“The family is a small church” in modern life. Family – small Church

Everyone knows what problems arise when two people, he and she, enter into life together. One of them, which often takes on acute forms, is the relationship between spouses regarding their rights and obligations.

Both in ancient times, and even in not so distant times, a woman in a family was in the position of a slave, in complete subordination to her father or husband, and there was no talk of any equality or equal rights. The tradition of complete submission to the eldest man in the family was a given. What forms it took depended on the head of the family.

In the last two centuries, especially now, in connection with the development of the ideas of democracy, emancipation, equality of women and men and their equal rights, the other extreme is increasingly manifesting itself: a woman is often no longer satisfied with equality and equal rights, and she, unfortunately, begins to struggle for a dominant position in the family.

Which is correct, which is better? Which model makes more sense from a Christian point of view? The most balanced answer: neither one nor the other - both are bad as long as they act from a position of strength. Orthodoxy offers a third option, and it is truly unusual: such an understanding of this issue has not existed before, and could not have existed.

We often do not attach due importance to the words that we meet in the New Testament: in the Gospel, in the Apostolic Epistles. And it contains an idea that completely changes the view of marriage, both in comparison with what was and in comparison with what has become. It's better to explain this with an example.

What is a car? What is the relationship between its parts? There are many of them, from which it is assembled - a car is nothing more than a collection of parts correctly connected into one whole. Therefore, it can be disassembled, put into shelves, and replaced with any part.

Is man the same thing or something different? After all, he, too, seems to have many “details” - members and organs, also naturally, harmoniously coordinated in his body. But, nevertheless, we understand that the body is not something that can be made up of arms, legs, head, and so on; it is not formed by connecting the corresponding organs and members, but is a single and indivisible organism living one life.

So, Christianity claims that marriage is not just the joining of two “parts” - a man and a woman, so that a new “car” is obtained. Marriage is a new living body, an interaction between husband and wife that is carried out in conscious interdependence and reasonable mutual subordination. He is not some kind of despotism in which the wife must submit to her husband or the husband must become the slave of his wife. On the other hand, marriage is not the kind of equality in which you can’t figure out who is right and who is wrong, who should listen to whom, when everyone insists on their own - and what next? Quarrels, reproaches, disagreements, and all this - whether for a long time or soon - often leads to a complete catastrophe: the breakup of the family. And what experiences, suffering and troubles this is accompanied by!

Yes, spouses should be equal. But equality and equal rights are completely different concepts, the confusion of which threatens disaster not only for the family, but also for any society. Thus, the general and the soldier as citizens are, of course, equal before the law, but they have different rights. If they have equal rights, the army will turn into a chaotic gathering, incapable of anything.

But what kind of equality is possible in a family so that, with complete equality of spouses, its integral unity is preserved? Orthodoxy offers the following answer to this vital important question.

Relations between family members, and primarily between spouses, should be built not according to a legal principle, but according to the principle of the body. Each family member is not a separate pea among others, but a living part of a single organism, in which, naturally, there should be harmony, but which is impossible where there is no order, where there is anarchy and chaos.

I would like to give one more image that helps reveal the Christian view of the relationship between spouses. A person has a mind and a heart. And just as the mind does not mean the brain, but the ability to think and decide, so the heart does not mean the organ that pumps blood, but the ability to feel, experience, and animate the entire body.

This image speaks well about the characteristics of male and female natures. A man really lives more with his head. “Ratio” is, as a rule, primary in his life. On the contrary, a woman is guided more by her heart and feeling. But just as the mind and heart are harmoniously and inextricably linked and both are necessary for a person to live, so in a family for its full and healthy existence it is absolutely necessary that the husband and wife do not oppose, but mutually complement each other, being, in essence, the mind and the heart of one body. Both “organs” are equally necessary for the entire “organism” of the family and should relate to each other according to the principle of not subordination, but complementarity. Otherwise there will be no normal family.

How can this image be applied to real life families? For example, spouses are arguing whether or not to buy certain things.

She: “I want them to be!”

He: “We can’t afford this now. We can do without them!”

Christ says man and woman are married no longer two, but one flesh(Matt. 19:6). Apostle Paul explains very clearly what this unity and integrity of the flesh means: If the leg says: I do not belong to the body because I am not a hand, then does it really not belong to the body? And if the ear says: I do not belong to the body, because I am not an eye, then does it really not belong to the body? The eye cannot tell the hand: I don’t need you; or also head to feet: I don’t need you. Therefore, if one member suffers, all members suffer with it; if one member is glorified, all members rejoice with it(1 Cor. 12, 15.16.21.26).

How do we treat our own body? The Apostle Paul writes: No one has ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and warms it(Eph. 5:29). Saint John Chrysostom says that a husband and wife are like hands and eyes. When your hand hurts, your eyes cry. When your eyes cry, your hands wipe away the tears.

Here it is worth remembering the commandment that was originally given to humanity and confirmed by Jesus Christ. When it comes to making a final decision and there is no mutual agreement, it requires that someone has the moral, conscience-based right to have the last word. And, naturally, it should be the voice of the mind. This commandment is justified by life itself. We know very well how sometimes you really want something, but the mind says: “This is impossible, this is dangerous, this is harmful.” And we, if we submit to reason, accept it. Likewise, the heart, says Christianity, must be controlled by the mind. It is clear what we are fundamentally talking about – ultimately, the priority of the husband’s voice.

But a mind without a heart is terrible. This is perfectly shown in the famous novel English writer Mary Shelley "Frankenstein". In it, the main character, Frankenstein, is depicted as a very intelligent creature, but without a heart - not an organ of the body, but a sense organ capable of love, showing mercy, sympathy, generosity, etc. Frankenstein is not a man, but a robot, an emotionless, dead stone.

However, the heart without the control of the mind inevitably turns life into chaos. One has only to imagine the freedom of uncontrolled inclinations, desires, feelings...

That is, the unity of husband and wife should be carried out according to the image of the interaction of the mind and heart in the human body. If the mind is healthy, it, like a barometer, accurately determines the direction of our inclinations: in some cases approving, in others rejecting, so as not to destroy the whole body. This is how we are made. Thus, the husband, who personifies the mind, must organize the life of the family (this is normal, but life makes its own adjustments when the husband behaves crazy).

But how should a husband treat his wife? Christianity points to a principle unknown before it: a wife is his body. How do you feel about your body? Nobody's own body normal people does not hit, does not cut, does not intentionally cause him suffering. This is a natural law of life called love. When we eat, drink, dress, heal, then for some reason we do it - of course, out of love for our body. And this is natural, this is the only way to live. It should be just as natural similar attitude husband to wife and wife to husband.

