s truth, wisdom, goodness, and almightiness were revealed, was a supernatural means, because the human nature is extraordinary, wondrous, divine in form, and priceless. Thus was accomplished the salvation of humanity, in which humanity was given more grace than it had before the fall. Only those who believe in Christ and in the Church established by Him on earth receive salvation; outside the Church, to which is entrusted Christ’s true teaching, the saving mysteries, and the guidance of shepherds, there is no salvation. “O our divine faith, divine Orthodoxy, shining brighter than the sun, Orthodoxy purchased for us by apostolic, episcopal, martyric, monastic, and all righteous blood, come to us! O precious pearl! O treasure hidden in the field (in the heart and in the Church)! O renewal! O incorruption! O light! O divine salt! O most bright sun! O eternal life itself! O perfect reconciliation of sinful humans with the righteous God! O golden chain to heaven! O golden ladder to heaven!”

Though redemption is accomplished, though the fearful Blood of the Son of God, offered at the Liturgy, daily intercedes for us before the throne of the Heavenly Father, each person must consciously appropriate salvation for themselves, each must give themselves wholly to Christ with all their thought, all their soul, and all their heart, using for this the grace-filled means and guidance of the Church. “/Know/ Christianity in all its spirit, in God’s plan, in its whole idea, magnificent breadth, goodness, wisdom, and God’s righteousness, /wonder at/ the greatness of God’s work, the work of human salvation, /humbly and devoutly/ bow before it, and /be a fulfiller/ of Christian virtues with the help of God’s grace”—this is the path of the Christian to God briefly but expressively portrayed, the direct and only way.

Our Lord Jesus Christ requires from each believer a feat of struggling, which becomes more difficult the more firmly sin has taken root in a person. This feat consists of the following: first, it is necessary to recognize your terrible fall and the need for restoration and correction; be a strict judge of yourself, prompted by the fact that there is a Righteous Judge, judging you at every moment, and that your end is near; compare your will, inclined toward sin, with the holy will of God, and you will be humbled before God’s perfections. “Be ashamed of yourself, weep over your unbelief, negligence, dullness, laziness, vanity, madness, and other passions.” Second, you must sincerely repent of your sins, loathing them not merely in words but even in thoughts. Frequent remembrance of the sufferings of Lord Jesus Christ, His redemptive death on the cross, His resurrection and ascension into heaven, and His second coming to judge the living and the dead will dispose the heart toward repentance. “You must always repent sincerely, for the Angel of God suffered for your sins too.” “If the Lord Jesus Christ had not offered Himself willingly as a sacrifice for us, repentance would not have been given to us, but for the sake of His sacrifice it is given to all believers, and all those who truly understand it eagerly make use of it, they are transformed by divine transformation, become new people with new thoughts, desires, intentions, deeds, and are saved, enlightened, and united with God.” Only in their madness do people fail to heed the Church’s call to repentance. God’s forbearance, calling all to repentance, is boundless; complete and perfect forgiveness is granted to those who have availed themselves of grace-filled repentance.

The third step to heaven is the struggle against impurity within ourselves, the recovery of nobility of spirit and the purity of soul and body. Born into Christianity and joined to the holy Orthodox Church, we must be pure. To free ourselves from sin and become children of light, we need fasting, prayer, and spiritual struggle; we must crucify fleshly passions (especially gluttony) and resist all evil. By means of constant struggle, you will reach such a state in which the soul will feel revulsion toward sin, where a healed conscience, like the voice of God, will immediately repel any touch of sin, while the soul will feel in its heart an inclination toward virtue.

Thus the fourth and final step to heaven, to the Kingdom of Heaven, is the unwavering following of the path of virtue, the path of fulfilling God’s commandments. Only a fool would refuse to fulfill God’s commandments, in which are holiness and blessedness, life and wisdom. “Our life is a continuous testing through life’s circumstances and encounters with people—the degree to which we are inclined in soul and heart toward faith, hope, and love for God, our Creator, and toward love of neighbor, and the degree to which we are inclined toward sin and various fleshly passions, or toward obedience to the devil acting through fleshly passions and the world’s delusions.” Testing people thus, God allows the devil to act wickedly so that God’s long-suffering might be revealed more and more infinitely and so that the deeds and virtues of people devoted to God might shine more brightly; for the unrepentant (such as Leo Tolstoy), God’s long-suffering will serve to multiply punishment. And so, from the lips of this merciful pastor flows a fervent prayer for all Russia in our time: “Lord, save the Russian people, the Orthodox Church in Russia—which is perishing: everywhere depravity, everywhere unbelief, blasphemy, lawlessness… Lord, all is in Your hands. You are the Almighty!”

The first and fundamental requirement of Christ’s law is /love for God/. We must love God because in Him is an abyss of life, holiness, and light; all His deeds and all nature unceasingly glorify the perfections of their Creator—good, wise, infinitely understanding; especially loudly does the human soul, created in the image and likeness of God, speak of the Creator’s perfections. Love for God is demanded by the thought of God’s constant care for humanity—fallen and redeemed. “To you, human, each day, each hour, each moment the Lord, Creator of all things, in every way shows kindness: the sun shines for you, caresses you with the quiet light of the clear moon, and with life-giving air… Thus God in every way shows you kindness for your existence and well-being, your joy! Are you not obligated to show Him kindness as well for your own good—to live by conscience and God’s law?” Finally, the commandment to love God is the fundamental commandment of the law because the “Lord Himself loved us with limitless love, coming down from the heavens and becoming human for us.”

The second fundamental commandment of the law is /love for neighbor/. The fulfillment of this commandment is the realization in practice of our love for God. “Love every person who hates you, and pray for him.”

Calling us to rise to the heights of virtue and to be inwardly transformed, Father John points to patience, forgiveness of injuries, non-judgment of neighbors, and other virtues, especially humility and mercy—such rare Christian virtues among us. Contemporary Christians have lost Christ, and therefore our life has become merely sleep, a dream, gradual dying rather than life. Speaking generally, unbelief, falling away from God, from God’s wise commandments, relying on our own intellect, blindly following our passions—these are the causes of all calamities and falls in the history of the human race. Father John briefly expresses daily human conduct in these words: “Always walk before God as before the face of the Father, all-good, all-powerful, swift to hearken, ready always to fulfill the righteous desires and petitions of your heart.” “Think and reason in such a way that heaven knows all your thoughts, feelings, and the dispositions of your soul.”

The crown of our moral life and our difficult inner struggle with ourselves is the future eternal blessed life, according to God’s Word: “To the one who overcomes I will grant to sit with me on my throne” (Apok 3:21). To this life in communion with the angels and all the saints, Father John called out loudly during all 53 years of his priesthood. “Prepare yourselves immediately; time flows and brings you to the end of life, and then you must give account to the Master righteous for your whole life. Yes, I say, let us all prepare ourselves to acquire a pure, holy, pleasing garment of soul for the heavenly Bridegroom!” The unbelieving, the stubborn and lazy, according to God’s just and eternal judgment, await eternal destruction.

This is what the dear Rector thought and wrote in the last year of his life, as consolation for all who love him. A month and a half before his death, entrusting his work for publication, he urged that it be completed by the feast of the Nativity of Christ—even almost at the time of his death he asked about the progress of the work, so much did he wish, while still alive, to console all with his final word, his final fatherly blessing. But it is clear that the Rector prayed fervently about his blessed departure: “I burn with a strong desire to see the Artist who created me wisely in His image and likeness, with reason, feeling, free will, and immortality of soul. When shall I see Him, the desired one?” He died—died the ascetic, the contemplator of God, the counselor of God, the ardent intercessor, the healer of souls and bodies, the kind shepherd, merciful, gentle, compassionate! Yet now “the light of this righteous one shines joyfully” (Prov 13:9) because “the wise shall shine like the brightness of the firmament, and those who turn many to righteousness like the stars forever and ever” (Dan 12:3). He who victoriously completed all 79 years of his life, shining as a bright light, and went to the throne of the Most High, left behind him “a shining path” (Job 41:24). He who, following the great Sower, scattered seeds with a generous hand in God’s field, left us “living ears of wheat,” which not only bring us joy with their full, divinely ripened appearance but nourish us, who hunger spiritually; and he himself became “a living ear of wheat,” cut down for earthly life but ready for eternal life. He who during his earthly life consoled us, the weak, and supported us, the feeble, sending grace-filled strength from Christ, to whom he prayed with faith, will pour out upon us a double measure of grace-filled help, seeing the Lord face to face, if we ask for his intercession. “God and the saints,” he said, “hear us at prayer just as people hear each other when conversing or as people in a church hear a preacher or as soldiers hear the voice of their commander—yet they hear us far more perfectly and completely, because we hear another’s words but do not know what is in his heart and thoughts. But God and the saints are different: they see what is in our thoughts and heart—God Himself by His all-knowing, and the saints by the grace of the Holy Spirit in Whom they eternally abide.” Let this work be a consolation from one who has now found peace and blessedness in God; and we, remembering the deeds, life, and passing of the dear Rector, shall “follow his faith” (Hebr 13:7). In fulfillment of the author’s wish to publish this in the most refined form, each book is accompanied by a portrait of Father John signed by him twenty days before his death, and by his own handwritten epigraph containing texts of Holy Scripture given by Father John specifically for this edition. Moreover, according to the author’s instruction, the cover of the book presents an artistic depiction of “a living ear of wheat” grown in his spiritual field. Bound sheaves, in the Rector’s thought, show the moment of separation from the earth, necessary so that it becomes “a living ear of wheat” in heaven. “Death is birth into eternal life.”

P. Ivanovsky

On Faith and the Orthodox Church. Enemies of Faith and the Church

Part 1

Christian faith is the restoration by God, in His boundless goodness, of the image of God in humanity—fallen, defiled, corrupted—the reconciliation of the Creator with an ungrateful, disobedient, prideful creation, the release from righteous curse and the granting of blessing, the opening of the heaven closed to us—“from now on you will see heaven opened” ()—victory over death and its elimination, and likewise over the devil, its author, entry into paradise and the bestowal of eternal life. How many countless blessings has God given in Christian faith to the believing human, obedient to the Gospel and Christ’s commandments! So what is the delay, Christians? Why do you sleep? Awake, be watchful, pray, repent and reform, do good deeds and ascend to heaven!

* * *

Christian faith is the restoration by God, in His boundless goodness, of the image of God in humanity—fallen, defiled, corrupted—the reconciliation of the Creator with an ungrateful, disobedient, prideful creation, the release from righteous curse and the granting of blessing, the opening of the heaven closed to us—“from now on you will see heaven opened” (Jn 1:51)—victory over death and its elimination, and likewise over the devil, its author, entry into paradise and the bestowal of eternal life. How many countless blessings has God given in Christian faith to the believing human, obedient to the Gospel and Christ’s commandments! So what is the delay, Christians? Why do you sleep? Awake, be watchful, pray, repent and reform, do good deeds and ascend to heaven!

The Holy Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—is for me and for all breath and light, life, strength and justification, wisdom, holiness, all wealth, help, healing from all sickness, prayerful fire, the source of compunction, protection, safety, all good. Eternal thanksgiving to you, my Lord. Receive my prayer for all people, especially for Your Church as the gathering of those who sincerely believe in You.

* * *

Does your heart beat with joy and trembling at the remembrance and utterance of the holiest Name of the Trinity uncreated yet creating all, all-good and all-blessed—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? O wondrous Name! O sweetest and life-giving Name! O beautiful, essential, and eternal Trinity, who has bestowed unspeakable beauty upon all creation spiritual and material! Adorn us too according to Your image and likeness, which we have willfully marred and corrupted through all manner of sins! O rightful Trinity, our God, glory to You!

* * *

The Only-Begotten Son is solely God’s Son, and the sole life-giving Spirit is God’s Spirit, by whom “every soul is vivified and exalted in purity, illumined by the sacred mystery of Trinitarian unity” (Antiphon). Glory to You, Lord, who have revealed to us the mystery of the Holy Trinity, as is fitting. Amen.

* * *

Whose words are these: “Take, eat: this is My Body, broken for you for the forgiveness of sins, and drink all of it: this is My Blood of the New Covenant, poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Mt 26:26-28; 1Cor 11:24)? Are they not the words of the all-good and almighty Creator and the all-merciful Savior of all humanity, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world? The heretic Arius degraded the Creator to the rank of creatures and did not recognize Him as consubstantial and coeternal with the Father, one in Being with Him and the Holy Spirit. Can a creature transform the substance of things into a completely different nature—for example, wheat bread into the most pure Body of God and red wine into the most pure and life-giving Blood of God? Is it not the almighty Creator alone who can do this? Arius with his followers, numbering tens of thousands, did not recognize Jesus Christ as Creator. Herein lay the great calamity for the Orthodox and the heretics: had they trusted Arius, they would have lost communion with the Church and eternal salvation. The heretic Arius wished to destroy the Orthodox faith, which brings salvation, and introduce heretical faith, which brings perdition. Therefore, the Orthodox bishops, priests, and faithful Orthodox laity firmly opposed Arius. The pious emperor Constantine, equal to the apostles, gathered from all corners of the Orthodox world holy bishops, presbyters, and some deacons, among whom was the holy archdeacon Athanasius, later appointed archbishop of Alexandria in Egypt. They examined, weighed, and refuted the impious teaching of Arius and his followers and anathematized it as contrary to God, and composed an exposition of Orthodox faith, the Creed, for all times until the end of the age, according to the clear, authoritative, and wise teaching of God’s Holy Spirit. And we to this day all agree and with one mind believe in this Creed and add not one iota to it so as not to lose salvation through a false addition, as the Catholics, Lutherans, and Anglicans have done. Glory to our God, glorified in Trinity, forever and ever! Amen.

* * *

“It is better for you that I go away” to the Father, “for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you; but if I go, I will send Him to you” (Jn 16:7). The followers of Christ—apostles, bishops, priests, myrrh-bearing women, and all others faithful to Christ—were destined to undergo, in the course of time, the most acute and severe trials, and amid these trials they needed the almighty and most loving Comforter, equal to the Father and the Son, namely the Holy Spirit, equally desirous of our salvation and wishing all consolation to the afflicted and bringing about this consolation—and He, as the Third Person of the Holy Trinity, needed to have equal participation in the salvation of the faithful, according to the unity of the three Persons of the Godhead. The Holy Spirit necessarily had to take a personal, all-good, wise, and almighty part in the salvation of Christians. That is why the Lord entreated the Father to send another Comforter to them after the redemption accomplished by the Son. The enemy devil with his demonic host was to be armed against the Church of Christ by God’s permission and for the testing of all believers through terrible and varied persecutions and torments—great consolation was needed, all-powerful and from the All-Mighty, to stand against all the terrible sufferings and woes of the persecuted Christians of the first and subsequent centuries. This is why Jesus Christ, with God the Father, opposed these terrible sufferings with the all-mighty and all-good Comforter, the Holy Spirit; and He consoled them always and aided them in the brave and joyful endurance of all torments. Read of the sufferings of the martyrs, of their joyful sufferings, and you will see in them the power of the Holy Spirit, the Comforter. Amen.

* * *

The Lord God is a beginningless, eternal Being of infinite holiness, righteousness, goodness, and mercy, of unimaginable and boundless brightness, for He is the Light everlasting, from whom all the countless secondary lights come—the choirs of angels, from Whom comes the light of sun, moon, and stars, from Whom thunder and lightning and every blade of grass in the world.

God is a Being of infinite, most firm order, beauty beyond words, eternal peace, unshakeable. Being Holy and having created us according to His holiness, He demands holiness from us and our complete turning away from all sin, which is darkness, confusion, ugliness, lawlessness, and removal from life and falling into curse and death. Judge for yourselves, sinful, fallen, darkened, mortal humans, what you must do with urgency? Repent ceaselessly, pray, reform, do good deeds, and become like God.

* * *

There exists a beginningless, infinite, personal, wise, all-good, and all-righteous Being, to Whom belongs the name “He Who Is” (Being), from Whom all being proceeds, and which cannot not exist. The creatures created by Him are infinite, infinitely diverse, beautiful, beneficial, living; all bear the mark of reason, wisdom, beauty beyond description. From them you can recognize the Artist who devised and created them, His vital nature, goodness, wisdom, beauty, the eternity of His existence, the faithfulness of all His words spoken in revelation to us, His intelligent creatures. We thank Him, our Creator and Maker, Redeemer and Savior, who has given us revelation of Himself in His Word, spoken through the prophets and apostles, and various covenants which He has fulfilled in their time, for example, the covenant of resurrection from the dead and the future blessed life with blessings so surpassing that “eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered the heart of any human” what “He has prepared” (1Cor 2:9). Glory and thanksgiving to You, O Creator and Savior and Redeemer!

* * *

Physical, vegetative, and animal life has been divided, or so to speak, scattered into countless multitudes of lives in an infinite number of beings, infinitely small, then smaller, medium, and great—from infusorians to elephants, from barely visible plants to the greatest cedars and oaks. All physical life proceeds and has proceeded from the first and only personal, wise, all-good, beginningless, almighty Life. This means that the first personal, beginningless Life has granted temporal life to all physical beings—angels and humans, created in His image and likeness and restored from the fall by the Hypostatic Word, incarnate and humanated and redeeming the believing from the fall and curse, sin and death. Glory to You, our Life. “In Him was life, and the life was the light of humans” (Jn 1:4).

* * *

By whose laws and ordinances is conception, formation, and growth of the human body in the mother’s womb accomplished, its maturation and emergence as a complete human organism? By whose laws are food and drink received, hunger and thirst satisfied, the nourishment of our body accomplished? Who conceived and created such wondrous diversity of flavors pleasant to the tongue and beautiful in appearance—countless fruits of the earth, wisely and intricately arranged and prepared for our food and enjoyment? By whose laws is blood produced in our body, without which human life is impossible? Is it not the greatest Wisdom and Artist, all-perfect, beginningless, and almighty—our Lord God! Fall to the dust, give thanks, show reverence before Him, love Him, yet also fear Him if you do not do His will, do not obey Him. Amen.

* * *

In all the animal and plant world, life beats as an abundant, pure, joyful spring that delights the eye and heart: we see ceaseless births in the realm of four-footed animals, domestic and wild, in the realm of birds, fish, insects, crawling and leaping creatures, in the plant kingdom we see marvelous, countless, beautiful, and nourishing growths and fruits in which we marvel at their beauty, taste, and varied fragrance. All of nature is full of life—earth, water, air. What harmony everywhere, what order, usefulness, beauty; how wisely and purposefully all creatures are arranged! The eye cannot have enough of gazing, nor the mind of wondering. Glory to You, Lord, who have created all and everything for humanity! Or rather, humanity and all things for the glory of God: for the Lord created everything for Himself, for the manifestation of His goodness, holiness, wisdom, and power. Glory to You, Lord, glory to You!

Infinite triumph in the animal, organic, and inanimate world—plants, verdure, flowers, shrubs, and all manner of trees. In spring and summer it seems to me that there is infinite merriment and joy, infinite triumph of all living creatures—crawling and leaping, flying birds of every sort and kind, insects, fish, beasts various and domestic, finally—people, especially the gay and jumping children, people busy or laboring, and I conclude: The author, Artist, and Source of life and joy of all these creatures is the Lord, one in three Persons, beginningless, all-good, wise, almighty, life-giving for all and everything; how blessed He is in Himself, if His creatures are so blessed and life-joyful, how beautiful He is, if His creatures are so beautiful and so purposefully arranged! How living, what fragrance do they emanate, how they please the eye of every reasoning being! And finally, how vital, intelligent, beautiful, active are people—capable of countless artistic and useful works in society, mental pursuits, and all else! The mind cannot wonder enough at how good, living, and almighty is the Creator and Artist, the Lord God! How it burns with desire to love Him, to kiss His creative hand, to reverence Him, to worship Him, to glorify Him, like the three youths in the fiery furnace of Babylon! O my Creator! All Your creatures, as many as there are, all raise my gaze to You as the source of vitality and joy. But what a feast, what a triumph of life is in heaven, in the world of angels, in the world of the righteous who have attained eternal life and stand before the throne of the Lord, the Life of all! Read the last chapters of the Revelation of the holy Apostle and Evangelist John the Theologian and you will see what an eternal feast, what eternal blessedness there is and will be in the kingdom of glory! Glory to You, Lord, who have created all so and provide for all thus!

* * *

O human, endowed with reason and understanding, do you look rationally upon the beautiful world of God, created infinitely rationally by the Creator, one in three Persons? Do you look rationally upon each individual of the plant kingdom, each tree and sapling, shrub, herb, flowers of countless kinds, upon fruits, upon the animal kingdom of domestic and wild beasts, upon all infinitely diverse creation? Do you not look upon all this unreasonably, foolishly, without reflection and wonder? Oh, how it delights and amazes me—the wisdom, purposefulness, usefulness, beauty of all things created, in every herb, tree, and shrub! In every animal I see a wise, all-good, almighty, beautiful God, and I kiss His hand, which creates, gives life, shapes, instilling into every plant flavor and fragrance, organization, life, and beauty. I cannot marvel enough at the infinite wisdom of God, saying with the psalmist David: “Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised, and His greatness is unsearchable” (Ps 144:3), and at the same time I burn with a strong desire to see the Artist who also created me wisely in His image and likeness with reason, feeling, free will, and the immortality of my soul. When shall I see Him, the desired one, all-good, beautiful, all-blessed, immortal Creator and Master, and bow before Him and thank Him personally for all, for all!

Part 2

Tasting the various fruits of trees, berries, grain and all manner of other produce, you encounter a boundless diversity of flavors—all pleasant and nourishing, entirely suited to our nature, so that you cannot help but marvel at the goodness and wisdom of the Creator, who in His fatherly kindness deigned to gratify us with His sweetness and omnipotence. From one earth, so many fruits, countless in form and flavor! I kiss You, I nestle myself against You, O Father and Creator and Sustainer of mine, in every fruit, in every berry, in every grain of bread (and how many varieties there are!). And as for the countless flavors of all the different foods given to us—truly there is no end to my wonder. In the taste of every crumb I see the Creator’s love for you, His desire to please you, to caress you, to comfort you, to gladden you, to strengthen you, to nourish you, to fortify you, to quicken you. Wondrous are You, O Lord, in all things and in the works of Your hands. But what incomparable, countless wealth of spiritual sweetness You have prepared for the age to come—the sweetness of enjoyment of the ineffable goodness and beauty of Your Face, by which unnumbered multitudes of angels and their hosts are infinitely blessed!

* * *

There exists a personal, unoriginate, all-good, wise Being who calls Himself “the Existing One: I am the Existing One” (Ex 3:14)—thus He called Himself to Moses, God’s prophet. There is, I say, an unoriginate personal Being, wondrous and giving all creatures life, sufficiency, well-being, and joy—a personal unoriginate Life that by its own will has given and gives all things life. To this Being people owe their well-being, love, gratitude, praise, and, as creatures who have transgressed through their own will—repentance and compunction, sighs, tears, correction, good works, and striving toward amendment and perfection. O Lord, help all of us in this necessary and saving work! Grant us always to glorify Your eternal being, Your goodness, Your creative and providential power and dominion, Your mercy and forbearance toward us. Amen.

* * *

This present visible world is but a shadow of the future, spiritual, immortal age, of the coming “land of the living” (Ps 26:13). Is it reasonable to cling to the shadow rather than to truth itself, to the truly real future age and the eternal day? The form of this world passes away; the seasons change; the atmosphere, the surrounding air, changes ceaselessly; one race passes and another comes; kings pass and are succeeded by others; the great and the ordinary cease, and all their talents with them; human beauty passes and turns to corruption; the forms of day and night pass—the endlessly varied forms of grain and all manner of plants—all passes and turns to decay. God alone never changes and abides eternally one and the same, all-good, all-holy, wise, beautiful, all-blessed, eternal, almighty; and the human soul, created in His image, if it has attained holiness.

* * *

Only what God has created and creates has the property of unbreakable firmness and constancy, as the heavens and earth and all the vault of heaven bear witness, still visible to us in all the unchanging wonder of their beauty. Human deeds and institutions are inconstant, shaky, changeable, because humans themselves are fallen beings, weak and changeable.

* * *

What wondrous goodness and wisdom of God, and God’s providence over His creatures, both rational and irrational! All their needs and wants are foreseen, and all has been created to serve for the benefit and pleasure of man, for the joy of his life—all things necessary and useful. All is foreseen and created in the needful quantity. There is no number to Your works, no number to Your wisdom, Your providence! Glory to You for all, for all the elements and for Your deeds, for the light of sun, moon, and stars, for Your winds, for Your countless waters! Amen.

* * *

“Are not five sparrows sold for two assaria? And not one of them is forgotten before God” (Lk 12:6). I was moved to tenderness when I saw in a grove a small nest of a small bird, with tiny chicks (gray in color), and saw how zealously and plaintively the male and female cried out, and their young ones waited for a worm or fly from their mother’s beak. Truly, even the tiniest bird is not forgotten before God; He cares for all, feeds and nourishes all, gives life to all.

* * *

In every earthly fruit there are several properties: color, form, taste, nourishment, beauty, fragrance. Glory to You, Trinity, who have devised and created all in food and enjoyment for Your creatures, especially for rational mankind!

* * *

Not a single drop of rain falls without the will of the Creator, and the Lord knows the number of all raindrops. All comes to pass by His command. Glory to Your goodness, wisdom, and providence.

* * *

O Lord, how wondrous are the beauty and wisdom, the realm of Your creation, Your almighty rule, Your dispensation for the salvation of mankind (I mean Your Church)! I stand in awe before the works of Your hands. Glory to You, infinite Mind, O Father! Glory to You, co-eternal Word! Glory to You, Perfecter, Giver of Life, Holy Spirit!

* * *

Everyone praises their own faith as the true one, but not the one who praises himself is true, but the one whom God praises, according to the word of the apostle (1Cor 4:5). And our faith—God Himself glorifies continuously, both in Himself and in His saints. Go to the reliquaries of the holy saints and see whose faith is true. In what faith does God perform such miracles as in Orthodoxy? In what faith do people attain to incorruptibility and fragrance of body after death and perform such great and manifold miracles? Go to the venerable Seraphim and to holy Sergius; go to Theodosius of Chernigov, and so on. Or do you wish to listen to modern intellectuals, half-taught and over-taught, who claim there are no relics, no miracles? Then listen to simple-hearted believers who are eyewitnesses—they will tell you something. How can one go against truth, against what is evident?

* * *

“They that are planted in the house of the Lord shall flourish in the courts of our God” (Verse of blessed Basil). Only in the Orthodox Church of God is there incorruptibility of relics, but nowhere else—that is, neither among Catholics, nor Lutherans, much less among Jews and Mohammedans. Hold fast to the Orthodox Church with a sincere heart!

