Why is “family a small Church”?

Orthodoxy is a religion that supports the teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ in purity and holiness. Therefore, Russia is a stronghold of faith and strength, called upon to save the world. The One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, which the Lord created, is preserved by the fact that traditional marriage in our country is enshrined in the laws of the Church and the laws of the state - now, according to the constitution, it is considered the only possible marriage between people. The family is the main instrument that serves to strengthen the unity of the Church.

Family origin

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God created the family. When creating man, he decided that he should not be lonely and created a wife from his flesh. Then, at the same time as the company, a family appeared. And since she is the creation of the Lord, the grace of the Holy Spirit abides on her. The Lord blessed the first spouses and told them that they should be fruitful, multiply, fill the Earth and rule it. This is how the history of mankind began, this was the standard of relationships: a husband and wife must receive God's blessing, and then the whole world will belong to them.

First declaration of love

In the Bible we see a Christian image of love and marriage.

Here we meet the first declaration of love: Adam says to Eve: bone of my bones and flesh of flesh. Think about how wonderful this sounds.

In the wedding rite itself, it first speaks of helping each other, and then only the perception of the human race: “Holy God, who created man from the dust, and from his rib formed a wife, and combined with him an assistant suitable for him, for it was so pleasing to Your Majesty, so that man may not be alone on earth.” And therefore having many children is not the goal either. If a family is given the following task: it is imperative to reproduce and reproduce, then a distortion of marriage may occur. Families are not rubber, people are not endless, everyone has their own resource. It is impossible to set such a colossal task for the Church to solve the demographic issues of the state. The Church has other tasks.

Any ideology that is introduced into the family, into the Church, is terribly destructive. She always narrows it down to some sectarian ideas.

Family – small Church

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After Jesus Christ created the Church for people during the New Testament to help them be saved, family became an even more important part of people's lives.

The Apostle Paul writes in his letter that “just as Christ is the head of the Church, so a husband is the head of his wife.” Such words cause a true believer to be in awe of the greatness and weight of responsibility that lies on the family, on the husband. To be a Christian in your home means to be constantly ready to save your family, even at the cost of your life, just as Jesus did.

But the Apostle Paul expands his thinking by saying that just as Christ loved His Church, so husbands should love their wives. What a great mission for husbands! After all, for the good of the Church, Jesus rejected all the temptations presented to him by the devil: from power over the whole world, from wealth, from ostentatious bravado and from fame. So, for the sake of their family, its preservation and salvation, husbands, it turns out, have to sacrifice some kind of temptation and temptation.

What about your wife? She is like the Church of Christ in her family, which means she is the way of salvation for herself, her husband and her children. This is a refuge from sins, this is purity and beauty itself. In the spiritual sense, of course. Appearance is of minimal importance here.

Preparing for marriage

The Church needs to prepare for marriage those people who do not come from within the church community. Those who could now come to the Church through marriage. Now a huge number of unchurched people want a real family, a real marriage. And they know that the registry office will not give anything, that the truth is given in the Church.

And here they are told: get a certificate, pay, come on Sunday at 12. The choir is for a separate fee, the chandelier is for a separate fee.

Before a wedding, people must go through a serious preparatory period - and prepare for at least several months. This should be absolutely clear. It would be good to make a decision at the Synodal level: since the Church is responsible for the indissolubility of marriage, it allows it only between those who regularly came to the Temple for six months, confessed and received communion, and listened to the priest’s conversations.

At the same time, civil registration in this sense recedes into the background, because under modern conditions it makes it possible to secure some property rights. But the Church is not responsible for this. She must comply with very clear conditions on the basis of which such a Sacrament is performed.

Otherwise, of course, these problems with debunked marriages will only grow.

Wedding is the path to unanimity and love

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The Orthodox family was created so that the grace of God would descend on the spouses, and they, united, together would give strength to preserve their small Church. And this is possible only by fulfilling the first and main commandment of Jesus Christ: these are the laws of love for God and for people.

In a family, these commandments are easier to follow, because how can you not love someone who is always there, will always support and help. Spouses can discuss all problems and find advice in the extensive history of Orthodoxy, in the teachings of saints and in the sermons of famous priests. But this is why so many families around the world are falling apart, God's commandments are not being followed, and no one is following advice. Selfishness and unwillingness to overcome devilish temptations are the cause of all family problems.

