A person with a torn soul not only suffers himself, but also dangerously affects the condition of those around him.
A contemporary of St. Seraphim, the Russian poet and thinker Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev, wrote lines that later became no less famous than the statement of St. Seraphim:
It is not the flesh, but the spirit that has become corrupted these days, And man is desperately yearning... He is rushing towards the light from the shadows of the night And, having found the light, he grumbles and rebels.
Here it is clear that the corrupted (decaying, dying) spirit of a person is expressed in a deep internal conflict, primarily within his own personality: one part of it strives for the light, the other rebels against the same light.
And of course, a person with such an internal structure will wreak the same chaos and destruction around himself. In any of his social interactions this deep devastation will manifest itself in one way or another. Not understanding his motives, desires, needs, such a person rushes from one extreme to another, trying to find support either in a more just social system, or in a strong personality capable of leading him to the desired happiness, or in some idea that unites people.
But where there is no clear understanding of what you are striving for, there cannot be clear guidelines for achieving an unknown goal. And, willingly or unwillingly, such a restless human spirit carries with it other people suffering from the same internal splitting. Thus, the internal chaos and rebellion of one person becomes the cause of mental confusion for those who communicate with him in one way or another. Whether this will lead to their death, or whether they will be able to overcome this embarrassment with God's help, is difficult to say. It happens this way and that. But it is obvious that this internal spiritual rebellion in itself does not at all contribute to salvation or even the ordinary quiet life of a person.
But what is this human spirit? How is it determined, what is it like, and how can one determine what is the norm for it and what is a deviation from this norm?
Thesis two:
What is meant by acquiring the Holy Spirit?
This expression means the acquisition of God's grace. The term “acquisition”, in its semantic meaning, means: accumulation, acquisition.
The expression “acquiring Grace” cannot be understood to mean that Divine grace can be stored and stored in one’s heart like a money-grubber who accumulates gold and silver.
The grace of God resting on a person is not his property. A person can use material values at his own discretion, but Grace acts only when all a person’s actions are aimed at good.
As the believer grows in holiness and virtue, the degree of his unity with the Lord increases. A person gradually increases in the moral and religious aspect, which is why this process is called “acquisition.”
Christians have a unique criterion for determining the standard to which a person’s spirit must conform.
Since both St. Seraphim and Fyodor Tyutchev were Orthodox Christians, there is a direct reason to look at what Orthodox doctrine says about the human spirit.
Saint Ignatius (Brianchaninov) gives an extremely precise definition of this concept: “The moral strength of a person is his spirit. <…> The Lord called the Holy Spirit the Power from above, the Spirit of Truth; Truth is the Son. The human spirit also has the property of strength; he is also the spirit of a person's thoughts - whether they are true or false. It manifests itself in the secret movements of the heart, in the way of thinking, and in all human actions. The spirit of a person reveals both his mind and his way of thinking; the spirit of each action reveals the thought that guided the person in the act.”
The human spirit is the moral force that moves us in everything we do. And the result of our activities depends on what this force will be.
The trace of the spirit is visible in all our deeds - both in the most sublime creativity and in the way a person throws out garbage. Our spirit determines the direction of our thoughts, actions, plans for the future. And it reveals itself precisely through them. As a man's spirit is, so will his deeds be.
And here Christians have a unique criterion for determining the norm to which the human spirit in all its manifestations must correspond - the Gospel description of the incarnate God - Jesus Christ. This description gives the absolute standard of humanity, as it should be according to the plan of our Creator. After all, God, who became Man, could not act otherwise than in strict accordance with His plan for man. This means that any action of Jesus Christ is the standard of human spirituality. And the main component of such a standard spirituality was defined and specially emphasized by the Lord Himself, who said: ... learn from Me, for I am meek and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls (Matthew 11:29).
Please note, He did not say: learn from me, for I am angry and threatening in anger (and this is also described in the Gospel). The only place where Jesus Christ sets Himself as an example for teaching is these amazing words about meekness and a humble heart. This is the pattern of action of the human spirit, given by God for all people of the Earth for all times until the end of the century.
