The Catalog of Good Deeds

By Fr. Andrew Lemeshonok

Today we are celebrating the feast day of the icon of the Mother of God of “the Three Hands”. It is an icon that is highly revered and venerated in Russia. Saint John of Damascus, one of the Holy Fathers of the church, was falsely accused of treason while serving under the caliph and as punishment his hand was cut off. He prayed to the Mother of God all night and then fell asleep. When he awoke his hand was fully healed with only a small scar where it was originally cut off. After some time, to show his gratitude to the Mother of God he added an image of an arm made from silver. In honor of this event this iconographic image of the Mother of God has since became know as “of the Three Hands”.

We talk about God’s miracles, but mostly in the past tense: at some point in time something happened,some miracle, but what about now? Miracles are occuring in our time as well! All around us we can see the Lord’s miraculous works. But the blind man does not see the light, someone who is spiritually deaf can not hear anything and someone who is spiritually tongue-tied will not say anything, because he is deafened by sin. Instead what does such a person need? A meal and a show. Yet what greater miracle could there be than the miracle of the Divine Eucharist? According to the Holy Fathers, when the Holy Spirit descends into the church, a pillar of fire ascends into sky, and pious people partake of the Holy Body and Blood of Christ. They partake of God’s love, the same love that scorches every thorn of our sins and makes us partakers of eternal life here on earth.

But we are missing something. The fact is that we do not have enough confidence in God, not enough inner peace nor humble thanksgiving for what we have. Someone does not have something, while someone has more of something - someone has health, someone has money, and someone has all joys of this earthly life. And we begin to compare those people with ourselves, which leads us to depression and we begin to complain and say that we have not received enough. Such a life becomes absolutely hopeless, because the longer a person looks around at what others have and what he does not have, the more he will suffer, because he will always need something. A grateful person does not need anything. I wish we could all always thank God for his endless blessings.

A man without faith judges his life based on today’s day or the current situation. There's something missing in such a person, and such a person does not feel well at all. While a person of faith will say that there will be a day of judgment and a time for eternal life. And the person will be preparing for this transition all his conscious life. Therefore, instead of thinking what he does not have, he will think that perhaps he has too much. He seeks what is most important: peace in his heart and the grace of the Holy Spirit. To seek the grace of the Holy Spirit is the goal every Christian. If a person has the Holy Spirit, then his soul can part with the mortal body and ascend into the Kingdom of Heaven, where there will be no sickness, no sorrows, no sadness, but eternal life.

Today we have to work, where we will of course stumble more than once, maybe somewhere we crash, but the main thing is to get up and continue on, regardless of any human conditions or moods which unfortunately change very quickly. Someone said the wrong word, somewhere was pushed away, somehow humiliated and already a person begins to lose trust in God. We can not live like this. We need to stand strong and plant our feet firmly on the ground. And our foundation needs to be faith as unbreakable as a stone. "Lord, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven ..." - so we pray, reading the Lord’s Prayer. Let us pray that by trusting God, he will give us stability in this world. And whatever uncertainties, whatever changes, whatever trials come to us in this world, we could stand on the pillar of faith, which is Christ. And we do not have any other foundation and never will.

One of my favorite books comes from the last years of the Soviet Union. It is the story of Tatiana Goricheva, a member of the “intelligentsia” and a Soviet-era dissident. Her book, Talking About God Is Dangerous, offers fascinating insights into both a period of time and the period of a human soul’s conversion by grace. The little volume is out of print but can be found on the internet for as little as a dollar. I share a sample as she tells of her first confession.

