No. 24 (921) / June 27 '17
Conversations with the priest
In this topic:
Conversations with the priest
Hieromonk Afanasy (Bukin): Is it possible to prove the existence of God to those who seek and doubt?
Conversations with the priest
Archimandrite Melchizedek (Artyukhin): Life must be devoted to the most important things
Most recently, we celebrated Pentecost (on this day the Holy Spirit descended on the apostles in the form of tongues of fire). Then All Saints' Week, the Feast of All Saints... Let's talk about grace. What is the grace of God, how is it manifested, and how to correctly understand this phenomenon of our spiritual life?
– This is a very good question. If we open the Holy Scriptures, in particular the New Testament, we will see that this word “grace” appears there quite often. By grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not from yourselves - it is the gift of God (Eph. 2:8). Grace is explained theoretically in theology, but it can be difficult to understand rationally - it must be felt through personal experience.
I remember when I was studying at the Lavra, at the Moscow Theological Seminary, I often visited a certain nun. She was already over 80 years old, she lived at the Lavra. I remember how she received communion at home. I brought the priest to her, she confessed for quite a long time, and then they gave her communion. Moreover, every time Communion took place, it was possible to observe a literal miracle. Just before you there was a tired person who had grumbled somewhere before Confession, was tired of life’s sorrows, but when she received the Holy Mysteries (this is difficult to convey), a change literally happened to her: she was transformed, and it was as if from her eyes some kind of light emanated, a reflection of Heaven - unearthly purity, peace, tranquility and love. And her word after Communion also became completely different, she herself strengthened and supported you. That is, it was a word of grace, and it was felt that grace was really present in her after Communion of the Holy Mysteries.
What is grace? If we open the dogmatic books, we will see that this is uncreated Divine power, uncreated Divine action. Uncreated – that is, uncreated, inherent in God from eternity. Strength – that is, it heals our infirmities, some shortcomings. But, by and large, God’s grace is the appearance of the Lord Himself, His presence next to us. When the prophet Moses saw a bush engulfed in flames that did not burn, he paid attention to it. The Lord God Himself addresses him from this bush. He says: take off your shoes from your feet, because the ground on which you stand is holy ground (cf. Exodus 3:5) - here grace appeared in the form of a flame.
Here we can remember that on the day of Pentecost, the grace of God also descends to the apostles in the form of fire, but in fact this is the appearance of God Himself, it is the Lord who is present next to people, revealing Himself, therefore grace cannot be imagined as some kind of force divorced from God . This is wrong. It is the Lord Himself who reveals Himself, He warms a person with spiritual warmth, gives him spiritual strength, and due to this, a person can be spiritually transformed, spiritually ascend to the heights of his Christian life.
Can we move on to some manifestations of God’s grace that descends on people?
– I just gave an example – Communion of the Holy Mysteries. By the way, I remember myself. When I had just become a church member, I came to church, and after the Liturgy there was a completely special state in my soul: amazing joy and love for all people. Then I had not yet theoretically tried to understand what it was, but now I can say for sure that this is precisely the action of God’s grace, because God’s grace is also a manifestation of God’s love: when God’s love touches the human heart, this heart is also filled with love to everyone around.
Having become a priest, I can observe: always the Liturgy (when you yourself pray before and always confess, so that there is no burden on you), Communion of the Holy Mysteries, change you in an amazing way. After the Liturgy, you come out completely renewed - all emotions, accumulated experiences go away, everything becomes secondary, loses its sharpness. And all the sorrows of life that previously worried you, with which you were preoccupied, go away and dissipate. After all, in Communion we are truly given grace, and this grace is the most essential, it penetrates a person, fills him.
I remember the words of Elder Father Kirill (Pavlov), an archimandrite who departed to the Lord: if after Communion you feel that there is no peace in your soul, it means there was some unconfessed sin or you were unable to solve some spiritual problem. Because this shouldn’t happen in principle. There should always be a peaceful, joyful state after the Liturgy. You must feel love in your heart. If this is not the case, then for some reason you have not touched God’s grace.
What other manifestations of God’s grace are there besides Communion? Where else can we get it?
