It was on Thursday. The day was overcast. There was a quarter of snow on the ground, and a rather thick snow crumbs poured from above, when Father Fr. Seraphim began a conversation with me at his closest pazhinka, near the same nearby wilderness opposite the Sarovka river, by a mountain close to its banks.
He placed me on the stump of a tree he had just cut down, and he himself stood squatting opposite me.
The Lord revealed to me, - said the great elder, - that in your childishness you zealously wanted to know what the purpose of our Christian life is, and you have repeatedly asked many great spiritual persons about this ...
I must say here that since the age of 12 this thought has persistently disturbed me, and I really addressed many of the clergy with this question, but their answers did not satisfy me. The elder did not know this.
But no one, - continued Father Seraphim, - has definitely told you about this. They told you: go to church, pray to God, do the commandments of God, do good - this is the goal of Christian life for you. And some were even indignant at you because you were busy with not godly curiosity, and told you: do not seek yourself higher. But they didn’t speak as they should. Here I, poor Seraphim, will explain to you now what this goal really is.
Prayer, fasting, vigilance and all other Christian deeds, no matter how good they are in themselves, however, the purpose of our Christian life does not consist only in doing them, although they serve as the necessary means for achieving it. The true goal of our Christian life is to acquire the Holy Spirit of God. Fasting and vigilance, and prayer, and alms, and every good deed done for Christ's sake are the means for acquiring the Holy Spirit of God. Note, father, that a good deed done only for Christ's sake brings us the fruits of the Holy Spirit. Yet what is done not for Christ's sake, although good, does not represent a reward in the life of the century to come, nor does it give us the grace of God in this life. That is why the Lord Jesus Christ said: " everyone who does not gather with Me, he scatters"A good deed cannot be called otherwise than gathering, for although it is not done for Christ's sake, it is nevertheless good. Scripture says:" fear God in every tongue, and do righteousness, it is pleasing to Him."And, as we see from the sacred narrative, this" do the truth"so pleasing to God that an angel of the Lord appeared to Cornelius the centurion, who feared God and did righteousness, during his prayer and said:" send to Joppa to Simon Usmar, tamo rite Peter and that one speaks the verbs of the eternal belly, in them you and your whole house will be saved". So, the Lord uses all his Divine means to give such a person the opportunity for his good deeds not to be deprived of the reward in the life of the Divine Order. But for this we must start here with the right faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, Who came into the world to save sinners. and the acquisition of the grace of the Holy Spirit, Introducing the kingdom of God into our hearts and paving the way for us to acquire the blessedness of the life of the century to come. either to implement them or not. That is why the Lord told the Jews: " If they had not seen it faster, they had no quicker sin. Now you speak - we see, and your sin remains on you". If a man, like Cornelius, takes advantage of God's pleasure in his deed, not done for Christ's sake, and believes in His Son, then such a deed will be imputed to him, as if done for Christ's sake and only for faith in Him. Otherwise, a person has no right to complain that his good did not go into business.This never happens only when doing some kind of good for Christ's sake, for good, done for His sake, not only in the life of the next century, the crown of righteousness intercedes, but also in this life fills a person with the grace of the Spirit Holy and, moreover, as it is said: " God gives the Holy Spirit too much, the Father loves the Son and gives everything in His hand".
So it is, your love of God! So in the acquisition of this Spirit of God is the true goal of our Christian life, and prayer, vigil, fasting, alms and other virtues for Christ's sake are only means to acquire the Spirit of God.
What about acquisition? - I asked Father Seraphim. - I don’t understand this.
Acquisition is the same as acquisition, - he answered me: - after all, you understand what acquiring money means. So it is all the same the acquisition of the Spirit of God. After all, you, your Love for God, understand what acquisition is in the worldly sense? The purpose of the mundane life of ordinary people is to acquire, or make money, and among the nobles, in addition, to receive honors, distinctions and other awards for state services. The acquisition of the Spirit of God is also capital, but only gracious and eternal, and it, like money, bureaucratic and temporary, is acquired in the same ways, very similar to each other. God the Word, our Lord God-Man Jesus Christ likens our life to a marketplace and calls our work on earth a purchase, and says to all of us: " bathe, dondezhe come, redeeming time, as the days of cunning are the essence", ie gain time to receive heavenly goods through earthly goods. Earthly goods are virtues done for Christ's sake, giving us the grace of the All-Holy Spirit. In the parable of the wise and holy virgins, when the holy fools lacked oil, it is said:" buy on the market"But when they bought, the doors to the bridal chamber were already closed, and they could not enter it. Some say that the lack of oil among the holy fools signifies a lack of good deeds in their lifetime. This understanding is not entirely correct. they were lacking in good deeds, when, even if they were holy fools, they were nevertheless called virgins? After all, virginity is the highest virtue, as a state of equal angels, and could serve as a substitute in itself for all other virtues. the grace of the All-Holy Spirit of God was lacking.
Creating virtues, these virgins, in their spiritual foolishness, believed that the point is only Christian, to do some virtues. We did, de, virtue, and so, de, and did the work of God, but before they received the grace of the Spirit of God, whether they achieved it, they did not care. About such and such ways of life, based only on one creation of virtues without careful testing, whether they bring and exactly how much they bring the grace of the Spirit of God, and it is said in the fatherly books: " there is a way, imagine to be good at the beginning, but its ends are in the bottom of hell". Anthony the Great in his letters to the monks speaks about such virgins: many monks and virgins have no idea about the differences in wills operating in a person, and do not know that three wills are at work in us: the 1st of God, the all-perfect and all-saving ; 2nd own, human, that is, if not harmful, then not saving; and 3rd demonic - completely harmful. And it is this third enemy will that teaches a person either not to do any virtues, or to do them out of vanity, or for one good, and not for the sake of Christ. The second is that our own will teaches us to do everything to please our lusts, or even, like the enemy teaches, to do good for the good, not paying attention to the grace they acquire. The first, the will of God and all-saving, consists only in doing good only for the acquisition of the Holy Spirit, as an eternal treasure, inexhaustible and in nothing fully and worthy of being appreciated by one who cannot. oil that it was lacking among the holy fools. That's why they are called holy fools, that they forgot about the necessary fruit of virtue, about the grace of the Holy Spirit, without which there is no salvation and no one can be, for: " By the Holy Spirit, every soul lives and rises in purity;". The Holy Spirit Himself dwells in our souls, and this is the very absorption in our souls of His, the Almighty, and the abiding with our spirit of His Trinity Unity and is given to us only through the all-round acquisition of the Holy Spirit from our side, which prepares in the soul and of our flesh is the throne of God, all-creative with our spirit, according to the immutable word of God: " I will dwell in them and I will be like, and I will be in God for them, and they will be in My people".
This is precisely the oil in the lamps of the wise virgins, which could burn lightly and for a long time, and those virgins with these burning lamps could wait for the Bridegroom, who came in midnight, and enter with Him into the palace of joy. The holy fools, seeing that their lamps were extinguished, although they went to the marketplace, and buy oil, did not have time to return in time, for the doors were already closed. Marketplace is our life; the doors of the bridal chamber, closed and not allowing access to the Bridegroom, is human death; the wise and foolish virgins are Christian souls; oil is not deeds, but the grace of the All-Holy Spirit of God received through them inside our nature, transforming it from corruption into incorruption, from spiritual death into spiritual life, from darkness into light, from the den of our being, where passions are tied like cattle and beasts, - to the temple of the Divine, to the luminous palace of eternal joy in Christ Jesus our Lord, Creator and Deliverer and Eternal Bridegroom of our souls. How great is God's compassion for our misery, that is, inattention to His care for us, when God says: " I’m standing at the door and confused!"... meaning by the doors the course of our life, not yet closed by death. Oh, how I wish, your love for God, that in this life you would always be in the Spirit of God!" In what I find, in that I judge"says the Lord.
Woe, great woe, if He finds us burdened with care and sorrows of life, for who will endure His anger and who will stand against the face of His anger! That is why it is said: " watch and pray, do not enter the attack", that is, do not be deprived of the Spirit of God, for vigilance and prayer brings us His grace. a tool for the acquisition of the grace of the Spirit. Would you want, for example, to go to church, but either the church is not there, or the service is gone; you would want to give to the beggar, but there is no beggar, or nothing to give; you would want to keep your virginity, but you have no strength to fulfill it. yours or through the efforts of the enemy's intrigues, which you cannot resist due to human weakness; you would want to do some other virtue for Christ's sake, but you also have no strength, or you cannot find an opportunity. to everyone and always there is an opportunity - both the rich and the poor, and the noble, and the simple, and the strong, and the weak, and the healthy, and the sick, and the righteous, and the sinner. ascends, judge by following example Holy Tradition: when, at the request of a desperate mother, who had lost her only-begotten son, abducted by death, a harlot wife, who had fallen in her way and had not yet been cleansed of her just-former sin, touched by the desperate sorrow of her mother, cried out to the Lord: " Not for the sake of the accursed sinner, but tears for the sake of a mother grieving for her son and firmly confident in Your mercy and omnipotence, Christ God, resurrect, O Lord, her son!"... - and the Lord resurrected him. So, your love for God, the power of prayer is great, and it most of all brings the Spirit of God, and it is most convenient for everyone to correct it. Blessed will we be when the Lord God finds us vigilant, in the fullness of gifts His Holy Spirit! Then we can boldly hope to be caught up in the clouds at the meeting of the Lord in the air, coming with glory and power to judge the living and the dead with much, and repay him according to his work.
Behold, your love for God, for the great happiness, please, deign to talk with the poor Seraphim, being sure that he is not deprived of the grace of the Lord. The fact that we speak about the Lord Himself, the source of the ever-scarce source of all goodness, both heavenly and earthly! But by prayer we are rewarded with talking with Him, the All-Merciful and Life-giving God and our Savior. But even here it is necessary to pray only until God the Holy Spirit descends on us in the measures of His heavenly grace known to Him. And when He delights in visiting us, then we must already stop praying. Why pray then to Him: " come and dwell in us and cleanse us from all filthiness and save us, Beloved, our souls"when He has already come to us, it is more possible to save us, who trust in Him and call on His holy name in truth, that is, so that we can humbly and with love meet Him, the Comforter, inside the temple of our souls hungry and thirsty for Him I will explain this to your love of God with an example: if only you would invite me to visit you, and at your call I would come to you and would like to talk with you. please, please, they say, to me! Then I should against my will have to say: what is he? Is he out of my mind? I came to him, but he still calls me! refers. That is why it is said: " abolish and understand that I am God, I will ascend into the town, I will ascend to the earth", that is, I will appear and will appear to everyone who believes in Me and calls on Me and I will converse with him, as I once conversed with Adam in Paradise, with Abraham and Jacob and with my other servants, with Moses, Job and the like. that this abolition applies only to the affairs of the world, that is, that during a prayer conversation with God it is necessary to abolish from the affairs of the world. the power of faith and prayer, the Lord God the Holy Spirit will deign to visit us and come to us in the fullness of His ineffable goodness, then we must also be abolished from prayer. , to hear clearly and intelligibly all the verbs of the eternal life, which He will then deign to proclaim. Moreover, one must be in complete sobriety of both soul and spirit and in the chaste purity of the flesh. So it was in Mount Horeb, when the Israelites were told to Before the appearance of God at Sinai, they would not have touched their wives for three days, for our God is " devour all unclean fire"and no one can enter into fellowship with Him from the defilement of flesh and spirit.
But what about, father, to be with other virtues, done for Christ's sake, in order to acquire the grace of the Holy Spirit? After all, you will only speak to me about prayer?
Acquire the grace of the Holy Spirit and all others of Christ for the sake of virtues, trade them spiritually, trade those of them that give you the greatest profit. Collect the capital of the blessed excess of the goodness of God, put them in the eternal pawnshop of God from the percentage of immaterial and not four or six per hundred, but one hundred per one spiritual ruble, but even that many times more. For example: giving you more of the grace of God prayer and vigilance, watch and pray; fast gives much of the Spirit of God, fast; more alms gives, do alms, and thus reason about every virtue done for Christ's sake.
Here I will tell you about myself, poor Seraphim. - I come from Kursk merchants. So, when I was not yet in the monastery, we used to trade in goods that give us more profit. So you, father, do, and, as in trade, it is not the power to just trade, but to get more profit, so in the matter of Christian life it is not power to just pray or whatever. -or a good deed to do. Although the apostle says: " pray incessantly", but why, as you remember, he adds:" I'd rather use five words with my mind than a thousand with my tongue". And the Lord says:" do not all speak Mi, Lord, Lord! will be saved, but do the will of my Father", that is, he who does the work of God and, moreover, with reverence, for" cursed is everyone who does the work of God with negligence". And the work of God is:" yes you believe in God and He sent Jesus Christ". If we judge correctly about the commandments of Christ and the apostles, then our Christian business consists not in increasing the count of good deeds that serve the goal of our Christian life only by means, but in extracting more benefit from them, that is, in acquiring the most abundant gifts of the Holy Spirit. ...
So I wish, your Love for God, that you yourself would acquire this ever-inexhaustible source of the grace of God and always reason to yourself whether you are found in the Spirit of God or not; and if - in the Spirit of God, then blessed be God! - there is nothing to grieve about: even now - at the terrible judgment of Christ! For " what I find, that's what I judge". If not, then it is necessary to understand why and for what reason the Lord God the Holy Spirit has deigned to leave us, and again seek and seek Him and not lag behind until the sought-after Lord God the Holy Spirit is found and will not be again with us by His grace. On those who drive us away from Him, our enemies must be attacked so long as their dust is taken away, as the Prophet David said: " I will marry my enemies, and I will comprehend, and I will not return, until they die, I will insult them, and they will not be able to become, they will fall under my feet".
That's it, father! So, if you please, trade spiritually virtue. Distribute the gifts of the grace of the Holy Spirit to those who demand, following the example of a lit candle, which itself shines, burning with earthly fire, and other candles, without diminishing their own fire, kindle in light to everyone in other places. And if this is so in relation to the earthly fire, then what can we say about the fire of the grace of the All-Holy Spirit of God ?! For, for example, the wealth of the earth, when it is distributed, becomes scarce, while the wealth of the heavenly grace of God the more it is distributed, the more it multiplies in the one who distributes it. So the Lord Himself deigned to say to the Samaritans: " drink from this water will thirst again, and drink from water, south of I will give him, it will not thirst for ever, but water, south of I will give him, there will be a spring in him ever-flowing into his belly, everlasting".
Father, - I said, - you all deign to speak about the acquisition of the grace of the Holy Spirit as the goal of the Christian life, but how and where can I see it? Good deeds are visible, but can the Holy Spirit be seen? How will I know if He is with me or not?
At the present time, - so answered the elder, - due to our almost universal coldness to the holy faith in our Lord Jesus Christ and due to our inattention to the actions of His Divine Providence for us and the communication of man with God, we have reached the point that, one might say, almost completely retired from a truly Christian life. Now the words of Holy Scripture seem strange to us when the Spirit of God through the mouth of Moses says: " and the sight of Adam the Lord walking in paradise"or when we read from the Apostle Paul:" go to Achaia, and the Spirit of God does not go with us, turn to Macedonia, and the Spirit of God is with us". Repeatedly in other places of the Holy Scripture it is said about the manifestation of God to men.
Here are some who say: "These places are incomprehensible. Could it be that people could see God so clearly?" And there is nothing incomprehensible here. This misunderstanding occurred because we moved away from the simplicity of the original Christian knowledge and, under the pretext of enlightenment, entered such darkness of ignorance that it already seems inconceivable to us what the ancients so clearly understood, that even in ordinary conversations they understood the concept of the manifestation of God. between people did not seem strange. So Job, when his friends reproached him for blaspheming God, answered them: " How can it be when I feel the breath of the Almighty in my nostrils?"ie how, de, I can blaspheme God when the Holy Spirit is with me. If I blasphemed God, the Holy Spirit would depart from me, but I feel His breath in my nostrils. This is exactly how it is said and about Abraham and about Jacob, that they saw the Lord and talked with Him, and Jacob even fought with Him.Moses saw God and all the people with him, when he was able to receive from God the tablets of the law on Mount Sinai. or, what is the same - the obvious grace of the Holy Spirit, they served as guides to the people of God in the wilderness.People did not see God and the grace of His Holy Spirit in a dream and not in dreams, and not in a frenzy of upset imagination, but truly manifest.
We have become very much inattentive to the work of our salvation, which is why it turns out that we and many other words of Holy Scripture are not acceptable in the sense that they should be. And this is because we do not seek the grace of God, we do not allow it, out of the pride of our mind, to dwell in our souls, and therefore we do not have true enlightenment from the Lord, sent into the hearts of people who are hungry and thirsty for the righteousness of God with all their hearts. For example, many people interpret that when the Bible says: " vdunu God is the breath of life in the person of primordial Adam and created by Him from the dust of the earth"- as if this meant that before that there was no human soul and spirit in Adam, but as if there was only one flesh, created from the dust of the earth. This interpretation is incorrect, for the Lord God created Adam from the dust of the earth in that composition, as the priest, the holy Apostle Paul asserts: " may your spirit, soul and flesh be all perfect at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ"And all these three parts of our nature were created from the dust of the earth, and Adam was not created dead, but an active animal being, like other animate creatures of God living on earth. But this is the power that if the Lord God had not breathed in then in the face of this breath of life, that is, the grace of the Lord God the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and rests in the Son and for the sake of the Son is sent into the world, then Adam, no matter how perfectly he was created over other God's creatures, as the crown of creation on earth, nevertheless, he would have remained without the Holy Spirit within himself, elevating him to God-like dignity, and would have been like all other creatures, although they have flesh and soul, and a spirit belonging to each according to their kind, but the Holy Spirit within himself to the have not . When the Lord God breathed in the face of Adam's breath of life, then, in the words of Moses, and " Adam fast into the soul I live", that is, absolutely in all things like God and such as He is, forever and ever immortal.
Adam was created to such an inappropriate action by any of the elements created by God that he was neither drowned by water, nor fire burned, nor the earth could devour in its chasms, nor could the air be damaged by any of its actions. Everything was subdued to him, as a favorite of God, as a king and owner of creation. And everyone admired him as the all-perfect crown of God's creations. From this breath of life, breathed in the face of Adam from the All-Creative Mouth of the All-Creator and Almighty God, Adam became so wise that there has never been a man ever since, no, and hardly ever will a man on earth be wiser and more knowledgeable than him. When the Lord commanded him to give names to every creature, then he gave each creature in the language such names that completely signify all the qualities, all the power and all the properties of a creature that it has according to the gift of God, given to it during its creation. It was by this gift of the above-natural grace of God, sent down to him from the breath of life, that Adam could see and understand the Lord going to paradise, and comprehend His verbs and the conversation of holy angels and the language of all animals and birds and reptiles living on earth, and all that is now hidden from us, as from the fallen and sinful, and that was so clear to Adam before his fall. The same wisdom and power, and omnipotence, and all other good and holy qualities, the Lord God gave to Eve, having created her not from the dust of the earth, but from the rib of Adam in the Eden of sweetness, in the paradise planted by Him in the middle of the earth. In order for them to comfortably and always maintain in themselves the immortal, God-gracious and all-perfect properties of this breath of life, God planted a tree of life in the middle of paradise, in the fruits of which he enclosed all the essence and fullness of the gifts of this Divine breath of His. If they had not sinned, then Adam and Eve themselves and all their offspring could always, using the eating of the fruit of the tree of life, maintain in themselves the eternally life-giving power of God's grace and the immortal, eternally youthful fullness of the forces of the flesh, soul and spirit and the incessant agelessness of the infinitely immortal of his all-blissful state, even incomprehensible to our imagination at the present time.
When, by eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil - prematurely and contrary to the commandment of God - they learned the difference between good and evil and underwent all the disasters that followed the transgression of the commandment of God, they lost this priceless gift of the grace of the Spirit of God, so that until the very advent of the God-man into the world Jesus Christ the Spirit of God " don't be in the world, as Jesus is not glorified"However, this does not mean that the Spirit of God was not at all in the world, but His stay was not as full as in Adam or in us, Orthodox Christians, but manifested itself only outside, and the signs of His stay in the world were known to the human race. So, for example, after the fall, Adam, as well as Eve with him, were revealed many secrets related to the future salvation of the human race. him.
Noah talked to God. Abraham saw God and His day and rejoiced. The grace of the Holy Spirit, acting from the outside, was reflected in all the Old Testament prophets and saints of Israel. The Jews later established special prophetic schools, where they taught to recognize the signs of the manifestation of God or angels and to distinguish the actions of the Holy Spirit from ordinary phenomena that occur in the nature of unfavorable earthly life. Simeon the God-Receiver, the Godfathers Joachim and Anna and many countless servants of God experienced constant, varied manifestations of Divine manifestations, voices, revelations justified by obvious miraculous events. Not with such power as in the people of God, but the manifestation of the Spirit of God also acted in the pagans, who did not know the True God, because from among them God also found people chosen for Himself. Such, for example, were the virgins - the prophetesses, the Sibyls, who doomed their virginity, although for an unknown God, but still for God, the Creator of the universe and Almighty and Ruler of the world, as He was recognized by the pagans. Likewise, the pagan philosophers, who, although in the darkness of the ignorance of the Divine, wandered, but, seeking the truth beloved of God, could, by this very God-loving search for it, not partake of the Spirit of God, for it is said: " tongues ignorant of God by nature create lawful and pleasing to God make"And the Lord so blesses the truth that He Himself proclaims about it by the Holy Spirit:" Truth is from the land of ascension, and truth from heaven is prince".
