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/

Firstly, it’s necessary to know and understand that children are not adults. The worldview of children differs quite strongly from that of adult's. Adults have already tried and experienced much in this life. Figuratively speaking: many times they have fallen and many times gotten up. For children life presents itself in bright colors. The world is enormous and miraculous, and unknown. Every day and every second children are like Christopher Columbus—sailing to discover their own America.

And from another side, children quite strongly differ from adults intellectually, psychologically, and physically. An adult is experienced, but already with a mind downtrodden and preoccupied with problems. A child’s mind is much sharper; he is like a sponge, absorbing information and more quickly processing it. Adults are sturdier and more patient; children are more impulsive, quicker, and more emotional, but tire more quickly. So, for example, as teachers of young students know, the active stage of receptivity during lessons for students seven-ten years old is no more than fifteen minutes. “To pour” more knowledge into their light heads is meaningless. They won’t receive it. As a rule, teachers should then change the activity—from intellectual to physical (for example, gymnastics). After five-ten minutes of muscular exercises the kids are ready to learn again.

We must also know that children and teenagers are different, and what would be interesting to a five-year-old won’t entice a third-grader, and what would be interesting to a third-grader won’t be entertaining for an eleventh-grader. Each age group needs its own special approach in light of the intellectual, emotional, and hormonal-physiological features of its development.

As always in a child’s upbringing, so with prayer, Orthodoxy offers to parents and teachers the method of the “golden mean.” We shouldn’t overly coddle a child, to indulge his weaknesses and burgeoning passions, but it’s also not worth it to raise children with excessive strictness and rigidity. It can break down and he will become embittered and pull back from the studies imposed upon him. This is how it happened, for example, with Chekhov. His father made little Anton sing in the church choir, right down to a beating. In the end, Anton Pavlovich developed a quite complicated relationship with religion. Coercion, whether physical or mental, never led to any good. We must remember, rather, the main truth of pedagogy. Children more often absorb not what we’re saying to them, but rather how we conduct ourselves in life, and they copy our behavior. So we see here a confirmation of the principle: Faith without works is dead (Jas. 2:26). A child measures our faith by our works and examines how far they correspond to our words.

It is best of all to being the work of prayer with an explanation. We mustn’t impose upon a child some rigid imperative: “They say you should, and that’s it.” “Read from here to there, and until you’ve read it all you can’t leave the room”—no. God does not love coercion. We should explain, guided by the experience of the Church, the Holy Fathers, and our own lives, why it’s necessary to pray. Who is the Lord? Why is He unseen? Why does He listen to our prayers? It’s important to answer a child’s questions, to adapt to his perception of the world, including in prayer. I teach in Sunday school. Believe me, children have very many questions regarding the faith, and often quite unexpected and rather interesting ones.

For instance, it might be enough to teach preschool children, perhaps, how to properly make the Sign of the Cross, and explain what is the Sign of the Cross, or how to kiss icons. Sometimes it’s enough just to take them to church, show them an icon and say: “It’s God!” From there their personal path to God begins. And we should accustom our youths to wearing a Cross necklace.

My priestly experience shows that it’s necessary to bring kids to church more often that they wouldn’t be afraid of the “strangeness” of the church or the unconventional appearance (for the modern world) of the priest.

You should also teach children an abridged form of the prayer rule so as not to exhaust them, but to, on the contrary, awaken in them an interest in prayer and attention to the words. It’s good to pray with them to answer all their questions afterwards.

Thus, for example, the morning or evening prayer rule for children could consist of a “cap,” that is, the beginning: from “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen” up to and including “Our Father.” Then you could add the prayer to your holy Guardian Angel and the Most Holy Theotokos and the child’s patron saint, and that’s enough. In this case it’s important that less is more. Let children read less prayers but with heartfelt attention, rather than more with straining and vexation. You can increase their prayer rule with age, not abruptly and all at once, but slowly and gradually. Memorize certain prayers by heart with your child, like poetry. For example, “Our Father” is the main prayer of Christianity. You should also explain to your child the meaning of each line of this great prayer. You can also learn with them some short prayer to your Guardian Angel, the Most Holy Theotokos, or your Heavenly patron, or, for example “O Heavenly King” for before and after studying. But don’t overload the child too much. Today we have special prayer books just for children.