Love in marriage

People marry not because they are animals, but because they love each other. But not much has been said about love in marriage throughout the history of Christianity. Even in fiction, the problem of love in marriage was first raised only in the 19th century. And it was never discussed in any theological treatises. Even in seminary textbooks it is not said anywhere that people who create a family must love each other.

Love is the basis for creating a family. Every parish priest should be concerned about this. So that people who are going to get married set themselves the goal of truly loving, preserving and multiplying, making it that Royal Love that leads a person to Salvation. There can be nothing else in marriage. This is not just a household structure, where the woman is the reproductive element, and the man earns his bread and has a little free time to have fun. Although now this is exactly what happens most often.

Problems of a modern family

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It’s worth starting with the fact that in our country the system of raising real husbands who are ready to take on the burden of responsibility for their small family church has been completely destroyed. There are very few such cells in society where real men receive education. Basically, on the contrary, children are taught to take every opportunity to shift responsibility to others, and to enjoy freedom and sin freely.

And if you think about this problem, it’s scary! The very divine foundation of society is crumbling, it is the only viable model left to us by God. The Lord did not provide any other options; only a small Church is the path to salvation.

What is it really? Even if marriages end, they end in divorce, children suffer, and it is not about saving souls. And abroad, unnatural families are also legalized and considered the norm, although this is the path to death. Thank God that this source of sin and defilement is closed in Russia. But in Russia, fornication and adultery are presented as an avalanche, so that it is difficult to accuse young people of failing to fulfill God’s commandments. This avalanche is engulfing the most determined people, and not just the youth.

Family as a small Church

Archpriest Rev.
Maxim Kozlov 1. What does it mean – family as a small Church?

The words of the Apostle Paul about the family as a “domestic Church” (Rom. 16:4) are important to understand not metaphorically and not in a purely moral sense. This is, first of all, ontological evidence: a real church family in its essence should and can be a small Church of Christ. As St. John Chrysostom said: “Marriage is a mysterious image of the Church.” What does it mean?

Firstly, in the life of the family, the words of Christ the Savior are fulfilled: “... Where two or three are gathered in My name, there I am in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:20). And although two or three believers can be gathered without regard to a family union, the unity of two lovers in the name of the Lord is certainly the foundation, the basis of the Orthodox family. If the center of the family is not Christ, but someone else or something else: our love, our children, our professional preferences, our socio-political interests, then we cannot talk about such a family as a Christian family. In this sense, she is flawed. A truly Christian family is this kind of union of husband, wife, children, parents, when the relationships within it are built in the image of the union of Christ and the Church.

Secondly, the family inevitably implements the law, which by the very way of life, by the very structure of family life, is the law for the Church and which is based on the words of Christ the Savior: “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” "(John 13:35) and the complementary words of the Apostle Paul: "Bear one another's burdens, and in this way fulfill the law of Christ" (Gal. 6:2). That is, the basis of family relationships is the sacrifice of one for the sake of the other. The kind of love when it’s not me at the center of the world, but the one I love. And this voluntary removal of oneself from the center of the Universe is the greatest good for one’s own salvation and an indispensable condition for the full life of a Christian family.

A family in which love is a mutual desire to save each other and help in this, and in which one for the sake of the other constrains himself in everything, limits himself, refuses something he desires for himself - this is the small Church. And then that mysterious thing that unites husband and wife and that can in no way be reduced to one physical, bodily side of their union, that unity that is available to church-going, loving spouses who have gone through a considerable path of life together, becomes a real image of that unity of all with each other in God, who is the triumphant Heavenly Church.

2. It is believed that with the advent of Christianity, Old Testament views on the family changed greatly. This is true?

Yes, of course, for the New Testament brought those fundamental changes to all spheres of human existence, designated as a new stage of human history, which began with the incarnation of the Son of God. As for the family union, nowhere before the New Testament was it placed so highly and neither the equality of the wife nor her fundamental unity and unity with her husband before God were spoken so clearly, and in this sense the changes brought by the Gospel and the apostles were colossal , and the Church of Christ has lived by them for centuries. In certain historical periods - the Middle Ages or modern times - the role of a woman could recede almost into the realm of natural - no longer pagan, but simply natural - existence, that is, relegated to the background, as if somewhat shadowy in relation to the spouse. But this was explained solely by human weakness in relation to the once and forever proclaimed New Testament norm. And in this sense, the most important and new thing was said exactly two thousand years ago.