* * *

Our salvation is in the Church, as in Noah’s ark, and nowhere else. “If he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you like a pagan and a tax collector” (Mt 18:17). The Church is us, the body of Christ, and He is Christ, the Savior of the body; we are “members of His body, of His flesh and of His bones” (Eph 5:30). The Holy Spirit is the pilot of the vessel of reason, the Church. Only in the Church, as in Noah’s ark, can one be saved. The righteous centurion Cornelius was a gentile who prayed always and gave alms, and he was instructed by an angel to call the apostle Peter and from him to hear the word of salvation and receive baptism with all his household.

A significant thing.

* * *

The holy Church gathers all of us together and, so to speak, concentrates us around one common living-beginning and life-giving Head, our Lord Jesus Christ, our Redeemer and Savior; we are all one mystical spiritual body and mutually members of one another. The holy Forerunner, the apostles, and all the saints—all are close to one another when we live by faith and piety. The saints pray for us, and we earnestly call upon them, and thus all are saved. What a magnificent, radiant, saving, eternal edifice is the holy Church! Blessed are we that we were born and live in her and receive from her countless gifts of grace, through the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ, through the good pleasure of God the Father and the grace of the Holy Spirit. Be saved, all of you, when salvation is so accessible.

* * *

Do not forget, Christian, that through your baptism, chrismation, and enrollment in the Church—you are a citizen of heaven and of the heavenly fatherland, to which the Forerunner has gone before us, our Redeemer Christ God, the Mother of God, and all the saints, both Old Testament and New Testament. “You are no longer strangers and outsiders, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of God’s household” (Eph 2:19).

* * *

What divine array surrounds us, members of the Orthodox Church—the communion of saints, if only we are truly members, for we are one spiritual body, one divine warfare. What help should we seek but the heavenly? To whom should we turn in afflictions, illnesses, sorrows, but to the holy members of the Church of God, especially to the Lord Himself, the Mother of God, the Forerunner, and the other saints?

* * *

Thank the Lord that He has made you a member of His Church, this divine society of saints, whose Governess and first member is the Mother of God. She regards all the faithful and sincere members of the Church and her children maternally, benignly, all-compassionately, with care and sympathy.

I am grafted and joined to the Church heavenly and earthly—with the Mother of God, with the ranks of angels, with all the holy patriarchs, prophets, apostles, hierarchs, martyrs, monastics, righteous ones, with all the saints, by the grace of God. How then ought I to think, feel, will, speak, and act? Here is how: “Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable—if there is any virtue and if there is any praise—think on these things. Whatever you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, do these things, and the God of peace will be with you” (Phil 4:8-9), says the apostle.

* * *

Your turning, Orthodox Christian, with warm prayer toward the intercession of the Mother of God, your holy guardian angel or angels of the Lord in general, toward the saints severally and all together, shows that you are a member of the Church of Christ, or the holy communion of those who are saved or being saved, triumphing in heaven in glorious victory over the world and its prince; that you are not alone and isolated, but in union with an innumerable multitude of the victorious or those struggling; that you are in a spiritual warfare, in the warfare of Christ the Savior, who is the almighty Head of the Church, enabling all the faithful to overcome the enemies of our salvation who attack unceasingly; that the saints are helpers, intercessors, and friends of ours, ready through our earnest invocation to help us. We are not alone in the field, or in this world, soldiers, but we who struggle are many, and in our multitude we are strong, especially through the aid of the all-powerful Head of the Church, the Lord Jesus Christ. Turn therefore earnestly to the prayers of the saints and believe in their sympathy and aid, in their love and cooperation toward your salvation.

* * *

Forget not the nearness of all members of the heavenly Church to the righteous members of the earthly Church, for the Church heavenly and earthly is one Body—and pray to the Head and members with faith and love in the simplicity of your heart. Glory to You, Sovereign Lady, Governess of the spiritual building! Glory to You, all-mighty Head of the Church, uniting all!

* * *

Do you know to what flock you have been joined? To the holy and chosen flock of Christ, to the society of God’s chosen ones. You have been joined to the Church of Christ, to the holy Body of Christ, of which He is the Head. Do you think on this? Do you treasure this? Do you give thanks to the Lord? Do you love Him? Do you ask His help that you might become like Him in goodness, righteousness, meekness, and the other virtues? Do you desire His eternal kingdom, to which you have been called through baptism?

What honor does the Lord bestow on the believing and loving soul, calling Himself her Bridegroom and Himself calling her His Bride, if she gives herself to Him entirely with her whole being! “Christ loved the Church and gave Himself for her, that He might sanctify her, cleansing her by the washing of water and the Word, so that He might present to Himself a glorious Church, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she might be holy and blameless” (Eph 5:25-27). What kind of life is required of us, what holiness! Incorruptible eternal goods await the faithful Christians. “What no eye has seen, no ear has heard, and what has never entered the human heart—that is what God has prepared for those who love Him” (1Cor 2:9). But the enemy flatters us with earthly goods (imaginary ones) and all vanity. Man, where are you? Where have you gone? The Lord waits for you; come to meet Him, answer His call! Here I am, a wanderer who abandoned You, my Life and Fountain of all good. O Lord! Seek us out, draw us to You. “Do not be like the horse or the mule, without understanding, whose mouths must be restrained with bit and bridle, or they will not come near you” (Ps 31:9), when they will not come to You. Glory to You, O Lord, patient with us! Bear with us yet more and draw us to Yourself by the power of Your grace!

* * *

In what exalted society are you placed, Christian, to what supremely holy communion you are enrolled as a Christian and member of the Church! “You are no longer strangers and outsiders, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of God’s household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Jesus Christ Himself as the cornerstone” (Eph 2:19-20). Remember this, Christian, and live worthily of the calling, in all virtue.

* * *

Remember, in what holy, spiritual, heavenly, divine union you abide (I mean the Church heavenly and earthly), in a living and most intimate union (communion of the Holy Mysteries) with God Himself, with the Mother of God, with the holy angels, with all the holy men, and with the earthly Church—with all her hierarchy and the faithful Christians. (The constitution of the proskomedia and the liturgy of the catechumens and the faithful.) Reach toward this union and think and feel accordingly. “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus” (Phil 2:5).

Part 3

How wondrous, holy, captivating to the mind, heart, and will is the idea of the universal Church of Christ, headed by her very Founder—Christ God! In the Gospel and in the Liturgy, as in a mirror, is reflected all the goodness and righteousness of God, all His love, all His wisdom, all His almightiness, all the wondrous stewardship of God for the salvation of humanity, all the divine evaluation of fallen humanity created in the beginning in the image of God, all the wondrous communion of God with renewed humans, all the deification, the elevation of human nature to the heavens and its co-seating with God. How wondrous, how blessed, with what physical and spiritual labors the saints completed their earthly path, their preparatory path, and how they were glorified by God during life and after death! How they became fragrant in spirit and body and appeared alive even after death! Enter into this idea of the Church, into the idea of the Liturgy, into this preparatory part of it (the Proskomedia), as well as into the Liturgy of the Catechumens and into the Liturgy of the Faithful; regard the idea of the Church as the Body of Christ, with whom faithful Christians are united inseparably; see what interaction members have one with another, earthly and heavenly, prophets, patriarchs, apostles, martyrs, hierarchs, ascetics, and all the saints; see what care the Church on earth has for the realm of the dead, or for the departed. See what communion the Church on earth has with the heavenly dwellers, or the perfected members of the Church of Christ, who have received incorruptible eternal goods; see what communion we have with all the saints; we glorify them, bless them, magnify them, beseech them to help us in the struggle to overcome our passions and invisible enemies; see how we thank God that He has glorified them and made them intercessors for us, especially the All-Holy Mother of God, and to complete our amazement at God’s mercy—we partake (some daily) of the most pure Body and Blood of Christ, most sincerely communing with the very Head of the Church, as a pledge of eternal life in the heavens. O holy Church! O divine Liturgy! How divine, holy, life-giving you are! There is no idea of the Church in the Catholic faith. It has come to nothing: it has no Proskomedia in it, the most pure Blood is not given to the laity, yet it is precisely this that is necessary. “Drink from it all”, says the Lord, “for this is My blood of the covenant, poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Mt 26:27-28).

* * *

The vital element of your soul is found in the Orthodox Church and in the Orthodox temple: there is God’s throne, there the holy Gospel with the Epistles of the divinely wise apostles, there is heavenly worship, there are the images of the Lord, the Mother of God, the holy angels and saints, there is incense to the Lord, there are lamps and candles burning and signifying the burning of your spirit before the Lord. Seek shelter there, flee there, there let your soul rest.

* * *

Traveling through Russia, you often encounter temples like the tents of Israel wandering through the wilderness, or like hospitable houses. And indeed, temples in cities or villages are tents and hospices, because we all believe and know that we are all here strangers and sojourners, not permanent inhabitants; temples are spiritual schools, infirmaries, places of enlightenment, rest stations for those traveling to heaven, charitable houses where we are shown the greatest benefactions and grace-filled helps to prepare us for dwelling in heaven.

* * *

With the coming to earth of the very incarnate hypostatic Wisdom (the Incarnation), to receive the great mystery of faith, there were needed pure, simple souls, capable of simplicity of faith and reception of the greatest divine truths, so that they could faithfully impart them to others as well (that they might be able to teach others). These lofty instruments of truth, inheritors of the greatest grace of God, heavenly wisdom, were the apostles.

* * *

O simplicity of heart! O faith, thinking not with guile! How precious and pleasing you are before God and how saving to humanity! Behold, God came into the world in the flesh to save the human race, and He had need of helpers for Himself from among humans. Who was worthy to be a helper to God the Word? Simple, uneducated people!

* * *

Who was worthy of humans to be entrusted with the greatest and wisest mystery of the incarnation of the Son of God and His wondrous work of salvation of the human race? The Heart-Knower and righteous Judge of humanity found worthy to receive, proclaim, and accomplish this mystery twelve simple fishermen, and then added to them another seventy, also from the simple ranks for the most part.

* * *

Christian holidays give us knowledge of the dogmas, or main saving truths of Christian faith: of the one God in essence, of the Trinity of Persons, of the redemption of the human race by one from the Trinity through the cross and liberation from sin, curse, and death, of the power of the cross and veneration of it, of the dogma of the resurrection of humanity, of the Last Judgment, or eternal torment of the unbelieving and unrepentant, of veneration of the saints and emulation of them, of the power of repentance and infinite mercy of God, having mercy on sinners, of the power and saving nature of mercy and almsgiving.

* * *

Why does the holy Church each year remember and celebrate the supreme events of the Christian world—the Annunciation, the Nativity of Christ, the Baptism, the Resurrection, and others? So that we might kindle and strengthen our faith, our Christian hope, our gratitude and love for God and the Mother of God, our unashamed Intercessor before God, so that we remember and do not forget our heavenly, eternal homeland and not be attached to this merely preparatory and instructional, temporal, passing life. If there were not these Christian holidays, then Christians would forget that they are indeed Christians, called to a heavenly homeland, and would not know why they live, why they joined Christian society or the Church of God, what the goal of their life is, why they must believe in Christ and the Holy Trinity, why they must pray to God and the Mother of God and call upon the saints. But the church holidays explain all this to us and inform us regarding God’s providence toward us sinners, teach us to love and thank God, and always keep in view the future life, which has no end, and prepare for it.

* * *

Are you interested, brothers and sisters, in the all-redemptive work of Christ, His stewardship of human salvation? Are you interested in the Church, the mysteries, the work of prayer, and repentance? To tell the truth, we are all often interested in things that are worthless, but not interested in those infinitely important things! Where is reason? Where is the goal of life? Everyone has many of their own goals—various pleasures, but not the one thing needful. And where is the soul? The soul is buried deep in passions and, like a dead thing, together with a burned-out conscience, is silent and manifests itself in nothing good because there is no soil for it and no occasion either. How can the drunkard and debauchee remember a hungry or cold neighbor, unless the thought comes to mind when he has no money for wine—then he must rob or kill his neighbor and drink again to death.

* * *

How did people treat the very incarnate Goodness and heavenly Truth, the very Beginning and First-Life, the Lord Jesus Christ? They tempted Him in every way, acted deceitfully before Him, envied Him, set snares for Him so as to catch Him in His words and deliver Him to the Roman court, and finally, after every mockery and torture, killed Him on the cross. What did people do with the true faith which Christ brought from heaven, with all His teaching, with the mysteries divinely instituted? They corrupted them beyond recognition, and some rejected them, and in place of His teaching put their own inventions, like the scribes and Pharisees, and in our time Leo Tolstoy.

* * *

The logic of Christianity seems neither difficult nor hard to understand, to study, and is sufficiently vital that all might love, study, and embrace it with all their heart; yet it is precisely this Christian logic that nearly everyone has forgotten—both the simple and the learned (the supposedly learned)—and none pay it any attention or study it with diligence as they do other earthly and wearisome sciences, arts, crafts, and trades. Heavenly logic and wisdom have been justified by its children such as the venerable Seraphim of Sarov, Theodosius of Chernigov, and other saints. Who among the laity now seeks this precious pearl (the soul in the image and likeness of God), this invaluable treasure so little valued?

* * *

Lord, how boundlessly You have exalted the human race through Your incarnation and your God-man-hood and through the Mother of God who bore You, Ever-Virgin, and through Your chosen humanity, in the persons of countless saints. And how much (oh horror!) Tolstoyan heresy and all this befuddled so-called intelligentsia blaspheme You and Your Church, Your teaching, Your mysteries, and Your worship. Lord, how long shall this blasphemy continue? How long shall this madness rage? Lord, come down and crush this mountain of impiety. So be it!

* * *

The Son of God came to earth so that through His teaching, miracles, example, suffering, and death He might restore and save the human race, enlighten it, purify it, renew it, adorn it with every virtue, and unite it with Himself forever; but Leo Tolstoy and writers like him, without number, have appeared and live on earth so as to darken, corrupt with their godlessness, unbelief, and anarchy multitudes of people who follow them and read their blasphemous writings. Lord, destroy them from the earth or turn them to faith, humble their demonic pride!

* * *

To Christians, especially the Orthodox, who preserve and maintain their faith’s dogmas in purity as handed down from God, so much has been given by God—goods and powers to salvation, so many of God’s mysteries revealed—that believers who are attentive and strive in their faith can easily be saved and become heirs of the eternal Kingdom of Heaven, “for His yoke is good and His burden is light” (Mt 11:30). The angels tremble with amazement at God’s mercy toward us, revealed in His incarnation for our sake, His dwelling with humans on earth, His personal teaching, the countless miracles He worked as testimony to His Divinity and divine mission, in His sufferings for us, death, burial and resurrection from the dead, and His ascension to the heavens with the promise of His second awesome coming to judge the living and the dead. But people for the most part remain either unbelieving or doubting, insensible, indifferent, deaf to the Gospel word, attached to the vain, hollow, and false words of humans, to hypocrisy and pretense, to all that is illusory and fleeting, to what presents a vain interest for one day, while forgetting the eternal, the one thing needful. “Many are called, but few are chosen” (Mt 20:16).

* * *

Do you all know—those to whom it is right to know—that all our present revolution is first and foremost the consequence of falling away from faith, from our beloved of God, holy, vital Orthodoxy, which contains in itself all the power for believers in it to order everything—our inner and external world, politics, and every family, civic, and economic life?

* * *

The Lord has entrusted us Russians with a great saving gift—the Orthodox faith, in which many believing people have been saved. We received this gift through the apostles of Christ. This priceless gift has been trampled by many Russians, and they will answer for it to the righteous Judge. In Christ’s first coming we were entrusted with this gift (to the human race), and “throughout all the earth their voice has gone out, and to the ends of the world their words”. In His second coming the Lord will require an accounting from all of us for the use of our gifts. Both king and every subject, small and great, and every mortal will be brought to trial, and the deeds of each person will be laid bare before all, no thought will be hidden, the entire inner life of each will be revealed as if photographed, and no one will be able to deny or excuse themselves in their transgressions if they have not repented while on earth. Where are your deeds, brothers! In what did you spend your earthly life, this precious pledge given you by the Creator for preparation for the future life, for developing your powers and abilities, for using your gifts? “The queen of the south came from the ends of the earth to listen to the wisdom of Solomon; and behold, something greater than Solomon is here” (Mt 12:42)

* * *

Lord, You are the true Lord of creation. What are the Finns, Poles, and Germans—who have corrupted Your Gospel and fallen from Your Church—scheming against Russia and against Your Holy Church? Lord, what are they scheming! They want to swallow us up completely and destroy Your Church, Your temples, Your worship, Your ordinances, the decrees of the holy apostles and holy fathers, the ecumenical and local councils. To what have we come!

* * *

Lord! You see the cunning of the enemies of Orthodox faith and Your Church and their zeal to overcome it. Put an end to them, and may all their evil work die with these people!

* * *

“Did you not sow good seed in your field” (Your Church)“? Where then did the weeds come from?” (Mt 13:27): heresies, schisms, adoption of new dogmas, all manner of vices, desire to rule, supreme authority in the Catholic Church, corruption of worship, mysteries, rites (unleavened bread)? The Lord answers: “An enemy has done this” (Mt 13:28)—human pride and malice; but the Lord permits everything to grow until the harvest, and in the age to come will judge each according to his deeds.

Part 4

The world is an assembly of dead souls, whose head and prince is the devil, father of lies. The Church in its true meaning is an assembly or union of living souls, whose head is Christ the Life-giver, the Comforter, and the Perfecter, the life-giving Spirit. “The whole world lies in evil” (1Jn 5:19); the world is an assembly of the spiritually blind. The Church is an assembly of those who see all in the true light. All people in the world are not reborn, subject to spiritual blindness; but the class of so-called intellectuals, writers of the official world, students, women are subject in the majority to the most destructive blindness from proud conceit, all the worse because they do not realize their misfortune and will see it only when they are dying and when their entire life appears to them as if in the palm of their hand. Current events confirm the truth of these words. In their spiritual blindness they do the mad deeds they do. Do not hold your heads too high and proudly, you who are learned but unbelieving (though not all)—you are all far from true wisdom and true knowledge and from the source of life, from the true path; many of you have not tasted true wisdom, Christian wisdom, have not believed in Christ as the true God, in His Gospel, in His Church, the only true and righteous teacher of truth and giver of life. You are all blind and dead, though you seem to yourselves wise. “God has made foolish the wisdom of the world” (1Cor 1:20). If you wish to have true knowledge, true wisdom, and true life—cast aside your pride, your conceit, your arrogance, humble yourselves sincerely, and go learn again from former fishermen and cast away your rotten, corrupted, and foolish wisdom. Descend from your heights, sit lower, bend your heads and your ears to the pre-eternal truths. Indeed, wisdom is not with Leo Tolstoy, who has become completely mad, but with the Church which he tramples underfoot, with the apostles and evangelists and with the ecumenical and all the holy fathers and teachers. Stop drinking the dead water of novels and the countless multiplied books of the foul wisdom of the world. If you do not listen, you will remain for all eternity learned blind ones not knowing the true path, and you will die in your sins and inherit eternal darkness. Stop laughing at eternal and living truths; with love we call you into the bosom of the Church—awake from sinful slumber and the passionate hypnosis which we justly ascribe to you.

* * *

Lord, if I am Your priest and for so many years in Your Name I have blown with my voice against the greatest heretic Tolstoy—this high wall of Jericho—then let this wall of pride fall to the amazement of all who believe and honor You, the one Lord of glory, mocked by this heretic of heretics. “How long, O Lord, will the wicked boast” (Ps 93:3)? How long will blasphemy and impiety triumph? The entire earth has been filled with blasphemy.

* * *

“You will die in your sins if you do not believe in Me”, says the Lord to the Pharisees (Jn 8:24). Woe to Leo Tolstoy, who does not believe in the Lord and dies in the sin of unbelief and blasphemy. The death of a sinner is cruel. And his death—Tolstoy’s—will be a terror to the whole world. (Of course, his family will conceal it.)

* * *

O Lord, lead Russia to the true and saving path through all the sufferings and martyr’s death by deadly weapons of Your faithful children, so many throughout all corners of this land. O Lord, plant firm faith in the hearts of all Your children, that Your Church may shine with Orthodoxy, with genuine piety; teach all people to believe and walk in the paths of Your commandments.

Who among the Orthodox would not wish to be united with Catholics or Lutherans and to be with them one in Christ, one Church, one community of believers! But who among the members of these so-called churches, especially their leaders who are called popes, patriarchs, metropolitans, archbishops, and bishops, or else Jesuits, fathers—who among them will agree to renounce their errors? No one. Yet we cannot agree with their heretical teaching without grave harm to our salvation. And their enmity toward us is eternal. Their prejudice against us, their assurance that we are schismatics—is this not a great obstacle to union? Go ahead and try to unite. Can the incompatible be united—falsehood with truth?

* * *

The Catholic Jesuits, in service to the pope and their own selfish base aims and goals, have perverted the law of conscience and the law of the Gospel, insisting that to achieve their self-interested aims or religious goals, Catholics may employ any unlawful means whatsoever: in other words, to kill, to deceive in every way, to persecute Orthodox faith, to call it schismatic and heretical, and to burn the Orthodox at the stake, as they did to Hus and others.

* * *

Because the pope and Catholicism have turned away from the Gospel truth, they have become a subject of heated dispute for the sake of truth, and Catholics, defending their falsehood, rage against the Orthodox, hate them, revile them with every unjust and blasphemous word, and in every way disparage our true faith itself. For them to correct their wrongs and make peace, they would need to abandon their false, harmful, and destructive opinions and come into agreement with Orthodoxy—but no: they think themselves justified to stand for falsehood and uphold it, to their own ruin and the ruin of Catholics. O Catholics, come to your senses, wake up! You have been led astray! Return to the truth!

* * *

True are the words of our Savior Jesus Christ: “whoever is not with Me is against Me” (Mt 12:30). Catholics, Lutherans, and Reformed have fallen away from the Church of Christ—they are not of one mind with us, they war against us, fiercely persecute us to death, oppress us in every way for our faith, mock it and us, and do us every harm, especially in their chief places of settlement; they openly set themselves against Christ and His Church, do not honor the life-giving Cross, holy icons, the holy relics of saints, do not respect fasting, pervert the saving dogmas of faith. They are not with us but against us and against Christ. Turn them, O Lord, to Your true Church and save them!

Catholics are guilty, among other things, of unjustly calling us heretics and schismatics, of mocking and cursing our holy, righteous, immaculate hierarchy, the catholic church, of refusing to examine our Orthodox teaching out of contempt, pride, and aversion, refusing even to set foot in our church, counting it a defilement. Satanic hatred!

* * *

From the incorrect understanding by Catholics of the Savior’s words: “You are Peter, and on this rock” (on Christ, whom Peter confessed to be the Son of God) “I will build My Church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it” (Mt 16:18), arise all the errors of Catholics and the popes, and especially the supposed primacy of the pope in the church and the papal vicariate. They are merely servants, fellow workers of the apostles.

* * *

A refutation of Catholic falsehood. Catholics acknowledge the pope as head of the church on the basis of the words of Jesus Christ, wrongly interpreted by them: “On this rock” (Christ, not Peter—according to us) “I will build My Church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it” (Mt 16:18). Why do Catholics apply the Savior’s words “on this rock” not to the Savior but to the apostle Peter? Because the Lord said to Peter before these words: “You are Peter”, and then said: “and on this rock I will build My Church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it” (Mt 16:18). We maintain that by the words “on this rock” the Lord means Himself, not Peter, for in Scripture the Rock of faith and of the church is everywhere called Christ. The Apostle Paul, when he speaks of the rock in the wilderness that miraculously provided water for the Hebrews and quenched their thirst, understands it to be Christ. But for the greatest and clearest proof that by the words “on this rock” we must understand Christ as the Foundation of the church, I adduce a similar passage from the Gospel of John: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (Jn 2:19). What does the Lord mean here by the church? Not the built temple of Jerusalem, but the temple not made with hands—His own Church, the Body itself. So also in the words cited above He understood not Peter but Himself. Is this clear?

* * *

The cornerstone of Catholic pride and Catholic falsehoods in doctrine, in church governance, and in moral teaching is the headship of the pope—the supposed and mistaken understanding of the Savior’s saying: “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build My Church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it” (Mt 16:18). All the holy fathers of the early and later centuries have acknowledged, and the earliest Orthodox popes recognized, that under the foundational Rock we must understand Jesus Christ Himself—“and the Rock was Christ” (1Cor 10:4). As the surest and most evident proof of this truth, I cite a passage with a similar turn of phrase in the Gospel of John: “Destroy this temple” (Jn 2:19). (By the temple is meant the temple not made with hands—the Body of the Lord—not the temple in Jerusalem; this is clear from the flow of the discourse.) By the Church the Lord means precisely His most pure Body, just as under the Rock of the foundation we must understand Christ Himself, not the successors of the apostle Peter or Peter himself. This is plain. But the popes imagined themselves heads of the church and its foundation, even claiming to be vicars of Christ—a notion both absurd and entirely at odds with all reason. And from this came all the arrogance of the Roman popes and their age-old claim to primacy and arbitrary rule over the whole universal church. Well, and the popes have perpetrated all manner of tricks and false dogmas in their papal church, leading to falsehood both in faith and in life. This is truly a heretical church.

* * *

Is the pope the head of the church? No, this is absurd. The Church encompasses both the saints and the heavenly hosts—it is one body under the one Head, Christ. What has a sinful pope to do with this?

* * *

If Jesus Christ had intended, after His ascension into heaven, to give His Church another head in place of Himself, or a vicar, as the popes claim to be—saying they are vicars of Christ on earth—then He would surely have declared this plainly before His ascension, as this is such an important dogma for the salvation of human souls; and the apostles would have proclaimed it, or one of them would have called himself a vicar. But none of them so much as hinted at it, remembering the words of the Lord: “Whoever wants to be great among you must be your servant” (Mt 20:26), “and all of you are brothers” (Mt 23:8). The whole trouble is that Catholic theologians have misunderstood the words of the Lord to Peter: “on this rock” (not on Peter, but on the Lord Himself) “I will build My Church” (Mt 16:18). Compare the words of the Lord: “Destroy this temple” (the Body of Christ), “and in three days I will raise it up” (Jn 2:19).

