You don't have to go to church to be good
It’s true—spiritual life without church services is possible to a certain depth. Church life and temples are only one aspect of spiritual experience, and to some extent it is not decisive. Not for nothing, in Christian tradition there is such an image - “Pharisee”. The Pharisee is the personification of artificial Church life: when a person goes to all services, observes church rules and regulations, but inside there is nothing behind this facade - only emptiness and fossilization.
Perhaps the main essence of Christianity - and the mission of Christ on Earth - is to help transfer a person’s spiritual life from the outside to the inside - into his soul. Because, without living trust in God, without love for Him and His Love, everything else is “dead.”
And the saints also taught: the “key” to finding your true self is in prayer, humility (that is, the ability to keep peace in your soul, no matter what happens), repentance (a constant determination to live according to the Love of Christ), and finally, in acquiring the Grace of the Holy Spirit . Acquiring Grace is the main goal of any Christian on earth. And everything else - even the commandments - are “tools” for achieving this goal.
That is, on the one hand, it turns out that the entire church and patristic tradition speaks of the exceptional importance of internal spiritual experience. But on the other hand: all the saints also noted the importance of churching - that is, regular, constant and never-fading church life. They said: no matter how deep and rich a person’s prayer is, no matter how righteous he himself is, without church services everything will be incomplete. In other words, there is no Christianity without the Church.
Why?
God in the soul? Christianity is a "team game"
After we have figured out that a church is not a building and that the real temple that the Bible speaks of is a meeting of Christians faithful to God, we can continue the conversation. For the past 17 years I have read the Bible almost every day. If you have ever read the entire New Testament at least once, then you could not help but notice how much it says about the relationships of some Christians with others (Christians in the Bible were called “disciples of Christ”). Over my considerable Christian life, I can say that it is almost impossible to be a Christian alone and “believe in your soul.” Christianity is a team game. You need someone you can confess to. The Bible tells us to confess to one another: one Christian to another. You need someone who will support your faith in difficult times. You need someone who will always understand you and listen to you. We need someone to help us overcome temptation and take the next step in faith. Friends and relatives who do not live according to the teachings of Christ will never replace brothers and sisters in the church in this spiritual regard.
I give you a new commandment: love one another. You must love each other as I have loved you. And if you have love for one another, then everyone will know that you are My disciples.” (John 13:34,35)
I will not quote countless Bible passages about brother-sister relationships in the church. If you remove them all from the Bible, the Gospel will lose meaning. Because it was precisely the brothers and sisters who were supposed to become, according to the idea of Jesus Christ, the church - the temple where God was going to live through the Holy Spirit. Take people out of the church and there will be nothing left. There will be no church itself. Church is a place where people learn to love God and each other. And this is the whole teaching of the Bible:
“Teacher, what is the most important commandment in the law?” He answered him: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind.” This is the first and most important commandment. There is a second commandment similar to this: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” The whole law and all the teachings of the prophets are based on these two commandments.” (Matthew 22:36-40)
Therefore, even in the title of this article we deliberately made a mistake. You can’t “go to church”, just like you can’t “go” to your family. You can only be part of the church or not be part of it, not go to it. And this is up to everyone to decide.
Why should you go to temple?
Spiritual life is not mathematics, and it does not break down into formulas. But since we are talking about why there is no Christianity without the Church and without the temple, then in all this we can distinguish four elements.
- A temple is a place where one can have a particularly powerful “spiritual experience.”
- The Church is like a place where the Sacraments are performed.
- Church life as strengthening the Christian community and a sense of common prayer.
- Church services as a necessary “rule” in human life.
These four aspects of church life are in fact inseparable from each other. And it is almost impossible to explain one in all its depth without mentioning the others. However, each of them in itself is complete enough to talk about it as a reason to go to church.
Why do we come to church
Conversation between the co-editor of the magazine “Thomas” Vladimir Legoyda and the rector of the Orthodox St. Tikhon’s Theological Institute, Archpriest Vladimir VOROBIEV
V. Legoyda: Father Vladimir, today I would like to start a conversation about a very important issue - about the first steps in the Church.
How a person imagines the Church and church life, and what the Church expects from those who come to Orthodoxy. It seems to me that often these things do not coincide. In this regard, I remember how, on one of my first visits to the church, I was amazed that behind the candle box - the place where icons, books, candles are sold - girls were sitting and... laughing. I then thought: “How can this be?! There is a temple here, and they sit and laugh.” Now that indignation no longer seems so “righteous” to me - why can’t you smile even while in church - but then I was seething with indignation.
I think that each of us has our own specific image of the Church, what it is or what it should be...
Father Vladimir:
You know, before discussing the characteristic ideas about the Church of people who have decided to become Orthodox, I would like to say a few words about the attitude towards the Church in our society as a whole.