So, your love for God, both in the Jewish people, the sacred, God-kind people, and in the pagans, ignorant of God, but still the knowledge of God was preserved, that is, father, a clear and reasonable understanding of how the Lord God the Holy Spirit acts in a person and how exactly and by what external and internal sensations it is possible to make sure that it is the Lord God the Holy Spirit, and not the enemy's delusion, that acts. This is how it was all from the fall of Adam to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ in the flesh into the world.
Without this, your love for God, which has always been perceptibly preserved in the human race about the actions of the Holy Spirit, there would be no way for people to know exactly whether the fruit of the woman's seed, promised to Adam and Eve, has come into the world, having to erase the head of the serpent.
But here is Simeon the God-Receiver, saved by the Holy Spirit after the foretelling to him in the 65th year of his life of the secret of his ever-virgin from the Most Pure Ever-Virgin Mary of His conception and birth, having lived by the grace of the All-Holy Spirit of God for 300 years, then, at 365 years of his life, he said clearly in the temple of the Lord that sensibly learned by the gift of the Holy Spirit that this is Himself, that Christ, the Savior of the world, about whose natural conception and birth from the Holy Spirit was foretold to him three hundred years ago from an angel.
Here is Saint Anna the prophetess, the daughter of Phanuil, who served eighty years from her widowhood to the Lord God in the temple of God and known for the special gifts of God's grace for a righteous widow, a pure servant of God, announced that it is indeed He who is the Messiah promised to the world, the true Christ. God and man, the King of Israel, who came to save Adam and the human race.
When He, our Lord Jesus Christ, deigned to complete the whole work of salvation, after His resurrection, He breathed on the apostles, resuming the breath of life lost by Adam, and bestowed upon them the same Adam's grace of the All-Holy Spirit of God. But this is not enough - after all, He told them: " they do not have it, but He goes to the Father; If He does not go, then the Spirit of God will not come into the world; If He, Christ, goes to the Father, then He will send Him into the world, and He, the Comforter, will instruct them and all those who follow their teachings into every truth and will remember them all, even He spoke to them still existing in peace with them"This has already been promised to them grace-grace. And on the day of Pentecost, He solemnly sent down the Holy Spirit to them in a stormy breath, in the form of tongues of fire, on each of them who sat down and entered into them, and filled them with the power of fiery Divine grace, dewy breathing and joyfully acting in souls, partaking of its strength and actions.And this very fire-inspired grace of the Holy Spirit, when it is given to us all faithful of Christ in the sacrament of Holy Baptism, is sacredly sealed by chrismation in the main places of our flesh indicated by the holy church, as eternal keepers of this grace.
It says: " seal of the Gift of the Holy Spirit". And on what, father, your love for God, do we, the poor, put our seals, if not on vessels that keep some treasure that we value highly? the sacrament of baptism, for this baptismal grace is so great and so necessary, so life-giving for a person that even a heretic person will not be taken away from his death, that is, until the period designated from above by the Providence of God for a life-long probation of a person on earth - for what, de, he will be good and that, de, he, in this time given to him by God, through the mediation of the power of grace given to him from above, will be able to accomplish. and removed from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit by the saints of God. little by little, we are deprived of the grace of the All-Holy Spirit of God and become sinful and many-sinful people in many different ways. But when someone, agitated by the wisdom of God seeking our salvation, bypasses every kind, decides for her sake to matins to God and vigil for the sake of gaining his eternal salvation, then he, obedient to her voice, must resort to the true repentance in all his sins and to the creation of the opposite. committed sins of virtues, and through the virtues of Christ for the sake of the acquisition of the Holy Spirit, acting within us and within us arranging the Kingdom of God. It is not without reason that the Word of God says: " the kingdom of God is within you, and it needs to be, and the needy delights in it "That is, those people who, in spite of the sinful bonds that bound them and do not allow their violence and excitement to new sins, come to Him, our Savior, with perfect repentance to torture with Him, despising the entire strength of these sinful bonds, they are forced to break their bonds, such people then really appear before the face of God, more than snow, whitened by His grace. " Come ", - says the Lord:"".
and if your sins will be, as crimson, as if the snow will make them white So the once holy mystic John the Theologian saw such people in white clothes, i.e. robes of excuse, and " dates in their hands "as a sign of victory, and they sang a wonderful song to God"". "Hallelujah The beauty of their singing no one else can imitate These are the essence, who came from great sorrow, who asked for his robe and made his robe in the Blood of the Lamb.", - asking with suffering and making them more pure in communion of the Most Pure and Life-giving Mysteries of the Flesh and Blood of the Immaculate and Most Pure Christ, who was slain before all ages by His own will for the salvation of the world. and our inexhaustible salvation, in the way of the eternal belly, is favorable in response at His terrible judgment and the replacement of the dearest and every mind surpassing that fruit of the tree of life, which the human enemy of man, who had fallen from heaven, Dennitsa wanted to deprive our race of. , and Adam fell with her, but the Lord not only bestowed upon them the Redeemer in the fruit of the Seed of the Woman, who had corrected death by death, but also gave all of us in the Woman, the Ever-Virgin Mary of the Mother of God, who erased the serpent's head in herself and erases the head of the serpent in all the human race, persistent An intercessor to His Son and our God, an unashamed and invincible Representative even for the most desperate sinners. That is why the Mother of God is called " An ulcer of demons ", for there is no way for a demon to destroy a person, if only the person himself does not retreat from resorting to the help of the Mother of God.
Also, your love for God, I must, poor Seraphim, explain the difference between the actions of the Holy Spirit, who sacredly dwells in the hearts of believers in the Lord God and our Savior Jesus Christ, and the actions of sinful darkness, at the instigation and incitement of demonic thieves in us. ... The Spirit of God remembers us the words of our Lord Jesus Christ and acts in one with Him, always solemnly, joyfully making our hearts and guiding our feet on the path of peace, but the flattering, demonic spirit, contrary to Christ, is wise, and his actions in us are rebellious, obstinate and full of lust fleshly, lust of hair and pride of life. " Amen, amen, I say to you, everyone who lives and believes in Me will not die forever": he who has the grace of the Holy Spirit for the right faith in Christ, if through human weakness and died mentally from any sin, he would not die forever, but will be resurrected by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, who takes away the sins of the world and gives grace to the tune. . About this grace, shown to the whole world and our human race in the God-man, and it is said in the Gospel: " in that belly be and belly be the light of man", and added:" and the light shines in the darkness, and His darkness does not embrace"This means that the grace of the Holy Spirit, given at baptism in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, despite the human falls, despite the darkness around our soul, still shines in the heart from time immemorial with the former Divine light of the priceless merits of Christ. This light Christ, with the sinner's unrepentant repentance, says to the Father: Abba Father, do not be angry with this impenitence to the end! And then, when the sinner turns to the path of repentance, he completely blots out the traces of the crimes committed, dressing the former criminal again with incorruptible clothes woven from the grace of the Holy Spirit, about the acquisition of which, as the goal of Christian life, I have spoken for so long to your love of God.
I will also tell you, so that you understand even more clearly what to understand by the grace of God and how to recognize it, and in what its effect is especially manifested in people enlightened by it. The grace of the Holy Spirit is the light that enlightens a person. All the Holy Scripture speaks about this. Thus, Godfather David said: " the lamp of my feet is Thy law, and the light of my paths, and if Thy law was not my teaching, then I would perish in my humility"That is, the grace of the Holy Spirit, expressed in the law by the words of the commandments of the Lord, is my lamp and light, and if it were not for this grace of the Holy Spirit, which I am so thoroughly and diligently acquiring that seven days a day I learn about the fate of Thy righteousness, would enlighten me in the darkness of the worries associated with the great title of my royal dignity, then where would I get even a spark of light to illuminate my path along the path of life, dark from the hostility of my enemies? Saint on those people whom He sanctified and enlightened with His great influences. Remember Moses after his conversation with God on Mount Sinai. People could not look at him - so he shone with an extraordinary light that surrounded his face. He was even forced to appear to the people not otherwise, as under a veil. Remember the Transfiguration of the Lord on Mount Tabor. Great light enveloped Him, and " there was His robe, shining like snow, and His disciples from fear of falling prostrate". When Moses and Elijah appeared to Him in the same light, then, in order to hide the radiance of the light of Divine grace, which blinded the eyes of the disciples, the" clouds ", it is said," overshadow them. "And in this way the grace of the All-Holy Spirit of God appears in ineffable light for all, to whom God reveals her action.
How is it, - I asked the priest about. Seraphim - to know to me that I am in the grace of the Holy Spirit?
This, your love of God, is very simple! - he answered me, - that's why the Lord says: " the whole point is simple for those who gain reason"Yes, our trouble is that we ourselves do not have this Divine mind, which does not boast (does not take pride), for it is not of this world. This mind, filled with love for God and neighbor, creates every person. for his salvation. The Lord said about this mind: " God wants everyone to be saved and come to the mind of truth"And to His apostles about the lack of this reason, He said:" Do you not naturally understand, and do you not understand these Scriptures and parables?"Again about this reason, the Gospel says about the apostles that" then the Lord opened their minds to understand the Scriptures". Being in this mind, the apostles always saw whether the Spirit of God abides in them or not, and those who were imbued with it and seeing the Spirit of God abiding with them, affirmatively said that their work is holy and completely pleasing to the Lord God. This explains why they are in their letters they wrote: " be pleased with the Holy Spirit and us"and only on these grounds did they offer their messages as an immutable truth for the benefit of all the faithful - so the holy apostles felt the presence of the Spirit of God in themselves ... So, your love of God, do you see how simple it is?
I answered:
Still, I do not understand why I can be firmly convinced that I am in the Spirit of God. How can I recognize His true manifestation in myself?
Father about. Seraphim replied:
I have already, your love for God, told you that this very simply and in detail told you how people are in the Spirit of God and how one should understand His appearance in us ... What do you want, father?
It is necessary, - I said, - so that I understand this well.
Then Fr. Seraphim took me very tightly by the shoulders and said to me:
We are both now, father, in the Spirit of God with you. Why aren't you looking at me?
I answered:
I cannot, father, look, because lightning is pouring out of your eyes. Your face has become brighter than the sun, and my eyes ache with pain.
O. Seraphim said:
Do not be afraid, your love of God, and now you yourself have become as bright as I myself. You yourself are now in the fullness of the Spirit of God, otherwise you would not have been able to see me like that.
And, bowing his head to me, he quietly said to me in my ear:
Thank the Lord God for His ineffable mercy to you. You saw that I did not even cross myself, but only in my heart I mentally prayed to the Lord God and inside myself said: Lord! honor him clearly and with bodily eyes to see the descent of Thy Spirit, with which Thou dost honor Thy servants, when Thou deign to appear in the light of Thy glorious glory! And so, father, the Lord instantly fulfilled the humble request of the wretched Seraphim ... How can we not thank Him for this ineffable gift to both of us! That way, father, the Lord God does not always show His mercy to the great hermits. This grace of God was pleased to comfort your contrite heart, like a child-loving mother, through the intercession of the Mother of God herself ... - Well, father, don't look me in the eyes? Just look, do not be afraid - the Lord is with us!
After these words I looked into his face, and an even greater reverential horror attacked me. Imagine, in the middle of the sun, in the brightest brightness of its midday rays, the face of a person talking to you. You see the movement of his lips, the changing expression of his eyes, hear his voice, feel that someone is holding you by the shoulders, but not only you don’t see these hands, you don’t see either yourself or his figure, but only one blinding light , stretching far, several yards in a circle and illuminating with its bright shine both the snow veil covering the clearing, and the snow pellet, which showered me and the great old man from above. Is it possible to imagine the position in which I was then?
What do you feel now ?! - asked me about. Seraphim.
Unusually good, I said.
How good is it? What exactly?
I answered:
I feel such silence and peace in my soul that I cannot express it in any words.
This, your love for God, ”said Father Fr. Seraphim - the world about which the Lord told His disciples: " My peace I give to you, not as peace gives, I give to you. If you were faster from the world, the world would love its own, but as if you were elected from the world, for this sake the world hates you. Lots of dare, as I have won the world". It is to these people who are hated from this world, chosen by the Lord, and the Lord gives the peace that you now feel in yourself;" peace, "according to the apostolic word," every mind prevails". This is what the apostle calls him, because no word can express the well-being of the soul that he produces in those people in whose hearts the Lord God instills him. Christ the Savior calls him the world from His own bounty, and not from this world, for nothing temporary earthly well-being cannot give him to the human heart: it is bestowed from above from the Lord God Himself, which is why it is called the peace of God ... What else do you feel? - Fr Seraphim asked me.
An extraordinary sweetness, - I answered.
And he continued:
This is the sweetness that the Holy Scriptures say: " from fatty to Thy house they will be drunk, and I will fill with a stream of Thy sweetness"This sweetness now fills our hearts and spreads through all our veins with our ineffable delight. From this sweetness our hearts seem to melt, and we are both filled with such bliss that no language can express ... Well, then can you still feel?
An extraordinary joy in my whole heart.
And Father Fr. Seraphim continued:
When the Spirit of God descends on a person and overshadows him with the fullness of His inspiration, then the human soul is filled with inexpressible joy, for the Spirit of God gladdens everything, no matter what He touches. This is the very joy about which the Lord speaks in His Gospel; " wife always gives birth, have grief, as if her year had come; Whenever he gives birth to a child, he does not remember the sorrow for the joy, as if a man was born into the world. You will be in sorrow in the world, but whenever I see you, your heart will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.". But no matter how comforting this joy that you now feel in your heart, it is nevertheless insignificant in comparison with that about which the Lord Himself through the mouth of His Apostle said that this joy" neither the sight of the eye, nor the ear of hearing, nor the good ascending in the heart of man, even God is ready for those who love Him". The foreshadows of this joy are given to us now, and if from them it is so sweet, good and cheerful in our souls, then what can we say about the joy that is prepared there, in heaven, for those who weep here on earth? Here you are, father, quite - yet we wept in your life on earth, and look, with what joy the Lord consoles you even in this life. may the words of the Lord come true on us: " those who endure the Lord, they will change the fortress, they will grow round, like eagles, they will flow and will not bother, they will go and not hunger, they will go from strength to strength and the God of the gods will appear to them in Zion of understanding and heavenly visions"... It was then that our present joy, which appears to us in a small and brief way, will appear in all its fullness, and no one will take it from us, filled with inexplicable despicable pleasures ... What else do you feel, your love of God?
I answered:
Extraordinary warmth.
How, father, warmth? Why, we are sitting in the forest. Now it's winter in the yard and there is snow under our feet, and there is more snow on top of us, and the croup from above is falling ... What kind of warmth can there be?
I answered:
And such, what happens in a bathhouse, when they put it on the stove and steam pours out of it in a column ...
And the smell, - he asked me, - is the same as from the bath?
No, I replied, there is nothing on earth like this fragrance. When, during my mother's life, I loved to dance and went to balls and dance evenings, my mother used to sprinkle me with perfume that she bought in the best fashion stores in Kazan, but those perfumes do not emit such a fragrance ...
And Father Fr. Seraphim, smiling pleasantly, said:
- And I myself, father, I know this exactly as you do, but on purpose I ask you - do you feel it this way? The absolute truth, your love of God! No sweetness of earthly fragrance can be compared with the fragrance that we now feel, because we are now surrounded by the fragrance of the Holy Spirit of God. What earthly things can be like him! .. Notice, your love for God, because you told me that it is warm around us, like in a bathhouse, but look, because neither you nor me the snow melts and under us too ... Therefore, this warmth is not in the air, but in ourselves. It is precisely that warmth about which the Holy Spirit with the words of prayer makes us cry to the Lord: " warm me with the warmth of the Holy Spirit". She somehow warmed hermits and hermitages were not afraid of winter filth, being dressed as in warm fur coats, in grace-filled clothing, woven from the Holy Spirit. So it should be in reality, because the grace of God must dwell within us, in the heart ours, for the Lord said: " the kingdom of God is within you". By the kingdom of God, the Lord meant the grace of the Holy Spirit. This kingdom of God is now inside us and is, and the grace of the Holy Spirit shines and warms us from the outside and, filling the air around us with many different fragrances, delights our senses with despicable delight, filling our hearts joy unspeakable. Our present situation is the same about which the Apostle says: " the kingdom of God is not food and drink, but the truth and peace about Dus the Holy". Our faith consists" not in words that are awkward to earthly wisdom, but in the manifestation of strength and spirit"It is in this state that we are now with you. It is about this state that the Lord said:" the essence is not from those who stand here, who do not have a taste of death, they still see the kingdom of God, which has come in power"Behold, father, your love for God, what inexpressible joy the Lord God has given us now! .. This is what it means to be in the fullness of the Holy Spirit, about which Saint Macarius of Egypt writes:" I myself was in the fullness of the Holy Spirit ... " then, with the fullness of His Holy Spirit and the poor, the Lord has now filled us with US?
I don’t know, father, ”I said,“ whether the Lord will deign to remember me forever as vividly and clearly as now I feel this mercy of God.
And I think, - Fr. answered me. Seraphim, - that the Lord will help you to forever keep this in your memory, for otherwise His goodness would not have bowed so instantly to my humble prayer and would not have anticipated listening to the poor Seraphim so soon, especially since it was not for you alone that you were given to understand this, but through you for the whole world, so that you yourself, having been established in the work of God, can also be useful to others. As for the fact, father, that I am a monk, and you are a worldly person, then there is nothing to think about: God is required to have the right faith in Him and His Only Begotten Son. For this, the grace of the Holy Spirit is abundantly given from above. The Lord seeks a heart filled with love for God and neighbor - this is the throne on which He loves to sit and on which He appears in the fullness of His heavenly glory. " Son, give Mi your heart!"He says:" and all the rest I myself will apply to you"for the kingdom of God can be contained in the human heart. The Lord commands His disciples:" Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and this will all be added to you. The message is for your heavenly Father, as you demand all of these".
The Lord God does not reproach for the use of earthly goods, for He Himself says that according to our position in earthly life, we demand all of these, i.e. everything that calms our human life on earth and makes our way to the heavenly fatherland convenient and easier. Relying on this, St. The apostle Peter said that in his opinion there is nothing better in the world than piety combined with contentment. And the Holy Church prays that this would be given to us by the Lord God; and although sorrows, misfortunes and various needs are inseparable from our life on earth, yet the Lord God did not want and does not want us to be only in sorrows and misfortunes, which is why he commands us through the apostles to bear each other's burdens and thus fulfill the law Christoff. The Lord Jesus personally gives us a commandment that we love each other and, consoling with this mutual love, make it easier for ourselves the sad and narrow path of our journey to the heavenly fatherland. Why did He come down to us from heaven, if not in order to take our poverty upon Himself and enrich us with the riches of His goodness and His unspeakable bounties? After all, He did not come to serve Him, but let Himself serve others and give His soul for the deliverance of many. Likewise, you, your love for God, do and, having seen the mercy of God clearly shown to you, report this to everyone who desires salvation for himself. " There is a lot of harvest"says the Lord:" workers are few". So the Lord God brought us to work and gave the gifts of His grace, so that, reaping the classes of salvation of our neighbors through the multiplying number of those brought by us into the kingdom of God, they would bring Him fruits - thirty, sixty, and one hundred.
Let us look after ourselves, father, so as not to be condemned to us with that crafty and lazy slave who buried his talent in the ground, and we will try to imitate those good and faithful servants of the Lord who brought their Lord, one - instead of two - four, and the other is ten instead of five. There is nothing to doubt about the mercy of the Lord God: yourselves, your love for God, you see how the words of the Lord, spoken through the prophet, came true on us. " I am God from afar, but God is near and at your mouth is your salvation". No sooner had I, poor man, made the sign of the cross, but only in my heart I wished that the Lord would deign to see His goodness in its fullness, as He already immediately and in fact, by fulfilling my wish, has deigned. in order to show you its significance and make you envious and not so that you think that I am a monk, and you are a layman, no, your love of God, no! " The Lord is near to all who call on Him in truth, and He does not have sight on faces, the Father loves the Son and gives everything in His hand"if only we ourselves loved Him, our heavenly Father, truly in a filial way. The Lord listens equally to a monk and a layman, a simple Christian, if only both were Orthodox and both loved God from the depths of their souls and both had faith in Him, at least " like grain is bitter"and both will move mountains." One moves a thousand, two darkness".
