Preface
Openly appearing to those who seek Him with all their hearts, and hiding from those who flee from Him with all their hearts, God regulates human knowledge about Himself - He gives signs visible to those who seek Him and invisible to those indifferent to Him. To those who want to see, He gives enough light; To those who do not want to see, He gives enough darkness.
Blaise Pascal
One warm September evening, we, then very young novices of the Pskov-Pechersk Monastery, made our way through the passages and galleries to the ancient monastery walls, and comfortably settled down high above the garden and above the fields. As we talked, we began to remember how each of us ended up in the monastery. And the more we listened to each other, the more surprised we were.
"Unholy Saints" and other stories
420 ₽ The most popular Orthodox publication of recent years, the book by Archimandrite Tikhon (Shevkunov) “Unholy Saints” and Other Stories,” presents unimagined stories about the amazing action of God’s Providence in the life of the author, as well as people known to him. Among the heroes of the work: Archimandrite John (Krestyankin), Archimandrite Alipy (Voronov), Archimandrite Nathanael (Pospelov), Archpriest Nikolai Guryanov, Sergei Bondarchuk, Bulat Okudzhava, Andrei Bitov, the family of Marshal Georgy Zhukov and many others. Some of them contributed to the spiritual development of the author, and he helped others to ascend to the Lord. The stories included in the book are filled with warm humor, a sense of the miraculous, and a joyful sense of the presence of God.
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The year was 1984. There were five of us. Four grew up in non-church families, and even the fifth, the son of a priest, had ideas about people who go to a monastery that were not much different from our Soviet ones. Just a year ago, we were all convinced that in our time either fanatics or people hopelessly unsuccessful in life go to the monastery. Yes! — and also victims of unrequited love.
But, looking at each other, we saw something completely different. The youngest of us was eighteen years old, the oldest twenty-six. They were all healthy, strong, good-looking young people. One brilliantly graduated from the mathematics department of the university, the other, despite his age, was a famous artist in Leningrad. Another spent most of his life in New York, where his father worked, and came to the monastery in his third year at the institute. The youngest is the son of a priest, a talented carver, who has just completed his studies at art school. I also recently graduated from the screenwriting department of VGIK. In general, everyone's worldly career promised to be the most enviable for such young men as we were then.
So why did we come to the monastery and with all our hearts wanted to stay here forever? We knew the answer to this question well. Because a beautiful, incomparable world has opened up to each of us. And this world turned out to be immeasurably more attractive than the one in which by that time we had lived our short and also, in its own way, very happy years. About this wonderful world, where they live according to completely different laws than in ordinary life, a world infinitely bright, full of love and joyful discoveries, hope and happiness, trials, victories and finding the meaning of defeats, and most importantly, about powerful phenomena of strength and I want to tell about God’s help in this book.
I didn’t need to invent anything - everything you read about here happened in life. Many of those who will be talked about are still alive today.
Archimandrite Tikhon (Shevkunov)
"Unholy Saints" and other stories
Preface
Openly appearing to those who seek Him with all their hearts, and hiding from those who flee from Him with all their hearts, God regulates human knowledge about Himself - He gives signs visible to those who seek Him and invisible to those indifferent to Him. To those who want to see, He gives enough light; To those who do not want to see, He gives enough darkness.
Blaise Pascal
One warm September evening, we, then very young novices of the Pskov-Pechersk Monastery, made our way through the passages and galleries to the ancient monastery walls, and comfortably settled down high above the garden and above the fields. As we talked, we began to remember how each of us ended up in the monastery. And the more we listened to each other, the more surprised we were.
The year was 1984. There were five of us. Four grew up in non-church families, and even the fifth, the son of a priest, had ideas about people who go to a monastery that were not much different from our Soviet ones. Just a year ago, we were all convinced that in our time either fanatics or people hopelessly unsuccessful in life go to the monastery. Yes! — and also victims of unrequited love.
But, looking at each other, we saw something completely different. The youngest of us was eighteen years old, the oldest twenty-six. They were all healthy, strong, good-looking young people. One brilliantly graduated from the mathematics department of the university, the other, despite his age, was a famous artist in Leningrad. Another spent most of his life in New York, where his father worked, and came to the monastery in his third year at the institute. The youngest is the son of a priest, a talented carver, who has just completed his studies at art school. I also recently graduated from the screenwriting department of VGIK. In general, everyone's worldly career promised to be the most enviable for such young men as we were then.
