Today, preacher and missionary Andrei Tkachev can be called one of the most famous and influential Orthodox priests. The archpriest very often appears on television, where he shares his understanding of the institution of family in the modern world.
The priest boldly tells people what, in his opinion, an Orthodox family should look like, what place the husband, wife, and relatives of the spouses occupy there, what should be done by whom and what duties to fulfill. Thousands of people perceive his words as a direct guide to action!
Fight for Greek Catholics!
Before you find yourself with your betrothed at the altar, Tkachev recommends taking a careful look at him. So, for example, the archpriest is merciless towards Greek Catholics: an Orthodox cannot build a marriage with a representative of this denomination! “It’s better to be with an atheist than with a Greek Catholic,” the priest frowns.
Age difference is a serious matter
Tkachev does not condemn marriages where a woman or a man is significantly older than his partner, but he does not approve too much either. The archpriest warns: the young spouse will eventually face a serious test. And if a person feels that he is not ready for him, then he should not get involved in a relationship.
About meeting future chosen ones
Andrey recommends that women not rush to meet the opposite sex. On the contrary, he advises men to search, look closely, and listen. “Sometimes you look: she’s beautiful; She opened her mouth and the flowers withered. Run away from this as fast as you can! The real ones are discreet.
Good girls are invisible, you really have to look for them. She will stand in the shadows out of modesty. And you take a closer look at it like an artist. After all, an artist sees a sculpture in a block of marble. A man must be able to see the real in a woman.”
Spiritual vs. Carnal
The girls ask the preacher: is spiritual unity enough for marriage or is carnal desire also necessary? Tkachev's answer surprised the audience.
“There must certainly be a carnal feeling! What about without carnal feelings? Why are you getting married? To read the Great Soviet Encyclopedia together? You must love each other, love with soul and body."
Correct behavior of a wife according to the priest
Father Andrei repeats over and over again: a girl should be passive, be able to wait, and if she really wants to act, do everything so that outwardly it seems that all ideas belong to her husband.
“It’s like in one movie: a weak-willed husband, an energetic wife, who all the time so unobtrusively gives her husband ideas, and then, when he offers her the same thing, she wildly admires: they say, what a great fellow you are, how great you came up with everything. This is where female strength and wisdom manifests itself.” The priest’s critics note: this idea reeks of Domostroy.
Question of jealousy
Tkachev considers jealousy to be a natural and integral part of feelings. “In marriage, we are each other's owners. The Apostle Paul says: the wife is the owner of her husband’s flesh, and the husband is the owner of his wife’s flesh. That is, my wife is my property, I do not allow anyone to touch my property.
And my wife has every reason not to let anyone near her property, that is, my flesh, because we are mutual owners of each other’s flesh.” To be fair, Father Andrei recommends distinguishing healthy jealousy from pathological jealousy caused by mania.
Mother-in-law and mother-in-law
But on the issue of relations between different generations in the family, the archpriest is categorical. “In a young, newly formed family, there is no place for a mother-in-law.” The same applies to the mother-in-law. “Who is your mother if you got married? A very close relative. But nothing more!”
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The idea, by the way, is relatively sound, especially considering that the priest necessarily recommends that newlyweds live separately. “If you get married, take your wife under your arm, a suitcase with simple belongings in the other hand, and go to your rented apartment, so that your spirit will not be in your parents’ house.”
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Of course, the point of view of Father Andrei, in principle, cannot be considered the absolute truth. But there is still a grain of wisdom in some of his comments.
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Time to Preach the Terrible Jesus
There are very few men in Orthodox churches. And this is our civilizational task: to return men and fathers to the temple, where wives and children will follow them.
I remember how in Krasnodar, at a conference dedicated to teaching the Fundamentals of Orthodox Culture, one priest from Adygea shared information that 100% of teachers and parents in their region said: “We don’t need any subjects about Orthodoxy, about Islam, everything we need to tell children about faith, we will tell it ourselves in the family. We don’t want some aunts, yesterday’s atheists, to teach children the basics of spiritual culture.” It turns out that if spiritual subjects are taught by a woman, the degree of assimilation is 10-12%. If a man - 70-80% or more.
Which of the grandmothers did not complain: “Father, my sweet grandson, Kolenka or Vasenka, went with me to the church, took communion, while he was 7, 8, 9 years old. Now he is 12 years old and cannot walk. He pulls out the handle and says: Grandma, leave me alone, I won’t go again.” Why? Because God gave woman the power to command only small children and women. And a man should rule the world.