* * *

How holy is Orthodox faith and the Church! How righteous, filled with the peace of God, filled with infinite and indescribable beauty (picture in mind all the saints by name, remember their lives full of every virtue and miracles both during and after life)! The Church satisfies all the needs of the human spirit and saves all who are faithful to her and remain true to her to the end of life. Glory, Lord, to Your holy Orthodox faith! The Papists, recognizing the pope as head of the church, elevated him to a throne in place of Christ and deified him, putting Christ in the background. They made the pope the vicar of Christ, whereas Christ remains with us “always, to the end of the age” (Mt 28:20). But look at how many errors have found their way into papal (not Christ’s) faith—strange errors, blasphemous in nature—and you will recoil from them in indignation and horror! O human pride! O satanic pride! The pope is supposedly infallible! O Jesuitism!

* * *

If the Roman pope were in complete unity and harmony of mind with the Lord, if he were one teacher with Him, then he might, though not in the proper sense, be called head of the church; but since he is of a different mind and teaches contrary to Christ, he is a heretic and cannot be called head of the church or teach the church: for She is “the pillar and support of the truth” (1Tim 3:15), whereas the pope and Papists are a reed shaken by the wind, and have utterly perverted the truth of Christ both in doctrine and in worship (unleavened bread and without the proskomedia), and in governance, enslaving all Catholicism to their heresy and rendering it unreformable, for the pope, despite all his heresies, is recognized as infallible by the Catholic church and thus irreformable, speaking contrary to the mind of the Church.

* * *

By recognizing the pope as head of the church, Catholics have lost the true Head of the Church—Christ—and remain without a Head. The entire history of the papacy testifies that Catholics have no Head, for they do the most unseemly things, make war against the Orthodox church not in the spirit but in the flesh—with hatred, malice, vengeance, every kind of reviling, assassinations from the shadows, arson, sedition, rebellion, insubordination, separatism. And this despite the fact that Poles living in Russia enjoy freedom, exemptions, tolerance, and comfort, as do other nations. The hatred of Catholics toward the Orthodox is historical, utterly frenzied: Jesuits and Catholic bishops, and many Polish intellectuals, are ready to swallow us alive. Enlighten, instruct, and save them, O Lord! Where is their Head of the Church—Christ? He is love, goodness, gentleness, mercy, forbearance, yet Catholics have nothing of this. And in their dogmas how many heresies and innovations and departures from truth! O disastrous papal system!

* * *

The sole Head of the Church in heaven, on earth, and in the underworld is Christ God. Can a human pope be the head of the Church which exists in the heavens? He cannot. And in general, can a pope—a sinful man—be the head of all the earthly church and dispose of both earthly and eternal destinies? Did the pope die on the cross for us? Has Christ been divided? Can a human being—so to speak momentary and constantly changing like a kaleidoscope in thoughts, inclinations, intentions, and undertakings—be the firm foundation of the Church that exists through all ages? Read the history of the popes: what manner of men were they? How many among them were truly worthy of their office? Only in the earliest centuries were there a few worthy ones, but in the later centuries how many unworthy and depraved ones came to the shame of the whole Roman church! Are these the heads of churches? Catholics point out that in our liturgical books also Peter is called head of the church, but it is not meant in the proper sense—rather, he is called the chief of the church of Rome, but not of the whole universal church. In this sense, the metropolitans of ancient Rus—Peter, Alexius, and others—were called heads of the Russian church.

* * *

It is remarkable how learned, cunning, and proud people in their free-thinking twist their great teachers—even Christ Himself, infinite Wisdom, and the apostles who possessed the wisdom of the Holy Spirit. So have Catholics twisted the teaching of the supremely Wise Christ, the heavenly Teacher, apart from Whom no one knows the Father, and only He knows the Father. Christ says that the Spirit proceeds from the Father, yet Catholics and Lutherans and Anglicans say He proceeds from both the Father and the Son. Stop at last blaspheming the Holy Spirit and raising false charges against Him: those who blaspheme the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven in this age or the age to come. And have you forgotten the words of the Apostle: “if even we or an angel from heaven should proclaim to you a gospel contrary to what we proclaimed to you, let that one be accursed” (Gal 1:8)? Are these words not fearful? “Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away” (Mt 24:35). And the words of the apostle are God’s words. Do not be angry with us, friends, but listen to God’s truth in the simplicity of your hearts—we too speak and venture to speak from the simplicity of our hearts. Reject falsehood and accept the truth, unite with us in one mind; it is time to stop your disputes and arguments. The coming of Christ is near, at the doors.

The proskomedia vividly portrays the whole Church with Christ as the Head and members in heaven, on earth, and in the underworld (the departed). O wondrous unity of God with humanity! The Roman Catholics abandoned the proskomedia and thereby beheaded the church, severing the visible link of the militant church with the invisible triumphant church, all so that in place of Christ they might set another head—a human head, not free from errors, errors of which it makes participants among both clergy and laity. O, how supremely wise, true, and salutary is the institution of the church, preserved from errors by the Holy Spirit—the Enlightener—and by Christ—the all-powerful Head!

* * *

The intercession of blood. I believe in the all-cleansing intercession of the most precious Blood of Christ God, shed for the forgiveness of the sins of all the world (those who truly and in truth believe) and of my own sins; I believe in the all-powerful intercession of this Blood, which speaks better (intercedes) than that of Abel. The popes and Catholics have rejected this all-interceding Blood for the laity and do not give it to them, probably for economy, to use less wine! And with what frenzied zeal they draw the Orthodox into Catholicism, into their destructive faith! Defend, O Lord, Orthodoxy from fierce Catholicism, in which all obey the will of the pope and the Jesuits.

* * *

We have received the talent of universal Orthodoxy from God for God’s glory and our salvation. How do we use and increase this talent? How do we give thanks to the Lord? What is our repentance? What good deeds do we perform? “All have turned away and become worthless. There is no one who does good, not even one” (Ps 13:3). Do not these words of Scripture apply also to us?

The Fall and Its Consequences.

Part 1

In every person, even a wise one, there is much foolishness, and sometimes foolishness that is repellent. Every moment, guard yourself, man, against your own foolishness. This greatest foolishness is sin: from it comes every ruin.

* * *

The fall of the first people and of all mankind was deep, wide, ruinous, and in its consequences most terrible—through the loss of those life-giving gifts that humans lost after the fall, and through those dreadful fruits that sin produced as a consequence of separation from God—the Source of Life.

* * *

Sin is the most abominable, deadly, most agonizing, and yet deluding poison of Satan, killing the soul and body forever, plunging into utter darkness, severing the soul forever from God. Only the Blood of Christ can purify this poison.

A vineyard planted by the Lord. The Lord expected from it sweet grapes, but the grape turned to thorns. The crown of thorns on the Head of the Savior is a sign of the thorny sin that has filled mankind.

* * *

O sin, sin, how ruinous you are! You have made the world, created by God out of nothingness, alien to God. “He was in the world, and the world came into being through Him; yet the world did not know Him. He came to what was His own, and His own people did not accept Him. But to all who received Him, who believed in His name, He gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God” (Jn 1:10-13).

* * *

In what lies the power of transgression, the greatest willful madness, ingratitude, and wretchedness of the first people? In this: they exchanged God for creatures, love for the Creator for devotion to an evil creature, the most holy, incorruptible union with the Creator for a foul, evil, and corruptible union with creatures. “Whoever loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me” (son and daughter…) (Mt 10:37). What can be said of the bonds and attachments of adulterers, of the evil unions such as the present-day revolutionary alliances? O associations of sectarians, schismatics, heretics, associations of robbers and thieves, opposed to the state?

* * *

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind… and your neighbor as yourself” (Mt 22:37-39). From the moment of disobedience to God’s commandment in paradise, man of his own will fell away from the love of God and transferred a perverted love to himself (self-love, selfishness) and to earthly things, clothed himself entirely in the spiritual delusion of the enemy, turned this delusion upon himself, was deluded by his own reason, having fallen away from God’s reason—fell into thousands of delusions, into every kind of attraction to earthly pleasures, and left no place in his heart for God, Whom he should love with all his being, glorify, thank, and honor with sacrifices pleasing to God, as a sign of acknowledgment and gratitude.

* * *

“If you have been raised with Christ, then seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God” (Col 3:1). To fully understand these words, we must remember that through sin man fell utterly away from God and became entirely earthly and worldly, rather than divine, spiritual, or heavenly, as he ought to be; he became a slave to madness, vanity, and corruption, and in this state not only did he not grieve, but he made a mockery of himself (as he does now), gave no thought to repentance and saw no need for it, just as now the proud writers and proud people in general refuse to recognize this need, forgetting that they are “worms, and not men” (Ps 21:7), earth and ashes.

* * *

Beguiled by the forbidden fruit in paradise, Adam and Eve left a destructive, delusional inheritance to the human race—every kind of spiritual delusion and earthly falsehood, every kind of vanity, every kind of sinful madness, and first of all woman herself became an object of delusion, lust, and mockery from countless men! O how deeply and into what filth woman—or rather the maiden she was—has fallen! How men mired in her uncleanliness and passions wallow in her mud. Then every person, except the chosen and righteous, turned into delusion and attachment everything earthly—transformed life itself into every kind of passion, and made himself the object and goal of every passion conceivable. Eternal darkness unless the Lord illuminates the eyes of the heart. O wretched animal man, endowed by the Creator with freedom, image and likeness at the beginning, and set as king over all irrational creatures—yet in many cases less reasonable and purposeful than they are! God has withdrawn from human hearts and does not reign in them, because in them reigns the evil spirit of every delusion and estrangement from the Creator—Satan. Man has become the workshop of the devil, the laboratory of evil demons, who build up in him every kind of delusion and evil. Christ the Redeemer came to earth for the very purpose of snatching man from this ruinous delusion and restoring in him again the image of God and likeness to God, making him a new creature and uniting him again with God. And the saints attained the goal of likeness to God through faith, love, labors, humility, obedience, and unceasing prayer. Glory to God for this.

* * *

Eve was beguiled by the forbidden fruit, and behold, all mankind fell into worldly delusion and all have become subject to delusion, and woman herself became an object of delusion through her bodily beauty, and everything, everything became for man an object of delusion: food and drink of every sort, clothing, money, all kinds of games and amusements, animals—dogs, cats, birds—man became attached to everything, and God passed from his heart; God became forgotten in hearts, distant and despised, blasphemed. O ungrateful animal man! O foolish creature, though honored with reason! What punishment do you deserve, wicked creature!

* * *

It is terrible and inconceivable how corrupted human nature has become by every kind of sin—sins so vile that it is shameful, painful, and fearful even to speak of them. We priests, confessors, know this better than anyone else, especially those of us who through our nearness and spiritual tenderness and sympathy, our fervent faith and genuine care for the spiritual ailments of our spiritual children, have earned their trust. O, how these simple, sincere souls of male and female sinners ache with their sins, and how they need our sympathy, counsel, healing, and God’s mercy! There is no sin so vile and monstrous that mankind has not fallen into it. Some man or woman has mixed with every kind of neighbor, even blood relatives, with domestic beasts and animals, with birds, with cats, dogs, pigs, horses, cows, calves. My God! How far has man fallen! These are common people. Yet the learned and educated, the rich and noble fall and have fallen even worse with all their education—men committing shameful acts with men. The ancient pagan emperors had a passion for beautiful boys and satisfied their lust upon them. The same was done by other highly placed officials. Saint Andrew the Fool for Christ openly rebuked one court official for this. Small wonder that one abbess, a great ascetic, once gathered his monks and spoke with them about spiritual poverty and the deep penetration of corruption into human nature; at the end he said: “Brothers, let us all pray and weep”—and all shed tears of heartfelt contrition.

* * *

Do you not feel yourselves in a state of loss, in the condition of a person who has lost what is most precious? And what is this loss? In a matter of supreme importance: you have lost what was essentially implanted in our nature; you have lost the likeness of God, and often have defiled, disfigured, and corrupted the very image of God. Seek therefore with haste this lost coin.

* * *

The devil, the enemy, who beguiled Eve and Adam through the forbidden tree, beguiles even now all people through every kind of worldly attachment—food, drink, carnal lust, and other passions. See how broad and deep are the consequences of sin!

* * *

Those who will be spouses must particularly abstain from passions, for passions are passed on through birth to children and communicated to them, so that children become wretched heirs of the passions of their parents, and likewise of their diseases (for example, scrofula). O, the inheritance of sin, a sorrowful inheritance!

* * *

How loathsome is sin, whatever its kind, to the All-Holy Lord. It is an abomination that severs from Him the soul that commits it. “Consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus, our Lord” (Rom 6:11).

* * *

The stench of sin, received through negligence, carelessness, and habit in youth, remains in the soul and in the bodily members through mature years and sometimes into old age, indeed throughout life. Remember and guard yourself!

* * *

Die to sin in order to live for God. What base, corruptible, unclean, and ruinous strivings are yours, O man! They sever the soul from God and lead to corruption and death, blind the soul, plunge into shameful slavery—into madness! Sorrow of the heart! Let us turn our minds and hearts toward the cross and crucify ourselves to Christ, who was crucified for us. Amen.

* * *

Our life is a continuous test by means of life’s circumstances and encounters with people—how inclined are we in soul and heart toward faith in, hope in, and love for God, our Creator, and love toward our neighbor, and how inclined are we toward sin and various worldly, carnal passions, or toward obedience to the devil, who acts through carnal passions and worldly delusions. Blessed is he who understands this profound task of his and walks with firm steps toward God, overcoming temptations of the flesh and the world, struggling against the world and its ruler, who ceaselessly beguiles us with the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. The holy saints of God—their lives serve as an example and guidance for us in our lives.

* * *

The Lord has exalted man above all earthly creatures by creating him in His image and likeness, with a rational and immortal soul, and even after its terrible fall into corruption and the filth of sin and death, He did not abandon it, but especially pitied and cared for it by sending for its cleansing His only-begotten Son. “The Good One, having sent His only-begotten Son for the cleansing of the world,” proclaims the Church’s hymnographer. How many enemies has fallen man—a captive! His own cunning, many-passioned flesh, the devil watching and scheming for our ruin, the lustful and sinful world with all its evil customs and delusions, all its vanity and inconstancy. Every moment there is danger of sin, danger of losing soul and body. Every moment one must be on guard, warring with sin and the enemy: to watch and fast, to pray and think, to weep for ourselves and for others perishing constantly and everywhere, for everywhere the enemy spreads his nets for destruction; everywhere the skillful and cunning hunter labors, not resting for a moment. Watch, soul, pray, struggle, avoid the enemy’s snares.

* * *

“As long as you have the light, believe in the light, so that you may become children of light” (Jn 12:35-36). Terrifying these final words are. The Lord warns the Jews to abandon their unbelief, their blindness, their cunning and blasphemy, and to believe in Him, the never-darkening Light that enlightens every person; otherwise they will become the prey and food of the roaring lion, Satan. Terrible to be swallowed by this serpent, this whale of hell itself. Beware, brothers and sisters, and serve the Lord diligently, while you live and can dispose of yourselves.

* * *

The abyss of countless sins has infected all of man’s being—soul and body—and always seeks to hide from man, to conceal its deformity, its monstrous appearance and form, so that man will not come to hate it and feel revulsion and hatred toward it; it always flatters man, presenting itself in an appealing, attractive form, and as its due demands obedience and gratification (cunning as a fox!).

* * *

God has exalted man by creating him in His image and likeness, while the enemy—the blasphemer and flatterer—ceaselessly strives to defile and destroy him with unworthy thoughts and blasphemies. Accursed!

* * *

From every kind of sorrow and grief the Lord Jesus Christ our God has delivered us and continues to deliver us, and we thank Him for this with all our hearts. Yet how quickly the enemy catches us with unexpected sorrows inflicted from nowhere, especially from evil and cunning people or from unforeseen circumstances. Glory to You, who preserves our lives from sorrows and griefs!

* * *

I pronounce a solemn curse upon that first apostate from God, from His eternal truth, order, peace, and blessedness, who first allowed sin and all its foulness to be born in God’s pure creation, falling from his great height and holiness—the Morning Star, sowing sin in the world by the permission of the wise Creator, so that through infinite ages might be displayed forbearance, and shone forth the deeds and valor of those spirits devoted to God who stood firm in goodness, and the faithful devoted to God to death, and so that there might be found a place for the extreme all-redemptive condescension to earth of God Himself, the God-Man, the Lord Jesus Christ, His incarnation, cross, death, burial, resurrection, and the final victory of good over evil; I curse that wicked, ungrateful belly in which first was born a foolish, audacious dream and pride—to equal oneself with God and declare war on Him, His eternal truth, holiness, wisdom, infinite beauty, and irresistible power.

* * *

The first apostate from God—the devil, puffed up with pride before the Creator, declared war on God and His truth, and then upon the human race, who obeyed, through Adam and Eve, his flattering words. Man, defeated by the enemy through negligence and frivolity and taken captive by the enemy through every kind of sin, must wage unceasing war with the enemy and sin and overcome them with God’s help, in order to reclaim what was lost thoughtlessly—the righteousness, holiness, and peace of God—and attain the crown of victory—incorruptibility. This is what God’s righteousness requires. Reclaim the lost likeness to God and the blessed life with immortality.

* * *

The enemy does not sleep: day and night, in sleep and waking, he draws us toward sin and nurtures in our soul every kind of soul-destroying passion. Watch, man, crucify the passions of the flesh, especially gluttony and all carnal sins.

* * *

A world of dreams and illusions our bodiless enemy creates for us each night, and as in waking he creates for us daily a world of dreams, vanity, and endless illusions, so also in sleep. Day and night man is under the spell of bodiless enemies. May the Lord deliver us from them!

Part 2

As we are conscious through fleshly feelings of visible things—for example, our senses—so we are drawn in when meeting someone, absorbed by their faces, their gait, their clothes, and often succumb to them sinfully; in general, we use all our senses with attachment, and through every sense the enemy strives to turn our hearts from the Lord. Woe to us! Constant struggle is necessary, constant watchfulness, otherwise cursed sin will captivate us and make us its slaves. “Lord, help us for Your name’s sake. Lord of Hosts, be with us!”

* * *

“Deliver me from demonic haste.” The devil hastens, hastens incredibly to capture man and destroy him forever, and people slumber, are idle, and sleep in their worldly concerns, in their attachments, greed, gluttony, carnal lust, gambling (theater and cards), fashions, literature, sleep, and every kind of vice, and perish by thousands like flies from poisoned toadstools. Hurry then, hurry, Christians, to save your souls while there is time, while the Lord waits and is patient, while the doors of the Kingdom of Heaven have not yet closed. “Then the foolish maidens came also, saying, ‘Lord, lord, open to us’,” but the Master will say to them: “I do not know you.” (Mt 25:11-12). But how does the Lord hurry to save the faithful, attentive, and ready! Every hour, every minute He hurries and sends every aid. “The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters; He refreshes my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for His name’s sake.” (Ps 22:1-3). O, hurry then, sinners, to salvation!

* * *

The enemy of our salvation has now for about eight thousand years remained true to his cunning, destructive system in order to trap people in ruin through every kind of temptation and passion. And how many, how many he has destroyed and sent to hell—careless and unbelieving, proud, cunning, and evil people from every nation, language, state, gender, and age—how wide is his fiery mouth, which swallows the unbelieving!

* * *

The enemy who beguiled Adam and through his delusion obtained dominion over him deprived him of power over nature and proclaimed himself prince of this age. At first, man was appointed by God to be prince of this age and lord of all visible creatures, so that fire could not burn him, nor water drown him, nor beast harm him, nor any poison damage him; but when he surrendered to the enemy’s deception, he also surrendered his dominion to the enemy. Therefore sorcerers and enchanters, by the action of the opposing force, by God’s permission, work certain miracles, controlling venomous beasts and entering fire and water without harm, as did Jannes and Jambres, who opposed Moses, and Simon the Magician, who rose up against the apostle Peter.

* * *

You are defeated by the cunning enemy; overcome him yourself as well; you have been given the powers, every helping and cooperating grace for victory over the enemy: believe, do not sleep, do not weaken, but strain all your forces. “To the one who conquers, I will give a seat with Me on My throne” (Apok 3:21). O simplicity of heart! O faith not crafty in its scheming!

* * *

Guard the purity and peace of your soul as the pupil of your eye; “do not let your foot slip” (Ps 120:3). Every earthly, worldly attachment is from the devil. Reject and despise it at once, that you may gain Christ in immortality.

* * *

Through his fall, man veered to the left and went very far, withdrawing from God the Giver of Life, losing uprightness and life, inheriting the deception of the enemy, his vanity, passion for corruption, malice, pride, envy, and death; what was needed was a reversal of direction to set things right, but man could not do this of his own power without the particular, all-powerful will of God—without redemption by the Lamb of God, the righteous, sinless God-Man. It was necessary to restore lost righteousness, holiness, and truth, but the devil had so possessed his victim that without a ransom of corresponding value, completed by eternal and infinite truth, he would not and could not return his victim to God the Creator; and by God’s justice, mankind should have suffered for ages and millennia, until the Deliverer of the human race came to earth to fulfill all justice, to suffer for the unrighteous and die for them, to trample death and rise from the dead, giving all resurrection. See what a strong enemy held us in the bonds of death!

* * *

Infinitely precious in us is the spiritual beginning—the immortal soul, created in the image and likeness of God, rational, loving, free, immortal, simple in its essence, without division, indivisible. But sin, contrived by the devil, has distorted and disfigured it, unnaturally split it, turned its thoughts and attachment and love toward creatures instead of the Creator, turned it away from love toward its First Source, its First Image, its First Life, drew it toward the First Principle of evil and darkness—the devil, sowed in it false, vain thoughts, passionate vain yearnings and feelings, attachments to creatures, turned its eyes away from incorruptibility and toward corruption, from heaven to earth, from paradise to the place of exile. Inevitably fallen man must rise again; the wandering must return to the true, first path; those who have fallen into darkness must return to light; those who have fallen into corruption must return to life; those who have fallen into slavery must return to their former freedom of spirit. All of this is accomplished in us by the Lord Jesus Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit and the Life-giver; all of this was accomplished in their earthly lives by the holy apostles and all the saints through faith, repentance, the word of God, contempt for the lustful, vain world, through spiritual wisdom, unceasing struggle with sin in all its forms, through self-control, prayer, almsgiving, mortification of the flesh with its passions and desires.

* * *

“I give thanks to You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth” (Mt 11:25). When the Savior of the world, our Lord Jesus Christ, desired, in the infinity of His goodness, to fulfill in the end of ages the eternal counsel concerning the salvation of the human race perishing through sin, and to find the lost royal coin, to seek out the lost sheep of His rational flock, He took upon Himself human form and, clothed in the whole of man from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, chose as helpers in His great work simple disciples and apostles, fishermen by trade, and through them showed in deed that our salvation does not depend on worldly nobility, learning, or earthly vain wisdom, but that it is solely God’s work—the work of His goodness, wisdom, power, and mercy. “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, and so on.” (1Cor 1:27).

* * *

Human nature is wonderfully, divinely organized, and to re-create it required such a supernatural means—the incarnation of the Son of God: His life on earth, countless miracles, divine teaching, sufferings, death, and resurrection. The fallen image of God, invaluable, which all the world cannot equal, was the reason for such supernatural providence of God. Do people understand this? Few understand and value it, and therefore many live unworthily, haphazardly, as if by chance, not thinking of the high purpose of Christian calling, living in the vanity of every attachment.

* * *

The necessity of the incarnation and death of the Son of God in the flesh, and the manifestation of God’s justice in the salvation of the human race fallen into death, are expressed more clearly in the words of the Apostle Paul to the Hebrews. “Since the children share flesh and blood, He Himself likewise shared the same things, so that through death He might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death… for He is not concerned with angels, but with the descendants of Abraham.” (Hebr 2:14-17). This is a lesson for the Tolstoyans and all the senseless intellectuals who place too much importance on blind human reason.

* * *

Man is great when he fulfills God’s commandments and is God’s friend, as the Lord said to His disciples: “You are My friends if you do what I command you” (Jn 15:14), and “Abraham was called God’s friend” (Jac 2:23); he is divine and deserving of the greatest honors from God and of an imperishable kingdom. But he is base and pitiable, senseless and foolish, subject to every misfortune and every absurd, meaningless passion, when he refuses to submit to God’s law and to fulfill the holy and blessed, life-giving and wise commandments of God. Man in his creation is honored by God with great honor, having been made in the image and likeness of God and as king over all earthly creatures, receiving the promise of immortality for keeping God’s commandments—such easy commandments! Yet inattention to himself and a thirst for pleasure and desire for divine honor with disobedience to the Creator’s commandment have turned human life upside down in righteous punishment. But wondrous is the eternal plan of the Creator for the salvation of fallen man: in the counsel of the all-good and supremely wise Trinity that created all things, it was resolved to redeem fallen man from sin, curse, and death through the incarnation and humanization of One of the Trinity—the Son of God; through His life on earth and the fulfilling of all God’s commandments to the cross and death, and the victorious resurrection with glorious ascension and the descent of fiery tongues. Glory to the Lord for this!

* * *

I am continually amazed at the all-good and supremely wise arrangement of God concerning the salvation of human souls, created in the image and likeness of the all-good, supremely wise, eternal God, from the very beginning of the human race to this day and to the end of the age. Pay attention and reflect: what has been done and what is being done by God for this great, humanitarian work from the very beginning of the fall of the first people into sin, curse, and death, from their first separation from Him! What care for salvation, what promise about the Seed of the Woman who would crush the serpent’s head! What concern for the chosen line—Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Noah, all the patriarchs of the chosen people, and indeed the people themselves! What wonderful thought, how many wonders (at the exodus from Egypt) in the wilderness, under the judges, under the kings of the chosen people! What paternal punishments from the Lord God upon the stubborn, sinful people, how many terrible captivities; how many of the guilty perished before God! And the different idolatrous nations—how many were instruments of God’s wrath for punishing the Hebrews, and how they themselves were crushed by the righteous judgment of God! And in the New Testament—the appearance of the Archangel to Zechariah, the birth of the Forerunner, the Annunciation to the Ever-Virgin, and the birth of the Savior of the world!

* * *

Through sin we lost the likeness of God in which we were created by the Creator, and became alien to Him, incompatible with Him. He Himself was pleased to become like us, to become man while remaining God, in order to make us like Him. He was born of a Mother, a pure Virgin, without a husband, and from the Holy Spirit. O wonder of wonders!

* * *

What did the Lord do for us as our Savior? How did He empty Himself? What punishment did He endure for the sins of the world and personally for all of us? And what have we done?

* * *

None of those not enlightened by the light of Christ’s Gospel could imagine or conceive that God so loved the fallen human race and gave us His only-begotten Son for our salvation—for teaching, working miracles, establishing the church and her mysteries, for voluntary sufferings, death, resurrection, and ascension to heaven, that He might send the Holy Spirit. Give thanks, tremble, O man!