With an older son or daughter you can analyze the Symbol of Faith (the Creed) for Church members, to memorize it. After all, it itself represents a gathering of the main dogmas (laws) of the Orthodox faith.

You can, of course, dear brothers and sisters, implement strictness and rigidity in raising a child, that he might feel your authority. But you must do so with love without anger or irritation. Generally, it’s best not to begin any undertaking with anger and malice. Nothing good can come of it. It’s better to keep quiet, go off to the side, pray, calm down, and maybe even ask forgiveness, only then beginning your work.

Often a priest has to hear something like this: “When my child was young he went to church, but as an adult he stopped.” We must remember that the adolescent and teenage years are a very difficult time. It’s when their personality and character is developed, it’s a time of reevaluating authority, a time of sexual development. And often with all this people must figure themselves out in order to build their own futures. Here the parents and Grandma and Grandpa can help with the most important thing—by praying for him and by good advice, but not by pressure and authoritarianism. Let your teenager work out his own problems, but also feel that you, his parent, are his good friend to whom he can always turn for help and advice in difficult times.

Our task is to pray, be patient, wait and show our children an example of a godly life. And believe they will at some point return to the Church—return consciously, in maturity, and forever.

From personal experience, I, as an example, always preserved in my heart this recollection: my great grandmother took me to a huge and bright church when I was three, carried me to the radiant chalice, to the batiushka in golden robes… I carried this memory with me throughout my entire young life, and it subsequently helped me to make the right choice. Your sons and daughters will travel their own particular paths in life, but you know that the foundation laid in their souls is true. They will fall and make the same mistakes you did in your youth, but they will be their own. And they will get up to go on. But upon them, in their inner hearts' horizon, will shine the star of Orthodoxy, carrying them through life.

Only try from a young age to instill in them, with God’s help, love for prayer. It is a journey, and its boat will undoubtedly guide us to God.

By Fr. Andrei Chizhenko

Source: http://orthochristian.com/97078.html

Avoid sinful thoughts, cut off your dreaming and every image that may be embarrassing, because the "omniscient" satan is trying to take you away from your God and Creator. And when together with certain thoughts he places blame on a person, then the grace of the Holy Spirit leaves just like a bee flies away from toxic smoke, and the soul remains without grace, without joy, full of depression and sadness. But when we oppose this type of evil dreaming, when we get rid of it and repel it right away, by immediately taking up our spiritual sword with zeal and true faith which is the holy Jesus prayer, then we instantly see how the thief (evil thoughts) runs away, giving victory to reason, which is strengthened by the grace and mercy of God.

The cunning enemy can not bare the sight of the holy Angel, the guardian of our soul, who is always next to us. He tries to remove him so that we are left without a "bodyguard" and then engulf us like a terrible storm, so that the snake in the depths of hell could devour us. He knows that the Angel repels only unchaste thoughts, and raises a cloud of shameful thoughts and dreams, in order to defile the mind, heart and body. But when an ascetic knows about his anger, he immediately takes up the spiritual weapon in Christ and destroys his evil schemes.

My child, be careful with dreaming. All sins take root from dreaming. Therefore, be alert and as soon as a dream takes shape or you start wondering about a certain actions, regardless of what it is, expel what you thought, heard or have seen with anger towards the sin and prayer from your mind. Pray a short but powerful prayer. Pray to the Mother of God in your mind to help you. Trust God and you will be rewarded with a victory.

You were full of pride, and so the devil began to wage a war against you. Now humble yourself, reprimand yourself and God will help you, seeing your humility.

The same way you run away from a snake ready to bite you or a burning fire, even more so, run away from evil dreams that come from the devil.

I say, be careful, with shameful dreaming. Great spiritual men fell and perished because of them.

By Elder Ephraim (Moraitis)

Translated by The Catalog of Good Deeds

Subscribe to: Posts ( Atom )

Search This Blog

featured Slider

Icon of “The Three Hands”: There Are Miracles Happening in Our Time!

Parable of the Day: Be Careful in Choosing Your Friends!

St. Elisabeth Convent Celebrates the Feast Day of Holy Royal Martyr Grand Duchess Elisabeth

The Experience of a Miracle: A Story about Confession and Repentance

What We Should Know to Teach Our Children to Pray

Athonite Elder: "My Child, Be Careful with Dreaming!"

Partners