The Catalog of Good Deeds

Our Publishing House published a book titled The Yonder Land in 2011. Its main characters are the residents of the Boarding Home No.3 for the mentally challenged, as well as the sisters and brothers of the Sisterhood of Saint Elisabeth, nuns of St. Elisabeth Convent, and doctors. There is a chapel in honour of St. Xenia of Petersburg in the Boarding Home. Today, just a couple of days after the patron saint's day of this chapel, we would like to share some excerpts from this wonderful book with you.

The society casts some people away as worthless. God finds them precious. They lack the privileges, the comfort, and the opportunities of this world. The Lord gathered them in the Boarding Home. This is where they spend their lives filled with suffering and pain, dreams and joys... Someone may view their lives as joyless, unbearable, and harsh. In fact, they are more real and more grounded in reality than the life of a regular person in this world where everything is based on self-deception and the desire to live for one's own sake.

Archpriest Andrew Lemeshonok: They look at every person with immense shrewdness. We often treat other people like silhouettes roaming around. We get tired of them and try to hide from them as quickly as possible. When you come to the boarding home, the residents who stay here look at you and see through you because they are attentive, compassionate, and loving.

Lena, 30

Lena is benevolent and polite. She has a gorgeous voice. She dreams of her own home and a family.

– What makes you happy?

I'm happy because God. We go to church, confess, and take communion. We love God. We pray for everybody.

– What is beauty?

Beauty is Love. The beauty of heart is when a person loves another person, his neighbour. You see? It's when he treats him with an open and warm heart. When he shares something to make the other person happy. When he helps that person and shows his kindness. Gets him on the right track.

Gregory, a parishioner: I recall how I had to go to the boarding home to attend a Liturgy. The day before, I had sprained my ankle and had not slept for almost the entire night. I was too tired to get up that morning. My mood was so gloomy! My soul protested: “What do you need it for? Today, you really have the reason to stay at home.”

I made myself go to the boarding home. I thought, "I'll get to church today even if I have to crawl..." Interestingly enough, although my leg ached badly at first, the pain soothed down halfway to the boarding home.

When I was standing in the church, I was immersed in thinking about all my problems. I had problems at work and I was anxious for my mum, who had a weak heart. I confessed but my condition did not improve. On the contrary, I felt even more pain. I was almost crying. The Communion began. The patients queued for the Chalice. I was struck by the pure eyes of a man who had usually behaved with visible insanity. After the Communion, his eyes were so amazing! I recalled Christ for some reason. His eyes were so pure and clear, filled with quiet sadness and placidity. The guy came to me, took my hand, and said, "Don't worry. Everything will be alright. Just don't worry, please." For some reason, I believed him.

Another man came to me after having received the Sacrament. He hugged me and said, "Calm down! You can't do anything. Everything will be fine with you and your mum. Everything will be alright."

Since that moment, I cannot perceive anyone from the boarding home as an ill person.

An old friend of mine who had the habit of asking me for a sweet or a small coin took communion, too. He came to me and said, "Listen, are you going to take communion? Why are you waiting here for so long?"

When I took communion, my heart was filled with quiet joy. Everyone in the Church must have had that feeling of Fatherly love. My heart felt warm and blissful... and tranquil, amazingly unagitated. The only thing that you want to do in such a situation is simply to pray to God, "Lord forgive my doubts and lack of faith." When you are happy, it is the best time to ask the Lord to forgive you.

Sister Yulia: Why do people end up in the boarding home? It's a huge mystery of the salvation of the human soul. A person can be sick and miserable, crippled by physical defects, but his soul can be amazingly pure and beautiful nonetheless!

They are finely attuned to God and other people. They are unsophisticated, open-hearted, and kind. These people are not of this world.

Xenia, 38

Xenia is often aggressive and angry but when she is in a good mood, she agrees to share what she feels.

– Have you been happy this week?

No, I haven't. I don't know if I have ever been happy. I have not been happy for a long time. I had seizures, and they injected some drug to calm me down. My eyes were swollen. Right now, I am getting back to my normal state after the injection. The last time I was happy was when I gave birth to my daughter at the age of 18. I was very beautiful. I won the first prize at Miss Yurmala-1991 Fashion Contest but I didn't sign the contract to work in France. I didn't fly to France because I had to look after my daughter. I ended up in a mental hospital. My relative called an ambulance on me.

– What do people live for? What do you live for?

We live in order to live and help each other.

Fragments from The Yonder Land,

published in St. Elisabeth Convent in 2011.

February 6, 2018

The life of the pupils of our Sunday School is so exciting and colourful that everyone – children, their parents, and the residents of the boarding home – are happy to go to school on Sundays. Novice Galina Shpakova, the headmaster of the Sunday School, has told us about the recent events, which stay in the memory of the big and the little ones.

We Took Part in Friendly Contests!

The recent draughts and table tennis tournaments have shown that there are plenty of young talents in our school! It turned out that some of the children play better than adults...

The children were divided into several groups according to their age to participate in the tournaments. The best table tennis players were selected out of more than fifty contestants. There were seventy draughts players to choose from! Even so, everyone received an award in the end!

We Learned a Lot!

Classes in the Sunday School are captivating, too. Not only children but also their parents come to acquire new knowledge. There are meetings for adults with seminarians, priests, matushkas, and theologians.

