Traditional medicine

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh. Conversation with teenagers about confession and rock music

Above I spoke about repentance and only touched on the issue of confession. But confession is so important question, that I want to dwell on it in more detail. Confession is twofold: there is personal, private confession, when a person approaches a priest and opens his soul to God in his presence; It happens general confession, when people gather in a large or small crowd, and the priest pronounces a confession for everyone, including himself.

I want to dwell on private confession and draw your attention to the following: a person confesses to God. The teaching that the priest pronounces before each person’s confession says: “Behold, child, Christ stands invisibly before you, accepting your confession. I am only a witness.” And we must remember this, because we are not confessing to a priest, and he is not our judge. I would say more: even Christ is not our Judge at this moment, but is our compassionate Savior. This is very, very important.

When we come to confession, we are in the presence of a witness. But what kind of witness is this? What is his role? There are different types of witnesses. There was an accident on the road. Some man was standing by the road and saw what happened. They ask him: “What happened?” He doesn't care at all who is right and who is wrong. He simply says what he saw with his own eyes. There is another kind of witness. At trial, one testifies against the defendant, and the other testifies in his favor. So is the priest. He stands before Christ and says:

There is a third kind of witness. During the marriage itself loved one invited to be a witness. He is the one who in the Gospel is called the friend of the groom. One could say that in our practice he is also the bride's friend. A person close to the bride and groom can share with them the most in full the joy of a transformative encounter connecting miracles. The priest occupies precisely this position. He is the groom's friend. He is a friend of Christ who leads the repentant to the groom - Christ. He is the one who is so deeply connected by love with the repentant that he is ready to share his tragedy with him and lead him to salvation. By tragedy I mean something very, very serious. I remember one ascetic who was once asked:

- How does it happen that every person who comes to you and talks about his life, even without a feeling of repentance and regret, suddenly becomes overwhelmed with horror at what a sinner he is? He begins to repent, confess, cry and change.

This ascetic said a wonderful thing:

– When a person comes to me with his sin, I perceive this sin as mine, because this person and I are one. And those sins that he committed by action, I certainly committed by thought or desire, or inclination. And so I experience his confession as if it were my own. I go step by step into the depths of his darkness. When I reach the very depths, I connect his soul with mine and repent with all the strength of my soul for the sins that he confesses and which I recognize as mine. He then becomes overwhelmed by my repentance and cannot help but repent. He comes out freed, and I repent of my sins in a new way, because we are united with compassionate love.

This is the ultimate example of how a priest can approach the repentance of any person, how he can be a friend of the Bridegroom, how he can be the one who leads a penitent to salvation. For this, the priest must learn to sympathize, learn to feel and recognize himself as one with the penitent. When pronouncing the words of the prayer of permission, he precedes them with a teaching, which also requires honesty and attention.

Sometimes it happens that during confession it is clearly revealed to the priest, as if from God, from the Holy Spirit, what he must say to the repentant. It may seem to him that this is not relevant, but he must obey this voice of God and say these words, say what God has put on his soul, on his heart and on his mind. If he does this even at a moment when it does not seem to relate to the confession brought by the penitent, he will say what the penitent needs. Sometimes the priest does not have the feeling that his words are from God. The Apostle Paul had this too. In his messages, he talks about this more than once: “I tell you this in the name of God, the name of Christ, and this - I tell you on my own. This is not a gag, this is what I learned from my personal experience, and I will share this experience with you, the experience of my sinfulness, my repentance and what other people taught me, who are purer and more worthy than me." And it happens that the priest cannot say this either. Then he can say what he read from the holy fathers or read in Holy Scripture. He can offer this to you, take it into account, think about it, and maybe through these words of Divine Scripture God will tell you what he could not say.

And sometimes an honest priest should say the following:

“I was with you with all my heart during your confession, but I can’t tell you anything about it.”

We have an example of this in the person of St. Ambrose of Optina, to whom people came twice and opened their souls, their needs, and who kept them for three days without an answer. When on the third day in both cases (these were various cases, they did not come together) they came to him for advice, he said:

– What can I answer? For three days I prayed Mother of God enlighten me and give me an answer. She is silent. How can I speak without Her grace?

In private, personal confession, a person must come and pour out his soul. Do not look at a book and do not repeat the words of others. He must pose a question to himself: if I stood before the face of Christ the Savior and in the face of all the people who know me, what would be a subject of shame for me, what I could not readily open in front of everyone, because it would be too scary from that I will be seen the way I see myself? This is what you need to confess. Ask yourself a question: if my wife, my children, my closest friend, my colleagues knew this or that about me, would I be ashamed or not? If you are ashamed, confess. If I were ashamed to reveal this or that to God, Who already knows it, but from Whom I try to hide it, would I be afraid? It would be scary. Reveal it to God, because the moment you reveal it, everything that is put into light becomes light. Then you can confess and pronounce your own confession, and not a stereotyped, alien, empty, meaningless one.