The Lord Himself says: " everything is possible for the believer"and Father the Holy Apostle Paul exclaims in a loud voice:" all I can about Christ strengthening me". Isn't our Lord Jesus Christ even more marvelous than that when he says about those who believe in Him:" Believe in Me, not just what I do, but I will also do more of these, as I am going to My Father and pray to Him for you, so that your joy will be filled. Hitherto do not ask for anything in My Name, but now ask and receive ..."So, your Love for God, whatever you ask the Lord God for, you will accept everything, if only it was for the glory of God, or for the benefit of your neighbor, because He also refers to His glory as and says: " all, even to the one of the least of these who have created, I have created". So do not have any doubt that the Lord God will not fulfill your requests, as long as they only relate to the glory of God, or to the benefits and edification of neighbors. But even if for your own need, or benefit, or benefit to you that - or it was necessary, and even so quickly and obediently the Lord God will deign to send you, if only the extreme need and necessity insist on it, for the Lord loves those who love Him: the Lord is good to everyone, but he is generous and gives to those who do not call His name, and His bounty in all His works, but He will do the will of those who fear Him, and he will hear their prayer, and he will fulfill all counsel, the Lord will fulfill all your requests. The Lord will deny you and that for your Orthodox faith in Christ the Savior, for the Lord will not betray the rod of the righteous to the lot of sinners and will unswervingly do the will of His servant David, but he will demand from him why he disturbed Him unnecessarily, ask l He has something without which he could very conveniently do.
So, your love for God, I have told you everything now and in practice showed that the Lord and the Mother of God through me, poor Seraphim, deigned to tell and show you. Come in peace. May the Lord and the Mother of God be with you always, now and forever and forever and ever. Amen. Come in peace! ...
And during the whole time of this conversation, from that very time, as the face of Fr. Seraphim was enlightened, this vision did not stop, and from the beginning of the story and until now he spoke to me, being in the same position. The ineffable shining of light emanating from him I saw with my own eyes, which I am ready to confirm with my oath.
This is where the Motovilov manuscript ends. The depth of the meaning of this act of the triumph of Orthodoxy is not my pen to begin to clarify and emphasize, and it does not require a testimony about itself, because it testifies to itself with such indestructible power that its significance cannot be diminished by the gossip of this world.
But if anyone could see the form in which I got the papers of Motovilov, which kept in their hiding places this precious testimony of the godly life of the holy elder! Dust, jackdaws and pigeon feathers, bird droppings, scraps of completely uninteresting accounts, accounting, agricultural extracts, copies of petitions, letters from third parties - all in one heap, mixed with one another, and weighing 4 p. 5 lb in total. All the papers are dilapidated, scribbled in a fluent and so illegible handwriting that I was simply horrified: where can I figure it out ?!
Sorting out this chaos, bumping into all sorts of obstacles - especially the handwriting was a stumbling block for me - I remember almost succumbing to despair. And here, in the midst of all this waste paper, no, no, and a hardly disassembled phrase will sparkle in the darkness: "Father Seraphim told me ..." What did you say? What do these unsolved hieroglyphs hide in themselves? I was desperate.
I remember that in the evening of a whole day of hard and fruitless work, I could not stand it and prayed: Father Seraphim! Is that why you gave me the opportunity to receive your servant's manuscripts from such a distance as Diveev, in order to return them to oblivion unselected?
From the heart, it must have been my exclamation. The next morning, starting to sort out the papers, I immediately found this manuscript and immediately got the ability to parse Motovilovsky's handwriting. It is not difficult to imagine my joy, and how significant the words of this manuscript seemed to me: "but I am thinking," Fr. Seraphim: "that the Lord will help you to keep this in your memory forever, for otherwise His goodness would not have bowed so instantly to my humble prayer and would not have anticipated listening to the poor Seraphim so soon, especially since it is not for you alone that you have been given to understand this, but through you for the whole world ... "
Seventy years this treasure lay hidden in attics, among various forgotten rubbish. He should have gotten into print, and when? just before the glorification of the holy relics of the one whom the Orthodox Church begins to ask:
"Venerable Father Seraphim, pray to God for us!"
Conversation of St. Seraphim of Sarovsky with N.A. Motovilov about the goal of Christian life is an amazing thing, read and experienced as the message of the Holy Spirit, miraculously not destroyed and open for our times. Unfortunately, the conversation is poorly understood and practically not in demand (1st half of the 19th century)
Conversation of St. Seraphim of Sarovsky with N.A. Motovilov
It was Thursday. The day was overcast. The snow was on
a quarter on the ground, and on top of it was rather thick, snow grains, when the priest
Father Seraphim began a conversation with me at his closest harvest, near the same
a nearby desert, opposite the Sarovka river, near a mountain that comes close to the banks
her.
He put me on the stump of a tree he had just cut down, and he himself stood against
me squatting.
The Lord revealed to me, - said the great old man, - that in your childishness you
zealously wanted to know what is the purpose of our Christian life, and for many
You have repeatedly asked great spiritual persons about this ...
I must say here that from the age of 12 this thought is unacceptable to me
disturbed, and I, indeed, addressed many of the clergy with this question,
but their answers did not satisfy me. The elder did not know this.
But no one, - continued Father Seraphim, - has definitely told you about this.
They told you: go to church, pray to God, do God's commandments, do good
- here's the goal of Christian life. And some even resented you for
the fact that you are busy with not godly curiosity, and told you:
look. But they didn’t speak as they should.
Here I, poor Seraphim, will explain to you now what this goal really is.
Prayer, fasting, vigil and all other Christian deeds, no matter how good
they are in themselves, however, not only doing them is the goal of our Christian
life, although they serve as the necessary means to achieve it. True
the goal of our Christian life is to acquire the Holy Spirit of God. Notice
Father, that a good deed done only for Christ's sake brings us fruit
Of the Holy Spirit. Still not for the sake of Christ what is done, although good, but rewards in life
the future age does not represent to us, and in this life, too, the grace of God
does not give. That is why the Lord Jesus Christ said: “No one else gathers with me,
that he wastes. " A good deed cannot be called otherwise than collecting, although it is
it is not done for Christ's sake, but good. Scripture says: “In every tongue
fear God and do righteousness, it is pleasing to him to eat ”. And as we see from the sequence
sacred narrative, this "do righteousness" is so pleasing to God that Cornelius
to the centurion, who feared God and did righteousness, an angel of the Lord appeared during
his prayers and said: “Send to Joppa to Simon the abomination, tamo rite Peter and
That one speaks the verbs of the eternal belly, in them you and your whole house will be saved ”.
So, the Lord uses all his Divine means to deliver such
a person for his good deeds will not be deprived of the reward in the life of the Divine Life. But for this
we must begin here with the right faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God who came
to save sinners into the world, and by acquiring the grace of the Holy Spirit,
into our hearts the Kingdom of God and paving the way for us to acquire bliss
life of the next century. But this is what limits this pleasing to God of good deeds,
not done for Christ's sake. The Creator gives us funds for their implementation. Per
it remains for man to realize them or not. This is why the Lord told the Jews:
“If they did not see it faster, they had no quicker sin. Now speak - we see, and sin
yours is on you. " A person, like Cornelius, will take advantage of the pleasantness
God of his work, not done for Christ's sake, and will believe in His Son, so and so
for the sake of the deed will be credited to him, as done for Christ's sake, only for faith in Him. V
Otherwise, a person has no right to complain that his good did not go into business.
This never happens, only when doing some good deed of Christ.
for the sake, for the good done for His sake, not only in the life of the century to come
the crown of righteousness makes intercession, but it also fills a person in this life
the grace of the Holy Spirit, and moreover, as it is said, “God gives the Holy Spirit beyond measure,
The Father loves the Son and gives everything in His hand ”.
So it is, your love of God! So in
acquiring this Spirit
Of God and is the true purpose of our Christian life, but prayer, vigil,
fasting, charity and other virtues done for Christ's sake are only means to
the acquisition of the Spirit of God.
- What about acquisition? - I asked Father Seraphim: I don’t understand something.
Acquisition is the same as acquisition, - he answered me, - after all, you understand,
what it means to acquire money. So it is all the same the acquisition of the Spirit of God. After all, you, your
Love of God, do you understand what acquisition is in the worldly sense? The Purpose of Worldly Life
ordinary people have the acquisition of money, and among the nobles, moreover, they receive honors,
distinctions and other awards for state merit. The acquisition of the Spirit of God is
also capital, but only gracious and eternal, and it, like money, bureaucratic and
temporary, acquired in almost the same ways, very similar to each
with a friend.
God the Word, our Lord our God-man Jesus Christ likens our life to a marketplace,
and the work of our life on earth he calls purchase, and says to everyone: “Bathe, dondezhe
come, redeeming time, as the days of cunning are the essence, ”- that is, gain time for
receiving heavenly goods through earthly goods. Earthly goods are virtues,
done for Christ's sake, giving us the grace of the All-Holy Spirit, without whom
and there is no salvation for anyone and cannot be, for: “By the Holy Spirit every soul lives
and it rises in purity, shines forth in the sacred triple unity ”. Myself
The Holy Spirit dwells in our souls, and this is the very dwelling in our souls of His, the Almighty,
and abiding with our spirit of His Trinity Unity and is given to us only through
every possible acquisition of the Holy Spirit on our part, which prepares in
to our soul and flesh, the throne of God All-creative with our spirit abiding,
according to the immutable word of God: “I will dwell in them and I will resemble and will be in God,
and these will be my people ”. Of course, every virtue done for Christ's sake gives
the grace of the Holy Spirit, but most of all it gives prayer, because it seems to always
in our hands, as an instrument for the acquisition of the grace of the Spirit. Would you like, for example,
to go to Church, but either there is no Church, or the service has passed; would a beggar want
give, but there is no beggar, or nothing to give; would want to keep virginity, but by
your addition or by the efforts of the enemy's wiles, which you, due to human weakness
you cannot resist, you have no strength to fulfill it; would like another one
to do virtue for Christ's sake, but also there is no strength, or one cannot find a chance.
And before prayer, this does not apply in any way: everyone always has an opportunity for it.
- both the rich and the poor, and the noble and the simple, and the strong and the weak, and the healthy
and sick, and righteous and sinner. The power of prayer is great, and it is more than anything
brings the Spirit of God, and it is most convenient for everyone to correct it. With prayer we
We are rewarded with the all-good and Life-giving God and our Savior, but also
here it is necessary to pray only until God the Holy Spirit descends on us in
known to Him measures of His heavenly grace. And when He delights to visit
us, then we must already stop praying. Why pray then to Him: “Come,
and dwell in us, and cleanse us from all filthiness, and save, O Lord, our souls ”, when
He has already come to us in order to save us, who trust in Him and call on His Name
holy in truth, that is, in order to humbly and lovingly meet Him, the Comforter,
inside the temple of our souls, hungry and thirst for His coming.
Well, what about, father, to be with other virtues, done for Christ's sake
to acquire the grace of the Holy Spirit? After all, you deign to speak to me only about prayer.
Acquire the grace of the Holy Spirit and all others, for Christ's sake, virtues,
trade those of them that give you more profit. Collect the capital of the blessed
excess of the goodness of God, put them in the eternal pawnshop of God and not in four or
six for a hundred, but one hundred for one spiritual ruble, but even that for an uncountable
times more. Roughly: will give you more of the grace of God prayer and vigil, vigil
and pray; fast gives much of the Spirit of God, fast; more gives alms, alms
do, and thus reason about every virtue done for Christ's sake.
So, if you please, trade spiritually virtue. Distribute the gifts of the grace of the Spirit
Demanding a saint, following the example of a kindled candle, which itself shines, grief
earthly fire, and other lights, without extinguishing their own fire, kindle in
illumination of all in other places. And if this is so in relation to earthly fire, then
what can we say about the fire of the grace of the All-Holy Spirit of God ?!
Father, - I said, - here you all deign to talk about the acquisition of grace
Holy Spirit as the goal of Christian life, but how and where can I see it?
Good deeds are visible, but can the Holy Spirit be seen? How am I going to know
Is He with me or not?
At the present time, - so answered the elder, - due to our almost universal coldness
to holy faith in our Lord Jesus Christ and through our inattention to action
His Divine providence for us and the communication of man with God reached such a point that
it can be said that they have almost completely retired from the true Christian life. We now
the words of Holy Scripture seem strange when the Spirit of God through the mouth of Moses spoke:
“And the sight of Adam the Lord going to paradise,” or when we read from the Apostle Paul:
"I go to Achaia and the Spirit of God is with us." Repeatedly in other places of the Sacred
The Scriptures speak of the manifestation of God to men.
Here are some who say: “These places are incomprehensible, could it really be that people could so obviously
see God? " And there is nothing incomprehensible here. There was this misunderstanding from the fact
that we have withdrawn from the vastness of the original Christian knowledge and under the pretext
enlightenment have entered such darkness of ignorance that it already seems inconceivable to us
what the ancients had so clearly understood that even in ordinary conversations they
the concept of appearing to God did not seem strange. God and the grace of His Holy Spirit
people did not see in a dream and not in a dream, and not in a frenzy of upset imagination,
but it is true in reality. We have become very inattentive to the cause of our salvation,
which is why it turns out that we and many other words of Holy Scripture are not acceptable
in the sense that it should. And all because we are not looking for the grace of God,
we do not allow her, by the pride of our mind, to dwell in our souls, and therefore we do not have
true enlightenment from the Lord, sent to the hearts of people who are waiting with all their hearts
and hungry for the truth.
When our Lord Jesus Christ deigned to complete the whole work of salvation, after the resurrection
His, blew on the apostles, resuming the breath of life lost by Adam, and bestowed
I have this very Adamic grace of the All-Holy Spirit of God. In a day
Pentecost, He solemnly sent down the Holy Spirit to them in a stormy breath in the form
tongues of fire, on each of them that sat down, and entered into them, and filled them
by the power of fiery Divine grace, breathing dewy and joyfully acting
in souls, partaking of Her power and actions. And this very fire-inspired
the grace of the Holy Spirit when it is given to us
to all the faithful of Christ, in the sacrament of Holy Baptism, they are sealed in the most important,
the places of our flesh indicated by the Holy Church as the eternal guardian of this
grace. It says: "The seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit." And why, father, your love of God,
We, poor, put our seals, if not on vessels that keep some highly valued
us a jewel. What can be higher than everything in the world and what is more precious
The gifts of the Holy Spirit, sent down to us from above in the sacrament of baptism, for baptism
this grace is so great, and so necessary, so life-giving for man,
that even a heretic will not be taken away from a person until his death: that is, until the term,
designated from above by the Providence of God for a lifelong test of man on earth
- what will he be good for and what will he be in this time given to him by God, if
help from above the power of grace bestowed on him, he can accomplish. And if we didn't
have never sinned after our baptism, then we would have remained saints forever
and by the saints of God taken out of all filthiness of flesh and spirit. But here's the thing
and the trouble is that we, succeeding in age, do not succeed in grace and in reason
Of God, as our Lord Jesus Christ succeeded in this, but on the contrary, being corrupted
little by little, we are deprived of the grace of the All-Holy Spirit of God and become in many different
measures by sinful and sinful people. But when, who, being excited by the seeker
of our salvation by the Wisdom of God, will decide for her sake for the morning to God
and vigil for the sake of gaining his eternal salvation, then the one obedient to the voice
her, must resort to the true repentance in all his sins and to commit
opposing the sins of the virtues, but through the virtues of Christ for the sake of
to the acquisition of the Holy Spirit, acting within us and within us the Kingdom of God
satisfying. The grace of the Holy Spirit, given at baptism in the Name of the Father and the Son
and the Holy Spirit, despite the human falls, despite the darkness around
of our soul, nevertheless, it shines in the heart from time immemorial with the former Divine light of priceless
merits of Christ. This Light of Christ, when the sinner turns to the path of repentance,
completely obliterates the traces of the crimes committed by dressing the former criminal
again with a garment of incorruption, woven from the grace of the Holy Spirit, about the acquisition of which,
as the goal of Christian life, I have been speaking for so long to your love of God.
If I tell you, so that you understand even more clearly what to understand by the grace of God, size = "3"> its effect is manifested in people enlightened by it. Grace "And there was His garment, shining like snow, and his disciples for fear of falling prostrate." When How then, - I asked Father Seraphim, - to find out that I This, your love of God, is very simple! - he answered me, - that's why the Lord I answered: Still, I do not understand why I can be firmly convinced that I am in the Spirit Father about. Seraphim replied: I already, your love for God, told you that it is very simple, and I told you in detail It is necessary, - I said, - so that I understand this well! .. Then Fr. Seraphim took me very tightly by the shoulders and said to me: We are both now, father, in the Spirit of God with you! .. Why are you not looking at I cannot, father, look, because lightning is pouring from your eyes. Face O. Seraphim said: Do not be afraid, your love for God, and now you yourself have become as bright as And, bowing his head to me, he quietly said to me in my ear: Thank the Lord God for His ineffable mercy to you. Have you seen, I looked after these words in his face, and attacked me with an even greater reverent How do you feel now? - Seraphim. Unusually good! - I said. How good is it? What exactly? asked me about. I answered: I feel such silence and peace in my soul that no words can express This, your love for God, ”said Father Fr. Seraphim is the world about which What else do you feel? - asked me about. Seraphim. Unusual sweetness! - I answered. And he continued: This is the sweetness about which the Holy Scriptures say: “From fatness to home An extraordinary joy in all my heart! And Father Seraphim continued: When the Spirit of God descends upon a person and overshadows him with the fullness of His inspiration, “A wife, always giving birth, has sorrow, as if her year would come; Whenever she gives birth to a child, What else do you feel, your love of God? I answered: Extraordinary warmth! How, father, warmth? Why, we are sitting in the forest. Now winter is in the yard, and under I answered: And the kind that happens in the bath, when they give it to the stove and when from it a pillar And the smell, - he asked me, - is the same as from the bath? No, I replied, there is nothing on earth like this fragrance. When, And Father Fr. Seraphim, smiling pleasantly, said: And I myself, father, I know this in the same way as you, but on purpose I ask "I myself was in the fullness of the Holy Spirit." With this fullness of the Holy Spirit and us, that I don’t know, father! - I said, - will the Lord deign me to remember forever And I think, - Father Seraphim answered me, - that the Lord will help you to keep
and how to recognize it, and what is special
The Holy Spirit is the light that enlightens a person. The Lord has repeatedly shown
for many witnesses the work of the grace of the Holy Spirit in those people whom He
sanctified and enlightened with His great influences. Think about Moses after the conversation
with God on Mount Sinai. People could not look at him - so he shone with an extraordinary
the light that surrounded him. He was even forced to appear to the people only under
blanket. Remember the transfiguration of the Lord on Mount Tabor.
but Moses and Elijah appeared to Him, then to hide the radiance of the light of Divine grace,
blinding the eyes of the disciples, "a cloud", it is said, "overshadow them." And this way
the grace of the All-Holy Spirit of God appears in an ineffable light for all, to whom
God reveals her action.
Am I in the grace of the Holy Spirit?
says: "All is simple in essence to those who gain reason" ... being in this mind, and the apostles
always saw whether the Spirit of God dwells in them or not, and those who penetrated them and saw
abiding with them the Spirit of God, affirmatively said that their work is holy
and is quite pleasing to God. This explains why they wrote in their epistles:
“It would be pleasing to the Holy Spirit and to us,” and only on these grounds did they offer their
messages, as an immutable truth, for the benefit of all the faithful, - so the holy apostles
felt the presence of the Spirit of God in themselves ... so this is your love of God,
can you see how easy it is? "
Of God. How can I myself recognize His true appearance?
to you, as people are in the Spirit of God and how should we understand His appearance in us ...
What else do you want, father?
me? I answered:
yours has become brighter than the sun, and my eyes ache with pain! ..
and myself. You yourself are now in the fullness of the Spirit of God, otherwise you couldn't
and see me like that.
that I did not even cross myself, but only in my heart I mentally prayed to the Lord
He said to God and within himself: “Lord, grant him clearly and with bodily eyes to see
that descent of Thy Spirit, with which Thou honor Thy servants, when Thou art pleased
to appear in the light of Your glorious glory, ”And so, father, the Lord fulfilled
instantly the humble request of the wretched Seraphim ... How can you not thank His unspeakable
a gift to both of us! That way, father, the Lord does not always show the great hermits
God is His mercy. It was the grace of God that was pleased to comfort a broken heart.
yours, like a child-loving mother through the intercession of the Mother of God Herself ... Well,
Father, don't look me in the eye? Look simply and do not be afraid - the Lord s
us!
horror. Imagine, in the middle of the sun, in its brightest brightness
midday rays, the face of the person talking to you. Do you see movement
his lips, the changing expression of his eyes, hear his voice, feel that someone
He holds you by the shoulders with his hands, but not only do you not see these hands, you do not see either
himself, not his figure, but only one blinding light, stretching far,
a few fathoms around, and giving its bright shine a snow veil covering
a clearing, and snow pellets, which showers from above both me and the great old man. Perhaps
can I imagine the situation in which I was then!
I can not!
The Lord told His disciples: “I give you my peace, it is not like peace gives, I give
to you. If only they were faster from the world, the world would love its own, but I will elect you from the world,
for this reason the world hates you. But go for it, as I will be victorious in the world ”. To these people,
to those who are hated of this world, chosen by the Lord, and the Lord gives the world that
you feel in yourself now. "Peace", in the apostolic word, "everyone. Mind prevails"
(Phil 1, 7).
