Orthodox teaching about the afterlife. Elder Paisius Svyatogorets: “On life after death

issued by the Sretensky Monastery in 2006.

We believe that a person's connection with God is not interrupted by death, that even beyond the threshold of death, a soul that loves God and has remained faithful to Him will live in great joy and happiness of constant communion with God. And we believe that in this, in communion with God, all the joys, all the happiness available to a human being are contained to the utmost degree.

But then, aren’t those right who say that the Christian faith is selfish, that we believe in God and serve Him out of fear of death and the disasters that it can bring us, and also out of selfish hope for a payment of bliss that God will give us after death? for serving Him in life? But this, of course, is not the case.

All Christian teachers who touched on this issue say that serving God out of fear of hell or out of a thirst for a heavenly reward is unworthy of a Christian. Abba Dorotheos, the most revered teacher of monks of old, says that serving God out of fear is the state of a slave, serving out of reward is the state of a mercenary, and only serving God for His own sake, out of love for Him, is a truly Christian filial state, the only worthy state of a child of God.

If Christianity were based on the fear of hell and on the expectation of a heavenly reward, then both in the teaching of Christ and in the preaching of the apostles much more would be said about both.

Meanwhile, both the Gospels and the Epistles say amazingly little about this. The Lord only briefly mentions the eternal torment prepared for the devil and his aggels, where unrepentant sinners will be sent, and the eternal joyful life that awaits the righteous, without giving a detailed description of the joys of paradise. The apostle, speaking of this, only briefly repeats the words of the Old Testament prophet: “Eye has not seen, ear has not heard, neither has it entered into the heart of man what God has prepared for those who love Him” (1 Cor 2:9).

Of course, this brevity of the Lord and His apostles in the description of heavenly life does not come from the fact that they were afraid of being reproached for the selfishness of their preaching, but because it is impossible to describe with our human language and our three-dimensional consciousness to understand the conditions of another, out-of-body existence. But from this brevity, almost silence of the Gospel regarding the details of the life in Paradise, we can conclude that the calls of Christianity are not based on this.

The main promise of the Lord for all those who believe in Him and love Him are His words: “I will take you to Myself, so that you too may be where I am.” In Slavonic it sounds even brighter: “Yes, where I am Az, and you will be” (Jn 14:3). Of course, the expectation of such an award cannot be called mercenarism. This is a manifestation of love. For only for the lover it is valuable to be where the one he loves. And if a Christian serves God in order to be with Him in eternity, then he is not a hired hand, but a child of God.

However, Holy History knows examples of an even higher rise in the service of God, when people who were infinitely devoted to the Lord, who loved Him infinitely, were ready to renounce the happiness of being with Him and doom themselves to the torment of separation from Him - for the sake of accomplishing His tasks. Thus, the holy prophet Moses, asking God for forgiveness for his people, exclaimed: “Forgive them their sin, but if not, then blot me out of Your book of life, in which You wrote me” (see: Exodus 32, 32). Thus, the Apostle Paul says: “I myself would like to be excommunicated from Christ for my brothers, who are kindred to me according to the flesh” (Rom 9:3). Thus, an immensely loving person can sometimes give up everything most valued in life, the happiness of communication with the one he loves, if this is required for the benefit of the beloved. This is the height of selflessness.

But let's not confuse the most holy self-denial of the righteous Moses and the Apostle Paul with the readiness of the sinner to sacrifice his salvation, that is, future communion with God, for the sake of this or that sinful temptation. There, love for God and devotion to His cause overflow over the edge, and here indifference to God and to one's own soul. Thus, the refusal of a loving mother from the happiness of being with her beloved child, when his good requires it, cannot be confused with the criminal neglect of unloving parents towards unloved children.

So, not out of trembling before hell, not out of a selfish desire to earn bliss in heaven, a Christian serves the Lord. But, serving Him out of love for Him, the Christian knows that the Lord, responding with love to love to an unlimited extent, will not leave the soul faithful to Him in any distressed state, but will draw it to Himself according to His word: “Where I am I, and you will be” (Jn 14:3).

So, a bride is bad if she marries not out of love for the groom, but out of the desire to get pleasure and wealth from him. But if, out of love, she strives for her fiance and at the same time, knowing his wealth and love of love, is sure of her future happiness, then this is natural and good. Such should be the attitude of a true Christian towards his Lord, according to the teaching of the Church.

But let us not at the same time think that the words of Christ about eternal blessedness and eternal torment have no essential meaning in Christianity. Like any word of the Lord, these words are important, but only on the periphery of the Church, where fear of torment can stop a soul ready for atrocity, or the thirst for eternal bliss will wake up a sleeping soul and move a lazy Christian to fulfill his life duty.

In her own upbringing of human souls, the Church strives to ensure that her children have as their goal not only salvation from torment or the acquisition of bliss, but above all the acquisition of God's love, so that not for the sake of anything else, but only for Himself, the Christian soul strives. to God, knowing, moreover, that where He is, there is heavenly joy, for there is the fullness of love.

Why do people get sick?

Why are there incurable diseases that inevitably lead to death?

What is death?

Will my self-awareness, my sense of self, my identity disappear at death, or is there some kind of afterlife?

Before the greatness of these questions, all others pale; everything else is nothing before them; everything else makes no sense. After all, when a person is born into this world, only one thing can be said about him with complete certainty: this person will die. Will die sooner or later.

Everything else can be spoken about only with a certain degree of probability: maybe it will grow, but maybe not; maybe he will get an education, but maybe not; maybe he will be a good and kind person towards other people, but maybe not; maybe she will give birth to her children, but maybe not; maybe he will live to old age, or maybe not, etc. etc.

All philosophical teachings and systems existing in the world aim to answer these most important questions of human existence. Some of these systems claim to call themselves religions.

In the Orthodox Church, a special science called comparative theology deals with the comparative study of various philosophical and religious systems. To it we refer those who wish to compare different views on the questions posed at the beginning of the lecture.

It should be noted that this lecture will not be of interest to those who do not think about the above issues, but lead a plant-animal lifestyle.

Yes, perhaps they will not open this lecture by reading its title. We have tried in this lecture not to express our own opinion, but to state as accurately as possible, consistently, as fully as possible, but briefly the Teaching of the Orthodox Church about sickness, death and the afterlife.

The modern world - secularism, isolation from spiritual life, atheism, materialism

The grief of modern people lies in the fact that today's culture has long been torn away from the Church, is alienated from it, even secretly afraid of it. This separation of various spheres of culture from the Church is called secularism (that is, separation from the Church), and it is clear that the process of secularization, which began in Western Europe already at the end of the 13th century, has left its mark on the entire modern culture.

This process achieved particular strength and influence in the field of science and philosophy, which very early began to claim "autonomy", i.e. to complete independence from the Church. The word "autonomy", consisting of two Greek words - avtos (self) and nomos (law), just means that modern science and philosophy are sure that they are their own law, they do not seek either foundation or support in religious beliefs.

The extraordinary successes of knowledge and technology, especially in the last two centuries, are not at all connected with this autonomy of science - it is enough to point out that in all areas of knowledge and technology people of the clergy worked very hard, always strictly adhering to the teachings of Christianity.

But it seems to many that the development of science and technology, as it were, testifies to the full maturity of the mind, as it were, confirms the self-sufficiency of our mind in the search for truth. In order to understand these claims of our mind, in its self-affirmation, we must delve into the question of the sources of knowledge.

Mankind has two indisputable ways of knowing - the first way of knowing is based on experience and experiments, the second - on the insights of the mind. Historically, the second method of cognition matured earlier, while the significance of experience and experiment was finally realized in Europe only towards the end of the 14th century.

This appeal to experience, especially the development of the experimental method, is called empiricism, and it must be said about it that empiricism is a truly powerful means of knowing the world.

All the main achievements of science and technology owe most of all to experience and experiment. But even that method of cognition, which is based on the reasoning of the mind and which is called rationalism, is also a powerful means of cognition. Suffice it to point out that all mathematical knowledge, which occupies a huge place in modern science, is purely rational.

Claims for complete freedom and autonomy are characteristic only of rationalism: only rationalism is characterized by boundless self-confidence, the desire to subordinate everything to our reason. Rationalism rejects everything that does not fit into the forms of our mind - and hence its intolerance and self-confidence.

Rationalism therefore rejects the possibility of a miracle, since in every miracle there is something inexplicable to the mind. The question of the possibility and reality of miracles is of paramount importance for religion, which is all connected with the belief that God can rise above the laws of nature and do what remains inexplicable to us: the impossible for man is possible for God.

Rationalism claims that the incomprehensible is only inexplicable for us so far, but that as knowledge develops, the volume of the inexplicable will decrease and someday will be reduced to zero. The ratio of faith and knowledge is often presented to us in such a form that faith is supposedly associated with a weak development of the mind and knowledge, that a person who stands at the height of modern knowledge can no longer live by faith, but can live only by knowledge.

As for empiricism, it is free from such categorical assertions, it listens to experience, is sometimes ready to admit a miracle, but in the atmosphere of secularism it becomes infected with indifference to faith and the Church. Modern culture generally leads souls away from faith and the Church. Modern life is, as it were, filled with godlessness, insensitivity to what is ABOVE the world - and this skeptical attitude towards faith, towards the Church is absorbed into our soul, poisoning it.

Meanwhile, to live without faith is not only difficult, but also scary, meaningless. In our soul lives an ineradicable need for total truth, a need to approach the Eternal Foundation of life; death makes our whole life meaningless, turns life into an insoluble and painful riddle. Our soul cannot come to terms with death - those who have lost loved ones, dear people, know this well. In the light of death, life seems to be some kind of deception, someone's unnecessary mockery, senseless fuss.

Our soul cannot help but love the world, love people; but this love only torments our hearts, because we cannot, if we do not have faith, reconcile ourselves to the fact that all this will disappear forever. The life of the world is a terrible mystery for those who do not believe in the existence of God, who do not feel His closeness to us.

The divergence of faith and knowledge is an invention of those who fight against faith and the Church; all modern culture is so deeply rooted in Christianity that it cannot be divorced from Christianity. By this we do not mean to say that there are no points at which both knowledge and culture are difficult to combine with Christianity, but essentially neither science, nor philosophy, nor art can reject Christianity.

Knowledge is in constant motion and development, due to which theories and hypotheses are replaced one after another in knowledge. What seemed indisputable in science yesterday disappears without a trace today.

This change of guiding ideas in knowledge is inevitable and legitimate. Science should be given complete freedom in constructing any hypotheses to explain certain phenomena, but we must remember that all these hypotheses can be replaced by other hypotheses.

Christianity tells us about what remains unchanged from the time when the Lord Jesus Christ was on earth. There may be serious differences between Christianity and science in one age, but they can dissipate by themselves in another age. And the difficulty of bringing Christianity and knowledge closer together is not in individual differences, but in principles, in the essence of the matter.

Without entering into a study of the relationship between faith and reason in their essence, we will only point out that Christianity values ​​reason so highly that it can be called a “religion of reason”: the Son of God, the Lord Jesus Christ is named in the Gospel (John, ch. 1., v.1) "LOGOS", and "logos" means both "word" and "mind". There is and cannot be anything unreasonable in Christianity, although its truths surpass our reason: they are superreasonable, but not unreasonable.

Christianity does not know any worldview, "mandatory" for believers. And at the same time, the Orthodox dogma is such a harmonious, logical and consistent construction that even a more or less serious acquaintance with it will inevitably lead you to the conclusion that such a doctrine could not have been created by people alone, it is divinely inspired, it is given people by God.

Our difference from our ancestors is the level of education, and not in our favor

If we think about how we differ from our ancestors (who were all Orthodox Christians), then the first thing that comes to our minds is the level of education, the amount of knowledge. Many of us feel like we know more than our grandparents. However, this opinion is deeply erroneous.

Indeed, we differ from our ancestors in the level of education, but, believe us, not in our favor. We do not know much of what was perfectly known to our ancestors, in which they did not doubt that they knew exactly.

Here are the words of the modern Orthodox journalist Deacon Andrei Kuraev about this:

“In my life, for the first time, interest in Orthodoxy manifested itself when I saw the eyes of a believer. I was then studying at the department of scientific atheism and had no personal interest in Orthodoxy.

Moscow State University students, together with their “brothers” from “fraternal socialist Hungary”, went on an excursion to the Trinity-Sergius Lavra. The tourist crowd “fell out” of the Cathedral, when suddenly, already on the threshold, the young man who was walking right in front of me turned around and, looking at the iconostasis, crossed himself and bowed. He looked past me, behind my back - at the images.

And I saw his eyes right in front of me. There was no mystical exaltation in them. They were quite ordinary - and that's what struck me. How so? Why is he praying? He is my peer. He went to the same Soviet school as me. Like me, he was told all sorts of nasty things from the history of the Russian Orthodox Church.

But why then am I here - like a foreign tourist who does not understand anything, and he - like a pilgrim at his native shrine? He knows everything that I know. But, if at the same time he prays, it means that he knows something that is closed to me. And I was pierced by such annoyance both at my ignorance and at the "Soviet authorities" that made me a foreigner in my own country, that I decided to learn more about Orthodoxy.

Deacon A. Kuraev is currently one of the most erudite Orthodox theologians. However, if we open a textbook on basic theology published before 1917 for seminaries (i.e., for students with the goal of obtaining a secondary education), we will find in it much that modern theologians do not know or consider too difficult for modern audience.

And for our grandfathers and great-grandfathers, this was compulsory knowledge for secondary education. Of course, some of them did not have a secondary education, and those who lived in the countryside could be illiterate. But they all regularly prayed to God, visited the Temple, knew the Orthodox service, the Psalter.

And it was this that served them as the main source of knowledge about the world, God, salvation, death, the afterlife, and so on. This means that our ancestors were more educated compared to us in the humanities and theology, their faith was meaningful, and not based on ignorance and ignorance, as it seems now to many of our contemporaries.

World creation. View of modern physics on the origin of the universe

The world was created. This is evidenced by all modern physics. The moment of creation of the World of physics is called the "Big Bang". The theory of the big bang and the collapse of the universe was the result of Einstein's general theory of relativity.