I will briefly talk about general confession. General confession can be pronounced in different ways. It is usually pronounced like this: people gather, the priest gives some introductory sermon and then, as if in a book, he pronounces greatest number sins, which he expects to hear from those present. These sins can be formal, for example: failure to read the morning and evening prayers, failure to read the canons, failure to fast. This is all formal. This is informal in the sense that the listed sins may be real for some people, maybe even for a priest. But these are not necessarily the real sins of these people. Real sins are different.

I'll tell you how I conduct general confession. It happens here four times a year. Before general confession, I have two conversations that are aimed at understanding what confession is, what sin is, what God’s truth is, what life in Christ is. Each of these conversations lasts three quarters of an hour. All those gathered first sit and listen, then there is a half-hour silence, during which everyone must think through what he heard; think over your sinfulness; look at your soul.

And then there is a general confession: we gather in the middle of the church, I put on the stole, the Gospel is in front of us, and usually I read penitential canon Lord Jesus Christ. Under the influence of this canon, I pronounce out loud my own confession, not about formalities, but about what my conscience reproaches me with, and what the canon I read reveals to me. Each time confession is different, because the words of this canon convict me differently each time, in a different way. I repent before all people, calling things by their proper names, not so that they would then reproach me specifically for this or that sin, but so that every sin would be revealed to them as my own. If, while pronouncing this confession, I do not feel that I am a true repentant, then I pronounce this as a confession. “Forgive me. Lord. I said these words, but they did not reach my soul.”

This confession usually lasts three quarters of an hour, or half an hour, or forty minutes, depending on what I can confess to people. At the same time, people confess with me silently, and sometimes they seem to say out loud: “Yes, Lord. Forgive me, Lord. And I am to blame for this.” This is my personal confession, and, unfortunately, I am so sinful and so similar to everyone under this action that my words reveal to people their own sinfulness. After this we pray: we read part of the penitential canon; we read prayers before Holy Communion: not all, but selected ones, which relate to what I spoke about and how I confessed. Then everyone kneels down, and I say a general prayer of permission, so that everyone who considers it necessary to come up and separately talk about this or that sin can do so freely. I know from experience that such a confession teaches people how to make a private confession. I know many people who told me that they do not know what to come to confession with, that they have sinned against many of Christ’s commandments, have done a lot of bad things, but cannot put it together in a repentant confession. And after such a general confession, people come to me and say that they now know how to confess their own soul that they learned this, relying on the prayers of the Church, on the canon of repentance, on how I myself confessed my soul in their presence, and on the feelings of other people who perceived this same confession as their own. Therefore, after a general prayer of permission, people who believe that they should confess something privately, separately, come up and confess. I think this is very important: general confession becomes a lesson on how to confess personally.

Sometimes people come to me and read out to me a long list of sins that I already know, because I have the same lists. I stop them.

“You are not confessing your own sins,” I tell them, “you are confessing sins that can be found in the nomocanon or in prayer books.” I need your confession, or rather, Christ needs your personal repentance, and not a general stereotyped repentance. You do not feel that you are condemned by God to eternal torment because you did not read the evening prayers, or did not read the canon, or did not fast.

Sometimes it happens like this: a person tries to fast, then he breaks down and feels that he has desecrated his entire fast and nothing remains of his feat. In fact, everything is completely different. God looks at him with different eyes. I can explain this with one example from my own own life. When I was a doctor, I worked with a very poor Russian family. I didn’t take money from her because there was no money. But somehow at the end of Great Lent, during which I fasted, if I may say so, brutally, i.e. Without violating any statutory rules, I was invited to dinner. And it turned out that throughout Lent they collected pennies in order to buy a small chicken and treat me. I looked at this chicken and saw in it the end of my Lenten feat. Of course I ate a piece of chicken, I couldn't insult them. I went to my spiritual father and told him about the grief that had befallen me, that I had fasted, one might say, completely, during the entire fast, but now, on Holy Week, I ate a piece of chicken. Father Afanasy looked at me and said:

– You know what? If God looked at you and saw that you have no sins and that a piece of chicken could defile you, He would protect you from it. But He looked at you and saw that there was so much sinfulness in you that no chicken could defile you even more.

I think that many of us can remember this example, so as not to adhere to the charter blindly, but to be, first of all, honest people. Yes, I ate a piece of this chicken, but I ate it so as not to upset people. I ate it not as some kind of filth, but as a gift of human love. I remember the place in the books of Father Alexander Schmemann, where he says that everything in the world is nothing more than God’s love. And even the food we eat is Divine love, which has become edible...

A man confesses to God. The teaching that the priest pronounces before each person’s confession says: “Behold, child, Christ stands invisibly before you, accepting your confession. I’m just a witness.” And we must remember this, because we are not confessing to a priest, and he is not our judge. I would say more: even Christ is not our Judge at this moment, but is our compassionate Savior. This is very, very important.