Meekness and humility instead of the spiritual rebellion described by Tyutchev. And it is not at all surprising that the poet ends his poem as if there is an unspoken call in it: man, please, spare yourself, return to Christ, be like Him in His peace and meekness, otherwise you will simply perish, torn apart by your own contradictory aspirations:
We are scorched by unbelief and withered, Today he endures the unbearable... And he recognizes his destruction, And longs for faith... but does not ask for it...
He will not say forever, with prayer and tears, No matter how much he grieves in front of a closed door: “Let me in! - I believe, my God! Come to the aid of my unbelief!..
Thesis three:
The Concept of God's Grace in the Bible
"Charis" and "dynamis" are found in the Greek texts of both the Old and New Testaments. The first of these words is especially meaningful. According to the Hebrew text of the Bible, it corresponds to “hen”.
In the Old Testament
"Heng" and "haris". used when talking about:
- external beauty, for example, when in the book of the Wisdom of Solomon it speaks of a woman, a “beautiful roe” (Wisdom 5:19), in another place - of a precious stone (Wisdom 17:8);
- wisdom - so, more than once it is said about “Χάρις” emanating from the speeches of a righteous person;
- favor, mercy that a person gains either from God, like Abraham (Gen. 18:3), or even from a person, for example, a ruler, like St. David from the first king of Israel Saul (1 Sam. 16:22), also called “charis”.
Prophet David 1727–1728. Moscow. 96 × 40 cm. Wood, tempera. From the Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg
In the New Testament
The time of the Messiah, when the hopes of saving people from sin were realized, became the time of God's direct participation in people's lives. The New Testament writers retain the same meanings of the word, however, new ones are added to them.
If a Jew understands God as distant, inaccessible, indescribable, then a Christian, on the contrary, extremely acutely feels the closeness of the Creator, because the Son of God, Christ , is Himself a perfect man. This means that “every perfect gift” that a person receives—whether material goods or spiritual virtues—comes from the Lord and is sanctified by him.
This is how “charis” acquires new meanings:
- at St. Paul , in 2 Corinthians there is the expression “χάρις τῷ Θεῷ” (charis to Feo), translated into Slavic as “thanksgiving to God” (2 Cor. 9:15); in essence, this is the return to Him of the ability to give thanks;
- St. Paul also refers to the material assistance that Christians sent to other communities as charis (2 Cor. 8:7); after all, it is a visible manifestation of love, which was also given to Christians by the Savior.
But sometimes it turns out that “charis” does not express the fullness of the feelings of a Christian, the bearer of the gift of the Holy Spirit received at Baptism. Thus, in the New Testament texts, and then in the works of the holy fathers, a new word Δύναμις (“dynamis”) appears, as more accurately meaning the Divine power itself, which is given to believers, strengthens their spirit, and imparts special gifts.
This word is also translated into Slavic as "grace". The choice of the creators of the Church Slavonic language is not accidental: after all, “charis” in all its meanings, from external beauty to internal wisdom, is essentially a manifestation of the power of God living in man. Even the almsgiving that St. speaks about. Paul is an expression of love, which, in turn, is God’s gift to people, a change in their hearts. And “dynamis” is the gift of the Spirit, manifested through “charis”. Therefore, both concepts can well be described as Grace.
No stranger to grace
How to maintain grace? First of all, you can’t get used to it. Everything in the Church is grace-filled: sacraments, rituals, traditions, services. There is nothing, not even a small thing, that is not sanctified by the Holy Spirit and filled with the grace of God. The main thing is that a person treats the shrine correctly. We must have reverence and fear of God.
It is human nature to get used to what he has, and when he gets used to it, he stops appreciating what he has. He turns grace into a tradition or even a “national tradition”, as is happening now. With such an attitude, the grace of the Holy Spirit within the Church is lost, because where the fear of God has gone, gratitude has gone, and reverence has gone, and this is sad. A person may be a church member, but if he has an incorrect attitude towards the gift of grace, he may remain graceless.
Marker of the presence of grace
A sign of the presence of the grace of the Holy Spirit is joy. We are often in sadness, melancholy, melancholy, irritability, anger - these are our chronic conditions. Of course, everyone’s mood can change, but if we are constantly in some kind of negativity, then we need to repent. If we rejoice, it means we are in the Holy Spirit. We should be delighted by communication, worship, participation in the sacraments, and our spiritual life. After all, where God is, how can it be sad and sorrowful? If He is near, is it possible to be discouraged? Of course not.
