“Hello, Maria! Maria, I’m not a believer, but with curiosity I go to the website of the Rossiyskaya Gazeta and read your articles there, among other things. And you know, I’ve been wanting to ask you this question for a long time. You constantly talk about God, but Where is he, your God, when there is so much injustice around? I won’t go far with an example: in our entrance, in our Khrushchev-era building, there lives a woman - a good, kind, friendly woman - and a few years ago her daughter got sick - she got so sick. , that now she is disabled. Her husband left them, and it is clear that the neighbor is literally exhausted with her disabled girl - only her old mother helps her. When I think about this, I am tempted to ask: “How can we understand evil. what happened to these people?" So, Maria, what do you answer to this?"

Gennady Ivanovich

Hello, Gennady Ivanovich! The question you are asking me has tormented humanity for thousands of years. The German poet Heinrich Heine formulated it this way:

"Why under the burden of the godmother

Is the one on the right wallowing in blood?

Why is everyone dishonest

Greeted with honor and glory?

Indeed, looking at a sick child or the inconsolable grief of a widow, it is difficult not to ask: why, if God is good, does He allow suffering? Why do not those who, in our opinion, deserve it with their sins, suffer, but the innocent? And if such injustice is possible, then it turns out that He is not good? And if He is able to look indifferently at the tears of the innocent, maybe He doesn’t exist at all?

Terrible news

All these questions are posed with extreme urgency in the biblical Book of Job. In a book that reveals to people the secret of suffering. In a book that attracts not only theologians, philosophers and writers, but also millions ordinary people. Because each of us, at a certain moment in our lives, is “a little Job,” and in a moment of pain, suffering and loss, a cry breaks out from our heart: “For what?”

“There was a man in the land of Uz, his name was Job; and this man was blameless, just and fearful of God, and shunned evil” - this is how the Book of Job begins. Job, who lived in the East at least two and a half thousand years ago, was not just righteous: God's favor visibly extended over him. Job had three daughters and seven sons, his home and the homes of his children were famous for their abundance, and the Bible details the livestock he owned. All this made Job, in the eyes of his fellow tribesmen, not just a respected man, but also “more famous than all the sons of the East.”

“And there was a day,” the Bible continues its story, “when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord; Satan also came among them.” Thus, the action of the “Book of Job” is transferred from the eastern land of Uz, where the righteous man lived, to another plane of existence - to heaven, to where the destinies of people are decided. And here, in heaven, Satan, justifying his name - and translated from Hebrew it means “adversary, enemy,” starts a dispute with the Lord. Satan asks the Lord: “Is it for nothing that Job fears God? Haven’t You fenced him around and his house and everything that he has? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his flocks are spread throughout the earth; but stretch out Your hand and touch everything that he has "Will he bless you?" A slanderer by nature, Satan hints that there is a “negotiable point” in Job’s relationship with God: Job is righteous only because the Lord favors him - as if God’s mercy can be bought! And in response to this, in fact, very daring slander not so much against Job, but against God Himself, the Lord answers Satan like this: “Behold, everything that he has is in your hand; only do not stretch out your hand against him.” The Lord, as it were, removes His cover from Job, allowing the enemy of the human race to act, but shows Satan the boundaries: “Just don’t touch him!” In this dialogue, it is very important to understand the following point - nothing happens without the will of the Lord, without His permission.

What happens next is scary. One after another, messengers come to Job with frightening news. Before the first one has time to announce that his herds were attacked by nomads, the animals were kidnapped, and the shepherds were “struck with the edge of a sword,” when the next one is at the door with a story about lightning that destroyed the remaining cattle... “This one was just speaking,” when he enters the new one - with the news that when the sons and daughters were eating and drinking wine in their brother's house, a great wind from the desert blew against the house, and "the house fell on the youths, and they died; and only I was saved, to tell you ".

God gave - God took

And Job stood up. And "torn outerwear his head,” and “shaved his head and fell to the ground.” And he uttered words that only a truly believing person can rise to in a moment of grief: “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, naked I will return. The Lord gave, the Lord also took away; Blessed be the name of the Lord!"

Thus ends the first chapter of the Book of Job. It would seem that Satan has been put to shame and will now leave the righteous man alone - but that was not the case. The second chapter begins with a dialogue between the Lord and the enemy of the human race. “And the Lord said to Satan: Have you turned your attention to My servant Job? For there is no one like him on earth: a blameless, just, God-fearing man who shuns evil, and is still firm in his integrity; and you stirred Me up against him. to destroy him innocently. And Satan answered the Lord and said: “Skin for skin, and for his life a man will give everything that he has” - barter trade was accepted in the East of that time, and the words “skin for skin” mean “equal.” for equal." Satan hints that Job is afraid of losing his life, and that’s the only reason he humbles himself before God, that’s the only reason he doesn’t complain. And Satan again incites the Lord: “Stretch out Your hand and touch Job’s bone and his flesh, will he bless You?” “And the Lord said to Satan: Behold, he is in your hand; only spare his soul.” This limitation that the Lord puts on Satan: “just save his soul” is fundamentally important. Look, God considers it possible to allow the enemy to touch Job’s property, even the lives of his loved ones, then the Lord, as it were, takes away his protection from the health of the righteous, but his soul is something where the enemy of the human race cannot be allowed under any circumstances! Think how often we ourselves, voluntarily, recklessly give our souls into the hands of the devil.

This time, the touch of Satan turned into a terrible disease for Job - leprosy, Job begins to rot alive - “from the sole of his foot to the very top of his head.”

bow down in front of the cross

Suffering severely, Job, according to the custom of that time, leaves the village - despised by everyone. "And he took himself a tile to scrape himself with it, and sat down in the ashes [outside the village]. And his wife said to him: You still stand firm in your integrity! Blaspheme God and die." Most likely, the wife, seeing Job’s unbearable suffering, considered that the death that awaits everyone who “blasphemes” God is better than continued torment. But what does Job answer? “You speak like one of the madmen: will we really accept good from God, but not evil?”

The severity of poor Job's physical suffering, as often happens, is aggravated by moral suffering. Friends come to the righteous man: at first they are silent, shocked by what they saw, and then they begin to loudly express their versions of the reasons for what happened. “Perhaps Job is not so righteous after all, since the Lord punished him.

Surely he sinned - and he sinned secretly, so that even we, friends, did not know about it, but the Lord sees everything, and this is the result..." These reasonings are quite logical if we consider that suffering is a punishment for sins. And just as Job lives in each of us, in the same way we often become like Job’s friends in our thoughts about the causes of evil.

But Job is unshakable: he knows for sure that he is not guilty of anything before the Lord. It is this feeling of injustice of what is happening, more than his own suffering, that oppresses him. He grieves, seeing the triumph of evil in this world: “A man born of a woman is short-lived and full of sorrows: like a flower, he comes out and falls; he runs away like a shadow and does not stop. And to him You open Your eyes... " - he reproaches the Lord. Job is bitterly aware that the Lord is far away, that He is alien to him, that the heavens are silent when mortals cry out to them: “Oh, if only I knew where to find Him and could approach His throne!.. Has He really become in full power? would he compete with me? Oh, no! Let Him just pay attention to me... But behold, I go forward - and He is not there, back - and I do not find Him,” bitter words escape from Job’s heart. And then the Lord Himself appears to Job, who is desperate and seeking God...