However, Einstein himself made a mathematical adjustment to his theory to prevent the inevitable conclusion that "the universe is not static", since both mathematical and logical theorems led to such a conclusion. Einstein was too rooted in the nineteenth century static view of the permanence of the world and the stability of the universe to accept his own conclusions.

However, in 1922, shortly after the publication of the theory of relativity (1915), this conclusion was reached not by Einstein himself, but by the Russian scientist, physicist and mathematician, Alexander Fridman. Friedman's conclusions were purely theoretical.

They were practically confirmed by the American astronomer Edwin Hubble, who discovered in 1924 that the world does not consist of our galaxy alone, since he discovered and studied nine galaxies with a powerful telescope. We now know that each galaxy is made up of hundreds of thousands of stars. Hubble physically proved the fact of the expansion of space between galaxies, which confirmed Friedman's calculations about the expansion of the universe in all directions.

This theory predicted the existence of relic radiation, which was discovered in 1965 by A. Penzance and R. Wilson in the radio range. Modern physicists should meet at the World Congress and declare that they have no objection to the revealed doctrine of the creation of the world.

For an Orthodox Christian, the main source of knowledge is the Revelation given to us in the BIBLE. Religious Revelation is partly comparable to how the teacher communicates to the student knowledge that he at his stage of development cannot comprehend without the help of the teacher. Listening to the teacher, the student first accepts everything that is said to him on faith.

And only then, depending on life circumstances, he can verify some of the information communicated to him by experience; others will remain an object of faith for him for the rest of his life. We can all check how this or that chemical reaction occurs, which the teacher just spoke about. But not everyone has the opportunity, for example, to check whether other continents exist or whether the calculations of astronomers are correct.

Creation is an act that requires a cause outside of it. Creation must not be confused with the reproduction of already existing forms, with a reproduction that could be carried out by man himself. Can a person produce living things from non-living things? Let's assume that would happen.

Would it be creation? The answer is clear - no. Let's consider a simple example. Suppose that our distant ancestors, who did not know how to make fire and limited themselves to transferring it to themselves from forest fires, suddenly managed to make fire on their own. Would it be a creation of fire? The answer is clear - no. The possibility of fire already exists in nature. This opportunity has already been created.

Creation is an act that goes so far beyond the limits of the reality surrounding us that it is impossible to give it either a description or a logical definition in the system of concepts about the already existing.

Speaking about the origin of the world, it is impossible to correlate the act of creation with any moment of the existence of the world, because the world can only be conceivable as existing in time, and time itself can only be conceivable in the existing world. The creation of the world is also the creation of time. This means that the Creator exists outside of time and space. This is what the Orthodox Church teaches.

In conclusion of the first sections of the lecture, the main subject of which is studied by another theological science called apologetics (to which we refer those who wish to get acquainted with the issues discussed in more detail), we want to give Kant's proof of the existence of God, for which the hero of The Master and Margarita Ivan Bezdomny wanted exile the philosopher to Solovki "for three years." Kant's first thesis: everything in the world is subject to the law of causality.

All events in the world are connected by causal relationships, and nothing happens in it without proper causes, which necessarily bring their consequences into being. The second thesis: if a person is also subject to this law, then he cannot bear moral responsibility for his actions.

The third thesis: if we affirm the moral responsibility of a person, we must postulate his freedom. Conclusion: therefore, a person living in the world does not obey the basic law of the universe. This means that a person is not worldly, i.e. has the status of extraterritoriality. Nothing in the world can act freely, but man can. It turns out that man is something more than the world.

Thus, in the human morally free experience, another dimension of being emerges - a being unlimited by space, time, determinism and endowed with freedom, morality and reason. Such being in the language of philosophy is called God. Man is free - which means that being is richer than the world of causality; man is free - which means it is morally necessary to recognize the existence of God.

I would like to note that today only an uneducated, blinkered person, with an extremely narrow outlook, can not believe in God. Belief in God is not a fashion, but an indicator of a person's level of knowledge, his inner culture, his ability to think, to lead an inner spiritual life.

The world is visible and the world is invisible. Simplicity of the device of the world, its harmony and beauty. Creation of man

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). It stands majestically, towering independently of the ancient mythological legends about the origin of the world, from various successive hypotheses about the beginning and development of the world order, inscribed on the first page of the Bible, the divinely inspired Moses story about the creation of the world. It is extremely brief, but in this brevity the whole history of the universe is covered.

From the majestic scheme of the origin of the world given by Moses, a number of conclusions follow:

1) about how the world came into being:

A) the world does not exist forever, but appeared in time;
b) it was not formed by itself, but is obliged to the will of God;
c) did not appear in an instant, but was created in sequence from the simplest to the more complex;
d) was created not out of necessity, but according to the free will of God;
e) created by the Word of God with the participation of the life-giving Spirit;

2) about the nature of the world:

A) the world is essentially different from God, it is neither a part of His being, nor His emanation (origin), nor His body;
b) was not created from some eternally existing material, but was brought into being from complete non-existence;
c) everything that is on earth is created from earthly elements, except for the human soul, which bears in itself the image and likeness of God;

3) about the consequences of creation:

A) God remains by His nature different from the world, and the world from it;
b) God did not suffer any loss and did not acquire for Himself any replenishment from the creation of the world;
c) there is nothing uncreated in the world except God;
d) everything created is beautiful, which means that evil did not appear along with the creation of the world.

Only on these foundations is true religion possible. Without the recognition of a personal God, we could not love Him, glorify Him, thank Him, seek His help, pray to Him; we would be like orphans, knowing neither father nor mother.

Some Fathers of the Church, in the first words of the book of Genesis, understand by heaven not the physical heaven formed later, but the invisible heaven or the dwelling place of the heavenly forces, incorporeal spirits, angels.

God created the angels far before the visible world, and when the latter was created, they already stood before the face of the Creator and served Him. Angels are incorporeal spirits, and since they belong to the invisible world, they cannot be seen by our bodily eyes.

However, an angel is called incorporeal and immaterial only in comparison with us. For in comparison with God, the One incomparable, everything turns out to be gross and material; the Deity alone is wholly immaterial and incorporeal.

Man was created by God in the image and likeness of God; man consists of soul and body, and therefore is connected both with nature (body) and with God (soul). The human body is perishable, but the soul is immortal. Proceeding through the body from the earth and thus being an earthly brother to all earthly beings that originated from the same earth, man is the image and likeness of God on Earth and, as bearing the breath of the Creator in himself, is a being that goes beyond the limits of the created series, although it completes this whole series of creatures.

Man was created as a thing and is one of the things on Earth, but as the image and likeness of God, as a bearer of divine breath, he is no longer created, but created and is no longer a thing.

He is the first and only of all creatures set free to rise from the dust of the earth, from the state of natural necessity, from the state of a slave to the conditions surrounding him, to become adopted by God, to become an employee of God on Earth and then enter into eternity to unite with God who created him.

Man came into being by combining in himself:

1) material (in the most objective sense of the word);
2) mental;
3) spiritual.

It is the unity of all planes of being, as if a kind of connecting rod, penetrating the Universe and containing all its elements. Man is called to deification, i.e. to unity with the Creator. Man is called to leave the framework of the created Universe in order to ascend into the spiritual sky to unite with the Creator.

Man was created by an animal who received the command to become a god, summarizes the Christian teaching about man, St. Basil the Great. Man created from the dust of the earth is the pinnacle of the universe, its completion, comprehension.

Western standard of human rights. The main drawback is the lack of the concept of sin

During the years of universal globalization now taking place in the world, the secularism of modern culture has manifested itself with particular clarity. The Western standard of human rights now being imposed on Russia was developed without any participation of Orthodoxy, or at least taking into account its opinion.

As a result, this standard completely lacks the concept of sin. Meanwhile, “everyone who commits sin also commits iniquity; and sin is lawlessness” (1 John 3:4). And man's main concern is to be cured of sin. “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 6:23). “... As by one man (Adam) sin entered the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned” (Rom. 5:12).

Physicians who treat the sick make the fulfillment of their prescriptions a condition for their recovery. They prescribe well-known medicines to the patient, prescribe a certain diet, on the use and implementation of which their bodily health depends.

So the Lord God, as an experienced physician of our soul, prescribes the conditions for us, sick with sin and its consequences. Yes, we are all sick with sins, our souls and bodies are undermined by a terrible ulcer of sins.

Sins are the cause of death; and not only bodily, but also spiritual, i.e. such, when the soul, completely immersed in sins, loses the image and likeness of God (given to us by the Lord from the creation of the world) and, thus, as it were, dies for eternal bliss, destined for it by God the Creator.

Where did sin, moral evil, come from? God created the world clean, perfect, free from evil. Evil entered the world as a result of the fall, which occurred first in the world of incorporeal spirits, and then in the human race.

According to the testimony of the word of God, the beginning of sin comes from the devil. “Whoever commits sin is of the devil, because the devil sinned first” (1 Jn 3:8). One of the intelligent spirits, the angels created by God, deviated into the path of evil.

Possessing, like all rational beings, the freedom given to him for perfection in goodness, he could not stand the truth and fell away from God. ". He was a murderer from the beginning, and did not stand in the truth; for there is no truth in it. When he tells a lie, he speaks his own; for he is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44). The cause of his fall was pride.

The sinfulness of earthly life. The impossibility of resisting sin without God's help. The meaning of morning and evening prayers. smart prayer

Man has no source of eternal life within himself. Man is created by nature neither mortal nor immortal. For if God had created him immortal at the beginning, he would have made him a god; if, on the contrary, he had created him mortal, then he himself would have revealed the cause of his death.

So He created man capable of both. By itself, man has neither the need to die, nor the fullness necessary for immortality. He has only a certain potentiality: to what he “leans” his being, he will become so.

A person can breathe God, and then he becomes immortal. But, if he is closed in himself and in the world of non-eternal creations, he will die. Man as he sees

Orthodoxy is similar to a diver who receives air through a hose from a ship. And this diver, with a careless movement, pinched the hose and is suffocating. It is useless for him to shout from above, scold him, or, on the contrary, affectionately inform him that the captain is not angry with him for damaging his property.

We need someone else to jump on top and bring a new hose of life-giving air and let the loser breathe. And the cry of the people of the Old Testament to God - that "there is no mediator between us" (Job., 9.33). There is no one to convey the Mountainous Breath to a drowning person.

We cannot make it look like God is angry with us and punishing generation after generation for Adam's transgression. We just created death ourselves. We are the culprits of the fact that the whole world began to obey the law of corruption. God, on the contrary, is looking for - how to save us from death.

The modern world believes that, in principle, everything was always good. Hence the demand of the mass consciousness for Christianity: “Comfort us, tell us that we can live according to the standards of a consumer society, we can practice practical materialism every day, and for this, Jesus, together with Buddha, will lead us after parting with the body into worlds that are both richer and more colorful. and happier.

We know nothing about the world of religions - and therefore all religions are equal for us. Do not prevent us from considering ourselves Christians, despite the fact that we leafed through the Gospel only once, and never fulfilled it. Our answer to this is: well, we can choose spiritual paths, we can follow or not follow spiritual laws.

But these laws themselves are as independent of our will as are the laws of astronomy. God has opened a spiritual path for us to find Him, and warned us about the cases in which the Kingdom of God is not inherited by people. Therefore, it is impossible to combine service to Christ with "contacting" and veneration of other "deities".

For the spiritual growth of a person, a struggle with sin is necessary, for our nature, although purified in baptism, is not deprived of the freedom of choice between good and evil. The whole world lies in evil, and sin attacks us from three sides at once (John 2:16).

The believer's heart, like the whole human race, is like a field in which the Lord Jesus Christ sows the seed of grace, and the sinful world and the devil-enemy are tares, sinful thoughts and deeds (Matt. 13). The tares can stifle the seed of grace, if, firstly, the believer does not struggle with sin himself, does not use the effort “for the Kingdom

The heavenly is taken by force, and those who use force take it by force” (Matt. 11:12); and, secondly, if the believer does not receive from the Lord a special grace-filled power for the cleansing of sins and the eradication of tares from the heart. This special grace, which cleanses sins, is given in the sacrament of repentance through priests, to whom God has given the power to bind and loose sins (Matt. 18:18).

Some people confuse repentance with confession, but this is erroneous. confession only completes or completes repentance.

True repentance consists of the following steps:

1) Consciousness of one's sins, for which one needs to remember one's sins and to know the degree of their severity;
2) Contrition, or sorrow for one's sins;
3) Determination to avoid sin, fight with it;
4) Confession, or free confession to the spiritual father of all the sins committed, with faith in the mercy of God and the hope for the complete cleansing of confessed sins.

Prayer, as John Chrysostom says, is our conversation with God and an equal-angelic occupation. What blood is for the body, so is prayer for the soul, so whoever does not pray is dead in his soul, he is a living corpse. Prayer is divided into external and internal (or mental), home and church.

External prayer, when the heart is raised to God, is manifested outwardly in words, the sign of the cross, bows, etc., while internal prayer consists in one offering of the heart to God without bodily movements: all Christians pray with the first external prayer, and the second prayer with the internal one who has reached perfection and received a special the gift of prayer; these latter truly fulfill the commandment of St. Paul: "Pray without ceasing" (1 Thess. 5:17).

The conditions for successful prayer are as follows:

1) Before you start to pray, prepare yourself (Sir., 18, 23), stand silently for a while, better with closed eyes, until the scattered thoughts gather into one, and in the heart, agitated by feelings, you feel silence: not in the storm is the Lord, but in a quiet breath of spirit (Kings, 19, 12);

2) Imagine yourself before the Face of the Merciful God, looking at you and accepting your prayer;

3) Pray with strong faith, for "whatever you ask in prayer with faith, you will receive" (Matt. 21:22);

4) Pray with constancy, with tirelessness: - today, tomorrow, a year, two, etc. until you finally receive, if not for virtue, then for your perseverance (Luke 11:8);

5) Pray with humility, with contrition for sins;

6) Pray with all your heart, fervently, fervently - if you can, then pray with tears, and not with your lips and tongue alone, so that your prayer is not in vain;

7) When praying for earthly needs, for the urgent, do not pray for something vain, fleeting, something for pride and something from the evil one, such as: wealth, power, glory, etc., but ask for eternal, spiritual, passing and for a coffin, such as: faith, hope, love, humility, the gift of prayer, spiritual wisdom, devotion to the will of God, etc.;

8) Pray with a heart reconciled with your enemies, otherwise your prayer will be in vain: “when you stand in prayer, forgive, if you have anything against anyone. “If you do not forgive, then your Heavenly Father will not forgive you your sins” (Mark 11:25). Therefore, pray for your enemies (Matt. 5:44). Prayer brings us closer to God and enlightens us, the more often we pray, the better.

