Patriarch Kirill on why marriages collapse and love disappears. His Holiness Patriarch Kirill about the Church, faith and love

Marriage disappears when love disappears, and therefore the reason for family separations is precisely what can be called a crisis of love. This also happened in the past, but people were brought up differently - the fear of God was present in their hearts.

Even when something happened in the depths of the soul and feelings for each other were transformed, they were preserved through prayer, turning to God, and good deeds. family relationships and the marriage survived. And then, when people went through these difficulties, they suddenly discovered in adulthood that a preserved marriage was the greatest value in their lives, because it was the only thing that protected them from the cold winds from the outside. Marriage really remains a home, a fortress, a place where people support each other - sincerely, selflessly, in the most difficult circumstances.

Have you ever seen older people walking arm in arm along the sidewalk? If it’s winter, then they are terribly afraid for each other, so that someone doesn’t slip or fall. They walk literally clinging to each other, they both need support, they have ceased to be strong, they have ceased to be independent of many circumstances, and the only thing that remains in their life is the support that is next to you.

What happens to people who destroy marriages and families? And the following happens. Love disappears and then living together becomes torture. Why does love disappear? After all, there was love when we met, when we looked after each other, when we entered into a family relationship... And not just love - a kind of apogee of life! In German, “marriage”, “wedding” is “ high time life”, this is a kind of apogee. In a sense, this is truly so - an emotional, spiritual apogee.

What happens next? Why is this apogee gradually fading away? Yes, because this great feeling that people experienced, they did not save it, they destroyed it - unconsciously, in small ways. When a person begins to live more for himself than for another, then he begins this destruction. He undermines, saws down the tree, and the more he or she lives for himself and not for another, the more it becomes loose. And when there is nothing left for anyone else, but only for oneself, when some parallel connections, hobbies, a parallel life with new interests, with new sensations appear - then you just have to lightly touch the tree, which is sawn on all sides, or blow strong wind, not to mention an earthquake, how it will collapse and crumble into pieces.

This is exactly how family relationships are destroyed. You need to take care of love and take care of marriage from the first day, and remember that this is difficult work, that this is a kind of feat that a person voluntarily takes upon himself.

The problem is that the words “happiness” and “pleasure” have different meanings. It's not the same thing. If a person strives only to receive pleasure, then he will not be happy - neither in the first marriage, nor in the second, nor in the third, nor in any other.

None common property, no common Home and even common children do not stop people from fatal decisions if the feeling of love is exhausted and hatred appears instead of love. To avoid such a fatal development of events, take care of your love.

Sermon in the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra on the day of memory of the Holy Equal-to-the-Apostles Prince Vladimir

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit!
“I declare to you, brethren, that the gospel which I preached to you is not that of men; I received it and learned it, not from men, but through the revelation of Jesus Christ” (Gal. 1:11-12). We have just heard these wonderful words of the Apostle Paul; he addressed them to the ancient Galatians, but through them to the whole world, affirming the great truth that the Gospel is not the fruit of human wisdom, that the Gospel is Divine Revelation, that is, the word of God Himself.