3. Has the church’s view of marriage changed over these two thousand years of Christianity?

It is one, because it is based on Divine Revelation, on Holy Scripture, therefore the Church looks at the marriage of husband and wife as the only one, at their fidelity as a necessary condition for full-fledged family relationships, at children as a blessing, and not as a burden, and to a marriage consecrated in a wedding, as a union that can and should be continued into eternity. And in this sense, over the past two thousand years, there have been no major changes. Changes could concern tactical areas: whether a woman should wear a headscarf at home or not, whether to bare her neck on the beach or should not do this, whether grown-up boys should be raised with their mother or whether it would be wiser to begin a predominantly male upbringing from a certain age - all these are inferential and secondary things that , of course, varied greatly over time, but the dynamics of this kind of change need to be discussed specifically.

4. What does master and mistress of the house mean?

This is well described in the book of Archpriest Sylvester “Domostroy”, which describes exemplary housekeeping as it was seen in relation to the middle of the 16th century, so those who wish can be referred to him for a more detailed examination. At the same time, it is not necessary to study recipes for pickling and brewing that are almost exotic for us, or reasonable ways of managing servants, but to look at the very structure of family life. By the way, in this book it is clearly visible how high and significant the place of a woman in the Orthodox family was actually seen at that time and that a significant part of the key household responsibilities and cares fell on her and was entrusted to her. So, if we look at the essence of what is captured on the pages of “Domostroi”, we will see that the owner and the hostess are the realization at the level of the everyday, lifestyle, stylistic part of our life of what, in the words of John Chrysostom, we call the small Church. Just as in the Church, on the one hand, there is its mystical, invisible basis, and on the other, it is a kind of social institution located in real human history, so in the life of a family there is something that unites husband and wife before God - spiritual and mental unity, but there is its practical existence. And here, of course, such concepts as a house, its arrangement, its splendor, and order in it are very important. The family as a small Church implies both a home, and everything that is furnished in it, and everything that happens in it, correlated with the Church with a capital C as a temple and as the house of God. It is no coincidence that during the rite of consecration of every dwelling, the Gospel is read about the Savior’s visit to the house of the publican Zacchaeus after he, having seen the Son of God, promised to cover up all the untruths that he had committed in his official position many times over. Holy Scripture tells us here, among other things, that our home should be such that if the Lord visibly stood on its threshold, as He always stands invisibly, nothing would stop Him from entering here. Not in our relationships with each other, not in what can be seen in this house: on the walls, on bookshelves, in dark corners, not in what is shyly hidden from people and what we would not want others to see.

All this taken together gives the concept of a home, from which both its pious internal structure and external order are inseparable, which is what every Orthodox family should strive for.

5. They say: my home is my fortress, but, from a Christian point of view, isn’t behind this love only for one’s own, as if what is outside the home is already alien and hostile?

Here we can recall the words of the Apostle Paul: “...As long as we have time, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who belong to the family of faith” (Gal. 6:10). In the life of every person there are, as it were, concentric circles of communication and degrees of closeness to certain people: these are everyone living on earth, these are members of the Church, these are members of a particular parish, these are acquaintances, these are friends, these are relatives, these are family, the closest people. And the presence of these circles in itself is natural. Human life is so arranged by God that we exist at different levels of existence, including at different circles of contact with certain people. And if we understand the above English saying “My home is my fortress” in the Christian sense, then this means that I am responsible for the structure of my home, for the structure in it, for the relationships within the family. And I not only protect my home and will not allow anyone to invade it and destroy it, but I realize that, first of all, my duty to God is to preserve this house.

If these words are understood in a worldly sense, as the construction of a tower of ivory (or of any other material from which fortresses are built), the construction of some isolated little world where we and only we feel good, where we seem to be (though, of course, illusory) protected from the outside world and where we still think about whether to allow everyone to enter, then this kind of desire for self-isolation, for leaving, fencing off from the surrounding reality, from the world in the broad, and not in the sinful sense of the word, a Christian, of course, should avoid.

6. Is it possible to share your doubts related to some theological issues or directly to the life of the Church with a person close to you who is more church-going than you, but who can also be tempted by them?

With someone who is truly a church member, it is possible. There is no need to convey these doubts and bewilderments to those who are still on the first steps of the ladder, that is, who are less close to the Church than you yourself. And those who are stronger in faith than you must bear greater responsibility. And there is nothing improper about this.

