The Catalog of Good Deeds

Cross processions in Russia have a vibrant history and are hugely popular. So much so that 60,000 Russians are willing to walk 100 miles to honor religious occurrences.

On holidays and special occasions, Russian believers will all suddenly empty out of the church and proceed outside, whether it’s swelteringly hot or snowing, and follow the cross and the priests... sometimes for a walk around the church, other times for hundred-mile hikes.

Cross processions are a traditional and very popular part of Russian Christianity. The tradition dates back to the Byzantine empire in 400 AD when saints organized night processions around Constantinople to help protect the city from the heretics of the day.

The clergy leads the procession with a cross, a Bible, and religious banners. Behind them, the crowd follows, singing religious hymns and sometimes carrying candles. The procession makes frequent stops to pray (and sometimes get sprayed with holy water).

Russians love the tradition. Sometimes cross processions are held to celebrate church holidays, such as Easter when the procession occurs at midnight. Everyone in the church files out and walks around the church three times, singing resurrection hymns. The empty church symbolizes the empty tomb of Christ.

Some monasteries have daily processions in the evenings. Monks walk around the perimeter of their monastery with candles. After they return to the gates of the monastery and re-enter it, the monastery is locked for the night. This procession is believed to protect the monastery from all evil and turmoil for the night.

There is another, especially popular, type of cross processions that reenacts spiritual journeys of saints or miracle-working icons. One of the most famous ones is a 92-mile walk to the place where, in 1382, the Velikoretsky miracle-working icon of St. Nicholas was found.

Though the icon itself disappeared during the 1930s and the Soviet Regime outlawed cross processions, pilgrims continued coming. Despite the danger of being harassed, arrested and some even executed, unofficially, the tradition continued throughout the entire Soviet period. In 1990, it was officially reinstated. Today, the procession mobilizes up to 60,000 people and lasts a week. Nights are spent in the fields.

According to a famous Russian priest, cross processions are physical expressions of “one communal national faith and zealous prayer for help and grace.” Indeed, the immeasurable zeal of people who joyfully dedicate a week to communal, religious marches to glorify God is absolutely stunning and inspiring.

Source: https://russian-faith.com/explaining-orthodoxy/religious-marches-are-big-part-russian-christianity-n1075

Question: My son drinks heavily and keeps telling me that he doesn’t want to live any longer. He says, “I’m going to hang myself. I’m desperate.” What should I do? Please help me. Tatiana.

Answer by Fr. Andrew Lemeshonok: You’ve got to find out the original reason for this if you want to fight your own sin and help your loved one in his struggle with his sin. He drinks and doesn’t want to live because he doesn’t see any meaning in life. He doesn’t know why and what for he has to keep going. He doesn’t recognise the value of his life. That is why he chooses to muffle his senses with alcohol to forget about everything. It’s self-deception.

There is a spiritual component of my answer to your question. You have to pray for your son and go to church and take communion as often as possible. You should believe and hope that God can help your son. In addition, you should be talking with your son. Talk with your son and try to persuade him that life does have a meaning; that a sober life is worth living; and that there is a real purpose in life.

Of course, it’s unlikely that you will be able to accomplish this without God’s grace and solely by willpower. However, if you persist in your dialogue with your son; if you don’t condemn him, judge him, or yell at him but instead, show him your understanding and sympathy; if he sees compassion and love in your eyes — then he will surely listen to you and you’ll be able to bring him to church for a confession. Hopefully, he will agree to pray to the Mother of God and read the Akathist to the Inexhaustible Chalice icon. By doing so, he will turn a new page of his life. It isn’t easy, of course, because he is used to sinning already; he has a habit of living in the drowsy and insane state of intoxication.

You will need a lot of humility, a lot of patience, and a lot of hard work. God can hear your every word. Spiritually advanced people say that a mother’s prayer can raise her child even from the bottom of an ocean.

August 17, 2018

St. Elisabeth Convent

A rude word out of a baby’s mouth isn’t something extraordinary nowadays. A four-year-old toddler can sometimes say a foul word that a drunken sailor would be ashamed of. “Where do they learn all those words?” the embarrassed parents gasp in bewilderment. “We never say words like these at home.” If you really never say “words like these”, hopefully we will be able to correct this situation.