We celebrate today the day of remembrance of the Holy Baptist of Rus', Equal-to-the-Apostles Prince Vladimir. And it is no coincidence that the Church offers these apostolic words to us on the days of remembrance of the holy men and women equal to the apostles. Saint Prince Vladimir demonstrated the truth of these words with his life. Who was Vladimir before receiving Baptism? A voluptuous cruel ruler. He was the cause of the death of many innocent people. There was a thirst for power, money and pleasure main goal his life, as it was the goal of life of other rulers of that time. That is why wars were fought and lands were seized - so that there would be more power, so that there would be more opportunities to command others.
And what happened after Prince Vladimir plunged into the baptismal waters? His life changed. He did not become a tougher, evil, voluptuous ruler - he became a ruler whom the people, in tenderness and heartfelt joy, called the Red Sun.
What happened to this man? Why did he change those clear and understandable goals and values ​​that he professed as the ruler of the state for other goals and life values? Because with Baptism he accepted Christ into his mind and into his heart; received along with Baptism new system values ​​so radically different from what he lived, what he believed in, what he fought for before.
And what lies at the basis of this system of values, to which Saint Vladimir gave his mind, soul and life, for he wanted all the people to follow him into this system of values? This is the word of the Gospel, and at the center of this word is something that is still difficult for people to understand; something that never ceases to amaze each subsequent generation of people with its novelty and attractive power. At the center of the Gospel message is one and the most important word: “love.” Love as the basis of being, love as the basis of personal and family life, love as the basis of social and even state life.
These words remain incomprehensible to many people - power, money and power are much more understandable. Any political program can be tailored to these goals; people can be inspired to fight, even to war, because this demon sits in everyone - the desire to be rich, strong, powerful.
What is the love that Christ preaches? How can you love your neighbor, how can you love even your enemy? As believers, we ask ourselves this question, realizing that there is no love in our hearts for another person, much less for an enemy. What do these words of the Lord mean? After all, these are not human words, not the wisdom of generations, not the wisdom of nations or of all humanity - this is Divine wisdom. Whether it is understandable to people or incomprehensible, people are able to follow this wisdom or are not capable - from this the word of God does not cease to remain God's word and Divine truth, eternal and unchanging. And the strength of a believer is that even without fully realizing the Divine truth with his mind and life experience, he kneels before it with his mind and heart in obedience to the word of God.
Divine truth becomes understandable through the inner, religious experience of man, and this experience helps us understand what God in Christ, His Son, accomplished for the sake of our salvation. The Lord came and suffered so that people would have life, and life in abundance, as we just heard in the Gospel of John (John 10:10), so that this fullness of human existence would not cease with death, but would pass into eternity. For this purpose, the Lord came and gave Himself, His life, to be desecrated by human malice, envy, anger and impurity. He did this, driven by love for people, for His creation, and through this example of the Lord Himself we can understand what love is - love is, first of all, the ability to give oneself to others. The willingness to give yourself and part of your life, time, care, money, human warmth and participation to another is a manifestation of love - not beautiful words, but the ability to share your life with others.
God wished that it was precisely this human ability to share one’s life with others that formed the basis of human existence, the basis of the most important law, according to which alone personal, family and public life. Each of us knows from experience what it is. When is a family strong? Then, when the husband gives himself to his wife and family, and the wife gives herself to her husband and children. Try to stop giving yourself to another - the family immediately feels a terrible cold blow of wind. Trust disappears, suspicion appears: why did he or she act this way, what is hidden behind it? Maybe he or she doesn't love me anymore? We know how families fall apart only because spouses have stopped giving themselves to each other, caring for each other, and perceiving the other’s life as their own. own life. But isn’t this the problem of fathers and sons, the problem of generations? After all, it grows out of understatement, from the fact that parental love was not fully expressed, from the fact that parents did not receive the love of their children. And continuity is broken, the historical connection of generations is broken.
And what happens in societies when the law of love disappears, when the struggle for one’s private interests begins - political, economic, national, class or social, when these interests and values ​​become the most important? There is a life-or-death struggle, and the fabric of human communication is being destroyed, and where there should have been mutual support, love, solidarity, harmony, human chaos and disorder appear under the slogans of building happy life.
Troubles and divisions of the people always stem from slogans that call us to a happy life. Didn’t our people wash themselves in blood when, during the terrible years of the revolution, they were seduced by these slogans and believed that it was possible to build a happy, prosperous, peaceful life without God and without love? Millions of people died, and this dream was not realized. It was not allowed to come true, because at the heart of this political dream were anger, confrontation, the desire to achieve one’s goals by fooling people with calls for happiness.
The church is called to be a place where people gain the experience of love and the experience of unity. Where there is division, there is no love. And how hypocritical and terrible it is when division occurs in the Church in the name of certain “higher” goals! This division reveals the most terrible thing that can happen in the life of a Christian - the absence of love. What kind of preaching of love then can there be, where is Christ, if for the sake of private interests, one way or another understood goals and objectives of the worldly order, the foundation of human existence is destroyed, love is destroyed and trampled upon by human malice? This is a perversion of the Christian message, this is a rejection of the Gospel, which is not human, but Divine revelation. This is a rejection of the Gospel with its eternal system of values, far from our vain aspirations.
The Church proclaims to those near and far, and to the whole world: there is no other way for the development of the world and human civilization, for the development of any human society, except the law of love and the solidarity, mutual support, harmony and peace arising from love.
We learned all this from the Kyiv font, from Saint Prince Vladimir. Here, on the banks of the Dnieper, within the ancient walls of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, the image of the Grand Duke appears especially vividly and powerfully in our consciousness. He cast off not only physical, but also spiritual blindness, leaving the baptismal font. He saw the secret of human existence and happiness, he turned away from cruelty and lust for power, from everything that recently warmed his soul and inspired his actions. Prince Vladimir at that moment rethought his whole life and gave us a great covenant of love and unity.
It is within these walls that we especially strongly experience the meaning of this commandment of Holy Prince Vladimir, church unity and life according to the law of love.
We will pray to Holy Equal-to-the-Apostles Prince Vladimir to grant us the strength to love our neighbor - husband, wife, brother, sister, children, work colleagues. May he give us the strength to love our enemies and prove through the experience of our lives that it is not the face distorted by malice preaching this or that human truth, but the meek face of Prince Vladimir of Kiev who emerged from the font of Baptism that is the ideal of Holy Rus'. And this ideal is invincible and insurmountable, for it is the word of God, and not human. Amen.