7. But is it necessary to burden your loved ones with your own doubts and troubles if you go to confession and receive guidance from your confessor?

Of course, a Christian who has minimal spiritual experience understands that unaccountably speaking out to the end, without understanding what it can bring to his interlocutor, even if this is the closest person, does not benefit any of them. Frankness and openness must take place in our relationships. But bringing down on our neighbor everything that has accumulated in us, which we ourselves cannot cope with, is a manifestation of unlove. Moreover, we have a Church where you can come, there is confession, the Cross and the Gospel, there are priests who have been given gracious help from God for this, and our problems need to be solved here.

As for our listening to others, yes. Although, as a rule, when close or less close people talk about frankness, they mean that someone close to them is ready to hear them, rather than that they themselves are ready to listen to someone. And then - yes. The deed, the duty of love, and sometimes the feat of love will be to listen, hear and accept the sorrows, disorder, disorder, and tossing of our neighbors (in the Gospel sense of the word). What we take upon ourselves is the fulfillment of the commandment, what we impose on others is a refusal to bear our cross.

8. Should you share with your closest ones that spiritual joy, those revelations that by the grace of God were given to you to experience, or should the experience of communion with God be only your personal and inseparable, otherwise its fullness and integrity are lost?

It's better to double check before sharing. There must be a lot of coincidences, internal correspondences, a situation must arise that implies openness between two people; there must be not only your willingness to tell and convey, but also the opportunity on the part of the other person to hear right now what you want to tell him. Finally, there must be that obvious desire, first of all, for this specific loved one, with this specific narrative, a story about his spiritual experience, to bring some benefit, good. And only if all these conditions coincide, this is possible. But this doesn’t happen often, maybe only a few times in your entire life you manage to convey something like this, from heart to heart, that is already undeniable for you, that for you has become a reality higher than the visible reality. However, this is not something that can be said at breakfast or returning from service: you know, dear, today I stood at the liturgy, and when the Royal Doors opened, it seemed to me that around the head of the priest, like a halo, shone and fire descended into the Chalice at Communion. That's not how it's told. After all, there shouldn’t be a word of falsehood here, but we so want to color these stories of ours, especially, of course, for those who somehow master the word, and not just untruth, but add a little bit of literature. And that’s it, a gram of literature destroys everything.

9. Should a husband and wife have the same spiritual father?

This is good, but not essential. Let's say, if he and she are from the same parish and one of them joined the church later, but began to go to the same spiritual father, from whom the other had been cared for for some time, then this kind of knowledge of the family problems of two spouses can help the priest give sober advice and warn them against any wrong steps. However, there is no reason to consider this an indispensable requirement and, say, for a young husband to encourage his wife to leave her confessor so that she can now go to that parish and to the priest to whom he confesses. This is literally spiritual violence, which should not take place in family relationships. Here one can only wish that in certain cases of discrepancies, differences of opinion, or intra-family discord, one can resort, but only by mutual agreement, to the advice of the same priest - once the confessor of the wife, once the confessor of the husband. How to rely on the will of one priest, so as not to receive different advice on some specific life problem, perhaps due to the fact that both husband and wife each presented it to their confessor in an extremely subjective vision. And so they return home with this advice received and what should they do next? Now who can I find out which recommendation is more correct? Therefore, I think that it is reasonable for a husband and wife in some serious cases to ask one priest to consider a particular family situation.

10. What should parents do if disagreements arise with their child’s spiritual father, who, say, does not allow him to practice ballet?

If we are talking about the relationship between a spiritual child and a confessor, that is, if the child himself, or even at the prompting of loved ones, brought the decision of this or that issue to the blessing of the spiritual father, then, regardless of what the original motives of the parents and grandparents were, This blessing, of course, must be guided by. It’s another matter if the conversation about making a decision came up in a conversation of a general nature: let’s say the priest expressed his negative attitude either towards ballet as an art form in general or, in particular, towards the fact that this particular child should study ballet, in which case there is still some an area for reasoning, first of all, of the parents themselves and for clarifying with the priest the motivating reasons that they have. After all, parents don’t necessarily have to imagine their child making a brilliant career somewhere in Covent Garden - they may have good reasons for sending their child to ballet, for example, to combat scoliosis that starts from sitting too much. And it seems that if we are talking about this kind of motivation, then parents and grandparents will find understanding with the priest.