There is a third kind of witness. During a marriage, the person closest to you is invited to be a witness. He is the one who in the Gospel is called the friend of the groom. One could say that in our practice he is also the bride's friend. A person close to the bride and groom can share with them in the fullest way the joy of a transformative meeting that unites a miracle. The priest occupies precisely this position. He is the groom's friend. He is a friend of Christ who leads the repentant to the groom - Christ. He is the one who is so deeply connected by love with the repentant that he is ready to share his tragedy with him and lead him to salvation. By tragedy I mean something very, very serious. I remember one ascetic who was once asked:

This ascetic said a wonderful thing:

This is the ultimate example of how a priest can approach the repentance of any person, how he can be a friend of the Bridegroom, how he can be the one who leads a penitent to salvation. For this, the priest must learn to be compassionate, learn to feel and be aware of himself united with the penitent. When pronouncing the words of the prayer of permission, he precedes them with a teaching, which also requires honesty and attention.

Sometimes it happens that during confession it is clearly revealed to the priest, as if from God, from the Holy Spirit, what he must say to the repentant. It may seem to him that this is not relevant, but he must obey this voice of God and say these words, say what God has put on his soul, on his heart and on his mind. If he does this even at a moment when it does not seem to relate to the confession brought by the penitent, he will say what the penitent needs. Sometimes the priest does not have the feeling that his words are from God. The Apostle Paul had this too. In his messages he talks about this more than once: “I tell you this in the name of God, the name of Christ, and this I tell you on my own. This is not a gag, this is what I learned from my personal experience, and I will share this experience with you, the experience of my sinfulness, my repentance and what other people who are purer and more worthy than me have taught me.” And it happens that the priest cannot say this either. Then he can say what he read from the Holy Fathers or read in the Holy Scriptures. He can offer this to you, take it into account, think about it, and maybe through these words of Divine Scripture God will tell you what he could not say.

And sometimes an honest priest should say the following:

“I was with you with all my heart during your confession, but I can’t tell you anything about it.”

We have an example of this in the person of St. Ambrose of Optina, to whom people came twice and opened their souls, their needs, and who kept them for three days without an answer. When on the third day in both cases (these were different cases, they did not come together) they came to him for advice, he said:

– What can I answer? For three days I prayed to the Mother of God to enlighten me and give me an answer. She is silent. How can I speak without Her grace?

I will briefly talk about general confession. General confession can be pronounced in different ways. It is usually pronounced like this: people gather, the priest gives some introductory sermon and then, as if in a book, pronounces the greatest number of sins that he expects to hear from those present. These sins can be formal, for example: failure to read morning and evening prayers, failure to read canons, failure to fast. This is all formal. This is informal in the sense that the sins listed may be real for some people, maybe even for a priest. But these are not necessarily the real sins of these people. Real sins are different.

And then there is a general confession: we gather in the middle of the church, I put on the stole, the Gospel is in front of us, and usually I read the canon of repentance to the Lord Jesus Christ. Under the influence of this canon, I pronounce out loud my own confession, not about formalities, but about what my conscience reproaches me with, and what the canon I read reveals to me. Each time confession is different, because the words of this canon convict me differently each time, in a different way. I repent before all people, calling things by their proper names, not so that they would then reproach me specifically for this or that sin, but so that every sin would be revealed to them as my own. If, while pronouncing this confession, I do not feel that I am a true repentant, then I pronounce this as a confession. "I'm sorry. God. So I said these words, but they did not reach my soul.”

This confession usually lasts three quarters of an hour, or half an hour, or forty minutes, depending on what I can confess to people. At the same time, people confess to me silently, and sometimes they seem to say out loud: “Yes, Lord. Forgive me, Lord. And I am to blame for this.” This is my personal confession, and, unfortunately, I am so sinful and so similar to everyone under this action that my words reveal to people their own sinfulness. After this we pray: we read part of the penitential canon; we read prayers before Holy Communion: not all, but selected ones, which relate to what I spoke about and how I confessed. Then everyone kneels down, and I say a general prayer of permission, so that everyone who considers it necessary to come up and separately talk about this or that sin can do so freely. I know from experience that such a confession teaches people how to make a private confession. I know many people who told me that they do not know what to come to confession with, that they have sinned against many of Christ’s commandments, have done a lot of bad things, but cannot put it together in a repentant confession. And after such a general confession, people come to me and say that they now know how to confess their own soul, that they learned this, relying on the prayers of the Church, on the canon of repentance, on how I myself confessed in their presence your soul, and on the feelings of other people who perceived this same confession as their own. Therefore, after the general prayer of permission, people who believe that they should confess something privately, separately, come up and confess. I think this is very important: general confession becomes a lesson on how to confess personally.

Sometimes people come to me and read out to me a long list of sins that I already know, because I have the same lists. I stop them.

“You are not confessing your own sins,” I tell them, “you are confessing sins that can be found in the nomocanon or in prayer books.” I need yours confession, or rather, Christ needs your personal repentance, and not a general stereotyped repentance. You do not feel that you are condemned by God to eternal torment because you did not read the evening prayers, or did not read the canon, or did not fast.