I think that now there is a huge civilizational problem - I would call it this way - on the scale of the entire human race. This is a complete deformation and distortion of the concept that is associated with the word “love”. For me, as a believer, love is a miracle and a gift from God, but it is not a selective gift. It's not like talents: God gifted one and he became a musician, another a mathematician, the third a doctor. Love is like air for everyone. And then whoever can perceive this gift of God. One person under the sun can become so irradiated that he ends up in the hospital, while another improves his health. One clean air breathes, and the other does everything to pollute the air with industrial waste, so that people no longer inhale air, but infection. It's the same with love.

This is an absolutely amazing gift from God, because love itself is capable of uniting people. Everything else: our talents, our identity, our national, cultural and political differences- almost everything works for disconnection. In this sense, someone might say: “God’s strange plan for the world - where do so many differences come from that work to divide?” Yes, indeed, it would be a strange idea if it were not for love, which is capable of connecting people. And what is meant by love now - human passion, the realization of this passion has nothing to do with love. This is how this concept is destroyed.

And now, perhaps, about the most important thing. Love is God's gift, but we respond to this gift, and we respond, first of all, with certain volitional attitudes. Therefore, love is at the same time the direction of the human will, the will to good. Let me give you a simple example. You think badly about a person, you don’t like him - externally or internally; There are a lot of factors that often push one person away from another. You can succumb to this feeling and live with it, or you can try to overcome this feeling. And there is a way to overcome it - this is to start thinking well about the person. And there is another absolutely amazing means - to do good to this person.

Those to whom we do good remain in our hearts forever. Your attitude towards a person changes if you do good to him. So, love is, among other things, such an orientation of the human will that directs a person’s actions to do good. We know what falling in love is: young people met, liked each other - this is a good, bright feeling. Sometimes they say: “We fell in love with each other.” The big question is whether you have fallen in love or not yet; the test of life will show whether there is love here or not. But in order for infatuation to develop into love, you need to direct the will to goodness, you need to share your life with each other, give a part of yourself to another person.

Therefore, love, on the one hand, is a gift, and on the other hand, it is a task that God sets before each of us. And as long as this exists in the human race, there is such a concept as a community of people, there is even such a concept as good, because the basis of good is always love.

Interestingly, in the same interview, he agreed with Pascal's statement that "There are only two types of people: righteous people who consider themselves sinners, and sinners who consider themselves righteous."

The service of the word, that church obedience, which His Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Rus', like no one else, carries throughout his entire adult life. His talent as a preacher bore abundant fruit. On the day of the 70th anniversary of the Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church, we again turn to his word, filled with Truth, faith and love.

Church

This Church - the Church of the Holy Spirit - cannot be defeated by the devil or any other force, because the Church of the Holy Spirit is nourished by the power of God, which is stronger than any human and devilish power.

In the Church we not only learn the will of God. In the Church we enter into special communion with God through prayer. In the Church we are given the opportunity, by correlating our actions and thoughts with the Word of God, to see how much we deviate from the course, how right or wrong we are doing. And if we act or think incorrectly, we have the opportunity to repent to God and correct our course in life.

Something else very important is happening in the Church: we not only learn the Word of God, we not only can correct our lives, but by the power of Divine we can actually destroy our sin.