It's a strange thing: in the "Book of Job" there is no logical, rational explanation the meaning of suffering, but Job, who saw the Lord with his own eyes, no longer needed it. Suffering and calling on God in his suffering, he meets Him and learns the main thing - that he is not alone in this cold world. These are the highest moments in a person’s life - moments of awareness of closeness to Him. The secret of suffering is that by seeking the Lord, we find Him. Because the Lord is not alien to man, because the Son of God also suffered - crucified for us all.

Gennady Ivanovich, there is no need to think about evil, there is no need to understand evil. “We must fight it,” wrote Father Georgy Chistyakov. “To overcome evil with good, as the Apostle Paul calls us: to heal the sick, to clothe and feed the poor, to stop the war, etc. Tirelessly. And if it doesn’t work out, if you don’t have enough strength, then bow before Your cross, then grasp its foot as the only hope.” And to these words of the priest, who devoted many years to serving children with cancer, I, Gennady Ivanovich, have nothing to add.

Born on November 13, 1961 in the city of Shymkent. short biography: 1968 - 1978 Gymnasium No. 8 - Shymkent, Shymkent region, Kazakh SSR. 1979 - 1985 Moscow State University them. M.V. Lomonosov (MSU) – biophysicist. Journalist, writer. Author of 5 books.

Maria Aleksandrovna GORODOVA: interview

Maria Gorodova, a journalist, host of a regular column in the Rossiyskaya Gazeta, co-author of the books of Archbishop John of Belgorod and Stary Oskol, “Love is long-lasting” and “Ship of Salvation”, reflects on the problems of modern women based on letters from readers.

Maria, you have been working with a female audience for many years - first in a glossy magazine, then in Rossiyskaya Gazeta. Most of Are the letters you receive also from women?
- No, not only, there are many letters from men. We have this trick: we realized that if a letter is from a man, men will definitely read it, but women too. And if the letter is from a woman, then only women will read it, and we will lose a male audience. So we pay close attention to men's mail as well.

When a woman just becomes a church member, sooner or later she begins to feel that there is a certain gap between the image of a woman that the Church offers us and the one that dictates the modern rhythm of life. Have you ever had to overcome this?
- Of course, I came across this. When I worked at Peasant Woman, and for several years now, I published an interview with Archbishop John. I remember once, I was sitting in a conference room, at a table in a beautiful, but not provocative, dress - it was the original work of one designer, so I sat in this dress and compared quotes from the Bible with the Symphony. And then a young guy, a computer scientist, comes up to me and says: “Wow, a believer is wearing such a dress!” It doesn’t happen like that!” If I'm blonde, beautiful dress, and I also laugh, then this, in his opinion, does not fit in with the image of a Christian woman. I think that now this stereotype of a believing woman - a floor-length dress, eyes down and a mincing gait - is already becoming a thing of the past. Look at the queues that line up to see Mother Matrona, there are a lot of young people there, everyone is dressed very modernly. That is, we are already beginning to understand what happiness it is that we are different, that individuality is permissible, but at the same time we are all together - the Church.

You analyze letters coming to Rossiyskaya Gazeta and systematize them. What, in your opinion, are the main pain points in the life of a modern woman?
- They really write to me a lot, letters come from all over Russia. And I can honestly say: people, unfortunately, live very difficult lives. One of the most serious problems is the problem of destruction of the institution of family. In my opinion, the family crisis is caused by a number of reasons. Firstly, not everyone adapted to the new economic realities. Men, unfortunately, often, much more often than women, allow themselves “internal emigration” - it seems that, nominally, there is a man in the family, but he does not take any responsibility for the life of the family. He simply “emigrates” - to alcohol, to the Internet, and so on. As practice shows, women cope with problems much better.

The second reason is more subtle - a change in role functions in the family: the man ceases to be the head of the family, and the woman takes on this role. And this is disastrous for the family. It’s as if some kind of tectonic shift has occurred - in our brains, in our behavior: a woman ceases to be a woman, and a man ceases to be a man.

In addition, there is now aggressive propaganda of permissiveness in the media society. Notice how little we now talk about love, especially about sacrificial love, or fidelity... But everywhere you will be reminded of sex. Moreover, sex is now a kind of promoted brand: the art of seduction is used by both clothing manufacturers and masters of cinema. This is how the emphasis in relationships between men and women shifts, and this cannot but affect the family.

Once, while preparing material for Rossiyskaya Gazeta, I went to dating sites, I emphasize, precisely to dating sites, and not to pornographic sites. I was simply shocked by what I saw. I could not even imagine that women could so actively, easily and willingly offer themselves for sale - just like a commodity. Moreover, these were teachers, economists, engineers - people with higher education. And no one perceived what was happening as something reprehensible. That is, all taboos have been lifted in society. And this is also one of the reasons for the destruction of the family. In the summer, the Rossiyskaya Gazeta published the material “Predator” - a letter from a man who was abandoned by his wife, and not only abandoned, but also completely robbed. After this material, we were bombarded with a flurry of letters, and from men. It turned out that the consumer stereotype of relationships between people is transferred to the family. One man wrote that his family treated him “just like a wallet, a wallet that still dares to have an opinion.” Of course, such an attitude cannot but offend. Such families perish from the lack of not even love, but basic respect.

Permissiveness leads to some very strange phenomena: for example, older women falling in love with young guys is becoming fashionable. When we published material about this, we received many very aggressive letters - from women who convinced themselves and others that living with a gigolo was normal.

- In your opinion, can the Church resist these social changes?
- Nobody else will do this. You can't hide from problems; they won't go away. We must calmly and firmly comment on what is happening in society, regardless of whether someone likes it or not. We must call a spade a spade: sin as sin, debauchery as debauchery, corruption as corruption. We need to explain to people that the taboos and restrictions that are established by the Church are not dictated by hypocrisy. These restrictions are primarily protective in relation to the person himself - his spiritual, psychological and even physical health. By the way, often achievements modern science only confirm the need for these prohibitions. Well, for example, it has now been proven that falling in love is accompanied by the release of endorphins - substances that reduce the ability to critically perceive what is happening. And for young people, when they are in love, it is clear that it is precisely this kind of “decrease in criticality”, this certain euphoria of falling in love that allows one to overcome the barriers that our egoism puts up: a girl falls in love with a young man, not noticing how lop-eared he is, and the young man may not even notice that the long-legged beauty is not so smart... But it turns out that if the same processes happen to a person at a different age, for example, at 45-50 years old, when he has a different hormonal background- then here is a completely different phenomenon, sometimes destructive - a person can simply become obsessed with the object of his love, the threshold of criticality is so greatly reduced. Such an exaggerated “intoxication of love” can destroy both the life of the person himself and the lives of his loved ones. It turns out that science is only now reaching those things that were known in the Church a long time ago.