Sometimes it happens like this: a person tries to fast, then he breaks down and feels that he has desecrated his entire fast and nothing remains of his feat. In fact, everything is completely different. God looks at him with different eyes. I can explain this with one example from my own life. When I was a doctor, I worked with a very poor Russian family. I didn’t take money from her because there was no money. But somehow at the end of Great Lent, during which I fasted, if I may say so, brutally, i.e. Without violating any statutory rules, I was invited to dinner. And it turned out that throughout Lent they collected pennies in order to buy a small chicken and treat me. I looked at this chicken and saw in it the end of my Lenten feat. Of course I ate a piece of chicken, I couldn't insult them. I went to my spiritual father and told him about the grief that had befallen me, that I had been fasting, one might say, completely, throughout Lent, and now, during Holy Week, I ate a piece of chicken. Father Afanasy looked at me and said:

I think that many of us can remember this example so as not to blindly adhere to the rules, but to be, above all, honest people. Yes, I ate a piece of this chicken, but I ate it so as not to upset people. I ate it not as some kind of filth, but as a gift of human love. I remember the place in the books of Father Alexander Schmemann, where he says that everything in the world is nothing more than God’s love. And even the food that we eat is Divine love, which has become edible...

What is repentance? A person who has turned away from God or lived by himself suddenly or gradually realizes that his life cannot be complete in the form and in which he experiences it. Repentance is about turning your face to God. This moment is initial and decisive. When we suddenly change course and instead of standing with our back or side towards God, towards truth, towards our calling, we have already made the first move, we have turned to God. We have not yet repented in the sense that we have not changed; but for this to happen, we must experience something, because we do not turn away from ourselves and do not turn to God just as we please. It happens: a person lives quietly, nothing special happens to him. He seems to be “grazing” on the field of life, nibbling grass, doesn’t think that the sky is bottomless above him, doesn’t think about any danger, he has a good life. And suddenly something happens and draws his attention to the fact that everything is wrong It's simple. It happens differently for everyone.

It happens that a person commits one or another seemingly insignificant act and suddenly sees its consequences. I remember one boy who waved a dagger at his little sister. Waving this dagger, he blinded her. At that moment, he suddenly realized that it was thoughtless and irresponsible to play with such an object as a dagger. This woman remained blind in one eye throughout her life, but her brother could never forget it. He remembered this not in the sense that he was afraid to touch a dagger or a penknife, he knew that the most minor actions may have an ultimately tragic significance. Sometimes the thought that leads us to repentance is not so tragic; we suddenly hear what people are thinking about us. We always present ourselves in in good shape. When we are criticized, we have a tendency to think that the person who does not see us as beautiful as we see ourselves is wrong. But we heard a few more opinions of other people about themselves. We thought we were heroes, but everyone thinks we are cowards. We thought that we were impeccably truthful, but people thought that we were deceitful, etc. If we focus on this, we are already asking ourselves the question: who am I? what is my calling in life? I'm not talking about a craft vocation, but about the kind of person I can become. Am I really satisfied with who I am, can’t I outgrow myself, become better?

It happens that what draws my attention to myself is not the voice of one or another of our acquaintances, but the reading of the Gospel. I read the Gospel and see what a person can be. I see the image of Christ in all its beauty, or, in any case, to the extent of beauty that I am able to see. I'm starting to compare myself. I begin to turn not to myself, but to something else: either to the image of Christ, or to what people think about me; and self-judgment begins. The moment judgment begins, repentance begins. This is not yet the fullness of repentance, because to carry out a quality judgment on oneself does not mean to be wounded in the soul by what I have done and what I am.

Sometimes we realize with our heads that we are bad and in this and that respect we should be different, but with our feelings we cannot survive this. I remember one incident. Many years ago (back in the 20s) there was a congress of the Russian student Christian movement. One remarkable priest was present at this congress - Father Alexander Elchaninov, whose writings have now been republished in Russia. An officer came to him for confession and said:

I can tell you all the lies of my life, but I only recognize them in my head. My heart remains completely intact. I don't care. In my head I understand that this is all evil, but in my soul I don’t respond in any way: neither with pain, nor with shame.

And Father Alexander said an amazing thing:

Don't confess to me. It will be completely in vain. Tomorrow, before I serve the Liturgy, you will go out to the Royal Doors. And when everyone has gathered, you will say what you just told me and confess to the entire assembled congress.

The officer agreed to this because he felt like a dead man; he felt that there was no life in him, that he had only memory and a head, but his heart was dead, and the life in him had gone out. He left the priest with a feeling of horror. The officer thought that if he started talking now, the entire congress would turn away from him. Everyone will look at him with horror and think: “We considered him a decent person, but what a scoundrel he is, he is not only a scoundrel, but also a dead man before God.” But he overcame his fear and horror, stood up and began to speak. And it happened for him The most unexpected thing was that at the moment when he said why he stood in front of the Royal Doors, the entire congress turned to him with compassionate love. He felt that everyone had opened up to him, that everyone had opened the arms of their hearts, that everyone was thinking with horror about how he would feel. It hurts how scared he was. He burst into tears and made his confession in tears; new life.