* * *

“I am the gate: whoever enters through Me will be saved” and so forth (Jn 10:9). Christ is the spiritual gate. Into what? Into paradise, into the Kingdom of Heaven, through faith in Christ the Redeemer and Savior, into His Church, the only one that saves, to which has been entrusted the true teaching of Christ, the saving mysteries, and the guidance of shepherds. Without Christ, without the Church there is no other gate into the Kingdom of Heaven. Those who have fallen away from faith in Christ, from the Church—they will perish if they do not turn and repent.

* * *

Because of the redemptive death of the God-Man for the world, the whole world stands firm and stands unshaken through all the ages, for this hour of innocent, redemptive death; the Lord is patient with all lawbreakers, blasphemers, and those who betray the faith and the Church for this hour; hell has not yet opened its terrible mouth to swallow the unrepentant, as it is said: “Go away from Me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire… and they will go away into eternal punishment.” (Mt 25:41-46).

* * *

“And the Word incarnate consumed all malignant sin” (from a canon). But here is a remarkable expression from the canon of the holy Forerunner: “In the river, O Baptizer, most wise, you plunged an abyss—the stream flowing with grace of all the transgression wrought” (of the human race), “but I pray, dry up the streams of my transgressions by Your divine intercession, O Forerunner.” An abyss of God’s justice, holiness, and mercy! Christ God, suffering and dying for us and rising again, drowned with His grace all the transgression of the human race that believes in Him. What a comforting thought for us sinners, what hope in the merits of Christ! He can by a word drown all our sins and cast them into the depths of the sea. Satan was and is the cause of the abyss of all human sins, though people themselves are guilty of them through their lack of repentance (repent). The Lord destroys all the corruption of sins. Glory to His justice and mercy!

* * *

There is a beginningless, personal Being, to whom the name is Existence (I AM), and who cannot fail to be. It gave being and existence to every thing in the world, and the world itself received its being from it. It created all creatures with being by a word, a single word: “Let there be light, and there was light; let there be an expanse in the midst of the water, and the expanse appeared” (Gen 1:3,6); and so on and so on, until all that was intended by the Creator came into its place and firm existence. This personal, beginningless Being, whom we call God, as the all-good and all-powerful Being, could give man a secondary moral being when he had willfully lost it, and it called it “rebirth” in the holy Gospel (Mt 19:28). Yet the giving of rebirth to man was purchased at a very high price—the price of terrible sufferings of the God-Man Creator and the Blood shed on the cross and His death: “you were bought at a price,” do not become slaves of men. “For you know that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your ancestors, not with perishable things like silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot.” (1Cor 6:20; 1Pet 1:18-19). Do we value this? Do we cherish this sacrifice of Christ?

* * *

O Lord, I am amazed at the greatness of Your works in the kingdom of grace and in the kingdom of created nature; I am amazed at Your boundless justice and wisdom, that You, having permitted the rational, dearly beloved creation of Yours (man) to fall deeply and be robbed, deceived, and mocked by the man-killing serpent, nevertheless graciously desired to redeem and restore him in a supernatural manner, incarnating Yourself and becoming man and choosing as the instrument of incarnation the good, most pure Virgin, whom You revealed to be the Protectress and Intercessor of all faithful Christians. The angels marvel at Your condescension, Your providence, Your goodness and wisdom.

* * *

If the goodness of God abandoned me, I would remain an old man, full of sins begun in youth and continuing in part to this day, and I would be all darkness and gloom, uncleanness and stench. But now the goodness of God continually purifies me, sanctifies me, renews me, makes me fragrant, and adorns me. Glory to the Lord for this!

* * *

O Lord, how wonderfully You arrange the salvation of the human race! How graciously, wisely, condescendingly, gently, patiently, and forbearingly, for You patiently await our correction and turning, enlightening us with the light of grace, compelling, moving to tenderness, testing our hearts and deepest thoughts. Yet we are so lazy, sluggish, callous, negligent, pleasure-seeking, greedy, impatient. Move us, O Lord, toward salvation in every way! “Let the faithful exult in glory; let them sing for joy on their couches.” (Ps 149:5).

Part 3

How the Lord draws to Himself through liturgical hymns, stichera, canons, and the whole of worship and to the end of the age will draw the chosen believers, those who love the service of God! What a treasury of fervent repentance, of heartfelt compunction is hidden in our worship! Day and night many ascetics stood in prayer, drawn by love toward Christ, and offered to the beloved and loving Christ the greatest feats of self-restraint, prayer, and contemplation.

* * *

My brother in the priesthood, whoever you are, our position in the holy Church is extraordinarily important, elevated, and grave with responsibility. We are entrusted with the constant proclamation of the true, saving faith, the performance of divine worship and of the supernatural, great, transcendent, salvific Mysteries; the tending of rational sheep and their guidance toward eternal life. We are obliged by our good example, our manner of life, and our word to lead the people toward the heavenly homeland. Especially do I direct your attention and my own to the performance of the Divine Liturgy.

My God! What an abyss of holiness, mercy, and divine justice, what incomprehensible majesty is hidden in it, what salvation, cleansing, sanctification, renewal, deathlessness, deification is concealed within! What supernatural union of creation with the Creator! Do we lift our hearts on high as we ought during its performance? Do we burn with the Spirit? Do we raise the hearts of the faithful to heaven by our reverent service? God through the Liturgy and Communion of the Holy Mysteries unites human nature with Himself and exalts it above the heavens, seats it with Himself on the throne of glory, unites it with the angels. Do we understand the height of our service, this boundless goodness, justice, and wisdom of God? Do we value it as we ought? Do we give thanks to the Lord and love Him fervently? Do we love one another? “Let us love one another so that we may confess with one mind: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the Trinity undivided and of one essence.”

* * *

O divine, most holy, transcendent, all-encompassing Liturgy of Orthodoxy, gathering heaven and earth! How wondrous you are, so desired, full of infinite goodness, wisdom, justice, holiness of God, and incomprehensible majesty. Already the preliminary part of you, the Proskomedia, in brief and general outline, displays your divine majesty, salvific character, and heavenly beauty. Here in symbolic, greatly unequal portions of wheat bread are figuratively represented:

The Lamb of God Himself, Jesus Christ, who takes away the sins of the world; the Mother of God, in whose honor a triangular portion is cut from a special proskomedia bread and placed on the right side of the Lamb; the hosts of all the saints—the Forerunner, the Prophets, the Apostles, the Holy Hierarchs, the Martyrs, the Ascetics, the Holy Unmercenaries, the righteous Theotokos-parents Joachim and Anna, the Saints of the day, and that Saint whose name the Liturgy bears. This is the heavenly, triumphant Church, which has unity with the earthly Church. In symbolic portions is represented the entire earthly Church—all the episcopate of the Church on earth, in Christ, as the serving order in the Mysteries, prayers, and teaching; and finally, there is figuratively represented the third rank of the Church—those in Hades, or those who have died in faith and repentance, the departed children of the Church.

Behold what a wondrous, all-encompassing divine communion of the heavenly, earthly, and those in Hades! It is a comfort, a majesty, divinely majestic to see the Lamb of God, slain and pierced, standing in the midst of the paten—the large, square portion of bread destined to become the Body of Christ. And beside the paten stands the holy Chalice, the image of that wondrous Cup filled with wine, about which at the Last Supper the Lord proclaimed: “«Drink of it, all of you, for this is My Blood of the New Covenant»” (Mt 26:27-28). But listen to what the priest reads—what prayer concludes the Proskomedia. “«O God, our God, Heavenly Bread, Sustenance of all the world, Lord and God and Savior of us Jesus Christ, whom You have sent as Deliverer and Benefactor, blessing and sanctifying us: do You Yourself bless this oblation, and receive it upon Your heavenly altar. Remember, Lord, those who have brought it forth, and those for whom it has been offered. And keep us undefiled in the performance of Your divine Mysteries!»” What touching divine love is revealed in this prayer to the Heavenly Father! What inexpressible love, not only beyond human but also beyond angelic utterance, does God show toward the world! Not some earthly food, not some manna from heaven, but the Flesh and Blood of His own Son He has given as Food and Drink—the most intimate communion and unity of ourselves with Godhead and humanity! O inexpressible love, O highest honor! O condescension that astounds all angelic, cherubic, and seraphic minds! O wisdom of God! O justice of God, mercy, beauty, and majesty of the unspeakable Mystery! And we, unworthy priests and bishops, celebrate this Liturgy so often, we communicate the holy Mysteries sometimes daily! O triumph of the love of God! O blessedness! O our affirmation and deification, received so frequently! How do we approach the Liturgy? With love, thanksgiving, and constant fear, are we transformed through continued transformation? Do we become heavenly, divine, holy? When the priest begins the Proskomedia, signing the prosphora with the lance three times, he says: “«in remembrance of our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ»”; and then, preparing the square portion of the prosphora that foreshadows the future Lamb, or the future most pure Body of Christ, he speaks in the words of the prophet Isaiah: “«As a lamb He was led to slaughter»” and so forth (Is 53:7). And with the words: “«His life shall be taken from the earth»” (Is 53:8), he takes the square portion from the center of the prosphora and places it on the paten, and cutting it crosswise, he says: “«The Lamb of God is sacrificed, taking away the sin of the world, for the life and salvation of the world.»” Then, piercing it at the side, he says: “«And one of the soldiers pierced His side with a lance, and immediately there came out blood and water»” (Jn 19:34). O indescribable love of God! O ineffable wonder of wonders—the Liturgy! Bow before it, humanity, and shed tears of repentance, for it is offered for your sins.

* * *

In the bestowing of the Divine Liturgy upon the Orthodox Church and in the bestowal of the other Mysteries, God has given so much that no human mind can evaluate the greatness of these gifts: the gift of rebirth, of adoption, of renewal, of the right to eternal life, of entrance into heaven, of communion with angels and all the saints, and of eternal reconciliation with the Heavenly Father and participation in His holiness and blessedness. Do you value, Orthodox Christians, this gift of God? Do you strive to live worthily of the Christian calling, in purity and holiness and in every virtue?

* * *

The terrible Blood of the Son of God, offered in the Liturgy, intercedes for us daily. And what a wondrous communion is the Liturgy—communion with God, the Head of the Church, with all the saints, both departed and living. With what love must the celebrant of the Mystery—the bishop or priest—be inflamed! How must he be detached from every earthly attachment! Lord, make us worthy by the power of Your Holy Spirit to celebrate this Mystery with reverence.

* * *

Communion in the Holy Mysteries at each Liturgy makes us whole, peaceful, renewed. How many supreme gifts are hidden in the Liturgy! Let us give thanks to the Lord who gives us life through His wondrous Mysteries! Orthodox Christians, hold the Liturgy in awe—the Liturgy that sanctifies us by God’s mercy! Priests and laypeople, be renewed by it daily. Glory to the mercies of God the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

* * *

See how many relatives, those near and dear to you, you have in Christ: the Mother of God, the holy angels, the patriarchs, the prophets, the apostles, the holy hierarchs, the ascetics, the hosts of martyrs, the righteous, and all the saints. Celebrate with attention, with understanding, with heartfelt devotion and reverence and gratitude, the Proskomedia and the entire Liturgy; understand it deeply, be moved to tenderness, and weep before God with tears of repentance and wonder. How many blessings has God bestowed upon the Orthodox Christian people in the celebration of the Liturgy! After death it will be made manifest what riches of blessings God has prepared for those who love Him—for “«now we see through a glass, darkly»” (1Cor 13:12).

* * *

The Church is the Body of Christ, to which belong all the saints, beginning with the Mother of God and ending with the last of the saints, all Orthodox Christians who truly believe and strive to live always in accordance with their Christian calling, all spiritual laypeople, and finally all those who have departed in faith and repentance. All, as members of one Body, help one another, especially the saints help us who labor on earth and earnestly have recourse to them, and most of all, we are saved by the all-good and almighty, most-just Head of the Church—Christ, that “«Lamb of God, who takes away the sin»” of ourselves and of all the “world” (Jn 1:29). The Liturgy is the all-interceding, divine service for all the living and the dead; the Blood of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, cleanses the sins of all believers, of the repentant, and of those who pray earnestly and strive in their Christian life. Wondrous, all-reconciling, all-sanctifying, all-cleansing, all-renewing Liturgy, and all-deifying! One must attend the Liturgy, participate in its prayers, glorify and give thanks to the Lord.

* * *

“«Take, eat… Drink of it, all»” (Mt 26:26-27)… Do all eat and drink the Flesh and Blood of the Lord according to His commandment? In our Orthodox world, in some places in church—you could roll a ball and there’d be no one; at universities—there are no communicants; not to speak of other Christian confessions… We are preoccupied with ourselves. What is happening among us! O our divine faith! Divine Orthodoxy, shining brighter than the sun, conquered for us by apostolic blood, by hierarchical blood, by martyr’s blood, by monastic blood, and by the blood of all the righteous, come to us! O most precious pearl! O treasure hidden in the field (in the heart and in the Church)! O renewal! O incorruptibility! O light! O divine salt! O brilliantly shining sun! O life itself, eternal! O reconciliation, perfected with a righteous God, of sinful men! O golden chain to heaven! O golden ladder to heaven!

* * *

Since sin in all its forms has permeated the entire being of man—soul and body—and has become mixed and mingled with him, the Lord, the wise Creator and Physician, was pleased to heal mankind—with like by like. The Physician Himself became mixed with the one being healed and gave him to taste His most pure Body and His most pure Blood and united with him His Godhead and humanity.

* * *

Mankind has been defiled and corrupted by all kinds of sins: the blood is infected with all the passions, and man is unclean in all his blood, marrow, and bones. Only the most holy Virgin Mother of God alone was and is pure in her most pure and virginal blood, from which the Son of God became incarnate. In order to be freed from all the filth of sin and for the renewal of human nature, it was necessary for the wise, just, and almighty Physician to establish the Mystery of Baptism and of Communion in His Body and Blood, and they were established by Christ the Savior Himself.

* * *

“«The Only-Begotten Son, O good Father, Thou hast sent cleansing into the world.»” There is in the world a terrible uncleanness that destroys the soul and body of man, defiles, darkens, and eternally separates him from God, the Source of Life, and it can be cleansed by nothing save the Blood of the Son of God, poured out for the sins of the world. This Blood was appointed before all ages in God’s Counsel for the cleansing of the world, that is, of believers and of the faithful, and was foreshadowed in the Old Testament in the bloody sacrifices of goats and calves. But the Old Testament sacrifices cleansed only bodily uncleanness, not that of the soul. The Blood of the Son of God cleanses both soul and body, but only those people who with faith and repentance approach the Mystery of Communion. Believe then, repent, be cleansed, and be healed!

* * *

O hypocrisy of the Pharisees and scribes! O cursed pettifoggery against the sinless God, walking in the flesh among His disciples on the earth! Simple in heart, humble disciples of Christ, following the Savior through a sown field, hungry, were plucking ears of grain, rubbing them in their hands and eating on the Sabbath day (Mt 12). Of course, such an apparent violation of the commandment of the Sabbath found enemies in the malevolent Pharisees, and they began to grumble about the transgression of the Sabbath, but the Lord, rebuking their hypocrisy and envy, defended the justice of His disciples. But let me ask you, O man: do you feel a spiritual hunger and thirst for the life-giving, supernatural grain and seed of twofold nature—the natural and vital—the Flesh and Blood of Christ the Giver of Life, the true heavenly Bread, who gives life to the world? If you do not feel this saving hunger, it means you are spiritually dead. A man beginning to recover or a healthy man naturally feels hunger and thirst. How many such corpses are there in Russia, in the Orthodox Church, who do not feel this saving thirst? Darkness upon darkness! An innumerable multitude of intellectuals never partake of Communion, many of the common people very rarely, many receive Communion only once a year. And the Lord daily calls: “«Take, eat… drink all of you…»” And there are none eating and drinking!

* * *

Inexpressible majesty and unspeakable gift—Communion in the most pure Body and Blood of the Son of God! What depth of falling and corruption through sin, what extremity of the means of restoration of the fallen, renewal of the corrupted, cleansing of the greatest defilement of sin, which by nothing can be cleansed save only by the invaluable, most pure, and all-cleansing Blood of the Holiest of all the holy, the Son of God. On this Mystery of Salvation we must meditate day and night, for it we must give unceasing thanks and praise, and strive to correspond to it with all our strength, desires, and the fulfillment of all of God’s saving commandments. “«Heaven was afraid and the ends of the earth were amazed, because God appeared in the flesh to mankind.»” O what love! O what condescension! O what justice, wisdom, what sanctification, deification, what elevation of our nature beyond all the heavens!

* * *

Glory to You, O Lord, for Your divine Mysteries, with which You clothe me as with divine raiment and power. Truly the greatest, divine adornment for a true communicant, priest or layman—are the divine Mysteries. What honor You have bestowed, O Lord, upon the Orthodox Christian people, entrusting and giving to it Your divine Blood, the entirety of Your Godhead and Manhood, enriching and deifying every human being. What love are we obliged to have toward You, O Lord, what thanksgiving, in what mutual love we ought to live, how we must love and “esteem” each other “above” “ourselves” (Phil 2:3)! I thank You, O Lord, for all Your unspeakable mercies.

* * *

Priests and deacons, both of parishes and of cities—do they receive Communion worthily at every Liturgy? No, many do so unworthily. God sees what they think and do. O Lord, You righteous Judge of all, do not condemn us, the unworthy, who often receive Communion from the Chalice of Your holy Body. Behold, we are all unworthy of Your awesome, transcendent, and life-giving Mysteries. Let Your boundless mercy cover our sins!

* * *

Do you value, O priest, who celebrates daily and performs the Liturgy, the fruits of Communion in the holy, life-giving, awesome, and transcendent Mysteries? Do you feel the cleansing of sins, renewal, enlightenment, rebirth, sanctification, the peace of God that surpasses all understanding, the easy yoke and the light burden (Mt 11:30), freedom of spirit, and joy in the Holy Spirit? Blessed are you if you feel all this and give thanks to God. Kindle within yourself the gift of God; do not be indifferent, unmoved, ungrateful. Through the feeling of gratitude you will be deemed worthy of greater grace. Improve yourself; in all things strive toward the perfection of life and virtue, so that you may be deemed worthy to hear from the Lord: “Good and faithful servant! You have been faithful over a few things; I will set you over many things. Enter into the joy of your Lord.” Amen (Mt 25:21).

* * *

You, priest of God, minister of the Most High Creator, serve the Liturgy with fear and proper preparation, especially if you serve daily. Watch what you are making of your belly, which becomes daily, through Communion in the holy, life-giving Mysteries of Christ, a temple of God—is it not an instrument of gluttony and greed, an instrument of the Devil, through whose belly he drew mankind into Hell and subjected it to a curse? Hold fast to the fast commanded by the Savior; watch over yourself and others, and save yourself and the people.

* * *

“Let a man examine himself” before he wishes to receive Communion in the Holy Mysteries, and then let him receive the heavenly Bread, the Body of Christ, and drink from the Cup of Life, “for whoever eats and drinks unworthily eats and drinks judgment to himself, not discerning the Body of the Lord” (1Cor 11:28-29). Therefore, those desiring Communion, examine yourselves, examine your conscience, remembering your sins—condemn yourselves before the Terrible Judgment, for if we would examine ourselves, that is, carefully review our lives and correct ourselves, then we would not be condemned.

The Christian’s Earthly Path to God

Part 1

“From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force” (Mt 11:12). Two invisible forces constantly act upon man: a good force and an evil one, the power of God, the power of grace, and the power of the Devil, the power of cunning and completely destructive. Man is placed in this world as it were between two fires, one of which is life-giving, about which the Lord says: “I have come to bring fire on the earth” (Lk 12:49), and the other is a consuming and devouring fire. Man must exert effort over himself to kindle in himself the divine fire, the fire of faith and love toward God and neighbor. Man has lost his first divine dignity, his righteousness, holiness, goodness, meekness, and has filled his soul with every kind of sin. See—you lack purity of heart—this is a great loss; you must acquire it. You lack constant compassion for your neighbor in his sorrow, need, poverty, and illness—transform yourself, become compassionate… You lack zeal in prayer to God, you lack a spiritual taste for prayer, you lack a spiritual ear for hearing the Word of God—transform yourself, awaken your spirit, your taste, and your spiritual ear, so that you might with love hear the Word of God, so that you might feel the sweetness of prayer and the sweetness of good deeds. Evil fights against man powerfully and compels him toward evil, while good attracts him to itself by its moral beauty, by peace of soul, by spiritual freedom. Good attracts by its promises of eternal life as the reward for victory over the passions. “To the victor I will give to sit with Me on My throne” (Apok 3:21).

* * *

A wondrous thing. The same man who stands in reverence before the Creator and sees His creation in its beautiful, marvelous aspect and is full of wonder, love, and reverence before Him—is also capable of low, unclean, sinful, cunning, and lustful thoughts and desires of the flesh, and can imagine in his mind the most unclean, bestial lusts and pleasures, and become deeply defiled in his thoughts and feelings. What contradiction in you yourself! What a drive toward sin is in you! How sin in the form of every kind of uncleanness strives to actualize itself in deed and defile you. What an inner spiritual struggle continually lies before you—to combat the uncleanness within you and to reclaim your noble spirit and the purity of your soul and body! Otherwise you will deprave and defile your nature—your soul and body. Truly, “the kingdom of heaven” is seized by effort and those “who use effort” gain “it” (Mt 11:12). “To the victor I will give to sit with Me on My throne, as I also conquered and sat down with My Father on His throne” (Apok 3:21). Constant warfare with sin is necessary for as long as we are on earth; we cannot sit idle, or else sin will overcome us and conquer us and subject us to eternal captivity, shame, and torment.

* * *

Do you know what we are all poor and misshapen in and what we most need? We are all conceived and born in lawlessness and poverty in righteousness and holiness—for unrighteousness and uncleanness have been conceived with us in our mother’s womb, in our father’s loins, and with our growth have grown and taken root and made themselves like weeds in a field amid wheat, or like dry, fruitless fig trees. This is worthy of weeping and tears. We were born in Christianity or have joined the Orthodox Church, and therefore we ought to live in purity and every virtue, but we live carelessly, mindlessly, vainly, as it comes, and do not think to strive toward the perfection of Christ, forgetting that we have been told by the Lord: “Be perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect” (Mt 5:48).

* * *

“The kingdom of heaven,” that is, holiness, purity, righteousness, self-restraint, prayer, chastity, love for God and neighbor—“is seized by effort” (Mt 11:12), that is, by the gracious help of God and by one’s own diligence—“and those who use effort” attain “it.” The flesh opposes the spirit, that is, every virtue, so that we might not do what we wish to do for God’s sake and for the salvation of our soul and for the good of our neighbors. What is required is man’s resistance to all evil, to every passion of flesh and spirit, to every lust, and the practice and acquisition of every virtue.

* * *

The creature strives against the Creator; the creature mocks the Creator or thinks it mocks Him, while at the same time it mocks itself to its own destruction; but behold it will be solemnly defeated: “for He must reign until He has put all His enemies under His feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1Cor 15:25-26). In the Fall, more grace was given to man than was given before the Fall. Wonderful is the exceedance of Thy goodness over the malice of the Devil, O Lord! May the excellency of Thy goodness be revealed, O Lord! Glory to Thee!

* * *

My God! How the enemy has dishonored and continues to dishonor Your creation, which was created in Your image, and to this day dishonors it in all of us day and night with countless sins and passions, with absurd, unclean, blasphemous, harmful, disturbing thoughts! What attentiveness, what prayer, what self-restraint, what struggle must there be within us against invisible enemies! O God, help us all, especially those who are faithful and attentive to themselves!

* * *

You have fallen into captivity to the Devil through inattention, through ingratitude, through pride. Strive to free yourself from this captivity with the help of the Almighty Warrior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who conquered our common enemy and adversary. On this you have been given all divine powers. Look to the example of the struggle of the Apostles, holy hierarchs, martyrs, and all the saints and imitate them. And they always help those who call upon them with faith.

* * *

O God is in complete disregard and without honor among you, brothers and sisters, because of your sinful attachments, because of your lack of love for one another. You dream only of earthly things and not at all of heavenly things, you care about physical health but not at all about the salvation of your soul. “Our citizenship is in heaven, from where we also await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ” (Phil 3:20).

* * *

There is nothing more certain than that evident truth that men and human societies, from the very beginning of their existence, from the very beginning of sin, have been in a state of fall. The fall of mankind has become constant and inevitable. Men neglected the first commandment of God, which was to keep them from falling, turned away from it, did not fulfill it through pride, recklessness, and negligence. And from that time the life of mankind has been an unceasing, uninterrupted series of falls—falls of individuals, whole families, and societies. Even to this day men continually stumble and fall. No matter how many laws you write for human societies, fundamental and of all kinds—these laws are not able to keep men in family and social order. Families, clans, and peoples are turbulent, in ferment, cannot live peacefully. All kinds of passions disturb human societies, disrupt the peaceful course, produce disorder, infidelity, betrayal in social life, everything is turned upside down. The paternal, governmental, and supreme power are shaken, are close to falling, and fall. What a picture of falls! This is a picture of centuries, of millennia.

* * *

What is the history of mankind? It is a history now of falls, now of risings; a history of the wavering of human thought, of family and social life, and a history of the falls of kingdoms and peoples or separate cities and institutions. And what picture does our time present? A picture of the falls of all societies. Where is the cause of such weakness of minds, estates, and institutions, deliberately gathered to establish a wavering state and, meanwhile, still wavering. Where is the cause of darkness, weakness, and fall? In disbelief, in falling away from God, from His wise commandments, in relying on one’s own blind reason, in following one’s passions. And it serves them right—without God, without God’s reason, without God’s law, without the “Church of God, which is the pillar and foundation of truth,” (1Tim 3:15), societies cannot stand firm and their institutions cannot have a firm foundation. Therefore they all fall apart, for it is said: “Without Me you can do nothing” (Jn 15:5).

* * *

Our life on earth is a dream, a fantasy, and constant and gradual dying, not life. I desire a true, genuine, divine life, befitting a being created in the image and likeness of God. My God, but what dreams when we sleep at night, in the morning or evening! These are fantasies, daydreams, and often sinful ones! This is a loss of time for God, for life in the love of God, in God’s holiness, in incorruptibility, in the light of His Godhead, in peace, in the expansiveness of the heart!

* * *

What is our life on earth? We are not living, but raving consciously or unconsciously, willingly or unwillingly. When will we actually live and serve God, who serves us constantly and pleases us with countless blessings of life, with all manner of help, all sorts of healings, comforts, warnings, and all manner of keeping and cherishing and forgiveness of our sins? When will we think, feel, speak, undertake, and act in a way pleasing to God, reasonably, and savingly? Are not all our sinful passions delirium on our part, not vanity?