Every Orthodox Christian, as St. John Chrysostom, should pray:

1) in the morning, having risen from sleep, thanking God for preservation in the night and asking for blessings for the coming day and work;
2) in the evening, going to bed, thanking God for the spent day and asking to save in the night;
3) in the afternoon, before the beginning of each business and at the end of it, before eating and after it (Cor., 10:30-31).

Table (meal) without prayer, says St. John of Damascus, is not much different from an animal stall. Prayer is accompanied by the sign of the cross, bows and is performed before the holy icons with the invocation of the Lord God, the Most Holy Theotokos and the Saints. It is best to use the Orthodox prayer book and not use non-statutory (not included in the prayer book) prayers.

The purpose of human life is the acquisition of the Holy Spirit

When creating man, the Lord God said: “Let us make man in Our image and after Our likeness” (Genesis 1:26). In the image and likeness of God, which are in the human soul, lies the whole meaning of our life, its highest goal: in our own image and likeness, we must strive for the Archetype, i.e. God, in order to become more and more like Him and in union with the Lord find one's bliss; in short, the goal of human existence is "likeness to God."

The Lord Jesus Christ saves sinners, points out the true path of life, gives true satisfaction to all the forces of man: “I am the way and the truth and the life” (John 14:5). The Lord Jesus Christ is the "way", therefore only through Him we know the meaning of being, through Him we achieve salvation; He is the “truth”, therefore only through Him will we be enlightened, we will achieve wisdom; He is “life”, therefore only through Him can we achieve bliss and peace of mind.

Holy Fathers and Ecumenical Teachers about illness

The main reason for cowardice and grumbling against God during the days of suffering is a lack of faith in God and hope in His Divine Providence. A true Christian believes that everything that happens to us in life is done according to the will of God; that without the will of God, even a hair from our head will not fall to the ground.

If God sends him suffering and sorrow, then he sees in this either a punishment sent to him by God for his sins, or a test of faith and love for Him; and therefore he not only does not faintheartedly and does not grumble against God for this, but, humbled under the mighty hand of God, he still thanks God for not forgetting him; that, in His mercy, God wants temporary sorrows to replace eternal torment for him; stricken with sorrow, he speaks to the righteous David: “It is good for me, O Lord, for thou hast humbled me, that I may learn thy justification” (St. Theophan the Recluse).

During illness, everyone should think and say, “Who knows? Perhaps, in my illness, the gates of eternity open to me? In illness, before doctors and medicines, use prayer and the sacraments: confession, communion and unction. (St. Theophan the Recluse).

The Lord sent you a disease not in vain, and not so much as a punishment for past sins, but out of love for you, in order to tear you away from a sinful life and put you on the path of salvation. Thank God for this, who cares about you (Igum. Nikon). Just as fire removes rust from iron, so sickness heals the soul.

The Lord, out of love for us, sends sickness and sorrow according to the strength of each, but also gives them patience in order to make us participants in his sufferings; whoever did not suffer here for Christ's sake will be remorseful in the future age - after all, one could show one's love for Christ by the patience of illness and sorrows, and did not do this, trying to evade and avoid all sorrows. Not in anger, not for punishment, the Lord sends us sickness and sorrow, but out of love for us, although not all people, and do not always understand this.

It should also be mentioned that the Holy Fathers offer to consecrate the medicine taken: for example, Rev. Barsanuphius the Great recommended one disciple to take medicine - rose oil from St. water. The same elder in case of illness does not advise praying hard for healing, for we do not know what is useful for us. "God wants all people to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth." (Tim. 2:4).

Illness as a means of moral purification of a person and his preparation for the afterlife

We have tried to solve this issue on the basis of the statements of some of the Holy Fathers. On our own behalf, we add that the great torch of Orthodoxy of the past twentieth century, Saint Righteous John of Kronstadt, died of bladder cancer. This means that the Lord sends illnesses to people, first of all, for purification, and not as a punishment for sins, for St. Righteous John of Kronstadt was, of course, a perfect man already during his lifetime, who healed the sick, cast out demons from the possessed, and even resurrected the dead.

This is described in detail in the Life of this saint, to which we refer those interested in details. And at the same time, it should be noted, in addition to what was said earlier, that only Jesus Christ was sinless, and any person, even having lived on earth for only two hours, is already a sinner, and in order to get to heaven after death, he needs moral purification, one of the means of which is disease.

In conclusion of this section of the lecture, we present a marvelous story from the Letters of the Holy Mountaineer.

One patient, exhausted, with a cry asked the Lord to stop his suffering life. “Good,” said an angel who appeared to the sick one day, “the Lord, how unspeakably good, deigns to your prayer. He ends your temporary life, only with the condition: instead of one year of suffering on earth, do you agree to spend three hours in hell?

Your sins require cleansing in the sufferings of your own flesh; you must be in relaxation for a year, because both for you and for all believers there is no other way to heaven, except for the cross laid by the God-man. That path has already bored you on earth; try what hell means, where all sinners go; however, just test for three hours, and there - by the prayers of the Holy Church you will be saved.

The sufferer thought. A year of suffering on earth is a terrible extension of time. “I'd rather endure three hours,” he finally said to the Angel. The angel quietly took his suffering soul into his arms and, having imprisoned it in hell, departed with the words: “In three hours I will come for you.”

The darkness prevailing everywhere, the tightness, the sounds of inexplicable sinful cries, the vision of the spirits of evil in their hellish ugliness, all this merged for the unfortunate sufferer into inexpressible fear and languor. He saw only suffering everywhere, and not a half-sound of joy in the vast abyss of hell: only the fiery eyes of demons sparkled in the darkness of hell, and their gigantic shadows rushed before him, ready to squeeze him, devour him and burn him with their hellish breath.

The poor sufferer trembled and screamed, but only the hellish abyss responded to his screams and cries with its echo fading in the distance and the gurgling of hellish flames. It seemed to him that whole centuries of suffering had already passed: from minute to minute he was waiting for the luminous Angel to come to him.

Finally, the sufferer despaired of his appearance and, gnashing his teeth, groaned and roared with all his strength, but no one heeded his cries. All sinners, languishing in hellish darkness, were busy with themselves, only with their own torment.

But then a quiet light of angelic power spilled over the abyss.

With a heavenly smile, the Angel approached our sufferer and asked:

"What, how are you, brother?"
“I didn’t think that there could be lies in the lips of angels,” the sufferer whispered in a voice that was barely audible, interrupted by suffering.
“What is it?” said the Angel.

“What is it?” said the sufferer. - "You promised to take me out of here in three hours, and meanwhile whole years, whole centuries have passed in my inexpressible torment."
“What years, what centuries?” the Angel answered meekly and with a smile. - "An hour has just passed since my departure from here, and you still have two hours to be here."

“How two o’clock?” the sufferer asked in fright. “Two more hours? Oh, I can not stand, there is no strength! If only it is possible, if only there is the will of the Lord, I beg you - take me out of here!

Better on earth, I will suffer for years and centuries, even until the last day, until the very coming of Christ to judgment, just take me out of here. Unbearable! Have pity on me!” the sufferer exclaimed with a groan, stretching out his hands to the bright Angel.
- “Good,” answered the Angel, “God, as a generous father, surprises you with His grace.”

At these words, the sufferer opened his eyes and saw that he was still in his painful bed. All his senses were in the utmost exhaustion; the sufferings of the spirit echoed in the body itself; but from that time on he already endured and endured his sufferings in sweetness, bringing to his memory the horror of hellish torments and thanking the merciful Lord for everything.

Death as a transition to eternal life in the world of spirits

Death is the common destiny of all people. But for man it is not annihilation, but only the detachment of the soul from the body. The truth of the immortality of the soul is one of the fundamental truths of Christianity. "God is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for with Him all are alive." The state of the soul after death, according to the clear evidence of the word of God, is not unconscious, but conscious.

Here is what the Savior the Lord Jesus Christ himself tells us about this in his parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31):

“A certain man was rich, dressed in purple and fine linen, and feasted splendidly every day. There was also a certain beggar, named Lazarus, who lay at his gate in scabs and desired to feed on the crumbs falling from the rich man's table; and dogs came to lick its scabs.

The beggar died and was carried by the angels to the bosom of Abraham; the rich man also died, and they buried him; and in hell, being in torments, he lifted up his eyes, saw Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom, and crying out, he said, Father Abraham! Have mercy on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am tormented in this flame.

But Abraham said: child! Remember that you have already received your good in your life, and Lazarus evil; now he is comforted here, while you suffer; and moreover between us and you a great chasm has been established, so that those who want to pass from here to you cannot, nor can they pass from there to us.

Then he said: so I ask you, father, send him to my father's house, for I have five brothers: let him testify to them that they also do not come to this place of torment. Abraham said to him: They have Moses and the prophets; let them listen. He said: No, Father Abraham! But if anyone from the dead comes to them, they will repent. Then Abraham said to him: if they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, then if someone rises from the dead, they will not believe.

There are two striking things about this parable. The rich man asks Abraham for five brothers who live without realizing the torment awaiting them after death. Suffering himself, he asks for his brothers, which means, according to all our established ideas, this rich man is a kind, good person. And this "good man" is in hell! It turns out that in order to avoid hellish torments, it is not enough to be just a “good person”, something else is needed. But it is this "something" that people don't want to hear about. And then, indeed, what is the point of sending the dead to those who no longer believed Moses and the prophets!

The dead do not come to the living, and therefore we must believe the Holy Scriptures - this is what the Gospel parable says. But, apparently, the times in which we live are indeed the last. After all, for many years in a row we have received testimonies from those who died, but came back to life again.

At death, a person is subjected to a judgment, which is called a private, in contrast to the general final judgment. The above parable also testifies to the reality of such a judgment.

It is not given to us to know in Holy Scripture how a private judgment takes place after the death of a person. We can only partly judge this, according to individual expressions found in the word of God. Thus, it is natural to think that both good and evil angels take a great part in the fate of a person after death in a private court: the former are instruments of God's goodness, and the latter, by God's permission, instruments of God's righteousness. On the basis of a number of indications from Holy Scripture from ancient times, St.

The Church Fathers depicted the path of the soul separated from the body as a path through such spiritual spaces, where dark forces seek to devour the spiritually weak, and where, therefore, the protection of heavenly angels and prayerful support from the living members of the Church are especially needed. The path of the soul after its departure from the body is commonly called “ordeals”.

Air trials

Of the ancient Fathers, St. Ephraim the Syrian, Athanasius the Great, Macarius the Great, Basil the Great, John Chrysostom, and others. St. Cyril of Alexandria in the "Word for the Exodus of the Soul", usually printed in the Followed Psalter; and a picture of this path is presented in the life of St. Basil Novago, where the deceased blessed Theodora, in a sleepy vision of Vasily's disciple, conveys what she saw and experienced after the separation of her soul from the body and during the ascent of the soul to heavenly abodes.

Regarding the figurativeness of the legends about ordeals, Metropolitan Macarius of Moscow in "Orthodox Dogmatic Theology" remarks: Macarius of Alexandria, as soon as he began talking about ordeals: “take earthly things here as the weakest image of heavenly things,” and the ordeals should be represented as much as possible in the spiritual sense, hiding under more or less sensual, humanoid features.

Afterlife Device

The Orthodox Church teaches the following about the state of the soul after a private judgment: “We believe that the souls of the dead are blessed or tormented by their deeds. Separated from the bodies, they immediately pass either to joy or to sorrow and sorrow: however, they do not feel either perfect bliss or perfect torment.

For everyone will receive perfect bliss or perfect torment after the general resurrection, when the soul is united with the body in which it lived virtuously or viciously ”(Epistle of the Eastern Patriarchs on the Orthodox Faith, part 18).

Thus, the Orthodox Church distinguishes two different states after a private judgment: one for the righteous, the other for sinners; in other words, heaven and hell. The Fathers of the Church, on the basis of the word of God, believe that the torment of sinners before the Last Judgment has an initial character.

These torments can be alleviated and can even be lifted through the prayers of the Church. For the dead beyond the grave, repentance is impossible. This is revealed from Holy Scripture, which teaches that the present time is a time of sowing, and the future life is only a harvest.

Spiritual life of the sick

The spiritual life of the patient: love your illness, the prayer of the patient himself and the prayers of relatives and friends for the sick, confession, communion, unction.

We spoke briefly about the spiritual life of the patient above. The main thing is not to grumble against God, to believe that the disease is allowed by God for the good of the sick person. The modern ascetic of Piety, Archimandrite John (Krestyankin), a resident of the Pskov-Caves Monastery, directly calls on the sick to love their illness and thank the Lord for everything. It is necessary to pray unceasingly, fulfilling the rule of prayer and, having received the blessing of the confessor, pray with mental prayer.

The collection “Prayers to the Saints” indicates that in case of cancer, one should pray to the Mother of God, before her icon “The Tsaritsa” (celebration on August 15/28). The miraculous icon of the Most Holy Theotokos, called “The Tsaritsa” (“Pantanassa”), was painted in the 17th century and is located in one of the monasteries of Mount Athos (in the Vatopedi monastery). This image is widely revered outside of Greece. Through him, the Mother of God grants healing from cancer to all who resort to Her intercession.

This special gift is confirmed by thousands of cases of healing from cancer. In Moscow, the revered copy of the "All-Tsaritsa" is located in the Church of All Saints of the former Alekseevsky Monastery. The same collection indicates that, according to the tradition prevailing among the Orthodox people, a cancer patient should be read an akathist to the Mother of God 40 times, before the icon of Her “quick listener” (November 9/22 celebration).

It is advisable for relatives of the patient who really want to help him to visit the Temple regularly and submit notes to the proskomedia about the health of the "sick"; order magpies about his health, prayers for blessings of water. This can be done not only in the closest to the house, the so-called. parish Church, but in any Orthodox Church, even if it is located in another city or another country.

