Order a prayer from your phone, confess in a chat and light a candle in the Assumption Cathedral of the Kremlin - dozens of sites on the Internet are trying to make life easier for believers in this way. The Russian Orthodox Church warns parishioners about the influx of fraudulent portals selling non-existent services. On the eve of major church holidays - Christmas and Easter - the number of orders from such sites increases. Priests are concerned about the ethical side of the issue: by paying off religious rituals, a person is cut off from religious life. Izvestia studied the market for online church services and found out what priests and religious scholars think about it.
Shrines to choose from
A year ago, the head of the Synodal Department for Relations of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) with society and the media, Vladimir Legoida, spoke about the influx of fraudulent sites collecting money for notes. According to him, in just a year, about 20 sites were discovered that deceive visitors in this way. However, the Russian Orthodox Church is in no hurry to indiscriminately accuse all the creators of such sites of fraud: some of them may actually transfer the collected money to the benefit of churches. But no one knows to what extent they do this.
Photo: RIA Novosti/Maxim Bogodvid
The constant use of online services for ordering prayers and virtual chapels separates a person from real religious life, says the head of the Synodal Department of the Russian Orthodox Church for Public Relations. For those who do not have the opportunity to personally order services, he recommends contacting churches directly, bypassing intermediary organizations. The Russian Orthodox Church emphasized that for a believer there should be no fundamental difference in which church they pray for him.
Symbol replacement: how scammers profit from business correspondence
Businesses suffer multimillion-dollar losses due to cyber fraudsters posing as representatives of reputable companies
— Don’t forget that it makes no difference whether you are remembered at the liturgy on Athos, Valaam or Biryulyovo. It’s one thing to submit notes at places of pilgrimage; this can be a small feat, the labor of traveling to a holy place. And when you go to the site, click and think that in famous monasteries the liturgy is “stronger,” then this is a delusion,” Legoyda said.
History of the film
The Georgian film “Repentance” became the final part of the trilogy, which included the 1968 film “Prayer,” based on Georgian poems and miniatures, as well as the 1977 film “The Wishing Tree,” which is also an adaptation of the Georgian poem.
The director filmed this work for himself, as he understood that the film would be too bold for the general public. The script was created for more than a year, and in 1982 it was completely ready for filming. The filming itself lasted only five months, and in general the filming process was extremely fast, although the characters constantly deviated from the script and many scenes were pure improvisation in front of the camera.
Kind of sacrilege
One of these sites almost completely copies the name of the Russian Orthodox Church. Its owner, Limited Liability Company “Church Shop Online,” offers to order prayer services in the most famous Russian churches for a nominal fee. For example, you can light a candle or order a magpie in the museum Archangel Cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin - the tomb of the Russian tsars. Without grueling queues, you can submit a note to the Church of the Matrona of Moscow. The creators assure that the site is not fraudulent, and the requirements are fulfilled in those monasteries where they are ready to accept them. The use of the abbreviation ROC, according to the creators of the platform, is not illegal, since neither it itself nor each individual word is subject to copyright or intellectual property. You can find out the cost of the service only after filling out the application. At the same time, the site’s creators invest in intrusive contextual advertising, which pops up literally everywhere after visiting the portal.
Photo: TASS/Vladimir Smirnov
The Elitsa service evokes a certain trust among representatives of the Orthodox Church, because its founder is famous; he created an Orthodox social network that has a number of activities, including charity. But the ROC-online service, on the contrary, raises a lot of questions. Its activities can hardly be verified, and the accounting and mechanisms for transmitting notes remain opaque, Vakhtang Kipshidze, deputy chairman of the synodal department for relations between the Church and society and the media of the Moscow Patriarchate, noted in an interview with Izvestia.
The expert spoke about popular pre-New Year scam schemes
“We consider this problem to be very complex and are thinking about how to interact with government agencies and civil society in order to restore some order. The ROC-Online service illegally uses the name to associate itself with the Russian Orthodox Church, although it has nothing to do with it. There is a general rule according to which the normal way to interact with the church is to visit churches and donate, including for services, in those churches where a person is regularly present during services. We proceed from the fact that a believer is connected with his parish, communicates with the clergy and makes donations there. Therefore, I don’t think that people who live a full parish life have a need to use online services,” Kipshidze explained.
An attempt to attract the attention of parishioners by ordering prayers in famous churches in the Russian Orthodox Church is considered a speculative technique. A request to pray, according to Kipshidze, has value if it comes from a person who needs support, and its effect depends on the faith of the person himself, and not on the significance of the temple or the fame of the priest.