It seems to me that another reason for divorce is that the secret has disappeared in the relationship between a man and a woman. We ourselves did not notice how the simplification of relations occurred. Even our children know everything about the most intimate moments of the physiology of men and women - because day and night they play videos on TV about pads, or about drugs for treating male problems. A person is reduced to the level of an animal - and not very clean, and not very perfect. But we are not animals! We are created in the image and likeness of God. Usually women who themselves grew up in prosperous families understand very precisely this line of where a man can be allowed in and where not. But this line must exist, absolutely.

But if you look at things realistically, it is obvious that there are not very many such prosperous families, because even in intact families the roles of men and women are mixed or relationships are far from ideal. Is there any other way to learn how to build relationships?
- Of course, we have before us the untold wealth of world literature - read, think, learn. I had a happy marriage, and from it I took the following: it seems to me that the main skill of a woman is the ability to inspire a man. And now, for some reason, women more often “extinguish” men; they like to show their husbands that he is a nobody. But how can you compete with a man if you are initially different? Take it one step lower. By the way, this is important to consider when raising boys.
Although sometimes I catch myself thinking that it’s easier to suppress - because it’s more convenient to have an obedient creature nearby. But God gives people the right to choose, the right to be free, and we certainly shouldn’t take it away.

You noted that there is an industry of commercial sex exploitation, but another problem is associated with it - the cult of eternal youth, formed by the beauty industry...
- Good question... When I worked in glossy journalism, when I met actresses backstage, I often felt real disappointment. Do you see the young tightened skin on a face completely devoid of individuality.

It is humanly understandable that actors “work with their faces”, that they must take care of them, that they want to stay young, but... You know, I have great respect for those actresses who have not had plastic surgery - they perceive their wrinkles, their age, and therefore your life. How else? After all, behind every wrinkle of mine there is a segment of my life - my pain, my suffering, or, conversely, my happiness, my joys. This is my experience, this is my life! Why should I be ashamed of her? For the sake of whom should we give it up?

But this is difficult to explain to a woman who has found her first gray hair or first wrinkle. What you say seems like an abstract theory. What to do when you are afraid that the employer will look at you and say that it is better to hire a young girl?
- There is still a difference between hair dye, wrinkle cream and a surgeon's knife, plastic surgery. And it's not even a health issue. It's a matter of how you feel about yourself. If you perceive yourself as a product that you offer to others, then it is clear that the product must be competitive: today youth is at a price, so it is necessary, as they say, “pre-sale preparation” - and a woman will go under the surgeon’s knife. But if you feel not like a product, but a person, when behind your years of living there is what you have learned, what you have learned, what you have become, then this is a different story. I think that then any employer will hire you because you are an individual. There is a limited range of professions - models, ballerinas, athletes - for whom age is a minus. But in all other professions, including creative ones, your years can become your experience, your unique professionalism. I often remember the French actress Annie Girardot, who was not afraid to be ugly. And with what dignity the Moscow Art Theater actresses wore their gray hair!

What, in your opinion, is most difficult to overcome? modern woman when does she come to Church? Have you yourself become a church member as an adult, and do you see examples of friends and acquaintances?
- Personally, I am not a very collective creature. To be honest, it bothers me when I have a lot of friends in the church; it’s easier for me to go where they don’t know me. Archbishop John of Belgorod and Stary Oskol said very well: “look for Christ in the church, not Christ’s.” Because after the neophyte stage, when you endow everything connected with the Church with holiness: the priest, the people in the church, the grandmother behind the candle box, and perhaps even this box itself, after such a stage of enchantment, a stage of disappointment inevitably comes. It turns out that the people in the temple are not saints, and even moreover, they are not devoid of some human weaknesses. You know, an example last days, the example of Father Daniil Sysoev, shows us that we must learn to distinguish the external in a person from the internal person. The outer man may not be alien to human passion, human fervor, he will not avoid mistakes. But all this does not exclude his holiness according to the inner man.

Source: taday.ru Interviewed by Ksenia Luchenko
All-Ukrainian magazine “Mgarsk Bell”

Maria Aleksandrovna GORODOVA: articles

The joy of meeting the Creator overshadows pain, illness, and fear of death.
“I noticed a long time ago: on Easter people flock to church - we love holidays...” From a letter from Natalya Ivanovna T.

Hello, Natalya Ivanovna! There are really a lot of people in churches on Easter, and it’s not a matter of love for the holidays in general. Back in the second century, the Christian writer and theologian Tertullian noted that the human soul is by nature Christian. So she reaches out Holy holiday The Resurrection of Christ to its Creator. So he rejoices because he who was crucified and accepted death on the cross Christ is risen. So he responds to this joyful news, answering “Truly he is risen!” By the way, Tertullian believed that the soul’s testimony about its Creator is the main proof of the existence of God. This is what he wrote in his work “Apologetics” (apologetics is the substantiation of Christianity with the help of rational evidence): “Although the soul is imprisoned in the body, although it is darkened by perverted teachings, although it is deprived of vigor due to passions and lusts, although it slavishly serves false gods; however, when he comes to his senses, freed as if from intoxication or sleep or any illness, and becomes healthy again, he pronounces the name God, and only this name, since true God there really is one... The soul testifies to Him. Oh, the testimony of a soul who is Christian by nature!”

There will only be you

This testimony of the soul to the existence of God, considered by theologians to be rational evidence, is most accurately, paradoxically, presented to us by poets.
1912, April. Osip Mandelstam. The brilliant poet brilliantly accurately captured the state of searching for God. Read this: after a century, the high, clear voice of the poet flies to us, flies and falls into our hearts. It falls because our soul is also familiar with this state of separation from the Lord, the unclear but painful yearning of creation for its Creator.

Your image, painful and unsteady,
I couldn't feel in the fog.
"God!" - I said by mistake,
Without even thinking about saying it.
God's name is like a big bird
It flew out of my chest!
There's a thick fog ahead,
And an empty cell behind...

But there is a different state of the soul - the state of meeting with your Creator. And the joy of this meeting is so great that it eclipses the pain, the disease itself, and the fear of death. Yuri Gal, 1944, stunning verse in truth, simplicity and power:

I will burst into happy tears.
I won't be there. There will only be you.
Is there really no barrier between us?
Of all the obstacles, have the last ones been removed?
Oh my God! My flesh is dear to me,
And the flesh burns. But the tears are not about her.
You told me that there is no abyss ahead,
And all the radiance of Your goodness.
In tears, in the heat, bedridden,
This is the first time I'm talking to You.
Shouldn't you believe me? Is it with you?
To complain about the flesh, O my God?

Yuri Gal was given only twenty-six years: at twenty, without taking advantage of the reservation given due to illness, he volunteered to go to the front. German captivity, then our camps. Short life, just a few poems, and this breakthrough into eternity. A breakthrough sealed for us - so that we know: the Lord does not leave us on the edge of the abyss, He is with us.
There are other testimonies of finding God. Remember Pasternak's "Dawn" from Doctor Zhivago?