Even if you don’t use foul language, your neighbors and their children, as well as other children in the kindergarten and at school, along with some of your guests, passers-by, and characters from YouTube videos that you let your children binge watch to get them occupied with anything, do. You say you avoid all those things? Great but the issue with worldly influences remains. You can’t shield your child from all dangers and evils of this world, for then must ye needs go out of the world. (1 Cor. 5:10).

What shall we do? You’ve got to teach your children to tell good from evil, useful from harmful, holy from sinful. You’ve got to teach your children to be thoughtful and responsible. You’ve got to teach them not just to avoid bad language but also regard the gift of speech as a God’s gift in general. You’ve got to teach them to use their tongues in moderation and in a clever manner. It’s high time that they learned it!

Having assigned themselves this lofty task and hasty to see the results, parents can start beating their children up and doing other unseemly things—and to no avail, in my opinion. Your child will not appreciate your deeply held righteous motives; she will resent you and feel the urge to do the opposite of what you’re trying to teach her.

Another extreme way to achieve your goal is making your child listen to your abstract and lengthy moralising. A child usually finds an abstract thought hard to memorize. Her world is filled with objects and feelings, not concepts. Children like to touch, smell, taste, or disassemble things. They can’t live without interaction and contact with the environment. A smack on the head is wrong; abstract moralising is wrong, too. You have to find the perfect balance.

When I happened to utter a foul word in my mother’s presence (I had heard it from my friends), she sent me to wash my mouth with soap. I was rubbing my lips and tongue with the bitter detergent and thinking that words can be dirty, too. Old school, huh? I don’t think anyone uses this method any longer nowadays but it made a huge impression on me and I didn’t feel offended or humiliated.

However, we should look for other ways of explaining this point. I’ve found one such way, not far from the soap: toothpaste. Dear readers, here is a sketch of a class on The Gift of Human Speech, for children aged (approximately) 6-9.

You will need several toothpaste tubes. Find an appropriate moment and be serious and focused: yours is an important mission.

Lesson 1. Recklessness

Give one tube to your child and invite him or her to squeeze all toothpaste onto a plate. “Dreams come true,” he or she will think and start doing it vigorously. When the child hands you the empty tube, smile and ask him or her to… put the toothpaste back into the tube.

Naturally, toothpaste won’t get back into the tube. That is when you will rightfully conclude that “a word is like toothpaste: once out, you won’t bring it back in.” An empty tube looks ugly; people throw it into a trash can. A verbose person is often considered empty and unworthy of paying attention to.

One more thing. If anything goes wrong, children sometimes say the magic phrase, “I take my words back.” The example of the squeezed toothpaste teaches them that what they do is hide the plate behind their back and pretend that the toothpaste isn’t there but it is a lie. As soon as the word enters the world, it begins to act, healing or crippling, building or destroying. You’ve got to bear responsibility for every word.

Lesson 2. Talking Too Much

Take another tube and another plate, this time with patterns or a drawing. Invite your child to repeat the contours on the plate with toothpaste. Encourage your child to imagine that she is a maverick artist who always wants to try something new. Praise her for her effort and say that it’s one thing to squeeze everything at once and the other thing to squeeze the toothpaste bit by bit and only where needed. It’s more difficult but the difference between a shapeless mass and a masterpiece is evident. Talking only as much as necessary is a great achievement that pleases our Heavenly Father.

Lesson 3. Slander and Flattery

If your son or daughter has already been to summer camps and seen the practice of smearing a sleeping person with toothpaste, typical of those places, you can give them this example to teach them about words that people can use to besmirch a person: to libel a righteous person or to justify a bad person. Applying toothpaste to your summer camp friend’s face isn’t the proper way of using this substance. The Lord gave us the gift of speech not for slander or flattery.

Lesson 4. Switcheroo

Finally, it’s time for the last tube, which is a special one. It appears to be the same as the other three, but this isn’t the case. You had previously replaced the toothpaste with shoe polish and made it look like toothpaste. Ask your child to apply this paste on a new toothbrush. Imagine how surprised she will be when a strange-smelling black substance will go out of the tube instead of the colorful and fragrant white toothpaste. Ask her if she likes it. Build your discussion in such a way as to make your child understand that foul language does not correspond to our calling. God wants to hear certain kinds of words from us but sometimes hears different words. The toothbrush is spoiled by the shoe polish, and we’ll have to throw it away. Isn’t it a symbol that shows how destructive swearing is?

I believe that’s all with regard to toothpaste. I’m sure, though, that there are some other funny ways to help children make sense of our complicated life. You can correct most of the character flaws of your child, hopefully—but only if you, dear readers, serve as a good example for your children and don’t use foul language.