The church is not only a place where a person meets God, but also a place where people meet in a special way. Through the communion of the One Bread and the One Cup, we become one, and in this mysterious unity of people, all existing differences - social, property, national, political - are overcome. If the world shows us an example of divisions that only multiply over the course of history, then the Church is a place of unification of people, a place of joint presence before God, and therefore a place where human divisions are or can be overcome in a mysterious but real way.

The Lord saves us by giving us a clear understanding of good and evil, and as long as the faith of the Church preserves this norm human life, as long as the faith of the Church testifies to what is truth and what is false, what is sin and what is holiness, together with the Church the entire human race retains the ability and opportunity, in conditions of differences of opinion, in conditions of plurality of views and beliefs, to preserve a certain common ground human existence.

If, someday in the eschatological perspective, the completion of human history occurs and evil triumphs over good, then this will happen only when humanity completely abandons the moral basis of its existence and when the voice of the Church turns out to be inaudible, when people are unable to perceive Divine truth.

The earthly Church is called the militant Church - the Church in conflict. Our struggle is not a struggle with human views and beliefs, not with flesh and blood; our struggle is against the forces of darkness, for the true faith, through which alone the moral nature of the human race can be preserved, regardless of how much people know or do not know the true faith, accept or do not accept it. But like a fermenting element, like yeast, like leaven, the faith of Christ is capable of transforming the whole world, all of creation.

To remain in the Church means to remain in faith, in communion with God by the power of the Holy Spirit, in the creation of God's truth, in life according to God's law - in the life to which the Lord has called us all.

By the power of the Holy Spirit in the Church, in the community of faith, the Sacrament of salvation is performed. In this community, by the power of the Holy Spirit, everything that Christ accomplished is actualized; it becomes real and effective for every person, regardless of the time and place of his life. By the power of the Holy Spirit, we mysteriously come into contact in the Sacrament of the Church, in the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist, with heavenly, Divine life. While still here on earth, we touch the Divine Kingdom. That is why the Liturgy begins with a wondrous exclamation: Blessed is the Kingdom of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit - because by the power of the Holy Spirit we come into contact with this Divine Kingdom, which is reflected in our hearts with grace, joy, peace and love.

Often baptized people treat the Church with contempt, allow insults, and ridicule the Church. Why does this happen - after all, they received the gift of the Holy Spirit at baptism? But this is what happens - because of passion and unbelief, the grace of God is cut off, and a person does not feel God, does not feel an answer to his prayers, for him coming to church is like coming to a museum, his heart does not beat joyfully during worship, it is dead because it is enslaved by passions and unbelief.

In order for the Church of God to be renewed following the example of the original apostolic community, we must use all our strength to fight passions, to arouse faith in ourselves through constant prayer, through repentance, through the acceptance of the Holy Mysteries of Christ, through a critical, strict attitude towards ourselves. to yourself, through constant self-reproach, through control over your thoughts, deeds, movements of the heart.

The main ministry to which the Church devotes itself is the ministry of God's grace. Having received it from the Lord Himself on the day of Pentecost, she is called to distribute it to people and perform such actions, pronounce such words, build such relationships with the outside world, so that everything is aimed at ensuring that passions are driven out of human hearts and ardent faith comes into the heart and along with it - the power of God's grace, which from illiterate fishermen made powerful preachers who conquered the universe, which from numerous ascetics formed a host of holy wonderworkers, from ordinary people- martyrs, from ordinary bishops and priests - saints and saints.

The Church exists to call on the Holy Spirit. The most important mission of the Church is the invocation of the Holy Spirit, epiclesis, as we say, using Greek word.

The Church exists to call on the Holy Spirit. The most important mission of the Church is the invocation of the Holy Spirit, epiclesis, as we say using the Greek word. Epiclesis is not only a prayer of invoking the Holy Spirit - it is life in Christ, it is a heart open to Him, it is a courageous and honest confession of faith in Christ the Savior and the Holy Trinity. AND in response to the life of the Church, God sends the gift of the Holy Spirit, and the Spirit lives and works in us.

If it were not for the descent of the Holy Spirit and not the birth of the Church, then Christianity would be another intellectual teaching, another version of human philosophy.

Faith

Faith, refracted in a person’s real religious experience, gives him a special spiritual vision, the ability to see and understand the meaning of current events, to see as far as no politician can see unless he believes in the Lord and Savior. Faith gives special visual acuity, which means it helps people find the right position in life. This position may conflict with the tastes of the era, with fashions in lifestyle and way of thinking, with human philosophies. And we know from history that this clash of the faith of Christ with human inventions very often requires heroism from those who keep the faith.