You meant everything in my destiny.
Then came the war, devastation,
And for a long time about You
There was no hearing, no spirit.
And after many, many years
Your voice alarmed me again.
All night I read Your Testament
And how he came back to life from fainting...

Re-read the lines of this verse, so swift, as if you are losing your breath with joy - this is the jubilation of a creature that has seen its Creator! The delight of the image that - finally! - found his prototype.
Night shift
But there is another state of soul - a state of reverence before the greatness of the Lord. Alexander Solodovnikov, "Night under the stars":

The night performs its Divine service,
The twinkling constellations move in a religious procession.
There is a harmonious movement through the temple of heaven
It flows solemnly in one stream.
As soon as the sunset curtain fell,
Lights came forth, countless in number:
Cross of the Swan, lamp of Hercules,
Triple fire of the constellation Aquila...

A hymn telling how the stars will serve the Lord during the Heavenly Liturgy:

They go around the precious cup
Ursa...
She's mysterious
In the depths of the sky, in the altar of the universe
It has been approved by the Creator for centuries.
But then the heavenly bodies passed,
The order created by the abyss of years is completed,
And the dawn chandelier flashed,
Praise be to You
who showed us the Light!

And after this solemn hymn to the Lord, the next line is sudden, like a blow. The kind that takes your breath away from surprise. The kind that you can't hold back your tears. This is a line of the date and place of birth of the verse: “1940, Kolyma, night shift.”
It turns out that verses of praise to the Lord were composed in molybdenum mines. They were composed: as you know, prisoners were not given paper, and the poems were first composed, and then repeated to themselves many times, memorizing them by heart - this was the only way to preserve them for posterity. They have reached us, these praises of the greatness of God. And Alexander Solodovnikov himself is not a miracle! - not only survived in Stalin’s camps (he was rehabilitated in ’56), but lived to be 81 years old and passed on to the Lord in 1974, leaving us two collections of poetry, one of which is called: “Glory to God for everything” !

From the veil

And here is another testimony - also from our contemporary, Sonya Shatalova. Maybe the lines are not so perfect, but they are also torn from the heart: “I’m not alone!” When you read, remember that the verse was written by a girl of 8 years old, suffering from a serious illness and unable to speak.

For some reason I can't get enough
No food
No pleasant things
No meetings.
I'm not capricious at all
I'm full of luxury and holidays
No need.
I just wish I could eat three times a day -
Not pickles, no, simple food.
But she’s still sorely missed!
I would like to communicate
With good people.
But I can't -
Autism gets in the way.
With ridiculous behavior
with fears, dumb -
Who is interested in me?
Who needs me?
And unskillful hands, and devoid of will -
Did you feel sorry for me?
No need!
The Lord is with me, I am not alone!
Both my mother and my sister are with me,
And even dad helps
Although he doesn’t always believe.
Father told me:
- Your illness
It's good for you now.
You must walk this path.
Be patient, heal, and most importantly, pray.
One day you will be free
Just be with God.
So He is in the heart!
It fills your chest!
Should I whisper to you
Those main words?
- Have mercy, Lord.
I'm not alone with You!

Sonya herself will best tell you about this terrible disease - autism. Thanks to her courage and talent, what is happening in the souls of these “children of the rain” is revealed to us.

Oh, the priceless gift of putting words into sounds
In the union of essence and sound!
But I...
It hurts me! Lord, do you hear? Hurt!
How long does silence last!
How endless is the ocean of silence!
And now - both voluntarily and involuntarily -
Darkness crept into my soul.
Tired of waiting.
And to freedom
Words are tired of breaking out of the captivity of the skull.
Melancholy dictates bad weather to the heart.
But am I really ready to surrender to darkness?
Accept into fate, find in it
positive,
Live in a melodramatic storm
turning?..
Well, no, thanks!
Lord, do you hear?
I will endure the pain.
I am a man, not a beast.
And my voice will destroy the prison roof,
And the door to a full-sounding world will open for me.

And finally a real masterpiece religious poetry. Of course, fourteen-year-old Sonya Shatalova, a girl with a terrible diagnosis of “early childhood autism,” first of all describes the cosmos of her experiences. Like all autistic people, Sonya lives in the abyss of her fears, and poetry for her is not just a way of communicating with us, but also an escape from the “prison of muteness,” “the door to a full-sounding world.” The verse “In the Shroud” is about the difficulties of this breakthrough. But not only. How does it happen with real poetry, the verse takes us to a different level of generalization. It is essentially about the inevitability of the Resurrection, although there is no direct mention of God. But, apparently, the Lord grants the ability to see the main thing not only to theologians.

Remember, the Gospel tells how on Sunday, at dawn, the disciples of Jesus came to the cave where the Savior was buried, and did not find the Body of Christ there: the stone that blocked the entrance to the cave was rolled away, the tomb was empty and shrouds lay on the ground - a sign of Christ's liberation from the shackles of death. The main event in the history of mankind took place - Christ was resurrected, and by His Resurrection he gave us the opportunity of eternal life. Read Sonya's verse - it's about us. After all, each of us is imprisoned in our own shrouds: in the shrouds of illnesses or infirmities, in the shrouds of our sins, our callousness, in the shrouds of selfishness... And in order to step into eternity, we must first break free from at least these fetters. So, Sonya Shatalova, 14 years old, “Out of the Veil.” A poem written in an algebra lesson is talent, after all, is also evidence of the presence of God in our world, isn’t it?

Don't wait, don't guess and don't be afraid,
The answer is already in the blood.
Alien obscure properties -
Where and whose hello?
So strangely mixed and stupid:
A volcano ready to explode -
Not a cat on a chain near an oak tree -
A hurricane gone crazy.
But this has happened before:
The cloth of the shrouds was torn,
And I grew out of myself
Escaping from the captivity of time.
Moscow, 2007

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Email Maria Gorodova: [email protected]

Maria Alexandrovna GORODOVA: prose

This story began on a hot July day in 1998, when a telephone rang in our house, and a man who introduced himself as a police officer from Ramenskoye near Moscow told me that my husband had died. My husband, Vasily Egorovich Babenko, a graduate of the Faculty of Journalism of Moscow State University, had already been working as a deputy editor at the Krestyanka publishing house for six months; we were finally preparing, with the whole family, to move from Kursk to Moscow, when this call came. I didn’t get ready for long: I threw some things into my bag, took our boys - twelve-year-old Petya and seven-year-old Georgy, and boarded the first train to Moscow to bury Vasya.

As the husband's friends later found out, he died trying to save an orphanage resident who was crossing railways. Eighteen-year-old Dima had headphones in his ears, and he simply could not hear the roar of a rapidly flying train. My Vasya, walking behind, rushed to save the young man - the last thing the old women saw selling greens on the platform was this Vasya’s jerk... He didn’t save, he himself died. So I was left alone, with two children.