Thy will be drunk and I will fill with the flow of Thy sweetness ”. Now this sweetness
fills and spreads through all veins with our ineffable delight. From
of this sweetness, our hearts seem to melt, and we are both filled with such bliss,
which cannot be expressed in any language ... What else do you feel?
then the human soul is filled with inexpressible joy, for the Spirit of God
joyfully creates everything, no matter what he touches, this is the same joy, about
which the Lord says in His Gospel:
moreover, he does not remember sorrow for joy, as if a man was born in the world. In a world of sorrow
you will, but when I see you, your heart will rejoice, and no one will take your joy
from you". But no matter how comforting the joy that you now feel
in her heart, yet she is insignificant in comparison with the one about which the Lord himself
through the mouth of His apostle he said that that joy “neither sight nor ear,
neither in the heart of man has a good ascending, even God is prepared for those who love Him ”. Pre-assignments
this joy is given to us now, and if from them it is so sweet, good and fun in
our souls, what to say about the joy that is prepared in heaven for those who weep
here on earth ?! Here you are, my dear, we cried enough.
in your life, and look, with what joy the Lord consoles you even in this
life.
snow on our feet, and more than an inch of snow on us, and from above the croup falls ...
maybe there is warmth ?!
steam is coming down ...
even during my mother's life, I loved to dance and went to balls and dance
evenings, then my mother will sprinkle me with perfume that I bought in the best
trendy shops in Kazan, but even those perfumes do not emit such a fragrance ...
you - is that how you feel? The absolute truth, your love of God! No pleasantness
earthly fragrance cannot be compared with the fragrance that we are now
we feel, because we are now surrounded by the fragrance of the Holy Spirit of God. What
can the earthly be like him? Notice, your love for God, for you said
me that it's warm around us, like in a bathhouse, but look, after all, neither you nor
the snow does not melt for me and above us the same way. Therefore, this warmth is not in the air, but
in ourselves. She is the very warmth about which the Holy Spirit in the words
prayer makes us cry out to the Lord: “With the warmth of Your Holy Spirit, warm
me! ” His warmed hermits and hermits were not afraid of the winter filth, being
dressed as in warm fur coats, in grace-filled clothing, woven from the Holy Spirit.
This is how it should be in fact, because the grace of God should dwell
within us, in our hearts, for the Lord said: "The kingdom of God is within you."
By the Kingdom of God, the Lord meant the grace of the Holy Spirit. This "
The Kingdom of God is now inside you, and the grace of the Holy Spirit is outside
shines and warms us and, filling the surrounding
us air, delights our senses with negligible delight, filling our hearts
joy unspeakable. Our present situation is the one about which
the apostle says: "The kingdom of God is not food and drink, but truth and peace about Holy Dus."
Our faith consists “not in convincing human wisdom of words, but in the phenomena
spirit and strength ”. It is in this state that we are now with you. About it
the state is precisely what the Lord said: “The essence of the
taste death, until they see the Kingdom of God, which has come in power ”... Behold, father,
Your Love for God, what inexpressible joy the Lord God has given us now!
- This is what it means to be in the fullness of the Holy Spirit, about which Saint Macarius of Egypt
writes:
the poor, the Lord has now filled ... Well, now there is nothing more, it seems, to ask,
your love for God, how people are in the grace of the Holy Spirit! .. You will
can you remember the present manifestation of the ineffable mercy of God that has visited us?
as vividly and clearly as now I feel this mercy of God.
it is in your memory, for otherwise his goodness would not have fallen so instantly
to my humble prayer and would not have preceded and so soon listen to the wretched
Seraphim, especially since it was not for you alone it was given to you to understand this, but through you
for the whole world, so that you yourself are established in the work of God and others could
be helpful. As for the fact, father, that I am a monk, and you are worldly
person, then there is nothing to think about. Right faith in Him and the Son is sought from God
His Only Begotten. For this, the grace of the Holy Spirit is abundantly supplied from above. Lord
seeks a heart filled with love for God and neighbor - this is the throne on which
He loves to sit and on which He appears in the fullness of His heavenly glory.
“Son, give me your heart,” He says, “and I myself will apply everything else to you,”
for the kingdom of God is in the human heart. “The Lord is near to all who call upon Him
in truth, and He does not have sight on faces, the Father loves the Son and will give everything in his hand
Him ”, if only we ourselves loved Him, Our Heavenly Father, truly in a filial way.
The Lord listens equally to a monk and a layman, a simple Christian, if only both
were Orthodox, and both loved God from the depths of their souls, and both would have
His faith, even if "like the grain is mountainous," and both will move mountains. “One moves thousands,
two darkness ”. The Lord Himself says: “Everything is possible
believer ”, and Father the Holy Apostle Paul exclaims publicly:“ All I can about
Christ strengthening me ”. Is it not even earlier than this that our Lord Jesus Christ says
about those who believe in Him: “Believe in Me, the works I do, I will also do that, and more
He will do these things, as I am going to My Father and implore Him for you, that your joy may be filled
will. Hitherto you have not prospered in My Name, but now you have prospered and you will receive ”...
So, your Love for God, whatever you ask the Lord God for, accept everything,
if only it was for the glory of God, or for the benefit of the neighbor, because the benefit
He attributes his neighbor to His glory, which is why He says: “All, even to the one from
the least of these who have made, I have made ”. So have no doubt that
The Lord God did not fulfill your offerings, if only they went to the glory of God,
went to the benefits and edification of their neighbors. But even if for your own
your need, or in favor, or benefit, you needed something, and that's even all
so quickly and obediently, the Lord God will deign to send you, if only in that
extreme need and necessity insisted, for the Lord loves those who love Him; blessings
The Lord is of every kind, but he will do the will of those who fear Him and hear prayer.
On the purpose of the Christian life (Conversation of the Monk Seraphim with Nikolai Alexandrovich Motovilov.) Nilus Sergei Alexandrovich
Sergey Nilus On the purpose of the Christian life - a conversation between Saint Seraphim of Sarov and Motovilov (full version)
Sergey Nilus
The purpose of the Christian life - a conversation between the Monk Seraphim of Sarov and Motovilov
(full version)
It was on Thursday. The day was overcast. There was a quarter of snow on the ground, and a rather thick snow crumbs poured from above, when Father Fr. Seraphim began a conversation with me at his closest pazhinka, near the same nearby wilderness opposite the Sarovka river, by a mountain close to its banks.
He placed me on the stump of a tree he had just cut down, and he himself stood squatting opposite me.
- The Lord revealed to me, - said the great elder, - that in your childishness you zealously wanted to know what the purpose of our Christian life is, and you have repeatedly asked many great spiritual persons about this ...
I must say here that since the age of 12 this thought has persistently disturbed me, and I really addressed many of the clergy with this question, but their answers did not satisfy me. The elder did not know this.
“But no one,” Father Seraphim continued, “didn’t tell you that definitely. They told you: go to church, pray to God, do the commandments of God, do good - this is the goal of Christian life for you. And some were even indignant at you because you were busy with not godly curiosity, and told you: do not seek yourself higher. But they didn’t speak as they should. Here I, poor Seraphim, will explain to you now what this goal really is.
Prayer, fasting, vigilance and all other Christian deeds, no matter how good they are in themselves, however, the purpose of our Christian life does not consist only in doing them, although they serve as the necessary means for achieving it. The true goal of our Christian life is to acquire the Holy Spirit of God. Fasting and vigilance, and prayer, and alms, and every good deed done for Christ's sake are the means for acquiring the Holy Spirit of God. Note, father, that a good deed done only for Christ's sake brings us the fruits of the Holy Spirit. Yet what is done not for Christ's sake, although good, does not represent a reward in the life of the century to come, nor does it give us the grace of God in this life. That is why the Lord Jesus Christ said: " everyone who does not gather with Me, he scatters"A good deed cannot be called otherwise than gathering, for although it is not done for Christ's sake, it is nevertheless good. Scripture says:" fear God in every tongue, and do righteousness, it is pleasing to Him."And, as we see from the sacred narrative, this" do the truth"so pleasing to God that an angel of the Lord appeared to Cornelius the centurion, who feared God and did righteousness, during his prayer and said:" send to Joppa to Simon Usmar, tamo rite Peter and that one speaks the verbs of the eternal belly, in them you and your whole house will be saved". So, the Lord uses all his Divine means to give such a person the opportunity for his good deeds not to be deprived of the reward in the life of the Divine Order. But for this we must start here with the right faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, Who came into the world to save sinners. and the acquisition of the grace of the Holy Spirit, Introducing the kingdom of God into our hearts and paving the way for us to acquire the blessedness of the life of the century to come. either to implement them or not. That is why the Lord told the Jews: " If they had not seen it faster, they had no quicker sin. Now you speak - we see, and your sin remains on you". If a man, like Cornelius, takes advantage of God's pleasure in his deed, not done for Christ's sake, and believes in His Son, then such a deed will be imputed to him, as if done for Christ's sake and only for faith in Him. Otherwise, a person has no right to complain that his good did not go into business.This never happens only when doing some kind of good for Christ's sake, for good, done for His sake, not only in the life of the next century, the crown of righteousness intercedes, but also in this life fills a person with the grace of the Spirit Holy and, moreover, as it is said: " God gives the Holy Spirit too much, the Father loves the Son and gives everything in His hand".
So it is, your love of God! So in the acquisition of this Spirit of God is the true goal of our Christian life, and prayer, vigil, fasting, alms and other virtues for Christ's sake are only means to acquire the Spirit of God.
- What about acquisition? - I asked Father Seraphim. - I don’t understand this.
“Acquisition is the same as acquisition,” he answered me: “after all, you understand what acquiring money means. So it is all the same the acquisition of the Spirit of God. After all, you, your Love for God, understand what acquisition is in the worldly sense? The purpose of the mundane life of ordinary people is to acquire, or make money, and among the nobles, in addition, to receive honors, distinctions and other awards for state services. The acquisition of the Spirit of God is also capital, but only gracious and eternal, and it, like money, bureaucratic and temporary, is acquired in the same ways, very similar to each other. God the Word, our Lord God-Man Jesus Christ likens our life to a marketplace and calls our work on earth a purchase, and says to all of us: " bathe, dondezhe come, redeeming time, as the days of cunning are the essence", ie gain time to receive heavenly goods through earthly goods. Earthly goods are virtues done for Christ's sake, giving us the grace of the All-Holy Spirit. In the parable of the wise and holy virgins, when the holy fools lacked oil, it is said:" buy on the market"But when they bought, the doors to the bridal chamber were already closed, and they could not enter it. Some say that the lack of oil among the holy fools signifies a lack of good deeds in their lifetime. This understanding is not entirely correct. they were lacking in good deeds, when, even if they were holy fools, they were nevertheless called virgins? After all, virginity is the highest virtue, as a state of equal angels, and could serve as a substitute in itself for all other virtues. the grace of the All-Holy Spirit of God was lacking. Creating virtues, these virgins, due to their spiritual foolishness, believed that this was the only Christian thing to do only virtues. and before they received the grace of the Spirit of God, whether they achieved it, they did not care. They bring the grace of the Spirit of God, and it is said in the paternal books: " there is a way, imagine to be good at the beginning, but its ends are in the bottom of hell". Anthony the Great in his letters to the monks speaks about such virgins: many monks and virgins have no idea about the differences in wills operating in a person, and do not know that three wills are at work in us: the 1st of God, the all-perfect and all-saving ; 2nd own, human, that is, if not harmful, then not saving; and 3rd demonic - completely harmful. And it is this third enemy will that teaches a person either not to do any virtues, or to do them out of vanity, or for one good, and not for the sake of Christ. The second is that our own will teaches us to do everything to please our lusts, or even, like the enemy teaches, to do good for the good, not paying attention to the grace they acquire. The first, the will of God and all-saving, consists only in doing good only for the acquisition of the Holy Spirit, as an eternal treasure, inexhaustible and in nothing fully and worthy of being appreciated by one who cannot. oil that it was lacking among the holy fools. That's why they are called holy fools, that they forgot about the necessary fruit of virtue, about the grace of the Holy Spirit, without which there is no salvation and no one can be, for: " By the Holy Spirit, every soul lives and rises in purity;". The Holy Spirit Himself dwells in our souls, and this is the very absorption in our souls of His, the Almighty, and the abiding with our spirit of His Trinity Unity and is given to us only through the all-round acquisition of the Holy Spirit from our side, which prepares in the soul and of our flesh is the throne of God, all-creative with our spirit, according to the immutable word of God: " I will dwell in them and I will be like, and I will be in God for them, and they will be in My people"This is that oil in the lamps of the wise virgins, which could burn lightly and for a long time, and those virgins with these burning lamps could wait for the Bridegroom, who came in midnight, and enter with Him into the chamber of joy. seeing that their lamps were extinguished, although they went to the marketplace, but they would buy oil, but they did not have time to return in time, for the doors were already closed. the wise and the foolish are Christian souls; oil is not deeds, but the grace of the All-Holy Spirit of God received through them into our nature, transforming it from corruption into incorruption, from spiritual death into spiritual life, from darkness into light, from the den of our being, where are the passions tied like cattle and beasts - to the temple of the Divine, to the luminous palace of eternal joy in Christ Jesus our Lord, Creator and Deliverer and Eternal Bridegroom of our souls. His care for us when God says: " I’m standing at the door and confused!"... meaning by the doors the course of our life, not yet closed by death. Oh, how I wish, your love for God, that in this life you would always be in the Spirit of God!" In what I find, in that I judge"says the Lord. Woe, great woe, if He finds us burdened with care and sorrows of life, for whoever endures His wrath and who will stand against the face of His wrath! That is why it is said:" watch and pray, do not enter the attack", that is, do not be deprived of the Spirit of God, for vigilance and prayer brings us His grace. a tool for acquiring the grace of the Spirit. Would you want, for example, to go to church, but either there is no church, or the service is gone; you would want to give to a beggar, but there is no beggar, or nothing to give; you would want to keep your virginity, but you have no strength to fulfill this by adding yours or through the efforts of the enemy's intrigues, which you cannot resist due to human weakness; you would want to do some other virtue for Christ's sake, but you also have no strength, or you cannot find an opportunity. to everyone and always there is an opportunity - both the rich and the poor, and the noble, and the simple, and the strong, and the weak, and the healthy, and the sick, and the righteous, and the sinner. ascends, judge by the following the example of Holy Tradition: when, at the request of a desperate mother, who had lost her only-begotten son, abducted by death, a whore wife, who had fallen in her way and had not yet been cleansed of her just-former sin, touched by the desperate sorrow of her mother, cried out to the Lord: " Not for the sake of the accursed sinner, but tears for the sake of a mother grieving for her son and firmly confident in Your mercy and omnipotence, Christ God, resurrect, O Lord, her son!"... - and the Lord resurrected him. So, your Love for God, the power of prayer is great, and it most of all brings the Spirit of God, and it is most convenient for everyone to correct it. Blessed will we be when the Lord God finds us vigilant, in the fullness of gifts His Holy Spirit! Then we can boldly hope to be caught up in the clouds at the meeting of the Lord in the air, coming with glory and power to judge the living and the dead with much, and repay him according to his work.
Behold, your love for God, for the great happiness, please, deign to talk with the poor Seraphim, being sure that he is not deprived of the grace of the Lord. The fact that we speak about the Lord Himself, the source of the ever-scarce source of all goodness, both heavenly and earthly! But by prayer we are rewarded with talking with Him, the All-Merciful and Life-giving God and our Savior. But even here it is necessary to pray only until God the Holy Spirit descends on us in the measures of His heavenly grace known to Him. And when He delights in visiting us, then we must already stop praying. Why pray then to Him: " come and dwell in us and cleanse us from all filthiness and save us, Beloved, our souls"when He has already come to us, it is possible to save us, who trust in Him and call on His holy name in truth, that is, in order to humbly and lovingly meet Him, the Comforter, inside the temple of our souls hungering and thirsting for Him I will explain this to your love of God with an example: if only you would invite me to visit you, and at your call, I would come to you and would like to talk with you. please, please, they say, to me! Then I should against my will have to say: what is he? Is he out of my mind? I came to him, but he still calls me! refers. That is why it is said: " abolish and understand that I am God, I will ascend into the town, I will ascend to the earth", that is, I will appear and will appear to everyone who believes in Me and calls on Me and I will converse with him, as I once conversed with Adam in Paradise, with Abraham and Jacob and with my other servants, with Moses, Job and the like. that this abolition applies only to the affairs of the world, that is, that during a prayer conversation with God it is necessary to abolish from the affairs of the world. the power of faith and prayer, the Lord God the Holy Spirit will deign to visit us and come to us in the fullness of His ineffable goodness, then we must also be abolished from prayer. , to hear clearly and intelligibly all the verbs of the eternal life, which He will then deign to proclaim. Moreover, one must be in complete sobriety of both soul and spirit and in the chaste purity of the flesh. So it was in Mount Horeb, when the Israelites were told to Before the appearance of God at Sinai, they would not have touched their wives for three days, for our God is " devour all unclean fire"and no one can enter into fellowship with Him from the defilement of flesh and spirit.
- Well, what about, father, to be with other virtues, done for Christ's sake, in order to acquire the grace of the Holy Spirit? After all, you will only speak to me about prayer?
- Acquire the grace of the Holy Spirit and all others of Christ for the sake of virtues, trade them spiritually, trade those of them that give you the greatest profit. Collect the capital of the blessed excess of the goodness of God, put them in the eternal pawnshop of God from the percentage of immaterial and not four or six per hundred, but one hundred per one spiritual ruble, but even that many times more. For example: giving you more of the grace of God prayer and vigilance, watch and pray; fast gives much of the Spirit of God, fast; more alms gives, do alms, and thus reason about every virtue done for Christ's sake.
Here I will tell you about myself, poor Seraphim. - I come from Kursk merchants. So, when I was not yet in the monastery, we used to trade in goods that give us more profit. So you, father, do, and, as in trade, it is not the power to just trade, but to get more profit, so in the matter of Christian life it is not power to just pray or whatever. -or a good deed to do. Although the apostle says: " pray incessantly", but why, as you remember, he adds:" I'd rather use five words with my mind than a thousand with my tongue". And the Lord says:" do not all speak Mi, Lord, Lord! will be saved, but do the will of my Father", that is, he who does the work of God and, moreover, with reverence, for" cursed is everyone who does the work of God with negligence". And the work of God is:" yes you believe in God and He sent Jesus Christ". If we judge correctly about the commandments of Christ and the apostles, then our Christian business consists not in increasing the count of good deeds that serve the goal of our Christian life only by means, but in extracting more benefit from them, that is, in acquiring the most abundant gifts of the Holy Spirit. ...
So I wish, your Love for God, that you yourself would acquire this ever-inexhaustible source of the grace of God and always reason to yourself whether you are found in the Spirit of God or not; and if - in the Spirit of God, then blessed be God! - there is nothing to grieve about: even now - at the terrible judgment of Christ! For " what I find, that's what I judge". If not, then it is necessary to understand why and for what reason the Lord God the Holy Spirit has deigned to leave us, and again seek and seek Him and not lag behind until the sought-after Lord God the Holy Spirit is found and will not be again with us by His grace. On those who drive us away from Him, our enemies must be attacked so long as their dust is taken away, as the Prophet David said: " I will marry my enemies, and I will comprehend, and I will not return, until they die, I will insult them, and they will not be able to become, they will fall under my feet".
That's it, father! So, if you please, trade spiritually virtue. Distribute the gifts of the grace of the Holy Spirit to those who demand, following the example of a lit candle, which itself shines, burning with earthly fire, and other candles, without diminishing their own fire, kindle in light to everyone in other places. And if this is so in relation to the earthly fire, then what can we say about the fire of the grace of the All-Holy Spirit of God ?! For, for example, the wealth of the earth, when it is distributed, becomes scarce, while the wealth of the heavenly grace of God the more it is distributed, the more it multiplies in the one who distributes it. So the Lord Himself deigned to say to the Samaritans: " drink from this water will thirst again, and drink from water, south of I will give him, it will not thirst for ever, but water, south of I will give him, there will be a spring in him ever-flowing into his belly, everlasting".
“Father,” I said, “you all deign to talk about the acquisition of the grace of the Holy Spirit as the goal of the Christian life, but how and where can I see it? Good deeds are visible, but can the Holy Spirit be seen? How will I know if He is with me or not?
“At the present time,” the elder answered, “because of our almost universal coldness toward the holy faith in our Lord Jesus Christ and through our inattention to the actions of His Divine Providence for us and the communication of man with God, we have reached the point that, one might say, almost completely retired from a truly Christian life. Now the words of Holy Scripture seem strange to us when the Spirit of God through the mouth of Moses says: " and the sight of Adam the Lord walking in paradise"or when we read from the Apostle Paul:" go to Achaia, and the Spirit of God does not go with us, turn to Macedonia, and the Spirit of God is with us". Repeatedly in other places of the Holy Scripture it is said about the manifestation of God to men.