By Fr. Leonid Kudryachov

Translated by The Catalog of Good Deeds

St. Moses is a perfect example, like St. Mary of Egypt, that sometimes the greatest sinners can become the greatest saints, by means of deep and sincere repentance. Moses had been a murderer, a thief, and a very violent person. Therefore, St. Moses is a marvelous model for us of the power of repentance and of God’s forgiveness, especially for those who might feel that they are too sinful to be reconciled to God and His Holy Church, because they have strayed and fallen into sin. The “righteous” can be further from God than the sinner, because the “righteous,” like the pharisee and the elder son of Jesus’ parables, do not see their sins, and therefore are filled with pride instead of humility. In contrast, like Jesus’ prodigal son and tax-collector, the great sinner who repents can grow ever closer to God by means of his continued sincere repentance and consequent humility and self-abasement. St. Moses is just such a person.

St. Moses lived in Egypt during the fourth century. He was a very dark-skinned Ethiopian, and thus is also called St. Moses the Black. In his youth he was a slave of a high-ranking man, but after Moses committed a murder, his master banished him. Filled with much anger and bitterness, Moses joined a band of thieves who attacked, robbed and murdered travelers in the Egyptian desert. His band of brigands chose Moses as their leader because of his enormous physical strength and readiness to sin. People were afraid at the mere mention of his name.

After a number of years of this sinful life, by the grace of God, Moses repented, abandoned his band of robbers and went to one of the desert monasteries. He had to weep and beg for a long time before the brethren believed he was sincere, and finally they accepted him. He wept bitter tears of repentance for his sinful life, and became very obedient to the abbot, his spiritual father and confessor, Abba (Father) Isidore, a wise and experienced spiritual guide. After a while, Moses withdrew to a solitary cell, where he prayed, fasted, and continued to struggle against the passions and the violent attacks of demons, with the guidance of Abba Isidore, who taught him how to pray all night and to struggle against the demons. His long struggle with the passions and demons was necessary in order to become completely cleansed of his former sins. In his battle between the legions of demons and angels, Abba Isidore assured Moses that the angels would prevail.

One time four robbers of his former band attacked him in his solitary cell, not realizing who he was. Having lost none of his great physical strength, Moses tied them up, threw them over his shoulder, and brought them to the monastery, where the elders said to release them. Upon learning that this was Moses, their former ringleader, and that he had dealt with them kindly, they followed his example, repented and also became monks. When the rest of the band of thieves learned what happened, they too abandoned their life of sin and became fervent monks.

Intensifying his spiritual efforts, St. Moses started carrying water every night from the well to each of the brothers, especially for the Elders, who lived far from the well, and for whom it was difficult to carry water. Once, while leaning over the well, the demons took revenge for Moses’ victory over them, and delivered such a severe blow to Moses’ back, that he fell unconscious, and for an entire year he lay crippled in his cell. After this, he was healed and was freed from his passions, and received from the Lord power over demons.

As the years went on, and word about St. Moses spread, people started coming to see him, and Moses left his cell to hide from visitors. Along the way he met the servants of the local governor who were sent to find the saintly desert dweller. Moses told them, “go no further to see this false and unworthy monk.” When the servants returned to the governor at the monastery, they learned that they had encountered St. Moses himself.

After many years of monastic struggles, St. Moses was ordained deacon. In his humility, he believed himself unworthy of this office. Once, wishing to test him, the bishop told the clergy to insult and ridicule him as an unworthy Ethiopian, and to drive him out of the altar. The humble monk accepted the abuse. After this test, the bishop then ordained St. Moses as a priest. He was sixty years old at this time. For another fifteen years he continued his monastic labors, and about 75 disciples gathered around the saintly Elder, who had been granted by the Lord the gifts of wisdom, foresight, and power over demons. When he was 75, he warned his monks that soon brigands would attack their small monastery (skete) and murder everyone. He begged his monks to leave, but he himself refused to leave, because he believed the time had come for the Lord’s words to be fulfilled: “All who take up the sword shall perish by the sword” (Mt. 26:52). Seven brethren stayed with their Abba, one of whom hid when attacked, and lived to tell how the robbers killed St. Moses and the other six monks. It was about the year 400.

By Sister Ioanna, St. Innocent Monastic Community,

Redford, MI

Source: https://www.stinnocentchurch.com/life_of_st_moses_the_black.html

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