The oncological patient himself should regularly go to confession and communion, and take unction. These duties of a Christian should not be delayed. It is advisable to resort to the help of the Mother Church already at the first suspicion of a malignant neoplasm.

In the event that the diagnosis of cancer is confirmed, the patient should as often as possible fast, confess, take communion, gather together and believe that through the prayers of himself, relatives, friends and the Mother Church, God will send him relief in his suffering and in no case resort to the help of "psychics", attendants, fortune tellers, etc. "folk healers"

Modern scientific oncology has very effective methods of treating malignant tumors, however, mainly in the early stages of detecting the disease.

There are numerous testimonies of miraculous healings from cancer through the prayers of the Monk Athanasius of Athos, hegumen (Comm. 5/18 July) and St. Righteous John of Kronstadt (Comm. 20 December/2 January).

The collection of prayers we quoted earlier recommends, in case of any bodily weakness, also pray to the Mother of God before the icon of Her “Joy of All Who Sorrow” (celebration October 24 / November 6); Great Martyr and Healer Panteleimon (Comm. 27 July/9 August); To the Unmercenaries and Wonderworkers Cosmas and Damian (commemorated July 1/14 and November 1/14); Martyrs and Unmercenaries Cyrus and John (commemorated January 31/February 13); Venerable Sampson the Hospitable (Comm. 27 June/10 July); Saint Spyridon, Bishop of Trimyphunte, the miracle worker (Comm. 12/25 December) and Martyr Tryphon (Comm. 1/14 February).

Actions of relatives immediately after the death of the patient

At the end of a person's life, when he leaves this world, a special canon is read over him - a collection of songs-prayers, compiled according to a certain rule. In the "Orthodox prayer book" this canon is called as follows: "The canon of prayer to our Lord Jesus Christ and the Most Pure Theotokos of the Mother of the Lord at the separation of the soul from the body of every true believer." This canon is read "on behalf of a person who is separated from his soul and unable to speak" (speak), usually it is called a waste (prayer). At the moment of death, a person experiences a painful feeling of fear, languor.

According to the testimony of the holy fathers, a person is terrified when the soul is separated from the body: it is especially hard for the soul for the first three days outside the body. When leaving the body, the soul meets the Guardian Angel, given to it at Holy Baptism, and the spirits of malice (demons). The sight of the latter is so terrible that the soul rushes about and trembles at the sight of them. The canon is read by relatives or friends over a dying person in order to make it easier for the soul to leave the body.

Relatives and friends of a dying person need to be courageous, so that, having said goodbye to a loved one, try to alleviate not so much bodily as mental suffering with prayer.

When the body of the deceased is washed, dressed and laid in a coffin, candles (or at least one candle) are lit around the coffin as a sign that the deceased has passed into the realm of light - into a better afterlife. Then they immediately begin to read the canon, called "Following the Exodus of the Soul from the Body" (see "Orthodox Prayer Book").

If a person died not at home, and his body is not at home, then on the day of his death, this canon is still read. The canon is read "for the one who died," i.e. for a person who has just died.

Therefore, one should not, while reading the refrain, pronounce the names of either recently deceased acquaintances, or parents, relatives, etc. The canon is read only for him alone.

Then, for three days, the Psalter is also read over the deceased. It is placed in the "Orthodox Prayer Book". The Psalter is read continuously (day and night) over the tomb of a Christian for as long as the deceased remains unburied.

Since the closest relatives of the deceased in the first three days have a lot of household chores for organizing the funeral, one of the friends and acquaintances is invited to read the Psalter. Any pious layman can read the Psalter for the deceased. An hour or an hour and a half before the removal of the body from the house over the body of the deceased, the “Following on the Exodus of the Soul from the Body” is read again.

Church funeral

In the temple, the coffin with the body of the deceased is placed in the middle of the church facing the altar, and lamps are lit on the four sides of the coffin.

According to the teachings of the Church, the soul of a person on the third day after death goes through terrible ordeals. At this time, the soul of the deceased has a great need for the help of the Church. To facilitate the soul's transition to another life, the canon and the Psalter are read over the coffin of an Orthodox Christian, and a funeral service is performed in the church.

After reading the Apostle and the Gospel, the priest reads the permissive prayer. This prayer resolves the prohibitions and sins that were on the deceased, in which he did not repent (or which, upon repentance, he could not remember), and the deceased is released in peace into the afterlife. The text of this prayer is immediately placed in the right hand of the deceased.

Relatives and friends of the deceased go around the coffin with the body, with a bow ask for forgiveness for involuntary insults, kiss the deceased for the last time (a halo on his head or an icon on his chest).

After that, the body is completely covered with a sheet, and the priest crosswise sprinkles it with earth (or pure river sand) with a prayer. The coffin is closed with a lid, after which it is no longer opened. When the coffin with the body is taken out of the temple, the face of the deceased is turned towards the exit and the Angelic song - the Trisagion is sung.

It often happens that the church is far from the house of the deceased, then an absentee funeral is performed for him. Relatives of the deceased order a funeral service at the nearest church.

After the funeral service, relatives are given a whisk, a permissive prayer and earth (or sand) from the funeral table. At home, a permissive prayer is put into the right hand of the deceased, a paper whisk is placed on his forehead, and after saying goodbye to him in the cemetery, his body, covered with a sheet from head to toe, crosswise, from head to toe, from the right shoulder to the left, is sprinkled with sand to make the correct form of the cross.

In the grave of the deceased, they are supposed to face the east, when the coffin with the body is lowered into the grave, the Trisagion is sung again, an eight-pointed cross of the correct form is placed at the feet of the deceased.

Soul after death, commemoration of the dead, 3rd, 9th and 40th day, year. Saturdays

The Holy Church constantly prays for all “our fathers and brothers who have died before,” but she also makes a special prayerful commemoration for each deceased, if there is our pious desire and need for this. Such a commemoration is called private, it includes thirds, nineties, forages and anniversaries.

The apostolic tradition tells of the commemoration of the dead on the third day after death. It says that the Lord resurrected on the third day, therefore we also need to pray to Him fervently on this day, remembering that the deceased was baptized in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the One God in the Trinity.

In addition to the theological significance of the commemoration of the deceased on the third day, it also has a mysterious meaning, relating to the afterlife state of the soul. When the Monk Macarius of Alexandria asked the Angel who accompanied him in the desert to explain the meaning of the church commemoration on the third day, the Angel answered him: “When on the third day there is a commemoration in the Church (for the soul of the deceased), then the soul of the deceased receives relief from the guarding Angel in sorrow , which she feels from separation from the body, she receives because the glorification and offering in the Church of God has been completed for her, from which a good hope is born in her, for in the course of two days the soul, along with the angels who are with her, is allowed to walk the earth wherever she wants. Therefore, the soul that loves the body sometimes wanders around the house in which the body is laid, and thus spends two days, like a bird, looking for its nests.

The virtuous soul, on the other hand, walks in those places in which it used to do the truth. On the third day, He Who Himself rose from the dead on the third day, commands, in imitation of His Resurrection, to ascend the Christian soul to Heaven, to worship the God of all.”

Ninth day. On this day, the Holy Church performs prayers and a bloodless Sacrifice for the deceased, also according to the apostolic tradition. Macarius of Alexandria, according to the revelation of the angels, says that after worshiping God on the third day, it is commanded to show the soul various pleasant abodes of the saints and the beauty of paradise.

All this the soul considers in six days, wondering and glorifying the Creator of all, God. Contemplating all this, she changes and forgets the grief she felt while in the body and after leaving it.

But, if she is guilty of sins, then at the sight of the pleasures of the saints, she begins to grieve and reproach herself: “Alas for me! How much have I hustled in this world? Carried away by the satisfaction of lusts, I spent most of my life in carelessness and did not serve God as I should, so that I too would be worthy of this grace and glory, Alas, poor me!

After considering the six days of all the joy of the righteous, she again ascends by the Angels to worship God.

Fortieth day. The Monk Macarius of Alexandria, discussing the state of the soul after the death of the body, continues: “After the second worship, the Lord of all commands to take the soul to hell and show it the places of torment that are there, the different sections of hell and the different torments of impious people, in which the souls of sinners incessantly weep and gnash teeth.

In these different places of torment, the soul rushes for thirty days (from the ninth to the fortieth), trembling, so that she herself would not be imprisoned in them. On the fortieth day, she again ascends to worship the Lord God, and now the Judge determines a place of detention appropriate for her.

What can we do for the dead within forty days of death? As soon as a person dies, it is necessary to immediately take care of the magpie, i.e. daily commemoration during the Divine Liturgy. If possible, it is good to order forty meals, and even in several temples.

Annual. The day of the death of a Christian is the day of his birth for a new better life. That is why we celebrate the memory of our brothers after a year has passed from the day of their death, imploring the goodness of God, may the Lord be merciful to their souls, may they give them a longed-for fatherland in an eternal inheritance and make them inhabitants of paradise.

The dead should be commemorated on the days of their earthly birth, on the days of their name days (the day of memory of the saint whose name they bore). On the days of their memory, order their commemoration at the Liturgy, order a requiem for repose.

The days of the special (special) commemoration of the dead are five ecumenical parental Saturdays: Meat Empty - two weeks before the start of Lent; Trinity - on the 49th day after Easter, before the day of the Holy Trinity; second, third and fourth Saturdays of Great Lent.

Private parental days: Tuesday of St. Thomas' week (the ninth day after Easter); September 11 (new style) - on the day of the Beheading of John the Baptist; Dmitrievskaya parental Saturday (takes place a week before November 8).

Orthodox education of children. Prayer for the dead

We hope that the need for such education has already become clear from the main content of the lecture. If we believe that prayers for the dead contribute to easing the afterlife of their souls, then our children are our main hope that after our death, someone will regularly pray to God for relief and our fate beyond the grave.

It does not matter how many years have passed since the death of a person. In the Orthodox Church, there is a pious custom to serve requiems even over the graves of the righteous until they are conciliarly canonized among the Saints.

The Second Coming of Christ and the Last Judgment

The first period of the afterlife of all people will end with the Second Coming of Christ. It will be sudden, equally obvious to all: “as lightning comes from the east and is visible even to the west, so will the coming of the Son of Man” (Mat. 24:27).

First of all - “the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven; and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn” (v. 30). On the great day of the coming of the Son of Man, the general resurrection of the dead will take place in a transfigured form. The resurrection of the dead will be universal and simultaneous, both for the righteous and for sinners. The Universal Judgment will begin.

Novikov G.A., Chissov V.I., Modnikov O.P.

They say that the other world is nearby. How to know about it?

The Lord is close to us. The shirt we wear on the body is farther away than the other world and the Lord Himself.

Once I had to go by car "Niva" from the village of Palekh to Puchezh. And it was winter, potholes on the road. Several people were driving in the car, one mother (dentist) began to talk about her trip to Palekh:

Father, when I was going to Palekh, our bus was like...

Before she had time to utter the word "skidded", our car was thrown into the side of the road, right into a tree hit. It is interesting that she began to speak suddenly. Before that, it was something completely different.

One day I was talking to the parish priest. He told:

We had a priest in Zharki before me, and one woman came every evening and made scandals for him. When I replaced this priest, she stopped arguing. I decided: "So, the father himself is to blame." And as soon as I thought about it, how she came that day and threw such a scandal at me! And now every day scandal! I should thank the Lord that He keeps me, but I blamed another priest, and thought to myself that I was good.

And another person, who was sitting next to us, listened to us and said:

And I was also interested. Once I was driving a car and thought: "I have been driving for three years and the wheels have never failed, they have not been lowered." I forgot that this is not my merit, but the Lord kept. I thought so, drove a kilometer, and - time! - the wheel is off. Replaced it. Drove a little - the second wheel went flat ...

The eyes of the Lord look at us day and night, control all our thoughts, words, deeds. And we must walk before God and try not to allow sinful habits, and if we do somewhere, repent and live properly, always remember that the invisible world is here with us.

How to explain to non-believers that life after the grave really exists?

We know that in the history of the Church there were many cases when the Lord showed the miracles of the return from the afterlife. Everyone knows the resurrection of the gospel four-day Lazarus, and today, among our contemporaries, there are many such cases. Usually people who returned from the other world said that their soul continued to think, feel, and experience. They told how the soul entered into communion with angels or demons, saw the abodes of Paradise and hell. The memory of what they saw did not disappear, and when the soul returned back to its body (apparently, the time had not yet come for their final departure), they testified to this.

Such "journeys" to the afterlife are not for free for the soul. They help many to reconsider their lives, to improve. People are starting to think more about salvation, about their souls.

There are many such cases. But ordinary worldly people who live in the bustle, in the difficulties of our time, have little faith in such stories and say: “Well, we don’t know! Is there life or not in that world - who knows? Nobody has returned here yet. at least we have not met such people. We have no experience of spiritual communication with those who died and returned."

I remember such a case. One journalist and I were driving in a car and drove past a cemetery.

This is our future city. We'll all be here," I said.

He smiled and replied:

If at least one person returned from the world you are talking about to the earthly one, then one could talk about it and believe in it. But no one has yet returned from the grave.

I told him:

You and I are talking like two twins who are about to emerge from their mother's womb. One says to the other: "Listen, dear brother. Time is running out. Soon we will go out into the world where our parents live. It is so great!" And the second, atheistically minded, says: “You know, you are talking about some strange things. What kind of world can there be? What kind of independent life? We are now completely dependent on our mother, we feed on oxygen from her. and who knows what will happen to us. Maybe we will perish? After all, no one has yet returned to the womb!

Here is what I told the unbelieving journalist. When we lived without faith, were brought up in an atheistic spirit, then we reasoned like that. All the forces of the devil were aimed at atrophying the most important organ in man - faith. The man became empty. No misfortunes, misfortunes, such as the Chernobyl accident, the Spitak earthquake, the Moscow hurricane, floods in Western Ukraine, terrorist acts, are capable of awakening the people sleeping in an atheistic coffin. The Lord constantly makes it known that the end of life is near for everyone, that we all walk and live only by His great mercy. He alone keeps us and waits for us to improve.

How do non-believers feel? They usually say: "You can believe in what is, what you can feel, see." What is this faith? This knowledge, and even that is biased, inaccurate, not comprehensive. This knowledge is materialistic. And only the Higher Mind, which is the Creator Himself, can know everything about everything.