* * *

You intellectuals have abandoned heavenly wisdom and grasped at earthly vanity, lies, mirage, and impenetrable fog, and you will be punished by your own folly and your own passions. You have scorned living water, life-giving light, the salt of the earth, and you will wither in your own eternal corruption and will never see the light of God, but will remain in darkness. You have preferred to Leo Tolstoy, to eminent worldly writers who have multiplied their hasty scribbling to infinity, so that there is no time for a Christian to take up the Word of God, which is the source of purity, holiness, justice, light, eternal life, and blessedness.

* * *

With bodily beauty and momentary pleasure the enemy seduces, while from the Source of spiritual and eternal beauty, from God, the enemy turns us away, accounting Him as nothing and hastening us toward death. What madness! But you, long for eternal, spiritual beauty—God, Creator of all beauty. Rise from that corruptible, decaying, and fetid beauty toward the incorruptible, eternally fragrant beauty that has marvelously perfumed the bodies of the saints, both living and even after death. O God, in what captivity mankind is held! In captivity to all kinds of sins that blind the mind and heart of man.

* * *

O Lord, You have caught the one who caught us, our murderer the Devil, have slain him, and have delivered us from his jaws. For this the Church cries out to the Sovereign Theotokos in one hymn: “The bow of the mighty ruler was shattered by Thy childbearing, O Sovereign Lady. For Thou didst supply the divine incarnation as a luminous hook, the righteous catch of our enemy the Devil, to the Word-Father. Wherefore we cry to Him: Glory to Thy power, O Lord!” (song 4, service August 1). What senselessness of sin, or of our old man! Through what have we been defiled, corrupted, darkened, gone mad, become dead, deprived of God’s blessing, and subjected to a curse and eternal torment? And are we continually striving, rushing, desiring the constant repetition of corrupting sin of any kind? For what? For momentary pleasure, a stirring of the flesh, the intoxication of carnal delight. O accursed sin! O accursed carnal passion—blind, all-destructive, death-dealing! How long will you live and reign in us and destroy us? O holy men of God of all ranks, we bless you for you warred boldly and constantly against the flesh, scorned it, trampled it, mortified it, and through this made God dwell in your heart and became a spacious dwelling of the Holy Spirit. Help us also to mortify it, which kills us every day.

* * *

Friendship with our flesh and the seduction of carnal pleasures—are the cause of our sins, the cause of coldness toward God, of attachment to the world and its imagined, fleeting, vanishing blessings, the cause of our spiritual sloth and negligence. “They slumbered and slept!” (Mt 25:5).

* * *

Mark the many-passioned flesh of yours—what a greatest enemy it is to you: through a thousand lusts it desires to distance your soul from God, to weaken it, to defile it, to kill it—it weakens you through sloth and coldness toward prayer, toward prostrations, toward meditation on God. O home-dwelling, all-cunning, flattering enemy! How long shall I be with you? “Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Rom 7:24).

* * *

Whoever sleeps long, to that one spiritual interests become foreign, prayer becomes difficult, external and not from the heart, while the interests of the flesh come to the forefront—food and drink, profit, games, various diversions. Excessive sleep is harmful—it weakens soul and body.

* * *

“One who suffers in the flesh ceases from sin” (1Pet 4:1). This is why suffering, the cross, is necessary for the Christian: without suffering, without affliction, our flesh plays the fool, rages, sins, angers God, and creates tribulation for itself and our soul. O wretched, many-passioned flesh, on account of which all the troubles in mankind! O many-passioned heart, foul! “The things which proceed out of the mouth come from the heart, and those are what defile a man. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy of the eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness—all these things proceed from within and defile a man” (Mk 7:20-23). Here is the source of evil in man—the heart! “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me” (Ps 50:12). “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow” (Ps 50:9). O goodness, O almighty power, O justice, O wisdom of God! O simplicity of the being of God!

* * *

Bathing and prolonged sleep, all things taken together, very much do not favor the spiritual life and develop sloth and lust. Avoid coddling the flesh by all means and treat it harshly for the sake of the Kingdom of God.

* * *

From the all-good God only good proceeds, and not evil—and even your sickness itself is a good, yet you grumble, lose courage, despair. Endure and give thanks. For voluntary pleasures in youth—involuntary sufferings in old age.

* * *

During fasting, especially for a priest, you must abandon the pleasures that irritate the flesh and not indulge it, but afflict it: sleep little, teach the people the Word of God, genuine repentance, fruitful repentance; arouse hatred for every sin, explain how it is contrary to our nature and contrary to God, how sin (contrary to nature) has become ingrained in our nature and acts in it powerfully, insatiably, and fatally.

* * *

Regard the world and all that is in it as a passing shadow and cling to nothing; do not have attachment. The spiritual, eternal world is essential, and the Lord who created it: cling to Him with all your soul.

Part 2

There is needed an urgent, unceasing struggle against all the passions that live and take root in us. Tell me, which passion have you overcome and killed? Are they not all still alive in you and do they not wound you and trouble you? Rise up and overcome all the passions, these invisible Amalekites living in you and dwelling with you. “What fellowship has righteousness with unrighteousness? What communion has light with darkness? What agreement has Christ with Belial?” (2Cor 6:14-15).

* * *

Some have become so accustomed to sins and have such a corrupted conscience that they do not even consider sin as sin, but as proper business and almost permitted, or as a matter of cunning, skill, and daring to deceive and seduce others and to profit from their oversight and ignorance to their advantage. You must keep your conscience healthy, clean, unstained, sensitive, tender, which immediately repels the touch of any kind of sin as if it were deadly poison. “For the wages of sin is death” (Rom 6:23). So in this evil present time, with various freedoms wrongly given and wrongly understood, some do not even consider murder a sin, nor adultery, nor robbery, and so on.

* * *

Through repeated sinning habit is formed. Through repeated sinning the will toward good becomes weaker and weaker, and toward evil stronger, so that it becomes difficult to resist sin. You must become accustomed to every virtue so that it becomes as if a natural property in man.

* * *

Every Christian soul must reach such a spiritual state that it always feels absolute abhorrence toward every sin, in whatever form it appears, and at the same time attains a complete disposition of the heart toward every virtue.

* * *

In order to inherit heaven and eternal life and to be deemed worthy of eternal communion with the holy angels and all the saints, you must here, on earth, purify yourself beforehand, come to hate sin and to love righteousness, only righteousness, and thus become like God and His saints. “What fellowship has righteousness with unrighteousness? What does light have in common with darkness?” (2Cor 6:14). The saints prepared and purified themselves their whole life from all filth of flesh and spirit. Above all, you must learn humility, for the beginning of sin is pride. Lucifer fell through pride.

* * *

All the saints felt and acknowledged themselves as sinners and all sincerely repented, wept, expressed as best they could their awareness of both voluntary and involuntary sins, ascended through the degrees of repentance and correction, exercised themselves in every virtue, and attained sanctity and likeness to God and unity with Him. We daily read prayers, are moved by them to tears, weep, and receive mercy from the Lord. Glory to His mercy, to His patience, to His obedience, and to His graciousness! How blessed we are to have such a God, “mighty in mercy and good in strength, to help and comfort all who hope in His mercy.”

* * *

You read in the evening prayer: “Deliver me from the teaching of evil” (a prayer to the Holy Spirit). If you have learned to be gluttonous, to eat and drink excessively, to harbor lustful thoughts and desires, to covet gain, to be lazy at prayer, to envy, to be offended at trifles, to murmur against the difficulty of life, against sickness, misfortunes—then now learn to kill all this in yourself through fasting, prayer, and deeds according to your strength, and do not think this is necessary only for a monk—it is necessary for every Christian in every station and condition. If you were able to sin, you are also able to justify yourself and be cleansed, so as to become a child of light.

Let us all reflect on our pitiful, terrible fall and on the necessity of rising up and being corrected. Many do not realize this fall and therefore do not consider it necessary and right to rise up and cling to countless passions and bad habits. O Lord, open our spiritual eyes.

* * *

A true Christian loathes every sin not only in words, but in deed he loathes it, in his thoughts, feelings, memory, and imagination, and loathing it, he loves God with all his heart and virtue. May this be with you always, servant of God.

* * *

Every day, every hour, and every minute be a strict observer and judge of all your thoughts, desires, all the movements of your heart, your words and deeds, and do not allow yourself to be defiled by a single sinful thought, imagination, desire, sinful word or deed, knowing that the Lord is a righteous Judge, judging you at every moment and assessing your entire inner man. For God’s sake, keep yourself pure continuously—your end is near.

Watch yourself and see where the gaze of your inner eye is directed—toward God, toward heaven, toward the incorruptible homeland, toward the saints and the heavenly glory they received for their labors and struggles, for their firm devotion to the Lord and unfailing love? Or toward the earth, toward earthly pleasures, toward this captivity, toward these vanishing dreams?

* * *

If you want to know yourself precisely—what you are like, what defects, habits, passions, vices you have—watch your dreams when you sleep day and night, notice them as much as possible—and you will get a picture, or an echo, of the direction of your soul, the bad and the good. And having known yourself, immediately strive to correct your defects and cut down the sinful weeds like grain.

* * *

“If your right eye causes you to stumble… if your right hand causes you to stumble” (Mt 5:29-30)… Man was created righteous and ought to remain so, having abandoned the cunning of sin. You must cut off passions, not hands and feet; you must pluck out passions, not the eye. “From the heart come evil thoughts” (the lustful eye) (Mt 15:19). All of this must be cut off and plucked out by the root with the help of God’s grace.

* * *

“If anyone… does not hate… his own soul… he cannot be My disciple” (Lk 14:26-27). Indeed, you must hate your own soul, for it is full of all kinds of passions that alienate you from God, from eternal Life—it is an instrument of the Devil, your irreconcilable enemy.

* * *

The righteous Lord permits good and evil to grow and ripen in this world and is patient with it, not willing the destruction of sinners, and for the multiplication of punishment for the impenitent and those who abuse His patience. This patience of God is praiseworthy and wonderful, the fruit of His love for His creatures. Through this patience how many sinners and sinful women have been saved, who ought to have perished forever if the Lord had not been patient with us, foreseeing our conversion and correction. O wondrous patience! I glorify this wondrous attribute of God, grace and patience! Through you how many greatest sinners have been saved! Manasseh, king of Judah, that most wretched of kings, was pitied only through Thy patience. Read the prayer of repentance of Manasseh (2Chron 36:23), king of Judah, and learn the depth of repentance and self-condemnation and be corrected.

* * *

God has given to us, the sinful, afflicted by countless passions, repentance as a spiritual healing, as life, like a merciful Physician. Every sincere soul longs for repentance as for life-giving nourishment, as for food strengthening body and soul, as the blind longs for light. The gift of repentance has been won for us from the Heavenly Father by the holy, blessed Jesus Christ, and by Him alone, for He alone fulfilled all righteousness, all of God’s law, which no one of men could fulfill by himself; He alone took upon Himself the curse with which the Heavenly Father righteous condemned disobedient mankind. He alone for us endured all torments and for us tasted “death,” which we ourselves incurred as the inevitable “wage of sin” (Rom 6:23). If the Lord Jesus Christ had not offered Himself as a sacrifice for us, repentance would not have been given to us, but because of His sacrifice it has been given to all believers, and all who truly understand use it eagerly, are transformed with divine transformation, become new people with new thoughts, desires, intentions, deeds, and are saved, enlightened, and united with God. Only the unbelieving, cunning, stubborn, and lazy perish.

* * *

Is mankind responsible for that terrible hour of the ninth, in which our Redeemer gave up the ghost? It is responsible, each soul is responsible, for each soul the Savior suffered and died, for each soul was paid this infinitely precious price. We must not live for ourselves, but for Him who died for us and rose again. Here is our responsibility, here is our duty toward Him who died for us on the cross, the God-Man. And since Christ also died for you, you too must sincerely always repent, for it was also for your sins that the Lamb of God suffered.

* * *

“King of heaven, Comforter, Spirit of truth… filling all things…” (Prayer to the Holy Spirit). All, that is, filling heaven and earth. Does He, the Holy Spirit, fill your heart? Ask yourself honestly, and if not, why—through what attachment of yours, on account of what sin? And strive through sincere repentance to draw the Holy Spirit into your heart.

* * *

O Christian man! Remember how great and wondrous a providence the Lord has shown toward your salvation, predestining to save you before the worlds were created, making His coming known through the prophets and through various righteous ones of the Old Testament. How He came to earth and fulfilled all His dispensation toward you, founded the Church with pastoral care and the Mysteries, gave it the saving word of grace upon grace, all the saving means to life and piety! Remember the sufferings for you of the Lord Jesus Christ, the death-dealing death on the cross, the resurrection, and the ascension into heaven and the promise to come again to earth in glory to judge the living and the dead. Tell me—what are you doing for your salvation? “For the kingdom of heaven” is taken by effort and those “who use effort” attain “it?” (Mt 11:12). Shame on yourself, repent, weep over your unbelief, your negligence, your dullness, your sloth, your vanity, your madness, and other passions, and quickly set about the work of your salvation. Read the Word of God, read how the saints, being subject to the same temptations as men, struggled.

* * *

O renewing power of repentance, by God’s mercy! How great are God’s mercy and patience toward us sinners! Each day (pursuing repentance) we are renewed by the grace of repentance. In repentance the Lord grants the soul restoration. I am moved by the boundless compassion of God toward mankind. What boundlessly great a price He gave to the Heavenly Father for delivering man from Hell and eternal torment and for granting him holiness—as a ransom for us to God: He gave Himself, suffered and died for us! O lost drachma, created in the image of God, a soul! Bride of God! Child of God! “He was wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement for our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed” (Is 53:5). Therefore we must suffer with Him and be crucified with Him so that we might live with Him.

* * *

How holy, good, wise, eternal, and supremely blessed is God’s will toward us, men, and how we must constantly, with all our strength, strive to fulfill it for our own eternal and temporal well-being. And how sinful is our will, shortsighted, blind, erring, selfish, destructive, having in view only our own personal profit and gain. Do not forget that you have been corrupted in soul and body from youth, and humble yourself deeply and repent before God and give thanks that He has given you time for repentance and correction. O how much mercy the Lord has poured out upon you all the days of your life on earth! There is no counting them! Weep and give thanks.

* * *

How many different passions, coldness and negligence about the soul and its eternal destiny beyond the grave, despair, murmuring, disobedience, and willfulness nest in the depths of our hearts—and how unclean we are before God, unworthy of Him almost every minute. We are worthy of Him only when we sincerely recognize our sins and weep over them, asking forgiveness and showing a firm resolve henceforth not to repeat sins, not to defile ourselves with them, not to enslave ourselves to them, but firmly to keep and fulfill God’s holy, righteous, and wise will.

* * *

“Draw near to God, and” He “will draw near to you” (Jac 4:8). Through sin men have separated themselves from God, the Source of Life, and have given themselves to the Devil, the author of sin and of all evil and death. But by the power of the Crucified, even now signs and wonders of man’s salvation are wrought—for his sincere repentance, through which he becomes near to God or to the God-Man—in one Person, indivisibly and inseparably united.

* * *

“He has filled the hungry with good things” (Lk 1:53). The deeper the repentance, the humility, the consciousness and feeling of one’s sins, the more abundantly is the grace of forgiveness poured out, the more blessings flow into the soul of man from the all-merciful Sovereign. Manasseh was the most lawless of the kings, but showed afterward great and deep repentance and was deemed worthy of great forgiveness and mercy from the Lord. Study closely the repentant prayer of Manasseh, king of Judah, how he humbled himself and repented; how he glorified the mercy and patience of God! His prayer is a model of repentance.

Part 3

“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Mt 3:2). Sins separate man from God, the Source of Life, and cast him into death. In order to draw near to God, sincere repentance is necessary. God Himself seeks the one who has gone astray. He Himself leaves heaven and comes to earth, becomes man, enters into the closest communion with him, speaks with him, sanctifies the waters with His Baptism, grants the bath of rebirth, having established the mystical supper—Communion in Body and Blood, brings down the grace of the Holy Spirit on believers, grants repentance, remission of sins, sanctification, renewal, strengthening, adoption as a child, and deification. What more has He not given? Everything, everything to overflowing. How do people use the means of salvation? They trample them as swine trample pearls (Mt 7:6). But it will be strictly exacted from the unbelieving, the ungrateful, the proud, and the evil-natured.

* * *

“I am not able to dig; I am ashamed to beg” (Lk 16:3). Therein lies the trouble and the important loss—that you cannot beg, yet you must beg. “Ask, and it shall be given to you” (Mt 7:7); “you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind, and naked” (Apok 3:17). You cannot dig, yet you must dig. You should dig into the depths of your soul and unearth that true treasure—the immortal soul, buried under the passions, that soul which was created in the image and likeness of God and which has been completely suppressed by the lusts and pleasures of life.

* * *

Great are the sins into which the holy men fell when tempted, for even the righteous falls seven times a day (Prov 24:16); but we are indebted to them for magnificent examples of repentance and God’s mercy, such as: David, Manasseh, and many saints of the New Covenant—the apostles Peter and Paul, the harlot, the prodigal son, the wise thief, Mary of Egypt, and many, many others. Had they not sinned grievously before God, the Church would not have been given such wondrous, burning, and sincere examples of repentance. Read with heart-felt attention the psalms of King David, especially Psalm 50, and the prayer of Manasseh, King of Judah, the most impious of kings, who commanded the great prophet Isaiah to be sawed asunder by a wooden saw, and was nevertheless forgiven—and you will see how great was the power of repentance in them, which God Himself accepted as a sweet fragrance, as an example for us sinners.

I love the great Forerunner and Baptist of the Lord John for his gentle but stern and decisive proclamation to the Pharisees and Sadducees: “His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the barn, but the chaff” (straw) “he will burn with unquenchable fire” (Mt 3:12). Listen to or read these fearsome words more often and repent, you modern Pharisees and Sadducees and all who are educated and ignorant in God’s Law. Expect the terrible execution of the latter; and all who struggle—the blessed promise of the Lord. Amen.

* * *

“But the Pharisee stood and prayed thus” (in this way) “with himself” (Lk 18:11). What does the all-seeing, all-just, awesome, judging Eye read in the soul of the Pharisee, for the Pharisee prayed not aloud, but secretly, to himself? “God, I thank you that I am not like other men” (Lk 18:11) and so forth. By the Pharisee one may understand all who are haughty, proud of their rank, station and intellect, their vain learning, wealth, beauty, power, and success, and who gaze with pride and contempt upon sinful, yet inwardly humble and repenting humanity. Their inner eye, illuminated by the light of grace, is turned inward, into the depths of the heart, and perceives all the abyss of sin, all the corruption which sin has brought into our nature, all our debt before God’s justice, all our deserving of divine judgment, and, humbly acknowledging his sins, cries out from the depth of his humble heart for mercy: “God, have mercy on me, a sinner” (Lk 18:13). This is what the righteous Eye saw, what It read in the heart of the publican: It saw, It read in one ignorant pride and boasting, and in the other (the publican) humble acknowledgment of the multitude of sins and the sinner’s helplessness before the highest Justice: “God, have mercy on me, a sinner”. What an innumerable multitude of Pharisees the divine Eye sees, especially in this present time—the age of godlessness, the worship of one’s own intellect, one’s literary talent, the worship of golden and silver idols, the striving for power over the subordinate. Wretched, senseless, short-sighted, blind you people! You do not imagine and do not think that all your judgments, light-minded and malicious, all your passions are inscribed with an indelible chisel there, in heaven, in the book of the eternal judgments of God, and also in your consciences—and all shall be revealed at the universal judgment and bring upon you unbearable shame and righteous condemnation. Now you hide from human judgment and from your own conscience and commit lawless deeds with impunity, spending your time in games, carnal pleasures, or idleness and mockery—there not a single thought will be hidden. Reckon with your sins while there is still time for repentance. Soon the doors will be closed, and you will knock in vain and say: “Lord, Lord, open to us” (Mt 25:11). You will be answered: “Depart from me, you workers of lawlessness; I do not know you” (Mt 7:23). You shall be first everywhere here—there you will be last, that is, in hell; but these repenting publicans will be first. On this universal threshing floor the winnowing fork will separate all the chaff and burn it with unquenchable fire, and gather the wheat into the heavenly barn. Therefore, “let the unjust still do injustice; let the filthy still be filthy”, but “the righteous do right still, and the holy be holy still. Behold, I come quickly, and my reward is with me, to repay each one according to what he has done” (Apok 22:11-12). What will you do, unbelieving, unprepared, weakened, corrupted to the bone, when God’s dread Judgment overtakes you unexpectedly, like the Japanese war, like the Russian revolution? Then you will not be given time even to enter your house to take something you need; “one will be taken and one left” (Mt 24:40).

* * *

The people of the antediluvian world were given 120 years to repent, and they were warned that for their sins there would be general punishment from God—the flood. Time passed, but the people grew more corrupt and did not think of repentance, nor did they believe the preacher of repentance, the righteous Noah—and God’s Word was fulfilled to the letter. The Jews did not believe the prophets that they would be taken captive by the Babylonian king, and they continued in idolatry—and they went into exile, and Jerusalem was destroyed, and all wealth passed to Babylon. The Jews of Jesus Christ’s time did not believe in Christ as the Messiah and put Him to death by crucifixion, and Christ’s prophecy about the fall of Jerusalem was soon fulfilled—the Romans destroyed the Jews without mercy. So too in this present time the people have gone mad, does not heed the cry of the holy Church, saying—this is a fairy tale, the priests deceive us for their profit. O blind, O stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart, are not all the events foretold in the Gospel now being fulfilled before your very eyes? Behold the destructive war, famine, deadly pestilence. Do you still not believe in God’s justice? Know that the judgment is at the door, and the Lord comes soon in glory “to judge the living and the dead” (2Tim 4:1).

* * *

The character of present life is faith, repentance, struggle or warfare against sin in all its forms, walking in the ways of the Lord, bearing the fruits of repentance, multiplying the talents given into our stewardship, clothing ourselves in the new man. “Whoever is in Christ is a new creation” (2Cor 5:17). “Behold, I make all things new” (Apok 21:5), says the Lord. The foundation of piety is a deep knowledge of oneself, of one’s image and likeness, knowledge of the entire depth of one’s fall, one’s helplessness without God, the only One who can restore us from our fall and cleanse us “from every defilement of flesh and spirit” (2Cor 7:1), to cleanse, sanctify, and make us a new creation. Lord, help us! Lord, save us!

* * *

We have been given much mercy by God, but much is also required of us—change for the better, much repentance, zeal, love, and every virtue, so that God’s man may be perfect, ready for every good work.

* * *

True repentance requires not a repetition of the sins from which one has repented, but steadfast pursuit along the path of virtue. Yet it often happens that a man repents of irritation, malice, and ill will, but soon is drawn into them again; he repents of intemperance, but soon falls into the same thing; he repents of partiality and attachment to a person, but a moment later—the same thing again.

* * *

“Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Mt 5:48). Diligent, daily, and hourly repentance should lead us to amendment, to virtue and perfection; day by day, hour by hour we must grow better. Repentance should produce sighs and tears, as in the publican and the harlot.

* * *

“My foot stands on level ground” (Ps 25:12). This verse of the psalm came to my mind, and I pondered it in my heart through meditation and thought: oh, if only my foot (my soul) might stand firm on the perfect righteousness of God’s law, on the righteousness of grace. Grant, O Lord, this mercy to your servant!

* * *

“Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding garment? And he said to the servants: Bind his hands and feet, take him away, and cast him into outer darkness; there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth; for many are called, but few are chosen” (Mt 22:12-14). Our Lord Christ compared Himself to a holy Bridegroom, radiant, light-bearing, eternal, who deigned to betroth Himself with an eternal, incorruptible, life-giving betrothal in the future unending life and here on earth pre-betroths Himself to a faithful soul. To betroth Himself to souls faithful yet defiled by countless sins, deformed by sin and turned from God, become strangers to Him by their sins. The Lord has granted them a beautiful, incorruptible, spiritual garment in the Mystery of Baptism and the sealing of the Holy Spirit through anointing with holy chrism. But man again defiled the garment of Baptism and again turned from God and clothed himself in the foul rags of the passions, having torn and dishonored his betrothal to God. Then the Lord, in His mercy, was pleased to grant him again the wedding garment in sincere repentance and communion of the Holy Mysteries of Christ, and man again receives the incorruptible garment and unites himself most closely with the heavenly Bridegroom, so as to be zealously careful not to stain the wedding garment again and to live in holiness. Who are these souls betrothed to Christ, the heavenly Bridegroom—where are they? These souls are you, brothers and sisters. I ask you: is your wedding garment adorned in purity? Have you adorned your souls with good deeds? With what will you appear at the wedding feast, in the Kingdom of Heaven? Are you preparing yourselves unceasingly for there, where the beautiful Bridegroom awaits us, the King of angels and all the saints? Prepare yourselves at once; time flows and draws you toward the end of life, and then you will have to give account to the Master of the house in righteousness for your whole life. Yes, I say to you: let us all prepare ourselves so as to acquire a garment for our soul—pure, holy, pleasing to the heavenly Bridegroom. Amen.

* * *

Fidelity and devotion to the Lord are required of every rational creature; but to be faithful and devoted to the Lord, you must cast off attachment to your passionate flesh and the adulterous and sinful world, which bewitches us with momentary pleasures. You must cease to be a slave to the belly, to the theater, to cards, to the circus, a slave to various debaucheries, to tobacco, a slave to silver and gold and fanciful fashions. Tell me, you lover of the theater, will you be justified at God’s judgment in your attachment to it? No, because on account of it you forgot God, God’s temple, God’s word, prayer, your high calling according to your soul, created in the image and likeness of God; you forgot eternal life and preparation for it, almsgiving, virginity, chastity, and sobriety. And you, lover of profit and extortioner, will you appear righteous before God when He judges you according to your works? No, your gold will crush you, your extortion, your greed, your avarice will overwhelm you; you will be a stranger to God’s mercy, having shown no mercy to your neighbor. You will be cast into the fire of Gehenna, and you will be denied even a drop of water to cool and quench the flames of hell. And you, fornicator, will you receive forgiveness at the judgment if you do not repent and do not abandon your fornication, do not weep over it, do not wash it away by almsgiving and self-denial? So all who are attached, clinging to the shadow of this world, to its deceptive passions, will not be forgiven unless they repent. O how many who have sinned and repented have been forgiven! How many former fornicators, murderers, extortioners, and those who repented have entered into paradise and enjoy blessedness! How great is God’s love for mankind! How immense, infinitely immense, is the redemptive power of the cross, the Blood of the Lamb of God Jesus Christ, poured out for the world! By what will the unbelieving, the proud, the hardened, the disobedient, the despairing justify themselves? For them God’s mercy was ready, had they humbly turned to God, who desires that none should perish, but wishes all to be saved and to come to knowledge of the truth. Lord, forgive us priests, who for lack of time “lay hands hastily” (1Tim 5:22) on those who confess (their sins). Do not judge us for this and for much else.