PORTAL CONTACTS
Salvation is the acquisition of grace, that invisible power of God, by the action of which the human soul is transformed.
In grace everything is always new; it is inexhaustible, like the Divinity Itself. Grace opens three directions to man . The first is the vision of the Divine world, which becomes internal evidence for him, and the internal vision of this world never represents two identical and identical pictures. Grace always reveals the spiritual world as new and unexpected in various capacities and depths. This vision does not have material forms, colors and outlines, but at the same time it is not emptiness like some kind of bottomless vacuum, not metaphysical darkness in which the human soul is lost - it is a world of other dimensions that opens to the soul as an invisible light, completely incomparable with physical light, with reflections of a flame or the rays of the sun.
The second concept is man’s own soul, the inner abyss. Grace reveals to a person his soul in its corruption by sin, in the rot of passions, in its deep fall. The very sight of sin is the beginning of healing. There is a strange and incomprehensible antinomy here: grace reveals to a person’s gaze the dark bottom of his heart, where passions swarm like snakes, and at the same time makes his soul more and more beautiful, as if removing dirty rags from it and clothing it in a white wedding attire.
The third thing that grace gives is a vision of the world around us . A person sees in the world the same thing as in his soul - its falling away from God and traces of a lost paradise. And he begins to love this fallen world, but in a different way, a love impartial to it, combined with pity, with pain that people themselves have plunged themselves into a sea of suffering, that they are deaf to the calls of God. Grace reveals to man the tragedy of the world, he comes to know Divine love, which the world does not accept. Grace reveals to a person that the worst misfortune is ignorance of God and eternal death, so a person begins to truly have compassion for those whom he previously considered his enemies.
Grace always creates new things. But the revelation of God was given to the Church, and therefore the sacraments, divine services, prayers as spiritual channels of grace have their own form, established over the centuries. And here again there is an antinomy: in the same forms of sacraments, rituals and prayers, a person must and can find new content, since rituals are symbols that include a person in the world of the infinite, where there are no boundaries and limits for spiritual perfection.
Let's take an example: to a person's gaze, the firmament appears to be limited by a horizon, it is like a blue sphere or a crystal dome crowning the earth; However, in reality, the sky is not only limitless in its depths, but is also always unique for humans. If a Christian carefully reads church prayers, then time after time he will discover something new and previously unknown in them, penetrate into their meaning, and experience each word differently; it will seem to him that he is reading a prayer for the first time, which he has long known by heart. That is why some of the holy fathers called prayer creativity; only this is a special creativity, addressed not to the outside, but to one’s own soul. Prayer involves effort. Our lazy flesh and passionate soul resist it. Often this struggle is tense and painful, a person resists his fallen nature, the world that breaks into him through thoughts and seductive pictures, and the demonic forces that, with God's permission, torment a person, fill his heart with melancholy, unaccountable fear, hatred, and sometimes drive him to death. to a state of complete exhaustion.
In order to pray attentively, you need a feat similar to bloodless martyrdom.
Here again is the antinomy: prayer combines pain and joy, struggle and peace, work and consolation. Prayer is a kind of exam that a person passes, thereby showing what his life is really like. But vile human egoism wants to receive a reward without labor, and the cunning mind of man agrees with his passions - to deceive God. This happens unnoticed. A person ceases to understand that prayer words receive life-giving power when they are comprehended by the mind and experienced by the heart. Praying absentmindedly, as if half asleep, is much easier for a carnal person, and he begins to replace prayer as a state of mind by simply pronouncing prayer words. Here there is a disintegration of the will, mind and feelings, which are united during attentive prayer. The mind is filled with thoughts, like unclean animals that no one kicks out of the house, the heart becomes deaf to prayer, hardens like a stone, on which not a trace remains of the prayer words. The will is disconnected from the mind and heart, it becomes like a weakened string that cannot make a sound. Some kind of invisible wall arises between man and God. A person begins to think that reading a certain number of words constitutes a prayer, and strives, as the ultimate goal, for the last word - “Amen”.