Yes, that's how it should be. But we remember very well the Russian proverb: “It was smooth on paper, but they forgot about the ravines and walked along them.” What kind of ravines are these, if we apply this proverb to our topic? Ravines are our passions. “I want, but I don’t want” - that’s all! And the end of love and reason!

What is the general picture of marriages and divorces in our time, everyone more or less knows. The statistics are not just sad, but difficult. The number of divorces is such that it already threatens the life of the nation. After all, family is a seed, a cell, it is the basis, the leaven public life. If it's not normal family life, then what will society turn into?!

Christianity draws a person's attention to the fact that the primary cause of marriage destruction is our passions. What does passion mean? What passions are we talking about? The word "passion" is ambiguous. Passion is suffering, but passion is also a feeling. This word can be used in both a positive and negative sense. After all, on the one hand, sublime love can also be called passion. On the other hand, the same word can be used to describe the ugliest vicious attraction.

Christianity calls on a person to ensure that the final decision on all issues is made by reason, and not by an unconscious feeling or attraction, that is, passion. And this confronts a person with the very difficult task of having to fight the spontaneous, passionate, egoistic side of his nature - in fact, with himself, because our passions, our sensual attractions are an essential part of our nature.

What can defeat them in order to become a solid foundation for the family? Everyone will probably agree that only love can be such a powerful force. But what is this, what are we talking about?

We can talk about several types of love. In relation to our topic, we will focus on two of them. One love is the same one that is constantly talked about in TV shows, books are written, films are made, etc. This is the mutual attraction of a man and a woman to each other, which can be called infatuation rather than love.

But even in this attraction itself there is a gradation - from the lowest to the highest point. This attraction can also take on a base, disgusting character, but it can also be a humanly sublime, bright, romantic feeling. However, even the brightest expression of this attraction is nothing more than a consequence of the innate instinct for the continuation of life, and it is inherent in all living things. Everywhere on earth, everything that flies, crawls, and runs has this instinct. Including a person. Yes, at the lower, animal level of his nature, man is also subject to this instinct. And it acts in a person without calling his mind. It is not the mind that is the source of mutual attraction between a man and a woman, but natural instinct. The mind can only partially control this attraction: either stop it with an effort of will, or give it the “green light”. But love, as a personal act conditioned by a volitional decision, is essentially not yet present in this attraction. This is an element independent of the mind and will, just like the feeling of hunger, cold, etc.

Romantic love - falling in love - can flare up unexpectedly and go out just as suddenly. Perhaps almost all people have experienced the feeling of falling in love, and many more than once - and remember how it flared up and faded away. It can be even worse: today love seems to last forever, and tomorrow there is already hatred for each other. It is correctly said that from love (from such love) to hatred is one step away. Instinct - and nothing more. And if a person, when creating a family, is driven only by him, if he does not come to the love that Christianity teaches about, then his family relationships are most likely in danger of a sad fate.

When you hear “Christianity teaches,” you should not think that we are talking about your own understanding of love in Christianity. Christianity in this issue did not come up with anything new, but only discovered what is the original norm of human life. Just as it was not Newton, for example, who created the law of universal gravitation. He just discovered, formulated and made it public - that’s all. Likewise, Christianity does not offer its own specific understanding of love, but reveals only what is inherent in man by his very nature. The commandments given by Christ are not legal laws invented by Him for people, but the natural laws of our life, distorted by the uncontrolled spontaneous life of man, and rediscovered so that we can lead right life and not harm yourself.

Christianity teaches that God is the source of everything that exists. In this sense, He is the primary Law of all Existence, and this Law is Love. Consequently, only by following this Law can man, created in the image of God, exist normally and have the fullness of all good.

But what kind of love are we talking about? Of course, it’s not at all about the love-in-love, love-passion that we hear about, read about, that we see on screens and tablets. But about the one about which the Gospel reports, and about which the holy fathers - these most experienced psychologists of humanity - have already written in detail.

They say that ordinary human love, as priest Pavel Florensky noted, is only “ selfishness in disguise“, that is, I love you exactly as long as you love me and give me pleasure, otherwise - goodbye. And everyone knows what egoism is. This is a human condition that requires constant pleasing to my “I”, its explicit and implicit demand: everything and everyone must serve me.

According to patristic teaching, ordinary human love, thanks to which marriage is concluded and a family is created, is only a faint shadow of true love. One that can revitalize a person’s entire life. But it is possible only on the path of overcoming one’s egoism and selfishness. This involves fighting slavery to one’s passions - envy, vanity, pride, impatience, irritation, condemnation, anger... Because any such sinful passion ultimately leads to cooling and destruction of love, since passions are illegal, unnatural, as the holy fathers put it, a condition for the human soul, destroying, crippling it, perverting its nature.

The love that Christianity speaks of is not an accidental, fleeting feeling that arises independently of a person, but a state acquired by conscious work on freeing oneself, one’s mind, heart and body from all spiritual dirt, that is, passions. The great saint of the 7th century, St. Isaac the Syrian, wrote: “ There is no way to be aroused in the soul by Divine love...if she has not overcome her passions. You said that your soul did not overcome passions and loved the love of God; and there is no order in this. Whoever says that he has not overcome passions and has loved the love of God, I don’t know what he is saying. But you will say: I did not say “I love,” but “I loved love.” And this does not take place if the soul has not achieved purity. If you want to say this just for the word, then you are not the only one saying it, but everyone is saying that they want to love God...And everyone pronounces this word as if it were his own, however, when pronouncing such words, only the tongue moves, but the soul does not feel what it is saying". This is one of the most important laws of human life.

A person has the prospect of achieving the greatest good for him and all those around him - true love. After all, even in the area of ​​ordinary human life there is nothing higher and more beautiful than love! This is all the more important when it comes to acquiring god-like love, which is acquired as you succeed in the fight against your passions. This can be compared to treating a crippled person. As one wound after another is healed, he becomes better, easier, and healthier. And when he recovers, there will be no greater joy for him. If physical recovery is such a great benefit for a person, then what can be said about the healing of his immortal soul!

But what, from a Christian point of view, is the task of marriage and family? St. John Chrysostom calls the Christian family small church . It is clear that the church in this case does not mean a temple, but an image of what the Apostle Paul wrote about: The Church is the body of Christ(Col. 1:24). What is the main task of the Church in our earthly conditions? The Church is not a resort, the Church is a hospital. That is, its primary task is to heal a person from passionate illnesses and sinful wounds that afflict all of humanity. Heal, not just comfort.

But many people, not understanding this, seek in the Church not healing, but only consolation in your sorrows. However, the Church is a hospital that has at its disposal the necessary medicines for a person’s spiritual wounds, and not just painkillers that provide temporary relief, but do not heal, but leave the disease in full force. This is what distinguishes it from any psychotherapy and all similar means.