And this is where we get very concerned important moment, namely repentance. Repentance consists not so much in cold-bloodedly seeing sin in oneself and bringing it to God in confession, but in the fact that something hit us in the soul so much that tears escaped from our eyes and from our heart. Saint Barsanuphius the Great says that tears of true repentance can cleanse us so that there is no need to even go to confession: if God has forgiven us, then there is nothing more for a person to forgive.

A student, Rev., has an interesting idea. Simeon the New Theologian, Rev. Nikita Stifat, where he says that tears of true repentance can even restore lost bodily virginity to a person. Repentance should be exactly like this.

But we cannot repent like this all the time. We can't do this. What should we do? You've probably read about how ancient cities or monuments are excavated. An archaeologist arrives and starts scraping the ground. At first he sees ordinary soil, but gradually begins to discern some outlines of what lay underground a long time ago. This is already the first vision. When we see in ourselves in the most rudimentary way something that is unworthy either of ourselves, or of the love and respect with which we are surrounded, or of the love that God shows us, this is already the beginning of our insight. We can go to confession and say that beneath the surface, perhaps very deep, lies the world of sin, but I have learned something about it on the surface. I would like to bring this to God and say:

I saw it! You helped me see this, Lord! And I renounce this evil. I don’t yet know how to repent, but I know that this is incompatible neither with my friendship with You, nor with the attitude of my loved ones with whom I am surrounded, nor with what I want to be.

There is an old medieval prayer of permission that ends with the words: “And may the Lord forgive you all the sins for which you have truly repented.” Not what you just told, but what your soul shuddered at, what gripped you with horror. These sins you are forgiven. The rest is your new task. You must go further and further, deeper and deeper into yourself, into these excavations, and begin to find what is unworthy of either you, or God, or what people think about you. Thus, it becomes part of a progressive, gradually deepening repentance. Gradually new depths are revealed to you. You will then say:

What is life? Is it about going into these depths and seeing in yourself only evil, evil, evil?.. Going into darkness? You can't live with this!

Yes, you can't live with this. But darkness is dispersed by light. If we see something smart in ourselves, it means that light has penetrated into a new depth of our life.

I want to give an example that I give to children.

A child comes to me and says:

I look at all the evil that is in me, and I don’t know how to eradicate it, tear it out of myself.

I ask him:

Tell me: when you enter a dark room, do you really wave a white towel in it in the hope that the darkness will disperse, dissipate?

No. Of course not!

What are you doing?

I open the shutters, I open the curtains, I open the windows.

That's it! You shine light where there was darkness. It’s the same here. If you want to truly repent, truly confess and change, you don’t have to focus only on what’s bad about you. You need to let the light in. And to do this, you need to pay attention to the fact that you already have a light one. And in the name of this light, fight all the darkness that is in you.

Yes, but how to do it? Am I really going to think of myself that I’m so good in this or that respect?

No. Read the Gospel and mark in it those places that strike you in the soul, that make your heart tremble, that brighten your mind, that spur your will to desire a new life. And know that in this word, in this image, in this commandment, in this example of Christ, you have found a spark of Divine light. And the desecrated, darkened icon that you are became brightened. You are already becoming a little like Christ, the image of God is gradually beginning to appear in you. And if so, then remember this. If you sin, you will desecrate the shrine that already exists in you, already lives, is already active, is already growing. You will extinguish the image of God in yourself, extinguish the light or surround it with darkness. Don't do this. If you are faithful to those sparks of light that already exist in you, then gradually the darkness around you will dissipate. Firstly, where there is light, darkness has already been dispelled. Secondly, when you discover in yourself some area of light, purity, truth; when you look at yourself and think that you really are real person, then you can begin to fight what is advancing on you like enemies advancing on a city, darkening this light in you. Now you have already learned to honor purity, and suddenly the dirt of thoughts, bodily desires, feelings, and sensitivity rises in you. At this moment you can say to yourself: no, I discovered in myself a spark of chastity, a spark of purity, a desire to love someone without desecrating this person even with a thought, not to mention a touch. I cannot allow these thoughts in myself, I will not, I will fight against them. To do this, I will turn to Christ and shout to Him: “Lord, cleanse! Lord, save! Lord, help!” And the Lord will help.

But He will not help you until you struggle yourself. There is a story in the biography of Rev. Anthony the Great, how he desperately fought temptation. He struggled so much that finally, exhausted, he fell to the ground and lay there without strength. Suddenly Christ appeared before him, and, not having the strength to rise to Him, Anthony said to Him: “Lord, where were You when I struggled so desperately?” Christ answered him: “I stood invisibly next to you, ready to enter into battle if only you would surrender. But you didn’t give up, and you won.”

And so I think that each of us can learn to repent and come to confession every time with a new victory and with a new vision of the battlefield that is opening wider and deeper before him. And we can receive forgiveness of our sins from Christ, forgiveness for what we have already begun to conquer in ourselves, and grace - new strength to overcome what we have not yet conquered.