Photo: IZVESTIA/Alexander Kazakov
- Moreover, this cannot be related to the size of the donation. Unfortunately, some of our compatriots continue to view the church as a kind of spiritual service to which they can transfer some funds and receive something in return. The Savior does not need our funds, but our heart; replacing the spiritual movement towards God with transactions through payment systems is, in some way, blasphemy,” notes the deputy chairman of the Synodal Department for Church Relations with Society.
Although communication tools are designed to make our lives easier, their widespread use in spiritual life leads to the simplification of complex relationships and their replacement with simpler solutions.
The foundation of the iceberg: how not to fall for Internet scams with iPhone
“The larger the layout, the older it is, the easier it is to pull it off” (c)
“This is comparable to the communication that we maintain with our loved ones. Of course, we can write them an SMS or a message in the messenger, but if we decide that we can limit such communication to our wife, children or parents, then it is easy to imagine what relationships within the family will turn into. No less valuable are the relationships we maintain through participation in church sacraments. They are not transmitted in virtual space and are an indispensable condition for participation in spiritual life. It seems to me that we lose something from the fullness of church life if we close it within the framework of virtual space,” Kipshidze concluded.
Confession in chat
On the social network VKontakte there are about 40 communities dedicated to ordering prayers. The most popular of them has over 25 thousand subscribers. Through it you can submit notes that will be read in one of the temples in Jerusalem. True, in what kind is not specified. The cost of reading the Psalter for one month is estimated at 600 rubles per name. Over the course of a year, the same service will cost 7.2 thousand rubles.
Photo: TASS/Kirill Kukhmar
In the image and likeness: how duplicate sites deceive us
Fraudsters copy the websites of banks, hotels, departments, insurers and many well-known companies
In Europe, online services have begun to spread to find priests who are ready to confess to a parishioner here and now. For example, in Spain, Catholic priest Ricardo Latorre launched the Confesor Go service. The application user can arrange confession in any convenient place by selecting the desired priest on the map. The priest's profile indicates his year of birth and year of ordination, as well as a photo.
Attempts to introduce services that provide users with a full range of “prayer services” are a logical step to bring the situation to the point of complete absurdity, Protodeacon Andrei Kuraev said in an interview with Izvestia.
— When they simply read out a list of people unknown to anyone in the church, this is a parody of cathedral prayer. The trouble is that even if this is not done online, in 90% of cases ordering a prayer service for someone is also a fraud. I was amazed at one time when I came to the Trinity-Sergius Lavra that when you stand next to the altar, a monk comes up to you and puts a stack of notes in your hands. Here, they say, pray. People wanted the monks to remember their loved ones, and they blame it on the pilgrims. The same thing happens in large crowded temples. The practice of conciliar prayer itself was born when communities were small: a rural church, everyone knows each other and prays for each other,” Kuraev noted.
Photo: RIA Novosti/Evgenia Novozhenina
They took the collection out of the hut: people's donations are being wasted
How the idea of crowdfunding is undermined by the irresponsibility of project authors
According to him, some time ago, adherents of the “God Kuzi” community launched similar activities at Orthodox fairs. They collected memorial notes and collected donations. Despite the fact that its founder Andrei Popov is under arrest, this practice has not disappeared.
“These traders simply take a stamped certificate from the abbot of some remote monastery and receive a pass to these fairs. They collect money and transfer a percentage of what they collect to the temple. But no one needs notes from complete strangers there. This is an outright scam of people. Any person who submits a note must understand that no one will pray for his needs and loved ones more fervently than himself. Again, when in ancient times this is a cathedral prayer, where many people ask for one person. But today, in the conditions of our anonymous Christianity, this is no longer the case,” Kuraev concluded.
Conversations with the priest. Confession and Communion
Audio |
Archpriest Andrei Tkachev, priest of the Church of St., answers questions from viewers. mts. Tatiana at Moscow State University. Broadcast from Moscow. Broadcast July 6, 2015 (Repeat broadcast from July 22, 2014)
– Hello, the “Conversations with Father” program is on air on the Soyuz TV channel. In the studio Sergei Yurgin.
Today our guest is the priest in honor of the holy martyr Tatiana at Moscow State University, Archpriest Andrei Tkachev.
Hello, father. Bless our viewers.
- Hello. May God's mercy be with every Christian soul, as well as with every human soul. Amen.
– Father Andrey, today I would like to talk about very important practical issues of the Orthodox faith: confession and communion.
– This is one of the core questions that concerns a person who is a Christian.
– Father, please tell us about the Sacrament of Confession, why do we need it?
– To confess – in the meaning of the word means to open. That is, a person reveals something about himself to two, of which One knows everything, the other does not know everything. That is, a person shows some of the wrong side of his life, a shameful secret, not the front room of his life, but some of his closets, attics and basements. God, who knows both the attics and basements of our lives, and the priest, who is the witness of the sacrament and is similar to the witness of the Bridegroom, the friend of the Lord. And he brings the repentant to Christ. The priest hears this confession, does not disclose it under pain of death, and ideally helps the person get rid of what torments him, if these issues relate to spiritual life.
