Preface
The currently widespread appeal to the faith of the fathers - Orthodoxy - is not always, unfortunately, crowned with a correct understanding of it. Very often, Orthodoxy is understood as its external side, its “clothing”: services, sacraments, rituals, church discipline, rules, etc., which are only its “icon”, necessary auxiliary means for the assimilation of Orthodoxy, but not itself. For the implementation of all these church institutions without understanding the essence of Orthodoxy can easily lead a believer to acquire not the god-like properties of humility and love, but directly ungodly ones: conceit, pride, pharisaism.
This is what led the Jews, who saw the essence of their faith in the scrupulous fulfillment of the external instructions of the Old Testament religion, to reject the coming Messiah-Christ, making them fighters against God. It is no coincidence that the Lord performed many miracles on Saturday, when according to Jewish law nothing could be done, thereby denouncing these zealots of the “letter” and fatherly traditions. He did all this to show that salvation is achieved not by ritual belief, but by purity of heart, for from the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, blasphemy - this defiles a person; but eating with unwashed hands does not defile a person
(Matthew 15:19–20). This teaching of the Savior is extremely vital today for the Orthodox believer. For one of the greatest temptations for him is to see the essence of Christianity not in the fulfillment of the commandments of Christ, but in adherence to external ritual life.
What is Orthodoxy?
This book of letters from one of the remarkable ascetics of the 20th century of our Church, Abbot Nikon (Vorobiev), is dedicated to the answer to this question. If we try to briefly express its main idea, we can say the following.
Orthodoxy is the correct spiritual life (as opposed to its many distortions), based on faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and His Gospel. Such a life is hidden from prying eyes, for it represents a struggle in the heart of a person, from which both good and evil intentions, thoughts, and desires emanate. This life, first of all, leads the believer to the knowledge of the deep corruption of human nature, his personal sinfulness and, hence, the need for a Savior. And by the faith of this knowledge, it reveals to the sincerely working Christian all the beauty of the Kingdom of God, hidden inside every human heart (Luke 17:21).
But how to reach the saving haven and enter the Kingdom of God is, as the fathers put it, the science of the sciences and the art of the arts. That is why the peculiarity of Orthodoxy is so important that, unlike all other directions of modern Christianity (Catholicism, Protestantism, pseudo-Christian sects), which study this science according to their own understanding, it is completely based on patristic teaching and experience. The very personal experience of an individual believer and the teaching of any Christian community (both Orthodox and non-Orthodox) are assessed exclusively through the prism of the conciliar experience of the fathers - only for Orthodoxy it is the only reliable criterion of truth in assessing all the truths of faith and phenomena of spiritual life. The reason for this approach is clear. When the holy fathers teach in agreement on any issues, their agreement testifies that they are not expressing their personal opinion, but are conveying the voice of the same Spirit of God with which the Holy Scripture itself was written. Therefore, their consistent teaching on any issue of faith and spiritual life is a guarantor of truth in Orthodoxy, and knowledge of the foundations of this teaching is necessary for every Christian.
I would like to hope that the proposed essay about the life of Abbot Nikon and his letters will make it possible to better understand the path of spiritual life and the dangers that stand on it - to understand what Orthodoxy is.
Honoring the memory of Abbot Nikon
In honor of the 50th anniversary of the priest’s death, a conference was held, where both people who knew him and those who were helped by his books on the path to Christian life spoke.
At this event, Professor Alexey Ilyich Osipov also shared his memories of his spiritual mentor.
According to Alexei Ilyich, Father Nikon, among other things, paid great attention to the quality of church services. He strictly prohibited trading in the shop, the giving of notes, as well as all kinds of charitable collections during most of the service. The abbot also resolutely fought against the overly emotional performance of chants by the church choir. Nikon Vorobyov said that a priest must constantly work on his diction, and the pace of his speech during the service should not be too fast.