But doing or not doing this kind of thing is most often a neutral thing, and if there is no desire, you don’t have to consult with the priest, and even if the desire to act with the blessing came from the parents themselves, whom no one pulled their tongues and who simply assumed that the formed their decision will be covered by some kind of sanction from above and thereby it will be given unprecedented acceleration, then in this case one cannot neglect the fact that the spiritual father of the child, for some reason, did not bless him for this particular activity.

11. Should we discuss big family problems with young children?

No. There is no need to place on children the burden of something that is not easy for us to cope with, or burden them with our own problems. It’s another matter to confront them with certain realities of their common life, for example, that “this year we won’t go to the south because dad can’t take a vacation in the summer or because money is needed for grandma’s stay in the hospital.” This kind of knowledge of what is really going on in the family is necessary for children. Or: “We can’t buy you a new briefcase yet, since the old one is still good, and the family doesn’t have much money.” These kinds of things need to be told to the child, but in such a way as not to connect him to the complexity of all these problems and how we will solve them.

12. Today, when pilgrimage trips have become an everyday reality of church life, a special type of spiritually exalted Orthodox Christians has appeared, and especially women, who travel from monastery to elder, everyone knows about myrrh-streaming icons and the healings of the possessed. Being on a trip with them is embarrassing even for adult believers. Especially for children, whom this can only scare away. In this regard, should we take them with us on pilgrimages and are they generally able to withstand such spiritual stress?

Trips vary from trip to trip, and you need to correlate them both with the age of the children and with the duration and complexity of the upcoming pilgrimage. It is reasonable to start with short, one- or two-day trips around the city where you live, to nearby shrines, with a visit to one or another monastery, a short prayer service before the relics, with a bath in the spring, which children are very fond of by nature. And then, as they grow older, take them on longer trips. But only when they are already prepared for this. If we go to this or that monastery and find ourselves in a fairly filled church at an all-night vigil that will last five hours, then the child must be ready for this. As well as the fact that in a monastery, for example, he may be treated more strictly than in a parish church, and walking from place to place will not be encouraged, and, most often, he will have nowhere else to go except the church itself where the service is held. Therefore, you need to realistically calculate your strength. In addition, it is better, of course, if a pilgrimage with children is made together with people you know, and not with people completely unknown to you on a voucher purchased from one or another tourist and pilgrimage company. For very different people can come together, among whom there may be not only the spiritually exalted, reaching the point of fanaticism, but also simply people with different views, with varying degrees of tolerance in assimilating other people’s views and unobtrusiveness in expressing their own, which sometimes can be for children , not yet sufficiently churched and strengthened in the faith, by a strong temptation. Therefore, I would advise great caution when taking them on trips with strangers. As for pilgrimage trips (for whom this is possible) abroad, then a lot of things can overlap here too. Including such a banal thing that the secular-worldly life of Greece or Italy or even the Holy Land itself can turn out to be so interesting and attractive that the main goal of the pilgrimage will disappear from the child. In this case, there will be one harm from visiting holy places, say, if you remember Italian ice cream or swimming in the Adriatic Sea more than praying in Bari at the relics of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker. Therefore, when planning such pilgrimage trips, you need to arrange them wisely, taking into account all these factors, as well as many others, right down to the time of year. But, of course, children can and should be taken with you on pilgrimages, just without in any way relieving yourself of responsibility for what will happen there. And most importantly, without assuming that the very fact of the trip will already give us such grace that there will be no problems. In fact, the larger the shrine, the greater the possibility of certain temptations when we reach it.

13. The Revelation of John says that not only “unfaithful, and abominable, and murderers, and fornicators, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, will have their part in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone,” but also “the fearful” (Rev. 21, 8). How to deal with your fears for your children, husband (wife), for example, if they are absent for a long time and for inexplicable reasons or are traveling somewhere and have not heard from them for an unreasonably long time? And what to do if these fears grow?