Here are some who say: "These places are incomprehensible. Could it be that people could see God so clearly?" And there is nothing incomprehensible here. This misunderstanding occurred because we moved away from the simplicity of the original Christian knowledge and, under the pretext of enlightenment, entered such darkness of ignorance that it already seems inconceivable to us what the ancients so clearly understood, that even in ordinary conversations they understood the concept of the manifestation of God. between people did not seem strange. So Job, when his friends reproached him for blaspheming God, answered them: " How can it be when I feel the breath of the Almighty in my nostrils?"ie how, de, I can blaspheme God when the Holy Spirit is with me. If I blasphemed God, the Holy Spirit would depart from me, but I feel His breath in my nostrils. This is exactly how it is said and about Abraham and about Jacob, that they saw the Lord and talked with Him, and Jacob even fought with Him.Moses saw God and all the people with him, when he was able to receive from God the tablets of the law on Mount Sinai. or, what is the same - the obvious grace of the Holy Spirit, served as guides to the people of God in the wilderness. People did not see God and the grace of His Holy Spirit in a dream and not in dreams, and not in a frenzy of upset imagination, but truly manifest. to the cause of our salvation, which is why it turns out that we and many other words of Holy Scripture are not acceptable in the sense that we should have, but all because we do not seek the grace of God, we do not allow it, out of the pride of our mind, to dwell in our souls and therefore do not have true enlightenment from the Lord, sent go to the hearts of people who are hungry and thirsty for the righteousness of God with all their hearts. For example, many people interpret that when the Bible says: " vdunu God is the breath of life in the person of primordial Adam and created by Him from the dust of the earth"- as if this meant that before that there was no human soul and spirit in Adam, but as if there was only one flesh, created from the dust of the earth. This interpretation is incorrect, for the Lord God created Adam from the dust of the earth in that composition, as the priest, the holy Apostle Paul asserts: " may your spirit, soul and flesh be all perfect at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ"And all these three parts of our nature were created from the dust of the earth, and Adam was not created dead, but an active animal being, like other animate creatures of God living on earth. But this is the power that if the Lord God had not breathed in then in the face of this breath of life, that is, the grace of the Lord God the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and rests in the Son and for the sake of the Son is sent into the world, then Adam, no matter how perfectly he was created over other God's creatures, as the crown of creation on earth, nevertheless, he would have remained without the Holy Spirit within himself, elevating him to God-like dignity, and would have been like all other creatures, although they have flesh and soul, and a spirit belonging to each according to their kind, but the Holy Spirit within himself to the have not . When the Lord God breathed in the face of Adam's breath of life, then, in the words of Moses, and " Adam fast into the soul I live", that is, completely similar to God in everything, and such as He is, forever and ever immortal. Adam was created so unresponsive to the action of none of the elements created by God that he was not drowned by water, nor fire burned, nor the earth could not devour in its abysses, nor the air could damage any of its actions. Everything was subdued to him as a favorite of God, as a king and owner of creation. And everyone admired him as the all-perfect crown of God's creations. This breath of life, breathed in the face of Adam from the All-Creative Mouth of the All-Creator and Almighty God, Adam became so wise that there has never been a man ever, no, and hardly ever will there ever be a man on earth wiser and more knowledgeable than him. Give him the names of every creature, then he gave each creature in the language such names that completely signify all the qualities, all the power and all the properties of a creature that it has according to the gift of God, given to it during its creation.
When, by eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil - prematurely and contrary to the commandment of God - they learned the difference between good and evil and underwent all the disasters that followed the transgression of the commandment of God, they lost this priceless gift of the grace of the Spirit of God, so that until the very advent of the God-man into the world Jesus Christ the Spirit of God " don't be in the world, as Jesus is not glorified"However, this does not mean that the Spirit of God was not at all in the world, but His stay was not as full as in Adam or in us, Orthodox Christians, but manifested itself only outside, and the signs of His stay in the world were known to the human race. So, for example, after the fall, Adam, as well as Eve with him, were revealed many secrets related to the future salvation of the human race. Noah talked with God. Abraham saw God and His day and rejoiced. The grace of the Holy Spirit, acting from the outside, was reflected in all the Old Testament prophets and saints of Israel. The Jews later established special prophetic schools, where they taught to recognize the signs of the manifestation of God or angels and to distinguish the actions of the Holy Spirit from ordinary phenomena that occur in the nature of unfavorable earthly life. Numerous servants of God have experienced constant, various manifestations of God, voices, revelations, justified by obvious miraculous events. Not with such power as in the people of God, but the manifestation of the Spirit of God also acted in the pagans, who did not know the True God, because from among them God also found people chosen for Himself. Such, for example, were the virgins - the prophetesses, the sibyls, who doomed their virginity, although for an unknown God, but still for God, the Creator of the universe and Almighty and Ruler of the world, as He was recognized by the pagans. Likewise, the pagan philosophers, who, although in the darkness of the ignorance of the Divine, wandered, but, seeking the truth beloved of God, could, by this very God-loving search for it, not partake of the Spirit of God, for it is said: " tongues ignorant of God by nature create lawful and pleasing to God make"And the Lord so blesses the truth that He Himself proclaims about it by the Holy Spirit:" Truth is from the land of ascension, and truth from heaven is prince".
So, your love for God, both in the Jewish people, the sacred, God-kind people, and in the pagans, ignorant of God, but still the knowledge of God was preserved, that is, father, a clear and reasonable understanding of how the Lord God the Holy Spirit acts in a person and how exactly and by what external and internal sensations it is possible to make sure that it is the Lord God the Holy Spirit, and not the enemy's delusion, that acts. This is how it was all from the fall of Adam to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ in the flesh into the world.
Without this, your love for God, which has always been perceptibly preserved in the human race about the actions of the Holy Spirit, there would be no way for people to know exactly whether the fruit of the woman's seed, promised to Adam and Eve, has come into the world, having to erase the head of the serpent.
But here is Simeon the God-Receiver, saved by the Holy Spirit after the foretelling to him in the 65th year of his life of the secret of his ever-virgin from the Most Pure Ever-Virgin Mary of His conception and birth, having lived by the grace of the All-Holy Spirit of God for 300 years, then, at 365 years of his life, he said clearly in the temple of the Lord that sensibly learned by the gift of the Holy Spirit that this is Himself, that Christ, the Savior of the world, about whose natural conception and birth from the Holy Spirit was foretold to him three hundred years ago from an angel.
Here is Saint Anna the prophetess, the daughter of Phanuil, who served eighty years from her widowhood to the Lord God in the temple of God and known for the special gifts of God's grace for a righteous widow, a pure servant of God, announced that it is indeed He who is the Messiah promised to the world, the true Christ. God and man, the King of Israel, who came to save Adam and the human race.
When He, our Lord Jesus Christ, deigned to complete the whole work of salvation, after His resurrection, He breathed on the apostles, resuming the breath of life lost by Adam, and bestowed upon them the same Adam's grace of the All-Holy Spirit of God. But this is not enough - after all, He told them: " they do not have it, but He goes to the Father; If He does not go, then the Spirit of God will not come into the world; If He, Christ, goes to the Father, then He will send Him into the world, and He, the Comforter, will instruct them and all those who follow their teachings into every truth and will remember them all, even He spoke to them still existing in peace with them"This has already been promised to them grace-grace. And on the day of Pentecost, He solemnly sent down the Holy Spirit in a stormy breath, in the form of tongues of fire, on each of them who sat down and entered into them, and filled them with the power of fiery Divine grace, dewy breathing and joyfully acting in souls, partaking of its strength and actions.And this very fire-inspired grace of the Holy Spirit, when it is given to us all faithful of Christ in the sacrament of Holy Baptism, is sacredly sealed by chrismation in the most important places of our flesh indicated by the holy church, as eternal keepers of this grace. It is said: " seal of the Gift of the Holy Spirit". And on what, father, your love for God, do we, the poor, put our seals, if not on vessels that keep some treasure that we value highly? the sacrament of baptism, for this baptismal grace is so great and so necessary, so life-giving for a person that even a heretic person will not be taken away from his death, that is, until the period designated from above by the Providence of God for a life-long probation of a person on earth - for what, de, he will be good and that, de, he, in this time given to him by God, through the mediation of the power of grace given to him from above, will be able to accomplish. and taken away from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit by the saints of God. little by little, we are deprived of the grace of the All-Holy Spirit of God and become sinful and many-sinful people in many different ways. But when someone, agitated by the wisdom of God seeking our salvation, bypasses every kind, decides for her sake to matins to God and vigil for the sake of gaining his eternal salvation, then he, obedient to her voice, must resort to the true repentance in all his sins and to the creation of the opposite. committed sins of virtues, and through the virtues of Christ for the sake of the acquisition of the Holy Spirit, acting within us and within us arranging the Kingdom of God. It is not without reason that the Word of God says: ""That is, those people who, in spite of the sinful bonds that bound them and do not allow their violence and excitement to new sins, come to Him, our Savior, with perfect repentance for torture with Him, despising all the strength of these sinful bonds, they are forced to break their bonds, such people then really appear before the face of God, more than snow, whitened by His grace. " to torture with Him, despising the entire strength of these sinful bonds, they are forced to break their bonds, such people then really appear before the face of God, more than snow, whitened by His grace. "", - says the Lord:" ", - says the Lord:"".
and if your sins will be, as crimson, as if the snow will make them white So the once holy mystic John the Theologian saw such people in white clothes, i.e. robes of excuse, and " dates in their hands "as a sign of victory, and they sang a wonderful song to God"". "Hallelujah The beauty of their singing no one else can imitate These are the essence, who came from great sorrow, who asked for his robe and made his robe in the Blood of the Lamb.", - asking with sufferings and making them whiten in communion of the Most Pure and Life-giving Mysteries of the Flesh and Blood of the Immaculate and Most Pure Christ, who before all ages was slain by His own will for the salvation of the world, ever to this day, tempered and fragmented, but not dependent on us, giving us into the eternal and our inexhaustible salvation, in the way of the eternal belly, in return is favorable at His terrible judgment and the replacement of the dearest and every mind surpassing that fruit of the tree of life, which our human race wanted to deprive of the human enemy of men, who fell from heaven Dennitsa. , and Adam fell with her, but the Lord not only bestowed upon them the Redeemer in the fruit of the Seed of the Woman, who had corrected death by death, but also gave all of us in the Woman, the Ever-Virgin Mary of the Mother of God, who erased the serpent's head in herself and erases the head of the serpent in all the human race, persistent An intercessor to His Son and our God, an unashamed and invincible Representative even for the most desperate sinners. That is why the Mother of God is called " An ulcer of demons ", for there is no way for a demon to destroy a person, if only the person himself does not retreat from resorting to the help of the Mother of God.
Also, your love for God, I must, poor Seraphim, explain the difference between the actions of the Holy Spirit, who sacredly dwells in the hearts of believers in the Lord God and our Savior Jesus Christ, and the actions of sinful darkness, at the instigation and incitement of demonic thieves in us. ... The Spirit of God remembers us the words of our Lord Jesus Christ and acts in one with Him, always solemnly, joyfully making our hearts and guiding our feet on the path of peace, but the flattering, demonic spirit, contrary to Christ, is wise, and his actions in us are rebellious, obstinate and full of lust fleshly, lust of hair and pride of life. " Amen, amen, I say to you, everyone who lives and believes in Me will not die forever": he who has the grace of the Holy Spirit for the right faith in Christ, if through human weakness and died mentally from any sin, he would not die forever, but will be resurrected by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, who takes away the sins of the world and gives grace to the tune. . About this grace, shown to the whole world and our human race in the God-man, and it is said in the Gospel: " in that belly be and belly be the light of man", and added:" and the light shines in the darkness, and His darkness does not embrace"This means that the grace of the Holy Spirit, given at baptism in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, despite the human falls, despite the darkness around our soul, still shines in the heart from time immemorial with the former Divine light of the priceless merits of Christ. This light Christ, with the sinner's unrepentant repentance, says to the Father: Abba Father, do not be angry with this impenitence to the end! And then, when the sinner turns to the path of repentance, he completely blots out the traces of the crimes committed, dressing the former criminal again with incorruptible clothes woven from the grace of the Holy Spirit, about the acquisition of which, as the goal of Christian life, I have spoken for so long to your love of God.
I will also tell you, so that you understand even more clearly what to understand by the grace of God and how to recognize it, and in what its effect is especially manifested in people enlightened by it. The grace of the Holy Spirit is the light that enlightens a person. All the Holy Scripture speaks about this. Thus, Godfather David said: " the lamp of my feet is Thy law, and the light of my paths, and if Thy law was not my teaching, then I would perish in my humility". That is, the grace of the Holy Spirit, expressed in the law by the words of the commandments of the Lord, is my lamp and light, and if it were not for this grace of the Holy Spirit, which I am so carefully and diligently acquiring that seven days a day I learn about the fate of Your righteousness, enlightened me in the darkness of the worries associated with the great title of my royal dignity, then where would I get even a spark of light to illuminate my path along the path of life, dark from the hostility of my enemies? Saint on those people whom He sanctified and enlightened with His great influences. Remember Moses after his conversation with God on Mount Sinai. People could not look at him - so he shone with an extraordinary light that surrounded his face. He was even forced to appear to the people not otherwise, as under a veil. Remember the Transfiguration of the Lord on Mount Tabor. Great light enveloped Him, and " there was His robe, shining like snow, and His disciples from fear of falling prostrate". When Moses and Elijah appeared to Him in the same light, then, in order to hide the radiance of the light of Divine grace, which blinded the eyes of the disciples, the" clouds ", it is said," overshadow them. "And in this way the grace of the All-Holy Spirit of God appears in ineffable light for all, to whom God reveals her action.
- In what way, - I asked the priest about. Seraphim - to know to me that I am in the grace of the Holy Spirit?
- This, your love of God, is very simple! - he answered me, - that's why the Lord says: " the whole point is simple for those who gain reason"Yes, our trouble is that we ourselves do not have this Divine mind, which does not boast (does not take pride), for it is not of this world. This mind, filled with love for God and neighbor, creates every person. for his salvation. The Lord said about this mind: " God wants everyone to be saved and come to the mind of truth"And to His apostles about the lack of this reason, He said:" Do you not naturally understand, and do you not understand these Scriptures and parables?"Again about this reason, the Gospel says about the apostles that" then the Lord opened their minds to understand the Scriptures". Being in this mind, the apostles always saw whether the Spirit of God abides in them or not, and those who were imbued with it and seeing the Spirit of God abiding with them, affirmatively said that their work is holy and completely pleasing to the Lord God. This explains why they are in their letters they wrote: " be pleased with the Holy Spirit and us"and only on these grounds did they offer their messages as an immutable truth for the benefit of all the faithful - so the holy apostles felt the presence of the Spirit of God in themselves ... So, your love of God, do you see how simple it is?
I answered: - Still, I do not understand why I can be firmly convinced that I am in the Spirit of God. How can I recognize His true manifestation in myself?
Father about. Seraphim replied: - I already, your love for God, told you that this very simply and in detail told you how people are in the Spirit of God and how one should understand His appearance in us ... What do you want, father?
“It’s necessary,” I said, “so that I understand this well.
Then Fr. Seraphim took me very tightly by the shoulders and said to me: - We are both now, father, in the Spirit of God with you. Why aren't you looking at me?
I answered: - I cannot, father, look, because lightning is pouring from your eyes. Your face has become brighter than the sun, and my eyes ache with pain.
Fr. Seraphim said: - Do not be afraid, your love for God, and now you yourself have become as bright as I myself. You yourself are now in the fullness of the Spirit of God, otherwise you would not have been able to see me like that.
And, bowing his head to me, he quietly said in my ear: - Thank the Lord God for His ineffable mercy to you. You saw that I did not even cross myself, but only in my heart I mentally prayed to the Lord God and inside myself said: Lord! honor him clearly and with bodily eyes to see the descent of Thy Spirit, with which Thou dost honor Thy servants, when Thou deign to appear in the light of Thy glorious glory! And so, father, the Lord instantly fulfilled the humble request of the wretched Seraphim ... How can we not thank Him for this ineffable gift to both of us! That way, father, the Lord God does not always show His mercy to the great hermits. This grace of God was pleased to comfort your contrite heart, like a child-loving mother, through the intercession of the Mother of God Herself ... - Well, father, don't look me in the eyes? Just look, do not be afraid - the Lord is with us!
After these words I looked into his face, and an even greater reverential horror attacked me. Imagine, in the middle of the sun, in the brightest brightness of its midday rays, the face of a person talking to you. You see the movement of his lips, the changing expression of his eyes, hear his voice, feel that someone is holding you by the shoulders, but not only you don’t see these hands, you don’t see either yourself or his figure, but only one blinding light , stretching far, several yards in a circle and illuminating with its bright shine both the snow veil covering the clearing, and the snow pellet, which showered me and the great old man from above. Is it possible to imagine the position in which I was then?
- What do you feel now ?! - asked me about. Seraphim.
“Unusually good,” I said.
- How good is it? What exactly?
I answered: - I feel such silence and peace in my soul that I cannot express it in any words.
“This is your love of God,” said Father Fr. Seraphim is the world about which the Lord told His disciples: " My peace I give to you, not as peace gives, I give to you. If you were faster from the world, the world would love its own, but as if you were elected from the world, for this sake the world hates you. Lots of dare, as I have won the world". It is to these people who are hated from this world, chosen by the Lord, and the Lord gives the peace that you now feel in yourself;" peace, "according to the apostolic word," every mind prevails". This is what the apostle calls him, because no word can express the well-being of the soul that he produces in those people in whose hearts the Lord God instills him. Christ the Savior calls him the world from His own bounty, and not from this world, for nothing temporary earthly well-being cannot give him to the human heart: it is bestowed from above from the Lord God Himself, which is why it is called the peace of God ... What else do you feel? - Fr Seraphim asked me.
“An extraordinary sweetness,” I replied.
And he continued: - This is the sweetness about which it is said in the Holy Scriptures: " from fatty to Thy house they will be drunk, and I will fill with a stream of Thy sweetness"This sweetness now fills our hearts and spreads through all our veins with our ineffable delight. From this sweetness our hearts seem to melt, and we are both filled with such bliss that no language can express ... Well, then can you still feel?
- An extraordinary joy in all my heart.
And Father Fr. Seraphim continued: - When the Spirit of God descends on a person and overshadows him with the fullness of His inspiration, then the human soul is filled with inexpressible joy, for the Spirit of God rejoices everything, no matter what He touches. This is the very joy about which the Lord speaks in His Gospel; " wife always gives birth, have grief, as if her year had come; Whenever he gives birth to a child, he does not remember the sorrow for the joy, as if a man was born into the world. You will be in sorrow in the world, but whenever I see you, your heart will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.". But no matter how comforting this joy that you now feel in your heart, it is nevertheless insignificant in comparison with that about which the Lord Himself through the mouth of His Apostle said that this joy" neither the sight of the eye, nor the ear of hearing, nor the good ascending in the heart of man, even God is ready for those who love Him". The foreshadows of this joy are given to us now, and if from them it is so sweet, good and cheerful in our souls, then what can we say about the joy that is prepared there, in heaven, for those who weep here on earth? Here you are, father, quite - yet we wept in your life on earth, and look, with what joy the Lord consoles you even in this life. may the words of the Lord come true on us: " those who endure the Lord, they will change the fortress, they will grow round, like eagles, they will flow and will not bother, they will go and not hunger, they will go from strength to strength and the God of the gods will appear to them in Zion of understanding and heavenly visions"... It was then that our present joy, which appears to us in a small and brief way, will appear in all its fullness, and no one will take it from us, filled with inexplicable despicable pleasures ... What else do you feel, your love of God?
I answered: - Extraordinary warmth.
- How, father, warmth? Why, we are sitting in the forest. Now it's winter in the yard and there is snow under our feet, and there is more snow on top of us, and the croup from above is falling ... What kind of warmth can there be?
I answered: - And the kind that happens in the bathhouse, when they put it on the stove and steam pours out of it in a column ...
- And the smell, - he asked me, - the same as from the bath?
“No,” I replied, “there is nothing on earth like this fragrance. When, during my mother's life, I loved to dance and went to balls and dance evenings, my mother used to sprinkle me with perfume that she bought in the best fashion stores in Kazan, but those perfumes do not emit such a fragrance ...
9. Day of Remembrance of the Monk Seraphim of Sarov In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit! We have come today to create the memory of the holy saint of God, the Monk Seraphim, to call him as one who fought with the world like a monk. We need to remember on this day that happens in our
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CONVERSATION OF THE ST. SERAPHIM OF SAROV ABOUT THE PURPOSE OF CHRISTIAN LIFE WITH THE SIMBIR PROVIDER AND CONSCIOUS JUDGE NIKOLAI ALEXANDROVICH MOTOVILOV
(From the handwritten memoirs of N.A. Motovilov)
Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in Me, the works that I do, he will do, and he will do more than these ...
I
“Once,” Motovilov writes in his notes, “it was in the Sarov Hermitage, shortly after my healing, at the beginning of the winter of 1831, on Tuesday the end of November, I stood during Vespers in the warm Cathedral of the Life-Giving Source on an ordinary it used to be, in my place, right opposite the miraculous icon of the Mother of God. ”Then one of the sisters of the Diveyevo Mill Community came up to me. I had no idea about the name and existence of this community, separate from the other church, also Diveyevo community, at that time. to me:
Are you, perhaps, a lame gentleman whom our father, Father Seraphim, healed just recently? I replied that it was me who was.
Well, so, - she said, - go to the priest - he ordered to call you to him. He is now in his cell in the monastery, and said that he would be waiting for you.