– In fact, the whole life of the Church is filled with grace. When the feast of the Holy Trinity, the Descent of the Holy Spirit on the Apostles, was celebrated, during the services the thought occurred to me that this might be the central holiday: at every service, every prayer ends with the glorification of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, that is, with the glorification of the Trinity, and the feast of the Trinity It just falls on the day of Pentecost - it is on this day that the Son of God from God the Father sends down the Holy Spirit to the apostles. After all, the Church is not just a collection of believers (several people gathered and said that they were believers), no: it is a society of believers communed with the Holy Spirit. The Lord gave the Holy Spirit precisely on the day of Pentecost.
The life of the Church is the life of the grace of the Holy Spirit in the Church, Who performs any divine service, rites, and, moreover, dwells in the sacraments. We know that grace sanctifies even the elements, which is why Epiphany water sometimes heals people from illnesses. In the spiritual sense, it helps, protects from demonic manifestations - dark forces, the forces of fallen spirits, fear the grace of God, and it is present in holy water. That is, in fact, grace is present in the Church - in all manifestations of the Church.
We understand that the Church is grace, we hear this in sermons. But people often ask another question: they want to feel grace in a separate way. I took communion and felt grace. And they ask how to understand whether there is grace or not. It often happens that we come to church, our thoughts are about something else, we don’t feel it, but we are looking for some small bursts...
“I think it’s dangerous to focus on your feelings.” If you come to church and focus on your inner sensations (did grace touch you or not? What do you feel?), then it is very easy to fall into seduction. It turns out that a person begins to cultivate some feelings within himself and then chews on these sensations. In fact, he himself may be playing with his feelings in this way. In spiritual life, it is important to avoid everything artificial and feigned, therefore it is best not to pay special attention to feelings, but to build a Christian life in simplicity.
We have been given the commandments of God, we are called to pray to the Lord attentively, to repent of our sins, to free our hearts from the burden of sins. If there’s anything we need to pay attention to, it’s what prevents us from partaking of God’s grace. If the windows in the house are closed, then the light will never penetrate there - the same thing happens to our soul when the soul is closed from the light of God's grace due to sins, passionate attachments, and falls. The task of a Christian is not to feel the manifestations of grace in himself, but, on the contrary, to try to notice sinful imperfections in himself, from which he should free himself and make an effort. When you are freed from sins, you open your soul to God’s grace, and it itself affects you. But there is no need to try to control this process. When we try to grasp this moment, in a sense we try to control it, then grace will definitely pass you by. It's not as simple as it seems.
You don’t need to force yourself to think: “Now I’ll take communion every service and I’ll be filled with grace, I’ll be so good” - does this mean that this is an erroneous judgment? Many people think exactly this way.
– We must approach the Holy Chalice in simplicity of heart and realize that we are the last sinners - see our sins and pray repentantly and begin Holy Communion, realizing our unworthiness, and leave everything else in the hands of God. As a rule, when a person realizes his unworthiness, it is to him that the Lord gives him a state of peace of soul, internal liberation, which is not subject to your imagination or personal manipulation. Therefore, you really experience God’s grace, something you yourself didn’t expect, didn’t want, and perhaps didn’t even prepare for. And she comes, pleases and gives consolation.
The Holy Fathers sometimes even distinguish types of grace; usually there are three types. The first is calling grace. In fact, the grace of God is one and only - this is the appearance of the Lord, this is His power, His light, but when the Lord wants to call a person, He touches his soul, and such a person suddenly feels dissatisfaction with the surrounding material life: he lived an ordinary worldly life, worked (or, on the contrary, he could not find a job), but he was striving for something material, and suddenly he sees that all this does not satiate his soul. And within him there comes a rejection from this corrupt world, drowning in sins. He feels that his soul is missing something, as it was with St. Augustine - he described this experience in “Confessions”. He begins his book with the words of a prayer addressed to God: “You, God, created us for Yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in You” - nothing earthly can satisfy the human soul! But usually, in our delusion, we do not notice this, and when the Lord touches the human soul, grace manifests itself precisely through the torment of the soul, when it feels dissatisfaction with the surrounding life: everything seems to be there, but something is missing. There are friends, family, and work, but something important is missing. It is God who is missing. Inviting grace is the touch of the Lord when the soul begins to turn to God.