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh
ABOUT CONFESSION

I am often asked: how should one confess?.. And the most direct, most decisive answer to this can be this: confess as if it were your dying hour; confess as if it were last time, when on earth you will be able to repent throughout your entire life before entering eternity and facing God's judgment as if it were -the last moment when you can throw off the burden of a long life of untruth and sin from your shoulders in order to enter free into the Kingdom of God. If we thought about confession this way, if we stood before it, knowing -not only imagining, but firmly knowing, -that we can die at any hour, at any moment, then we would not pose so many idle questions to ourselves; our confession would then be mercilessly sincere and truthful; she would be straight; we would not try to avoid heavy, offensive, humiliating words; we would pronounce them with all the harshness of the truth. We would not think about what to say or what not to say; we would say everything that in our minds seems untrue, sin: everything that makes me unworthy of my human title, my Christian name. There would be no feeling in our hearts that we need to protect ourselves from these or those harsh, merciless words!; we would not raise the question of whether it is necessary to say this or that, because we would know with what we can enter eternity, and with what we cannot enter eternity... This is how we should confess; and it’s simple, it’s terribly simple; but we don’t do this because we are afraid of this merciless, simple directness before God and before people.

We will now prepare for the Nativity of Christ; the pre-Christmas fast begins soon; this is a time that figuratively reminds us that Christ is coming, that He will soon be among us. Then, almost two thousand years ago, He came to earth, He lived among us, He was one of us; Savior, He came to seek us, to give us hope, to assure us of Divine love, to assure us that everything is possible if only we believe in Him and in ourselves... But now the time is coming when He will stand before us -either at the hour of our death, or at the hour of the final judgment. And then He will stand before us as the crucified Christ, with hands and feet pierced by nails, wounded in the forehead with thorns, and we will look at Him and see that He was crucified because we sinned; He died because we deserved the condemnation of death; because we were worthy of eternal condemnation from God. He came to us, became one of us, lived among us and died because of us. What will we say then? The judgment will not be that He condemns us; the judgment will be that we will see the One whom we killed with our sin and who stands before us with all His love... Behold -to avoid this horror, we need to stand at every confession as if it were our dying hour, the last moment of hope before we see it.

I said that every confession should be as if this is the last one confession in our lives, and that this confession must be summed up, because every meeting with our Living God is a preliminary to the final, final judgment that decides our fate. Can't get upin the face of God and not leave there either justified or condemned. And so the question arises: how to prepare for confession? What sins should you bring to the Lord?

Firstly, each confession must be extremely personal, mine, not some general one, but my own, because my own fate is being decided. And therefore, no matter how imperfect my judgment of myself may be, I must begin with it; we need to start by asking ourselves the question: what am I ashamed of in my life? What do I want to hide from the face of God and what do I want to hide from the judgment of my own conscience, what am I afraid of? And this question is not always easy to resolve, because we are so often accustomed to hiding from our own fair judgment that when we look into ourselves with hope and the intention of finding the truth about ourselves, it is extremely difficult for us; but this is where we need to start. And if we had not brought anything else to confession, then it would already have been a truthful confession, mine, my own.

But besides this, there is much more. We need to look around and remember what people think about us, how they react to us, what happens when we find ourselves in their environment -and we will find a new field, a new basis for judging ourselves... We know that we do not always bring joy and peace, truth and goodness to the fate of people; It’s worth looking around at the row of our closest acquaintances, the people who meet us in one way or another, and it becomes clear what our life is like: how many I have hurt, how many I have bypassed, how many I have offended, how many I have seduced in one way or another. And so new trial stands before us, because the Lord warns us: what we did to one of these little ones, that is, to one of the people, the least of His brethren, we did to Him. And then let us remember how people judge us: often their judgment is caustic and fair; often we don't want to know what people think about us, because it -truth and condemnation are ours. But sometimes something else happens: people both hate us and love us unfairly. They hate unfairly, because sometimes it happens that we act according to God’s truth, but this truth does not fit into them. And they often love us unfairly, because they love us because we too easily fall into the untruths of life, and they love us not for virtue, but for our betrayal of God’s truth.

And here we must again pronounce judgment on ourselves and know that sometimes we have to repent of the fact that people treat us well, that people praise us; Christ again warned us: Woe to you when all people speak well of you...

And finally, we can turn to the gospel court and ask ourselves the question: how would the Savior judge us if He looked -as He actually does- for our lives?

Ask yourself these questions, and you will see that your confession will be serious and thoughtful, and that you will no longer have to bring to confession that emptiness, that childish, long-outdated babble that you often hear. And don't involve other people: you came to confess your sins, not the sins of others. The circumstances of sin matter only if they shade your sin and your responsibility; a story about what happened, why and how -has nothing to do with confession; this only weakens your consciousness of guilt and the spirit of repentance...

Now the days are approaching when you will probably all fast; start preparing now to bring an adult, thoughtful, responsible confession and cleanse yourself.