Unbelievers say: "We, people, are a product of matter. Man died, crumbled to dust in the grave, and there can be no more life." But man is not made of flesh alone. Every person has an immortal soul. It is an exclusively spiritual substance. Many researchers tried to find it in the body, feel it, see it, measure it, but there could be no result, because they looked at the otherworldly spiritual world with our earthly, material eyes. As soon as the soul leaves the dead body, it immediately opens a vision of the other world. She sees both worlds together: the spiritual world permeates the material, earthly. And the spiritual world is much more complex than the visible world.

Recently, a young woman called from Kyiv and said:

Father, pray for me: I will have an operation.

Three days later, he reports that the operation went well. When they put her on the operating table, she asked the surgeon:

Can you baptize yourself with your hand? He replied:

Better mentally baptized. And he goes on to say:

When I mentally crossed myself, I felt that I had left my body. I see my body on the operating table. I felt so free, so easy and good that I even forgot about the body. And I saw a tunnel, and at the end of its bright light. And from there I hear a voice: "Do you believe that the Lord will help you?" They asked me that three times, and I answered three times: "I believe! I believe, Lord!" I woke up and was already in the room. And I immediately appreciated earthly life. Everything seemed empty and vain to me. All this is nothing compared to the otherworldly, spiritual world. There is true life, there is true freedom.

Once a priest was talking in a maternity hospital with nurses and doctors. He told them about Dr. Moody, who described in the book "Life after death" cases of clinical death. People came back to life and talked about what they saw when they were... dead. All as one said: "Yes, they saw the tunnel, they saw the light at the end of it."

Hearing this, one doctor said:

Father, how interesting! You know, when a child is in the womb, he also needs to go through a tunnel in order to enter our world, into the light. Here the sun shines, everything lives here. Probably, a person, in order to go to the other world, needs to go through a tunnel, and after the tunnel in that world there will be real life.

What do those who have been in the other world say about hell? What is he?

Television rarely shows something soulful, instructive. But then somehow an interesting program was going on on the Muscovy channel. One woman, Valentina Romanova, told how she was in the afterlife. She was an unbeliever, got into a car accident, died and saw how her soul was separated from her body. In the program, she told in detail what happened to her after her death.

At first, she did not realize that she had died. She saw everything, heard everything, understood everything, and even wanted to tell the doctors that she was alive. Screaming: "I'm alive!" But no one heard her voice. She grabbed the doctors by the hands, but she did not succeed. I saw a piece of paper and a pen on the table, I decided to write a note, but I could not take this pen in my hands.

And at that time she was drawn into a tunnel, a funnel. She came out of the tunnel and saw a dark man next to her. At first she was very glad that she was not alone, turned to him and said: - Man, tell me where I am?

He was tall and stood on her left side. When he turned, she looked into his eyes and realized that no good could be expected from this man. Fear gripped her and she ran. When she met a luminous young man who protected her from a terrible man, she calmed down.

And then the places that we call hellish opened up to her. A cliff of terrible height, very deep, and below there are many people - both men and women. They were of different nationalities, different skin colors. An unbearable stench emanated from this pit. And there was a voice to her that said that there are those who committed terrible Sodomic sins during their lifetime, unnatural, fornication.

In another place, she saw a lot of women and thought:

These are child killers, those who had abortions and did not repent.

Then Valentina realized that she would have to answer for what she had done in her life. Here she first heard the word "vices". I didn't know what the word was before. Only gradually she understood how terrible the hellish torments are, what sin is, what vice is.

Then I saw a volcanic eruption. A huge fiery river flowed, and human heads floated in it. They then plunged into the lava, then emerged. And the same voice explained that in this fiery lava there are souls of psychics, those who were engaged in divination, witchcraft, love spells. Valentina was frightened and thought: "What if they leave me here too?" She did not have such a sin, but she understood that in any of these places she could stay forever, since she was an unrepentant sinner.

And then I saw a staircase that led to heaven. There were a lot of people going up this staircase. She also began to rise. A woman walked ahead of her. She was exhausted, became exhausted. And Valentina realized that if she did not help her, she would fall down. It can be seen that she is a merciful person, she began to help this woman. So they got into the light space. She couldn't describe him. She spoke only about the amazing fragrance and joy. When Valentina experienced spiritual joy, she returned to her body. She ended up in a hospital bed with the man who hit her standing in front of her. His last name is Ivanov. He told her:

Die no more! I will pay for all damages on your car (she was very worried because the car was broken), but don't die!

She was in the next world for three and a half hours. Medicine calls it clinical death, but allows a person to be in this state for no more than six minutes. After this period, irreversible changes in the brain and tissues begin. And even if a person is then revived, he turns out to be mentally handicapped. The Lord once again showed the miracle of the resurrection of the dead. He brought a person back to life and gave him new knowledge about the spiritual world.

I also knew such a case - with Claudia Ustyuzhanina. It was in the sixties. When I was returning from the army, I stopped by Barnaul. A woman approached me in the temple. She saw that I was praying and said:

We have a miracle in the city. The woman lay in the morgue for several days and came to life. Would you like to see her?

And I went. I saw a huge house, a high fence, there. Everyone had these fences. The shutters in the house are closed. We knocked and a woman came out. They said that we came from the church, and she accepted. At home there was still a boy of about six, Andrei, now he is a priest. I don't know if he remembers me, but I remember him well.

I spent the night with them. Claudia showed certificates of her death. She even showed scars on her body. It is known that She had cancer of the fourth degree and she died during the operation. She told a lot of interesting things.

And then I entered the seminary. He knew that Claudia was in persecution, the newspapers did not leave her alone. Her house was constantly under control: nearby, two or three houses away, there was a two-story police building. I spoke with some fathers in the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, and she was called. She sold her house in Barnaul and bought a house in Strunino. The son grew up, now he serves in the city of Alexandrov.

When I was in the Pochaev Lavra, I heard that she had gone to the other world.

Where is hell?

There are two opinions. Saints Basil the Great and Athanasius the Great imagine that hell is inside the earth, because in the Holy Scriptures the Lord, through the mouth of the prophet Ezekiel, says: "I will bring you down /.../ and place you in the underworld of the earth" (Ezek. 26, 20). The same opinion is confirmed by the canon of Matins of Great Saturday: "Thou hast descended into the lower earth," "Thou hast descended into the underworld of the earth."

But other teachers of the Church, for example, St. John Chrysostom, believe that hell is outside the world: "Just as royal dungeons and ore mines are far away, so hell will be somewhere outside this universe. But what are you asking, where and in what place will is she? What does it matter to you? You need to know what she is, and not where and in what place she hides. And our Christian task is to avoid hell: loving God, neighbors, humble ourselves and repent, go to that world.

There are many mysteries on earth. When Archdeacon Stephen was stoned to death, a temple was erected for him at this place, at the gates to Jerusalem. In our time, archaeologists from Belarus and Ukraine came there, opened the entrance under the temple, which leads under the city, brought equipment there and suddenly saw black birds with wingspan of more than two meters in huge underground caves. The birds rushed at the archaeologists, caught up with them

such fear that they left the equipment, drove an excavator and blocked the entrance with stones and sand, refusing to further research ...

How many people go to the Kingdom of God, and how many go to hell?

One priest was asked this question. He smiled.

You know dear! When I climb up to ring the bell tower before the Divine Liturgy, I see people coming from the nearby villages along the paths to the church. Grandmother with a wand, grandfather mince with her granddaughter, young people go ... By the end of the service, the whole temple is filled. So people go to the abodes of Paradise - one at a time. And to hell... Now the service is over. I - again to the bell tower, I see: people all come out of the church gates together. They can’t get through right away, but they still hurry from behind: “Why are you standing there! Get out faster!”

Holy Scripture says: "Enter through the narrow gate, for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and many go through it" (Matthew 7:13). It is very difficult for a sinful person to give up his vices and passions, but nothing unclean will enter the Kingdom of God. Only souls purified in repentance enter there.

The Lord gave all the days of our life to prepare for eternity - all of us will have to go there someday. Those who have the opportunity should constantly go to church - both in the morning and in the evening. The end will come, and we will not be ashamed to appear before the heavenly inhabitants, before God. The good deeds of an Orthodox Christian will intercede for him.

Do you think the saved person will be completely happy if he knows that his relatives and neighbors have gone to hell?

If a person enters the abode of Paradise, then from the fullness of grace, he forgets earthly suffering, he is not tormented by memories and thoughts about his dead neighbors. Each soul unites with God, and He fills it with great joy. A holy person who has gained the bliss of Paradise prays for those who remain on earth, but he can no longer pray for those who have ended up in hell. We, the living, must pray for them. Alms, prayers and good deeds to save our loved ones. And ourselves, while there is still an opportunity, try to live holy, not to sin, not to oppose God, not to blaspheme Him. After all, if we throw mud at the sun, this mud will fall on our bad head. And God cannot be mocked. We must humble ourselves before Him: "I am weak, I am weak, help me!" Let us ask Him, and He will give what we ask. For it is said in the Gospel: "Ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find, knock and it will be opened to you" (1 Corinthians 11:9).

Is it possible to know his afterlife by the death of a person? After all, they say: "The death of sinners is fierce" (Ps. 33). But even Orthodox Christians had many deaths, which, by outward signs, cannot be called peaceful.

A peaceful Christian death is a state of mind when a person feels the presence of God, the protection of the Most Holy Theotokos and entrusts his soul to the Lord. This is a Christian death, even if outwardly it was a martyr. "The death of sinners is fierce" not only because it is outwardly impious (for example, someone was killed in a drunken fight), but also because it is sudden. A person does not have time to prepare, confess, purify, reconcile with everyone, and most importantly - with the Lord.

How do monks die? Peacefully. In our monastery, one nun fell seriously ill. Mother, who looked after her, says: "Father, you are leaving, what if something happens?" - "Wait." I'm coming in a week. At 3 o'clock in the morning she was given communion. I come in the morning, I ask: "Will you go to the Kingdom of Heaven?" She barely moves her lips. As St. Silouan taught: if the confessor says: "Go, child, to the Kingdom of Heaven and see the Lord," knowing that the child lived with dignity, the Lord will accept him in the abode of Paradise.

I crossed her and I said: "The Lord is waiting for you. Go to the Kingdom of Heaven." And went to confession. Mothers read the canon on the exodus of the soul, and after 30 minutes she went to the Lord.

A person from birth is sick with a severe hereditary disease. All his life he suffers and suffers. What awaits this sufferer in this world and in the next?

If he is sick from birth and does not grumble, does not blame anyone for his illness, thanks God and humbles himself, then before God he is a sufferer, a martyr. If his life ends in suffering from illness, he will receive a martyr's crown in the Kingdom of God.

Many holy people asked that the Lord, even during this life, give them suffering, sickness for their sins, in order to temporarily suffer, suffer, and the Lord would forgive them their sins for these sufferings. And in that world there will be no more suffering.

Bodily suffering is valuable for salvation. If we are sick, then we must be strengthened in spirit in this test.

I remember such a case. In the thirties of the last century, a rich landowner lived in Moscow. For fifty years he never slept lying down. Wherever I went out of the house, I slept sitting everywhere. And at home he slept in a chair. He didn't even have a bed. And then everything was revealed, why he did this, why he undertook such a "feat". It turned out that some gypsy woman predicted that he would die lying in bed. Then, in order not to die, he decided never to go to bed again. Always just sitting. And, of course, he died sitting in a chair.

This "feat" of his was based on superstition, pride and did not lead to salvation.

If we suffer for the sake of the Lord, for the sake of our neighbors, endure sickness and do not grumble, only then will martyrdom and patience be charged to us as a feat; if we take upon ourselves "martyrdom", indulging our passions, it will lead us to destruction.

If a person, according to worldly concepts, was quiet, peaceful, calm, did not get irritated, did not swear, and did not even grumble in illness, but at the same time was non-church, did not repent and did not take communion, what will be his fate in that world?

It is said that the deeds of a man go to that world. The apostle Paul writes: "The unbeliever is already condemned, but the believer will be judged." There are people who would like to be in the Church, but they do not have such an opportunity. But if a person has a temple nearby, at his side, and he does not recognize the sacraments of the Church, then this will be especially blamed on him.

For seventy years, party agitators have driven people into the head that faith is obscurantism, a dark, illiterate Middle Ages. And generations of people who grew up on this "truth" can be called lost for God. Their souls died before their bodies died. Rarely in anyone (only through the prayers of neighbors) has the flame of faith in Christ been preserved.

A person, even a quiet, peaceful one, without God does not have the fullness of spiritual development that he could have, living in God. A non-church person, even a quiet one, has an unrepentant soul, darkened by sins. About such "quiet" the Russian people themselves put together a saying: "In a still whirlpool, demons are found." That is, a person is afraid to show people his insides and covers it with a benevolent appearance, but passions are still inside. Without God and repentance, one cannot be freed from them. We know from the Holy Scriptures that "the same kind (that is, demonic - A.A.) is cast out only by prayer and fasting" (Matt. 17:20). Therefore, one must live like a Christian, and not just be quiet.

A person during his lifetime did good deeds and passed into that world. Will these good deeds be to his salvation if they were done not for the sake of God, but for the sake of neighbors, for the sake of his good name?

The Holy Scriptures say that everything that is not done for the sake of Christ is sin.

There are people who still live in a pagan way, do good deeds not for the glory of the name of God. If they do good not for their own glory, but for the sake of their neighbor, in time these good deeds will lead them to God, because God is love, God is good.

I know one woman. She lives in Kineshma. Once she helped one temple, and after that her dacha burned down. A woman in spiritual matters is inexperienced. Someone take it and tell her: "You see, you did a good deed, and now you have a temptation, the dacha burned down." This woman answers: "Well, that's it! Now I will no longer help anyone, otherwise I will remain a beggar!"

Here's how it happens. The man did good and did not understand why. The cottage burned down - no big deal. It is said: "Lost wealth - lost nothing, lost health - lost half, lost God - lost everything." The Lord will multiply many times over what evil spirits have taken from you in revenge for a good deed.