What is the second type of grace?
– This is affirming grace – helping a Christian to persevere in goodness.
There are situations in life when we seem to be leading a spiritual life, but then we begin to weaken. It may happen that after some time you abandon the prayer rule, your desire for spiritual life disappears - your sinful nature manifests itself, laziness arises. But there comes a moment when something inside suddenly begins to burn, conscience awakens. The grace of God at this stage helps the Christian to return to the Christian way of life, so as not to fall away and fall into laziness. If a Christian does not deliberately commit serious sins or renounce the Christian life, then the grace of God will undoubtedly help him.
I have before my eyes a living example of one young Christian who tried to strive, but at one moment he was very strongly drawn to sins of the flesh. And he could not fall into these sins, something stopped him. Then he nevertheless acted very recklessly - he simply took off his pectoral cross. When he did this, he managed to fall into fornication - however, after this he repented. I want to say that the Lord is constantly trying to keep us in spiritual life and contributes to our correction. But when we decisively refuse God’s help, from what protects us (by deliberately removing the cross, he expressed his personal desire, he said to Christ: I don’t want to be with You), then we are deprived of protecting grace. When he lost protecting grace, then he fell into sin. Therefore, we must, of course, always remember that we simply need to protect ourselves from rash actions, and the Lord is always nearby, He will not leave, He will support in any situation.
And at Baptism (or even before) what state is a person in? In Baptism, we say, grace is given to a person.
– Before Baptism, it is the invoking grace of God that acts: the Lord gives a person such situations so that he becomes disillusioned with worldly life - vain, devoted to the passions of a sinful life, and so that he leans at least a little towards the spiritual, and thinks. But the sacrament of Baptism changes a person radically. Of course, sometimes they ask: how is this possible? We see that a person after Baptism can also sin, and his lifestyle is no different from an unbaptized person. But in fact the difference is cardinal.
Saint Theophan the Recluse and Saint Ignatius unanimously said that a baptized person is a person to whom grace has already been given. It's like a seed planted in the ground. But it still has to germinate. This is the same as how wealth given to a person can remain hidden - so, he received some treasure, hid it in a chest, buried it in the ground, and it remains unclaimed: he did not use it in any way in his life, he could not do anything build on it. The same thing happens to people who were baptized, accepted the treasure of grace, but do not realize it in their spiritual life. But a huge treasure is birth into eternal life.
In the grace of God what was given to the first created man is given. What made primordial man especially different? When the first man was created, we read in the Holy Scriptures, God breathed into his face the breath of life, and man became a living soul. According to the interpretation of the holy fathers, the breath of life was the grace of the Holy Spirit, which was infused into the nature of the primordial Adam. How is a person different from an animal? It is the grace of the Holy Spirit, which was given only to Adam, in contrast to all other living beings. And when man lost the Holy Spirit, he thereby, in a sense, submitted to animal life, and the animal nature began to dominate in people, base instincts began to appear: man lost the grace of the Holy Spirit. Instead of communion with God, he became subject to base desires, became in the likeness of animals - even human disposition became in many ways similar to the disposition of predatory animals.
Therefore, the goal of spiritual life is to return to the state that the primordial Adam lost, to again find the grace of the Holy Spirit. This grace is given to us in Baptism, but in order to keep it pure, we must strive. The Holy Fathers said: what the soul is to the body, the grace of the Holy Spirit is to the soul. The human body is alive as long as the soul is present in the body, but the soul is also alive as long as the grace of the Holy Spirit is present in it. And when a person is deprived of the Holy Spirit, his soul dies for eternity. So there is no other goal of spiritual life other than acquiring the grace of the Holy Spirit.
I still have this image. When a person receives some kind of wound, blood flows out, and he loses strength and becomes weak. A man who is bleeding is a weak man. The same thing happens to our soul when we receive some kind of spiritual wound: we become, in a sense, spiritually exsanguinated - we lose the Holy Spirit and also become weak. If a person is deprived of the grace of God, his lower sides immediately awaken in him, he becomes irritable, hot-tempered, petty, and angry. And when a person is exposed to the grace of the Holy Spirit, then grace makes up for any shortcomings in him.