And so, for the vast majority of people, the best means or, one might say, the best hospital for healing the soul is the family. In a family, two “egos”, two “I” come into contact, and when children grow up, there are no longer two, but three, four, five - and each with their own passions, sinful inclinations, selfishness. In this situation, a person faces the greatest and most difficult task - to see his passions, his ego and the difficulties of defeating them. This feat of family life, when looked at correctly and careful attention to what happens in the soul not only humbles a person, but also makes him generous, tolerant, and condescending towards other family members, which brings real benefit to everyone not only in this life, but also in the eternal one.

After all, while we live in peace from family problems and worries, without the need to daily build relationships with other family members, it is not so easy to discern your passions - they seem to be hidden somewhere. In a family, there is constant contact with each other, passions manifest themselves, one might say, every minute, so it is not difficult to see who we really are, what lives in us: irritation, condemnation, laziness, and selfishness. Therefore, for a reasonable person, a family can become a real hospital, in which our spiritual and mental illnesses are revealed, and, with an evangelical attitude towards them, a real healing process. From a proud, self-praising, lazy person, a Christian gradually grows, not by name, but by state, who begins to see himself, his spiritual illnesses, passions and humbles himself before God - becomes a normal person. Without a family, it is more difficult to reach this state, especially when a person lives alone and no one touches his passions. It is very easy for him to see himself as a completely good, decent person, a Christian.

The family, with a correct, Christian view of oneself, allows a person to see that it is as if his entire nerves are exposed: no matter which side you touch, there is pain. The family gives the person an accurate diagnosis. And then - whether to undergo treatment or not - he must decide for himself. After all, the worst thing is when the patient does not see the disease or does not want to admit that he is seriously ill. The family reveals our illnesses.

We all say: Christ suffered for us and thereby saved each of us, He is our Savior. But in reality, few people feel this and feel the need for salvation. In the family, as a person begins to see his passions, it is revealed to him that, first of all, it is he who needs the Savior, and not his relatives or neighbors. This is the beginning of solving the most important task in life - acquiring true love. A person who sees how he constantly stumbles and falls begins to understand that he cannot correct himself without God’s help.

It seems that I’m trying to improve, I want this, and I already understand that if you don’t fight your passions, then what will life turn into! But with all my attempts to become cleaner, I see that every attempt ends in failure. Then I only begin to truly realize that I need help. And, as a believer, I turn to Christ. And as I realize my weakness, as I become humble and turn to God in prayer, I begin to gradually see how He really helps me. Realizing this no longer in theory, but in practice, through my very life, I begin to know Christ, turn to Him for help with even more sincere prayer, not about various earthly matters, but about healing the soul from passions: “Lord, forgive me and help me I can’t heal myself, I can’t heal myself.”

The experience of not one person, not a hundred, not a thousand, but a huge number of Christians has shown that sincere repentance, coupled with forcing oneself to fulfill the commandments of Christ, leads to self-knowledge, the inability to eradicate passions and cleanse oneself from constantly arising sins. This awareness in the language of Orthodox asceticism is called humility. And only with humility does the Lord help a person to free himself from passions and acquire what is real love for everyone, and not a fleeting feeling for some individual person.

Family in this regard is a blessing for a person. In the context of family life, it is much easier for most people to come to self-knowledge, which becomes the basis for a sincere appeal to Christ the Savior. Having acquired humility through self-knowledge and prayerful appeal to Him, a person thereby finds peace in his soul. This peaceful state of mind cannot help but spread outward. Then a lasting peace can arise in the family, in which the family can live. Only on this path does the family become a small church, becomes a hospital that supplies medicines that ultimately lead to the highest good - both earthly and heavenly: firm, ineradicable love.

But, of course, this is not always achieved. Often family life becomes unbearable, and for a believer an important question arises: under what conditions will divorce not become a sin?

In the Church there are corresponding church canons, which regulate marital relations and, in particular, talk about the reasons for which divorce is allowed. There are a number of topics on this issue church rules and documents. The last of them, adopted at the Council of Bishops in 2000 under the title “Fundamentals of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church,” provides a list of acceptable reasons for divorce.

“In 1918, the Local Council of the Russian Church, in its definition of the reasons for the dissolution of a marriage union sanctified by the Church, recognized as such, in addition to adultery and the entry of one of the parties into a new marriage, also the following:

Unnatural vices [I leave without comment];

Inability to cohabitate in marriage, occurring before marriage or resulting from intentional self-mutilation;

Leprosy or syphilis;

Long unknown absence;

Condemnation to punishment coupled with deprivation of all rights of the estate;

Encroachment on the life or health of the spouse or children [and, of course, not only the spouse, but also the spouse];

Snitching or pimping;

Taking advantage of a spouse's indecencies;

Incurable serious mental illness;

Malicious abandonment of one spouse by another.”

In the “Fundamentals of the Social Concept,” this list is supplemented by such reasons as AIDS, medically certified chronic alcoholism or drug addiction, and a wife committing an abortion with her husband’s disagreement.

However, all these grounds for divorce cannot be considered as necessary requirements. They are only an assumption, an opportunity for divorce, but the final decision always remains with the person himself.

What are the possibilities of marrying a person of a different faith or even a non-believer? In the “Fundamentals of the Social Concept,” such a marriage, although not recommended, is not unconditionally prohibited. Such a marriage is legal, since the commandment about marriage was given by God from the beginning, from the very creation of man, and marriage has always existed and exists in all peoples, regardless of their religious affiliation. However, such a marriage cannot be sanctified by the Orthodox Church in the sacrament of Wedding.

What does the non-Christian lose in this case? And what does a church marriage give a person? You can give the simplest example. Here are two couples getting married and getting apartments. But some of them are offered all kinds of help in settling down, while others are told: “Sorry, we offered you, but you didn’t believe it and refused...”.

Therefore, although any marriage, but, of course, not the so-called civil marriage, is legal, only believers in the sacrament of Wedding are given the grace-filled gift of help in living together as Christians, raising children, and establishing a family as a small church.

Isaac the Syrian, St. Ascetic words. M. 1858. Sl. 55.

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 on 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 both for one’s own salvation and an indispensable condition for a full life as 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, because New Testament brought those dramatic changes into all spheres of human existence, designated as a new stage 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 precisely 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 necessary condition full-fledged family relationships, on children as a blessing, and not as a burden, and on 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 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. Neither in our relationships with each other, nor in what can be seen in this house: on the walls, on bookshelves, in dark corners, nor in what is shyly hidden from people and that 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 everyone should strive for. Orthodox family.

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 you can remember 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 take care of 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 outside world and whether 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 it is the most dear person, is not good for 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. It will be a deed, a duty of love, and sometimes a feat of love to listen, hear and accept the sorrows, disorder, confusion, and tossing of our neighbors (in evangelical sense this 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?