The response that a Christian makes to those who blaspheme should always be full of wisdom, spiritual strength and peace, because God is with us (Isa. 8:10; Matt. 1:23), the Lord Jesus Christ, the author and finisher of our faith .

Keeping the Orthodox faith, maintaining the ability to distinguish good from evil, we must in our lives - personal, family, social - always take the side of those forces that are either directly, or perhaps in a not entirely visible way, but essentially - together with Christ, together with Him who is the author and finisher of our faith.

Unity of the Church

Sometimes in our parishes divisions arise between the clergy and the laity. Often these divisions are associated with a struggle for some kind of primacy, for some kind of power in the parish. We know how parishioners are sometimes divided, grouping around one or another priest. Veneration of this or that shepherd and love for him is legal, but division in the name of love is sinful, because where there is love, there cannot be division.

We must preserve the unity not only of Ecumenical Orthodoxy from any heresies and schisms, we must not only preserve our unity as the apple of our eye Local Church, the martyr Church, which suffered through its right to be one and indivisible. We must maintain the unity of our parishes and monasteries, remembering that the most important criterion for assessing the activities of any Christian - from the Patriarch to the simple layman - is love. There is love - there is Christ! No love - no Christ!

Walk before the face of God

What does it mean to walk before the face of God? This means feeling God's presence, realizing that God is near. And if God is nearby, then how can you insult God, how can you do something that is disgusting to God? If God is nearby, then a person not only constantly turns to Him, but tries to build his life so that the Divine eyes, looking at Him, are always filled with mercy and love.

We need to learn to hear the voice of God, to see the presence of God both in human history and in our lives, and for this we need to be sensitive to the impact on us God's grace. A person who relies on his own strength most often lacks such sensitivity. For him, God is at best a philosophical concept. At best, he agrees with God's presence as a kind of theory, but in practice there is no God in the life of such a person. The power of intellect, the power of will, the power of conviction, the power of authority, the power of money, the power of organization - this is what is put above God, because by relying on strength, many solve the problems facing them.

Body of Christ

The Body of Christ is not a metaphor, it is a reality. And when the Church, a community of believers, gathers together with its bishop or priest and together celebrates the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ in the Holy Eucharist, when by the grace of the Holy Spirit, through the prayers of the Church, bread and wine become the container of the incontainable God, then the Sacrament of the Church is visible - the Sacrament Body and Blood of the Lord and Savior.

In this Sacrament we are freed from sin, through this Sacrament what Adam destroyed is restored, and we, feeble and weak, enter into real communication with God, we touch the Divine Kingdom.

It is in the Eucharist that the Church reveals its essence, it is in the Eucharist that it becomes what it has become by the will of God - the Body of Christ, continuing the work of the Savior in this world.

The Church of God is that community where, by the power of the Holy Spirit, people constantly participate in everything that Christ did - through eating the bread and wine consecrated in the Sacrament of the Eucharist, through the communion of the authentic Body and Blood of the Lord. And through this communion we gain great strength - God enters us, corrects our weaknesses, forgives our sins, gives us spiritual and physical strength. The Holy Eucharist is the greatest action that takes place in the human race. Nothing can compare to this action because it is - open road to God, by which man ascends to Heaven and by which Divine grace is descended from Heaven to man.

By partaking of the Holy Mysteries of Christ, we become one body, we become a community living and existing in the image of God.

In order for us to be able to truly realize the unity we have acquired in the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist with each other and with God in the life of this world, we must also remember that love is a sacrifice. And if we find ourselves capable of giving a piece of ourselves, sacrificing our time, our attention, our love, our means - sacrificing to those who need it, then we will live outside the temple according to the law of love.

Prayer

If a person prays, then he is a truly religious person. If he calls himself a believer and is even convinced of the existence of God as Higher power, but if he does not turn to God in prayer, then such a believer is an irreligious person. Sometimes it even happens that fairly church-going people stop praying. They get so used to their churchliness that living prayer how the connection with God disappears from life. It happens that even some clergy, while performing divine services, know the prayers by heart, but do not pray with their hearts. If a person stops praying, he stops living a religious life.