After the funeral, the editor of the magazine where Vasya worked, wanting to support me, invited me to write for them, and I, either out of despair or out of naivety, jumped at it. I was not a journalist at all, I was a housewife, I had a diploma from the Faculty of Biology of Moscow State University, and the only thing I could boast of in the field of journalism were two tiny notes in the newspaper “Culture”, written because Vasya did not have time to write them himself. During the six months that Vasya worked at Krestyanka, almost everyone fell in love with him - for his decency, for his patience, for the fact that he was a hard worker. And this respect later helped me more than once. Until now, the name of my husband, who never held any special positions - never had time - opens for me the doors of very serious offices of his comrades.

This death, so unexpected, was very with a strong blow. And not only for me - for the children. I remember there was a difficult moment before the funeral: my youngest could not accept his father’s death so much, his protest against what had happened was so strong that he refused to go to both the funeral and the funeral service. Then I, confused, not knowing what to do, called Bishop John, Archbishop of Belgorod and Stary Oskol, who baptized us and our children four years before. I called out of despair, in trouble, not knowing what to do. And the bishop, from the other end of the country, talked with Gosha for a very long time, comforting and convincing, until he convinced him that he had to go to the father’s funeral service.

I decided not to return to Kursk. Firstly, I understood that I wouldn’t find a job there, and secondly, because I simply wanted to escape from the pain. I repeat, for the last six months we were forced to live in two houses, and every time Vasya came, we waited for him from early morning, peering at how he hurried towards us along the long concrete road to the house... Looking out the window at the road, knowing that no one would come along it, was unbearable.

My world, the world of my family, collapsed, and I had to learn to live again. Where how? Dont clear. But it immediately became clear that it was impossible to cry. My boys literally clung to me, not letting go of my hands for a minute, their eyes were absolutely confused, they peered into mine in fear. And I understood that the main thing now is to hold on. Because as soon as I lost control of myself and tears welled up in my eyes, they immediately burst out too. For them, the death of their beloved father was not just a loss - the foundations of their life were crumbling. The youngest started having spasms from crying and had a headache...

Everything was rapidly going to hell, there was no stopping it, so I firmly understood only one thing - I had to hold on. Those who remember me at that time later said: everyone was surprised when, in response to condolences and sympathetic questions about how I was going to live further, I confidently reported that everything would be fine with us, that I had already been offered a job at “Peasant Woman”, and I'm about to find a place to live. As one journalist later said: “Masha smiled all the time, and it was scary.” It's actually simple: as long as you smile, it's hard to cry.

I really very quickly rented some shack in Voskresensk near Moscow - I wouldn’t have had enough money to rent an apartment in Moscow. This is how my other life began.

I, until that day protected by the love of my husband, had a rather vague idea of how to make money. She raised children, wrote poetry, cooked borscht. Now my greatest fear was that I would not be able to feed my children. I remember how at confession in Elias Church, in Kursk, where I went immediately after the funeral, an old priest (I think his name was Luka) told me: “Pray and do not be afraid of anything, widows are in Christ’s bosom.” I remember how I sinfully thought: “It’s easy to say, but what do I need to live on?”, but there was some enormous truth in these words.

I remember how I was called to “Krestyanka” in order to give back the salary Vasya had not received and some other money owed. I remember well how the accountant Marina Borisovna, looking at me carefully and forcing me to recalculate the amount received several times, very accentuated, emphasizing every word, said: “Maria, hide the money away,” apparently, despite the smile and confident look, I still instilled fears in her. I remember how I left the gray high-rise publishing house and went to the metro, how a yellow exchange office board appeared before my eyes, how I almost automatically walked into the nook of the exchanger. I know for sure that I didn’t fully understand what I was doing, but for some reason I changed all the money given to me into dollars, leaving only change for transport. I know for sure that at that moment I didn’t understand well what I was doing, and I could easily have been deceived... A few days later the default occurred, and the dollars that I exchanged that day fed us for almost six months. The most difficult six months, when publications were closed, nothing was paid anywhere, and even the most venerable journalists were without work or money.
To be honest, some things that were akin to a miracle for me accompanied me for a long time. For example, without having a residence permit and permanent job, I easily got my boys into the best school in Voskresensk, and they were surrounded there with such care as we had never encountered before or since. As it turned out later, the director of this school, Roza Nikolaevna Utesheva, once had her husband die under similar circumstances, and she did everything so that the boys would thaw out in the new place. The first year I went to work in Moscow from Voskresensk near Moscow, the children did not leave me alone, and I took them with me.

I think I was lucky in journalism too: even my first materials were immediately included in the issue. The very first was with Yan Arlazorov, and he liked him so much that Yan Mayorovich helped me take the next interview - with Gennady Khazanov. Those who have ever encountered glossy journalism know that it takes professionals years to reach such stars. I didn’t have this time, I had to feed my children every day and pay for a rented apartment.
Everyone says that I was lucky when Alla Pugacheva sang a song to my poems, written at the request of the very talented composer Sasha Lukyanov. The fact that the text “Caution, leaf fall!” fell into the hands of Alla Borisovna, it was an accident, a happy coincidence - call it whatever you like: after all, before, when I lived in Kursk, I wrote poems and even sent some of them to Pugacheva, but I never got into a hit " And that year, all autumn, every evening I returned home from work to the accompaniment of my song, which sounded from every window. I was not just glad, it was not a matter of the author’s vanity - although, of course, it was nice. Everything was much more prosaic: Alla Borisovna immediately paid very decently for my poems - it was real money, which allowed me not to have to get more and more work, gave me the opportunity once again get some sleep. In general, that year both Masha Rasputina and Lev Leshchenko sang songs based on my poems, during that first year I made a professional breakthrough - an interview with Igor Krutoy, Laima Vaikule, Tatyana Tolstoy, Gennady Khazanov...

But perhaps the biggest miracle happened when I started writing religious materials. One day in “Krestyanka” just before the issue was handed over, some material flew out, and in a hurry they decided to give the text on the free space, dedicated to Christmas. By that time, I had already established myself as a journalist, everyone knew that I was a believer, so they gave me the task.
With whom to make the material? For me there was no question here. I called the Archbishop of Belgorod and Stary Oskol, Bishop John. Luckily, on that day, November 9, 1999, he happened to be passing through Moscow, and we did our first interview. I liked the material: it contained both the living, ardent faith of the bishop, and tact towards readers who were just beginning their path to God; both depth of thought and subtlety of feelings; and also the ability to speak simply about complex things. Therefore, the editors decided to continue the topic, and I very soon realized that for me these articles were salvation.
Imagine, I could ask about what really interested me - about what sin is and how to come to repentance, what God’s providence is and how to recognize God’s will for oneself... For me, who lives precariously - permanent rented apartments, work in several places, these materials, which had to be handed in every month, created the skeleton, the framework of my life. They became my support.

You can sleep on the kitchen floor in a rented apartment, but feel absolutely happy if you wrote a wonderful material called “Salvation Ship.”

Very quickly I felt that this was the most important thing I was doing. One such incident once convinced me of this. I remember I went into the editorial review department to ask the proofreader for the night “Symphony” - a book where keyword I found exact biblical quotes. I didn’t have time to do this during the day because I was writing other material at the same time, so I decided to ask for the book to take home. “Yes, take it, for God’s sake,” said our proofreader Zhanna. And she continued, surprised at what she was saying. - No one in the editorial office has ever asked us for this “Symphony.” Only you and... your Vasya!”