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, consider this an indispensable requirement and, say, to my young husband There is no reason to encourage your wife to leave her confessor so that she now goes 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're talking about about the relationship between a spiritual child and a confessor, that is, if the child himself, or even at the prompting of loved ones, decided to resolve this or that issue with the blessing of the spiritual father, then, regardless of what the initial motives of the parents and grandparents were, with this blessing, certainly, and should be guided by. It’s another matter if the conversation about making a decision came up in a conversation general: let’s say the priest expressed his negative attitude either towards ballet as a form of art in general or, in particular, towards the fact that this particular child should study ballet, in this case there is still some area for discussion, first of all, by the parents themselves and for clarifying those with the priest motives 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 more opportunity certain temptations when we achieve 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? Isn’t there a 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.

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 under men's clothing Since we primarily understand 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.

18. Why does a woman pray with her head uncovered in front of home icons, but wear a headscarf to church?

A woman should wear a headscarf to a church meeting in accordance with the instructions of the Holy Apostle Paul. And it is always better to listen to the apostle than not to listen, just as in general it is always better to act in accordance with the Holy Scriptures than to decide that we are so free and will not act according to the letter. In any case, the headscarf is one of the forms of concealing external female attractiveness during worship. After all, hair is one of the most noticeable adornments of a woman. And a scarf covering them, so as not to make your hair shine too much in the rays of the sun peeping through the church windows and not to straighten them every time you bow to “Lord, have mercy,” will be a good deed. So why not do this?

19. But why is a headscarf optional for female choir singers?

Normally, they should also wear scarves on their heads during the service. But it also happens, although this situation is absolutely abnormal, that some of the singers in the choir are mercenaries who work only for money. Well, should we make demands on them that are understandable to believers? And other singers begin their path of churching from an external stay in the choir to an internal acceptance of church life and for a long time follow their own path until the moment when they consciously cover their heads with a scarf. And if the priest sees that they are going their own way, then it is better to wait until they consciously do this than to order them by threatening to reduce their salaries.

20. What is the consecration of a house?

The rite of consecrating a home is one of many other similar rites that are contained in the liturgical book called the Trebnik. And the main meaning of the whole set of these church officials consists in the fact that everything in this life that is not sinful allows for the sanctification of God, since everything earthly that is not sinful is not alien to Heaven. And by consecrating this or that, on the one hand, we testify to our faith, and on the other, we call on God’s help and blessing for the course of our earthly life, even in its very practical manifestations.

If we talk about the rite of consecration of the home, then although it also contains a petition to protect us from the spirits of evil in heaven, from all sorts of troubles and misfortunes coming from outside, from various kinds of disorder, its main spiritual content is testified by the Gospel, which is read at this time . This Gospel from Luke is about the meeting of the Savior and the chief tax collector Zacchaeus, who, in order to see the Son of God, climbed a fig tree, “because he was small in stature” (Luke 19:3). Imagine the extraordinary nature of this action: for example, Kasyanov climbing a lamppost to look at the Ecumenical Patriarch, since the degree of decisiveness of Zacchaeus’s action was exactly that. The Savior, seeing such boldness that went beyond the scope of Zacchaeus’s existence, visited his home. Zacchaeus, amazed by what happened, confessed his untruth in the face of the Son of God, as a fiscal tax chief, and said: "God! I will give half of my property to the poor, and if I have offended anyone, I will repay him fourfold. Jesus said to him, “Now salvation has come to this house...”(Luke 19:8–9), after which Zacchaeus became one of Christ’s disciples.

By performing the rite of consecration of the home and reading this passage from the Gospel, we thereby first of all testify in the face of the truth of God that we will strive so that in our house there is nothing that would prevent the Savior, the Light of God, from entering it just as clearly and It is palpable how Jesus Christ entered the house of Zacchaeus. This applies to both external and internal: there should not be unclean and nasty pictures or pagan idols in the house of an Orthodox person; it is not appropriate to store all kinds of books in it, unless you are professionally engaged in refuting certain misconceptions. When preparing for the rite of consecration of a home, it is worth thinking about what you would be ashamed of, why you would sink through the earth in shame if Christ the Savior were standing here. After all, in essence, by performing the rite of consecration, which connects the earthly with the Heavenly, you invite God to your home, into your life. Moreover, this should concern the internal being of the family - now in this house you should strive to live in such a way that in your conscience, in your relationships with each other, there is nothing that would prevent you from saying: “Christ is in our midst.” And testifying to this determination, calling on God’s blessing, you ask for support from above. But this support and blessing will only come when the desire matures in your soul not only to perform the prescribed ritual, but to perceive it as a meeting with the truth of God.

21. What if the husband or wife does not want to consecrate the house?

There is no need to do this with a scandal. But if it were possible for Orthodox family members to pray for those who are still unbelievers and non-church members, and this would not cause any particular temptation for the latter, then it would be better, of course, to perform the rite.

22. What should church holidays be like in the house and how to create a festive spirit in it?

What is most important here is the correlation of the very cycle of family life with the church liturgical year and the conscious urge to build the way of life of the whole family in accordance with what is happening in the Church. Therefore, even if you participate in the church blessing of apples on the Feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord, but at home on this day you again have muesli for breakfast and chop for dinner, if during Lent a lot of birthdays of relatives are celebrated quite actively, and you still haven’t learned to refrain from such situations and get out of them without losses, then, of course, this gap will arise.

Transferring church joy into the house can begin with the simplest things - from decorating it with willows for the Entry of the Lord into Jerusalem and flowers for Easter to burning on Sundays and holidays lamps. At the same time, it would be better not to forget to change the color of the lamp - red to blue during Lent and green for the Feast of the Trinity or the Feast of the Saints. Children joyfully and easily remember such things and perceive them with their souls. You can remember the same “Summer of the Lord”, with what feeling little Seryozha walked with his father and lit lamps, and at the same time his father sang “May God rise again and His enemies be scattered...” and other church hymns - and how it fell on the heart . You can remember that they used to bake on the Sunday of the Triumph of Orthodoxy, on the occasion of the Forty Martyrs, because the festive table is also part of the Orthodox life of the family. Remember that on holidays they not only dressed differently than on weekdays, but that, say, a pious mother went to church on the Nativity of the Virgin Mary in a blue dress, and thus her children did not need to explain anything else what color the Virgin Mary is, when they saw in the priest's vestments, in the veils on the lecterns, the same festive color as at home. The closer we ourselves try to correlate what is happening at home, in our small Church, with what is happening in the large Church, the smaller the gap between them will be in our consciousness and in the consciousness of our children.