“I have always sincerely strived for God”
Hegumen Nikon (in the world Nikolai Nikolaevich Vorobyov) was born in 1894 into a peasant family in the village of Mikshino, Bezhetsky district, Tver province. He was the second child. In total, there were six children in the family, all boys[1]. As a child, Kolya, it seems, was no different from his brothers, except for his special honesty, obedience to his elders and amazing cordiality, pity for everyone. He retained these traits throughout his life.
In this regard, it is interesting to note one episode from his childhood life. A holy fool, nicknamed Vanka the Small, often appeared in their village and lived for a long time, whom Kolya’s parents willingly welcomed. And then one day, when the children were playing, this holy fool suddenly approached Kolya and, pointing at him, repeated several times:
"This is a monk, a monk." These words caused nothing but laughter from anyone. But 30 years later this amazing prediction came true - it was Kolya who became a monk.
Vanka the little one was truly insightful. He also predicted the death of Kolya’s mother in Taganrog several decades in advance.
One day, going up to her and folding his hands like a tube, he began to play: “Duru-dara, duru-dara, life died in Taganrog.” At that time, no one in the family had even heard of the existence of such a city. In the 30s, she actually moved to Taganrog to live with her son Vasily and died there. After elementary school, which Kolya graduated with flying colors, his father managed to get him into a secondary school in Vyshny Volochyok. And here he immediately attracted attention with his exceptional and versatile abilities. He showed excellent mathematical talents and was an excellent stylist. He said more than once that it was always easy for him to write essays. This is also evident from his letters, which he wrote, as a rule, immediately, without drafts. He sang (tenor) in the choir, played the alto, performed in various programs at school events, and was an excellent sketcher and painter. The younger brothers said that his drawings were still hanging in their classrooms as models. When moving from class to class, he invariably received a first-class award (a certificate of merit and a book).
But under what conditions did Kolya live and study at the real school?
They helped from home only in primary school. When he decided to study further, he had nowhere to wait for help: his parents lived very poorly, and besides him there were four more sons who also needed education. Therefore, Kolya had to continue studying under conditions that would seem incredible to a modern person. Immediately after the compulsory lessons, he, while still a boy, was forced, in order to earn his bread, to go and help his wealthy comrades who were lagging behind. He was paid a little for this. After spending several hours there, he ran to the apartment (for which he had to pay) and began preparing his lessons. Difficulties increased when his brother Misha entered the same real school, whom only he could help.
Need, hunger and cold were his constant companions throughout his studies. In winter, he wore a light permanent coat and boots, even without insoles.
* * *
The family from which the priest came was Orthodox. But this faith, like that of most ordinary people, was of a ritual nature, external, traditional, and had no basis in either knowledge of the Christian faith or a solid spiritual foundation. Such faith, at best, brought up honest people, but received at the everyday level, according to tradition, was not strong and was easily lost.
Father Nikon said that the bulk of the people easily left the faith after the revolution because many shepherds tended themselves more than their flock, and instead of edifying them in the truths of faith and life, they were often simply mechanical demand-correctors. Their entire teaching consisted of a call to do what was “supposed”: to baptize, to marry, to perform funeral services, to go to church on holidays, to observe fasts, to receive communion once a year. The people knew almost nothing about spiritual life, about the fight against passions; rarely did anyone teach them this. Therefore, as soon as he was told that the church was a deception of the priests, many people stopped believing in God. For if the church is a deception, then God Himself is a fiction. This is what happened to Nikolai. In real school he lost faith. He was a man of deep nature. Unlike many, he was not carried away by the routine of this life. He was looking for the meaning of life. And this quest was not of an abstract philosophical nature, but came from the very heart and captured his entire soul. In this respect he was very similar to F.M. Dostoevsky, who said that his hosanna to Christ passed through a great crucible of doubts
.