My Vasya was not a churchgoer. Decent - yes, he was. He was, as they call it, “pure of heart” - for example, I never heard him condemn anyone or say anything bad about anyone. But he was not a church member, he didn’t have time... And now, it turns out, in recent months he needed this book in his life...

I lived both hard and surprisingly happily at the same time, and for some reason it seemed to me that nothing bad would happen to me. Bishop John and I were already planning to make a book from our materials - everyone convinced us that it was time, when my eldest son, nineteen-year-old Petya, died.

Petya was a second-year student at the Faculty of Applied Mathematics and Physics at the Moscow Aviation Institute, having entered there on his own, and was already becoming a real support for me. He helped in all my endeavors, typed my materials on the computer, and many of the questions and topics included in the interview were suggested by him. That day, after passing the exam, Petya went with the guys to sunbathe in Serebryany Bor, left his family and disappeared.

We searched for Petya for four days - calling hospitals, morgues, and the police. On the fifth day they found him, beaten, in the river. For what, who? So it’s unclear. From my pure, childishly open Petya, who, apart from his mathematics and physics, naive youthful poems and guitar, still knew nothing in life, and there was nothing to take. When they found him, beaten, he was wearing only panties and a cross...
I remember I’m standing near the morgue where my child lies, I have to go, do something, sign some papers, but I can’t move, and it seems that life itself is flowing out of me. Moreover, it’s scary that you don’t even resist this anymore - you can’t, because this life itself is devalued by what happened.

And I still remember the funeral service. Petya was a believing boy; he had been going to church on his own for a long time, without me, obeying his inner impulses; a week before that terrible day he confessed and took communion. And either because they loved Petya, or because they knew that he was a believer, a lot of his friends came to the funeral service; I didn’t even suspect that he had so many of them.
Of course, because so many people have come to share your pain with you, it becomes easier. But all the same, it’s very hard, even just physically hard, to stand at the coffin of your child, and only the fact that your youngest son’s hand is in your hand, and there’s also mom and dad, that’s the only thing that makes you hold on. And here, in the temple, at some point, when I was not so much praying as trying to pray, I suddenly realized with distinct clarity that my love for Petya, just like his for me, had not gone away. That I feel it, and with that primordial strength that we are rarely given the opportunity to experience in ordinary life.

And it suddenly became obvious that for this love there are no boundaries that exist between our world and that world, that love really “never ceases,” and this love is more obvious than the reality of the coffin standing in front of you. It seems to me that it was from that moment, in the temple, that life began to return to me.

One Optina elder compared sorrows to a drill of God, which opens a source of prayer in a person. This is true. When this happens, you pray - constantly, simply because otherwise you won’t survive, it’s necessary condition survival. When I got a little stronger, the question “what to do?” He wasn’t even standing in front of me. I took our fifty-eight interviews and sat down with the book “Love is patient,” plunging into the space of the Bible, the bishop’s stories, prayers and Christian poetry. This book, I believe, saved me twice. Can I forget about this?

Gennady Ivanovich

Hello, Gennady Ivanovich! The question you are asking me has tormented humanity for thousands of years. The German poet Heinrich Heine formulated it this way:

"Why under the burden of the godmother

Is the one on the right wallowing in blood?

Why is everyone dishonest

Greeted with honor and glory?

Terrible news

All these questions are posed with extreme urgency in the biblical Book of Job. In a book that reveals to people the secret of suffering. In a book that attracts not only theologians, philosophers and writers, but also millions of ordinary people. Because each of us, at a certain moment in our lives, is “a little Job,” and in a moment of pain, suffering and loss, a cry breaks out from our heart: “For what?”

God gave - God took

And Job stood up. And “he tore his outer garment,” and “shaved his head, and fell to the ground.” And he uttered words to which only a truly believing person can rise in a moment of grief: “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, naked I will return. The Lord gave, the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord!”

This time, the touch of Satan turned into a terrible disease for Job - leprosy, Job begins to rot alive - “from the sole of his foot to the very top of his head.”

bow down in front of the cross

It’s a strange thing: in the “Book of Job” there is no logical, rational explanation of the meaning of suffering, but Job, who saw the Lord with his own eyes, no longer needs it. Suffering and calling on God in his suffering, he meets Him and learns the main thing - that he is not alone in this cold world. These are the highest moments in a person’s life - moments of awareness of closeness to Him. The secret of suffering is that by seeking the Lord, we find Him. Because the Lord is not alien to man, because the Son of God also suffered - crucified for us all.

Journalist and writer Maria Gorodova is well known to readers. Her books, including “Wind Tenderness,” evoke a keen response from the most different people. Now her new book is being published - “The Cradle of Fire”, which talks about love. A conversation with her about this book, about the letters that come to the editorial office of Rossiyskaya Gazeta, on the pages of which Maria has been answering letters from readers for several years now, about the topics that concern many today.

– Maria, how did the idea for your new book come about? Is this the same inspiration?

– Everything is much more prosaic. About two years ago Chief Editor“Rossiyskaya Gazeta” Vladislav Aleksandrovich Fronin called me and asked what could be done so that more young people would read us. I thought: the audience for the “Correspondence” section is people 27 years old and older. But there were a lot of letters in my mail about teenage children. Moreover, they were all written as carbon copies, although they came from different cities and their authors were people of different professions, different social strata. But everywhere there was the same pain, expressed in almost the same phrase: “I raised my child, but now he is a stranger to me...”

And further variations: “The computer has taken my child away from me: he looks up from the monitor just to see what they put on his plate...”, or “American TV series are more valuable to her than a family; I grew up as a rag-picker, in her head only the names of fashion boutiques and recommendations from women’s magazines on how to seduce a man...”, or “My girl decided that she was an emo, and the company of people like her was closer to her own mother...”

Letters about youth suicides are a separate story. The hardest topic! Your heart breaks when you read confessions from mothers or peers of the unfortunate person. Unfortunately, there are too many such letters, and often the cause of the tragedy is the teenager’s isolation, the fact that at a critical moment in his life no one cared about him and he was left alone with the obsessive whirling of a harmful thought.

It seems to me that this is generally global problem modernity: with all the diversity of means of communication - a diversity that civilization has never known before - man is more alone than ever. Of course, the reason here is isolation from God.

In general, I was thinking, I was thinking about how to hook teenagers, where to start a conversation, and then my son says to me: “Mom, why bother? We need to talk about love! Every girl will be interested! And the guys too. Maybe they won’t show it.” , but they will definitely read it. Otherwise - a strange thing! - everywhere there is about sex, there is nowhere to escape from porn, even to the ends of the earth: both in the “box”, and on the Internet, and on every corner, in any magazine kiosk - it’s terrible! But no one explains about love!” And that’s it – I realized that we need to start the conversation with the topic of love.

And an avalanche of letters from teenagers came...

– What discoveries awaited you?