23. What does comfort in the home mean from a Christian point of view?

The community of church people is mainly divided into two numerically, and sometimes qualitatively, different categories. Some are those who leave everything in this world: families, homes, splendor, prosperity and follow Christ the Savior, others are those who, throughout centuries of church life in their homes, accept those who walk the narrow and harsh path of self-denial, starting with Christ himself and His students. These houses are warmed by the warmth of the soul, the warmth of the prayer that is performed in them, these houses are beautiful and full of cleanliness, they lack pretentiousness and luxury, but they remind us that if the family is a small Church, then the abode of the family - the house - should also to be in a certain sense, albeit a very distant one, but a reflection of the earthly Church, just as it is a reflection of the Heavenly Church. The house should also have beauty and proportionality. The aesthetic feeling is natural, it is from God, and must find its expression. And when this is present in the life of a Christian family, it can only be welcomed. Another thing is that not everyone and does not always feel this is necessary, which also needs to be understood. I know families of church people who live without really thinking about what kind of tables and chairs they have, and even whether they are completely tidy and whether the floor is clean. And for several years now, leaks in the ceiling have not deprived their home of warmth and have not made it less attractive for relatives and friends who are drawn to this hearth. So, striving for reasonable appearance of the external, we will still remember that for a Christian the main thing is internal, and where there is warmth of the soul, crumbling whitewash will not spoil anything. And where it’s not there, even hang Dionysius’ frescoes on the wall, it won’t make the house any cozier or warmer.

24. What is behind such extreme Russophilia at the everyday level, when the husband walks around the house in a canvas blouse and almost bast shoes, the wife in a sundress and a headscarf, and on the table there is nothing other than kvass and sauerkraut?

Sometimes it’s a game for the audience. But if someone enjoys walking around at home in an old Russian sundress, and someone feels more comfortable wearing tarpaulin boots or even bast shoes than synthetic slippers, and this is not done for show, then what can you say? It is always better to use what has been tested for centuries and, all the more, sanctified by everyday tradition, than to go to some revolutionary extremes. However, this becomes truly bad if there is a desire to indicate some ideological direction in one’s life. And just like any introduction of the ideological into the sphere of the spiritual and religious, it turns into falsehood, insincerity and, ultimately, spiritual defeat.

Although I personally have never seen the sacralization of everyday life to such an extent in any Orthodox family. Therefore, purely speculatively, I can imagine something like this, but it is difficult to judge something with which I am unfamiliar.

25. Is it possible even when a child is quite old enough to guide, for example, the choice of books for him to read, so that in the future he does not have any ideological distortions?

In order to be able to guide children’s reading even at a fairly late age, it is necessary, firstly, to start this reading with them very early, and secondly, parents must read for themselves, which children certainly appreciate, thirdly, from a certain age, there should be no prohibition on reading what you yourself read, and thus there should be no difference between books for children and books for adults, just as there should not be, unfortunately, a very common discrepancy between children reading classical literature, encouraged to do so by their parents, and their own devouring of detective stories and all sorts of cheap waste paper: they say, our work requires a lot of intellectual effort, so at home you can allow yourself to relax. But only wholehearted efforts produce significant results.

You need to start with reading at the crib as soon as children begin to perceive it. From Russian fairy tales and Lives of Saints, translated for the little ones, to reading one or another version of the children's Bible, although it is much better for a mother or father to retell the Gospel stories and parables in their own words, in their own living language and in a way that their own child can understand them better. And it’s good that this skill of reading together before bed or in some other situations is preserved for as long as possible - even when children already know how to read on their own. Parents reading aloud to their children every evening, or whenever possible, are the best way to instill in them a love of reading.

In addition, the reading circle is quite well formed by the library that is at home. If there is something in it that can be offered to children, and there is nothing that needs to be hidden from them, which, in theory, should not exist at all in the family of Orthodox Christians, then the children’s reading circle will form naturally. Well, for example, why, how is it still preserved in other families according to the old practice, when books were difficult to access, to store a certain amount literary works, which, perhaps, are not at all beneficial to read? Well, what is the immediate benefit for children from reading Zola, Stendhal, Balzac, or “The Decameron” by Boccaccio, or “ Dangerous Liaisons"Charles de Laclos and the like? Even if they were once obtained for a sacrificial kilogram of waste paper, it’s really better to get rid of them, after all, a pious father of a family won’t suddenly re-read “The Splendor and Poverty of Courtesans” in his spare time? And if in his youth this seemed to him literature worthy of attention, or if, out of necessity, he studied it according to the program of one or another humanitarian institute, today one must have the courage to get rid of all this burden and leave at home only what one is not ashamed to read, and, accordingly, one can offer to children. In this way, they will naturally develop a literary taste, as well as a broader artistic taste, which will determine the style of clothing, the interior of the apartment, and the painting on the walls of the house, which is, of course, important for an Orthodox Christian. For taste is an inoculation against vulgarity in all its forms. After all, vulgarity comes from the evil one, since he is a vulgarity. Therefore, for a person with educated taste, the machinations of the evil one are at least in some respects safe. He simply won’t be able to pick up some books. And not even because they are bad in content, but because a person with taste cannot read such literature.

26. But what is bad taste, including in home interiors, if vulgarity is from the evil one?

Vulgar, probably, can be called two converging, and in some ways intersecting, scopes of concepts: on the one hand, vulgar is obviously bad, low, appealing to that in a person that we call “below the belt” both literally and figuratively sense of the word. On the other hand, something that apparently claims internal merit, serious ethical or aesthetic content, in fact, absolutely does not correspond to these claims and leads to a result opposite to that which externally declared. And in this sense, there is a merging of that low vulgarity, which directly calls a person to his animal nature, with vulgarity, as if beautiful, but in fact sending him back there.

Today there is church kitsch, or rather para-church kitsch, which in some of its manifestations can become such. I don't mean the humble paper Sofrino icons. Some of them, almost painted by hand in some exotic way and sold in the 60–70s and at the very beginning of the 80s, are infinitely expensive for those who had them then as the only ones available. And although the extent of their inconsistency with the Prototype is obvious, nevertheless, in them there is no repulsion from the Prototype Itself. Here, rather, there is a huge distance, but not a perversion of the goal, which occurs in the case of outright vulgarity. I mean a whole set of church crafts, for example, the Cross of the Lord with rays diverging from the center in the style in which Soviet time the prisoners made finks. Or pendants with a cross inside the heart and similar kitsch. Of course, we are more likely to see these “works” from parachurch producers than from the actual Orthodox churches, but nevertheless they penetrate here too. For example, His Holiness Patriarch Alexy I said many decades ago that there should be no artificial flowers in the church, but they can still be seen near icons today. Although this reflects another property of vulgarity, which the patriarch, without using this word itself, mentioned when he explained why there should not be artificial flowers: because they say something about themselves that is not what they are, they lie. Being a piece of plastic or paper, they appear to be alive and real, in general, not what they really are. Therefore, even modern plants and flowers, which so successfully imitate natural ones, are inappropriate in the church. After all, this is a deception that should not exist here at any level. It's a different matter in the office, where it will look completely different. So it all depends on the place in which this or that item is used. Even banal things: after all, clothing that is natural on vacation will be blatantly unacceptable if a person comes to church wearing it. And if he allows himself to do this, then in a sense it will be vulgar, because in an open top and a short skirt it is appropriate to be on the beach, but not on church service. This general principle attitude towards the very concept of vulgarity can also be applied to the interior of the home, especially if the definition of family as a small Church is not just words for us, but a guide to life.