Having entered a real school, he eagerly rushed into the study of sciences, naively believing that the truth was hidden in them, believing the atheistic propaganda that spread widely in Russia after the manifestos (“On strengthening the principles of religious tolerance”, “On improving the state order”) of 1905 Nicholas II on freedom of the press and all religions (except the Orthodox Church). This blind faith in science easily replaced his equally blind faith in God at that time. Only in high school did he understand that empirical sciences in general do not deal with problems of knowledge of Truth, the spiritual world, the existence of God; the question of the meaning of human life is not only not raised in them, but also does not follow from the nature of these sciences themselves. Seeing this, he, with all the fervor of his nature, began studying the history of philosophy, in which he achieved such great knowledge that even his teachers sometimes turned to him on some issues.
His search for Meaning was so great that often, being literally left without a piece of bread, he used his last money to buy a book. He could only read it at night. At night he studied the history of philosophy, read classical literature - and all with one goal, with one thought: to find the truth, to find the meaning of life.
But the more knowledge he acquired and the older he became, the more acutely he felt the meaninglessness of this life, concluded between birth and inevitable death. Death is the lot of everyone, without exception. And if so, then what is the meaning of life, which can end at any moment? There is no point in living for yourself, but for others? All others are the same mortals, whose life, therefore, also has no meaning. And why, in this case, does a person live if nothing saves him or anyone else from death? Neither science nor philosophy gave him an answer to this question. " The study of philosophy,
- he said at the end of his life -
showed that every philosopher believed that he had found the truth.
But how many of them, philosophers, were there? But there is only one truth. And the soul yearned for something else. Philosophy is a surrogate; It’s like giving people chewing rubber instead of bread. Eat this rubber, but will you be full? I realized that just as science does not give anything about God, about the future life, so philosophy will not give anything .”
* * *
In 1914, at the age of twenty, Nikolai brilliantly graduated from a real school, but left it without joy.
Having lost faith in both science and philosophy, he makes another attempt to find a scientific answer to the main question of life: why am I living? He enters the Psychoneurological Institute in Petrograd. However, here too he was deeply disappointed. “I saw: psychology studies not a person at all, but the “skin” - the speed of processes, apperceptions, memory... Such nonsense that it also repelled me. And the conclusion became absolutely clear that we need to turn to religion.”
[2].
After finishing his first year, he left the institute. The final spiritual crisis has arrived. The struggle was so difficult that the thought of suicide began to occur.
And then one day in the summer of 1915, in Vyshny Volochyok, when Nikolai suddenly felt a state of complete hopelessness, the thought of his childhood years of faith flashed through him like lightning: what if God really exists? Should He reveal himself? And so, the young man, an unbeliever, from the entire depth of his being, almost in despair, exclaimed: “Lord, if You exist, then reveal yourself to me! I am not looking for You for any earthly, selfish purposes. I only need one thing: are You there or not?”
And... The Lord revealed himself.
«Impossible to transfer
“,” said the priest,
“that action of grace that convinces of the existence of God with force and evidence that does not leave the slightest doubt in a person.
The Lord reveals himself the way, say, the sun suddenly shines after a dark cloud: you no longer doubt whether it was the sun or someone who lit a lantern. So the Lord revealed himself to me that I fell to the ground with the words: “Lord, glory to You, I thank You! Grant me all my life to serve You! Let all the sorrows, all the suffering that exists on earth come to me - grant me to survive everything, just not to fall away from You, not to lose You .
How long this state lasted: an hour, two, he did not remember exactly. But when I got up from my knees, I heard the powerful, measured beats of a church bell, going off into infinity. At first, he did not attach any importance to this, believing that they were calling from a monastery that was nearby. But the ringing did not stop, and the time turned out to be too late for the good news - after midnight.
Nikolai was perplexed for a long time about this ringing, fearing whether it was a hallucination. The explanation came later when he found the same thing in S.N.’s autobiographical notes. Bulgakov in “The Never-Evening Light”, and also remembered Turgenev’s story “Living Relics” in “Notes of a Hunter”, where Lukerya also said that she heard a ringing “from above”, not daring to say “from the sky”. He realized that the Lord sometimes, along with internal revelation, shows a person special external signs for his greater identification.
Thus a complete revolution in his worldview took place. God revealed Himself to those who sought Him with all the strength of their soul. The Lord answered this quest and gave him a taste
and
see
that He
exists
and that He is
good
.