If a person did good deeds out of the kindness of his soul, then this is a direct road to God. And if he did to glorify his name, then there is no benefit to him in this, he will not receive rewards in that world. What is the reward for the communists? They destroyed temples, monasteries, went against God. It seems that many countries were helped, but the goal was the same - to establish their ideology in all countries. Countries passed to another government, their peoples hated the old government for its godless propaganda, because it brought death to people. And now we are reaping the fruits of godlessness, and the fruits are bitter. Even nature cannot bear them: more and more tornadoes, earthquakes, disasters.

Our relatives died, we pray for them, but it is not known where they ended up - in Paradise or in hell. If they ended up in hell, I want to know when they will be relieved from our prayers: after the Last Judgment or before?

After the Last Judgment by the Lord, everything will be finally determined and prayers for the departed will not be needed. They need them now. After death, the soul that left the body appears before the Lord for a private judgment to determine its fate. Through the prayers of the Church, relatives and neighbors left to live, a change in this fate is possible, the Lord sends His angels, and they either transfer the soul to places of less torment, or completely remove it from hell.

An angel of the Lord appeared to one man and asked:

Would you like to see human affairs?

Yes, I do.

And the angel led him through the underground passages. They go around, they hear groans, screams, screams. They approach the place where there are huge red-hot furnaces, and terrible screams are heard from there. Suddenly, the angel rushed into one of the furnaces and freed the man, enveloped from head to toe in fire. I touched his body, and all the cinders flew off this man. The angel dressed the liberated man in white clothes, and his face shone with heavenly joy. Then the first man asked the angel:

What happened to this soul, why such a change?

The angel replied:

This man, when he lived on earth, went to church very rarely, he only lit candles. Occasionally, once or twice a year he came to confession, he spoke sins, but not all, he concealed some. He approached the Chalice and communed in condemnation. He kept the fasts badly, only the first and last weeks of Great Lent, on Wednesday and Friday, he used to allow himself to be modest, saying: "All right, the Lord is merciful, he will forgive!"

His soul was suddenly separated from his body, no one foresaw his death. Relatives, knowing his negligence, knowing that instead of evening and morning prayers, he often read the short rule of St. Seraphim of Sarov, they began to pray intensely for him, served in many monasteries, donated to churches. Forty years passed, and through the prayers of the Church, the Lord freed this man.

Do you know why I showed you these places? Why did you tell about this person? I knew that I needed to free him, and I took you here. You, just like this man, lead a negligent, sinful life. If you don't want to get here, you must correct yourself, be a real, living Christian.

The man came to himself. He understood that the Lord had specially revealed to him the secret of the other world. He corrected himself radically and repented of all his sins.

And all shameful sins burn with shame. On the day of the Last Judgment, demons will not be able to show the sins confessed by a person - they will be forgiven and erased from demonic charters. And unrepentant sins will be declared before all people, before saints and angels. If we are afraid of the confessor at confession, then what awaits us at the Last Judgment, what a shame and shame! Remember: millions have passed before the confessor and all with the same sins. You will not surprise him with your sins, and he will not condemn you, but will help you repent.

What can you say about those who have already gone to that world? How can they influence those who remained on earth?

Of course. The sins of the parents weigh heavily on the children, the holy, God-fearing life of the parents accustoms the children to the fear of God.

Many people know that all children are pure as angels. For example, a girl is pure, kind, but suddenly, by the permission of God, an evil spirit enters her and, sometimes, beats and beats her, torments her for twenty or thirty years. She is pure, she has few of her own sins and all of them are children, but she can bear this punishment for the sins of her forefathers. It happens that the ancestors are in hell, and she has to suffer for her kind in order to beg their sinful souls.

Possessed people sooner or later come to church, to the priest. Often they are able to understand why this happened to them, and are ready to bear their cross. These people, in whom the Lord allows an evil spirit to inhabit, if they do not grumble at their lot in earthly life, after death they will be martyrs in the Kingdom of Heaven. And martyr's crowns are the most precious in the eyes of the Lord.

The sins of parents up to the third or fourth generation are reflected in the lives of children. Let's not go far for an example. Those people who, after the revolution, destroyed churches, shot believers (and forty million Orthodox were destroyed), many remained on earth without punishment, but in the future life they will answer for all their crimes and find eternal hellish torment. And retribution on earth will come through the lives of their children and grandchildren. If children also live without faith in God, their generation will end. God won't let it go on.

Those people who live holy, pray, fulfill the holy commandments of the Lord, have joy in procreation. The Lord says to Abraham: "For your pious life, I will multiply your family, like the sand of the sea." And believing Christians will live and be saved in such a pious kind. They will inherit the heavenly mansions.

What is the afterlife, or what is life after death like? Wishing to proceed to the feasible solution of this mysterious question, I remember Your words, Christ our God, that without You we can do nothing good, but “ask and it will be given to you”; and therefore I pray to Thee with a humble and contrite heart; come to my aid, enlightening me, like every person in the world who comes to you. Bless yourself and point out, with the assistance of Your All-Holy Spirit, where we should look for the solution of our question about the afterlife, a question so necessary for the present time. We need such permission both in and of itself, as well as to put to shame the two false directions of the human spirit, materialism and spiritualism, which are now striving for dominance, expressing a painful state of the soul, an epidemic state, contrary to Christian doctrine..

Part 1

WILL LIVE!

Man's afterlife consists of two periods; 1) the afterlife until the resurrection of the dead and the universal judgment - the life of the soul, and 2) the afterlife after this judgment - the eternal life of man. In the second period of the afterlife, everyone has the same age, according to the teachings of the word of God.

The Savior directly said that souls live beyond the grave like angels; therefore, the afterlife state of the soul is conscious, and if souls live like angels, then their state is active, as our Orthodox Church teaches, and not unconscious and sleepy, as some people think.

The false doctrine of a sleepy, unconscious, and therefore inactive state of the soul in the first period of its afterlife does not agree with either the Revelation of the Old and New Testaments, or with common sense. It appeared in the III century in the Christian society due to a misunderstanding of some expressions of the word of God. In the Middle Ages, this false doctrine made itself felt, and even Luther sometimes attributed an unconscious sleepy state to the souls after the grave. During the Reformation, the main representatives of this doctrine were the Anabaptists - the Baptists. This doctrine was further developed by the Socinian heretics, who rejected the Holy Trinity and the divinity of Jesus Christ. False teaching does not cease to develop even in our time.

The revelation of both the Old and the New Testament offers us the dogma of the afterlife of the soul, and at the same time lets us know that the state of the soul after the grave is personal, independent, conscious and effective. If it were not so, then the word of God would not represent to us the sleeping ones acting consciously.

After separation from the body on earth, the soul in the afterlife continues its existence on its own during the entire first period. The spirit and soul continue their existence beyond the grave, enter into a state of either blissful or painful, from which they can be delivered through the prayers of St. Churches.

Thus, the first period of the afterlife also includes the possibility for some souls of deliverance from hellish torment before the final judgment. The second period of the afterlife of souls represents only a blissful or only painful state.

The body on earth serves as an obstacle to the soul in its activity, in the same place, beyond the grave, in the first period - these obstacles will be eliminated by the absence of the body, and the soul will be able to act solely according to its own mood, assimilated by it on earth; either good or evil. And in the second period of its afterlife, the soul will act, although under the influence of the body, with which it will again unite, but the body will already change, and its influence will even favor the activity of the soul, freeing itself from gross carnal needs and gaining new spiritual properties.

In this form, the Lord Jesus Christ depicted the afterlife and the activity of souls in the first period of the afterlife in his parable of the rich man and Lazarus, where the souls of the righteous and the sinner are presented as alive and consciously acting internally and externally. Their souls think, desire and feel. True, on earth the soul can change its good activity to evil and, conversely, evil to good, but with which it passed beyond the grave, that activity will already develop for the whole eternity.

It was not the body that animated the soul, but the soul - the body; consequently, even without a body, without all its external organs, it will retain all its powers and abilities. And its action continues beyond the grave, with the only difference being that it will be incomparably more perfect than earthly. As proof, let us recall the parable of Jesus Christ: despite the immeasurable abyss separating paradise from hell, the dead rich man, who is in hell, saw and recognized both Abraham and Lazarus, who are in paradise; moreover, a conversation with Abraham.

Thus, the activity of the soul and all its forces in the afterlife will be much more perfect. Here, on earth, we see objects at a great distance with the help of telescopes, and yet the action of vision cannot be perfect, it has a limit beyond which vision, even armed with lenses, does not extend. Beyond the grave, even the abyss does not prevent the righteous from seeing sinners, and the condemned from seeing the saved. The soul, being in the body, saw a person and other objects - it was the soul that saw, and not the eye; the soul heard, not the ear; smell, taste, touch were felt by the soul, and not by the members of the body; therefore, these powers and abilities will be with her beyond the grave; she is either rewarded or punished because she feels rewarded or punished.
If it is natural for the soul to live in the company of creatures like it, if the feelings of the soul are united on earth by God Himself in the union of undying love, then, according to the power of undying love, souls are not separated by a grave, but, as St. Church, live in the society of other spirits and souls.

The internal, self-personal activity of the soul consists of: self-consciousness, thinking, cognition, feeling and desire. External activity, however, consists of various influences on all beings and inanimate objects around us.

DIE BUT DID NOT STOP LOVING

The Word of God revealed to us that the angels of God do not live alone, but are in fellowship with each other. The same word of God, namely the testimony of the Lord Jesus Christ, says that beyond the grave, righteous souls in His kingdom will live as angels; consequently, the souls will also be in spiritual communion with each other.

Sociability is a natural, natural property of the soul, without which the existence of the soul does not reach its goal - bliss; only through communication, interaction can the soul get out of that unnatural state for it, about which its Creator Himself said: "it's not good to be alone"(Gen. 2, 18). These words refer to the time when man was in paradise, where there is nothing but heavenly bliss. For perfect bliss, it means that only one thing was lacking - he was a homogeneous being, with whom he would be together, in cohabitation and in communion. From this it is clear that bliss requires precisely interaction, communion.

If communion is a natural need of the soul, without which, consequently, the very bliss of the soul is impossible, then this need will be most perfectly satisfied after the grave in the company of God's chosen saints.
The souls of both states of the afterlife, saved and unresolved, if they were still connected on earth (and especially for some reason close to each other’s heart, sealed by a close union of kinship, friendship, acquaintance), and beyond the grave continue to sincerely, sincerely love: even more than loved during earthly life. If they love, it means that they remember those who are still on earth. Knowing the life of the living, the inhabitants of the afterlife take part in it, grieving and rejoicing with the living. Having a common one God, those who have passed into the afterlife hope for the prayers and intercession of the living and wish salvation both for themselves and those still living on earth, expecting them hourly to rest in the afterlife fatherland.

So, love, together with the soul, passes beyond the grave into the realm of love, where no one can exist without love. Love planted in the heart, sanctified and strengthened by faith, burns beyond the grave to the source of love - God - and to the neighbors left on earth.
Not only those who are in God are perfect, but also not yet completely removed from God, imperfect, retain love for those who remain on earth.

Only the lost souls, as completely alien to love, to whom love was still painful on earth, whose hearts were constantly full of malice, hatred - and beyond the grave they are alien to love for their neighbors. Whatever the soul learns on earth, love or hatred, passes into eternity. The fact that the dead, if they had only true love on earth, and after the transition to the afterlife, love us, the living, is testified by the gospel rich man and Lazarus. The Lord clearly expresses: the rich man, being in hell, with all his sorrows, still remembers his brothers who remained on earth, cares about their afterlife. Therefore, he loves them. If a sinner loves so much, then with what tender parental love do the resettled parents love their orphans left on earth! With what ardent love do the spouses who have passed into the other world love their widows who have remained on earth! With what angelic love do the children who have moved beyond the grave love their parents who have remained on earth! With what sincere love do brothers, sisters, friends, acquaintances and all true Christians who have departed from this life love their brothers, sisters, friends, acquaintances who have remained on earth, and all with whom the Christian faith united them! So those who are in hell love us and take care of us, and those who are in paradise pray for us. He who does not allow the love of the dead to the living discovers in such reasoning his own cold heart, alien to the divine fire of love, alien to spiritual life, far from the Lord Jesus Christ, who united all the members of His Church, wherever they were, on earth or beyond. coffin, undying love.

The activities of a good or evil soul relative to loved ones continue beyond the grave. A kind soul, thinks how to save loved ones and everyone in general. And the second - evil - how to destroy.
The gospel rich man could know about the state of life of the brothers on earth from his own afterlife state - not seeing any afterlife joy, as the Gospel tells, he made a conclusion about their carefree life. If they had led a more or less pious life, they would not have forgotten their dead brother either, and would have helped him in some way; then he could say that he was receiving some comfort from their prayers. Here is the first and main reason why the dead know our earthly life, good and evil: because of its influence on their own afterlife.
So, there are three reasons why the imperfect dead know the life of the living: 1) their own afterlife, 2) the perfection of feelings beyond the grave, and 3) sympathy for the living.
Death at first produces grief - because of the visible separation from the beloved person. It is said that a grieving soul is much relieved after shedding tears. Sorrow without crying greatly oppresses the soul. And by faith only temperate, moderate weeping is prescribed. He who is leaving somewhere far away and for a long time asks the one with whom he is separated not to cry, but to pray to God. The deceased in this case is completely similar to the one who left; with the only difference being that separation from the first, i.e. with the dead, perhaps the shortest, and each next hour can again become an hour of joyful rendezvous - according to the commandment given by God, be ready for relocation to the afterlife at any hour. Therefore, immoderate crying is useless and harmful to those separated; he interferes with prayer, through which everything is possible for the believer.

Prayer and lamentation for sins are beneficial to both who have been separated. Souls are cleansed from sins through prayer. Since love for those who have departed cannot be extinguished, therefore it is commanded to show sympathy for them - to bear each other's burdens, to intercede for the sins of the dead, as if for their own. And from here comes weeping for the sins of the deceased, through which God advances in mercy to the deceased. At the same time, the Savior brings blessedness to the intercessor for the dead.

Unrestrained weeping for the dead is harmful to both the living and the dead. We need to cry not about the fact that our loved ones moved to another world (after all, that world is better than ours), but about sins. Such weeping is pleasing to God, and benefits the dead, and prepares the weeping faithful reward beyond the grave. But how will God have mercy on the dead, if the living one does not pray for him, does not sympathize, but indulges in immoderate weeping, despondency, and perhaps grumbling?