I have already talked about how you can test your conscience, starting with what it reproaches us for and continuing with how people treat us. And now we will take one more, final step in this test of our conscience. The final judgment on our conscience does not belong to us, does not belong to people, but to God; both His word and His judgment are clear to us in the Gospel-Only rarely do we know how to treat it thoughtfully and simply. If we read the pages of the Gospels with simplicity of heart, without trying to extract from them more than we are able to accept, much less -more than we can accomplish with our lives, if we treat them honestly and simply, we see that what is said in the Gospel falls, as it were, into three categories.

There are things the truth of which is obvious to us, but which do not concern our soul -We will agree to them. With our minds we understand that this is so, with our hearts we do not rebel against them, but with our lives we do not touch these images. They are an obvious, simple truth, but they do not become life for us. These passages in the Gospels say that our mind, our ability to understand things, stands on the border of something that we cannot yet comprehend either by will or by heart. Such places condemn us in inertia and inactivity; these places demand that we, without waiting for our cold heart to warm up, begin to do the will of God with determination, just because we-The Lord's servants.

There are other places: if we treat them conscientiously, if we look truthfully into our souls, we will see that we turn away from them, that we do not agree with God's judgment and with the Lord's will, that if we had sad courage and power to rebel, then we would rebel as we rebelled in our time and as everyone rebels from century to century, to whom it suddenly becomes clear that we are afraid of the Lord’s commandment about love, which requires sacrifice from us, complete renunciation of all selfishness, from all selfishness, and often we wish it didn't exist. So, around Christ, there were probably many people who wanted a miracle from Him, in order to be sure that Christ’s commandment was true and that one could follow Him without danger to one’s personality, to one’s life; There were probably those who came to Christ’s terrible crucifixion with the thought that if He did not come down from the cross, if a miracle did not happen, then that would mean... He was wrong, which means He was not a man of God and you can forget His terrible word that a person must die to himself and live only for God and for others. And we so often surround the Lord's table, go to church -however, with caution: lest the truth of the Lord wound us to death and demand from us the last that we have, renunciation of ourselves... When in relation to the commandment of love or one or another specific commandment in which God explains to us the infinite variety of thoughtful, creative love, we find this feeling within ourselves, then we can measure how far we are from the Lord's spirit, from the Lord's will, and we can pronounce a reproachful judgment on ourselves.

And, finally, there are places in the Gospel about which we can speak in the words of the travelers to Emmaus, when Christ spoke to them along the way: Didn’t our hearts burn within us when He spoke to us on the way?..

These places, albeit few, should be precious to us, for they say that there is something in us, where we and Christ -one spirit, one heart, one will, one thought, that in some way we have already become akin to Him, in some way we have already become His own. And we must keep these places in memory as a treasure, because we can live by them, not always fighting against the bad in us, but trying to give space to life and victory to what is already divine in us, already alive, already ready to be transformed and become part of eternal life. If we so carefully note each of these groups of events, commandments, words of Christ, then our own image will quickly appear to us, it will become clear to us what we are like, and when we come to confession, not only the judgment of our conscience will be clear to us, not only human judgment, but also God’s judgment; but not only as horror, not only as condemnation, but as a manifestation of the whole path and all the possibilities that exist within us: the opportunity to become in every moment and to be all the time those enlightened, illuminated, exulting people in spirit that we sometimes are, and the opportunity to conquer in ourselves, for the sake of Christ, for the sake of God, for the sake of people, for the sake of our own salvation, that which is alien to God in us, that which is dead, that which has no way into the Kingdom of Heaven. Amen.

Anthony Metropolitan Surozhsky

ABOUT REPENTANCE

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

I want to say a few words about Saint John the Baptist and about the most important thing that was in his sermon. He is called in church books a teacher of repentance . What is repentance, what is it?

When we act wrongly, when we say the wrong thing, when dark thoughts swarm in our heads or darkness descends on our hearts, if we become even a little enlightened, we begin to feel remorse. But remorse is not repentance: you can reproach yourself all your life for bad deeds and evil words, and dark feelings and thoughts - and not improve. Remorse can indeed make our earthly life a complete hell, but it does not open to us the Kingdom of Heaven; something else must be added to remorse: that which constitutes the very core of repentance, namely, turning to God with hope, with the confidence that God will have enough love for us to forgive us, and strength to change us. Repentance is that turn of life, a turn of thoughts, a change of heart that turns us to face God in joyful and reverent hope, in the confidence that although we do not deserve God’s mercy, the Lord came to earth not to judge, but to save, he came to earth not to the righteous, but to the sinners.

But turning your face to God with hope and calling on Him for help is not everything, because much in our lives depends on ourselves. How often do we say: “Lord, help! Lord, give me patience, give me chastity, give me purity of heart, give me a truthful word!” And when the opportunity presents itself to act according to our own prayer, according to the inclination of our own heart, we do not have enough courage, we do not have enough determination to actually begin to do what we ask God for. And then our repentance, our rise of the soul remains fruitless. Repentance must begin precisely with this hope in God’s love and together with a feat, a courageous feat, when we force ourselves to live the way we should, and not the way we have lived until now. Without this, God will not save us, because, as Christ says, not everyone who says “Lord, Lord” will enter the Kingdom of God, but the one who bears its fruit (Matthew 7:21). And we know these fruits: peace, joy, love, patience, meekness, self-control, humility (Gal 5:22-23) - all these wonderful fruits that could turn our earth into paradise now, if only, like a tree fruitful, we could bring them.