The skill of prayer is one of the most important ascetic deeds. You need to pray with the words of prayers, if you know them, as well as with your own in simple words, you need to pray not only in the morning and evening, you need to pray many times throughout the day, turning to the Lord at least for a moment.

Today many people come to churches and turn to God, but not everyone knows how to pray. There are circumstances in which even people of little faith pray - when we find ourselves in difficult life circumstances. As war participants say, even the atheists rose up to attack with prayer. When despair and awareness of impossibility arise on our own overcome difficulties, then a person turns the words of prayer to God with ease. This also happens when, suddenly turning to a doctor, a person hears the terrible words of an incurable diagnosis. Then people pray and find words and no one needs to be taught to pray. But once you overcome the difficulties, receive healing, your connection with God and prayer are cut off again.

You need to educate yourself to strive to understand what is said in the temple. But even if in thought we move away from prayer due to our weakness, then still being in church, in the grace-filled atmosphere of other people’s prayers, we are under the constant influence of Divine grace. That is why prayer in the temple has a special meaning, meaning and power, “For where two or three are gathered in My name, there I am in the midst of them.”(Matt. 18:20).

Repentance

In repentance, we again return God to his place in our life; we displace ourselves, giving way to God. And if we don’t push ourselves, we will never leave this central place, and God will forever leave our lives, no matter how much we convince ourselves that we are believers.

Repentance is a turning to God. There can be no conversion without repentance, and without conversion there can be no return of God into our lives. By renouncing our own “I,” we restore the order of life that God was pleased to establish during the creation of the world and man. In repentance, we seem to recreate God’s plan for the world and man.

No repentance - no religious life. And none of the wisest religious philosophies, none of the most beautiful words can change anything in a person’s life if he does not have the experience of repentance.

True repentance requires a change of thoughts, a change of life. It is not for nothing that the Greek word “metanoia”, which is translated into Russian as “repentance”, means change, a change of mind, heart, life. We know how difficult it is to make this change, how sin attracts us, how many times we repeat it.

Word

The Word is God's great gift. Through words we establish connections with other people. The word is a means and method of communication, something that belongs to a person and distinguishes him from another world, the world of the wordless. But a word exists only when it is heard. If there is no listener, then there is no word.

When we fulfill a word with sinful emptiness, we destroy with this word inner world other people.

Empty, idle words that we address to our neighbors devastate their soul, and, even without wanting to harm, we harm them with our idle talk. So the Lord tells us that we will give an answer for every idle word, because with this word the soul of other people is damaged.

The word we turn outward is the result of our thought. When a person thinks, he spends internal energy, but when he speaks, much more energy is spent. It just seems that the word is something completely simple and easy.

In the word - part of our inner life. If we talk idle talk, utter idle words, then we waste our inner strength, we damage our spiritual life.

Heresy

In the search for a wise and relevant interpretation of faith, one must never cross the line beyond which there is no longer interpretation, but destruction.

What is heresy? How can heresy be distinguished from dissent that is acceptable in the Church? How to distinguish a heretic from a zealous one Orthodox Christian who wants to protect and preserve the purity of his faith? There is only one way. Every heresy gives rise to schism, and where there is schism, there is no love. We know this well from our lives. The family falls apart: spouses separate, children turn away from their parents when love disappears from the family. And no matter how kind Nice words one of the spouses said, where there is no love, there is no purity of relationships and no unity. The same thing happens in the Church. If we meet a person who claims that he is fighting for the purity of Orthodoxy, but in his eyes there is a dangerous fire of anger, he sees heretics everywhere, he is ready to go to battle and to divide the Church, he is ready to shake the foundations of church life, supposedly defending Orthodoxy; when in a person leading a heretical teaching we do not find love, but only anger, then this is the first sign that he is a wolf in sheep's clothing - like Arius, Nestorius and many others who preached ardently without love in their hearts, and They were ready to divide church life for the sake of their righteousness.

Heresies were an intellectual challenge to Orthodoxy: referring to pastoral expediency, logic, common sense, even referring to the need to maintain piety, heretics tried to introduce false truths into the consciousness of the Church that destroy the true truth. Such intellectual attempts most often ended in a terrible struggle, when the Church had to defend with all its might Orthodox faith, and by the grace of God she protected her.