* * *
But the young man did not know at all what to do now and what the path of his new life should be so as not to lose the truth he had found. Father told how at school a priest taught them the Law of God: he forced them to cram texts without delving into their meaning, to retell the Holy Scriptures and to memorize dogmas, commandments, facts of the history of the Church with one naked mind without any application to spiritual life, to the thought of salvation . The teaching was so dead and scholastic that the lessons of the Law of God, he recalled, turned into “ a time of witticisms and blasphemy.”
"
Christianity was studied as one of the usual secular subjects, but not as the path to Christ, and this completely killed the spirit in the students. There was no sense of life in all the teaching. It is no coincidence that the Monk Barsanuphius of Optina said: “ The revolution came out of the seminary
.”
In this regard, Father often said that it was precisely because of this “ spiritual
" education, the most evil atheists came out of the walls of theological schools, and our people, participating only in church events, remained without knowledge of Orthodoxy and therefore easily succumbed to atheistic propaganda.
This is what Father Nikon said about his next steps in life after his conversion.
“And in the future, the Lord leads a person along a difficult path, a very difficult path. I was amazed when, after such a revelation of God, I entered the church. And we had to before: we were forced to go to school at home, and in high school we were taken to church. But what is there? He stood there like a pillar, wasn’t interested, was busy with his thoughts and that’s it.
But when, after conversion, my heart opened a little, then in the temple the first thing I remembered was the legend about the ambassadors of Prince Vladimir, who, when they entered the Greek church, no longer knew where they were: in heaven or on earth. And here is the first feeling in the church after the experience that the person is not on earth. The church is not earth, it is a piece of heaven. What a joy it was to hear: “Lord, have mercy!” It simply had an incredible effect on the heart: the entire service, the constant remembrance of the name of God in various forms, chants, readings. This evoked some kind of admiration, joy, satiation...
It's very difficult nowadays. There are no leaders, no books, no living conditions. And on this path - I draw your attention, I emphasize - on this difficult path, as can be seen from all the holy fathers, the most important, the most difficult thing is to lead a person to humility, for pride led both the star and Adam to the fall. And this is the way of the Lord for a person who with all his soul decided to live for the sake of the Lord in order to be saved. And without humility a person cannot be saved. Although we do not achieve real humility, we can reach the initial level, so to speak.
And when a person comes like this, falls to the Lord: “Lord, I myself don’t know anything (in fact, what do we know?), do with me what you want, just save me,” then the Lord begins to lead the person Himself.”
Indeed, at that time the young man did not know anything about the spiritual path, and, alas, he said, there was no one to ask. There was only one thing left to do - to fall down with tears to God and ask Him to show the way. And the Lord led him. “He led me in such a way that after this I lived in Volochyok for two years, studied with books, and prayed at home.” This was a period of “burning” of the heart. He did not see or hear what was happening around him. At that time he was renting one half of a private house in Sosnovitsy [Tver province]. He was only 21–22 years old. Behind a thin partition there were young people dancing, singing, laughing, playing: they were having fun there. He was also invited. But he lost his taste for the world, for its naive, short-sighted, momentary joys.
“Eat, drink, be merry” - this motto did not suit either his mind, or, especially, his heart.
These two years of his life were a time of continuous feat, real asceticism. For the first time here he became acquainted with the works of the holy fathers, for the first time, in essence, with the Gospel. Here is what the priest said about this period:
“And only in the holy fathers and in the Gospel did I find something truly valuable. When a person begins to struggle with himself and strives to follow the path of the Gospel, then the holy fathers will become necessary for him and his relatives. The Holy Father is already a dear teacher who speaks to your soul, and it perceives it with joy and is comforted. Just as these philosophies and all sorts of sectarian nasty things caused melancholy, despondency, and vomiting, so, on the contrary, he came to his fathers as if he were visiting his own mother. They consoled me, admonished me, nourished me.
After
[in 1917]
The Lord gave me the idea to enter the Moscow Theological Academy.