I constantly ask myself: where are our men, where are they? I once went to football with my sons: yes, here they are, I found the men! 70 thousand broad-shouldered, well-fed, satisfied, cheerful, waving scarves.
Archpriest Andrei Tkachev on the hierarchy of the Orthodox family and the special responsibility of fathers
Vladyka Arseny of Istra once noted: how many people clog the streets of our cities during Kurban Bayram - and these are young, healthy, strong men. How many men pray to God at the same time - in one impulse, in one bow to the ground!
If we don’t bring our men to the temple, if they don’t take everything into their own hands, we will simply disappear, and that’s fair. One general who served in Afghanistan told me: a religiously motivated enemy is the worst thing. He is not afraid to die and is not afraid to kill. He has a religious idea. He runs with a machine gun and shouts: “God is great!” - in Arabic “Allah Akbar!” Why should we shout? "Happy New Year!"? It’s another matter if a fighter responds by saying: “Christ is Risen”! Then you can already fight!
Muslims will force us to pray. Either pray today in Russian, or tomorrow you will pray in Arabic, because God exists. They have already taught half the universe to pray in their own way - Tajiks, Turks, Persians. And no one scolds the mullah. “The mullah has a ring, the mullah has four wives, the mullah has two Mercedes, the mullah has a big house... Shh! Don’t criticize the mullah, it’s dangerous.” We can be blamed for this: our belly is big, our nose is red, we pray little, we have a lot of money. You can wag your tongue about us, because we are kind and do not punish for criticizing the clergy. And if today our crazy Russian people carry poor priests in their teeth - read social networks, how much hatred there is for the Church - tomorrow they will be forced to pray in Arabic, and they will not say a word, because their heads will be taken off their shoulders in one second.
If you don’t want to act kindly, Christianly, mercifully, then it will be different. Do you know how the Arab conquest of Central Asia took place? An Arab soldier came to the village and lived there for several months. The saber is drawn - constantly, the sword is drawn. He says: I pray, and you pray. He bows five times a day, and they bow. The soldier says “la-la-la”, they repeat: la-la-la. “I will eat this, you can’t eat anything else, and you do the same.” He lived in the village for three months, taught them prayer, rituals, and moved on. Thus a new Islamic nation emerged. Former Kyrgyz and Tajiks became Muslims.
Lecture audience
Our baptized people today go out on pickets with posters: “We don’t need churches!” “The tree will be cut down, my Tuzik will grieve, because there will be nowhere for him to raise his paw... The bell will ring in the morning, waking us up...” And what - will God tolerate this disgrace? Let him sweep away everyone, populate them with Tajiks or Chinese!
The time has come to preach the formidable Jesus, who will shake the soul and dirt out of us. This is not a tutor: what do you want? How are you? business blessing? This is not Santa Claus. He will beat the soul out of you and me - until we come to our senses!
What kind of Russian people have appeared in the world who do not pray to God?! Russians have always prayed to God! They were sick - they prayed. When we recovered, we prayed. We fought and prayed. We won - we prayed. If we lost, we also prayed. Wherever fate took him, the Russian man built a temple everywhere. And he felt good in this temple. There, native faces looked at him from the walls: Seraphim of Sarov, Sergius of Radonezh, Nicholas the Wonderworker...
Moving to Kyiv
In 2005, Tkachev decided that he could attract even more people to the church. For this purpose, he moved his family to Kyiv. This was necessary in order to take an active part in various television and radio programs with an Orthodox bias.
At first, Tkachev did not know which parish to serve in. Therefore, I preached sermons wherever I was invited. In the Church of Agapit of Pechersk, the parishioners very much asked Andrei Tkachev to remain their rector, since the previous one was ill. And Tkachev was the rector of this church for 8 years.
In parallel with the service in the temple, Andrei Tkachev hosted a program on the Kievan Rus - television channel with the title “For the future ones.” He also read sermons on the TV show “Garden of Divine Songs” on the same TV channel. Also, on Era FM radio, there was the author’s program “Guide with Father Andrey.”
Later, Andrei Tkachev began writing a column in the newspaper Segodnya, became the author of the magazine of the Ionin Monastery and the Orthodox online publication for young people, Otrok.