– The terrible, frightening illiteracy of the bulk is the first thing. The second is non-discrimination, where is good and where is evil - indeed, “those who do not know how to distinguish right hand from the left." You read the letters, start communicating with the guys - and you understand that they have purity, chastity, conscience, a thirst for truth, and a rejection of falsehood, lies, a sense of where evil is. All these gifts of God are there, they haven’t gone anywhere. They were young thirty years ago and three centuries ago. But modern society so aggressively corrupts, so aggressively imposes sin as a norm, or even an example to follow, that it simply disfigures an unformed personality.

She is not ready to counteract such pressure, because this requires criticality, will, the ability to think independently, firmness, and the ability to withstand pressure not just from her environment, but from the whole world. Not every teenager can do this. It's easier for us adults. Remember the epitaph of Grigory Skovoroda: “The world caught me, but did not catch me”? An adult will find a way, at least if he doesn’t fight environment, then minimize contacts with her: throw the TV in the trash, pass by a mocking, foul-smelling headline, “ban” someone who sends out porn advertisements, find friends who are close in spirit, try to avoid situations where you have to bend your heart, find a use for yourself in that area activities where this soul does not need to be sold... In general, an adult has the opportunity to “install filters”... Now I am deliberately not talking about the Church - the only force that can really resist moral decay...

In a word, an adult can protect himself, but a child is defenseless, the world will catch the child. Moreover, this is not a tragedy of one individual or his family - this is a tragedy of society. It’s bad that we haven’t realized it yet and we, like blind people, are leading our children to the slaughter. By the way, in my new book “The Cradle of Fire” there are several chapters exploring this problem: how to protect a child from modern world, what values to instill in him.

- So, “Cradle of Fire” is about youth?

- A book about love. For young people, but not only. The book is simply a must-read for adults: mothers, fathers, those whose children are still small, and those whose offspring have already grown up. The Cradle of Fire contains the most modern stories, they allow us to see not only who we are today, but also to look into the future - a book for the thinking reader. I also wanted it to unite generations so that the whole family could read it.

– You said that the book “explores a problem.” Is this journalism?

In the book real stories today's life, and using their example, we, together with our readers, think and explore the problem. I receive a huge number of letters, and as soon as I decided that I would start a conversation about love, I selected letters that talked about the early puberty of modern girls. And you know, it was as if a dam had broken: 15-year-old girls wrote, signing themselves “Stasya TrEshKa” or “Zlyuchka-Kalyuchka,” and their mothers, and high-brow intellectuals who tried to lead our common conversation into the philosophical jungle. Thanks to my editors Igor Chernyak and Vladislav Aleksandrovich Fronin - there were no taboo topics. We talked about the secrets of gender, about sex as an idol of our time, about virginity, about chastity, about types of love, about how to distinguish what kind of feeling a person experiences, about the destructive power of passions, about the power of eros and the weakness of man...

You know, the biggest difficulty was to write in such a way that it would be understandable both to a teenager who reads nothing but posts on the VKontakte wall, and to more enlightened people. Losing intellectuals who are always ready to challenge the point of view of N.A. Berdyaev (or V.S. Solovyov, Professor B.P. Vysheslavtsev, Archimandrite Cyprian (Kern), Christos Yannaras), I didn’t want to. I am proud that I have educated readers, much more educated than me. It makes you grow. Therefore, each time I came up with ways to captivate both young people and people who already have a taste for words, who know a lot about both literature and life. I specifically questioned Professor V.A. Voropaev, a reviewer of the book, a man of the highest culture, was he interested? And he answered in the affirmative.

– Which letters do you remember most?

– I try to select the sharpest, brightest ones. I was personally surprised by a letter from a 20-year-old guy who sincerely believed that yes, love exists (he experienced it; sometimes, as he wrote, “it lasts two days, sometimes two months, sometimes two minutes”), but love, as he thinks, “not at all.” “It was invented so that there would be something to describe in novels or poems, and then a whole industry revolved around it: “Valentine’s Day,” movies, TV series, songs, advertising, and so on.

And since such a business has already revolved around this, no one now admits that love is a deception.” The letter surprised me with its approach: he noticed that love had been turned into a commercial brand, he noticed the commercialization of everything in our world. Even love. How his peers argued with this young man! And this very open, honest letter helped me understand the psychology of a man, his perception of a woman, there are many subtle, purely male observations.

There are letters that are sarcastic. I intentionally included one of these in the book “Cradle of Fire” - it came to the Rossiyskaya Gazeta website as a comment after the article: we have complete democracy on our website. A certain lady who signed herself “Samantha-and-even-Jones (90-60-90)” was indignant: “What, have you all fallen out of the woods? I am outraged by the hypocrisy of your articles, Maria Gorodova. To sell the words of some holy fathers to young children when they promised to talk about love... well, this is too much! Since when are they the authorities in this matter?”

– Do you publish such letters in your book?

- Definitely! Such a letter is an occasion to talk about what Christianity knows about love. And by the way, who, if not the saints, can you trust in this matter? People who have learned that God is Love, not from books, know much more about love as a feeling, about love as a movement of the heart, about love as about the structure of the soul than the scriptwriters of the series “Sex in big city“The author of the letter chose the name of the heroine of this television project as her nickname. This is all I explain to the author of the message. And at the same time I talk about the signs of love, its classification, how to distinguish what feelings you experience. Or they feel for you.

I remember one very typical story described by a 15-year-old girl who began her letter with the question: “Tell me, who needs virginity today?”

- And you answered?

“I wasn’t the only one who answered.” The message gave rise to a new wave of letters, a new twist on the topic: together with the readers, we thought about what virginity, chastity is, what dignity is and - most importantly! – how a girl can learn to keep these qualities in herself.

– Why did you choose such a name – “Cradle of Fire”?

– Of course, the name is not accidental. And there are many meanings there, these are very polysemantic images in themselves - both “cradle” and “fire”. And together they create a new, even deeper image. But I won’t reveal it yet - read the book and decide for yourself what this name means and what meanings it gives rise to. You can even write to me about this, the address is the same - [email protected]. I think the publishing house and I will find ways to reward those who come closest to the truth.

You can purchase the book in the online store: www.blagovest-moskva.ru

Anton Leontyev talked with Maria Gorodova

“Do curses affect our lives? If so, how to get rid of them? I would like to know specifically, without speculation. Here my sister visited the city of her childhood and was told that our father’s first wife cursed both my mother and us for a long time. Now Olya spends her nights doesn’t sleep, remembers everything that happened to her: illnesses, losses, although what is our fault?” Oleg N.

Oleg, the curse entered the life of humanity so long ago that if every evil word and wishes for troubles were fulfilled, we would not be having conversations with you now due to the fact that the human race would definitely have ceased to exist. Nevertheless, the phenomenon of curse exists - both the human curse and the divine curse. But we must clearly understand that the blessing did not just arise earlier, it was more primary. Which means stronger. Just as good is primary and stronger than evil, and the Lord only allows evil to triumph for educational purposes towards man, and not as punishment. The saints believe it’s the same with a curse. Now let's look at it in detail.