It meant a lot to me." According to him, thanks to lectures, first of all, by Father Pavel Florensky, he received here a theoretical justification for the existence of God, the spiritual world, and an understanding of the meaning of life.
But a year later the academy was closed.
«Then the Lord arranged it so that I could remain alone in Sosnovitsy for several more years, in solitude
" Here in high school he taught mathematics with a small number of hours. However, he was fired from the school after he refused to study on Easter. In 1925, he moved to Moscow and got a job as a psalm-reader in the Boris and Gleb Church. Here he becomes close friends with the rector of the temple, Feofan (Semenyako), who is soon elevated to bishop and sent to Minsk.
Ten days before his death on the feast of the Dormition of the Mother of God, the priest, with the last of his strength, told his loved ones something about this part of his journey to those gathered at his bedside as a “ psychological illustration of spiritual life from the lips of an already dying person - perhaps it will be useful
»:
«And there
[in Sosnovitsy]
he lived like an ascetic: he ate a piece of bread, a plate of empty cabbage soup.
There were almost no potatoes then. And during this, so to speak, real ascetic life (now everything can be said), I was in prayer all day - I was in prayer and in fasting. And it was then that I understood spiritual life, the inner state: the Lord revealed the action in the heart of prayer. I thought that the Lord would continue to place me somewhere in the village, in some crumbling house, where I could continue the same life. I had enough bread, half a palm, five potatoes (I’m already used to it) - that’s all. The Lord did not arrange this. It seems, why not? But for me it’s clear. Because in the very depths of my soul an opinion about myself grew: this is how I live as an ascetic, I already understand heartfelt prayer. What is this concept? This is one billionth of what the holy fathers experienced. I am telling you so that you understand a little. And instead of such solitude, the Lord arranged it so that I would fall into the very mud, so that I would roll around in it, realize that I myself was nothing, and would fall to the Lord and say: “Lord, Lord, what am I? Only You are our Savior."
I learned that the Lord arranges it this way because a person needs to humble himself. Seems clear? But it turns out that this is not at all clear to humans. After that, he became a monk, was in the camp, returned and still brought back a high opinion.”
* * *
In Minsk, on March 23 (April 5, new style), 1930, on Palm Sunday, Nikolai Nikolaevich was tonsured as a monk. He received the name in honor of Abbot Nikon of Radonezh, a student of St. Sergius. The tonsure was performed by Bishop Feofan of Minsk, with whom he and he moved here from Moscow. On the day of the Annunciation of the Most Holy Theotokos, March 25 of the same year, Father Nikon was ordained a hierodeacon, and on December 26, 1932 (on the second day of the Nativity of Christ) - a hieromonk by the same bishop.
One has to be amazed at the strength of Nikolai Nikolaevich’s faith and zeal, which prompted him to accept monasticism and the priesthood during this fierce time of persecution of the Church. Few dared to undertake such a feat. This was a real renunciation of the world and a direct path to Golgotha! And she did not hesitate to come to Hieromonk Nikon on April 5 (March 23, O.S.), 1933, on the very day of her father’s tonsure
Nikon was arrested and exiled to Siberian camps for five years to build the future Komsomolsk-on-Amur. It is impossible to listen, read, or remember what the prisoners suffered there without shuddering. Now the horrors of those years have only begun to be revealed. Father said almost nothing - he was under constant surveillance. But in one of his letters he shared a little memory of this period of his life:
«Today, 5/IV–30, was Palm Sunday. I got a new name. And three years later, also 5/IV–33, I was verhaften
[arrested]
.
It was truly a renunciation of everything. Our generation (there are only a few of them alive) was literally manure for future births. Our descendants will never be able to understand what we experienced. We received what was worthy of our deeds. Will you perceive something? And you are hardly better than us. May the Lord deliver you from our fate! “When A. Solzhenitsyn’s book “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” was published, the priest, after reading it, said: “Solzhenitsyn, apparently, was sitting at a resort, and not in a camp.” But many were struck by the difficult living conditions of prisoners that Solzhenitsyn describes in this essay.