The priest, being himself a sinful person, must be filled with fear when accepting someone else's confession, because, in principle, he hears his own sins, which indirectly or directly affect him. But he takes part in confession because he is a person invested with the power and glory of God, which is given to him in the Sacrament of the Priesthood. One of the manifestations of this glory and power is the power of Christ to bind and solve the sins of men: what you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and what you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Clothed with glory, but not without sin, that is, personally weak, but strong in Christ, he is a witness to a certain human mystery and must be a person read in the Scriptures, compassionate, attentive, and many more moral and spiritual requirements. In order not to aggravate the sinner’s fear for his sins, not to offend, not to drive him away, but to help him cope with himself, correct himself and rejoice in the Lord.
The sacrament of confession is the bringing together of Christ and the sinner with the help of a priest. That is, in confession there are three “actors”: the Lord, the repentant person and the priest who Christ needs in order for everything to be accomplished.
– Why do you need a mediator? Many do not go to confession and say that God already knows our sins and broken hearts.
– The fact is that no one will have the courage to reject the need for private prayer, personal repentance, a person’s personal standing before God.
Repentance is a very broad concept. When a person repents, he can visit the sick, and this will be a sign of his repentance. In repentance, he can give away his earned property, partially or completely. In repentance, he can refuse treatment and endure illness, knowing that he is worthy of all pain. Repentance includes a person’s personal prayer to Christ the Savior for the forgiveness of his sins.
But just as it is impossible to personally give communion to oneself, it is also impossible to perform the Sacrament of Confession on oneself. Therefore, confession is woven into repentance as a certain thread that holds this fabric together, which completes all a person’s repentant labors.
Before you come to confession, there is one more thing you need to do. For example, reconcile. If possible, says the Apostle Paul, be at peace with every person. For example, a person once fasted, prayed as best he could, abstained from something, reconciled with someone, struggled, suffered, cried something, and came to confession with already matured hatred of his sin. In essence, confession is the last chord, when a certain symphony of repentance that has already taken place ends, but the last word here belongs to the name of God. “And I,” says the priest, “an unworthy priest, by His power given to me, forgive and absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen". The last word, after all, belongs to the name of God and to the priest who pronounced these sacred words.
One cannot belittle or reject personal penitential works, but one must understand that in complete, holistic repentance, confession occupies the most important place, and, perhaps, the place of the last chord.
– That is, it is necessary to distinguish between the concepts of repentance and confession?
- Of course, they don’t match. Repentance is broader than confession. You can confess all your life, but never repent. If we take critical things. I confess, that is, I talk about myself, but I do not leave my sins, I return to them with convenience and pleasure, and I do not even think that I should get rid of them.
For example, before death, a person’s illusions disappear, he only has a trembling soul. Then, of course, a person asks for forgiveness from the Lord, loved ones, children, is ready to give everything to them, and suddenly a guardian angel comes to him - a priest with the Secrets. The last thing is the most important, without which everything else will be incomplete. The priest who will cover the epitrachelion will listen to the confession, say these great, sacred words that have in themselves the great power of God, and will give him the Sacraments of the Body and Blood. And then everything will be done. If this action of the priest does not happen, then something will also happen, but it will be everything, but everything is needed.
Mediation is a Catholic word, just like disputes about a mediator are Catholic disputes in conflict with Protestantism. We have absorbed this due to religious disputes, the general religious field, but in Orthodoxy it is different.
We are not talking about mediation, we are talking about the Sacrament of the Church, which is not performed without the priesthood. There is a personal sacrament. Saint John Chrysostom says: make prayer a sacrament. That is, try to pray in such a way that prayer is a sacrament. If you stood at the bedside of a sick person, prayed for him, left, and he recovered. That is, the Lord heard you: in response to your prayer, He performed mercy on this man. Is this possible? Of course it is possible, otherwise why pray?
A priest is the one who gives you a great church sacrament that you yourself cannot ask for. None of the Sacraments is performed without the presence of the priesthood: grace upon grace. As the first concept of the Gospel: By Moses the law was given, and the law is good, but by Jesus Christ the truth was given, and grace upon grace.
When a person knows this and he needs it, then the person runs to the doctor. As in the story about Gerasim of Jordan: it happens that a person comes running to confession like a lion with a splinter in its paw. The person is in pain, he does not know what to say, the word has not yet been born to him, and the priest must be that competent person, like a midwife, who will help him talk. Then the source of this person’s word breaks through. A person is needed here, a priest is needed, the right priest is needed at the right time, in the right place.