What draws us near to God, or what makes us proper, true children of God? The living image of God, placed or implanted in our soul, the covenant of faith into which we entered with God through Baptism, having been born of water and Spirit and become God’s own, the mutual obligation on both sides: on the Lord’s part—to have mercy upon us and to educate us spiritually for the Kingdom of Heaven, for eternal life in God; on our part—the desire and effort to love God, who loved us to the extreme, to please Him by keeping His commandments, and to live holily, turning from sins and offering Him repentance. This is what makes us God’s own, true children of His. But sin constantly strives to estrange us from God, to withdraw, to cool us toward Him, to make us wild, like beasts and animals. “The ox knows its owner, and the donkey its master’s crib”, but man often does not know his Lord (Is 1:3).

Part 4

Let each one change, be transformed within; the proud man humble himself and count himself the least of men, never be exalted in anything and do not boast. For what good do you have that is not from God? All good is from Him. Change envy into goodwill; if you live lewdly, at once abandon your uncleanness and strive for purity of thoughts and desires; if your will is vicious, correct it and be spotless within; if you love money, abandon your attachment and hard-heartedness toward the poor and be merciful; if you are quarrelsome and ill-tempered, be modest and live in peace with all; if you are lazy in prayer and virtue, be henceforth diligent; if you are a drunkard, henceforth live soberly; if you steal, you yourself give; if you are deceitful, be simple and sincere. Let all ascend to the heights of virtue as to a mountain, and cast off your sins like mud, like filth, like decay and the source of decay.

* * *

Walk always before God, as before the face of the Father, who is all-good, all-powerful, quick to listen, always ready to fulfill the righteous desires and petitions of our hearts.

* * *

Think and reason that in heaven all your thoughts, feelings, and dispositions of your soul are known—when you sit, lie down, walk, work, pray, read, converse—all, absolutely all are known. Therefore live carefully, think and feel rightly, live by conscience and by the commandments of the Savior and God, deal with people sincerely, simply, without guile, with goodwill, purely and holily, pray to God and the saints earnestly and with reverence. Amen.

* * *

To you, O man, every day, every hour, every moment the Lord, the Creator of creation, pleases in all ways: He gives you light with the sun, caresses you with the gentle light of the clear moon, with life-giving air and pleasantly refreshing, with fire and water for every need of yours, and with grains and trees, and root crops, and fruits lying on the earth (and in what countless multitude of pleasant flavors!) and with flesh of every kind of animal and all kinds of fish and birds. And what fabrics—how many fabrics the Lord has granted you for covering and clothing your flesh or for your adornment! How many metals, and precious stones for your adornment and for holy temples! Thus God pleases you in all things for your being and well-being and enjoyment. Are you not also obligated to please Him for your own good—to live by conscience and God’s Law, by His commandments and counsels, according to His Gospel, according to the direction of your spiritual mother, the Church of God? Do you please Him? It is pleasant and delightful for you to breathe the air and be lit by the sun, to eat pleasant bread for sustenance, vigor and strength, to drink various drinks. What then do you do for the Lord that is pleasant and pleasing to Him? Although He has need of nothing of yours, yet He asks to be pleased by you for your own sake, because in this pleasing Him is your life, your peace, your light, your strength, your joy, your blessedness. Abandon folly—and you will live; correct your understanding in knowledge—and you will inherit eternal life.

* * *

The Lord loved us with infinite love, having come down from heaven and become man for us; and how little faith and love to Him there is in us, and in many none at all, because they are wholly absorbed in worldly and carnal passions. Behold the holy saints loved Him with self-denial, with fervor, with what struggles! For this reason they are blessed and the Church honors them eternally.

* * *

“God, who did not spare His own Son, but gave Him up for us all—how will He not also give us all things with Him?” (Rom 8:32). And how should we not sacrifice for Him, for communion with Him all our worldly attachments, all our preferences, our love for family and friends, for wealth, for honor, for food and clothing, for games and diversions? Whom and what should we envy, having in ourselves God, the Source of life and all good things?

* * *

Who should be dearest to us above all? Is it not the Lord, our Creator and all-good Providencea? What an abyss of life, holiness, and light dwells in Him! And if you consider carefully all His works to the best of your ability—what goodness the Lord has shown and constantly shows in them, and what wisdom and wondrous providence for all! What a wonderful book is this visible nature, ever proclaiming to the attentive, thinking, and believing one the perfections of the Creator, His infinite mind! But what is most wonderful—the Lord, as the greatest proof of His goodness, created man in His own image and likeness, with reason, with freedom to love one another mutually and to love the Creator and Providence-Giver, to appreciate His works, to be grateful and devoted to Him until the end of life, ordained for immortality. In it, in the human soul, seek especially the illumination of God’s goodness, wisdom, and divine majesty. For what is more precious and exalted in man than to be an image and likeness of God and to manifest His perfection in oneself? Therefore the Lord alone is worthy of our highest and wholehearted love and self-sacrifice. “Whoever wants to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me” (Mk 8:34). But what do we find in creatures, in our passions and lusts of flesh and blood, in our attachments to the world? We find constant deception, spiritual delusion, decay, sorrow, darkness and confinement, disappointment and boredom, emptiness, and finally eternal torment, if we do not come to ourselves, repent, and turn to God, the Source of our life and all good. There we constantly find deception and harm in excessive belly-pleasures, in foods, in drinks, in games, spectacles, debaucheries, in reading nothing but worldly books of light content. How many after death will groan and weep inconsolably over having squandered the time given for so great a purpose—namely, for the salvation of the soul, for appropriation to God, for repentance, separation from all sin, for every good deed! While we still have time, let us awake from our sinful and ruinous sleep, from our sinful daydreaming. “Behold, the Bridegroom comes at midnight, and blessed is the servant whom he finds watching…”

* * *

The chief commandment of God’s Law is love, and it must be fulfilled without delay; but the devil, knowing this, has opposed and continues to oppose his unclean carnal love, which he has taught from the beginning and teaches even now, the love of this world—adulterous love, the love of worldly honor: “I will give you all this glory if you bow down and worship me”, the devil said to the Lord (Mt 4:9).

How many varieties of sins and passions nest in the depths of your soul when the Lord opens the eyes of your heart to see them. Lord, “cleanse me from my hidden faults, and keep your servant also from willful sins” (Ps 18:13-14). “Foxes” (demons) “have holes and birds of the sky” (demons) “have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” (Mt 8:20). But what a reward is prepared for the pure in heart! How the Lord glorifies them even in this present life! And what He has prepared for them in the future!

* * *

Your heart must be wholly embraced and consumed by the love of God and must have no place for carnal uncleanness, blind, senseless, ruinous for soul and body. Meanwhile the enemy tempts and draws you toward carnal lawlessness, inflames and burns you with thoughts and imagination of vile sin; but you resist with all your strength and do not allow yourself to be led away by them, lest you become defiled and anger God.

* * *

Do you not prefer the creature to the Creator and love the creature more than the Creator? It is necessary that every person come to true understanding and learn to sincerely honor and love the eternal personal loving Creator of creatures, and for His love’s sake despise earthly, partial love.

* * *

Do not love the gifts more than the Giver; do not love perishable food more than imperishable food—the most pure Body and Blood of Christ. For some love their dainty foods more than this heavenly, imperishable, life-giving sustenance.

* * *

One must abhor every sin and have no heart’s inclination or attachment (love) to it—for example, to food, drink, and various unsuitable things. Instead, one must constantly have reverent and grateful thoughts of God, of His ceaseless goodnesses, of His sweetest promises in this age and the age to come, of the incomparability of future heavenly goods in comparison with these present, passing, perishable, crude ones. One must always repent of all deviations from God’s Law and of negligence in fulfilling it.

* * *

You, Christian, must be master and lord in your own heart; you must rule over all the passions and kill them, and grant dominion to grace and every good thing, especially love of neighbor, so that you love God above all, for love of God is tested by love of neighbor: “whoever does not love their brother or sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen” (1Jn 4:20), and we have this commandment from Him: that the one who loves God must also love his brother. “Whoever hates his brother or sister is a murderer” (1Jn 3:15).

* * *

One Supremely Desired, the One who is the goal of all desires—the Lord, pure, incorruptible, holy, above all worlds, eternal Desire, whom all the saints desired strongly, irrevocably, irresistibly. He who is the unwavering Desire of all the countless ranks of angels. But we have so many charming, deceptive, unclean, perishable desires, on account of which we constantly fall away from love of God and neighbor! Vain, wretched, worthless people, who have turned your whole life into a lie, your thoughts and desires, your strivings, who have abandoned the one thing necessary—the grace of God, who have abandoned the well of living water and dug for yourselves broken cisterns, in which there is no living water, only muddy, unclean, bitter, dead water of the passions! O how sin and all our passions have darkened us, deformed us, and killed us! We need illumination, cleansing, sanctification, ceaseless repentance, self-knowledge, especially knowledge of our countless sins. “My iniquity I acknowledge, and my sin is ever before me” (Ps 37:19). Glory to you, Lord, our illumination, our love, our life’s treasure!

* * *

Have you, O priest, wholly appropriated yourself to Christ with all your mind, with all your soul and all your heart, so that He may appropriate you to Himself, dwell in you, and make His dwelling in you?

* * *

“I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ” (Phil 3:8). O the sublime, heavenly, Christian philosophy of the heaven-sent Paul! Count all earthly things—human beauty, perishable wealth, the delights of food and drink, beautiful clothing, gold and silver—count all earthly enticements that attract the eye and the senses as refuse, so that you may gain Christ! For you cannot possess the heart of Christ if you are attached to anything earthly. Behold the heavenly wisdom! Imitate it.

* * *

Do not be angry at inanimate things and do not curse them when they do not arrange themselves as needed and become an obstacle to your work. If you grow accustomed to being angry at things, you will become angry at people, even without cause, and will fall away from love. Love is the very essence of all God’s Law. “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Mk 12:33).

* * *

The Lord says: “Love your enemies, bless those who curse you and who do you wrong” (Mt 5:44). So love your enemies—the Poles, the Finns, the Georgians, the Armenians, the Jews, the Caucasian peoples. They hate bitterly and are consumed with devilish hatred; they are pitiable, wretched, subject to passions and a hundred times in need of our compassion and sympathy. Hatred has blinded the eyes of their hearts; they war even against God, who commanded all to love. Love every man who hates you, and pray for him; “overcome evil with good”, according to the apostle (Rom 12:21).

* * *

Whoever grows accustomed to being irritated and angered at various things that don’t satisfy him (things that fall or break, don’t fit his measure, etc.), becomes accustomed to being irritated at people who for some reason don’t please him, who oppose him intentionally or unintentionally. You must bear all things with indifference, and at the slightest impulse to irritation, repent to God and ask Him to help us weaklings.

* * *

If a king or any authority, spiritual or secular, errs greatly and acts unlawfully, out of weak conscience or lack of character, with visible failures, do not despise them, do not curse them, do not demean them in words, but pray for them to the Lord, that He “will heal the weak and supply what is lacking”, for without God we cannot do anything truly good and beneficial.

* * *

“Blessed are you when people insult you” (Mt 5:11). The Lord blesses those who are reviled for His holy name, for He Himself was reviled by the scribes and Pharisees and slandered. So rejoice and do not grieve, do not be offended if people insult you and bring all sorts of lies upon you. “Great is your reward in heaven. Rejoice and be glad” (Mt 5:12). This was lacking for you: people did not reproach you, but only praised you. So when people praise you, think about how you might not be condemned by God because everyone speaks only good of you. Remember Christ God, “who when He was reviled, did not revile in return; when He suffered, He did not threaten, but committed Himself to Him who judges righteously” (1Pet 2:23). Amen.

* * *

“If you are offering your gift at the altar… go first and be reconciled…” (Mt 5:23-24). We must not harbor enmity toward anyone, but must have an attitude of forbearance, patience, all-forgiving, full of love, so that God may forgive us as well.

Part 5

“Do not judge, so that you will not be judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and by the measure you use it will be measured to you” (Mt 7:1-2). Lord, grant us not to judge the living, still less the dead. You alone are the righteous Judge—as the Creator and Lawgiver of the living and the dead. Grant us to judge ourselves strictly and to ask forgiveness and remission of sins, voluntary and involuntary, for the departed.

* * *

See how the Mother of God exalts a love-of-God humility: “He has shown his mighty power, she says, the Lord has looked upon the lowliness of his servant. From now on all generations will call me blessed” (Lk 1:48), and how she condemns pride, by which so many angels fell from the Thrones, Dominions, Virtues, and Powers. “He has shown the strength of his arm, the Theotokos says, he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts” (Lk 1:51). Who are these proud in their heart-thoughts? The fallen Lucifer and his angels, the entire kingdom of demons. O how many more must be victims of suffering and death, human victims, to fill the number of the fallen! And how many that number grows even now! How many victims of death, especially in these years of lawlessness, impunity, and terror! How many innocent children dying each day! How many killed for faith, for the tsar, and for the fatherland! All of them fill the number of the fallen angels. Lord, how righteous, good, wise, wondrous, and incomprehensible are Your works. Death reaps and mows down countless victims. Lord, keep Your Church unshakeable.

* * *

The wondrous, wise prophetic song of the Mother of God: “My soul magnifies the Lord… He has looked on the lowliness of His servant; for behold, from henceforth all generations will call me blessed…” (Lk 1:46-48). First of all She glorifies God because He gave Her humility and looked upon that humility. The Most Holy Virgin corrected the tendency of Eve toward pride and the desire to equal God through profound humility. Her Son and God “humbled Himself, becoming obedient even to death, and death on a cross; He emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, becoming as men” (Phil 2:7-8). For humility He exalted the Virgin Mary, making Her His Mother—He created for Her a greatness beyond all imagining.

* * *

Serve people without partiality and willingly—whether rich or poor, healthy or sick, fair or ugly, noble or simple, believing and remembering that all are members of Christ and your limbs, and that for impartial and zealous service you will receive a reward from Christ the Founder of Ascetic Struggle. “Whoever gives drink to even the least one, though it be just a cup of water,” in His name, “shall not lose his reward” (Mt 10:42), He says. In serving your neighbor, partiality sometimes arises—or laziness, reluctance, or anger and irritation, or a desire for reward. Know that your reward is Christ.

* * *

When you serve in church, you serve with reverence; but when you serve in simple homes and among simple people, you serve carelessly, hastily, and without heart, as if the same God, the great and awesome Heart-Knower, is not present both in the church and in every place. Reform yourself and be sincere and reverent everywhere.

* * *

Take from me, O Lord, all the cunning thought of this visible life. How wearisome is to me this constant cunning thought of the visible (though there is the invisible) life, which draws us away from the real, invisible, eternal life. We constantly see in the world greed for the visible, passionate striving, envy of the wealthy, and still more acquiring without end for themselves and not giving of their riches to the poor, or even taking from them. Be rich in God and do not envy those who grow rich to the point of madness and forgetting God.

* * *

Do not regard the multitude of beggars pestering you with their requests as your enemies on account of your attachment to wealth, but as truly friends of God and your friends, for whom eternal, incorruptible reward is being prepared for you in heaven. Do not regard them as idlers, but rather regard yourself as such, because you freely eat and drink in abundance at many tables. Pity not their money, but them as truly poor and wretched, having nowhere to lay their heads, going to exhaustion for small alms. “Freely you have received; freely give” (Mt 10:8).

* * *

I was in villages and saw peasant life. What poverty everywhere, what rags with countless patches! What worn faces from lack of food! What sorrowful faces! What, are these stepchildren, not the children of God? The wealthy do not even want to look at them, do not want to clothe them, feed them, console them! What a soul the wealthy man has! How repugnant it is to God the lover of mankind! Do not flatter the rich, do not fawn on him, do not envy him, but weep for him as the most wretched of men.

* * *

I compare mentally the city, especially capitals, and villages, and marvel at the contrast between them. In those—the cities—there is senseless luxury, millions spent on unnecessary splendor, brilliance and elegance, while in the villages there is extreme poverty, huts and cottages, mostly thatched with straw, the simplest furnishings. For food and drink, black bread and whatever soup God provides. Serving both God and mammon, the passion for acquisition makes man an idolater: “Greed… is idolatry”, says the apostle (Col 3:5). Remember how avarice led Judas. This is the enemy to God and man—the love of money. Flee avarice—it makes man stone-hearted, an enemy to God and men.

* * *

In the rich man mentioned in the Gospel, who departed sorrowful from the Lord, we see, just as many wealthy men now do, who seemingly believe and love the Lord, yet fall into distrust and hard-heartedness at once when charity to the poor is asked of them, and they depart from the preacher in sorrow, preferring to live in wealth rather than with God.

* * *

“He heaps together” (earthly treasures) “and knows not who shall gather them” (Ps 38:7), says the prophet David. A pitiable state of the rich man’s soul. “Who will get what you have prepared for yourself?” (Lk 12:20), the Lord says to the rich man in the parable. A fearful state! He has prepared immense wealth, yet lost God and his soul and prepared it for eternal torment. “Sell everything you have and give it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me, taking up your cross” (Mk 10:21), the Lord says to the rich young man.

* * *

Remember the Savior’s words about the wealthy, how hard it is for those trusting in riches “to enter the Kingdom of God” (Mk 10:23), and that their portion is eternal torment for attachment to wealth and hard-heartedness toward the poor, for they depart from Christ in sorrow when asked to sell their property and give to the poor, of whom they take no care. The wealthy in general are pitiable, having corrupted their nature, having become wild, placing life not in God but in accumulation, ready to strip the last shirt from the poor. Our wealth is God and His righteousness and mercy.

* * *

The chief ailment of the rich young man mentioned in the Gospel was this: he was passionately devoted to profit-seeking, to avarice—from head to toe—and his heart was not merciful but hard and uncompassionate toward the poor, and he lied to the Lord the Heart-Knower when he said he had kept all the commandments since youth: he loved neither God nor his neighbor; he loved only himself, loved to gather and accumulate, not to give to the poor. He saw the hungry and did not feed them, the naked and did not clothe them. In general, he did not help anyone in need. You see, he grudged what he had gathered, grudged to give it. When he prayed, he thought of money, not God; he thought only of the earth, never of how to love God and neighbor more fervently, to do good more zealously. He kept the commandments only for show, to appear righteous to others. O wretched soul of mine, flee such hypocrisy and double-mindedness as well!

* * *

Lord, what wealth You have given to man! You gave Yourself, all the grace of the Holy Spirit, the future kingdom with its eternal goods and joys—yet earthly wealth, attachment to it, deprives man of God and eternal life; it is an enemy to man. Think of it therefore according to the teaching and example of Christ and the apostles, how the saints regarded earthly wealth, how they willingly abandoned it, how they despised it, counted it as refuse, as a great obstacle to love of God and the salvation of the soul. Is the spiritual wealth not yet enough for you? God Himself has given you all of Himself, has given Himself to “those who fear Him” (Ps 110:5)—and you listen to the enemy’s flattery and envy the rich, growing richer day by day and losing—whom? The Lord Himself!

* * *

Two lives, two forms of existence, are appointed by God to chosen men—temporal, earthly, and eternal, heavenly. This life is given to us without regard to us; the future life cannot be given to anyone without him, without his faith and desire, without good works. One must believe firmly and constantly in the future resurrection of the dead and in the future infinite life; one must prepare oneself for it, lay up a store of good deeds and almsgiving, for “the merciful will obtain mercy” (Mt 5:7). That is why the Lord and the Gospel showed to the rich young man desiring to know the way to the Kingdom of God the path of almsgiving, and generous almsgiving at that. Yet to the young man the word about selling his property and giving to the poor seemed too great for him to bear, and he departed from the heavenly Teacher in sorrow. On this account the Lord said that “it is hard for the rich to enter the Kingdom of God”, for one cannot make confidence in soulless wealth and earthly happiness one’s goal instead of the heavenly homeland, instead of spiritual poverty. As for me, in place of all earthly wealth, honor, beauty, and pleasures—Christ God is for me the true, eternal, inalienable wealth, says the faithful Christian. Truly!—a possession for the man who believes and is devoted. “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain” (Phil 1:21).

* * *

A man who envies another’s wealth or comfortable life thereby reveals his own attachment to such things and the false direction of his mind and heart, and draws away from God in his heart and becomes an idolater. Look rather at the peasant: his drink is water, sometimes tea, and not for everyone, only according to each one’s means. His possessions are two or three cattle, a horse, and a few sheep for food and clothing. And if you consider the constant fires that burn entire villages to the ground, you wonder how the poor peasants manage to live at all. City folk are drowning in wealth; the villages are drowning in fire and poverty. The villagers—these are martyrs, sorrowful people forever. Many of these last ones will be first in the age to come.

Do not envy the miserly and hard-hearted wealthy who have grown rich unjustly at the expense of the poor people. They perish in vanity and in their riches and do not have God and have completely fallen away from Him. Remember that “the earth and all things on it will burn” (2Pet 3:10). Do not compete with those growing rich in body while heedless of their immortal souls, but pray for them, the perishing, darkened in soul, and always keep God in your heart—the true wealth of the believing man. Yes, amen.

* * *

He who envies the wealth of others thereby reveals a hidden desire to seize their livelihood and wealth for himself, along with the emptiness of his mind and heart and the lack of faith in God, by whom every man lives, and of love for weak neighbors. If God were the wealth of his heart, he would never envy the earthly and perishable wealth of his neighbors, seeing it as vain and a great hindrance to the salvation of his soul. For it is exceedingly hard for the rich to enter the Kingdom of God, yet easy for them to perish, like the Gospel’s wealthy reveler or the man who “had a good harvest in his fields and thought to himself: what shall I do? I have no place to store my crops” (Lk 12:16-17). Read the Gospel and seek wherein lies the wisdom of the true Christian: not in spiritual poverty and self-denial? “As possessing nothing, yet possessing everything”, says the apostle (2Cor 6:10).

* * *

“Shine in our hearts the true sun of Your righteousness”. The Church prays to the Lord on behalf of every Orthodox Christian that He teach us completely in the righteousness of God, so that it may shine like the sun in our heart and soul and thoughts, so that there remain in us not a single dark passion of sin, not a single cunning thought, no ill feeling toward anyone, so that man be girded about the loins with truth and truth bind his ribs, so that he “love righteousness and hate wickedness” (Hebr 1:9). This is what it means: “Shine in our hearts the true sun of Your righteousness, O Lord”.

* * *

Lord! Do we grieve You, infinitely good and ever benefiting us in all ways, with every sin and every passion? Correct us by those means You know and show us worthy of You, so that we may live worthily of our Christian calling and election.

At Your feet, O Lord, we lie in tears of repentance with all the holy hierarchs, prophets, priest-martyrs, apostles, and all the righteous who have wept—and we ask mercy from You through their prayers, and the salvation of our souls, and the Kingdom of Heaven, though unworthy of it on account of our sins. I bring to You as our intercession Your most pure Mother, and the ranks of Angels, and all rational creation—have mercy and save us sinners by Your grace and mercy. Yes, amen.

* * *

Lord, save the Russian people, the Orthodox Church in Russia—they are perishing: everywhere debauchery, everywhere unbelief, blasphemy, lawlessness. Lord, all is in Your hands; You are the Almighty!

The Responsibility of the Christian Man Before God

Part 1

What dignity is man’s, what dignity is the human soul, when the Lord deigns to grant him communion with the most pure Body and Blood of Himself and makes him His temple, a temple of the Holy Trinity! Think on this, mortal men, and learn of immortality granted to you by the Victor over death. “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life” (Jn 6:54).

* * *

The soul is a creative principle: both awake and asleep, especially in sleep, it constantly creates, imagines, or represents all sorts of beings, things, and forms of nature most diverse, produces or sees different events so that you wonder where they come from, how they are created, from what inexhaustible source. This creative property of the soul is wondrous. Where do these diverse manifestations come from, these things, these forms of nature? Who presents them to the soul’s eye? It is strange that a sleeping man, not using any senses while asleep, yet sees and hears and touches and uses the organ of speech, which during sleep is completely bound and inactive. The soul during sleep acts independently, independent of the body, as the ruling living principle. “How wondrous are Your works, Lord” (Ps 138:14)!

* * *

The human soul is of beyond measure worth, truly and by God’s righteousness, yet people value it very little or not at all, do not care for it, do not cleanse it from the thorns of the passions, do not care for repentance (repent), for cleansing, for adornment (the wedding garment), for confirmation, for striving with all strength and ability toward heaven, toward heavenly life on earth, as the saints did: “our citizenship is in heaven” (Phil 3:20), for the fulfillment of every virtue. Most people as if deliberately give themselves to every passion and abomination, every vice, and remain unrepentant. Woe to those men who bury their talents in the earth and do not multiply the pledge given by God for their own blessedness, for God’s glory, for His infinite goodness and bounty. Read, Christian, with attention and often the Gospel; understand it and lay God’s words in your heart.

* * *

Only the Creator knows all the dignity of the human soul, whom He created in His image and likeness, and only He can worthily appreciate all her boundless love and devotion to Him, the Lord God. Blessed is the Christian who will understand this and with all his heart cleave to God, his Creator and Redeemer, and endure every trial in love and devotion to Him, as Job of the Old Testament, as the apostles, hierarchs, martyrs, and all the ascetics who pleased God and were deemed worthy of heavenly citizenship for their faithfulness and devotion.

* * *

All organic and animal life in the world lives its own peculiar life to the glory of God, proclaiming His wisdom, goodness, beauty, the first and unbeginning Life. A special, rational, personal, eternal, blessed life is given by the primordial and unbeginning Life to live only to angels and to the rational, chosen human race, obedient to the commands of the Creator—that is, to the holy saints. And this is the life we must attain, according to the guidance and commandments of the Creator and with His almighty help, each day and hour—and we are commanded to watch constantly, “because your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour” (1Pet 5:8).

* * *

The Lord wants you to grow spiritually and reach maturity like an ear of grain, or to flourish and be fragrant before God with every spiritual virtue, like a beautiful flower of the fields and valleys. This is your calling, man. But at the same time the Lord wants you to avoid every stench of sin through repentance and tears, through self-denial and constant watchfulness over yourself, through struggling against thoughts and sinful inclinations and passions, for “the Kingdom of Heaven has been forcefully advancing, and forceful men lay hold of it” (Mt 11:12).