There are special classes for the residents of the boarding home for the mentally challenged. The sisters teach them to paint, read, and pray. The residents of the boarding home rehearse various drama performances with the help of the teachers and the sisters.

We Shared Our Love!

Thanks to the Sunday School classes, the parents of our pupils met the young patients of the boarding home for children. Recently, on St Xenia of Petersburg Day, young singers of the Bozhya Korovka (Ladybug) Choir greeted the residents of the boarding home for children. The singers' parents visited the boarding home together with their children, in spite of the fact that it was a working day. They shared the joy of this feast with the young patients. The children were singing a song about little people with strong faith, and it sounded so heart-warming!

The parents did their best to help the residents of the boarding home to feel the feast, too: a birthday party for all children born in this month was held there last Sunday. Small gifts, sweets and biscuits, a concert, and stories about the children's holy patrons blended together in one big and meaningful day, which will be remembered in the boarding home for a long time.

February 12, 2018

St. Elisabeth Convent

Monday marks the beginning of Great Lent in the Orthodox Church (which liturgically begins at Forgiveness Vespers on Sunday). Though Great Lent is kept with rigor in Orthodox Tradition, there is nothing unusual asked of believers – nothing that we do not do on many days throughout the rest of the year. We fast; we pray; we give alms; we attend services, etc. But we do these with greater intensity and frequency during the Great Fast (the more universal name of the season). As preparation for the feast of Pascha, the “feast of feasts,” all of these disciplines drive the point of the Christian faith further and deeper.

Much of modern Christianity lives as a stranger to ascetical discipline. Few Christians fast, and the fasting of many others has forgotten the traditions of earlier generations. Various historical factors have turned the Christian life into a set of beliefs rather than a way of life. Monasticism seems exotic to many.

There is nothing exotic about asceticism. The New Testament assumes fasting and similar activities as normative for the Christian life. The Pharisees observed that the disciples of Jesus did not fast. When Christ was asked about this omission (something that seemed entirely unusual in the Judaism of the time), He responded:

Can the friends of the bridegroom mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them? But the days will come when the bridegroom will be taken away from them, and then they will fast (Matt. 9:15).

The days in which “the bridegroom is taken away” are the days in which we live. Fasting is normative. Fasting is part of the practice of continual repentance – the proper attitude of the Christian heart. Repentance is not a single action taken in response to having done something wrong – repentance is a state of the heart – the state of brokenness and contrition:

A broken and contrite heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise (Psalm 51).

To a large extent – this is the goal of the Christian way of life – to cultivate a heart of repentance. King David is called “a man after God’s own heart,” not because he was without sin (he was an adulterer and a murderer). He was a man after God’s own heart because when confronted with his sin – his heart is broken. He makes no defense and offers no excuse.

St. Paul offers this admonition:

I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. For by the grace given to me I bid every one among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith which God has assigned him (Romans 12:1-3).

No other single passage, it seems to me, manages to gather as many aspects of the Lenten life (and thus daily life at all times). Our bodies become “a living sacrifice.” I can only wonder which sacrifice St. Paul had in mind (there were many different ones in the Old Testament). Or it may be that the sacrifice of Christ is now the dominant image for him. But our bodies, now “crucified” with Christ are offered up in what St. Paul calls our “spiritual worship” logike latrein.

To offer our bodies as a sacrifice, through fasting and prayer, is itself lifted up to the level of worship, and interestingly our logike worship (“spiritual” is perhaps a more accurate translation than “reasonable” as some render it – though it would also be quite accurate to translate it as “natural” or “the worship that is proper to us as human beings”). It is a struggle to fast, to present our bodies as a “living” sacrifice. This is so much more than a “one time” offering: it stretches through the days and nights of this great season.

St. Paul then admonishes us not to be conformed to the world but to be transformed by the renewal of our mind (nous) which could easily be rendered “heart.” Fr. John Behr describes the passions, in his The Mystery of Christ, as “false perceptions,” our own misunderstanding of the body and its natural desires. Thus renewing our minds is an inner change in the perception of our selves and our desires, or in the words of St. Irenaeus (quoted frequently by Behr) “the true understanding of things as they are, that is, of God and of human beings.”

I find it of great importance, that St. Paul concludes this small admonition by pointing us towards humility (as he does as well in Philippians 2). It is in embracing the cross of Christ, in emptying ourselves towards God and towards others that our true self is to be found and that our minds are renewed. We cannot look within ourselves to find our true selves. “For he who seeks to save his life will lose it.” Rather the true self is found when we turn to the other and pour ourselves out towards them. We find ourselves by losing ourselves in the beloved. This is the love that makes all things possible for us.

The Fast, like all things in the gospel, is ultimately an act of love. It is an act of love for it is a training in the sacrifice of self. Having denied ourselves in such small things (such as abstaining from various foods and drink), we learn to deny ourselves in much larger things – such as pride and anger, self-love and envy. By God’s grace such efforts are molded into the image of Christ – who Himself began His ministry with a fast of 40 days – and this for love.

By Fr. Stephen Freeman

Source: https://blogs.ancientfaith.com/glory2godforallthings/2010/02/15/the-great-fast/

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