If you tell such a person that he does not pray, but is deceiving himself and God, he will be offended and will not even understand what he is being reproached for. The essence of Pharisaism is an external ritual without spiritual content, a pious pose with an empty heart. A person gradually forgets about those blessed states that he experienced in the past. He begins to look at prayer as a kind of external matter, as a yoke that he must bear, as a tribute that he must pay. This tribute becomes the number of pages read. The light of prayer goes out in a person, and at the same time the spiritual world becomes distant for him. Non-religious people often wonder why some believers, Orthodox Christians who regularly attend church, practically do not change for the better, remaining the same, with all their shortcomings and vices. Most often, this happens precisely because these Christians have extinguished their own prayer, replacing it only with a certain verbal form, like the rustle of dry paper. If you ask such a person what he is praying for, he is unlikely to be able to answer. He does not even give himself as little work as is required to understand the meaning of what he reads or hears, not to mention spiritual experiences. It happens that a person, having finished the prayer rule, does not remember whether he just read the morning or evening prayers.
There is a particular danger here for clergy. They must read prayers “to order,” despite being busy, tired, or their state of mind, so it is a considerable temptation for them to read a prayer without being involved in it as they should, without experiencing it in their hearts. That is why an incomparably greater feat is required from a priest - to always be internally prepared for prayer, to fulfill every requirement as one’s hardest work.
Usually those who pray carelessly and absent-mindedly also become careless in relation to fulfilling the commandments of God; the moral side of Christianity seems to cease to exist for them. They cease to see and feel their sinfulness. As prayer weakens, repentance weakens, and so does spiritual life. A person, while praying at home or in church, constantly thinking about his thoughts or everyday affairs, at the end of the service or rule says to himself with satisfaction: “I prayed,” without at all thinking that he stood before God like a dead man.
Often the false Pharisaic prayer develops a special pride in a person, he begins to reproach and teach others, as if he had acquired the right to do so. And in their lives, such hypocritical “prayer people” can be touchy, irritable and angry, which is why, seeing this, non-believers say: “He goes to church, but lives worse than us.” These people do not understand that they have long ceased to be truly present in the church. Only their bodies stand in the temple as the coffin of the soul, and the mind is buried, buried in worldly worries. They are immersed in their dreams and plans, deaf and blind to what is actually happening in the temple, the hearts of such people are closed to the grace that descends during worship. Or rather, they see only the shell of the temple: how the temple is decorated, which of their friends came to the service today, how they are dressed; they come up to greet them, report and learn the news, look at their faces, are indignant that they were pushed, are indignant that the singers have bad hearing, and then leave the temple, confident that they have prayed and paid tribute to God. This state of spiritual complacency and hypocrisy can be called philistine pharisaism.
But there is another type of people who want to pray, but their prayer crumbles like a house made of sand; they strain their strength, but do not hear their own prayer, just as the sounds of a voice do not penetrate the iron door of a prison. These are people who have filled their soul and memory with the external, just as they fill the space of rooms with things, so that it becomes difficult to move and breathe. This is a cult of knowledge, this excessive absorption of information, when the mind becomes fat and flabby, like the body of a glutton, like the belly of Gargantua, who absorbed everything that was on his huge table. Such people live in a world of accumulated information, unnecessary and unsystematic, just like Plyushkin among the rubbish he has collected. The mind loses its strength trying to process this material, which fills a person’s memory and suppresses his creative abilities, but almost all of it remains dead ore. The soul, suffocating in a pile of external knowledge, cannot rise above the earth. The earth is the element of scientists, they can talk about God, but when they try to pray, they most often turn into some kind of helpless asthmatics.
The second cult is of emotions and experiences. These are the people who are passionate about art; they live in the world of their dreams and imagination. Their heart, filled with passions, is also deaf to prayer. In the temple they are lost in their dreams. They complain that there is little showmanship in the worship service. The service seems to them something alien and very boring. Sometimes they begin to compose their prayers - the way others write poetry, but they soon come to the conclusion that in the theater spiritual life is much brighter, more varied and more effective.
The third cult is the cult of pleasures at the level of sensations; in this area the thirst for sex and blood prevails. Such people lose not only their spiritual, but also their spiritual appearance. There is no point in talking about this type of people here. A pig's eyes are always directed downwards. But the trouble is that these people often consider themselves Christians. What can we say about their prayer? They pray only when they fall off a cliff or when they are diagnosed with a malignant tumor.