Thus, repentance begins with the fact that suddenly it hits us in the soul, conscience speaks, God calls us and says: where are you going? to death? is that what you want? And when we answer: no, Lord, forgive, have mercy, save! - and let us turn to Him, Christ tells us: I forgive you, and you - out of gratitude for such love, not out of fear, not in order to save yourself from torment, but because in response to My love you are capable of love, start living differently.

So what's next? The first thing we must learn is to accept our whole life: all its circumstances, all the people who entered it - sometimes so painfully - accept, and not reject. Until we accept our life, all its contents without a trace, as from the hand of God, we will not be able to free ourselves from internal anxiety, from internal captivity and from internal protest. No matter how we say to the Lord: God, I want to do Your will! - a cry will rise from our depths: but not in this! Not that! Yes, I am ready to accept my neighbor - but not this neighbor! I am ready to accept whatever You send me - but not what You actually send me. How often in moments of some kind of enlightenment we say: Lord, now I understand everything! Save me, save me at any cost! If at that moment the Savior suddenly appeared before us or sent His angel or a saint who called out to us with a formidable word, who would demand from us repentance and a change in life, we might have accepted it. But when instead of an angel, instead of a saint, instead of coming Himself, Christ sends us our neighbor, and one whom we do not respect, do not love and who tests us, who poses a vital question to us: is your repentance in words or in reality? - we forget our words, we forget our feelings, we forget our repentance and say: get away from me! It is not from you that I receive God’s punishment or instruction; it is not from you that you will open a new life for me. And we pass by both that incident and that person whom the Lord sent to us to heal us, so that we would humbly enter the Kingdom of God, bear the consequences of our sinfulness with patience and readiness (as we ourselves said) to accept everything from the hand of God.

If we do not accept our life from God’s hand, if we do not accept everything in it as from God Himself, then life will not be our path to eternity, we will always look for another path, while the only path is the Lord Jesus Christ .

But this is still not enough. We are surrounded by people with whom our relationships are sometimes difficult. How often do we wait for another to come to repent, ask for forgiveness, humiliate himself before us. Perhaps we would forgive if we felt that he had humiliated himself enough. But it is not the one who deserves forgiveness that needs to be forgiven; how can we expect God to forgive someone who deserves it? Is it when we go to God and say: Lord, save! Lord, forgive me! Lord, have mercy! - we can add: because I deserve it?! Never! We expect forgiveness from God through the pure, sacrificial, love of Christ on the cross. The Lord expects this from us in relation to each of our neighbors; It is not because we must forgive our neighbor that he deserves forgiveness, but because we are Christ’s, because we have been given the name of the Living God Himself and the crucified Christ to forgive.

But it often seems: if only it were possible to forget the offense, then I would forgive, but I cannot forget, - Lord, give me oblivion! This is not forgiveness: forgetting does not mean forgiving. To forgive means to look at a person as he is, in his sin, in his unbearability, what a burden he is for us in life, and say: I will carry you like a cross, I will bring you to the Kingdom of God, whether you want it or not. Whether you are good or evil, I will take you on my shoulders and bring you to the Lord and say: Lord, I have carried this man all my life, because I felt sorry for him so that he would not die! Now forgive him, for the sake of my forgiveness! How nice it would be if we could bear each other’s burdens like this, if we could carry and support each other: not try to forget, but, on the contrary, remember. Remember who has some weakness, who has what sin, in whom something is wrong, and not tempt him with this, protect him so that he is not tempted in the very thing that can destroy him. If only we could treat each other this way! If, when a person is weak, we surrounded him with caring, affectionate love, how many people would come to their senses, how many people would become worthy of the forgiveness that is given to them freely...

This is the path of repentance: enter into yourself, stand before God, see yourself as condemned, deserving of neither forgiveness nor mercy, and instead of, like Cain, running from the face of God (Genesis 4:3-16), turn to Him and say: I believe, Lord, in Your love, I believe in the Cross of Your Son - I believe, help my unbelief! (Mark 9:24). And then follow the path of Christ, as I just said: accept everything from the hand of God, from everything bring the fruit of repentance and the fruit of love, and first of all, forgive our brother, our brother, without waiting for his correction, bear it like a cross, be crucified, if necessary, on him in order to have the power, like Christ, to say: forgive them, Father! they do not know what they are doing (Luke 23:34). And then the Lord Himself, Who told us: with the measure you use, it will be measured to you (Luke 6:38); forgive, as your Heavenly Father forgives; you will not remain in debt: He will forgive, correct, save, and already on earth, as saints, will give us heavenly joy.

Let it be so, let this path of repentance begin in the life of each of us today, now at least a little, because this is already the beginning of the Kingdom of God. Amen.