– Question from a TV viewer from Chelyabinsk: How to fight demons? In the book “Orthodox Faith” it is written that we must fight them with patience, humility, long-suffering, and Theophan the Recluse in his book suggests driving them away with the words “go away!” What's the best way to fight?
– Obviously, we are talking about different issues. If a person finds himself in a difficult situation in which he is offered a choice: to fight or to be patient, then the quote that you cited first says “be patient, like Christ. And in Christ you will overcome through patience.”
The second quote obviously concerns a situation where, for example, temptation suddenly arose, and you understand that the temptation is of a devilish nature. This concerns neither neighbors nor relatives; something diabolical has broken out. Apparently the second quote refers to this. When we say: “I deny you, Satan,” “Lord, save,” and you leave this situation, and at the same time, try to protect yourself from the action of evil spirits in the name of God.
The first concerns entire life processes and long-term situations, the second concerns specific situations in which demonic anger suddenly flared up.
– How often should you confess?
“The law does not lie with the righteous.” The measure of love determines the frequency, and no matter how much we argue about the frequency, we will not reach any standard that would be church-wide. For example, children and old people, women with many children and childless women, living with a husband and without a husband, living with a believing husband and with an unbelieving husband, strong and strong in body and weak, working away from home, and so on. That is, fasting and receiving communion will work out differently for all of them. That is, I can’t fast, I don’t know where to confess, I’m on the road, at work, weakened from fasting, I have weak faith, my husband won’t let me. That is, here we must come to terms with each case.
As doctors say, there are general methods in treating illness, but each illness is a separate case. Sometimes treatment begins with a conversation and ends with it. As the ancients said, illness can be cured with words, herbs and iron. That is, the first word, then grass, and surgery is the last. The priest is the first healer, the first step. Everyone needs their own word, because each person is a separate case.
For example, a person receives communion once a year or only receives communion once in his life. You tell him: come to church every Sunday. He listened and comes, then you can tell him: take communion every Lent, that is, four times a year. Another year passes, and you can tell him: take communion every month, that is, 12 times a year. And after two or three years he himself says: can we do it more often?
A priest must be a teacher, he must have pedagogical tact: he must understand who is in front of him. Just as a coach cannot give the same load to someone who has just come to the section and is already a candidate for master of sports, he must distribute these things. We also distribute, but not always, but we want to give some general label. This is unacceptable, we need to delve into the person.
There are thousands of nuances, and they require from the priest tact, experience, attention, love for the person, and, probably, the priest himself needs to love the sacrament, to feel the benefits of the sacrament. So that he would receive communion not because he is serving today, but so that he would receive communion with love, and then he would want everyone to receive communion.
But at the same time, he will try to ensure that everyone receives communion “not for judgment or condemnation.” If a person was defiled the day before by unclean visions or had a fight with his wife and could barely restrain himself from raising his hand, even if he formally asked for forgiveness, the priest may not allow him to receive communion today.
But if a person himself wants to receive communion, then this is very important, and this situation must be considered. For example, an old woman who, after the death of her husband, lives in inevitable purity, knows nothing but the Psalter, and goes out into the street only to pay the rent and buy bread, and she wants to receive communion every Sunday. Her lifestyle is almost monastic, and what prevents her from receiving communion every Sunday? This is almost like the prophetess Anna, daughter of Phanuel, the one who met the baby Christ in the Jerusalem temple, a widow from her youth, who served God day and night in the temple.
– Some fathers warn to take communion often so that it does not become a habit.
– Of course, habit is a criterion for wrong direction. If it is the same for a person to eat the antidor and to take the sacrament, of course, this is wrong.
A person's spiritual health is determined by hunger and thirst. We know from ourselves that when a person is sick, he does not eat, that is, the body that suffers turns away from food, and health is when you want to eat. When Christ raised Jairus' daughter, He said: Give her something to eat. This is a sign that He not only resurrected her, but gave her health.
A spiritually healthy person wants to eat. The Lord says: “Take, eat, this is My Body.” The man says: “I am hungry for Your Body, I want to eat it.” If there is thirst, good, but if it’s a habit, then we need to figure it out. Maybe you need to abstain for a longer time in order to cultivate this thirst in yourself.
– Question from a TV viewer from Yekaterinburg: I’m one of the neophytes, I’ve been going to church for 18 years, I take communion once every two to three weeks. Lately I have noticed several times that after communion I get sick, not very much, but I do get sick. Please tell me, is this the result of an unworthy communion, or could there be some other reason?
– Firstly, let’s not just analyze whether it is worthy or unworthy, because when a person suffers misfortune, it can be a sign of worthy communion. Let's put it this way: it doesn't leave you the same as you were.