* * *

Out of compassion and infinite love God mingled Himself with human nature, to deliver man, created in God’s image, from kinship and admixture with the devil; but man, taught by the devil, mingled himself passionately with every kind of brute flesh, not to mention unlawful and unnatural mingling with human flesh. He mingled himself even with wood and stone, creating stone and wooden gods, saying to wood: “You are my father”, and to stone: “You gave me birth” (Jer 2:27). What absurdity is sin! What lawlessness, what mockery of the enemy over man! Deliver us, Lord, from such madness.

* * *

Eternal divine love unceasingly surrounds us, builds us up, keeps us, directs us, helps us, strengthens us, makes us victors over enemies both visible and invisible, and heals our sicknesses, cleanse our sins, brings peace to our souls, enlightens us, comforts us. Glory to infinite love!

* * *

In our mind, in our heart, and in the movements of our fallen will there are almost constantly moving and acting sinful imaginings, imaginings of this or that passion, which from earliest youth nest in us, grow, and take root. Therefore it is the duty of every male and female Christian to watch themselves strictly, to constantly drive away these sinful imaginings, this spiritual delusion, this devilish abomination, and to guard their spiritual and bodily vessel in holiness and honor, so as to be forever temples of the Holy Spirit. “You were bought at a price”, says the apostle, “so glorify God… in your bodies and in your souls, which are God’s” (1Cor 6:20). Conduct yourselves “worthy of the calling you have received” (Eph 4:1).

* * *

“All mankind is vanity”, says David (Ps 38:12). “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity”, says Solomon (Eccl 1:2). Even a great part of the Christians who have received from Christ the graceful new law serve vanity.

* * *

Remember the great supper and the endless good things prepared by the Master of the house and the invited guests through His mercy: all declined because of their worldly attachments, and therefore none of the invited will taste His supper. This is terrible! What unbelief, what disrespect toward the Master! What sloth, what absurd attachments! And yet this is how it was and how it will be! All go the broad path of easy sin; all avoid the narrow, sorrowful path, the path of purification, of trial, of preparation!

And even the dust of the earth will testify against us at God’s judgment. “And shake off the dust from your feet as a testimony against them” (Mk 6:11). My God, how many witnesses of our impiety! Where can we flee? Where can we hide?

All the saints will be witnesses to the salvation-bringing power of Christian faith against all our learned worldly ignoramuses who boast of their false education, against all non-Orthodox Christians, especially those who are only called Orthodox Christians, having long betrayed their faith in their deeds. That is why the martyrs are called in Greek μάρτυρες—witnesses. Remember, Christian, how many witnesses stand against you at Christ’s judgment.

People are in upheaval, the elements are in upheaval, air, water, earth, fire are in upheaval—because of men’s sins, the elements soon to be burned will be destroyed, and the earth and all things upon it will burn. Sins have multiplied to their measure. There is no longer the possibility to live in peace. Church of God, Bride of Christ—adorn yourself to stand bright before Your beautiful Bridegroom, incorruptible, eternal.

* * *

It was frightfully heavy for all creation at the hour of death of the God-man: not in vain “the whole earth shook, the rocks split, the sun went dark, tombs broke open, and many bodies of the holy dead were raised, and having come out of the tombs after his resurrection appeared to many” (Mt 27:51-53). But creation held firmly in the hand of the Almighty and still holds… waiting for the end, when the human race becomes a stinking corpse and will have no reason to exist, when the wheat is finally ripened and ready for the final harvest… Then it will be said: “Put in your sickle and reap, because the time to reap has come” (Apok 14:15).

In the end we all must leave this brief age, pass into eternity, appear before the holy and righteous Judge and Creator of all, God, and give account of our lives. How and with what shall we appear? What judgment and verdict of His shall we hear for all eternity? This is what we must think about more often, this is what we must care about. O, let all think on this future fate and prepare good works, spiritual fruits, lest anyone appear as a barren tree.

Christ raised Lazarus from the dead by His word—which means He is the Creator of Lazarus, the Creator of mankind. He raised the widow’s son by His word—which means by that same word He created the world out of nothing. He commanded the winds and waters by His word—which means He created them by His word, and all things obey it. He walked on the waves of the sea as on dry land—which means He is the Creator of the seas, lakes, rivers, and all waters. He turned fire into dew, water into wine, rivers into blood, dust into gnats, and brought frogs from the sea to punish the Egyptians—which means He is the Creator of the elements. Therefore by that same word of the Lord the earth in the last time will become a blazing pyre and the elements will be burned up and destroyed. Thus by the word of the Lord all the dead will rise. Is this marvelous creativity and God’s providence over the world clear even to the godless?

Lent has ended, the Great Fast is over. The feast has come celebrating Christ’s raising of the righteous Lazarus from the dead, a sign of Christ’s resurrection and of the universal resurrection yet to come. In that future resurrection all will begin a new eternal life—for the righteous and the repentant, blessing; for sinners who disbelieve and do not repent, eternal torment, as Christ Himself declared. His word does not pass away. The righteous Lazarus lived several years after his resurrection, was made bishop, and died in advanced old age. Everyone must prepare for the life to come. Man was created for endless life; only sin brought death into the world and a brief life full of sickness and sorrow. But the Lamb of God took upon Himself the sin of the world—Christ conquered death.

Glory to the greatest feast of Christ’s resurrection from the dead and to the triumph of resurrection!

Glory to the future universal resurrection of mankind. Let no one dare to darken the glory of this worldwide event. No godless persons, no Tolstoy—an irresistible glory covers this event, and the Church celebrates it worthily, alone in all the world. How meager, how impoverished, how puppet-like is the celebration of Christ’s resurrection among Catholics and our schismatics, because it is false, man-made, not from the Holy Spirit.

* * *

Since our enemy the devil has become all in many and seeks to be all in all humanity through a darkening, defiling, demonizing, corrupting, deadening, and deforming power, and seeks to enslave the entire human race to himself, the all-good, all-just, all-wise, and all-powerful Lord wishes to be all to humanity in combat: in holiness, righteousness, conquering power, victory, enlightenment, cleansing, renewal, fragrance, strengthening, deification. Glory to You, Trinity our God! Sin has infected the whole human race—soul and body: the mind, heart, and will, the physical organs, all the senses—sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch—sin has infected all the elements: air, water, fire, earth, and light—all is defiled by human sin. Therefore “the earth and all the deeds on it will be burned up” (2Pet 3:10), and there will be a new heaven and new earth—incorruptible—and “creation itself will be freed from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God” (Rom 8:21).

“From now on I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom” (Mt 26:29). The Lord speaks thus as man: He foresaw a new heaven and new earth in which all the chosen will be renewed and will have all things new—a new city, the spiritual Jerusalem, new food and new drink, which are Christ Himself and the Holy Spirit, and a new Sun, or Lamp, which is Christ. The current fruit of the vine—Christ’s Blood—is the symbolic drink of the future true communion with Christ in His kingdom (its likeness). How truly worthy is it to partake of You in the unwaning day of Your kingdom.

* * *

How oppressive to the body and dark to the soul when light fails altogether—the absence of the sun. How everything freezes from the extreme cold, how it dies! How sorrowful, painful, dreary! And what of the human soul without God’s grace, without prayer, without God’s Word, without worship, without the communion of the Holy Mysteries! Only death will show many the destitution, poverty, and wretchedness of their souls!

* * *

O Lord, how the human soul will grieve one day—how it will regret—that when given freedom to enrich itself with theology, divine contemplation, and love of God, to rise above all earthly and corruptible things and inherit the Heavenly Kingdom, it voluntarily subjected itself to corruption and fleshly passions! When it could have soared high, it sank low—so very low, into the abyss!

Terrible are the words of the Lord Jesus Christ: “where their worm” (of sinners) “does not die and the fire is not quenched” (Mk 9:44). These will be fulfilled in all their truth and power upon unrepentant sinners—adulterers, murderers, thieves, and others. O sinner, weep with tears of blood for the terrible calamity that comes upon you. Whether you believe or not, this calamity will come to you and creep upon you unaware. “It will come…on a day he does not expect” (unexpectedly), “and at an hour he does not know. And will cut him in pieces and appoint him his portion with the hypocrites; there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Mt 24:50-51).

* * *

All unbelieving and unrepentant sinners await eternal punishment, eternal torment, “prepared for the devil and his angels” (Mt 25:41), and justly so, for they did evil and fulfilled his wicked and ruinous will. Each of us experiences within himself the punishment for sin: disturbance, sorrow, and anguish (Rom 2:9).

* * *

The present life is a spiritual school, a struggle, an effort, a battle against sin and the spirits of malice in the heavenly places who war against us to evil. Everyone must learn to conquer sin in himself with God’s help; for without God we cannot even step across the threshold. From God are given all the divine powers for life and godliness; we need only not be lazy in using them. Do you want to learn to seize the kingdom of heaven by force? Learn from the saints how they labored, what effort they applied to themselves, what self-denial they had, what detachment from wealth, worldly honor and glory, fleshly pleasures! What temperance they had, what zeal for God, what constant prayer, what labor, what virtues! And truly they attained the kingdom of God. Not one of them was put to shame; all received incorruptible life and eternal glory, eternal blessedness, and live secure from any fear of losing the kingdom of heaven they have acquired. Imitate them too, each according to his strength; read, hear God’s Word, pay attention, understand, strive unceasingly toward the goal of your life—and you will receive eternal blessedness. After all, you labored this way or that for earthly well-being; labor then especially to obtain eternal life: “seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things,” all earthly goods, “will be given to you” (Mt 6:33). Amen.

Part 2

How exalted, how rich, how bright, how divine is the soul in the holy people of God! What deeds it was capable of in them—in all the saints! What divine contemplations it could reach! What gift of speech, what works, what hymnic compositions in John Chrysostom, Theodore of Studium, John of Damascus, Joseph the Hymnographer, Cosmas of Maiuma, and countless other church hymnographers! And the people of today—how far they have fallen! To the level of dumb animals, and even worse!

* * *

The human soul is wonderful, even though fallen. For what is it like in the saints who have served the Lord diligently in this temporal life! How devoted it becomes to God with love, with self-denial, with prayer, with temperance, with unceasing gaze toward God! How pure, how firm, how bright, how fragrant! Indeed, even the bodies of saints give off fragrance. And their death—how peaceful, how glorious, how bright, how holy!

* * *

My God! What a sight, what heavenly consolation for the saints Sergius and Seraphim! The Lord Himself appears plainly and solemnly to the vision of saint Seraphim with the heavenly powers at the little entrance of the liturgy, and the most holy Mother of God appears to him many times! And to saint Sergius the Mother of God Herself came with the saints into his cell. O comfort! O dignity of man—Christian and ascetic! Glory to God who willed it so!

* * *

The saints watched vigilantly over every movement of their hearts and noticed whether any hostility, ill-will, and malice or envy toward anyone, partiality for persons, greed were nesting there, and immediately uprooted these diabolical roots, cast out this hellish leaven—and also all other passions. Every root and rootlet they cut down immediately with zeal for God and did not allow them to spread, so that they would not choke them and separate them from God. Amen.

* * *

Remember the sole wealth of Elijah the prophet—his mantle cast upon Elisha at the prophet’s taking up to heaven. O, how he loved God, how he was alien to every worldly attachment! He was wholly in God and even before his taking up to heaven lived in heart with God, in heaven. “As the Lord lives, before whom I stand,” he said (1King 18:15).

* * *

Just as we with good sight can see things near and far, so it is easy for the holy angels and the holy saints of God to see in the Holy Spirit, in whom they dwell, in whom they rest—the hearts of people, their thoughts and desires, by God’s grace. These so-called seers saw with their heart’s eyes even on earth the hearts and deeds of people done in secret. Saint Andrew, the holy fool for Christ’s sake, rebuked a certain nobleman for a grave and secret sodomitic sin.

* * *

God’s divine economy of human salvation is true in itself to the letter throughout all ages, and God’s promises to the faithful and those who labor truly are true to the letter. Not one who has walked truly and steadfastly on the Lord’s path was put to shame, was lost, but received for his labors an incorruptible reward—the kingdom of heaven. And the world—how does it regard the labors of believing and pious people and the ascetics themselves? As fools and madmen. It does not believe in the truth of God’s divine economy and therefore perishes in its disbelief. O wonderful truth of God’s divine economy of human salvation!

* * *

“Let us sing of Mary, the Mother of God, who gave birth to the Lord and is exalted above the angels” (the hymn of the angels about the Mother of God and the Church). “She is truly heaven and the temple of God.” Thus the church’s hymnographer, the golden-stringed saint John of Damascus, glorifies the most holy Virgin Mother of God in his first dogmatikon on Her dormition, which we now remember and celebrate. Let us speak with joy and glorify this Virgin and Mother, glorified by all the world, who comes from mankind, whom the bodiless angels and faithful earthly people unceasingly glorify in joy, for She became heaven and the temple of God. The predestined end of Her earthly sorrowful life came, and She fell asleep for three days with death’s sleep, a life-giving sleep. Of Her it could be said at that time: “the maiden is not dead but sleeps” (Mt 9:24). Yes, She slept, died for three days, as Christ God, Her Son, and on the third day rose. She rose and was taken to heaven. O miracle! O blessed lot! O infinite joy! It is right and just! For it would seem that She, the all-pure, only should rejoice on earth as the all-righteous, yet She suffered all Her life for Her only-begotten Son, feared for Him all Her life because of the multitude of His enemies—both the kings of this world and the learned, the unbelieving, the hypocritical, the superstitious, the deceitful, the proud, the flatterers, the envious, the greedy. But now the earthly life of the God-man, full of suffering, has ended. The crucified has risen, His eternal glory has begun; He has sat down at the right hand of God according to His humanity on the throne of glory. She remains still to live on earth in the house of John the apostle, whom She adopted as a son. Already in old age She rested and soon passed over to the eternal, most radiant dwellings. And what was Her glorious dormition! With what light did Her most pure face shine! What wonderful, boundless, ineffable fragrance came from Her ever-virgin Body, as the holy Dionysius the Areopagite writes, he who was present at Her burial! What sweet angelic singing! With what honor, with what wonderful hymn-singing was She buried with the inspired singing of the holy martyr Hierotheus! The glorious end of a glorious beginning, of her earthly life!

* * *

How beautiful is the assembly of angels, countless and harmonious! If the visible world—the starry sky, for instance—is so beautiful, and earthly nature with all its elements, fields, meadows, gardens, forests, rivers, seas, lakes, with all its plants and animal kingdom and other creatures is so great and beautiful, then how great and beautiful must the angelic world be—bright, sinless, intelligent, beautiful, strong, mighty! O beauty, O greatness, O blessedness, O praise to the Creator!

* * *

“Let the saints rejoice in glory, let them sing for joy on their beds” (Ps 149:5). Let us remember the life of the venerable Xenia, her abandonment of her parents’ house, her scorning of wealth and nobility and her betrothed, her fiery love for Christ, her fasting, prayer, mortification of the flesh, her care for the salvation of the souls of virgins. Why this striving toward God in faithful, pious souls? Because like strives toward like; the soul, created in the image and likeness of God, strives toward Him who is like, the image strives toward the archetype, light toward Light, life toward Life, good strength toward good Strength, reason toward the Source of wisdom. And the unbelieving and senseless, sinful and evil people strive toward what is like them—toward evil and the all-wicked devil; evil toward evil, darkness toward darkness, uncleanness toward uncleanness, evil power toward evil power. Like the foolish virgins, unbelieving people sleep and slumber, and believing people but without good deeds, without mercy toward their neighbor. The foolish virgins had faith but no good deeds, so they were condemned. O how many Christians will be condemned!

* * *

Reading church services to the saints with attention for each day of the year and contemplating their deeds in spirit, I cannot marvel enough at their self-denying love, the unspeakable condescension of God to them, and God’s love for them. How many spiritual gifts they received from God, what miracles they performed, what gift of prophecy they had! And both during their lives and after their repose God glorified them, dwelt in them, and honored them with glory and honor unspeakable. Some saints shone like the sun at their repose, and angels were their guides to heaven. This is what the human soul means—purified from sins and having loved its Creator with all its heart!

* * *

How beautiful and varied in form, color, and fragrance are the countless flowers and plants in nature and in different climates of the earth! One cannot enjoy enough the sight and fragrance of them. If plants are so beautiful, then how fragrant in paradise are the saints, the righteous of God of every calling, rank, and dignity! “If God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, like that, how much more will he clothe you, you of little faith” (Mt 6:30). Labor, O man, to attain inner beauty, faith, virtue, and do not grow lazy. How fragrant—better than any flowers—are the relics of the saints! God is wondrous in His saints, and He is wondrous even in me, in me a repentant sinner who receives continual mercy and judgment from the Lord.

* * *

Christ’s transfiguration on Mount Tabor shows that if earthly sunlight is so beautiful and life-giving, how much more beautiful and life-giving will be the future eternal and never-ending light.

* * *

The present elemental world is a faint shadow of future incorruptible, eternal, most sweet goods. Judge from present things concerning future incorruptible goods. “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no heart of man has conceived what God has prepared for those who love Him” (1Cor 2:9). “How wondrous are Your deeds,” O Lord! (Ps 138:14).

* * *

“Come, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world” (Mt 25:34). What do You say, Lord—“come, inherit”… Your words are entirely true and faithful. For us God has prepared in His boundless goodness an eternal, incorruptible kingdom where there is no need, sickness, sorrow, or sighing, no decay and death, but eternal enjoyment, eternal joy and righteousness. And we, unfaithful and vain, do not strive, do not care for this kingdom in which the righteous will reign eternally with God and in God. O, how blind we are, attached to the visible and temporal! How wretched and foolish, senseless we are! We renounce eternal blessedness, communion with God and the saints, and cling to dust, to a dream, to spiritual darkness and stench.

* * *

Who is worthy of the kingdom of heaven from among mankind? One who strives with all his strength to become like God in holiness, goodness, mercy toward his neighbors, like the Father and Son and Holy Spirit; one who strives to become like the saints—in repentance, prayer, temperance, patience, gentleness, meekness, obedience, sincere love (for we are all prone to partiality for persons). In heaven there is room only for holiness, love, one mind, one holy and spotless will. “The kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Rom 14:17).

* * *

Daily I see the firm and orderly course of all the lights and planets of heaven and the firm standing of the earthly sphere with all that is on it, and I marvel and cannot marvel enough at the goodness, strength, and wisdom of the Creator, the One God in Trinity, and, moving my thought to the invisible, incorruptible, eternal world, surpassing beyond measure the visible world, I am struck even more with wonder at the Creator of all the worlds, visible and invisible. If the visible world is so beautiful, so varied, so full of life and beauty, then what is the invisible world? It was not in vain that it was said in God’s Word that “no eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no heart of man has conceived what God has prepared for those who love Him” (1Cor 2:9). Love God now, therefore, all you sensible Christians, and strive toward perfection in love and eternal righteousness.

* * *

“If you have not been faithful with worldly wealth, who will entrust you with true riches” (Lk 16:12). Worldly wealth is earthly riches, earthly positions, the earthly body and health, which we knew not how to use and did not wish to use according to God’s will as transitory and temporary. Our true wealth is our soul, rich with the image and likeness of God, with rational free will, with immortality, with the ability to love God and neighbor, to repent, to pray, to give thanks and glorify God. This is our wealth—the soul created in God’s image, which we have made alien to God through our worldly attachments. The holy saints of God were faithful to God even in worldly wealth, scattering it among the poor, and made proper use of their own wealth—their soul—cleansing it with prayers and tears of repentance, with the labors of vigil and fasting, with suffering as martyrs for Christ. So let us be faithful to God both in external and internal wealth, or in what is not our own and in what is our own. What is our own is the soul, given us by God for Christian education, for the restoration of God’s image, for becoming like God and endless blessedness.

* * *

Man is terribly inconstant and changeable because of his original corruption in paradise: from the heights of heavenly contemplation and divine thoughts he can in an instant fall into abominable, foul, lustful, and blasphemous, evil and envious thoughts and feelings, so that after high spiritual joy he must secretly weep over his wretchedness. Blessed is the one whom God’s grace has firmly established in God and who has escaped the snares of Beliar, the blasphemer.

* * *

Man is so deeply corrupted, decayed, and defiled by sin—so infinitely varied in its forms—that even when laboring long in contemplation and God-mindfulness, if for a moment he loosens the spiritual reins of his mind and heart, he can at once descend into low, fleshly, foul thoughts and feelings. For the roots of sin run deep and in all directions through the human heart, and often up to a man’s death these roots remain within him and paralyze his soul. They are uprooted only through endurance, temperance, unceasing prayer, illnesses, and sufferings. “I die daily,” said the holy martyr Ignatius, “so that I might become pure bread of God.”

* * *

For the sake of the transitory, material things, do not neglect the eternal and spiritual, and do not lose love and peace with your neighbors for the sake of material losses, damages, and deprivations. Hold fast to peace and love. “Make every effort to live in peace with everyone and to be holy, without which no one will see the Lord,” the apostle says (Hebr 12:14).

Part 3

“No one who has left house or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or lands for my sake and for the gospel will fail to receive a hundredfold now in this time,” and in the age to come “eternal life” (Mk 10:29-30). Why? Because all who have clung to this age are like leaky wells that cannot hold living water, and often perish by a terrible death.

The form of this world passes away like something corruptible, with all its beauty, wealth, sweetness, glory, and honor. Only eternal goods remain—treasures, eternal life, righteousness, love with holiness and peace from God. Turn your heart’s eyes there, go there, “from where help will come” (Ps 120:1).

“Grant that I, too, along with all Your chosen, be a partaker of Your incorruptible goods, which You have prepared for those who love You, O Lord!” Incorruptible goods are ready, yet I do not strive to receive them through faith and hope, through zeal for virtue. Woe is me, O Lord!

We pray and glorify the great saints of God daily, who have left to the Church their prayers in writing; we think their thoughts, we feel their feelings, we grieve over our sins with their sorrow, we strive to rise to their love for our common Creator and God. We are joined with them as one Church, one flock of Christ, and may we be pitied and saved. Only let us not weaken, let us not grow lazy in life, but let us compel ourselves toward repentance and all good deeds. The saints lived, labored, struggled, endured trials, conquered in the name of the Lord the enemies within and without, and were saved. By God’s mercy, so shall we be saved.

* * *

A Christian must not only abhor all sins but must not allow sinful thoughts to approach him. Holiness is the realm of the Christian; without it, a Christian is not a Christian. “Whoever does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him” (Rom 8:9). “Be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy” (Lev 11:44). It is necessary to always repent, always struggle against sin, pray to God for help—and help is ready. Give thanks for it, for it is said: “Without me you can do nothing” truly good (Jn 15:5).

* * *

The saints of God gazed steadfastly with their heart’s eyes upon the future eternal life and strained toward it unwaveringly all their lives. So do you.

Everywhere in the world we see the triumph, strength, joy, and playfulness of life: creeping things, insects, birds, fish of countless kinds, countless animals, beasts, and the king of earthly creatures—mankind; all live, strive toward comfort of life and joy, toward labor. Look how joyfully insects fly and play—butterflies, grasshoppers, flies; birds, fish, kittens, puppies, lambs, calves, foals—and marvel at the joy and triumph of life in them. But this is fleeting life; it does not last long before all this play and joy cease: soon they are no more, yet new ones are born in their place—and so life turns like a wheel. Who gave them and gives all of them life? Life without beginning, eternal, personal, all-wise, all-good—God. But this coveted earthly life with all its goods passes quickly for the wordless creatures and ends for them. Therefore the all-good personal Life has willed and determined to give to the rational human being eternal life in heaven together with God, and for achieving it has given man all the means. This is your goal, O man: strive toward eternal life and eternal joy!

* * *

Draw near to the Savior and God’s Mother as a sincere son or daughter, draw near, I say—reading heartfelt canons, akathists to Jesus the Sweetest and to God’s Mother, draw near also to the saints with fervent prayers and the appointed canons and akathists, and you will not be put to shame; soon you yourself will feel in your heart a caress from heaven from the Holy Spirit. But do not lose heart if your heart is cold through dark temptations from the bodiless enemy. The Lord sees all, and no one goes away empty from Him, and He soon gives each according to his merits. Endure, for it is said: “By your steadfastness save your lives” (Lk 21:19).

When praying to God and the saints, you must compel yourself to set aside all worldly attachments to people and things, or all partiality for people and things, and compel yourself to love everyone as brothers and sisters with all goodwill, as yourself.

* * *

Incessantly, joyfully, and without ceasing the heavenly angels, innumerable in multitude, glorify the Lord Almighty Creator, and so also do the holy people, yet we, earthly and earth-bound, dull, are so lazy at prayer, glorification, and thanksgiving! Because we have grown attached to the earth, to carnal pleasure and laziness, to earthly possessions and various sensual delights. To worthily glorify and love the Creator, it is necessary to uproot sinful self-love, self-centeredness, egoism. “If anyone wants to come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Mt 16:24).

* * *

Long sleep cools the heart and dulls it to prayer. O, how carefully one must yield to sleep. Indulgence in food and drink also cools our heart to prayer.

* * *

Relate yourself to every person sincerely, lovingly, with simplicity of heart, without hypocrisy, regardless of appearance, as you wish that others would treat you. With great reverence and love relate to the saints of God, pray to them, especially to the Mother of God and all the saints. God willing, you will see them face to face in the age to come—their radiance and glory which God has granted them—and will be convinced that you did not honor them in vain and did not call upon them here on earth while in the flesh and in the Church of God, to which they, like you, belong as members of one Body of Christ, whose Head He is.

* * *

“Hallowed be Your name, Your kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Mt 6:9-10). Do you, sinner, wish for holiness sincerely, do you strive for God’s peaceful kingdom (first in yourself and then in all people), seized by the enemy, the destroyer-devil? Do you sincerely want to fulfill God’s righteous, all-good will, and do you ask and pray to God that all people come to know and fulfill the will of our Heavenly Father? We speak these words of the Lord’s Prayer every day without deep understanding of their meaning and throw them like wind, and so there is no good change in us, and we remain the same sinners, careless and wicked.

* * *

With what attention, with what reverence, with what love, peace, and thanksgiving should we always pronounce the name of God and the Lord’s Prayer: “Our Father…,” and all other prayers. God’s name is great, holy, awesome, and for the believer the mere naming of it is a blessing.

* * *

In heaven they receive only the sincere tongue of a faithful, praying, repentant, merciful, and compassionate heart—one that is pure and chaste. From a deceitful heart the Lord turns away His face.