People who, at least once during the life of the great elder Seraphim, who were in the Sarov desert and even only heard about him, can fully comprehend what inexplicable joy my soul was filled with at this unexpected call of him. Leaving the hearing of the Divine service, I immediately ran to him, to his cell. Father Seraphim met me at the very door of his vestibule and said to me:
I was waiting for your love of God! Just wait a little while I talk to my orphans. I have a lot to talk with you. Sit down here!
At these words, he pointed out to me a ladder with steps, made, probably, to close the chimneys of the stove and placed opposite the stove, with its mouth in the entrance, as in all double cells of the Sarovs, arranged. I was about to sit down on the bottom step, but he said to me:
No, sit higher!
I switched to the second one, but he told me:
No, your love of God! If you please sit on the very top step. - And, having made me sit down, he added:
Well, here, sit here and wait, when I, having talked with my orphans, come out to you.
Batiushka brought two sisters into his cell, one of whom was a girl from the nobility, the sister of the Nizhny Novgorod landowner Manturov, Elena Vasilievna, as the sisters who remained with me in senets told me to my request.
For a long time I sat waiting for the great old man to open the door for me too. I think I sat there for two hours. Seraphim's cell attendant, Pavel, came out to me from another cell closest to the entrance to the vestibule of this cell, and, despite my excuses, persuaded me to visit his cell and began to give me various instructions on spiritual life, which in fact had a goal, at the instigation of the enemy, weaken my love and faith in the merits of the great elder Seraphim before God.
I felt sad, and with sorrow I said to him:
I was stupid, Father Paul, that, having obeyed your convictions, I entered your cell. Father Abbot, Niphont is a great servant of God, but even here I did not come to the Sarov Monastery for him and I do come, although I respect him very much for his shrine, but only for Father Seraphim alone, about whom I think that in of antiquity there were few such holy saints of God, endowed with the power of Elijah and Moses. Who are you who are imposing on me with your instructions, while, I guess, you don't even know the way of God yourself. Forgive me - I am sorry that I listened to you and went to your cell.
With that, I left him and sat down again on the top step of the ladder in the senses of my father's cell. Then I heard from the same Father Paul that the priest reprimanded him for this, saying to him: "It is not your business to talk with those who crave words for the poor Seraphim and come to him in Sarov. And I myself, poor, are not theirs. I say, but what the Lord has deigned to me to open for edification. Do not interfere with your own affairs. Know yourself, and never dare to teach anyone; God did not give you this gift - after all, it is not given to people for nothing, but for their merits before the Lord our God and by His special mercy and Divine look on people and His Holy Providence. " I am writing this here for the memory and edification of those who value both the little speech and barely perceptible character trait of the great Elder Seraphim.
Just before the glorification of the Monk Seraphim, in 1903, Sergei Nilus discovered the records of a friend and admirer of the saint, Nikolai A. Motovilov, where there was a whole theological teaching of the Monk Seraphim about the Acquisition of the Holy Spirit (the meaning of human life) in full agreement with the teachings of the Holy Fathers of the Church. Until 1917, several editions of this conversation were published, from which all of its foreign editions were reprinted. But on the eve of the revolution, S. Nilus, having finally examined the manuscript, published the definitive text of 1917, from which we are publishing here without changes, adding only a preface from a long-dispersed book published by our St. Germanic Brotherhood in 1968.
The conversation of our Reverend and God-bearing Father Seraphim of Sarov the Wonderworker about the goal of the Christian life is of great importance, it is almost the most important thing that exists about him.
As a theological lesson, it was delivered by one of the greatest saints Orthodox Church, equal to the holy fathers of antiquity. As something genuine, remaining as evidence of the holiness of the great righteous man of the Russian Church, it is clearly a revelation from above. It is quite unusual to find him just before the glorification of the great secret viewer. Absolutely amazing is the significance of this "from another world" teaching, as it were intended for a Christian of the 20th century! It is also surprising who exactly was destined to acquire this wondrous treasure and under what conditions to make public the entire estate of Great Russia, precisely on the eve of the historical disappearance of Holy Russia from the earth ... "has ears to hear" and a heart that is ready to accept the fiery words of the Truth Itself emanating from the lips of the truly heavenly Seraphim - our dear and dear Father Seraphim.
The miracle of this seraphim's appearance on our sinister land, in addition to the fact that it lives and breathes in our church life to this day, has not yet said its last word, it has not yet ended. The Monk Seraphim is the heritage of the entire Universal Church of Christ, one and true. Concluding his Conversation, the Reverend says to Motovilov, his interlocutor: "... The Lord will help you to forever keep this (the teaching about the Holy Spirit) in your memory ... the more that it was not for you alone that it was given to you to understand this, but through you for the good of the world ... "The Reverend has not yet appeared to many ignorant and in darkness, the Seraphim has not yet burned their hearts with Divine love in order to make them his final choice, and the last trumpet will thunder ... , it can be seen, soon to be the end of it, for the news of the Monk Seraphim is spreading.
This Conversation was redirected by Sergei Alexandrovich Nilus. It was a wonderful person. It was not for nothing that the Reverend himself chose him to be, as it were, a new "servant of the poor Seraphim," and in fact he served the saint as a publication of the Conversation, and in general with his writings. Below is the complete text from the third and last edition of the Beseda, which was corrected by Nilus and provided with a preface, an afterword, and notes never published before. The conversation constitutes one of the chapters of his first and extremely interesting book "Great in Small", dedicated "with a sense of reverent gratitude" to his miraculous healer, the Holy Righteous Father John of Kronstadt.
Gleb Podmoshensky Summer, 1967
"FOREWORD by S. A. NILUS"
While Apollos was in Corinth, Paul, having passed the upper country, arrived in Ephesus and, finding some disciples there, said to them: Have you received the Holy Spirit by believing? But they said to him: we have not even heard if there is the Holy Spirit. He said to them: What were you baptized into? They answered: in the baptism of John. Paul said: John baptized with the baptism of repentance, telling people to believe in the One who comes after him, that is, in Christ Jesus. Hearing this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus, and when Paul laid his hands on them, the Holy Spirit descended on them, and they began to speak in other tongues and prophesy. All of them were about twelve of them. (Acts XIX, 1-7).
And behold, now, by the attraction of the Spirit, I am going to Jerusalem, not knowing what will meet me there; only the Holy Spirit in all cities testifies, saying that bonds and sorrows await me. (Acts XX, 22-23).
And my word and my sermon are not in convincing words of human wisdom, but in the manifestation of spirit and strength, so that your faith may not be based on human wisdom, but on the power of God. (1 Cor. 11: 4-5).
And God revealed it to us by His Spirit; for the Spirit permeates everything, and the depths of God (1 Cor. II, 10).
The soulful man does not accept what is from the Spirit of God, because he considers it insanity; and cannot understand. (1 Cor. II, 14).
I was in the spirit on Sunday decks and heard a loud voice behind me, like a trumpet, which said: I am the Alpha and Omega, the first and the last. (Rev. 1, 10).
A month before the Highest command to speed up the work being done in the Holy Synod about the glorification of the Holy Pleasant of God, Seraphim of Sarov, the Lord brought me back to Sarov and Diveev. Of the three contemporaries, Fr. Seraphim, whom I met on my first trip, I found only Elena Ivanovna Motovilova alive. Soon after my departure, in 1900, mother Hermionia departed for the villages of the righteous; at Easter, two years later, Mother Evanthia also went after her.
Over the years, Elena Ivanovna has also surrendered greatly: her camp has bent, her light and penetrating eyes have begun to fade, so recently. Seraphim no longer needs earthly witnesses of his righteousness, he calls them to himself in a place of eternal rest, to see and share with him his glory, that incorruptible and eternal, unfading glory that the Lord has prepared from all eternity for all who love Him, “go to the face of the saints and the righteous ones shine like the sun! "
But the freshness of mind and memory has not left the dear old woman. The past will live and flourish in her memories, and time has no power over them! ..
At my request, with the permission of the abbess, Elena Ivanovna gave me a whole box of papers left after her late husband, Nikolai Alexandrovich. Anyone who was interested in the life of Father Seraphim should know this name, which is so closely connected with the name of Father and the Diveyevo women's monastery built by him. This man lived incomprehensible, unappreciated and died, but during his lifetime he was a "servant of the Seraphims", as he himself liked to call himself, and remained so after death. In his papers, I happened to find such a treasure, which in fairness can be called the greatest testimony of faith. This preciousness, with the preservation of all the originality of the syllable of the forties of the last century, in which it was written, I wish to share with the Orthodox reader.
I. INVITATION
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| Sarov desert. The photo
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"Truly, truly, I say to you: he who believes in Me, the work that I do, he will do, and he will do more than these ..." (John 14.12)
“Once,” Motovilov writes in his notes, “it was in the Sarov Hermitage soon after my healing, at the beginning of the winter of 1831, on Tuesday the end of November, I stood during Vespers in the warm Cathedral of the Life-Giving Spring on an ordinary one, as it always happened afterwards. in my place, right opposite the miraculous icon of the Mother of God. ”Then one of the sisters of the Diveyevo Mill Community came up to me. This mill received the name "Mill" (the part of the monastery into which, according to the elder's behest, only girls were to be admitted) I had no idea about the name and existence of this community, separate from the other church, also Diveyevo community, at that time. told me:
Are you, perhaps, a lame gentleman whom our father, Father Seraphim, healed just recently?
I replied that it was me who was.
Well, then, - she said, - go to Father; he ordered to call you to him. He is now in his cell in the monastery and said that he would be waiting for you.
People who, at least once during the life of the great elder Seraphim, who were in the Sarov desert and even only heard about him, can fully comprehend what inexplicable joy my soul was filled with at this unexpected call of him. Leaving the hearing of the Divine Service, I immediately ran to him in his cell. Father Seraphim met me at the very door of his vestibule and said to me:
I was waiting for your love of God. Just wait a little while I talk to my orphans. I have a lot to talk with you. Sit down here.
At these words, he pointed out to me a ladder with steps, made, probably, to close the chimneys of the stove and placed opposite the stove, with its mouth in the vestibule, as in all double cells of the Sarov dispensations. I was about to sit down on the bottom step, but he said to me:
No, sit higher.
I switched to the second one, but he told me:
No, your love of God. If you please sit on the very top step. - And, having made me sit down, he added: - Well, sit there, wait, when I, having talked with my orphans, come out to you.
Batiushka brought two sisters into his cell, one of whom was a girl from the nobility, the sister of the Nizhny Novgorod landowner Manturov, Elena Vasilievna, as the sisters who remained with me in senets told me to my request.
For a long time I sat waiting for the great Elder to open the doors for me too. I think I sat there for two hours. Pavel, the cell attendant of Father Seraphim, came out to me from another cell closest to the entrance to the vestibule of this cell, and, despite my excuses, persuaded me to visit his cell, and began to give me various instructions on spiritual life, which in fact had a goal, at the instigation of the enemy, weaken my love and faith in the merits of the great elder Seraphim before God.
I felt sad, and with sorrow I said to him:
I was stupid, Father Pavel, that, having obeyed your convictions, I entered your cell. Father Abbot Niphon is a great servant of God, but even here I did not come to the Sarov Monastery for him and I do come, although I respect him a lot for his shrine, but only for Father Seraphim alone, about whom I think that even in antiquity there was not enough such holy saints of God, endowed with the power of Elijah and Moses. Who are you who are imposing on me with your instructions, while, I guess, you don't even know the way of God yourself. Forgive me, I am sorry that I listened to you and went to your cell.
With that, I left him and sat down again on the top step of the ladder in the senses of my father's cell. Then I heard from the same Father Pavel that Father was threatening to reprimand him for this, telling him: “It is not your business to talk with those who long for the word of God Seraphim and come to Sarov. , but what the Lord has deigned to me to open for edification. Do not interfere with your own affairs. Know yourself, and never dare to teach: God did not give you this gift - after all, it is given not for free to people, but for their merits before the Lord our God and by His special mercy and Divine look on people and His Holy Providence. " I am writing this here for the memory and edification of those who value both a little speech and a barely noticeable character trait of the great Elder Seraphim.
When the Elder talked with his orphans at about two o'clock, then the door opened and Father Seraphim, seeing off the sisters, said to me:
I have detained you for a long time, your love of God. Do not exact. Here are my orphans in need of many things: so I, the poor, and comforted them. Come to your cell.
In his monastic cell, he talked with me about various subjects related to the salvation of the soul and to the life of the world, and ordered me and Father Gury, the Sarov hotel, to go to him in the nearby wilderness the next day, after early Mass.
II. DELIVERY OF THE LORD
The whole night Fr. Guriy and I talked about Fr. Seraphim, the whole night almost did not sleep for joy, and the next day we went to Fr. Seraphim in his nearby wilderness, without even drinking or eating anything, and all day until late at night, If you did not drink, you did not eat, we stayed at the door of this nearby wilderness. Thousands of people came to the great Elder, and all departed without receiving his blessing, and after standing a little in his senets, they returned back; about seven or eight people stayed with us to wait for the end of this day and the way out of the hermitage of Father Seraphim, including, as I remember now, the wife of the Balakhna treasurer from the county town of the Nizhny Novgorod province of Balakhny and some wanderer who was all bothering about the discovery of the holy relics of Paphnutius , it seems, in Balakhna resting incorruptibly. They decided to wait with us for the opening of the doors of the great Elder. Finally, they too were embarrassed in spirit, and even Father Gury himself, in the evening, when I was already instructed later, was very embarrassed and said to me:
It's already dark, father, and the horse is hungry, and the coachman boy is probably hungry. How would it be if we go later and the animals would not attack us. (You need to know the virgin Sarov forest, which surrounds the Sarov desert for tens of thousands of dessiatines, in order to appreciate the natural fear of Father Gury.
But I said:
No, father, Father Gury, go back alone if you are afraid of something, and even though the animals will tear me to pieces here, and I will not leave Father Seraphim's door, even if I had to die of starvation in their presence; I will still wait for him, as long as he opens the doors of his holy cell for me!
And Father Seraphim, quite a bit later, really opened the doors of his cell and, turning to me, said:
Your love for God, I called you, but don’t demand that I didn’t open the whole day: now is Wednesday, and I’m silent, but tomorrow, you are welcome, I will be glad to have a heart-to-heart talk with you. But it’s not so early, if you please, to come to me, otherwise, not eating all day, you are exhausted. And so after the late Mass, and having supported yourself with enough food, please come with Fr. Guriy to me. Now come and refresh yourself with food - you are exhausted.
And he began to bless us, beginning with me, and said to Father Guriy:
So, friend, so, my joy, tomorrow with the master, please come to me on my next pazhninka
You will find me there, and now come in peace. Goodbye, your love of God!
With these words, Batiushka closed up again. No word can express the joy that I felt in my heart. I swam in bliss. The thought that, in spite of not long-suffering the whole day, at least in the end I was honored, however, not only to see the face of Father Seraphim, but also to hear the greetings of his inspired words, so comforted me. Yes, I was at the height of bliss, inconceivable by any earthly likeness! And, in spite of the fact that I did not drink or eat all day, I became so full that it was as if I had eaten to the point of satiety and drank to a reasonable intoxication. I speak the truth, although, perhaps, for some who have not experienced in practice what sweetness, satiety and intoxication mean, with which a person is filled during the influx of the Spirit of God, my words will seem exaggerated and the story is too enthusiastic. But I assure with my Orthodox Christian conscience that there is no exaggeration here, and everything I have said now is not only a mere truth, but even a very weak idea of what I really felt in my heart.
But who will give me a verb that can express at least a little, at least partially, what my soul felt the next day?
III. THE PURPOSE OF THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. (MEANING OF LIFE)
It was on Thursday. The day was overcast. There was a quarter of snow on the ground, and a rather thick snow pellet was crushed from above, when Father Seraphim began a conversation with me on his closest pazhninka, near the same nearby wilderness opposite the Sarovka river, near a mountain close to its banks.
He placed me on the stump of a tree he had just cut down, and he himself stood squatting opposite me.
The Lord revealed to me, - said the great Elder, - that in your childishness they zealously wanted to know what the purpose of our Christian life is, and you have repeatedly asked many great spiritual persons about this ...
I must say here that from the age of twelve this thought has persistently disturbed me, and I, indeed, addressed many of the clergy with this question, but their answers did not satisfy me. The elder did not know this.
But no one, - continued Father Seraphim, - has definitely told you about this. They told you: go to church, pray to God, do the commandments of God, do good - this is the goal of Christian life for you. And some were even indignant at you because you were busy with unpleasant curiosity, and told you: do not seek yourself higher. But they didn’t speak as they should. Here I, poor Seraphim, will explain to you now what this goal really is.
Prayer, fasting, vigilance and all other Christian deeds, no matter how good they are in themselves, but not only doing them is the goal of our Christian life, although they serve as the necessary means to achieve it. The true goal of our Christian life is to acquire the Holy Spirit of God. Fasting and vigilance, and prayer, and alms, and every good deed done for Christ's sake are the means for acquiring the Holy Spirit of God. Note, father, that only for the sake of Christ a good deed done brings us the fruits of the Holy Spirit. Still, what is done not for Christ's sake, although good, does not represent a reward in the life of the century to come, and in this life it does not give the grace of God either. That is why the Lord Jesus Christ said: "Everyone who does not gather with Me, he scatters." A good deed cannot be called otherwise than gathering, for although it is not done for Christ's sake, it is nevertheless good. Scripture says: "In every tongue fear God and make righteousness his delight." And as we can see from the sequence of the sacred narrative, this "do righteousness" is so pleasing to God that an angel of the Lord appeared to Cornelius, who feared God and was doing righteousness, while he was praying, and said: "Send to Joppa to Simon Usmar, where you have ordained Peter, and that one speaks the verbs of the eternal belly, in them you and your whole house will be saved. "
So, the Lord uses all His Divine means to give such a person the opportunity for his good deeds not to lose the reward in the life of the Divine Life. But for this we need to start here by right faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who came to save sinful people, and by acquiring the grace of the Holy Spirit, Introducing the Kingdom of God into our hearts and paving the way for us to acquire the blessedness of life in the age to come. But that is what limits this pleasure to God of good deeds that are not done for Christ's sake: our Creator provides the means for their implementation. It remains for a person to either implement them or not. That is why the Lord said to the Hebrews: "If they did not see it faster, they had no quicker sin. But now you speak, we see, and your sin remains upon you." If a person, like Cornelius, takes advantage of God's pleasure in his work that was not done for Christ's sake, and believes in His Son, then this kind of work will be imputed to him, as if for the sake of Christ, done and only for faith in Him. Otherwise, a person has no right to complain that his good did not go into business. This never happens only when doing some kind of good for Christ's sake, for good, for His sake, is done not only in the life of the next century, the crown of righteousness intercedes, but also in this life fills a person with the grace of the Holy Spirit, and moreover, as it is said: "Not in God gives the measure of the Holy Spirit. The Father loves the Son and gives everything in His hand. "
So it is, your love of God. Thus, the true goal consists in the acquisition of this Spirit of God. our Christian life, and prayer, vigil, fasting, alms and other virtues for Christ's sake are only means to acquire the Spirit of God.
What about acquisitions? - I asked Father Seraphim. - I do not understand something.