The worst thing is when you receive communion and nothing changes: neither for the better nor for the worse. Then obviously, something is wrong here: you mixed with fire, tasted fire, and nothing has changed. When you have tasted this fire, obviously something must change for the better or for the worse, existentially understood. The sick will recover, the healthy will fall ill. The one who was in a quarrel will make peace, the one who is at peace will quarrel, that is, movement will occur because you have started communion.
Don't be afraid of this. We must go to communion, and all the consequences of this are God’s work. We cannot and should not plan what and how the Lord will do after our communion. We must know that we have some kind of internal spiritual disorder, and the Lord, coming to us through the doors of our open lips, comes inside and begins to restore order there. When order is restored after a long mess, something is thrown away, something is washed, something is scraped out, something is cleaned. In any case, this process is difficult and not very pleasant. This happens to people who, having received communion, suddenly feel a storm of sins rising from within. Where does it come from? Christ came inside and stirred up your dirty waters, full of all kinds of silt. He comes there as an enemy of all uncleanness; Christ does not want to live with your dirt. He begins to cleanse all this through various illnesses and troubles. But you need to look not at illnesses and loved ones, but to understand that certain processes are taking place inside you, a struggle is going on. Thank God, because it would have been worse if nothing had happened.
As a person who wants to serve God, to become His servant, His abode, for He wants to live inside us, we must decide that He will cleanse us, as He Himself knows, as He Himself wants. Look at this calmly and prepare reverently for communion, accepting the Holy Mysteries wisely and consciously.
– You started talking about the secret of confession, that the priest, under pain of death, cannot divulge the secret of confession. Why is that? After all, in the first centuries of Christianity there was a practice of publicly confessing one’s sins. Why did it happen that confession is a purely personal and intimate matter?
– There is a struggle between quality and quantity here. For example, in monasticism. Until some time, the abbots were involved in both the spiritual life of the monastery and its material component. There were few people, everything was simple. As the complexity increases, the abbot deals with the spiritual life and economizes with the physical life of the monks. As life becomes even more complicated, the abbot bears the title, the confessor deals with spiritual life, the steward takes care of his side, and a whole series of positions appear. Life becomes more complicated - definitions become more complicated, and something ancient, ancestral, primordial can slowly disappear.
When there were few Christians, when they paid for their faith and prayer with blood, much was not needed. Note that they were baptized in adulthood. Having been baptized in adulthood and having washed away adult sins, they were afraid to commit these adult sins under pain of death, and they had nothing to confess except for everyday, everyday trifles.
Like a historian, one must look at the large-scale process of the Church’s movement over time: how it increased in number, how spiritual practices changed, how they adapted to the lifestyle and psychology of the newly arrived human masses. Then the need arose to secretly listen to everyone. Those who were baptized in childhood and did not experience religious conversion as an adult, but who experience it when you are already baptized, this is a completely different situation.
For example, a pagan who believed in the Lord at the age of thirty entered the baptismal font and came out of it, feeling his rebirth. He turned away with disgust from his former sins, his former life. Among the ancient Christians these were the majority.
In our time, of course, there are such cases, but what happens much more often is that a person was baptized in childhood, tried or not to join the Church, but then he broke away from the Church and returned to it at the age of 30-40, having already gained so much and such sins that forcing him to talk about them publicly would be like forcing him to die.
Many historically arisen nuances arise to which we are forced to react, and the Church reacts to them by changing the practice of performing the Sacraments, adapting to this or that situation.
We have already talked about the difference between repentance and confession. Repentance is if I got a job as a volunteer in a nursing home and massage bedsores of bedridden patients because I feel like a sinner. Confession is the central sector of repentance.
There is confession, and there is revelation of thoughts; with us these things are also mixed. There is repentance for sins, for example: I beat the children in anger, I am really ashamed, I put sin on sin. These are my sins, I repent of them. And there is the confession of thoughts, this is a monastic activity that many lay people do in our country. This is already different. There is repentance for sinful facts, and there is revelation of thoughts. Many people who do not have major sins, but confess often, essentially turn confession into a revelation of thoughts, telling what thoughts have been bothering them over the past week or two. Then the requirements for the priest, who turns out to be some kind of elder or monk, increase. Not every priest can do this, and not everyone should be able to deal with thoughts.
Some person read a monastic book, where it is written that every evening a certain monk came to the elder’s cell and revealed his thoughts to him, thereby achieving deep humility and great faith. Fine? Very good, but how to apply it to yourself? Where to go? And the man tries to go to his priest and each time reveal his thoughts to him, and the frightened priest tells him: “Why are you telling me all this? You don’t need all this.” It turns out to be a conflict: the desire is good, the implementation is wrong. You need to understand that these are different things. Confession of thoughts is monastic work. In addition, not every monk is capable of accepting thoughts, for this is already a height. Moreover, not every layman is obliged to do this.