In 2008, the first book, “Look, the Sky is Getting Closer,” was released. The second book, “Thoughts of Repentance,” was not long in coming and was released in 2009. The book "Letter to God" was released in 2010.
Andrei Tkachev openly took a pro-Russian position, which in the future became the reason for his hasty departure from the country.
In 2013, Andrei Tkachev became the head of the Missionary Department of the Kyiv Diocese, and in 2014, when a coup d’état began in Ukraine, he had to leave the country and transfer to Moscow.
Andrei Tkachev continued his active preaching work in Russia.
“And I was thirteen years old...”
You need to get married earlier. In marriage there should be responsibility for a person - this applies mainly to boys. Because the sins of boys remain outside the threshold, and the sins of girls are brought into the house. Men and women are not equal to each other, we are different people, therefore a woman who has sinned is not equal to a man who has sinned. A man smells of the wind, a woman smells of a hearth.
Life is harder for women, which is why there are more saints among them. As Sevastyan Karaganda said, it is easier to pray for deceased women, they have fewer sins. You can’t beat a girl, if only because she will have a hard life - she’ll still have too much to eat, poor thing. Once again you can kiss her, caress her, hug her, give her something, play. She will drink her bitter cup yet. You can hit the guy one more time, he won’t die. Unbeaten children are generally cheap. For one beaten, they give two unbeaten - the Russian proverb correctly says.
True, the time will soon come when our children, for whom you bought phones and computers, will “knock” on these phones to the juvenile service for not buying them a toy or pulling their ears. He came, he smelled of cigarettes, you hit him in the ear, he called - you were taken to prison. This is the scenario of tomorrow.
But did you know that any person will be beaten in life. And more than once. So it’s better to let dad beat him now, and then the Lord will save him. This is better than being beaten on the street in a gateway - it will be cruel and merciless there.
The guy needs to take responsibility. Their mustaches are already growing, and they are told at school that the Volga flows into the Caspian Sea, that Alexander the Great went to Persia and fought with Darius. What Darius is - their thoughts are completely different.
At what age did you get married before? According to Roman law, puberty occurred at the age of 12. Remember “Eugene Onegin”. When Tatyana pestered the nanny whether she loved her, she answered her:
“And, that’s it, Tanya! These summers We have not heard about love; Otherwise my dead mother-in-law would have driven me out of the world. - How did you get married, nanny? - So, apparently, God ordered. My Vanya Was younger than me, my light, And I was thirteen years old. <…> They unraveled my braid while crying, and led me to church singing.”
What love when she was 13 years old, and Vanya was even younger! This way of life contained its own wisdom: people believed that it was necessary to marry children early so that they would go crazy already in marriage. And then he will endure it and fall in love. This is how many generations of Russian people lived.
We can't do this anymore. But the guy still has to be responsible. If he conceived a girl, there should be no abortion. Well, my dear, get married. Necessary.
Biography of Andrey Tkachev
Born in the Ukrainian city of Lvov on December 30, 1969.
At first he studied at a regular high school, and as a teenager he began to study Christianity. In 1984, after finishing 9th grade, at the insistence of his parents, he entered the Moscow Suvorov Military School. The Faculty of Special Propaganda was one of the most difficult. The specialization was in Persian, which is very difficult to learn. But not because of the difficulty, but because of a reluctance to learn, the future archpriest was expelled.
After college, he was drafted into the army, where he first read the book “A Poem about God.” Upon returning home, he first worked as a loader in a grocery store, and then as a watchman in a church.
One of his friends was fond of church music and invited Andrei to monasteries to pray and listen to the church choir sing. They studied the Gospel and Orthodox literature together.
How Andrei Tkachev got into the Russian Orthodox Church
In 1992, Andrei’s spiritual father advised him to enter the Kyiv Theological Seminary as an external student. There Andrei met high-ranking clergy who greatly influenced his future.
For two years, while Tkachev was studying at the seminary, he served in Lviv churches.
Then Andrei Tkachev was expelled from the seminary for missing classes. He explained this by saying that he was very busy with church affairs. Now the archpriest says to himself that he is self-taught. But from the results of his work it is clear that the lack of seminary education did not affect his activities in any way.
In 1993, Andrei Tkachev was ordained a deacon, and by the end of the year he was ordained a priest. Until 2005, he served in the Church of St. George and taught at the Lviv Theological Academy. Also in high school he taught the Law of God in secular ethics classes.