If you look at the history of the emergence of heresies, they all arose under plausible pretexts, and the heresiarchs, the founders of heresies, were motivated by good motives. It seemed to them that faith needed to be made more understandable, logical, convincing, more consistent with the Word of God, and, delving into their own understanding of faith, ignoring the general church conciliar perception of faith, they came to conclusions that were extremely dangerous for the very existence of the Church.

Defense of the Faith

The entire history of the Church of Christ is the history of the struggle for the purity of the Divine Word.

If we look at the whole history after Christ, we can testify that no other human belief, no other worldview has experienced so many attempts to distort or destroy it. These attempts were made at different levels: at the level of thought, philosophy, practice and, finally, as just said, at the level public policy. And we know that standing for the truth has never been easy - it required courage, fortitude, the strength of faith, the strength of one’s convictions.

main reason According to which the Orthodox faith is indestructible, and lies in the fact that through this faith people gain such an experience of life with God that exceeds all the joys of the earthly world. It is this experience of living in communion with God that fills our hearts with conviction of the correctness of faith and gives us the strength to build our lives on this conviction.

Humility

Humility and humility are identical concepts. But the word “humility” helps to better understand the meaning of humility, because it combines two words - “humility” and “wisdom”.

A humble person is a person for whom God is at the center of his life, and he puts his actions under the judgment of God, which means he places his actions under the judgment of his conscience.

A humble person is one who places himself under the judgment of God.

If we give up to God the main place in our lives, if God becomes the most important thing in life for us, then everything secondary that we are called to do by virtue of our vocation, position or professional duty is accomplished with the help of God. God imparts part of his Divine power to a humble person, and no human power can compare with this power.

Forgetting such a virtue as humility is very dangerous for human society. In his Everyday life we suffer from the fact that this greatest virtue is becoming increasingly rare.

Patience

Patience is the ability to react to the evil that concerns us without losing our presence of mind, without wasting our internal energy, without falling into grumbling, anger, malice, or the desire for revenge.

Undoubtedly, the will is present in our attempts to acquire patience, but a patient person does not necessarily have to be strong-willed, because patience is a state of mind. Every strong-willed person at some point cannot withstand lies, insults, insults. And there is not enough will, and patience is running out, because there was no patience, but there was will or good upbringing.

Hope in God, a living sense of faith, the understanding that God will protect and God will restore justice, and create a person’s inner peace. Patience, like armor, protects the inner state of our soul from all external evil and sinful circumstances, and patience becomes a step on the path to the Kingdom of God.

A patient person is one who has already acquired the Holy Spirit within himself. Then nothing can shake his peace, because even the most terrible and dangerous devilish obsessions are not capable of crushing the power of the Holy Spirit.

Patience as a virtue elevates us above the vanity of the world. A patient person acquires a different angle of view on everything he sees, a different point of reference, a different ability to evaluate what is happening. In a sense, patience is always wisdom, distinguishing a person from those who do not have wisdom.

Mercy

We must remember - and perhaps especially those who take upon themselves the great responsibility of serving mercy - that through this sacrifice that we make to people, God gives us His love.

Mercy is a school of love. Modern world, modern society sometimes in bewilderment he asks himself why, in our enlightened age, when almost everyone has an education, when science has reached such heights, we see so much suffering, crime, family tragedies, human grief. And you don’t need to be a philosopher to say: neither education, nor strength, nor power, nor money - all that is so desirable for modern man - are unable to give people love, are unable to bring them happiness.

Love

Love is sacrifice, it is communication and it is unity.

The ability to give oneself to another is one of the most important and significant manifestations of love. A person gives himself to another sincerely - there is no hypocrisy here, here is a real feat, a real sacrifice. The clearest manifestation of such a sacrifice is maternal love, but not only: whenever we give ourselves to another, we love.

If we give up our place to God, this means that we love God. No need philosophical definitions, everything is very clear: if we devote ourselves to God, at least partially give ourselves to God, then we love Him.

Making room for God in your life means making room for other people. Love for one's neighbor, sacrifice, the ability to give oneself to others - this is the most important dimension of a person's religious life.

The word “love” is used in everyday life so often and in so many different contexts that modern man no longer able to clearly understand its meaning. Like many holy things, by the power of the devil this word is often desecrated and devalued in human life. But this does not make the concept of love any less significant. As the Apostle John the Theologian tells us, “God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him” (1 John 4:16), and this is an exhaustive definition of love.