These fears have a common basis, a common source, and, accordingly, the fight against them must have some common root. The basis of insurance is lack of faith. A fearful person is one who trusts God little and who, by and large, does not really rely on prayer - neither his own nor others whom he asks to pray, since without it he would be completely afraid. Therefore, you cannot suddenly stop being fearful; here you need to seriously and responsibly take on the task of eradicating the spirit of lack of faith from yourself step by step and defeating it by warming up, trusting in God and a conscious attitude towards prayer, such that if we say: “Save and preserve ”, - we must believe that the Lord will fulfill what we ask. If we say to the Most Holy Theotokos: “There are no other imams of help, no other imams of hope, except for You,” then we really have this help and hope, and we are not just saying beautiful words. Everything here is determined precisely by our attitude towards prayer. We can say that this is a particular manifestation of the general law of spiritual life: the way you live, the way you pray, the way you pray, the way you live. Now, if you pray, combining with the words of prayer a real appeal to God and trust in Him, then you will have the experience that praying for another person is not an empty thing. And then, when fear attacks you, you stand up for prayer - and the fear will recede. And if you are simply trying to hide behind prayer as some kind of external shield from your hysterical insurance, then it will come back to you over and over again. So here it is necessary not so much to fight fears head-on, but to take care of deepening your prayer life.

14. Family sacrifice for the Church. What should it be?

It seems that if a person, especially in difficult life circumstances, has trust in God not in the sense of an analogy with commodity-money relations: I will give - he will give it to me, but in reverent hope, with the faith that this is acceptable, he will tear something from the family budget and give it away The Church of God, if he gives to other people for Christ’s sake, he will receive a hundredfold for it. And the best thing we can do when we don’t know how else to help our loved ones is to sacrifice something, even if it’s material, if we don’t have the opportunity to bring something else to God.

15. In the book of Deuteronomy, the Jews were prescribed what foods they could and could not eat. Should an Orthodox person adhere to these rules? Is there no contradiction here, since the Savior said: “...It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth defiles a person” (Matthew 15:11)?

The issue of food was resolved by the Church at the very beginning of its historical path - at the Apostolic Council, which can be read about in the Acts of the Holy Apostles. The apostles, guided by the Holy Spirit, decided that it was enough for converts from the pagans, which we all actually are, to abstain from food, which is brought for us with torture for the animal, and in personal behavior to abstain from fornication. And that's enough. The book “Deuteronomy” had its undoubted divinely revealed significance in a specific historical period, when the multiplicity of prescriptions and regulations relating to both food and other aspects of the everyday behavior of the Old Testament Jews was supposed to protect them from assimilation, merging, mixing with the surrounding ocean of almost universal paganism .

Only such a palisade, a fence of specific behavior, could then help not only a strong spirit, but also a weak person to resist the desire for what is more powerful in terms of statehood, more fun in life, simpler in terms of human relationships. Let us thank God that we now live not under law, but under grace.

16. Should a wife read a prayer out loud before meals if her unbelieving husband perceives this with disdain, almost as religious fanaticism: they say, we don’t live in a monastery?

Based on other experiences in family life, a wise wife will conclude that a drop wears away a stone. And the husband, at first irritated by the reading of the prayer, even expressing his indignation, making fun of him, mocking him, if his wife shows peaceful persistence, after some time he will stop letting go of the pins, and after a while he will get used to the fact that there is no escape from this, There are worse situations. And as the years pass, you’ll see, and you’ll begin to listen to what kind of words of prayer are said before meals. Peaceful persistence is the best thing you can do in such a situation.

17. Isn’t it hypocrisy that an Orthodox woman, as expected, only wears a skirt to church, and wears trousers at home and at work?

Not wearing trousers in our Russian Orthodox Church is a manifestation of respect by parishioners for church traditions and customs. In particular, to such an understanding of the words of Holy Scripture that prohibit a man or woman from wearing clothes of the opposite sex. And since by men's clothing we primarily mean trousers, women naturally refrain from wearing them in church. Of course, such exegesis cannot be literally applied to the corresponding verses of Deuteronomy, but let us also remember the words of the Apostle Paul: “...If food makes my brother stumble, I will never eat meat, lest I cause my brother to stumble” (1 Cor. 8 , 13). By analogy, any Orthodox woman can say that if by wearing trousers in church she disturbs the peace of at least a few people standing next to her at the service, for whom this is an unacceptable form of clothing, then out of love for these people, the next time she goes to the liturgy, she will not will put on trousers. And it won't be hypocrisy. After all, the point is not that a woman should never wear trousers either at home or in the country, but that, while respecting church customs that exist to this day, including in the minds of many believers of the older generation, not to disturb their peace of mind prayer.