Modern people have a dominant attitude towards the Church as some kind of relic, a very narrow direction of life, which is hopelessly behind the world in its views on life. In addition, people who serve in the Church are not entirely understandable. Neither our clergy nor our parishioners have much authority in society. This is largely due to the fact that today there are very few people who show the world a true image of the Orthodox structure of the human heart, of Orthodox life.
Now there are almost no confessors that I have yet met who lived through the tragic beginning of the century for our country, who went through persecution - many of them were in prisons and camps. These were people of amazingly rich souls, very broad views. Meeting them made a huge, indelible impression.
A modern priest is something else. In Moscow, this may be a more or less intelligent person, but for the most part without real spiritual experience, and on the periphery, this is often a person of little ability, not to say illiterate. Such a person himself does not know much about Orthodoxy, so he can even scare him away from the Church! And if you start asking him, he might say something that has nothing to do with Orthodoxy.
It is necessary to understand that the life of our Church today can only be explained by a special miracle of God’s Grace. Seventy years of persecution should have completely destroyed it. It is not surprising that we are having such difficulty restoring our theological schools, our temples, and monasteries from oblivion. Restore the church clergy, i.e. raising a new generation of priests is very difficult. This takes time.
— In this case, can we say that this situation is one of the reasons for misconceptions about the Church and what awaits a person if he becomes a member of the Church?
— I would say that these are not entirely misconceptions. Today, very often, when a person becomes a member of the Church, he can actually get into various unpleasant situations that are far from genuine Orthodox life.
In ancient times there was such a sect of kafara. These were people who believed that Christians should be completely pure. And if any uncleanness appeared in someone, then he could no longer be a member of the Church. For any unacceptable offense, the Kafars ejected a person from their sect. This applied not only to the clergy, but also to parishioners. The sect existed for a long time. Our Church does not accept such a rigid worldview. But we must not forget that the Church, of course, needs cleanliness. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God,” says the Gospel. The Church needs to show the pure face of Christ to the world.
Coming to the temple, a person should see and feel a completely different life than the one that surrounds him in the world. This life should be bright, should amaze with its beauty. And not only the decoration of the temple, priestly vestments, and church singing should be beautiful. The most important thing is that believers and their relationships should be beautiful. The newcomer must immediately understand that love, purity, righteousness reign here, it is true that church people live according to a different law - according to the commandments of God and that their prayer is real communication with God, Who is for them the Heavenly Father.
Today we are able to do this, unfortunately, with great difficulty. When a person comes to Church, there is so much he can see! And sometimes it’s very difficult to see the action of God’s grace behind all this...
— Father Vladimir, how can you talk about grace if there are so many “sores” in modern church life?
— One of the images that well explains what the Church is is Golgotha. Golgotha is usually perceived as an image of suffering. This is certainly true. But look what this place was like during the crucifixion of Christ. A variety of people were gathered together at Golgotha: robbers, warriors, and Pharisees... And it might seem that Christ was not there. Even Christ’s disciples were afraid then, doubted, and ran away. They thought: “How can it be that Christ died and was crucified?” and they doubted. They still did not truly know who Christ was. I think it was the most difficult moment in their lives.
But it was here, in this most terrible place, that Christ was. Christ crucified, mocked, tortured. And it was here, at this place of shameful execution, that the Heavenly Powers were. Here were the Mother of God, the Apostle John the Theologian, and the myrrh-bearing women. But it was very difficult to understand, to recognize this presence of God. And those passing by Golgotha blasphemed Christ, saying: “Come down from the cross, save yourself.”
Even today, when coming to the Church, there is no need to look for sectarian organization and order in it. Coming to God is not an easy task and not very quick. To do this you need to take yourself very seriously. What is needed is a feat, and not just the enthusiasm characteristic of new, young organizations.
There’s so much we don’t have in our lives right now! And all this has long burst into the earthly life of the Church: commercial interests, human rudeness, rudeness, lack of love, vanity, lust for power, and careerism.
Seeing Christ behind all this is very difficult. The task of the priest and modern missionary is, first of all, to help those who enter the temple to see Christ there, i.e. behind all the ordinary human vanity, in the context of the language of centuries-old traditions and rituals that are difficult for a newly arrived person to understand, to hear the word of Christ, to feel the love of Christ, to feel the mysterious breath of God’s grace. It can be explained that, being sinful people ourselves, we should not count on the saints to sit behind our candle box. Therefore, we can be glad that young girls are sitting at the box and smiling. Thank God they don’t scold or get angry.
— Father, if you had to write a book “First Steps in the Orthodox Church,” where would you start it? From what chapter, for example? True, there are such books today, but almost all of them boil down to a description of behavior in the temple...
-I would probably devote the first chapter to the question: where is Christ and the grace of the Holy Spirit in the Church? How to feel the presence of God?