Acquisition is the same as acquiring, - he answered me, - do you understand what acquiring money means? So it is all the same the acquisition of the Spirit of God. After all, you, your Love for God, understand what acquisition is in the worldly sense? The purpose of the life of the mundane ordinary people is to acquire or make money, and among the nobles, in addition, to receive honors, distinctions and other awards for state services. The acquisition of the Spirit of God is also capital, but only gracious and eternal, and it, like money, bureaucratic and temporary, is acquired in the same ways, very similar to each other. God the Word, our God-man Jesus Christ likens our life to the marketplace and calls our work of life on earth a purchase, and says to all of us: "Bathe, until I come, redeeming time, as the days are deceiving the essence," that is, gain time to receive heavenly blessings through earthly goods. Earthly goods are virtues done for Christ's sake, giving us the grace of the All-Holy Spirit. In the parable of the wise and foolish virgins, when the foolish fools lacked oil, it is said: "Shedshi, buy it at the marketplace." But when they bought it, the doors to the bridal chamber were already closed, and they could not enter it. Some say that the lack of oil among the holy fools signifies a lack of good deeds in their lifetime. This understanding is not entirely correct. What was it they lacked in good deeds, when they, though fools, are still called virgins? After all, virginity is the highest virtue, as a state of equal angels, and could serve as a substitute in itself for all other virtues. I, poor man, think that it was precisely the grace of the All-Holy Spirit of God that was lacking. Creating virtues, these virgins, by their spiritual foolishness, believed that this was the only Christian thing, to do some virtues. We did a virtue, and so did the work of God, but before they received the grace of the Spirit of God, whether they achieved it, they did not care. About such and such ways of life, based only on one creation of virtues without careful testing, whether they bring and exactly how much they bring the grace of the Spirit of God, and it is said in the fatherly books: the bottom of hell. " (The essence of the path is the imaginary rule of being to the husband, both the latter see them in the bottom of hell (Proverbs 16:25). There are paths that seem straight to man, but their end is the path to death.) Anthony the Great in his letters to the monks speaks of such virgins : "Many monks and virgins do not have any idea about the differences in wills operating in a person, and do not know that three wills are at work in us: the first of God, the all-perfect and all-saving; the second is our own, human, that is, if not harmful, then and not saving, and the third demonic - completely pernicious. " And it is this third enemy will that teaches a person either not to do any virtues, or to do them out of vanity, or for one good, and not for the sake of Christ. The second - our own will - teaches us to do everything to please our lusts, otherwise, as the enemy teaches, to do good for the sake of good, not paying attention to the grace they acquire. The first - the will of God and all-saving - consists only in doing good only for the acquisition of the Holy Spirit as an eternal treasure, inexhaustible and fully and worthy of being appreciated by one who cannot. It is this, this acquisition of the Holy Spirit, in fact, is called that oil, which was lacking among the holy fools. That is why they are called holy fools, for they have forgotten about the necessary fruit of virtue, about the grace of the Holy Spirit, without which there is no salvation and no one can be, for "by the Holy Spirit, every soul lives and rises in purity, brightens the Trinity Unity in sacred secrecy." The Holy Spirit Himself; settles in our souls, and this is the very introduction into our souls of His, the Almighty, and coexistence with our spirit of His Trinity Unity and is given to us only through the all-round acquisition of the Holy Spirit from our side, which prepares in our soul and flesh the throne for the All-creative Divine with our spirit of abiding, according to the immutable word of God: "I will dwell in them and I am like, and I will be with them in God, and they will be in my people." This is the very oil in the lamps of the wise virgins, which could burn lightly and for a long time, and those virgins with these burning lamps could wait for the Bridegroom, who came in midnight, and enter with Him into the palace of joy. The holy fools, seeing that their lamps were extinguished, although they went to the marketplace, and buy oil, did not have time to return in time, for the doors were already closed. Marketplace is our life; the doors of the bridal chamber, closed and not admitting to the Bridegroom, is human death; the wise and foolish virgins are Christian souls; oil is not deeds, but the grace of the All-Holy Spirit of God received through them inside our nature, transforming it from this into this, that is, from corruption to incorruption, from spiritual death to spiritual life, from darkness into light, from the den of our life, where passion tied like cattle and beasts - into the temple of the Divine, into the luminous palace of eternal joy in Christ Jesus our Lord, Creator and Deliverer and Eternal Bridegroom of our souls.
How great is God's compassion for our misfortune, that is, inattention to His care for us, when God says: "Behold, I stand at the door and sense," meaning by the door the course of our life, not yet closed by death. Oh, how I wish, your Love for God, that in this life you would always be in the Spirit of God! "Wherever I find, in that I judge," says the Lord. Woe, great woe, if He finds us burdened with cares and sorrows of life, for whoever can endure His anger and stand against the face of His anger! That is why it is said: "Watch and pray, lest you enter into an attack," that is, do not be deprived of the Spirit of God, for vigilance and prayer bring us His grace. Of course, every virtue done for Christ's sake gives the grace of the Holy Spirit, but most of all it gives prayer, because it is, as it were, always in our hands as an instrument for gaining the grace of the Spirit. Would you like, for example, to go to church, but either there is no church, or the service has ceased; you would want to give to a beggar, but there is no beggar, or you have nothing to give; you would want to keep your virginity, but you do not have the strength to fulfill it according to your addition or according to the efforts of the enemy's intrigues, which you cannot resist due to human weakness; you would want to do some other virtue for Christ's sake, but you also have no strength, or you cannot find a chance. And before prayer, this does not apply in any way: everyone always has an opportunity for it - both the rich and the poor, and the noble and the simple, and the strong and the weak, and the healthy and the sick, and the righteous and sinner. How great is the power of prayer, even of a sinful person, when it rises from the bottom of your heart, judge by the following example of Holy Tradition: when, at the request of a desperate mother who has lost her only-begotten son, abducted by death, a whore wife, caught on her way and even from just She was not cleansed of her former sin, touched by the desperate sorrow of her mother, cried out to the Lord: "Not for the sake of the accursed sinner, but tears for the sake of the mother grieving for her son and firmly convinced of Your mercy and omnipotence, Christ God, resurrect, Lord, her son!" - the Lord resurrected him. So, your love for God, the power of prayer is great, and it most of all brings the Spirit of God, and it is most convenient for everyone to correct it. We will be blessed when the Lord finds us vigilant, in the fullness of the gifts of His Holy Spirit. Then we can boldly hope to be caught up in the clouds at the meeting of the Lord in the air, Coming with glory and power to judge the living and the dead with much, and reward others according to his deeds.
Behold, your love for God, for great happiness, please, be willing to talk with God Seraphim, being sure that he is not deprived of the grace of the Lord. What are we talking about the Lord Himself, the source of the ever-scarce source of all goodness, both heavenly and earthly? But by prayer, we are worthy to talk with Him, the All-Merciful and Life-giving God and our Savior. But even here it is necessary to pray only until God the Holy Spirit descends on us in the measures of His heavenly grace known to Him. And when He delights in visiting us, then we must already stop praying. Why then pray to Him: "Come and dwell in us and cleanse us from all defilement and save, O God, our souls," when He has already come to us in a hedgehog to save us, who trust in Him and call on His holy name in truth, that is, in order to humbly and lovingly meet Him, the Comforter, inside the temple of our souls, hungry and thirsty for His coming. I will explain this to your Godliness with an example: if only you would invite me to visit you, and at your call I would come to you and would like to talk with you. And you would all begin to invite me: you are welcome, de we ask, please, they say, to me. Then I should against my will have to say: what is it, out of the mind, or what, came out? I came to him, and he still calls me! This is how the Holy Spirit relates to the Lord God. That is why it is said: "Abolish and understand that I am God; paradise, with Abraham and Jacob and with my other servants, with Moses, Job and the like. Many people interpret that this abolition applies only to the affairs of the world, that is, during a prayer conversation with God, one must abolish from the affairs of the world. But I will tell you according to Bose that although it is necessary to abolish from them during prayer, but when, with the almighty power of faith and prayer, the Lord God the Holy Spirit deigns to visit us and come to us in the fullness of His ineffable goodness, then it is necessary to abolish from prayer. The soul speaks and is in the rumor when you pray, and with the invasion of the Holy Spirit you must be in complete silence, hear clearly and intelligibly everything, the verbs of the eternal life, which He then deigns to proclaim. Moreover, one must be in complete sobriety of both soul and spirit and in the chaste purity of the flesh. So it was at Mount Horeb, when the Israelites were told that they would not touch their wives in three days before the appearance of God in Sinai, for our God is "consuming fire all that is unclean," and no one from defilements of flesh and spirit.
IV. ACQUISITION OF GRACE
Well, but what about, Father, to be with other virtues, done for Christ's sake, in order to acquire the grace of the Holy Spirit? After all, you only wish to speak to me about prayer.
Acquire the grace of the Holy Spirit and all others of Christ for the sake of virtues, trade them spiritually, trade those of them that give you the greatest profit. Collect the capital of the blessed excess of the goodness of God, put them in the eternal pawnshop of God from the percentage of immaterial and not four or six per hundred, but one hundred per one spiritual ruble, but even that many times more. For example: prayer and vigilance gives you more of the grace of God - watch and pray; fast gives much of the Spirit of God - fast; more alms gives - do charity, and thus reason about every virtue done for Christ's sake.
Here I will tell you about myself, poor Seraphim. I come from Kursk merchants. So, when I was not yet in the monastery, we used to trade in goods that give us more profit. Do the same you, father, do, and just as in the trade business is not the power to just trade, but to get more profit, so in the Christian life is not the power to just pray or whatever. - or a good deed to do. Although the apostle says: "Pray incessantly," but why, as you remember, he adds: "I would rather say five words with my mind than a thousand tongues." And the Lord says: "Not everyone say to Mi: Lord, Lord, it will be saved, but do the will of My Father," that is, he who does the work of God and, moreover, with reverence, for everyone is cursed who does the work of God with negligence. And the work of God is: let you believe in God and He also sent Jesus Christ. If you judge correctly about the commandments of Christ and the apostles, then our Christian work consists not in increasing the count of good deeds that serve the goal of our Christian life only by means, but in extracting more benefit from them, that is, in acquiring the richest gifts of the Holy Spirit.
So I wish, your love for God, that you yourself would acquire this ever-inexhaustible source of God's grace and always reason to yourself whether you are found in the Spirit of God or not; and if in the Spirit of God, then, blessed be God, there is nothing to grieve about, even now - at the Last Judgment of Christ. For in what I find, in that I judge. If not, then it is necessary to understand why and for what reason the Lord God the Holy Spirit has deigned to leave us, and again seek and seek Him, and not lag behind until the sought-after Lord God the Holy Spirit is found and will be with us again By your grace. Our enemies who drive us away from Him must be attacked so long as their dust is swept away, as the Prophet David said: "I will marry my enemies and I will comprehend, and I will not return, until they die, I will insult them, and they will not be able to fall under my feet. ".
That's it, father. So, if you please, trade spiritually virtuous. Distribute the gifts of the grace of the Holy Spirit to those who demand, following the example of a kindled light, which itself shines, burning with earthly fire, and other lights, without diminishing its own fire, kindles into light to everyone in other places. And if this is so in relation to the earthly fire, then what can we say about the fire of the grace of the All-Holy Spirit of God? For, for example, the wealth of the earth when it is distributed becomes scarce, while the wealth of heavenly grace of God is distributed the more, the more it multiplies in the one who distributes it. So the Lord Himself deigned to say to the Samaritans: "Drink from this water he will thirst again, but drink from water, from the south I will give it, it will not thirst forever, but the water from the south I will give him, there will be in him a ever-flowing spring into the everlasting belly."
V. THE MOTHER OF GOD - THE PLOUS OF THE IMPAIRS
Father, - I said, - so you all deign to speak about the acquisition of the grace of the Holy Spirit as the goal of the Christian life, but how and where can I see it? Good deeds are visible, but can the Holy Spirit be seen? How will I know if He is with me or not?
At the present time, - so answered the Elder, - due to our almost universal coldness towards the holy faith in our Lord Jesus Christ and due to our inattention to the actions of His Divine Providence for us and the communication of man with God, we have reached the point that, one might say, almost completely retired from the true Christian life. Now the words of Holy Scripture seem strange to us, when the Spirit of God through the mouth of Moses says: "And in the sight of Adam the Lord going to Paradise," or when we read from the Apostle Paul: "I go to Achaia, and the Spirit of God does not go with us, we will turn to Macedonia, and the Spirit of God is with us. " (In the Apostolic Acts, having passed through Phrygia and the Galatian country, they were not allowed by the Holy Spirit to preach the word in Asia. Having reached Mysia, they attempted to go to Bithynia, but the Spirit did not allow them (16, 6-7.) Repeatedly in other places of the Holy The Scriptures speak of the manifestation of God to men.
Here are some who say: "These places are incomprehensible: could people really see God so clearly?" And there is nothing incomprehensible here. This misunderstanding arose because we moved away from the simplicity of the original Christian knowledge and, under the pretext of enlightenment, entered such darkness of ignorance that it already seems inconceivable to us what the ancients had so clearly understood that, even in ordinary conversations, the concept of the manifestation of God between people didn't seem strange. So Job, when his friends reproached him for blaspheming God, answered them: "How can it be when I feel the breath of the Almighty in my nostrils?" That is, how can I blaspheme God when the Holy Spirit is with me? If I blasphemed God, the Holy Spirit would depart from me, but I feel His breath in my nostrils. In exactly the same way it is said about Abraham and about Jacob that they saw the Lord and talked with Him, and Jacob even fought with Him. Moses saw God and all the people with him when he was honored to receive from God the tablets of the law on Mount Sinai. The pillar of cloud and fire, or, what is the same, the obvious grace of the Holy Spirit, served as guides to the people of God in the wilderness. People did not see God and the grace of His Holy Spirit in a dream, and not in a dream, and not in a frenzy of upset imagination, but truly manifest. We have become very much inattentive to the work of our salvation, which is why it turns out that we and many other words of Holy Scripture are not acceptable in the sense that they should be. And all because we do not seek the grace of God, we do not allow it, due to the pride of our mind, to dwell in our souls and therefore we do not have true enlightenment from the Lord, sent to the hearts of people who are hungry and thirsty for the righteousness of God with all their hearts.
For example, many interpret that when the Bible says, "God breathes the breath of life in the person of the primordial Adam and created by Him from the dust of the earth," as if only one flesh, created from the dust of the earth. This interpretation is incorrect, for the Lord God created Adam from the dust of the earth in the same composition as, father, the holy Apostle Paul asserts: "May your spirit, soul and flesh be all-perfect in the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ." And all these three parts of our nature were created from the dust of the earth, and Adam was not created dead, but an active animal being, like other animate God's creatures living on earth. But this is the strength that if the Lord God had not breathed into this breath of life later in his face, that is, the grace of the Lord God the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and rests in the Son and for the Son is sent into the world for the sake of the Son, then Adam, no matter how he was absolutely superbly created over other God's creatures, as the crown of creation on earth, nevertheless, it would remain without the Holy Spirit, which elevates him to a God-like dignity, and would be similar to all other creatures, although they have flesh, soul, and spirit , belonging to each according to their kind, but not having the Holy Spirit within themselves. When the Lord breathed in the breath of life in the face of Adam, then, as Moses put it, “Adam will live into the soul,” that is, completely similar to God in everything and such as He is, forever and ever immortal. Adam was created so that he was not subject to the action of any of the elements created by God, that he was neither drowned by water, nor fire burned, nor the earth could devour in its chasms, nor the air could damage by any of its actions. Everything was subdued to him, as a favorite of God, as a king and owner of creation. And everyone admired him as the all-perfect crown of God's creations. From this breath of life, breathed in the face of Adam from the All-Creative Mouth of the All-Creator and Almighty God, Adam became so delusional that there has never been a century ago, no, and indeed there will hardly ever be a man on earth wiser and more knowledgeable than him. When the Lord commanded him to bap the names of every creature, then he gave each creature in the language such names that completely signify all the qualities, all the power and all the properties of a creature that it has according to the gift of God given to it during its creation. It was by this gift of the divine grace of God, sent down to him from the breath of life, that Adam could see and understand the Lord going to paradise, and comprehend His verbs, and the conversation of the holy Angels, and the language of all animals and birds and reptiles living on earth. , and everything that is now hidden from us, as from the fallen and sinful, and that was so clear to Adam before his fall.
The same wisdom and power, and omnipotence, and all the other good and holy qualities, the Lord God gave to Eve, having created her not from the dust of the earth, but from the rib of Adam in Eden of sweetness - to the paradise planted by Him in the middle of the earth. In order for them to comfortably and always maintain in themselves the immortal, God-gracious and all-perfect properties of this breath of life, God planted a tree of life in the middle of paradise, in the fruits of which he enclosed all the essence and fullness of the gifts of this Divine breath of His. If they had not sinned, then Adam and Eve themselves and all their offspring could always, using the eating of the fruit of the tree of life, maintain in themselves the eternally life-giving power of God's grace and the immortal, eternally youthful fullness of the forces of the flesh, soul and spirit and the incessant agelessness of the infinitely immortal of his all-blissful state, even incomprehensible to our imagination at the present time.
When, by eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil - prematurely and contrary to the commandment of God - they learned the difference between good and evil and underwent all the disasters that followed the transgression of the commandment of God, they lost this priceless gift of the grace of the Spirit of God, so that until the very advent of the God-man into the world Jesus Christ the Spirit of God "is not in the world, because Jesus is not glorified." However, this does not mean that the Spirit did not exist in the world at all, but His stay was not as full as in Adam or in us, Orthodox Christians, but manifested itself only outside, and the signs of His stay in the world were known to the human race. So, for example, Adam after the fall, as well as Eve with him, were revealed many secrets related to the future salvation of the human race. And Cain, in spite of his wickedness and his crime, understood the voice of the grace-filled Divine, albeit accusatory, conversation with him. Noah talked to God. Abraham, seeing God and His day, and rejoiced. The grace of the Holy Spirit, acting from the outside, was reflected in all the Old Testament prophets and saints of Israel. The Jews later established special prophetic schools, where they taught to recognize the signs of the manifestation of God or Angels and to distinguish the actions of the Holy Spirit from ordinary phenomena that occur in the nature of unfavorable earthly life. Simeon the God-Receiver, the Godfathers Joachim and Anna and many countless servants of God experienced constant, varied manifestations of Divine manifestations, voices, revelations justified by obvious miraculous events. Not with such power as in the people of God, but the manifestation of the Spirit of God also acted in the pagans, who did not know the True God, because from among them God also found people chosen for Himself. Such, for example, were the virgin prophetesses, the Sibyls, who doomed their virginity, although for the Unknown God, but nevertheless for God, the Creator of the universe, and the Almighty, and the Ruler of the World, as whom the pagans also recognized. Likewise, the pagan philosophers, who, although in the darkness of the ignorance of the Divine, wandered, but, seeking the truth beloved of God, could be, by this very God-loving search for it, partakers of the Spirit of God, for it is said: "Languages that do not know God, by nature create lawful and pleasing to God. do ". And the Lord so blesses the truth that He Himself proclaims about it by the Holy Spirit: "The true ascended from the earth, and the truth is prince from heaven."
So, your love of God, both in the Jewish sacred, God-kind people, and in the pagans who do not know God, but still the knowledge of God was preserved, that is, father, a clear and reasonable understanding of how the Lord God the Holy Spirit acts in a person and how exactly and by what external and internal sensations it is possible to make sure that it is the Lord God the Holy Spirit, and not the enemy's delusion, that acts. This is how it was all from the fall of Adam to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ in the flesh into the world.
Without this, your Love for God, which has always been preserved in the human race, is perceptible about the actions of the Holy Spirit of understanding, there would be no way for people to know exactly whether the Fruit of the Seed of the Woman, which has to erase the head of the serpent, came into the world, promised to Adam and Eve.
But here is Simeon the God-Receiver, saved by the Holy Spirit after the foretelling to him in the 65th year of his life of the secret of his ever-virgin from the Most Pure Virgin Mary of His conception and birth, having lived by the grace of the All-Holy Spirit of God for 300 years, then at the 365th year of his life he said clearly in the church The Lord, that he had perceptibly learned by the gift of the Holy Spirit that this is He Himself, that Christ, the Savior of the world, about whose natural conception and birth from the Holy Spirit was foretold to him three hundred years ago from an angel.
Here is Saint Anna the prophetess, the daughter of Fanuil, who served eighty years from her widowhood to the Lord God in the temple of God and known for the special gifts of God's grace for a righteous widow, a pure servant of God, announced that this really is He, the promised Messiah, the true Christ , God and man, the King of Israel, who came to save Adam and the human race.
When He, our Lord Jesus Christ, deigned to complete the whole work of salvation, then after His resurrection, He breathed on the apostles, resuming the breath of life lost by Adam, and bestowed upon them the same Adam's grace of the All-Holy Spirit of God. But this is not enough - after all, He said to them: "They have no food, but He goes to the Father; if He does not go, then the Spirit of God will not come into the world; if He, Christ, goes to the Father, then He will send him into the world, and He, the Comforter, will instruct them and all those who follow their teachings into all truth and will remember them all, even He spoke to them that still exists in peace with them. " This has already been promised by Him grace-grace. And so on the day of Pentecost He solemnly sent down the Holy Spirit to them in a stormy breath, in the form of fiery tongues, on each of them who sat and entered them and filled them with the power of fiery Divine grace, breathing dewy and joyfully acting in souls who partake of its power and actions. And this very fiery-spiritual grace of the Holy Spirit, when it is given to us all, faithful of Christ, in the Sacrament of Holy Baptism, is sacredly sealed by chrismation in the most important places of our flesh indicated by the Holy Church, as the eternal guardian of this grace. It says: "The seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit." And on what, father, your love of God, do we, God, put our seals, if not on vessels that store some precious precious thing for us? What can be higher than everything in the world and what is more precious than the gifts of the Holy Spirit, sent down to us from above in the Sacrament of Baptism, for this baptismal grace is so great that even from a heretic man it will not be taken away until his death, that is, until the time indicated from above according to the providence of God for a lifelong probation of man on earth - what will he be good for, and what will he be able to accomplish in this God-given period, through the mediation of the power of grace given to him from above? And if we had never sinned after our Baptism, we would have remained holy, blameless, and saints of God, taken away from all defilement of the flesh and spirit. But the trouble is that, when we succeed in age, we do not succeed in grace and in the mind of God, as our Lord Christ Jesus did, but on the contrary, being corrupted little by little, we are deprived of the grace of the All-Holy Spirit of God and we become in many different ways by sinful and sinful people. But when someone, agitated by the wisdom of God seeking our salvation, bypasses every kind, decides for her sake to matins to God and vigil for the sake of gaining his eternal salvation, then he, obedient to her voice, must resort to the true repentance in all his sins and to the creation of the opposite. committed sins of virtues, and through the virtues of Christ for the sake of the acquisition of the Holy Spirit, acting within us and within us establishing the Kingdom of God. It is not for nothing that the Word of God says: "Within you is the Kingdom of God, and it is needed, and the needy do not delight." That is, those people who, in spite of the sinful bonds that bound them and do not allow their violence and excitement to new sins, come to Him, our Savior, with perfect repentance for torturing Him, despising the entire strength of these sinful bonds, are forced to break them - such people then really appear before the face of God, more than snow, whitened by His grace. "Come," says the Lord, "and if your sins are like crimson, then as if the snow will make them white." So once the holy seer John the Theologian saw such people in white clothes, that is, clothes of justification, and "dates in their hands" as a sign of victory, and they sang to God the wondrous song "Alleluia". "No one can imitate the beauty of their singing." About them the Angel of God said: "These are the essence, who came from great sorrow, who asked for his robe and made his own garment in the Blood of the Lamb," - asking with suffering and making them ready in communion of the Most Pure and Life-giving Mysteries of the Flesh and Blood of the Immaculate and Most Pure Christ, before all the ages of the world that was slain by His own will for the salvation of the world, ever and to this day tempered and fragmented, but never dependent, giving us our eternal and inexhaustible salvation to the path of our eternal life in response, favorable to His Terrible Judgment and the replacement of the dearest and every mind surpassing that the fruit of the tree of life, which our human race wanted to deprive of, the enemy of men, who fell from heaven Dennitsa.