27. Do you need to react somehow if your child is given an icon bought in the subway or even in a church shop, in front of which it is difficult to pray because of its pseudo-beauty and sugary glossiness?

We often judge by ourselves, but we must also proceed from the fact that a huge number of people in our Russian Orthodox Church were raised aesthetically differently and have different taste preferences. I know an example and I think that it is not the only one, when in one rural church the priest, who replaced the iconostasis, which was blatantly tasteless from the point of view of the categories of even an elementary artistic style, with a very canonical one, painted under Dionysius by famous Moscow icon painters, caused real righteous anger in the parish, consisting of grandmothers, as is mostly the case in villages today. Why did he remove our Savior, why did the Mother of God exchange and hang these, I don’t understand who? - and then all sorts of abusive terms were used to designate these icons - in general, all this was completely alien to them, before which it was in no way possible to pray. But it must be said that the priest gradually coped with this old woman’s rebellion and thereby acquired some serious experience in dealing with vulgarity as such.

And with your family, you should try to follow the path of gradual re-education of taste. Of course, the icons of the canonical ancient style are more consistent with church faith and, in this sense, church tradition than counterfeits academic painting or under a letter from Nesterov and Vasnetsov. But to follow the path of returning both our small and our entire Church to ancient icon need to be slow and steady. And, of course, we need to start this path in the family, so that at home our children are raised on icons, canonically painted and correctly located, that is, so that the red corner is not a nook between cabinets, paintings, dishes and souvenirs, which is not immediately visible. So that children can see that the red corner is what is most important for everyone in the house, and not something that they should be ashamed of in front of other people coming into the house and it is better not to show it again.

28. Should there be many icons at home or few?

You can reverence one icon, or you can have an iconostasis. The main thing is that we pray in front of all these icons and that the quantitative multiplication of icons should not come from a superstitious desire to have as much holiness as possible, but because we honor these saints and want to pray to them. If you pray in front of one single icon, then it should be an icon like that of Deacon Achilles in the “Councils”, which would be the light in the house.

29. If a believing husband objects to his wife setting up an iconostasis at home, despite the fact that she prays to all these icons, should she remove them?

Well, there probably has to be some kind of compromise here, because, as a rule, one of the rooms is the one where people mostly pray, and, probably, there should still be as many icons in it as it's better that way who prays more, or to those who need it. Well, in the remaining rooms, everything should probably be arranged in accordance with the wishes of the other spouse.

30. What does a wife mean to a priest?

No less than for any other Christian person. And in a sense, even more, because although monogamy is the norm of every Christian life, the only place where it is absolutely realized is in the life of a priest, who knows for sure that he has only one wife and must live in such a way that forever they were together, and who will always remember how much she gives up for him. And therefore, he will try to treat his wife, his mother, with love, pity and understanding of her certain weaknesses. Of course, there are special temptations, enticements and difficulties on the path of the married life of clergy, and perhaps the greatest difficulty is that, unlike another full, deep, Christian family, here the husband will always have a huge area of ​​​​counseling, absolutely hidden from his wife, whom she should not even try to touch. We are talking about the relationship between a priest and his spiritual children. And even those of them with whom the whole family communicates at the everyday level or at the level of friendly relations. But the wife knows that she should not cross a certain threshold in communication with them, and the husband knows that he has no right, even by hint, to show her what he knows from the confession of his spiritual children. And this is very difficult, first of all for her, but it is not easy for the family as a whole. And here a special measure of tact is required from each clergyman so as not to push away, not to rudely interrupt the conversation, but also not to allow either direct or indirect transition of natural marital frankness into areas that have no place in their common life. And perhaps this is the biggest problem that every priestly family always solves throughout their entire married life.

31. Can a priest's wife work?

I would say yes if, all other things being equal, it does not harm the family. If this is a job that gives the wife enough strength and internal energy to be an assistant to her husband, to be a teacher of children, to be a keeper of the hearth. But she has no right to put her most creative, most interesting work above the interests of her family, which should be the main thing in her life.

32. Is having many children a mandatory norm for priests?

Of course, there are canonical and ethical norms that require a priest to be more demanding of himself and his family life. Although nowhere is it said that a simple Orthodox Christian and a church cleric should differ in some way as family men, except for the unconditional monogamy of the priest. In any case, the priest has one wife, and in everything else there are no special rules, there are no separate instructions.

33. Is it good for worldly believers to have many children in our time?

Psychologically, I cannot imagine how in a normal Orthodox family, whether in old times or in new ones, there can be attitudes that are non-religious in their inner essence: we will have one child, because we will not feed any more, we will not give a proper education. Or: let's live for each other while we're young. Or: we’ll travel around the world, and when we’re over thirty, we’ll think about having children. Or: the wife does successful career, she must first defend her dissertation and get a good position... In all these calculations of her economic, social, and physical capabilities taken from magazines in shiny covers, there is an obvious lack of faith in God.

It seems to me that in any case, the attitude towards abstaining from childbearing in the first years of marriage, even if it is expressed only in calculating the days on which conception cannot occur, is detrimental to the family.

In general, you cannot look at married life as a way of giving yourself pleasure, no matter carnal, physical, intellectual-aesthetic or mental-emotional. The desire in this life to receive only pleasures, as described in the Gospel parable of the rich man and Lazarus, is a path that is morally unacceptable for an Orthodox Christian. Therefore, let every young family soberly evaluate what guides it when refraining from having a child. But in any case, it is not good to begin your life together with a long period of life without a child. There are families who want children, but the Lord does not send them, then we must accept this will of God. However, to begin family life by postponing for an unknown period what makes it complete is to immediately introduce some serious defect into it, which then, like a time bomb, can go off and cause very serious consequences.

34. How many children should there be in a family so that it can be called large?

Three or four children in an Orthodox Christian family is probably the lower limit. Six or seven is already a large family. Four or five are still an ordinary normal family of Russian Orthodox people. Is it possible to say that the Tsar-Martyr and Tsarina Alexandra are parents of many children and are heavenly patrons? large families? No, i guess. When there are four or five children, we perceive this as a normal family, and not as some special parental feat.