In the camp, shortly before his liberation, the priest unexpectedly met for a short time with his friend Bishop Theodosius (Zatsinsky), who gave him the following document (just in case):
«19/I–1937
Komsomolsk-on-Amur
Certificate
The bearer of this is Hieromonk Nikon, in the world Nikolai Nikolaevich Vorobyov... in the faith of fidelity to the covenants of the Holy Orthodox Church, he is very well read in the word of God and patristic literature, his life and way of thinking is strictly Orthodox Christian. He bore the cross of the camp bonds patiently, without despondency or sorrow, setting a good example with his life to everyone around him. With benefit for the Orthodox Church he can be used as a parish pastor and even as the closest faithful collaborator of the diocesan saint, which I certify.
Theodosius (Zatsinsky), Bishop of Kuban and Krasnodar, b. Mogilevsky
* * *
Due to the counting of working days, and in fact a direct miracle of God, the priest was released early in 1937. Returning from the camp, he settled in Vyshny Volochyok as a universal servant with a very authoritative friend in the city, the surgeon-surgeon Mikhail Lvovich Sergievsky (1872–1955), with whose son he studied at the Real School and whose intercession later saved Fr. Nikon from a new arrest. But here he had to undergo another harsh course in the science of heroism and patience. The doctor's wife Alexandra Efimovna and her sister, also a doctor, Elena Efimovna, were convinced atheists and in an open, often sarcastic form, expressed their attitude towards both Christianity and their monk-servant. How he reacted to this is best illustrated by subsequent facts from the life of this family. Both sisters eventually abandoned their belief in atheism and became true Christians. And what brought them to Christ was not just his intelligence, encyclopedic knowledge and clear answers to the most seemingly devastating questions about Christianity, but to a much greater extent his truly Christian life, asceticism and amazing patience.
He lived on the second floor of the outbuilding in a small room. This outbuilding, the main house and the entire estate have been preserved to this day. The estate is huge, about one and a half hectares. On it, with his own hands, the priest planted an orchard with a variety of species of apple trees, pears, plums, cherries, currants, gooseberries, not to mention various garden crops, which had to be grown in large quantities, since Mikhail Lvovich constantly had friends who came and came. , acquaintances and patients. One is involuntarily amazed by the amount of work that Hieromonk Nikon performed alone! But now the whole area is overgrown and neglected - there is no one to take care of it.
The story of the conversion of the first of the sisters, Alexandra, is very interesting and unusual. Elena Efimovna described it in her diary.
“May 30, 1940. Even after the death of my sister, Alexandra Efimovna, I had a desire to describe her illness and death and what she partially revealed to us about herself. Let what I tell you serve for the glory of God.
My sister was an unbeliever all her life. The sister's ideas about faith, God and religion were typical of an intellectual of her time. She was intolerant of everything related to religion, and her objections were often cynical. During these years, Nikolai Nikolaevich (Nikon’s father) lived in our house. I always suffered from her tone and did not like it when Nikolai Nikolaevich touched on these issues. My sister’s favorite objection to all Nikolai Nikolaevich’s arguments were the words: “You can write anything, all books about the spiritual contain nothing but lies, which only paper can tolerate.”
She became hopelessly ill (stomach cancer) and did not stop mocking her faith, became very irritable, lost sleep, lost her appetite and went to bed. At first, her husband looked after the patient, but from sleepless nights he began to collapse. During the day he had a lot of work to do at the hospital. Then we introduced night duty with Nikolai Nikolaevich. She had a period of severe irritability, demandingness, she demanded something every minute. When it became difficult for her to strain her voice, Nikolai Nikolaevich ran an electric bell to her bedside. He sat in the sick room at night.
The wife of the patient’s eldest son, E.V., came from Leningrad, but she did not stay for long. The patient told her about her vision. She saw how seven elders, dressed in schema, entered the room. They surrounded her with love and goodwill and said: “Let her see the light through his prayers!” Nikolai Nikolaevich forbade speaking “with his prayers,” and E.V. claimed that the patient said exactly that. This phenomenon repeated several times.