The deceased have learned by experience about the eternal life of man, and we, who are still here, can only strive to improve their condition, as God commanded us: "Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness"(Matthew 6:33) and "carry one another's burdens"(Gal. 6:2). Our life will greatly help the state of the dead if we take part in them.

Jesus Christ commanded to be ready for death at any hour. It is impossible to fulfill this commandment if you do not imagine the inhabitants of the afterlife. It is impossible to imagine judgment, heaven and hell without people, among whom are our relatives, acquaintances and all dear to our hearts. And what is this heart that would not be touched by the state of sinners in the afterlife? Seeing a drowning man, you involuntarily rush to give a helping hand to save him. Vividly imagining the afterlife of sinners, you will involuntarily begin to look for means to save them.

Weeping is forbidden, but complacency is commanded. Jesus Christ himself explained why crying is useless, telling Martha, Lazarus' sister, that her brother would rise again, and Jairus that his daughter was not dead, but asleep; and in another place he taught that he is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living; therefore, those who have passed into the afterlife are all alive. Why cry for the living, to whom we will come in due time? Chrysostom teaches that it is not sobs and cliques that do honor to the dead, but songs and psalmody and a fair amount of life. Crying inconsolable, hopeless, not imbued with faith in the afterlife, the Lord forbade. But weeping, expressing grief at the separation of cohabitation on earth, the weeping that Jesus Christ Himself manifested at the grave of Lazarus, such weeping is not forbidden.

The soul has an inherent hope in God and in itself similar beings, with which it is in various proportions. Having parted from the body and entered the afterlife, the soul retains everything that belongs to it, including hope in God and in the people close and dear to it who have remained on earth. Blessed Augustine writes: “The deceased hope to receive help through us; for the time of work has flown away for them.” The same truth is confirmed by St. Ephraim Sirin: “If on earth, moving from one country to another, we have a need for guides, how will this become necessary when we pass into eternal life.”

Approaching death, ap. Paul asked the believers to pray for him. If even the chosen vessel of the Holy Spirit, who was in paradise, desired prayer for himself, then what can be said about the imperfect departed? Of course, they also want us not to forget them, to intercede for them before God and help them in any way we can. They want our prayers just as much as we, still alive, want the Saints to pray for us, and the Saints want salvation for us, the living, as well as the imperfectly deceased.

The departing one, wishing to continue the fulfillment of his deeds on earth even after death, instructs the other, who remains, to realize his will. The fruits of activity belong to its inspirer, wherever he may be; to him belongs glory, thanksgiving, and recompense. Failure to fulfill such a will deprives the testator of peace, since it turns out that he is no longer doing anything for the common good. The one who did not fulfill the testament is subject to God's judgment as a murderer, as having taken away the means that could save the testator from hell, save him from eternal death. He stole the life of the deceased, he did not distribute his name to the poor! And the word of God states that almsgiving delivers from death, therefore, the one who remains on earth is the cause of death of the one who lives behind the grave, that is, the murderer. He is guilty as a murderer. But here, however, a case is possible when the sacrifice of the deceased is not accepted. Probably not without reason, everything is the will of God.

The last wish, of course, if it is not illegal, the last will of the dying person is fulfilled sacredly - in the name of the peace of the departed and the executor of the will's own conscience. Through the fulfillment of the Christian testament, God moves to have mercy on the deceased. He will hear the one who asks in faith, and at the same time will bring blessing and intercession for the deceased.
In general, all our negligence regarding the dead does not remain without sad consequences. There is a popular proverb: “A dead man is not standing at the gate, but he will take his own!” This proverb must not be neglected, for it contains a considerable part of the truth.

Until the final decision of God's judgment, even the righteous in paradise are not alien to the sorrow that comes from their love for sinners who are on earth and for sinners who are in hell. And the mournful state of sinners in hell, whose fate is not finally decided, is increased by our sinful life. If the dead are deprived of grace through our negligence or malicious intent, then they can cry out to God for revenge, and the true avenger will not be late. The punishment of God will soon befall such unjust people. The stolen estate of the one who has been killed will not go for the future. For the iniquitous honor, property and rights of the deceased, many suffer to this day. Torments are infinitely varied. People suffer and do not understand the reason, or, to put it better, do not want to confess their guilt.

All babies who died after St. baptism will surely receive salvation, according to the power of the death of Jesus Christ. For if they are pure from common sin, because they are cleansed by Divine baptism, and from their own (since children do not yet have their own will and therefore do not sin), then, without any doubt, they are saved. Consequently, parents at the birth of children are obliged to take care: enter through St. the baptism of the new members of Christ's Church into the Orthodox faith, thereby making them heirs of eternal life in Christ. It is clear that the afterlife of unbaptized babies is unenviable.

The words of the Golden Mouth, spoken by him on behalf of the children, testify to the afterlife of babies: “Do not cry, our outcome and the passage of air ordeals, accompanied by angels, were painless. The devils found nothing in us and By the grace of our Lord, God, we are where the angels and all the Saints are, and we pray to God for you. So, if children pray, it means that they are aware of the existence of their parents, remember and love them. The degree of blessedness of infants, according to the teaching of the Fathers of the Church, is more beautiful than even virgins and saints. The afterlife voice of babies calls to their parents through the mouth of the Church: “I died early, but I didn’t have time to blacken myself with sins, like you, and escaped the danger of sinning; therefore, it is better to cry about yourselves, who sin, always ”(“ The Order of the Burial of Babies ”). Love for dead children should be expressed in prayer for them. A Christian mother sees in her dead child her closest prayer book before the Throne of the Lord, and in reverent tenderness blesses the Lord both for him and for herself.

AND THE SOUL SPEAKS TO THE SOUL ...

If the interaction of souls still in the body on earth with those already in the afterlife without bodies is possible, then how can one deny this after the grave, when everyone will be either without gross bodies - in the first period of the afterlife, or in new, spiritual bodies - in second period?

Now let's proceed to the description of the afterlife, its two states: heavenly life and hellish life, based on the teachings of St. of the Orthodox Church about the twofold afterlife state of souls. The Word of God also testifies to the possibility of delivering some souls from hell through the prayers of St. Churches. Where are these souls before their deliverance, since there is no middle ground between heaven and hell?

They cannot be in heaven. Therefore, their life is in hell. Hell contains two states: unresolved and lost. Why are some souls not finally decided at a private judgment? Because they did not perish for the kingdom of God, it means that they have hope for eternal life, life with the Lord.

According to the testimony of the word of God, the fate of not only mankind, but also the most evil spirits has not yet been finally decided, as can be seen from the words spoken by demons to the Lord Jesus Christ: "who came to torment us before the time"(Matt. 8.29) and petitions: "so that he does not command them to go into the abyss"(Luke 8.31). The Church teaches that in the first period of the afterlife, some souls inherit heaven, while others inherit hell, there is no middle ground.

Where are those souls behind the grave whose fate has not been finally decided in a private court? To comprehend this question, let's look at what the unresolved state and hell mean in general. And for a visual presentation of this issue, let's take something similar on earth: a dungeon and a hospital. The first is for the criminals of the law, and the second for the sick. Some of the criminals, depending on the nature of the crime and the degree of guilt, are determined for temporary imprisonment in prison, while others for eternal imprisonment. The same is true in a hospital where patients are admitted who are not capable of a healthy life and activity: for some, the disease is curable, while for others it is fatal. The sinner is morally ill, a criminal of the law; his soul after the transition to the afterlife, as morally ill, bearing in itself the stains of sin, is itself incapable of paradise, in which there can be no impurity. And that is why she enters hell, as into a spiritual prison and, as it were, into a hospital for moral ailments. Therefore, in hell, some souls, depending on the type and degree of their sinfulness, linger longer, others less. Who is less?.. Souls who have not lost the desire for salvation, but who have not had time to bear the fruits of true repentance on earth. They are subject to temporary punishments in hell, from which they are freed only by the prayers of the Church, and not through the patience of punishment, as the Catholic Church teaches.

Destined for salvation, but temporarily residing in hell, along with the inhabitants of paradise, they bow their knees in the name of Jesus. This is the third, unresolved, state of souls in the afterlife of the first period, i.e. a state that must later become a state of bliss, and therefore not entirely alien to angelic life. What is sung, for example, in one of the Easter songs: “Now everything is filled with light: heaven, and earth, and the underworld ...”, and is also confirmed by the words of St. Paul: "that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven, on earth, and in the underworld..."(Phil. 2, 10). Here, under the word "hell" it is necessary to understand the transitional state of souls, which, along with the inhabitants of heaven and earth, kneel before the name of Jesus Christ; they bow, because they are not deprived of the grace-filled light of Christ. Of course, the inhabitants of Gehenna do not bow their knees, completely alien to the light of grace. The demons and their accomplices do not kneel, because they have completely perished for eternal life.

There are similarities and differences between the dogma of the Catholic Church about purgation and the Orthodox dogma about the unresolved state. The similarity of the teaching lies in the assessment of which souls belong to this afterlife. The dissimilarity lies in the method, the means of purification. Among Catholics, purification requires punishment for the soul after the grave, if it did not have it on earth. In Orthodoxy, however, Christ is a cleansing for those who believe in Him, for He took upon Himself both sins, and the consequence of sin is punishment. Souls of an unresolved state that are not completely cleansed on earth are healed and replenished with grace, at the intercession of the Church triumphant and militant for the imperfect dead, who are in hell. The Spirit of God Himself intercedes for His temples (people) with inexpressible sighs. He worries about the salvation of His fallen creature, but not denying its God, the Lord Jesus Christ. The dead in St. Easter, on one of its days, they receive special mercy from God; if they repent of their sins, then their sins are forgiven, even if they did not bear the fruits of repentance.

LIFE PARADISE

A person, having a moral aspiration, while still on earth, can change his character, his state of mind: good for evil, or vice versa, evil for good. It is impossible to do this behind the grave; good remains good, and evil remains evil. And the soul beyond the grave is no longer an autocratic being, for it is no longer able to change its development, even if it wishes, as evidenced by the words of Jesus Christ: "Bind his hands and feet, take him and cast him into outer darkness..."(Matthew 22:13) .

The soul cannot acquire a new way of thinking and feeling, and in general cannot change itself, but in the soul it can only further unfold what has been begun here on earth. What is sown is what is reaped. Such is the meaning of earthly life, as the basis of the beginning regarding life after death - happy or unhappy.

Good will develop more and more in eternity. Bliss is explained by this development. Those who subdue the flesh to the spirit, laboring in the name of God with fear, rejoice with unearthly joy, because the object of their life is the Lord Jesus Christ. Their mind and heart are in God and in heavenly life; for them everything earthly is nothing. Nothing can disturb their unearthly joy; here is the beginning, the anticipation of a blissful afterlife! The soul that finds its joy in God, having passed into eternity, has face to face an object that delights the senses.
So, on earth, he who abides in love with his neighbors (of course, in Christian love - pure, spiritual, heavenly) already abides in God and God abides in him. Stay and communion with God on earth is the beginning of that stay and communion with God, which will follow in paradise. Destined to be heirs of the kingdom of God, Jesus Christ Himself said that while they were still on earth, the kingdom of God was already within them. Those. their bodies are still on earth, but their minds and hearts have already acquired the spiritual, impassive state of truth, peace and joy that is characteristic of the kingdom of God.

Isn't this what the whole world expects in the end: eternity will swallow up time itself, destroy death, and reveal itself to humanity in all its fullness and infinity!

The place where the righteous go after a private judgment, or in general their condition, in the Holy Scriptures has different names; the most common and most common name is paradise. The word "paradise" means a garden proper, and in particular a fertile garden full of shady and beautiful trees and flowers.

Sometimes the Lord called the place of residence of the righteous in heaven the kingdom of God, for example, in a speech addressed to the condemned: “There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth when you see Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and all the Prophets in the kingdom of God; and themselves driven out. And they shall come from the east and the west, and the north and the south, and shall lie down in the kingdom of God.”(Luke 13:28).

For those who seek the kingdom of God, little is needed on the earth of the sensible; they are satisfied with little, and visible poverty (according to the concept of the secular world) constitutes perfect contentment for them. In another place, the Lord Jesus Christ calls the dwelling place of the righteous the house of the Heavenly Father with many mansions.

The words of St. app. Paul; he, ascended to the third heaven, heard voices there that it is impossible for a person to speak. This is the first period of the afterlife of heavenly life, a blissful life, but not yet perfect. And then the apostle continues that God has prepared for the righteous beyond the grave such perfect bliss, which nowhere on earth has the eye of man seen, nor the ear heard, and cannot imagine, imagine anything similar to man on earth. This is the second period of the afterlife paradise life of perfect bliss. So, according to the apostle, the second period of the heavenly afterlife is no longer the third heaven, but another perfect state or place - the kingdom of heaven, the house of the Heavenly Father.

REVELATIONS FROM THE LIVES OF THE SAINTS

The saints of God loved to meditate on the bliss of the righteous, and some of them were honored with special revelations about life in paradise.

The rapture into paradise of blessed Andrew Christ for the sake of the holy fool.

St. Andrei, a fool for Christ's sake, is the same one who saw in the temple of Blachernae the "veil of the Mother of God", celebrated by the Church. Andrew lived in Constantinople in the 5th century. His life was described by the person closest to him - his confessor, the priest Nicephorus. The biographer also heard something about him that he personally did not know from another person closest to him - Epiphanius (this was Andrei's disciple, who saw with him a wonderful revelation in the temple, later the patriarch of Constantinople).