Therefore, you need to confess the facts. In addition, of course, you need to work with yourself and understand what passions live in you, that is, from what roots facts are born. For example, I am angry, obviously because of anger I curse, say unnecessary things, behave incorrectly while driving and at home. Let's deal with anger. But the priest is not obliged to listen to a list of all the outbursts of anger for a month; he is not intended for this. He will say: “Let’s repent of everything together, may the Lord forgive. Read the rule and go to the sacrament.” And he will do the right thing. So we need to separate repentance, confession and revelation of thoughts.
Any serious work leads us to separation: to the separation of one thing from another. For example, prayer: there is vocal prayer, there is mental prayer, there is church prayer, there is cell prayer. There is a whole science about prayer, the same science about confession, but for this we all need to talk about it, which is what we are doing now, read, think.
Naturally, a person wants to confess to a grandfather with kind eyes, rays of wrinkles from a smiling face, with calloused hands, and of course, with a white beard. Why grandfather? Because when a young man comes to a young priest, there are some nuances. When a young girl comes to a young priest. There is an option that it will remove chips. When the grandfather takes confession from his “grandson” by age, he will have more compassion, more pity, more mercy, more experience, he will have more right to say: “Son, okay, you’ll cry, God is good, He will forgive. You will suffer, you will recover, I know, I have seen this many times.”
Where the young priest says, “Yes, how could you, how did you allow yourself to do this, how the earth carries you,” there the grandfather will say: “What kind of life is this, God, so young, and yet they do such things. Okay, come to me, come.” He will find words that, in essence, will “buy” a person without wanting to buy him. He will simply warm it for a minute, but will buy it for life, but not for himself, but for Christ. A person will experience an ideal change in his soul.
Modern man does all sorts of things to himself, and suddenly he wakes up, bursts into tears over himself, and realizes that he is disgraced, ugly, and has lived a bad life all his life. What should he do? Climb into a noose - God forbid! To go to church, but he must be received, and they will tell him: “Here he comes, a scarecrow, covered in tattoos. Remove the nostril ring." That’s also correct, but that’s not what he needs right now. He will then take everything off himself, but he must be accepted as a child of God, as a prodigal son; this requires the priest’s experience of personal repentance. A priest is good when he himself is a penitent.
Remember how it happened with the Apostle Peter? The Lord says to him: “I will give you the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven.” And at this time the Lord allows Peter to sin gravely, in fact, to deny Him. Why? After all, Peter will have to accept the repentance of millions. If he is innocent, like Archangel Michael, he will simply drive everyone away from the doors of heaven.
– That is, according to the principle “having been tempted, you can help those who are tempted”?
- Absolutely right. Our Lord Jesus Christ is tempted in everything except sin, that is, He knows sweat, blood, tears, pain, joy. If people said:
-What do you need in heaven... what do you know about our lives? Do you know what bloody calluses are?
Christ says:
- I know.
- Do you know what betrayal is? Have you ever been beaten?
“I know,” says the Lord. “They beat me and betrayed me.”
- Do you know what it’s like to get up early in the morning and go to work when the sun has not yet risen?
“I know,” the Lord answers.
The Lord knows everything. But the apostles still know the experience of sin, the tearful experience. The Apostle Peter cried every time the rooster crowed and said: I, too, am a sinner. “The Lord came into the world to save sinners; I am the first of them.”
Every person has personal experience of sin. The loss of paradise in childhood is the first sin of childhood: some first theft, spying on someone, the first lie, the first betrayal. Then the skies are already leaden - and you are no longer a child. Childhood is paradise, and the first sin is the way out of it. Each of us has our own history of sin, and we cannot forget about it. And it turns out that this history of sin can be our treasure, because thanks to this we can look at the sinner as a brother, as a prisoner in the same prison, crammed into the same stocks. And we will fulfill the commandment of the Gospel: “do not judge.” Why? Because I have the same thing inside me, or was, or is, or maybe. The priest must feel this. He should strive for holiness as much as possible, but he is a man, and he also has his own sinful history.
– Question from a TV viewer: My goddaughter turns 7 years old in the fall, she was baptized in very early infancy, and literally every Sunday we first brought her, then brought her to the Chalice. But from the age of seven she must confess. How can I, her successor, properly prepare or help her?
– I think that here is the simplest and most ingenuous advice: take a closer look at the clergy in the churches of your district, at such grandfathers who will one hundred percent hug your child, talk, will not scare you with demands, will listen, question. Or to priests who have three or four children of their own, who know what children are, what they are like, and what is connected with them. And then such a grandfather or father in the priesthood will be able to ask the child the right questions regarding the scope of his responsibilities.
The main thing is to make sure that the child is drawn to church, so that he feels good there. This task is best performed by those who have their own children, or those who look at everyone through the eyes of a grandfather. Grandfather's eyes are the most correct.