How can we compare the earthly Church that we see today with Heaven, with the Gospel, with the Christian commandments? How to understand why the service lasts two to three hours and is in the Slavic language, what all these priestly vestments are for, why you need to ring the bells and burn incense in the temple... And much more. What does this have to do with the grace of God? For a modern person who grew up outside the context of Christian culture, all this is incomprehensible.
—And this, probably, cannot be understood outside the Church, remaining outside it, being only an outside observer?
- Yes. But even when a person enters the Church, it is very important to help him figure it all out.
“When a person has already decided to come to Church, he understands that he must somehow change his life and is ready to do it. But the neophyte most often thinks like this: “Now I’m becoming Orthodox, I probably shouldn’t drink or smoke. It would be nice to urgently change the style of clothing...” Of course, you can change your clothes, you can demonstratively cross yourself before eating at the institute, at school, at work. But, probably, this does not mean being Orthodox. To what extent do such neophyte ideas coincide with what the Church expects from a person?
— I think that it is very difficult for a modern person to immediately understand the meaning of Christian life and its main tasks. It may even be almost impossible. What is immediately clearer is what is easier, more obvious - that is, external: say, put on a long skirt, tie a scarf, stop painting your lips, acquire, so to speak, a church appearance.
But this is much easier to do than to change your heart. It’s easy to put on a long skirt, but stop being rude to your mother at home, learn a sense of Christian responsibility, learn to pray to God, learn to love the Truth, not just verbally confess your faith, but rebuild your whole life in a Christian way... This is very difficult. Of course, such understanding does not come immediately.
When you begin to explain this to a modern young man, he cannot understand for a long time: how is this so, how can he live then, should he be left alone?!
Recently I spoke with one young man. He is a believer and goes to Church. But he told me that every time he meets with his other comrades, they chip in, buy a bottle and drink. At the same time, all the guys are believers, they often talk about “church” topics, go to church... Honestly, I was horrified and told him that this had never happened to me in my life. No, of course, I understand that if people gather for some occasion, for a holiday, then you can treat the guests at the table. But chipping in, drinking... I just don’t understand it. And I tried to explain this to my interlocutor. And he told me in response that if he didn’t drink, he would be left completely alone - after all, that’s what all his comrades do! And they all go to Church, they all take communion, they all confess...
Why do they do this? Because just visiting the temple is not so difficult after all. But to feel what Christian life is and what spiritual norms you need to make your norms is much more difficult. And the daily struggle with one’s weaknesses and vices is, of course, a feat. Because the whole world, our entire environment, is now quickly moving away from the Gospel. And here you really need not to be led. You need to say: “Yes. Let me be alone. But I won’t go-DU.”
In the days of my youth, when the Church was persecuted, it was in some ways even easier. True, at that time there were very few believing youth and it was very difficult to get into the Church. But if a person was already in the Church, then by this very fact he was, as it were, protected - the Church raised him in such a way that he had to go against the flow. That's why I was alone at school and at university. And although I was on friendly terms with everyone, and very good, respectful relationships were established with many, I did not have close friends. I never went to any parties, dances, etc. I was not interested there, and they were not interested in me.
Then, over time, I found myself with more friends than anyone else, even my university friends, had ever had. The fact that in my youth I endured and did not go with the flow turned out to be only for the better...
— You mentioned the word “feat”. In general, for modern people, especially for our generation, this word is more likely associated with the heroes of the Patriotic War, etc. For many of our contemporaries, the word “feat” in a Christian context sounds quite unexpected. And from your answer it is clear that the Church expects from a person, first of all, some kind of feat. What meaning does the Church give to this word?
- Yes, spiritual life is, first of all, a feat, without feat it simply cannot exist.
But feats can be different. There is heroism when a person goes to his death. This happens not only in war. It is precisely our Church in this century that has revealed a lot of such ascetics. According to research conducted at our institute, there were many hundreds of thousands of such victims. And they must be canonized in the Russian Church.
But this is not the only feat. Any person who builds a life according to the commandments of Christ accomplishes a personal feat: this requires great effort, great courage, and great perseverance.
The feat can take completely different forms. But everything that is very difficult for a person, even exceeds his strength, his natural capabilities - this is a feat. This is what happens in spiritual life when a person fights with himself, with his own passions. To win, to cleanse your heart for life with God is also a feat. The most real one.
Temple is a place where you can have a particularly powerful spiritual experience
The soul is the place of contact with God within a person. The temple is a place of contact with God from the “external” side. When these two sides coincide, spiritual resonance occurs.
If you ask any Christian, he will tell you that it was in the temple that he experienced some extraordinary feeling, “God is here and God is now.” And he will tell you that this feeling is sometimes so strong and so deep that after it everything around for a while seems to change.
A person will remember that many times - if not every time - when leaving a service on the street, you feel how far all this fuss is from you, and how true exactly what is happening in the temple is.