I communicate with some fairly experienced confessors (I would say, with elders). In purely human terms, we can say that they are susceptible to various ailments, some even have oncology, but in spiritual life they turn out to be so cheerful, vigorous, active that it is not clear where their strength comes from - the body is susceptible to all sorts of diseases, but in the soul there is amazing power. And this is not their power, not human, it is from the grace of the Holy Spirit, it enlightens a person from the inside, gives him spiritual strength.
We have not yet agreed on the third type of grace.
– The third type of grace is sanctifying grace, which elevates a Christian to a certain spiritual perfection. It’s hard for us to describe – we haven’t been granted it yet. This is granted to special ascetics of God who have shown fidelity to Christ in fulfilling the commandments. God's grace is present as a special sanctifying force, and when we are close to these people, we also feel good from the feeling of Divine grace, clearly present in these people. That is, at the third stage, God’s grace elevates a person to holiness, so to speak.
What is holiness? Holiness is not a human quality: it is not that a person has a good character or is sympathetic by nature. Holiness is, first of all, communion with God: only God is holy by nature. Participation in Divine grace makes such a person a saint. The term “holy” is close to the term “light”; in theology these two terms are usually correlated. God's grace often manifests itself as uncreated light. We know that this light shone on Mount Tabor when the Savior was transfigured before the disciples. They felt the Divine grace shining forth and said: “Lord, it’s good for us to be here!” This is a feeling of goodness when your soul becomes good: you experience a special peace, joy, inner harmony, because you have come into contact with Divine grace, and it shines like light.
By the way, grace also visited the Apostle Paul. Remember, he was the persecutor Saul, but when he went to Damascus...
...saw the light.
- Yes, a light shone from the sky. This is also a manifestation of God's grace. Saul was not baptized (you asked about the action of grace before Baptism), but the Lord calls him through the manifestation of His grace as light, and this light even blinded him for some time - due to his inner state, Saul was not able to perceive God's grace. But thanks to this appearance of God, a change occurs inside him, a complete rethinking of values, and he himself becomes a disciple of Christ, the greatest apostle and preacher of God.
God's grace often reveals itself precisely as light. The Old Testament says: when Moses descended from Mount Sinai, light emanated from him, and his fellow tribesmen could not stand this radiance, so he covered his head with a cloak so that the radiance of light would not strike his fellow tribesmen. In the New Testament this radiance already constantly passes through the lives of the saints. And in the life of St. Sergius of Radonezh we very often encounter the radiance of light when he contemplated a vision of many birds. It was at night, he was given the opportunity to see how many students and followers he would have, and the birds flew in the Divine radiance. Then, when the Mother of God appeared to him, the radiance of Divine light was also given.
The same Motovilov wrote: imagine a shining sun and in the middle of the sun the face of a person talking to you. This is how Saint Seraphim of Sarov shone with Divine light. This light warmed and enlightened, and there was a feeling of amazing peace inside. Such a person, of course, is filled with Divine gifts.
Thank you very much for this wonderful conversation, I listened with bated breath inside. I think it will also be of great benefit to our TV viewers.
– I would really like to wish everyone who sees us now to go to Christ, not to be afraid to open the doors of their hearts to the Lord in order to commune with God and find the joy of the Holy Spirit.
Recorded by: Margarita Popova
You can view or listen to the full version of the program on the website of the Soyuz TV channel.
In other rooms:
Attitude towards grace
Photo: Pokrovkop.cerkov.ru
To maintain grace, it is important not to get used to it. When a person comes to church, everything here is blessed - rituals, sacraments, worship, observed traditions. You cannot find a single little thing in the temple that has not been sanctified by the Holy Spirit. A person should treat these shrines accordingly. Before them, every parishioner should have the fear of God at the same time as reverence.
However, human nature is such that we get used to everything. This is especially dangerous because then we stop appreciating what we have. When grace turns into tradition, it loses its true meaning and meaning. As a result, when visiting church, the fear of God goes away, and along with it, reverence disappears. A person can sincerely believe in the Almighty, regularly visit temple, but if he has the wrong attitude towards grace, he will never feel it on himself.