So why did we come to the monastery and with all our hearts wanted to stay here forever? We knew the answer to this question well. Because a beautiful, incomparable world has opened up to each of us. And this world turned out to be immeasurably more attractive than the one in which by that time we had lived our short and also, in its own way, very happy years. About this wonderful world, where they live according to completely different laws than in ordinary life, a world infinitely bright, full of love and joyful discoveries, hope and happiness, trials, victories and finding the meaning of defeats, and most importantly, about powerful phenomena of strength and I want to tell about God’s help in this book.
I didn’t need to invent anything - everything you read about here happened in life. Many of those who will be talked about are still alive today.
Start
I was baptized immediately after graduating from college, in 1982. By that time I was twenty-four years old. Nobody knew whether I was baptized as a child. In those years, this happened often: grandmothers and aunties often baptized a child in secret from unbelieving parents. In such cases, while performing the sacrament, the priest says: “If he is not baptized, he is baptized,” that is, “if he is not baptized, such and such a servant of God is baptized.”
I, like many of my friends, came to faith in college. There were many excellent teachers at VGIK. They gave us a serious humanitarian education and made us think about the main questions of life.
Discussing these eternal questions, the events of past centuries, the problems of our seventies, eighties, and tens - in classrooms, dormitories, in cheap cafes favored by students and during long night journeys along the ancient streets of Moscow, we came to the firm conviction that the state is deceiving us, imposing not only their crude and absurd interpretations of history and politics. We understood very well that, on someone’s powerful instructions, everything was done to deprive us of even the opportunity to understand the question of God and the Church ourselves.
This topic was completely clear only to our teacher on atheism or, say, to my school Pioneer leader Marina. She absolutely confidently gave answers to this, and in general to any questions in life. But gradually we were surprised to discover that all the great figures of world and Russian history, with whom we became spiritually acquainted during our studies, whom we trusted, whom we loved and respected, thought about God completely differently. Simply put, they turned out to be believers. Dostoevsky, Kant, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Goethe, Pascal, Hegel, Losev - you can’t list them all. Not to mention the scientists - Newton, Planck, Linnaeus, Mendeleev. We, due to our humanitarian education, knew less about them, but here the picture was the same. Although, of course, these people’s perception of God could be different. But, be that as it may, for most of them the question of faith was the most important, although the most difficult in life.
But here are the characters who did not evoke any sympathy in us, with whom everything that was most sinister and repulsive in the fate of Russia and in world history was associated - Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Hitler, the leaders of our atheistic state, the destroyers-revolutionaries - all as one were atheists. And then we were faced with another question, formulated by life roughly but definitely: either the Pushkins, Dostoevskys and Newtons turned out to be so primitive and narrow-minded that they could not understand this problem and were simply fools, or the pioneer leader and I were fools Marina? All this provided serious food for our young minds.
In those years, our extensive institute library did not even have the Bible, not to mention the works of church and religious writers. We had to look for information about faith bit by bit from primary sources, either in textbooks on atheism or in the works of classical philosophers. Great Russian literature had a huge influence on us.
I really liked going to services in Moscow churches in the evenings, although I understood little about it. My first reading of the Bible made a great impression on me. I took it from a Baptist to read, and I kept putting it on without returning it, knowing full well that I wouldn’t find this book anywhere else. Although that Baptist did not insist on returning at all.
He tried to convert me for months. I somehow didn’t immediately like their prayer house on Maly Vuzovsky Lane, but I am still grateful to this sincere person who allowed me to keep his book.
Like all young people, my friends and I spent a lot of time arguing, including about faith and God, reading the Holy Scriptures I had obtained, spiritual books that we somehow managed to find. But most of us delayed baptism and church membership: it seemed to us that we could completely do without the Church, having, as they say, God in our souls. Everything might have continued like this, but one day we were shown quite clearly what the Church is and why it is needed.
Paola Dmitrievna Volkova taught us the history of foreign art. She read very interestingly, but for some reason, perhaps because she herself was a seeker, she told us a lot about her personal spiritual and mystical experiments. For example, she devoted a lecture or two to the ancient Chinese book of fortune telling, the I Ching. Paola even brought sandalwood and bamboo sticks into the classroom and taught us how to use them to see into the future.
One of the classes concerned the long-term research on spiritualism of the great Russian scientists D.I. Mendeleev and V.I. Vernadsky, known only to narrow specialists. And although Paola honestly warned that passion for this kind of experiment is fraught with the most unpredictable consequences, we, with all our youthful curiosity, rushed into these mysterious, exciting areas.