– There is a concept of “general confession”. Can everyone come to this, and what is it anyway?
– General confession is carried out with those who want it and who need it. If a person wants to “scrape out” all of himself, he must find a priest who will be ready to accept such a confession from him. Obviously, this will be an analysis of everything that happened in his life, it will be a long conversation. This is what they do in monasticism; I read about this, for example, in the books of Elder Silouan. When he came to the monastery, he examined his life for a long time, scraped himself out, and then brought such a confession in order to begin a new life in monasticism.
This must be done before any decisive step; I don’t think everyone needs this. Because there are healthy natures who calmly “swallow a camel” and do not worry about many things, but there are very subtle natures, prone to soul-searching, analysis, and painful “straining out a mosquito.” It is the latter who feel the need for such a confession. And such a confession usually turns into writing several books “Childhood”, “Adolescence”, “Youth”, which they bring to confession.
Probably some people need this, but not everyone, and I am sure that not every priest can accept such a confession. Therefore, here we need to approach it differentiatedly: who needs it, why is it needed, and who can accept such a confession?
– Is it necessary to go to confession with brochures like “Helping the Penitent” and read out everything that is written there?
- I don’t care about fat, I wish I was alive. You can go with brochures and notes. I think no one will drive me away or swear. However, we do not come to the doctor with a medical encyclopedia. If your tooth hurts, you come to the acute pain office. If it’s the stomach, see a gastroenterologist, ear, see an otolaryngologist. A person knows what hurts, he comes to the doctor and begins to tell where it hurts, how it hurts, and a dialogue between the patient and the doctor about the disease begins. I think it's a lot like confession.
There are sins that can be constantly named. For example, people say: no love, no patience, no humility. These are the right words, but you need to understand that you will always have to say them. Can you imagine that someday you will come and say: before I didn’t have love, now it has appeared, but I still don’t have patience. No, you will always say this. Maybe then let's move this into the realm of default understanding.
Let's accept it as a fact that you have no love. Who do you work for? Let's look at your specific life. If you are a seller, are you selling stale goods? If you're a Ural driver, don't you dump the diesel fuel on the side? Let's talk about you, why do we need to talk about lofty formulas every time. It seems to me that at some stage this repetition of lofty formulas becomes harmful. You must understand that by repeating what you don’t have, you won’t get it. Patience, love and humility are acquired throughout life.
In repentance we need to focus on what is bothering us today. There is a war going on in the south-east of Ukraine, and I am jumping up in my chair and want to do this and that, is it a sin or not a sin? This is already concrete.
You can carry little books to confession, but sooner or later you have to put them aside and go to confession with your sins.
– What if, on the contrary, a person does not see himself as sinful?
“Then you shouldn’t awaken the beast in him, poison his soul.” After all, sins are forgiven by grace - this is a radically important thing. This is the pillar of normal life.
You and I are sitting in a studio where there is a lot of artificial lighting and no windows. This is necessary in order to be able to shoot. But if all the lamps were turned off and sunlight was allowed in, we would see dust in its rays. Dust is everywhere. We don't see it now because the lighting is artificial. But the sun “convicts” the dust, just as Christ exposes sin. Sin is known only in Christ. Sin itself is not recognized, or it is known and plunges one into despondency, or it is known, but does not give rise to repentance, or it is known, weighs on, and kills a person. Why do I need to know something that I can’t run away from? I need to know what I can free myself from.
The knowledge of sin occurs only to the extent of the knowledge of God, from the contrary. Sin itself is not worth studying. We must know sin by knowing God. You go to God, but sin gets in the way, and at this time it becomes known. As long as I don’t go to God, no one bothers me. As soon as I start going to God, laziness, irritability, gluttony, envy and so on arise. Where did it come from? Woke up. Where was it before? It's asleep. Why? Because I didn't go to God. These snakes sleep peacefully until you go to God. One must learn about sin not from a book, but from striving for God. Sin will reveal itself and say:
- Stop! You are my!
And you will answer:
- No, I’m not yours, I’m God’s!
And the struggle for man will begin. This is the only way to recognize sin, expose it and enter into some kind of battle, God forbid that it does not strangle us in this battle, because the battle is serious.
– Question from a TV viewer from St. Petersburg: How useful is general confession, which is now often practiced, really? I read the words of one famous elder who said about himself that he was lower than all sinners. What then should we, ordinary people, do?
– I will try to be brief and specific. Where bishops bless general confession, where the clergy has such a blessing, this is possible, because general confession is already designed for well-educated, established parishioners. There is no need to send a newcomer to general confession; first he must be carefully examined. Those who have confessed and received communion many times repeat the same thing from confession to confession; they need such a general confession. Where the Eucharistic life does not suffer from this, we see the fruits of this life, God help.