Here is the story of what Blessed Andrew saw and heard in his rapture to Paradise. “What happened to me,” says the blessed one, “I don’t understand. By the will of God, I stayed in a sweet vision for two weeks, just as if someone slept sweetly all night and got up in the morning. I saw myself in paradise, very beautiful and wondrous, and admiring the spirit, I thought: what does this mean? I know that my dwelling is in Constantinople; but by what force I was brought here, I don’t know, and I didn’t understand myself, was I with the body, or out of the body? God knows this. But I saw myself dressed in bright clothes, woven as if from lightning, I was girded with a royal belt, and a crown, woven from a wonderfully beautiful color, was on top of my head. Excessively surprised at this unspeakable beauty, I admired the mind and heart from the inexpressible beauty of God's paradise, and, being in it, I was filled with joy. I saw there many gardens with tall trees, they, swaying with their branches, extremely delighted the eyes, and a great fragrance poured from their branches. Some of the trees were incessantly blooming, while others were adorned with golden leaves, others were burdened with various fruits of indescribable beauty. It is impossible to liken the trees of paradise to any tree on earth, the most beautiful: for God's hand planted them, and not man's. In these gardens there were countless birds, some of them had golden wings, others were white like snow, others were dotted with various colors. Sitting on the branches of paradise trees, these birds sang so beautifully and delightfully that from their pleasant singing I reached self-forgetfulness, and it seemed to me that the voice of their singing was heard at the highest heavenly heights. So delighted was my heart!

And those beautiful gardens stood in wonderful order, like a regiment against a regiment. When I walked with gladness of heart in these gardens of Eden, I saw there a great river flowing through the gardens and watering them. On both sides of the river grew vines, which were decorated with golden leaves and golden fruits. A soft and fragrant wind blew from four sides, with the breath of which the gardens swayed, and with the shaking of the leaves they produced a wondrous rustle.

Then a certain terror attacked me; it seemed to me that I was standing above the firmament of heaven, and some young man, dressed in purple, with a sun-shaped face, walked around me. Following him, I saw a great beautiful cross, which in appearance was like a heavenly rainbow. Fiery singers stood around him and, burning with love for the cross, they sang a wondrous and beautiful song, with which they glorified the Lord crucified on the cross. The flaming young man who accompanied me crossed to the cross and kissed it; then he made a sign to me that I also kissed the cross. Instantly falling down to the holy cross, I kissed it with trembling and great joy. As soon as I touched him with my lips, I was fed up with the flow of inexpressible spiritual sweetness and smelled a much greater fragrance than in the Gardens of Eden.

Leaving the cross and looking down, I saw under me, as it were, the abyss of the sea; but it seemed to me that I was walking on air, and being afraid of the abyss, I cried out to my leader: “Terror seizes me at the thought of falling into this abyss.” My companion, turning to me, said: “Do not be afraid! We must go even higher." He gave me his hand - and we appeared above the second firmament. I saw marvelous men there, their peace, the everlasting joy of celebrating them - things inexpressible for human language. Then we ascended into an amazing flame, which did not scorch us, but only enlightened me: I was stricken with fear, but my guide, turning to me, gave me his hand and said: “We must ascend even higher”; and with this word we found ourselves above the third heaven, where I saw and heard countless heavenly powers singing and glorifying God. Approaching a certain veil that shone like lightning, before which stood great, terrible fiery youths, whose faces shone brighter than the sun, with fiery weapons in their hands, I saw the vast multitude of the heavenly host, approaching with fear. The heavenly youth who accompanied me said: “When the mysterious veil is opened, then you will see the Lord Christ and bow down to the Throne of His glory.” Hearing this, I trembled and rejoiced: horror and inexpressible joy filled my heart, I looked with reverence until then, until the veil was taken away. When some kind of fiery hand pulled back the veil, then, like the prophet Isaiah, I saw my Lord sitting on a high and exalted Throne; Seraphim stood around Him; He was dressed in a purple robe, His face was bright. He looked at me kindly. Seeing the Lord, in an inexpressible excitement of spirit, I fell prostrate before Him and bowed to the most luminous and terrible Throne of His glory. O! here the lips become numb, the tongue refuses to express spiritual objects, spiritual joy in sensual forms. What joy and rapture seized my heart from seeing His face, it is impossible to explain, so even now, remembering this vision, I am filled with indescribable joy! Falling in great horror before my Lord, I marveled at His great mercy, according to which He allowed me, a sinful and impure person, to stand before Himself and see His divine beauty. Imbued with a feeling of compunction and thinking about the incomprehensible majesty and goodness of my Lord and about my own unworthiness, I uttered in myself the words of the prophet Isaiah: “Woe is me, I am lost! For I am a man with unclean lips... And my eyes have seen the King. Lord of hosts" (Isa. 6:5). The heavenly host, looking at such philanthropy and condescension towards fallen humanity, sang a marvelous and inexpressible song.

Having enjoyed the contemplation of the heavenly beauties of the spiritual world, blessed Andrei was in an anxious thought that among the vast host of angels and saints he had not been able to see the Most Pure Mother of God. Instantly, the saint saw a certain cloud-like, most luminous man wearing a cross. This wonderful man, understanding my thought, said to me: “You want to see the most luminous Queen of Heavenly powers; but now She is not here: She has departed to the world of great misfortune to help suffering humanity and console the mournful. I would show you Her holy abode, but now there is no time: you must again return to where you were taken away from. Thus commands you the Lord of all! After this, the miraculous vision of heavenly life ended, and St. Andrew again saw himself on the ground.

Vision of heavenly paradise by St. Tikhon of Zadonsk

Let us mention here the revelation of heavenly paradise to St. Tikhon of Zadonsk. St. Tikhon, as a reward for his divinity and piety, was even worthy to see the Kingdom of Heaven twice, each time at night.

He had his first vision even before his monastic calling. One day he went out on the porch to enjoy a quiet and bright night. From the beauties of the May night, he moved on to thinking about eternal bliss. And then, suddenly, the sky opened before him: he saw in the sky an extraordinary radiance and lordship! A minute later the sky had already taken on its former, ordinary appearance. In spite of the shortness of the time during which the vision lasted, however, he was greatly delighted whenever he remembered the vision.

On another occasion, already in the rank of bishop and walking around the monastery church at night, as was his custom, he stopped at the altar. It was here, after some fiery prayerful words to the Lord God that he be shown the eternal bliss of the righteous, he again saw the light from heaven, extending over the entire monastery. A voice from heaven also followed him: “See what has been prepared for those who love God!” After the real vision, the righteous had already fallen to the ground and could barely reach his cell.

Revelation of Righteous Martha

Once the righteous Martha, mother of St. Simeon Divnogorets, having arrived to her son on Divnaya Gora to say goodbye to him, stopped to spend the night with him. In a dreamy vision, she (i.e., her soul) was caught up to heavenly heights and saw a bright and wonderful chamber, which is impossible to describe. When she walked around that ward, she saw the Blessed Virgin Mary there with two bright angels. The Mother of God said to her: “Why are you surprised?” She bowed to Her with fear, joy and reverence and said: “O Lady! I am surprised at the beauty of the chamber, because in all my life I have not seen such chambers. The Mother of God asked her: “Who do you think she is preparing for?” She: “I don’t know, oh, Mistress!” Mother of God: “Don’t you know that this rest is prepared for you, in which from now on you will abide forever: your son bought it for you.” The Mother of God ordered the Angels to place a wondrous throne in the middle and said to her: “This glory is given to you, because you lived pleasingly in the fear of the Lord”; then she added: "Do you want to see even better?" And told her to follow Him. They ascended to the highest heavenly places, where the Mother of God showed her the most wonderful and brightest, better than the first chamber, full of heavenly glory, which the human mind cannot comprehend and language can express. The Mother of God said: “Your son created this chamber for himself and began to build a third.” The Mother of God again led her higher to the east of the sun and showed her from above heavenly villages, in which many rejoicing husbands and wives rejoiced, and said: “Your son gave these places to those who live in observance of the commandments of the Lord, chastely and righteously, with zeal they do alms, for that from the Lord they themselves will be worthy of mercy: blessed is the merciful "...

Monastery of St. Philaret

After the death of the merciful Philaret, one pious man was honored to see his miraculous abode. He said this: “In admiration, I saw myself in a bright place, where I saw a bright and handsome man who showed me a fiery river flowing with such noise and fear that a person cannot endure. On the other side of the river, a beautiful paradise was visible, full of indescribable joy and fun, the whole place was filled with fragrance; beautiful large, multi-fruited trees were shaken by a quiet wind, and everything that God had prepared for those who love Him was beautiful there. There, among the people in white robes, rejoicing and having fun and enjoying the fruits, I also saw the merciful Filaret, but did not recognize him; he was dressed in light clothes and sat on a golden throne in the middle of the gardens; on the one hand, children stood before him, holding candles in their hands, and on the other, the poor and the poor crowded. A young man appeared here, with a bright face, with a golden rod in his hand, and I dared to ask him: “Lord, who is sitting on the bright throne among those bright-looking men, isn’t it Abraham?” The young man answered: “Philaret of Amniates, lover of the poor, like Abraham in his honest life.” St. Philaret looked at me and began to quietly call me, saying: “Child! Come here and enjoy these blessings." I told him that I couldn’t, the fiery river forbids and frightens me, through it the path is narrow and the bridge is inconvenient, I’m afraid that I won’t get there either. Filaret said: “Go fearlessly, everyone came here this way and there is no other way; I will help you,” and extended his hand. I began to pass the fiery river without harm, and when I approached his hand, the vision ended, and I woke up.

Case with Father Pankraty

Pankraty, the monk of Athos - Father Pankraty, in the world of Paramon, was a master's man. As a child, his cruel mistress forced him to walk barefoot in deep autumn, when snow and ice covered the ground, which made his legs hurt badly. The poor lad could not bear it; he secretly ran away from his mistress and at all costs decided to get abroad, and went beyond the Danube, Ge remained for some time in the service of the Russians, who also moved abroad.

The case of the arrival of Pankratius on the Holy Mountain is strange: he was a sincere friend of one of the Little Russians, who for some reason committed suicide: the unfortunate man strangled himself. The sensitive Pankratius was greatly touched and struck by the eternal loss of a cordial friend; he fervently prays to God for mercy on the unfortunate, and, seeing how vain worldly life is, he abandoned it and retired to the Holy Mountain. Here, in Rusik, he found the desired peace of mind, despite the fact that his leg was already rotting from wounds that were the result of a severe cold in childhood. However, no matter how terrible the suffering of Father Pankratius, he rejoices and often even says to me: “Believe me that I agree to rot with my whole body, I only pray to God to save me from heart suffering, because they are unbearable. Sometimes I look at you and feel sorry for you: you are sometimes not yourself from internal unrest. Oh! if the heart hurts - troublesome business! This is hellish torment; and my wounds, if they were ten times more, are a wasteland: I do not rejoice in my illness, because, as far as suffering, God comforts me. The heavier my leg, the more significant the pain, the merrier I am, because the hope of heavenly bliss rests me, the hope of reigning in heaven is always with me. And it’s very good in heaven!” - Pankraty sometimes exclaims with a smile.

How do you know this? I asked him once.

Forgive me, - he answered, - to such a question I should not answer you frankly; but I feel sorry for you in your heartfelt suffering, and I want to give you at least a little consolation with my story. You have seen how I am tormented by time; oh, it's not for nothing that I wind like a snake on my bunk; it hurts, it hurts hard - unbearable! But what happens to me after that, only it knows, ”Pankraty remarked mysteriously, putting his hand to his heart; - Do you remember how I once, unable to bear the pain, tossed about on my bed, and even something like a murmur escaped from my filthy lips. But the pain subsided, I calmed down, you dispersed from me to your cells, and I laid my foot down and dozed sweetly. I don’t remember how long I slept or dozed, I only saw it, and God knows why ... Even now, as soon as I remember about that vision, I feel an inexplicable, heavenly pleasure in my heart, and I would be glad to be ill forever, if only it would happen again at least once in my life an unforgettable vision for me. So I felt good then!

What did you see? I asked Father Pankraty.

I remember, - he answers, - when I dozed off, a boy of amazing, angelic beauty comes up to me and asks: “Are you in pain, father Pankraty?” “Nothing now,” I answered, “thank God!” “Be patient,” the youth continued, “you will soon be free, because the master bought you, and very, very expensively” ...

How am I bought again? I objected.

Yes, bought, - answered the lad with a smile, - paid dearly for you, and your master demands you to him. Would you like to come with me? - he asked.

I agreed. We went through some too dangerous places; wild, huge dogs were ready to tear me to pieces, angrily throwing themselves at me, but one word from the boy - and they rushed away from us like a whirlwind. Finally, we came to a spacious, clean and bright field, which seemed to have no end.

Now you are safe, - the lad told me, - go to the master, who, you see, is sitting far away. I looked and, indeed, I saw three people sitting next to me. Wondering at the beauty of the place, I joyfully went forward; people unknown to me in wonderful attire met and hugged me; I even saw many beautiful maidens in white royal attire: they greeted me modestly and silently pointed to the distance, where three strangers were sitting. When I approached those who were sitting, two of them got up and moved aside; the third one seemed to be waiting for me. In quiet joy and in a kind of touching trembling, I approached the stranger.

Do you like it here? the stranger asked me meekly. I looked at his face: it was light; regal grandeur distinguished my new master from ordinary people. Silently I fell at his feet, towards him, and kissed them with feeling; wounds were pierced through his legs. After that, I respectfully folded my hands on my chest, asking permission to press his right hand to my sinful lips. Without saying a word, he handed it to me. And there were also deep wounds on his hands. Several times I kissed the stranger's right hand, and looked at him in quiet, inexpressible joy. My new master's features were surprisingly good; they breathed meekness and compassion; a smile of love and greeting was on his lips; his gaze expressed the imperturbable calmness of his heart.

I redeemed you from your mistress, and now you are mine forever, - the stranger began to tell me. “I was sorry to see your suffering; your childish cry reached me when you complained to me about your mistress, who tormented you with cold and hunger; and now you are free forever. For your suffering, this is what I am preparing for you.

The wondrous stranger pointed me to the department: it was very light there; beautiful gardens, in their full bloom, were drawn there, and a magnificent house shone under their Eden canopy. “This is yours,” continued the stranger, “only it’s not quite ready yet, be patient. When the time comes for your eternal rest, I will take you to me; meanwhile stay here, look at the beauties of your place and endure until the time: he who endures to the end, he will be saved!

Lord! - I exclaimed overjoyed - I do not deserve such mercy! At these words, I threw myself at his feet, kissed them; but when I got up, there was no one and nothing in front of me. I woke up. A knock on the board for Matins resounded throughout our monastery, and I quietly got up from my bed to pray. It was very easy for me, and what I felt, what was in my heart is my secret. I would give a thousand years of suffering for a repetition of such a vision. So it was good! (From "Letters of the Holy Mountaineer")

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