I will not go deeper into the description of the technical techniques that we read in Mendeleev’s scientific treatises and learned from the staff of the Vernadsky Museum in Moscow. Having applied some of them experimentally, we discovered that we could establish a special connection with some incomprehensible to us, but completely real beings. These new mysterious acquaintances, with whom we began to have long night conversations, introduced themselves in different ways. Either Napoleon, or Socrates, or the recently deceased grandmother of one of our friends. These characters sometimes told unusually interesting things. And, to our immense surprise, they knew the ins and outs of each of those present. For example, we could be curious about who our classmate, the future famous director Alexander Rogozhkin, is secretly walking with until late at night?
Start
I was baptized immediately after graduating from college, in 1982. By that time I was twenty-four years old. Nobody knew whether I was baptized as a child. In those years, this happened often: grandmothers and aunties often baptized a child in secret from unbelieving parents. In such cases, while performing the sacrament, the priest says: “If he is not baptized, he is baptized,” that is, “if he is not baptized, such and such a servant of God is baptized.”
I, like many of my friends, came to faith in college. There were many excellent teachers at VGIK. They gave us a serious humanitarian education and made us think about the main questions of life.
Discussing these eternal questions, the events of past centuries, the problems of our seventies and eighties - in classrooms, dormitories, in cheap cafes favored by students and during long night journeys along the ancient streets of Moscow, we came to the firm conviction that the state is deceiving us, imposing only their crude and absurd interpretations of history and politics. We understood very well that, on someone’s powerful instructions, everything was done to deprive us of even the opportunity to understand the question of God and the Church ourselves.
This topic was completely clear only to our teacher on atheism or, say, to my school Pioneer leader Marina. She absolutely confidently gave answers to this, and in general to any questions in life. But gradually we were surprised to discover that all the great figures of world and Russian history, with whom we became spiritually acquainted during our studies, whom we trusted, whom we loved and respected, thought about God completely differently. Simply put, they turned out to be believers. Dostoevsky, Kant, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Goethe, Pascal, Hegel, Losev - you can’t list them all. Not to mention the scientists - Newton, Planck, Linnaeus, Mendeleev. We, due to our humanitarian education, knew less about them, but here the picture was the same. Although, of course, these people’s perception of God could be different. But, be that as it may, for most of them the question of faith was the most important, although the most difficult in life.
About the characters of the book
The book introduces the inexperienced reader to the everyday details of life in the monastery, and to the difficulties encountered on the difficult path of daily prayer. In parallel, the work shows the special attractive beauty of this work.
Like a beautiful page from an ancient book, the author reveals to the reader the image of old age. The work is very valuable because it contains living portraits of the great Russian elders of the late 20th century, written by an eyewitness. And among them, first of all, is the appearance of Archimandrite John Krestyankin, who passed unbroken through Stalin’s camps and had the gifts of insight and spirituality that attracted tens of thousands of people from all over the country.
The descriptions of such personalities as the treasurer of the monastery, Father Nathanael, who hid his special gift under the guise of a pedantic guardian of monastic order, and schemamonk Melchizedek, who, after his miraculous departure and resurrection, radically changed his life, are also attractive with their purity and inner strength. The author also shows the power of the prayers of the elder Father Nikolai Guryanov, who once predicted the monastic path for him.
Particularly noteworthy is the story about the abbot of the monastery during the most difficult times for him - Archimandrite Alipiya Voronov. A talented artist, he, like half of his brethren, walked the fiery roads of World War II, where he took an oath to devote himself entirely to God. Having taken monastic vows in honor of Saint Alipius the icon painter, the future archimandrite himself became the author of many images. But most of all, Father Alypiy’s talent was realized as the governor of the Pskov-Pechersk monastery. Father Tikhon paints for us a portrait of an excellent business executive, organizer and warrior abbot, who with his inflexibility saved the monastery from closure and ruin during Khrushchev’s persecutions.
Descriptions of the passing away of major cultural figures of the second half of the 20th century - Bulat Okudzhava and Sergei Bondarchuk - make one think about God's great long-suffering, which allows a person, even on his deathbed, to take the path leading to eternal life.
"Unholy Saints": author
The book “Unholy Saints” was written by Metropolitan Tikhon (Shevkunov). At that time he was the rector of the Moscow Sretensky Monastery.
If we talk about society as a whole, then already at that time, in 2011, Archimandrite Tikhon Shevkunov was one of the most recognizable Church figures in the country. He had the gift of words - the ability to find the right words for a particular audience. Do not belittle the essence and principles of Christianity, but also do not alienate the doubting public.
According to Tikhon (Shevkunov) himself, he was asked to write this book a long time ago, because he had already told it all in one way or another, either at sermons in church, or in ordinary conversations.
Metropolitan Tikhon (Shevkunov) is the author of the best-selling Orthodox book in history (not counting, of course, the Bible)
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