1. What does it mean – family as a small Church?

The words of the Apostle Paul about the family as a "home Church"(Rom. 16:4), it is 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 Saint John Chrysostom said: “Marriage is a mysterious image of the Church”. What does it mean?

Firstly, the words of Christ the Savior are fulfilled in the life of the family: “...Where two or three are gathered in My name, there I am in the midst of them.”(Matt. 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, in the family a law is inevitably implemented, which, by the very structure, 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 on 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 precisely 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 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 you can remember the words of the Apostle Paul: “...As long as we have time, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of our own in the 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 you understand the above English saying "My home is my castle" in the Christian sense, this means that I am responsible for the structure of my home, for the structure in it, for relationships within the family. And I not only take care of 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?

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 begins 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: "Bless and save",– we must believe that the Lord will fulfill what we ask. If we say to the Blessed Virgin Mary: “There are no other imams of help, no other imams of hope, except for You,” then we really have this help and hope, and 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 in "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.

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 applied literally to the corresponding verses of Deuteronomy, but let us also remember the words of the Apostle Paul: “...If food causes my brother to stumble, I will never eat meat, lest I cause my brother to stumble.”

A new conversation with Schema-Archimandrite Iliy (Nozdrin), aired on the Soyuz TV channel, is dedicated to the family.

Nun Agrippina: Good afternoon, dear TV viewers, we continue our conversations with Schema-Archimandrite Eli about life, about eternity, about the soul. The topic of today's conversation is family.

– Father, the family is called “Little Church”. In your opinion, is there a contradiction between public and family education these days?

In the first centuries of Christianity, the family was a small church in its entirety. This is clearly visible in the life of St. Basil the Great, his brother Gregory of Nyssa, sister Macrina - they are all saints. Both father Vasily and mother Emilia are saints... Gregory of Nyssa, brother of Basil the Great, mentions that their family held services and prayers to the 40 martyrs of Sebaste.

Ancient writings also mention the prayer “Quiet Light” - during the service, during its reading, light was brought. This was done in secret because the pagan world was persecuting Christians. But when the candle was brought in, “Quiet Light” symbolized the joy and light that Christ gave to the whole world. This service was performed in the secret circle of the family. Therefore, we can say that a family in those centuries was literally a small church: when they live peacefully, amicably, prayerfully, evening and morning prayers are performed together.

– Father, the main task of a family is raising a child, raising children. How to teach a child to distinguish between good and evil?

– This is not all given at once, but is developed gradually. Firstly, moral and religious feelings are initially embedded in the human soul. But here, of course, parental education also plays a role, when a person is protected from bad deeds so that bad things do not take root and are not absorbed by the growing child. If he did something shameful or unpleasant, his parents find words that can reveal to him the true nature of the offense. The vice must be eliminated immediately so that it does not take root.

The most necessary thing is to raise children according to God's laws. Instill in them the fear of God. I couldn't formerly man allow some dirty tricks, dirty words in front of people, in front of parents! Now everything is different.

- Tell me, father, howRightcelebrate Orthodox holidays?

– First of all, a person goes to worship on a holiday and confesses his sins in confession. We are all called to attend the liturgy, to receive the holy gifts of the sacrament of the Eucharist. As N.V. once wrote. Gogol, a man who has attended the liturgy, recharges himself, restores lost strength, becomes a little different in spiritually. Therefore, a holiday is not only when the body feels good. A holiday is when the heart is happy. The main thing in the holiday is that a person gains peace, joy, and grace from God.

– Father, the holy fathers say that fasting and prayer are like two wings. How should a Christian fast?

– The Lord himself fasted for 40 days while he was in the Judean desert. Fasting is nothing more than our appeal to humility, to patience, which a person initially lost through intemperance and disobedience. But the severity of fasting is not unconditional for everyone: fasting is for those who can withstand it. After all, it helps us in acquiring patience and should not harm a person. Most fasters say that fasting has only strengthened them, physically and spiritually.

– Airtime is coming to an end. Father, I would like to hear your wishes to TV viewers.

– We must value ourselves. For what? So that we can learn to appreciate others, so that we don’t suddenly inadvertently offend our neighbor, don’t offend him, don’t offend him, or spoil his mood. For example, when an ill-mannered, selfish person gets drunk, not only does he not take into account his needs, he ruins the peace in the family and brings grief to his relatives. And if he thought about his own good, it would be good for those around him.

We, as an Orthodox people, are endowed with great happiness - faith is open to us. For ten centuries Russia has believed. We have been given our precious Christian faith, which shows us the true path of life. In Christ, man acquires a solid stone and unshakable foundations for his salvation. Our Orthodox faith contains everything that is necessary for the future eternal life. The immutable truth is that the transition to another world is inevitable and that the continuation of life awaits us. And this makes us Orthodox happy.

Living by faith is the key to a normal lifestyle both for our family and for all the people around us. By believing, we acquire the main guarantee for moral actions, the main incentive for work. This is our happiness - the acquisition of eternal life, which the Lord himself indicated to those who followed Him.

Frankly, it's hard to know where to start because this topic has many ramifications. I might begin by mentioning how other churches view this issue. In the Catholic Church, for example, artificial birth control is prohibited under all circumstances. This is because, according to the official teaching of the Catholic Church, the primary cause and function of marriage is children; thus, procreation is the main reason for sexual intercourse. This doctrine is rooted in the Augustinian tradition, which regards sexual intercourse, even intramarital, as something inherently sinful, and therefore procreation is presented as a necessary justification for marriage, because serves to fulfill God's command to be fruitful and multiply. In Old Testament times there was indeed a legitimate concern for the preservation of the human race. Today, this argument is unconvincing and therefore many Catholics feel entitled to ignore it.

Protestants, on the other hand, never developed a clear doctrine about marriage and sex. Nowhere in the Bible does the Bible specifically mention birth control, so when birth control and other reproductive technologies were introduced in the early 1960s, they were hailed by Protestants as milestones in human progress. Very quickly, sex guides proliferated, developed on the basis that God gave man sexuality for his pleasure. The main purpose of marriage became not procreation, but entertainment - an approach that only strengthened the Protestant teaching that God wants to see a person satisfied and happy, in other words - sexually satisfied. Even abortion has become acceptable. It wasn't until the mid-1970s, when the debate around Roe v. Wade and it became increasingly clear that abortion was murder, evangelical Protestants began to rethink their positions. In the late 1970s they joined the pro-life cause, where they remain at the forefront to this day. It was the issue of abortion that made them realize that human life must be protected from the moment of conception, and that contraception through various abortion-inducing means is unacceptable. Meanwhile, liberal Protestant churches remain pro-abortion and place no restrictions on birth control.