“God built the temple like a harbor - so that people who took refuge in it from noise and disturbances would enjoy great peace” (St. John Chrysostom).
This alone is a reason not to deprive yourself of this church side of spiritual life.
Church as a place where the Sacraments are performed
If the deep sensations mentioned above can sometimes still be attributed to psychology and emotions, then the Sacraments are the most mystical part of church life. For example, confession is a sacrament of cleansing the soul. Or the sacrament of confirmation. Or a wedding. And of course, communion. In fact, churches are erected precisely for the sake of the Sacrament of Communion.
It is impossible to convey the whole essence of the sacrament in words. Traditionally, everyone understands that this is the central moment of church life - all churches, all services lead a person to this Sacrament. Christians try to give communion to their children from infancy. Adults - if they go for a long time without communion - vaguely feel that something is wrong in their lives.
Through communion, a person connects himself with Christ and Eternity. Communion is what binds Christians and Christian communities of all times. In Communion, Christ gives Himself to man. And a person unites with God not only spiritually, in the form of prayer, but also “tangibly.”
Saints, ascetics and many Christians considered the sacrament to be the main source of internal strength and their entire life. And it was for his sake, and not for the sake of deep sensations, that they went to the temple.
A worthy family man with a broken family
Even if a person is wrong in choosing to help a loved one at the expense of attending services and receiving frequent communion, I do not see this as a great sin. I really like the words: “It is better to sin in the direction of love than in the direction of its absence.” I recently read an article by Alexander Filonenko, in which he writes that we very often, to the detriment of our soul, find other values - very high and, of course, Christian. For example, jealousy in attending services. Father has appointed twenty-five liturgies a month, which means you have to attend them all. And it doesn’t matter that I can harm myself or my family by doing this. Plunging into the whirlwind of parish worries, forget about your relatives. We always say that family comes first, but the statistics of such cases are simply terrifying. A woman can be the right hand of the rector, an excellent regent or a Sunday school teacher, and no one will believe that her family is falling apart.
Church life - strengthening the Christian community
Speaking from theological positions, the Church is the body of Christ. She unites in Herself in one moment all the prayers that have ever been performed by Christians, all services, saints and all Christians - living and who have ever lived. In the Church there are no distances or temporary barriers - in Her everything is united by Christ, we are all one and we are all part of His Body.
But the Church unites people in a completely earthly sense. From the very first days, one of the integral parts of Christianity has been its communalism. Read about this in the text about the holy fathers - it tells what an extraordinary phenomenon the first Christian communities were - how complete this unification of people in Christ was. People not only in words, but in deeds and in thoughts became brothers and sisters.
To this day, communalism has been preserved in its original form only in monasteries - and even then not in all. However, temples and temple parishioners are “echoes” of these communities. Even if only for a couple of hours, even if only in this form, but all of us gathered in the church become together. Poor and rich; people with a wide variety of hobbies and habits; men and women; simpletons and intellectuals - all this difference between us within the walls of the church mystically disappears. Everything - as if by magic - for a while throws off the artificial shell and becomes “prayer” - the very prayer that erases distances and time.
Of course, this is in many ways an ideal picture - there are different people in church, and we ourselves come there with very different moods. However, a person immersed in prayer in church looks at everything with completely different - “spiritual” - eyes. And in the temple, dozens of “spiritual” gazes simultaneously coexist, uniting together and rushing to Christ. And such a community is no worse than the early Christian one!
Church services as a necessary “rule”
In the text about morning and evening prayers, we said that another aspect of spiritual life is the “rule.” That is, a certain “duty” that a person performs not according to his own reasoning, but because “it’s necessary.” Such duties govern and ultimately spiritually correct a person, because renunciation of self-will is one of the pillars on the path to holiness.
Saints and priests say: you need to go to church not only for the sake of Communion and some kind of Christian community, but also for the sake of proper internal order. At first, regular trips to the temple will be rather difficult. But over time - as one grows spiritually - this will become a spiritual joy and even a necessity for a person. As are morning and evening prayers.
We have the right to choose
Perhaps stones will fly at me, but I am convinced: we have the right and must choose a temple in which we will feel good. The same applies to the priest. Look for someone close in spirit. We may not reach the abbot, and it will be uncomfortable. We may outgrow the abbot - and it will also be uncomfortable. Don't be afraid to look for what is close, what inspires and supports. Unnecessary struggle takes away strength. God does not forbid us to be happy. Why do we have so many gloomy and joyless people in churches? - because it’s much easier to be serious and strict. The charter removes the need to make decisions from a person: it teaches how to behave in the service, how to eat, but here I am smiling - and nothing is written about this in the Typikon. “So is this right? I’d rather be unperturbed,” thinks a responsible Christian. And then we are surprised that people don’t want to come to our churches. Maybe this is not a coincidence?
Priest Dimitry Palamarchuk