***

We knew virtually nothing

…I had come to make my confession for the first time in my life. Shortly beforehand I had become a Christian by the grace of God. I had no deeper knowledge either of Christianity or of the church – who could have taught me? I and my newly-converted girl friend, both in the same position, learned what to do by imitating our old women, who zealously preserved the Orthodox faith and practices. We didn’t know anything. But we had something which in our day should perhaps be treasured more than knowledge: a boundless trust in the church, belief in all its words, in every movement and demand. Only yesterday we had rejected all authority and all norms. Today we understood the deliverance that we had experienced as a miracle. We regarded our church as the indubitable, absolute truth, in minor matters just as much as in its main concern. God has changed us and given us childhood: ‘Unless you become as children, you will not enter into the kingdom of heaven.’

I only knew that it was necessary to go to confession and to communion. I knew that both confession and communion were high sacraments which reconcile us with God and even unite us with him, really unite us with him in all fullness, both physical and spiritual. I was formally baptized by my unbelieving parents as a child. Whether they did that out of tradition or whether someone had persuaded them to do it, I never discovered from their explanations. Now at the age of twenty-six I had decided to renew the grace of baptism.

Like a hardened crust

I knew that the priest himself – the well-known confessor Father Hermogen – would ask me questions and guide my confession. Then the day before I read a little booklet in order to prepare myself for confession, I discovered that I had transgressed all the commandments of the Old and New Testaments. But quite independently of that it was clear to me that the while of my life was full of sins of the most varied kind, of transgressions and unnatural forms of behavior. They now pursued me and tormented me after my conversion, and lay like a heavy burden on my soul. How could I have not seen earlier how abhorrent and stupid, how boring and sterile sin is? From my childhood my eyes had been blindfolded in some way. I longed to make my confession because I already felt with my innermost being that I would receive liberation, that the new person which I had recently discovered within myself would be completely victorious and drive out the old person. For every moment after my conversion I felt inwardly healed and renewed, but at the same time it was as though I was somehow covered with a crust of sin which had grown around me and had become hard. So I to longed for penance, as if for a wash. And I recalled the marvellous words of the Psalm which I had recently learned by heart: ‘Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me and I shall be whiter than snow.’

The experience of a miracle

And so my turn came. I went up, and kissed the gospel and the cross. Of course because I felt dismay and apprehension, I was afraid to say that I was confessing for the first time. Father Hermogen began by asking,

‘When did you last fail to go to church? What festivals have you deliberately neglected?’

‘All of them,’ I replied.

Then Father Hermogen knew that he was dealing with a new convert. In recent times new converts have come into the Russian church in large numbers, and they have to be treated in a different way.

He began by asking about the most terrible, the ‘greatest’ sins in my life, and I had to tell him my whole biography: a life based on pride and a quest for praise, on arrogant contempt for other people. I told him about my drunkenness and my sexual excesses, my unhappy marriages, the abortions and my inability to love anyone. I also told him about the next period of my life, my preoccupation with yoga and my desire for ‘self-fulfillment’, for becoming God, without love and without penitence. I spoke for a long time, though I also found it difficult. My shame got in the way and tears took away my breath. At the end I said almost automatically: ‘I want to suffer for all my sins, and be purged at least a little from them. Please give me absolution.’

Father Hermogen listened to me attentively, and hardly interrupted. Then he sighed deeply and said, ‘Yes, they are grave sins.’

I was given absolution by the grace of God: very easily, it seemed to me: for the space of several years I was to say five times a day the prayer ‘Virgin and Mother of God, rejoice’, each time with a deep prostration to the ground.

This absolution was a great support to me through all the following years. Our sins (the life of my newly-converted friend was hardly different from my own) somehow seemed to us to be so enormous that we found it hard to believe that they could disappear so simply, with the wave of a priest’s hand. But we had already had a miraculous experience: from the nothingness of a meaningless existence bordering on desperation we had come into the Father’s house, into the church, which for us was paradise. We knew that with God anything is possible. That helped us to believe that confession did away with sin. And the starets also said, ‘Don’t think about it again. You have confessed and that is enough. If you keep thinking about it you are only sinning all over again.’

By Fr. Stephen Freeman

Source: https://blogs.ancientfaith.com/glory2godforallthings/2009/03/27/a-story-of-repentance/

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