Then the sick sister turned to N.N. with a request for confession and Communion.
She did not fast for forty years. Request from patient N.N. I did it myself, and the visions stopped. A turning point took place in the patient’s soul: she became kind and gentle with everyone. She became affectionate.
[This change greatly amazed her family and everyone who knew her.]
N.N.
said that after Communion she reasoned with him that if these were hallucinations, then why did they immediately stop after Communion of the Holy Mysteries and were repeated several times before? Her mind worked until her last breath. She said that if she recovered, her first trip would be to church, which she had not been to for forty years. Her consciousness was clear, and she thought a lot and said: “Every person must die in the faith of the fathers!” The priest himself told this story, but he conveyed only the following words of the elders: “You have a priest in your house, turn to him.”
About the second sister, Elena Efimovna, the priest said that, having believed, she repented as much as anyone else in his priestly practice. It was a groan from the depths of the soul. She soon took monastic vows with the name Seraphim. When she died in 1950, and she, a doctor, as was customary in those days, was buried from the hospital solemnly, with music, no one knew that under the pillow in the coffin lay the monastic mantle, paraman, and rosary. In his letters, the priest asked very much to remember everyone who knew her, for she did a lot of good. So, on 13/X–50 he wrote: “ ... returned from Volochok yesterday. Elena Efimovna, whom Valentin’s mother knows, died there, and they called me by telegram. I promised her that I would bury her and I kept my promise. She did a lot of good things for me. I ask everyone to remember her
».
* * *
With the opening of churches, the priest began to serve as a priest. In 1944, Bishop Vasily of Kaluga appointed him rector of the Annunciation Church in the city of Kozelsk, where he served until 1948.
Here he lived in an apartment with nuns and continued to lead an ascetic lifestyle in the full sense of the word. According to the recollections of those who communicated with him at that time, he was incredibly exhausted. In a small (5-6 sq. meters) room fenced off with a plank partition, he spent all his time in prayer (so said the nuns who quietly peeked and often saw him kneeling), reading the Holy Scriptures, the Holy Fathers. Apart from Sundays and holidays, he celebrated the Liturgy every Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, and even on minor holidays. As a rule, he preached at every liturgy, often on weekdays, even if there were few people, sometimes during evening services. His sermons made a strong impression on believers, and not because he had the gift of speech, but because of his sincerity, depth of understanding of spiritual life, and constant appeal to the holy fathers.
* * *
In Kozelsk, Father Nikon had spiritual communication with the last tonsure of the Monk Ambrose of Optina, Hieroschemamonk Meletius (Barmin, November 12, 1959). Father Meletius was also the last confessor of the Shamordina women's monastery (not far from Kozelsk). He also did not escape the camp. They said that during some interrogation, when he was brought to an almost unconscious state, he allegedly signed an indictment against someone. Organs
Of course, this method was often used. But one could easily be convinced of the purity of the soul of Father Meletius by talking with him for at least a few minutes. He was distinguished by extraordinary meekness and was very taciturn. They will ask him: “Father, how to live?” He answers: “Always pray,” and that’s all. There was always peace and tranquility around him.
. Older brother Vanya died in adolescence. His younger brothers were: Alexander (1895–1988), Mikhail (1899–1982), Vasily (1903–1961), Vladimir (1906–1985).
. Here and further quoted from a tape recording.
Studying at the Theological Academy
Two years later, the young man entered the Moscow Theological Academy. The young man devoted himself with incredible passion to studying the fundamentals of theology. But, by coincidence, he was not destined to graduate from this institution. A few years later, the academy, like many theological institutions, was closed.
Nikon moved to the village of Vyshny Volochek, where he began teaching mathematics at a local school. After some time, Vorobiev moved to Minsk, where he took monastic vows, and then the priestly rank.
However, he failed to devote himself to church service then. Father Nikon, along with some other church leaders, was arrested on charges of anti-Soviet activity.