1. Let's start with the curse of God. As Saint Philaret of Moscow writes, this is the condemnation of sin by the righteous judgment of God. Just don’t attribute vindictiveness to God: they say, by cursing, He punishes a person because he dares to violate His will, expressed in the commandments given to man. Sin is self-destructive. By committing a sin, a person alienates himself from God, because God is light, there is no darkness in Him, therefore nothing dark, sinful, evil can be in the presence of God, be in communion with him. The first curse against a person comes from the mouth of God for the sin of fratricide: the Lord curses Cain. But - and this is extremely important! - the curse does not sound immediately after Cain kills Abel, but after the embittered Cain rejects the opportunity to repent to the Lord for his deed. The saints teach that the purpose of God's curse is not revenge, but a chance to correct a person through humility and bring him to repentance. Let's think about why, cursing Cain, excommunicating him from His Face, the Lord placed a sign on Cain, a “seal” that forbade anyone to kill the first fratricide of the human race.

2. The curse of God is a reaction to flagrant violations of spiritual laws given to us in the form of commandments. Arising later than God’s blessing, God’s curse is a kind of negative echo of the blessing, its formidable echo, but both of them, blessing and curse, from different sides outline for us the line beyond which a catastrophe happens to us, the line beyond which a person’s self-exclusion can occur from God as the Source of life. For example, the fifth commandment reads: “Honor your father and mother, so that it may go well with you and your days may be long.” Before us is the condition of God's blessing: “honor your father and mother.” And in another book of the Bible there is already a warning: “Cursed is he who curses his father or his mother!” This is the line - attitude towards parents, elders, old age. Be careful here, be attentive, otherwise you will break the global spiritual law, and that’s it, your days are numbered. It is no coincidence that the fifth commandment is also interpreted this way: “As long as you honor your parents, you live; if you stop, you die.”

3. That is, with all the menacingness of God’s curses, it is not the words of the curse that make a person cursed, but the sin itself, committed by him, defiles, destroys, curses. It is not God who throws the sinner into the abyss of destruction, but the person himself, by violating spiritual laws and commandments, alienates himself from God's mercy and blessing. Sometimes only death can stop both the sinner and the spread of evil; it would seem that this is the cruel irreversibility of retribution. But a person’s life is not limited to a short period of stay on earth. And the posthumous fate of even the most inveterate sinners is in the hands of God's mercy. Another thing is that repentance can only be brought in this life. But only sincere repentance can save us both from our sins and from the malice of others.

4. But what happens if a person curses? It is clear that such a curse is subjective; man, unlike God, is not always capable of administering righteous judgment and is certainly not as powerful as the Creator of the Universe. And yet, as the saints teach, cursing a person can also have consequences. In which cases? For whom? The one who curses or the one who is cursed? As Saint Paisius the Holy Mountain explained, a curse is valid if it is a reaction to injustice. That is, when we do evil to someone and in a fit of resentment they curse us, this can come true. God allows such curses to have power. However, if there was no injustice, then the curse returns back to the one from whom it came. The one to whom the curse is directed suffers in this life. But the one from whom the curse comes is tormented in this life and will be tormented in the next life, because if he does not repent and confess, then there he will be punished by God as a criminal. After all, when you curse someone who has offended you, it’s like you’re taking a gun and killing him. It’s especially scary if people do this on purpose. After all, if a person curses someone contrary to God’s law, he himself breaks the law. In this case, the curse irreversibly falls on the head of the curser himself: “You are inexcusable, judging another, for by the same judgment with which you judge another, you condemn yourself...” - we read from the Apostle Paul.

Both the curse and the evil eye lose their power over those who repent of their sins

5. How to free yourself from the curse? Confession. “If people who have suffered from a curse, realizing that they were cursed because they were guilty of something, repent, then all their troubles will stop. If the one who is guilty says: “God, I did such and such That's injustice. Forgive me,” and with pain and sincerity he will tell the priest about his sins in confession, then God will forgive him, because He is God. This applies to innocent victims of someone else’s malice, and to those who have been touched by an envious glance, popularly called the evil eye.” , - teaches Saint Paisius the Svyatogorets.

6. “Those suffering from envy are considered even more harmful than poisonous animals. They let poison in through the wound, and the bitten place gradually rots; those who are envious are thought to be causing harm with one glance, so that from their envious glance they begin to wither away, as if from a destructive, harmful stream flows from envious eyes. I reject such a belief,” teaches St. Basil the Great and explains: when demons who hate goodness find in a person the will for evil, that is, the tendency to commit it, they begin to use the unfortunate envious person as a puppet, thoughtless and insane. conductor of his evil will. In this case, envy, concentrated in a look or a caustic word, can both embarrass the other person and harm him. But only if the victim of the envious person is not protected by firm faith and the Sacraments of the Church - Confession, Communion. And of course, when trying to protect yourself from the malice of others, you should not run to magicians and other proliferating swindlers from superstition.

7. He also warned about the harmfulness of superstitions, witchcraft and sorcery Old Testament. And even in New Testament times, the Church punished extremely strictly for following superstitions. Because, by trusting magicians and other possessors of “supernatural abilities,” we are actually entrusting the most valuable thing, our immortal soul, into the hairy paws of the enemy of the human race. It turns out that we are running in a circle: frightened by the supposedly omnipotent damage and the evil eye, we, like foolish children, voluntarily rush into the arms “carefully” opened for us by the devil. But salvation can only be found in God. And isn’t He stronger than any envious people, no matter whose evil will they relay?

To be continued

Prayer for the well-being of the family to the Blessed Virgin Mary

“Do not be afraid, little flock! I am with you and no one else is against you.” Most Blessed Lady, take my family under Your protection. Instill in the hearts of my husband and our children peace, love and non-questioning of all that is good; Do not allow anyone from my family to experience separation and difficult parting, to premature and sudden death without repentance. And save our house and all of us living in it from fiery ignition, thieves’ attacks, all evil of the situation, various types of insurance and devilish obsession. Yes, and we, collectively and separately, openly and secretly, will glorify your name Holy always, now and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen. Most Holy Theotokos, save us!

First hand

Saint Paisius the Svyatogorets on the power of parental curse and blessing

Know that the curse and even just the indignation of parents are very powerful. And even if the parents did not curse their children, but simply became indignant because of them, then the latter do not have a single bright day afterwards: their whole life is sheer torment. I remember one mother had four children. None of them got married or got married. The mother cried: “I will die of grief, none of my children got married. Pray for them.” She was a widow, her children were orphans. I felt bad for them. I prayed for them, but to no avail, and then I asked the children, maybe your mother cursed you. “That’s right, father,” they answer, “in childhood we played pranks, and from morning to evening she repeated: “Yes, may you be stumps!” - “Go,” I say, “to your mother and tell her the true reason for your disorder, so that she came to my senses. Tell her to repent and today, without ceasing, blessed you." And within a year and a half, all four started families.

The greatest treasure for people living in the world is parental blessing. Just as in monastic life the greatest blessing is the one with which your elder blessed you. That’s why they say: “Don’t miss your parent’s blessing.”

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