It is very important for us to be aware of the teachings of these other churches in the area of ​​sexuality because... they can involuntarily affect our own views. Moreover, we must be aware of the obsessive influence of the so-called existing in our society. sexual revolution, due to the easy availability of contraceptives. The cheeky views she encouraged persist to this day. Given our culture's obsession with sex and sexual gratification, it is important that we clearly understand our Church's teaching in this area. This teaching is based on Scripture, on the canons of various ecumenical and local councils, on the writings and interpretations of various Holy Fathers of the Church, who do not at all pass over this issue in silence, but write about it very openly and in detail; and finally, this teaching is reflected in the lives of many saints (the parents of St. Sergius of Radonezh come to mind).

The specific issue of birth control is not easily accessible; it cannot be looked up in any alphabetical index or index. However, it can be deduced from the very clear teaching of the Church on abortion, on marriage, on asceticism. Before delving into this subject, it should be noted that the Orthodox Church is not as rigidly dogmatic as the Catholic Church, and that for Orthodoxy this issue is primarily a pastoral one, in which many considerations may come into play. However, freedom should not be used for abuse, and it would be very useful for us to keep before our eyes the original standard that was given to us by the Church.

With all this in mind, let's look at what exactly is the Church's teaching on birth control?

The practice of artificial control of fertilization – i.e. pills and other contraceptives are, in fact, strictly condemned by the Orthodox Church. The Greek Church, for example, in 1937 issued a special encyclical specifically for this purpose - to condemn birth control. In the same way, the other two Churches - the Russian and the Romanian - often spoke out against this practice in former times. And only in modern times, only among the generation that grew up after the Second World War, some local churches(as, for example, the Greek archbishopric in America) began to teach that birth control could be acceptable in some cases, as long as the matter had been discussed with the priest in advance and his permission had been obtained.

The teaching of the Orthodox churches should not, however, be identified with the teaching that we see in the Catholic Church. The Roman Church has always taught and continues to teach that the main function of marriage is procreation. This position does not correspond to the teachings of the Orthodox Church. Orthodoxy, on the contrary, places first the spiritual goal of marriage - the mutual salvation of husband and wife. Each must help the other and encourage the other to save his soul. Each exists for the other as a comrade, assistant, friend. And already in second place are children as a natural result of marriage, and until recently they were the expected and highly desirable result of marriage. Children were seen as the fruit of the marriage union, as proof that husband and wife had become one flesh, and therefore children were always considered a great blessing to marriage.

Nowadays, of course, our society considers children more of a nuisance than a blessing, and many couples wait a year, two, three or more before having children. Some decide not to even have children at all. So, although in the Orthodox Church procreation is not the main purpose of marriage, the intention of many newlyweds to wait to have children is considered sinful. As a priest, I must tell all couples who come to me to get married that if they are not ready and do not agree to conceive and have a child without violating the will of God by using artificial contraceptives, then they are not ready to get married. If they are not ready to accept the natural and blessed fruit of their union - i.e. child - then it is clear that their main purpose for the wedding is legalized fornication. Today this is a very serious problem, perhaps the most serious and most difficult that a priest must deal with when talking to a young couple.

I use the term “artificial” birth control because I must point out that the Church allows the use of some natural methods to avoid conception, but these methods cannot be used without the knowledge and blessing of the priest, and only if the physical and moral well-being of the family requires it. Under the right circumstances, these methods are acceptable to the Church and can be used by spouses without burdening their conscience, because they are “ascetic” methods, i.e. consist of self-denial and self-control. There are three such ways:

1. Complete abstinence. Contrary to expectation, in very pious families this phenomenon is quite common, both in the past and in the present. It often happens that after an Orthodox husband and wife have produced a number of children, they agree to abstain from each other, both for spiritual and temporal reasons, spending the rest of their days in peace and harmony as brother and sister. This phenomenon occurred in the lives of saints - in this regard, the life of St. right John of Kronstadt. As a Church that greatly loves and defends the monastic life, we Orthodox are not afraid of celibacy, and we do not preach any foolish ideas that we will not be satisfied or happy if we stop having sex with our spouses.

2. Limiting sexual intercourse. This already happens naturally among Orthodox couples who sincerely try to observe all fasting days and all fasts throughout the year.

3. And finally, the Church allows the use of the so-called. the “rhythm” method, about which there is a lot of information today.

In the old days, when poor parents knew nothing about contraception, they relied solely on the will of God - and this should be a living example to all of us today. Children were born and accepted in the same way - the last as the first, and the parents said: “God gave us a child, He will give us everything we need for a child.” Their faith was so strong that last child often turned out to be the greatest boon.

What about family size? One thing that has a huge impact on our view of this issue is the fact that over the last hundred years we have gone from being a predominantly agricultural society to a predominantly urban, industrial society. This means that while in earlier times large families were actually needed to take care of farms or homesteads - where there was always enough food and work for everyone - today we have the opposite problem, and sometimes it can be very difficult to support a large family, although there are people who can handle it. From a strictly spiritual point of view, a large family is good so that the family is strong, durable and full of love, and so that all its members bear each other's burdens in life. life together. A large family teaches children to care about others, makes them more warm-hearted, etc. And although small family can provide for every child big amount worldly goods, it cannot in any way guarantee a good upbringing. Only children are often the most difficult because... They often grow up spoiled and self-centered. Thus there is no general rule, but we must expect and be prepared to accept as many children as God sends us and as moral and moral will allow. physical state the health of the mother and the entire family as a whole, always remaining in close contact with your priest on this matter.

However, we must be careful not to put too much emphasis on this whole issue of childbearing, number of children, etc. St. John Chrysostom says: “Procreation is a natural matter. Much more important is the task of parents to educate the hearts of their children in virtue and piety.” This position brings us back to what should be put in first place, i.e. to positive qualities rather than negative ideas about birth control, family size, etc. After all, the Church wants us to understand and remember that the children we bring into the world belong not to us, but to God. We did not give them life; on the contrary, it was God, using us as an instrument, who brought them into being. We parents are, in a sense, only nannies of God's children. Thus, our greatest responsibility as parents is to raise our children “in God” to know, love, and serve their Heavenly Father.

The main goal of our earthly life is eternal salvation. This is a goal that requires constant achievement, because... It's not easy being a Christian. The influence of our modern society makes our task very difficult. Our parish church and our home are the only bastions where we can praise God in spirit and truth

However, our lives, our marriages and our homes will be like that first low-quality wine served at the wedding in Cana of Galilee, if we do not try to become mature men and women, mature husbands and wives, mature Orthodox Christians, ready to accept all the responsibilities of that worldly position , in which we are placed. And only after we take the trouble to prepare ourselves personally and our families and homes to receive Christ will our lives, our marriages and our homes become the good wine that Christ turned from water at that joyful feast. Amen.