Although the enemy, the devil, deceived Eve, and Adam fell with her, but the Lord not only gave them the Redeemer in the fruit of the Seed of the Woman, who had corrected death by death, but also gave all of us in the Woman, the Ever-Virgin Mary of the Mother of God, who erased in herself and erased in everything to the human race, the head of the serpent, the persistent Intercessor to His Son and our God, the unashamed and invincible Representative even for the most desperate sinners. For this very reason, the Mother of God is called the "Plague of Demons", for there is no way for a demon to destroy a person, as long as the person himself does not retreat from resorting to the help of the Mother of God.
Vi. GRACE IS LIGHT
Also, your love for God, I must, poor Seraphim, explain the difference between the actions of the Holy Spirit, who sacredly dwells in the hearts of believers in the Lord God and our Savior Jesus Christ, and the actions of sinful darkness, at the instigation and incitement of demonic thieves in us. ... The Spirit of God remembers us the words of our Lord Jesus Christ and acts in one with Him, always solemnly, joyfully making our hearts and guiding our feet on the path of peace, but the flattering, demonic spirit, contrary to Christ, is wise, and his actions in us are rebellious, obstinate and full of lust fleshly, lust of hair and pride of life. "Amen, amen I say to you, everyone living and believing in Me will never die." He who has the grace of the Holy Spirit for his rightful faith in Christ, if through human weakness and died mentally from any sin, he will not die forever, but will be resurrected by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, who takes away the sins of the world and gives grace to the tune. About this grace, manifested to the whole world and our human race in the God-man, is said in the Gospel: "In that belly was the light of man," and it was added: "And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not embrace it." This means that the grace of the Holy Spirit, given at Baptism in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, despite the human falls, despite the darkness around our soul, still shines in the heart with the former Divine light of the priceless merits of Christ. This light of Christ, with the sinner's unrepentant repentance, speaks to the Father: "Abba, father, do not be completely angry at this unrepentance!" And then, when the sinner turns to the path of repentance, he completely obliterates the traces of the crimes committed, dressing the former criminal again with clothes of incorruption, woven from the grace of the Holy Spirit, about the acquisition of which as the goal of Christian life, I have been talking for so long to your Love of God.
I will also tell you, so that you understand even more clearly what to understand by the grace of God, and how to recognize it, and in what its effect is especially manifested in people enlightened by it. The grace of the Holy Spirit is the Light that enlightens a person. All the Holy Scripture speaks about this.
So the Godfather David said: "The lamp of my feet is Thy law and light to my paths, and if Thy law was not teaching me, then I would have perished in my humility." That is, the grace of the Holy Spirit, expressed in the law by the words of the commandments of the Lord, is my lamp and light, and if it were not for this grace of the Holy Spirit, which I am so thoroughly and diligently acquiring that seven days a day I learn about the fate of Thy righteousness, would enlighten me in darkness of worries associated with the great title of my royal rank, then where would I get at least a spark of light to illuminate my path along the road of life, dark from the hostility of my enemies! And in fact, the Lord repeatedly manifested for many witnesses the effect of the grace of the Holy Spirit on those people whom He sanctified and enlightened with His great influences. Remember Moses after his conversation with God on Mount Sinai. People could not look at him - so he shone with an extraordinary light that surrounded his face. He was even forced to appear to the people only under a veil. Remember the Transfiguration of the Lord on Mount Tabor. A great light embraced Him, and "His garments were shining like snow, and His disciples fell on their faces out of fear." When Moses and Elijah appeared to Him in the same light, then, in order to hide the radiance of the light of Divine grace, which blinded the eyes of the disciples, "clouds, it is said, overshadow them." And in this way the grace of the All-Holy Spirit of God appears in an ineffable light for all to whom God manifests its action.
Vii. PEACE AND HEAT OF GRACE
How, then, - I asked Father Seraphim, Father, - should I know that I am in the grace of the Holy Spirit?
This, your love for God, is very simple, - he answered me, - that is why the Lord says: "The whole essence is simple for those who acquire reason." Yes, our whole trouble is that we ourselves do not have this Divine reason, which does not boast (does not take pride), for it is not of this world. This mind, filled with love for God and neighbor, builds up every person for his salvation. The Lord said about this mind: "God wants everyone to be saved and come to the mind of truth." But to His Apostles about the lack of this reason, He said: "Do not you be foolish of nature and do not read the Scriptures, and do you not understand these parables? .." Again about this reason, the Gospel says about the apostles, Scriptures ". Being in this mind, the apostles always saw whether the Spirit of God abides in them or not, and those who were imbued with Him and seeing the Spirit of God abiding with them, affirmatively said that their work was holy and completely pleasing to the Lord God. This explains why they wrote in their epistles: "Be pleased with the Holy Spirit and us" and only on these grounds and offered their messages as an immutable truth, for the benefit of all the faithful - this is how the holy apostles felt the presence of the Spirit of God in themselves. So, your love of God, do you see how simple it is?
I answered:
Still, I do not understand why I can be firmly convinced that I am in the Spirit of God? How can I recognize His true manifestation in myself?
Father Seraphim answered:
I have already, your love for God, told you that it is very simple, and I told you in detail how people are in the Spirit of God and how one should understand His appearance in us ... What do you want, father?
It is necessary, - I said, - so that I understand this well! ..
Then Father Seraphim took me very tightly by the shoulders and said to me:
We are both now, father, in the Spirit of God with you! Why aren't you looking at me?
I answered:
I cannot, father, look, because lightning is pouring out of your eyes. Your face has become brighter than the sun, and my eyes ache with pain ...
Father Seraphim said:
Do not be afraid, your love of God! And now you yourself have become as bright as I myself. You are now in the fullness of the Spirit of God, otherwise you would not have been able to see me like that.
And bowing his head to me, he quietly, in my ear, said to me:
Thank the Lord God for His ineffable mercy to you. You saw that I did not even cross myself, but only in my heart I mentally prayed to the Lord God and said within myself: “Lord, grant him clearly and with bodily eyes to see that Descent of Thy Spirit, with which Thou dost honor Thy servants, when You deign to appear in the light Your splendid glory! " And so, father, the Lord instantly fulfilled the humble request of God Seraphim ... How can we not thank Him for this ineffable gift to both of us? That way, father, the Lord God does not always show His mercy to the great hermits. This grace of God has deigned to comfort your contrite heart, like a loving mother, through the intercession of the Mother of God Herself ... Well, father, don't look me in the eyes? Look simply and do not be afraid - the Lord is with us!
After these words I looked into his face, and an even greater reverential horror attacked me. Imagine: in the middle of the sun, in the brightest brightness of its midday rays, the face of a person talking to you. You see the movement of his lips, the changing expression of his eyes, hear his voice, feel that someone is holding you by the shoulders, but not only you don’t see these hands, you don’t see either yourself or his figure, but only one blinding light , stretching far away, several yards in a circle, and illuminating with its bright shine both the snow veil covering the clearing, and the snow pellet, which showered me and the great Elder from above. Is it possible to imagine the position in which I was then?
How do you feel now? - Father Seraphim asked me.
Unusually good! - I said.
How good is it? What exactly?
I answered:
I feel such silence and peace in my soul that I cannot express it in any words!
This, your love for God, - Father Seraphim said, - is the peace about which the Lord told His disciples: “I give you my peace, I don’t give you peace, I give you. as if you are elected from the world, for this sake the world hates you. Dare, as I have won the world. " It is to these people, who are hated from this world, who are chosen by the Lord, and the Lord gives the peace that you now feel in yourself: "Peace, according to the word of the Apostles, all mind prevails." The apostle calls him that, because no word can express the well-being of the soul that he produces in those people in whose hearts the Lord God instills him. Christ the Savior calls it the world from His own bounty, and not from this world, for no temporary earthly prosperity can give it to the human heart; it is given from above from the Lord God Himself, which is why it is called the peace of God. What else do you feel? - Father Seraphim asked me.
Unusual sweetness! - I answered. And he continued:
This is the sweetness about which it is said in the Holy Scriptures: "From fatness to Your house they will be drunk, and I will give you a stream of Your sweetness." It is this sweetness that now fills our hearts and spreads through all our veins with our ineffable delight. From this sweetness our hearts seem to melt and we are both filled with such bliss, which cannot be expressed in any language ... What else do you feel?
An extraordinary joy in all my heart!
And Father Seraphim continued:
When the Spirit of God descends on a person and overshadows him with the fullness of His inspiration, then the human soul is filled with inexpressible joy, for the Spirit of God gladdens everything, no matter what He touches. This is the very joy about which the Lord speaks in His Gospel: "... A wife always rejoices, has grief, as if her year has come; when she gives birth to a child, she does not remember the sorrow for joy, as a man was born into the world. In the world. you will be in sorrow, but when I see you, your heart will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you. " But no matter how comforting this joy that you now feel in your heart, it is nevertheless insignificant in comparison with that about which the Lord Himself through the mouth of His Apostle said that that joy “is neither an eye, nor an ear, neither in the heart of man has he poured good, God has prepared even more for those who love Him. " The preconditions of this joy are given to us now, and if they make it so sweet, good and cheerful in our souls, then what can we say about the joy that is prepared there, in heaven, crying here on earth ?! Here you too, father, have wept quite enough in your life on earth, and look how the Lord consoles you with joy even in this life. Now it is up to us, father, the task so that, applying labor to labor, we ascend from strength to strength and reach the measure of the age of fulfillment of Christ, may the words of the Lord come true on us: eagles, they will flow and will not bother, they will go and will not be hungry, they will go from strength to strength, and the God of the Gods will appear to them in the Zion of understanding and heavenly visions ... its fullness, and no one will take it from us, who are filled with inexhaustible, heavenly pleasures ... What do you feel, your love of God?
I answered:
Extraordinary warmth!
How, father, warmth? Why, we are sitting in the forest. Now it's winter in the yard, and there is snow under our feet, and there is more snow on top of us, and croup from above is falling ... What kind of warmth can there be?
I answered:
And the kind that happens in the bath, when they put it on the stove and when steam is pouring out of it in a column ...
And the smell, - he asked me, - is the same as from the bath?
No, I replied, there is nothing on earth like this fragrance. When, during my mother's life, I loved to dance and went to balls and dance evenings, my mother used to sprinkle me with perfume that she bought in the best fashion stores in Kazan, but those perfumes do not emit such a fragrance ...
And Father Seraphim, smiling pleasantly, said:
And I myself, father, know this in the same way as you, but on purpose I ask you if you feel it this way? The absolute truth, your love of God! No pleasantness of an earthly fragrance can be compared with the fragrance that we now feel, because we are now surrounded by the fragrance of the Holy Spirit of God. What can the earthly be like him? .. Notice, your love for God, because you told me that it is warm around us, like in a bathhouse, but look, because neither you nor me the snow melts and under us too ... Therefore, this warmth is not in the air, but in ourselves. It is precisely that warmth about which the Holy Spirit with words of prayer makes us cry out to the Lord: "Warm me with the warmth of the Holy Spirit!" She-warmed hermits and hermits were not afraid of winter filth, being dressed, as in warm fur coats, in grace-filled clothing, woven from the Holy Spirit. This is how it should be in reality, because the grace of God must dwell within us, in our hearts, for the Lord said: "The kingdom of God is within you." By the Kingdom of God, the Lord meant the grace of the Holy Spirit. It is this Kingdom of God that is now within us, and the grace of the Holy Spirit shines and warms us from the outside and, filling the air around us with a varied fragrance, delights our senses with pre-heavenly delight, filling our hearts with inexpressible joy. Our present situation is the one about which the Apostle says: "The kingdom of God is not food and drink, but truth and peace about Holy Dus." Our faith consists "not in words that are awkward to earthly wisdom, but in the manifestation of strength and spirit." It is in this state that we are now with you. It was about this state that the Lord said: “The essence of non-citizens is from those who are standing here, who do not have a taste of death, they still see the Kingdom of God, which has come in power ...” Behold, father, your Love for God, what inexpressible joy the Lord God has given us now !. This is what it means to be in the fullness of the Holy Spirit, about which Saint Macarius of Egypt writes: "I myself was in the fullness of the Holy Spirit ..." With this fullness of His Holy Spirit and us, with God, the Lord has now filled ... Well, now there is nothing more, it seems, to ask, your love for God, how people are in the grace of the Holy Spirit! .. Will you remember the present manifestation of the ineffable mercy of God that has visited us?
I don’t know, Father, - I said, - whether the Lord will deign me forever to remember so vividly and clearly, as I now feel, this mercy of God.
And I think, - Father Seraphim answered me, - that the Lord will help you to keep this in your memory forever, for otherwise His goodness would not have bowed so instantly to my humble prayer and would not have preceded to listen to God Seraphim so soon, especially since it would not for you alone it was given to you to understand this, and through you for the whole world, so that you yourself, having been established in the work of God, and others could be useful. As for the fact, father, that I am a monk, and you are a worldly person, then there is nothing to think about: God is required to have the right faith in Him and His Only Begotten Son. For this, the grace of the Holy Spirit is abundantly given from above. The Lord seeks hearts filled with love for God and neighbor - this is the throne on which He loves to sit and on which He appears in the fullness of His heavenly glory. “Son, give Me your heart! - He says. - And I will put everything else to you,” for the Kingdom of God can be contained in the human heart. The Lord commands his disciples: "Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all this will be added to you. The message is that your Heavenly Father, as you require all of these." The Lord God does not reproach for the use of earthly goods, for He Himself says that according to our position in earthly life, we demand all of these, that is, everything that calms our human life on earth and makes our way to the Heavenly Fatherland convenient and easier. Based on this, the holy Apostle Peter said that, in his opinion, there is nothing better in the world than piety combined with contentment. And the Holy Church prays that this will be given to us by the Lord God; and although sorrows, misfortunes and various needs are inseparable from our life on earth, yet the Lord God did not want and does not want us to be only sorrows and misfortunes, which is why he commands us through the apostles to bear each other's burdens and thus fulfill the law of Christ ... The Lord Jesus personally gives us a commandment that we love each other and, consoling with this mutual love, make it easier for ourselves the sad and close path of our march to the Heavenly Fatherland. Why did He come down to us from heaven, if not to take on our poverty upon Himself, to enrich us with the Wealth of His goodness and His ineffable bounties. After all, He did not come to serve Him, but let Himself serve others and give His soul for the deliverance of many. Likewise, you, your love for God, do and, having seen the mercy of God clearly shown to you, report this to everyone who desires salvation for himself. "The harvest is plentiful," says the Lord, "but the laborers are few." So the Lord God brought us to work and gave the gifts of His grace, so that, reaping the classes of salvation of our neighbors through the multiplying number of those brought by us into the Kingdom of God, they would bring Him fruits ovo thirty, ovo sixty, ovo one hundred. Let us look after ourselves, father, so as not to be condemned to us with that crafty and lazy slave who buried his talent in the ground, and we will try to imitate those good and faithful servants of the Lord, who brought their Lord one instead of two - four, the other instead of five - ten. There is nothing to doubt about the mercy of the Lord God: yourselves, your love for God, you see how the words of the Lord, spoken through the prophet, came true on us. "I am God from afar, but God beat me down, and at your mouth is your salvation." No sooner had I, poor man, been baptized, but only in my heart I wished that the Lord would deign to see His benevolence in all its fullness, as He immediately and in fact, by fulfilling my desire, has deigned to hurry. I say this without boasting, and not in order to show you my significance and make you envious, and not so that you think that I am a monk, and you are a layman, no, your love of God, no! "The Lord is near to all who call upon Him in truth, and He has no sight on faces, the Father loves the Son and gives everything in His hand," if only we ourselves loved Him, our Heavenly Father, truly, in a filial way. The Lord listens equally to a monk and a layman, a simple Christian, as long as both are Orthodox, and both love God from the depths of their souls, and both have faith in Him, even if "like a grain of mountains," and both will move mountains. "One moves a thousand, two darkness." The Lord Himself says: "All is possible for the believer," and Father the Holy Apostle Paul exclaims in a loud voice: "I can all about Christ who strengthens me." Isn't our Lord Jesus Christ even more marvelous than this about those who believe in Him: "Believe in Me, I do not do the same things, but He will do more than these, as I am going to My Father and I will ask Him for you, so that your joy will be filled Hitherto you have not squandered anything in My name, now ask and receive ... "So, your Love for God, whatever you ask the Lord God for, you will accept everything, if only it was for the glory of God or for the benefit of a neighbor, because He also attributes the benefit of a neighbor to His glory, which is why He says: "All, even to the one who is the one of the least who have created, I have created." So do not have any doubts that the Lord God will not fulfill your requests, as long as they only relate to the glory of God, or to the benefits and edification of neighbors. But even if for your own need, or benefit, or benefit you needed something, and even so quickly and obediently the Lord God will send you, if only an extreme need and necessity insisted on that, for the Lord loves Those who love Him: the Lord is good to everyone, but he gives and gives to those who do not call on His name and His mercies in all His works, but He will do the will of those who fear Him, and he will hear their prayer, and all their counsel will fulfill, the Lord will fulfill all your requests. Beware of one thing, your Love for God, so as not to ask the Lord for what you will not have an urgent need. The Lord will not deny you even that for your Orthodox faith in Christ the Savior, for the Lord will not betray the rod of the righteous to the lot of sinners and will unswervingly do the will of His servant David, however, he will exact from him why he disturbed Him unnecessarily, asked Him for that, which could be very convenient to do without.
So, your love for God, I told you everything now and in practice showed that the Lord and the Mother of God through me, with God Seraphim, deigned to tell and show you. Come in peace. May the Lord and the Mother of God be with you forever, now and ever, and forever and ever. Amen. Come in peace! ..
And throughout this conversation, from the very time when Father Seraphim's face brightened up, this vision did not stop, and everything from the beginning of the story and what was said until now he told me, being in the same position. The inexpressible shining of light emanating from him I saw myself, with my own eyes, which I am ready to confirm with an oath.
THE AFTERWORD
This is where the Motovilov manuscript ends. The depth of the meaning of this act of the triumph of Orthodoxy is not my pen to begin to clarify and emphasize, and it does not require a testimony about itself, because it testifies to itself with such indestructible power that its significance cannot be diminished by the gossip of this world.
But if anyone could see the form in which I got the papers of Motovilov, which kept in their hiding places this precious testimony of the God-pleasing life of the holy Elder! Dust, jackdaws and pigeon feathers, bird droppings, scraps of completely uninteresting bills, accounting, agricultural statements, copies of petitions, letters from third parties - all in one heap, mixed with one another, and only weighs 4 pounds of 25 pounds. All the papers are dilapidated, scribbled in a fluent and so illegible handwriting that I was simply horrified: where can I figure it out ?!
Sorting out this chaos, bumping into all sorts of obstacles - especially handwriting was a stumbling block for me - I remember almost succumbing to despair. And here, among all this waste paper, no, no, and a spark in the darkness, a hardly disassembled phrase will flash: "Father Seraphim told me ..." What did you say? What do these unsolved hieroglyphs hide in themselves? I was desperate.
I remember that in the evening of a whole day of stubborn and fruitless work, I could not bear it and prayed: "Father Seraphim! Is that why you gave me the opportunity to receive the manuscripts of your" servant "from such a distance as Diveyev, so that they could be returned to oblivion without being analyzed?"
From the heart, it must have been my exclamation. The next morning, starting to sort out the papers, I immediately found this manuscript and immediately got the ability to parse Motovilov's handwriting. It is not difficult to imagine my joy, and how significant the words of this manuscript seemed to me: "But I think," Father Seraphim answered me, "that the Lord will help you to keep this in your memory forever, for otherwise His goodness would not have bowed so instantly to my humble prayer. and would not have anticipated listening to God Seraphim so soon, especially since it was not for you alone it was given to you to understand this, but through you for the whole world ... "
For seventy long years this treasure lay hidden in attics among various forgotten rubbish. He should have gotten into print, and when? Just before the glorification of the holy relics of the one whom the Orthodox is, the Church begins to ask:
"Reverend Father Seraphim! Pray to God for us!"
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