* * *

When you pray before an icon of the Lord or the Mother of God or the saints, ask yourself inwardly: are you sincere, do you gaze with love at the holy icons, with faith, with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your hope? Is your heart sleeping, is your mind asleep?

* * *

When we pray for our neighbors, the Lord looks upon our hearts—whether we sincerely wish salvation and all good for our neighbors as for ourselves. Secondly, whether we sincerely abhor sin and love repentance and virtue. Thirdly, whether we sincerely love the Lord and are wholeheartedly devoted to Him. Fourthly, whether we are angry with anyone or have enmity with anyone.

* * *

“Rejoice, Full of Grace, the Lord is with you” (Lk 1:28). The Lady received all the fullness of grace from the Lord as the Mother (in her humanity) of the all-perfect Creator—the fullness of righteousness, holiness, goodness, mercy and compassion toward sinful and suffering mankind, the fullness of power and strength, blessedness, glory eternal and preeminence over all heavenly powers. She received all ten mysteries of grace, and because of the incomprehensible abundance of grace, like countless waters of the sea, can abundantly pour forth and does pour forth to all who come to Her with faith all graceful help in misfortunes, sorrows, illnesses, and in every sorrowful circumstance. Come therefore to Her with unshakeable faith and hope.

* * *

Turn to the holy and all-powerful prayers of the Mother of God; do not deprive yourself of this grace—Her prayer suffices to appease for all and for you. Amen.

* * *

“Rejoice, Full of Grace, the Lord is with you” (Lk 1:28). All in You is grace, O Lady: and the conception, and the birth, and the upbringing, and the annunciation, and the conception from the Holy Spirit, and the birth of the pre-eternal Infant; and all Your life is full of grace.

* * *

Face to face, mouth to mouth do we, Orthodox Christians, converse with the Lord, the Mother of God, the holy angels, and all the saints. This is what it means according to the Orthodox-Christian custom to pray reverently before the holy icons “in spirit and in truth” (Jn 4:23). This is why we set them in temples and prayer houses (chapels) and in our dwellings. We believe in the closeness of the Lord and His saints to us and that we are one spiritual body with them, one Church, as we have one Head, our Lord Jesus Christ. With such faith in the holy icons and in the Church, will you, iconoclast heretics, cast stones of slanderous condemnation at them? We are right, and you are wrong and false.

* * *

In the life-giving face of the Savior, the Mother of God, the Forerunner, and the saints is depicted the most holy righteousness, goodness, humility, mercy. With what love one must gaze upon the holy icons, the image of the holy Cross, the Gospel and other holy things that remind us of the great deeds and words of God and of the saints! Gaze thus, and do not bow your face to the earth, do not turn away in heart and sight, like Lutherans, Pashkovists, or Jews. Belong to the heavenly Church. You love monuments of people famous for something, you love to look at their portraits and photographs—why don’t you love to look at the faces of the saints? You are inconsistent and very, very foolish, false, and strange.

* * *

Looking at the iconostasis in a church, chapel, or at home, remember the words of the Savior: “Now you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God’s people and members of God’s household” (Eph 2:19). And say: by God’s mercy we, Orthodox and faithful Christians, are fellow dwellers with the Mother of God and all the saints. This is why we use holy icons and honor them, and in them—the originals themselves, that is, the saints themselves—we comprise one assembly, one Church, heavenly and earthly. Honoring them, we remember and honor their deeds out of love for God, their faithfulness and devotion to Him to death, and we ourselves wish to imitate them in faith and self-denial for His name’s sake.

* * *

The Orthodox Christian turns toward the holy icons of the Savior, the Mother of God, angels, and saints to show thereby his faith in their presence, in their closeness to him. In the holy icons we actualize our Orthodox faith; without the holy icons we hang, as it were, in the air, not knowing to whom we pray. When David the prophet prayed to the Lord, he said: “Seek his face evermore” (Ps 104:4); “Your face, Lord, I seek” (Ps 26:8); “The face of the Lord is against evildoers to cut off the memory of them from the earth” (Ps 33:17).

* * *

The holy apostles and the whole innumerable assembly of the righteous and all the saints are heavenly minds and minded on heavenly things, not earthly things: in body they lived on earth, but in heart and mind were in heaven. Pitiable are the Christian communities that do not honor the saints—they deprive themselves of the holy example of their life and their intercession. The Lord Himself teaches us to call upon the saints as our intercessors. “The smoke of the incense, together with the prayers of the saints, went up before God from the angel’s hand” (Apok 8:4). Lutherans, what do you say to this?

* * *

With faith and love I call upon all the holy apostles and prophets and all the saints and I bow to them, and in their faces to the one God who dwells in them and abides in them. I honor in them the unwavering love for the Creator, their holiness, their incorruptible life, the trampling down of all worldly snares by them, their heavenly mindedness, their perfect righteousness, their devotion to the Lord, their obedience to His commandments, their patience, their unshakeable patience in their labors, in their suffering as martyrs for Christ, their steadfastness in the truth, in the dogmas, in the commandments, in all instruction in virtue.

Sorrow takes hold of me about people who do not read God’s Word at all, but read only newspapers and secular literature without discrimination. Woe to them for their ignorance of God’s Word and God’s will concerning them. What account will they give to God at the judgment?

* * *

The bodiless enemies employ all efforts to devalue in our minds and hearts the sayings of God’s Word and the words of church prayers and to give value to worldly, vain books and sheets filled with every worldly sin and temptation (songs, dramatic works, novels, and the like). Some have noticed in themselves how the enemies hindered them from speaking the words of Holy Scripture and familiar prayers, and how much sorrow, despair, darkness they caused them, confusing and killing their hearts (paralyzing them), and how much struggle they had—the most intense—to overcome the enemies and peacefully and sincerely read God’s Word and prayer.

* * *

In our old nature there is a habit, when reading God’s Word or worship books or patristic writings and generally sacred books, sometimes secretly to oppose what is being said—that is, what is being said and written. This is the secret voice of the adversary—Satan, who was the first to learn and taught the fallen spirits and people to resist God, His holy truth and righteousness. Thus I have noticed and notice that even I, in my heart and mind, the devil opposes secretly when I read prayers, canons, stichera, the Creed, and I must struggle and cast him down for these thoughts. O wretched one, away from me, enemy of God’s truth and righteousness! You lead to lies, curses, and death those who listen to you, as you did Adam and Eve.

Excerpts From the Diary for the Biography of Father John of Kronstadt

I glorify the boundless mercy and longsuffering of God toward me and toward all mankind. Throughout seventy years I have sinned every day and repented, and the Lord has been merciful to me, has not punished me according to all His justice, awaiting my correction every day. The days of my youth have passed—and in higher education, in the Seminary, I began to relate more carefully to my inner world. Having become a priest, I lived not without sin, but I delved deeper and deeper into the meaning of my calling, and the Lord was merciful to me daily, granting me tears of repentance, granting me frequent communion of the Holy Mysteries. My service to the Holy Church, the performance of prayers and the Mysteries was not without stumbling; the invisible enemies strongly fought and captivated me, troubled me, especially during the performance of the Mysteries—a battle for life and death, spiritual death. I repented, wept, defeated, and received forgiveness. In the first years of my priesthood I did not serve the liturgy often, not every day, and therefore often grew weak spiritually; then, seeing the benefit of daily performance of the liturgy and communion of the Holy Mysteries, I began to serve daily and partake. And throughout all my years of priesthood and service to God how much mercy I have received from Him—it cannot be counted. I thank the Lord for the wondrous evening and morning prayers and the rule for Holy Communion. How many tears of tender repentance the Lord gave me, what floods of mercy He poured out upon me, and this every day—even now! What can I render to the Lord for all these mercies? My iniquities are multiplied beyond the number of the sands of the sea, and I yet live and repent, and still sin without ceasing—in deed, word, thought, laziness, carelessness, intemperance, and every sin inherent to man. O God, be merciful to me, a sinner, again and again! Be patient with me, grown old in iniquities, and cleanse me from all filthiness of flesh and spirit. Amen.

* * *

Lord, I experience daily a repulsion from You by the spirit of earthly spiritual delusion that deadens me, darkens, torments with vanity. Constantly I must wage war with myself, with my lusts and the enemy’s delusions, and mortify every passion, counting them absurd, senseless, and ruinous, and preferring to love You alone above all. O how cunning, wakeful, and active is the enemy for our destruction! And we do not soon recognize his schemes; only afterward when he has become extremely tiresome and repugnant do we perceive them. We are often under his delusion. Lord, deliver us from the evil one. “Blessed is the life of those living in deserts, uplifted by divine longing” (an antiphon).

* * *

Lord, fill all my being, and let every ill-will flee far from me; not for a single moment let this absurdity touch me. Let me be wholly in You and with You, You all-sufficient Good. You are my life. You are my peace. You are my blessedness, You are my light, my strength, and my glory. Amen.

Lord, do not let me boast in myself as though I were better than someone else, but let me think of myself as the worst of all and judge no one, but judge myself strictly.

* * *

My holy Guardian Angel instructs me daily and hourly on the path of salvation. I see this with the eyes of my heart, feel it, and thank God and His appointed guardian.

* * *

Each day the Lord renews and recreates me through the performance of the liturgy and communion of the life-giving Holy Mysteries. I see, feel, sense this divine wonder and thank the Creator and my Recreator, “recreating me as a new creation,” healing, making peace. What shall I offer or render to You, Lord? I have nothing good of my own; all is Yours. Teach me to love You fervently, O Lord my God.

* * *

The Trinity is my life, my light, peace, deliverance, my salvation, my glory, my health, my contentment, the providence for me and all creation, my strength and glory, my renewal vast. She is all to me; I envy no one, I wish good to all and pray to God to grant each what is needed, to the rich a generous heart and a compassionate heart.

I would like to see the original Goodness, Brightness, Beauty, infinite Wisdom, Strength, which created all and sustains and governs all, but I am not ready, my heart is unclean. “Since we have these promises, let us purify ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, perfecting holiness out of reverence for God” (2Cor 7:1).

* * *

By my old age (79 years) every day is a special mercy of God, every hour and every minute: my physical strength is exhausted, yet my spirit is vigorous and burns with longing for my beloved Bridegroom, the Lord Jesus Christ. So many pledges of mercy I have received and continue to receive from God in this life; I hope for them in the future life after death as well. Death is birth into eternal life, by God’s mercy and loving-kindness.

* * *

Glory to God! Fifty-two years have been fulfilled to my priesthood by God’s grace and mercy; I am yet alive, though I am ill. For so many years of gracious priesthood I will not be able to thank the Lord sufficiently, the One God in Trinity. As much as I could, as I knew, as I strove—I have served, yet I often made mistakes, was weak, the enemy fought hard. Cover, Lord, all my sins with Your mercy.

What shall I render to You, Lord, seeing that You granted me mercy to be born and raised in the Orthodox faith and Church and in my precious, priceless fatherland, Russia, in which the Orthodox Church has been planted since ancient times. I thank and glorify You as I am able, by Your grace!

* * *

Lord, there are no words in human speech worthy enough to thank You for all the innumerable benefactions shown by Your goodness to me, a sinner, throughout all my life that has passed before Your face, O merciful Father! Even now, here in my seventy-ninth year, You preserve and save me every day, and now especially, in the face of my enemies who seek to devour me because I am Your servant, though unworthy. But grant me, Lord, grace to thank You perfectly and to attain a life made pure by repentance, grant me to escape the delusion of sin manifold, which fights me and seeks to steal me from You. Grant me to glorify You loudly—loudly—in this godless world. Amen.

A Discourse

In one of our morning prayers to God the Creator we read: “Save us and lead us into Your eternal kingdom, for You are my Creator and the Provider and Giver of all good.” Today during morning prayer I turned special attention to these words. They contain important, very instructive, and consoling thoughts.

We are all sinful, do not have freedom from sins; we are all like all things and beings in the world, and our bodies are corruptible and fleeting, passing, perishable; meanwhile our soul is eternal and longs for eternal existence and strives to perpetuate itself somehow. Believing and pious souls have a longing for eternal life and regard this life as a fleeting dream and reverie. We, Christians, are taught from the Gospel, which is the Word of eternal and unchanging truth, to believe in eternal life, and we say every day to ourselves: “I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.” Christ our God is resurrection and life. He has granted us eternal life. “Christ is risen from the dead, by death conquering death, and to those in the tombs granting life.” So, dear brothers and sisters, there is a kingdom of eternal light, eternal life, eternal love, eternal righteousness, eternal peace, eternal beauty, eternal, endless, and unimaginable blessedness for those who have prepared themselves for the age to come. This is inviolable truth. But it is also undeniable truth that for this kingdom of peace, righteousness, and love we must prepare ourselves here. The Gospel teaches us this preparation; the Church teaches us this. We must educate ourselves here in true faith and in all Christian virtues: love, simplicity of heart, gentleness, humility, goodness and mercy, forgetfulness of wrongs, temperance, and the beginning and end of all virtue—constant prayer. Without prayer a Christian, like a fish without water, cannot live.

Let us then, dear brothers and sisters, prepare for the eternal kingdom through faith, prayer, and virtue. Amen.

Glory to God!

Scripture Index

Every Scripture reference identified in this book, sorted in canonical Bible order. Tap a reference to jump to the verse where it appears.

Exodus
Exodus 3:145. Part 2 (5.3)
Leviticus
Leviticus 11:4421. Part 3 (21.6)
1 Samuel
1 Samuel 18:1520. Part 2 (20.9)
2 Chronicles
2 Chronicles 36:2314. Part 2 (14.27)
Job
Job 41:242. Introduction (2) (2.18)
Psalms
Psalms 13:37. Part 4 (7.40)
Psalms 18:13–1416. Part 4 (16.16)
Psalms 21:79. Part 1 (9.14)
Psalms 22:1–310. Part 2 (10.3)
Psalms 25:1215. Part 3 (15.20)
Psalms 26:821. Part 3 (21.42)
Psalms 26:135. Part 2 (5.5)
Psalms 31:95. Part 2 (5.40)
Psalms 33:1721. Part 3 (21.42)
Psalms 37:1916. Part 4 (16.28)
Psalms 38:717. Part 5 (17.21)
Psalms 38:1219. Part 1 (19.19)
Psalms 50:913. Part 1 (13.37)
Psalms 50:1213. Part 1 (13.37)
Psalms 93:37. Part 4 (7.3)
Psalms 104:421. Part 3 (21.42)
Psalms 110:517. Part 5 (17.27)
Psalms 120:121. Part 3 (21.2)
Psalms 120:310. Part 2 (10.11)

Psalms 138:1419. Part 1 (19.3); 20. Part 2 (20.27)

Psalms 144:34. Part 1 (4.26)

Psalms 149:510. Part 2 (10.45); 20. Part 2 (20.19)

Proverbs
Proverbs 13:92. Introduction (2) (2.18)
Proverbs 24:1615. Part 3 (15.5)
Ecclesiastes
Ecclesiastes 1:219. Part 1 (19.19)
Isaiah
Isaiah 1:315. Part 3 (15.25)
Isaiah 53:514. Part 2 (14.37)
Isaiah 53:711. Part 3 (11.8)
Isaiah 53:811. Part 3 (11.8)
Jeremiah
Jeremiah 2:2719. Part 1 (19.13)
Daniel
Daniel 12:32. Introduction (2) (2.18)
Matthew
Matthew 3:215. Part 3 (15.1)
Matthew 3:1215. Part 3 (15.6)
Matthew 4:916. Part 4 (16.15)
Matthew 5:717. Part 5 (17.29)
Matthew 5:1116. Part 4 (16.42)
Matthew 5:1216. Part 4 (16.42)
Matthew 5:23–2416. Part 4 (16.44)
Matthew 5:29–3014. Part 2 (14.23)
Matthew 5:4416. Part 4 (16.36)

Matthew 5:4813. Part 1 (13.5); 15. Part 3 (15.18)

Matthew 6:9–1021. Part 3 (21.20)
Matthew 6:3020. Part 2 (20.23)
Matthew 6:3319. Part 1 (19.43)
Matthew 7:1–217. Part 5 (17.1)
Matthew 7:615. Part 3 (15.1)
Matthew 7:715. Part 3 (15.3)
Matthew 7:2315. Part 3 (15.8)
Matthew 8:2016. Part 4 (16.16)
Matthew 9:2420. Part 2 (20.15)
Matthew 10:817. Part 5 (17.13)
Matthew 10:379. Part 1 (9.10)
Matthew 10:4217. Part 5 (17.7)

Matthew 11:1213. Part 1 (13.1, 13.3, 13.7); 14. Part 2 (14.35); 19. Part 1 (19.11)

Matthew 11:2510. Part 2 (10.17)

Matthew 11:306. Part 3 (6.27); 11. Part 3 (11.36)

Matthew 12:307. Part 4 (7.14)
Matthew 12:426. Part 3 (6.31)
Matthew 13:276. Part 3 (6.37)
Matthew 13:286. Part 3 (6.37)
Matthew 15:1914. Part 2 (14.23)

Matthew 16:187. Part 4 (7.17, 7.19, 7.21, 7.25)

Matthew 16:2421. Part 3 (21.14)
Matthew 18:175. Part 2 (5.23)
Matthew 19:2810. Part 2 (10.39)
Matthew 20:166. Part 3 (6.27)
Matthew 20:267. Part 4 (7.25)
Matthew 22:12–1415. Part 3 (15.22)
Matthew 22:37–399. Part 1 (9.12)
Matthew 23:87. Part 4 (7.25)
Matthew 24:357. Part 4 (7.35)
Matthew 24:4015. Part 3 (15.8)
Matthew 24:50–5119. Part 1 (19.39)
Matthew 25:513. Part 1 (13.31)
Matthew 25:1115. Part 3 (15.8)
Matthew 25:11–1210. Part 2 (10.3)
Matthew 25:2111. Part 3 (11.36)
Matthew 25:3420. Part 2 (20.29)
Matthew 25:4119. Part 1 (19.41)
Matthew 25:41–4610. Part 2 (10.35)
Matthew 26:26–2711. Part 3 (11.20)
Matthew 26:26–284. Part 1 (4.10)

Matthew 26:27–286. Part 3 (6.1); 11. Part 3 (11.8)

Matthew 26:2919. Part 1 (19.34)
Matthew 27:51–5319. Part 1 (19.26)
Matthew 28:207. Part 4 (7.27)
Mark
Mark 6:1119. Part 1 (19.22)
Mark 7:20–2313. Part 1 (13.37)
Mark 8:3416. Part 4 (16.13)
Mark 9:4419. Part 1 (19.39)
Mark 10:2117. Part 5 (17.21)
Mark 10:2317. Part 5 (17.23)
Mark 10:29–3021. Part 3 (21.1)
Mark 12:3316. Part 4 (16.34)
Luke
Luke 1:2821. Part 3 (21.30, 21.34)
Luke 1:46–4817. Part 5 (17.5)
Luke 1:4817. Part 5 (17.3)
Luke 1:5117. Part 5 (17.3)
Luke 1:5314. Part 2 (14.45)
Luke 12:65. Part 2 (5.11)
Luke 12:16–1717. Part 5 (17.34)
Luke 12:2017. Part 5 (17.21)
Luke 12:4913. Part 1 (13.1)
Luke 14:26–2714. Part 2 (14.25)
Luke 16:315. Part 3 (15.3)
Luke 16:1220. Part 2 (20.35)
Luke 18:1115. Part 3 (15.8)
Luke 18:1315. Part 3 (15.8)
Luke 21:1921. Part 3 (21.11)
John
John 1:44. Part 1 (4.19)
John 1:10–139. Part 1 (9.8)
John 1:2911. Part 3 (11.18)
John 1:514. Part 1 (4.3)
John 2:197. Part 4 (7.19, 7.21, 7.25)
John 4:2321. Part 3 (21.36)
John 6:5419. Part 1 (19.1)
John 8:247. Part 4 (7.5)
John 10:910. Part 2 (10.33)
John 12:35–369. Part 1 (9.38)

John 15:513. Part 1 (13.19); 21. Part 3 (21.6)

John 15:1410. Part 2 (10.23)
John 16:74. Part 1 (4.12)
John 19:3411. Part 3 (11.8)
Romans
Romans 2:919. Part 1 (19.41)
Romans 6:119. Part 1 (9.28)
Romans 6:2314. Part 2 (14.3, 14.29)

Romans 7:242. Introduction (2) (2.8); 13. Part 1 (13.33)

Romans 8:921. Part 3 (21.6)
Romans 8:2119. Part 1 (19.33)
Romans 8:3216. Part 4 (16.11)
Romans 12:2116. Part 4 (16.36)
Romans 14:1720. Part 2 (20.31)
1 Corinthians
1 Corinthians 1:207. Part 4 (7.1)
1 Corinthians 1:2710. Part 2 (10.17)

1 Corinthians 2:94. Part 1 (4.17); 5. Part 2 (5.40); 20. Part 2 (20.27, 20.33)

1 Corinthians 4:55. Part 2 (5.19)

1 Corinthians 6:2010. Part 2 (10.39); 19. Part 1 (19.17)

1 Corinthians 10:47. Part 4 (7.21)
1 Corinthians 11:244. Part 1 (4.10)
1 Corinthians 11:28–2911. Part 3 (11.40)
1 Corinthians 13:32. Introduction (2) (2.6)
1 Corinthians 13:1211. Part 3 (11.16)
1 Corinthians 15:25–2613. Part 1 (13.9)
2 Corinthians
2 Corinthians 5:1715. Part 3 (15.12)
2 Corinthians 6:1017. Part 5 (17.34)
2 Corinthians 6:1414. Part 2 (14.9)
2 Corinthians 6:14–1514. Part 2 (14.1)

2 Corinthians 7:115. Part 3 (15.12); 22. Excerpts From the Diary for the Biography of Father John of Kronstadt (22.13)

Galatians
Galatians 1:87. Part 4 (7.35)
Ephesians

Ephesians 2:195. Part 2 (5.28); 21. Part 3 (21.40)

Ephesians 2:19–205. Part 2 (5.42)
Ephesians 4:119. Part 1 (19.17)
Ephesians 5:25–275. Part 2 (5.40)
Ephesians 5:305. Part 2 (5.23)
Philippians
Philippians 1:2117. Part 5 (17.29)
Philippians 2:311. Part 3 (11.32)
Philippians 2:55. Part 2 (5.44)
Philippians 2:7–817. Part 5 (17.5)
Philippians 3:816. Part 4 (16.32)

Philippians 3:2013. Part 1 (13.15); 19. Part 1 (19.5)

Philippians 4:8–95. Part 2 (5.33)
Colossians
Colossians 3:19. Part 1 (9.14)
Colossians 3:517. Part 5 (17.17)
1 Timothy

1 Timothy 3:157. Part 4 (7.29); 13. Part 1 (13.19)

1 Timothy 5:2215. Part 3 (15.24)
2 Timothy
2 Timothy 4:115. Part 3 (15.10)
Hebrews
Hebrews 1:917. Part 5 (17.36)
Hebrews 2:14–1710. Part 2 (10.21)
Hebrews 12:1420. Part 2 (20.41)
Hebrews 13:72. Introduction (2) (2.18)
James
James 2:2310. Part 2 (10.23)
James 4:814. Part 2 (14.43)
1 Peter
1 Peter 1:18–1910. Part 2 (10.39)
1 Peter 2:2316. Part 4 (16.42)
1 Peter 4:113. Part 1 (13.37)
1 Peter 5:819. Part 1 (19.9)
2 Peter

2 Peter 3:1017. Part 5 (17.32); 19. Part 1 (19.33)

1 John
1 John 3:1516. Part 4 (16.26)
1 John 4:2016. Part 4 (16.26)
1 John 5:197. Part 4 (7.1)
Revelation
Revelation 3:1715. Part 3 (15.3)

Revelation 3:212. Introduction (2) (2.17); 10. Part 2 (10.9); 13. Part 1 (13.1, 13.3)

Revelation 8:421. Part 3 (21.44)
Revelation 14:1519. Part 1 (19.26)
Revelation 21:515. Part 3 (15.12)
Revelation 22:11–1215. Part 3 (15.8)

The Author: Saint John of Kronstadt

Saint John of Kronstadt (1829–1908) was a Russian Orthodox archpriest, pastor, and spiritual writer, and one of the most beloved and influential figures of the late Russian Church. A married parish priest rather than a monk or a bishop, he became renowned across the whole empire for his fervent celebration of the Divine Liturgy, his ministry of prayer and healing, and his tireless charity among the poor of Kronstadt.

He was born Ioann Ilyich Sergiev to a poor clerical family in the far north of Russia, in the village of Sura in the Arkhangelsk province. He was educated at the Saint Petersburg Theological Academy, and in 1855 was ordained to serve at Saint Andrew’s Cathedral in Kronstadt, the naval town near the capital, where he would remain for more than half a century. He gave himself to the destitute of the town, founding the House of Diligence to give work and dignity to the poor, and thousands sought him out for confession, counsel, and prayer.

He is best remembered for his spiritual masterwork My Life in Christ, a collection of reflections drawn from his diaries on prayer, repentance, and the Eucharist, marked throughout by a vivid sense of the reality of God and of the Church’s Mysteries. His many sermons, catechetical talks, and later diaries—among them A Living Ear of Wheat and his Lenten preaching—extend the same ardent, experiential piety, and everywhere his eucharistic realism is stated without reserve.

He reposed in 1908 and was mourned throughout Russia. He was glorified by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia in 1964 and by the Moscow Patriarchate in 1990, and is commemorated on 20 December and on 1 June, the day of his glorification. His writings remain a standard of modern Orthodox spiritual life.

Colophon

A Living Ear of Wheat
by John of Kronstadt.

This edition was produced by
Royal Archives.

The cover features
Reapers
by Alexei Venetsianov (Russian, 1780–1847), Wikimedia Commons, which is in the public domain.

The text is set in Palatino and Georgia.

The first edition of this ebook was released on
August 16, 2026.

Table of Contents

- Title Page
- Copyright
- Introduction
- Introduction (2)

- On Faith and the Orthodox Church. Enemies of Faith and the Church

- Part 1
- Part 2
- Part 3
- Part 4

- The Fall and Its Consequences.

- Part 1
- Part 2
- Part 3

- The Christian’s Earthly Path to God

- Part 1
- Part 2
- Part 3
- Part 4
- Part 5

- The Responsibility of the Christian Man Before God

- Part 1
- Part 2
- Part 3

- Excerpts From the Diary for the Biography of Father John of Kronstadt

- A Discourse

- Scripture Index
- The Author: Saint John of Kronstadt
- Colophon