But not everyone has everything. Some people need to have their spiritual father and regularly, in detail tell him about themselves, while for others it is enough to pray, fast, listen to a general confession, a general blessing, and go with the fear of God and faith to the Chalice once every two or three weeks . This is needed for different people, and the Church accommodates different people. Such confession can happen where it is blessed, and where such practice has justified itself.
As for the words of the elder, I would warn the laity and all of us from telling in excellent terms what a sinner I am. My sins are my toothache inside, my sadness. And there is no need to say that you are the biggest sinner. Holy people inevitably feel like sinners, because they are close to God. If a person is far from God, he thinks that he is good. The closer he gets to God, the worse he feels. Abba Dorotheus has wonderful words about this: the main person in the village will be the most inconspicuous in the city, and in the royal palace the most insignificant; near the royal throne he will be unworthy even to raise his eyes. That is, the closer you are to the king, the more your own dignity is lost in your eyes: you are just a little man. The closer holy people are to God, the more they feel their deep sinfulness. But there is no need to talk about this in public often.
– If a person comes to confession, but does not reveal all his sins, but only those that he considers the least serious?
– This is a common phenomenon, it can be explained from the point of view of shame. But I must say that great sins are conveniently hidden in a person when he has not repented of them. A person repents of little things, but hides big things. But from my own experience I will say that often a person starts with little things, and after a month he comes and begins to remove all the bad questions from himself.
It happens that a person comes to church, first to bless a cross, then a car, then an apartment. And six months later he comes and asks:
– Lent begins, can I fast?
- Can.
Time still passes:
-Can I confess?
- Can.
And at this first confession he doesn’t say anything special. And you accept confession for what it is. But the next time, in a month or two, more or less, it will remove layer by layer, it will reach the magma, the core. And when this core opens slightly, then he will come and say:
- Well, father, now I’ll tell you what I really have and what I suffer from.
And he will pour out in all honesty and ugliness all his sadness about what is in his family, with himself, since childhood, manifested in his heart, in his thoughts. But we need to get to this point.
Based on my own experience, I can say that this often happens: they start small, and when the path is trodden, they come in a serious way. So let's be patient and wait. But if the main thing is not pulled out, the secondary will return. We'll be patient, but we won't drag it ourselves. If we drag him ourselves, it will hurt him, he will not be ready.
– Many people ask whether it is necessary to fast before confession?
– The Church determined everything. It only depends on the pastor to take into account the person’s age, his spiritual age, degree of church involvement, health, marital status, and other numerous nuances of his life.
There are serious discussions among educated clergy, in patriarchates and academies about the fact that if a person fasts on Wednesday and Friday, should he fast on the eve of Sunday. This is all being discussed.
We strive for communion, we want to receive communion, therefore, we will consider and discuss the norms of favorable practice. The pastor needs to be attentive and understand that the same rule applies differently to two different people, and therefore he needs to act pedagogically and compassionately.
– Question from our TV viewer: Is a confession written on paper and read by the priest himself accepted by God? I'm disabled and can't do it any other way.
- Without a doubt. Amen.
– Question from a TV viewer: I confessed and took communion, then sinned again. How to return to God. I visit church regularly, but I feel indifferent, as if I am borrowing grace from God. I say “I believe”, but in reality it turns out that I don’t fulfill it. How to return to the fold of the Church?
– This is the noble suffering of the human heart, which does not feel fully involved in God. I must say that every believing heart experiences such suffering, because we are saved in hope and have not all, but part. Therefore, we all strive for completeness, and each of us suffers from the fact that he is not completely what he should be. Therefore, your suffering is not alone, move forward without despondency. Our main enemy is despondency. Move forward and rely not on yourself and your labors, but on the forgiving, saving grace of the Lord. What torments you, torments every person with a circumcised heart.
– Is the parish priest to whom you go to confession considered a confessor?
– Yes, if you regularly go to him for confession, he is at least your friend, adviser and giver of grace. You may not consult with him about your every step, as happens in communication with a confessor, but if you bring your sins to him for confession, then, of course, this is not a stranger to you, this is almost a spiritual father.
– The time of our transmission has come to an end. Thank you for today's conversation. What would you like to wish our viewers in closing?
– Based on the calls that we had, and these were calls from our mothers, sisters, grandmothers, I would like Orthodoxy to be a male religion. Not because women will have to disappear, no, you will still make up a large share of the believing population: you will give birth, you will feed, you will raise. But I would like our men to wake up, tear themselves away from TV and find themselves in the Church.
When religion becomes masculine, when clear masculine eyes and broad masculine shoulders fill the temple of God, then we know that we have a future, and such a Church makes the right voyage to Heavenly Harbor.
May the merciful Christ strengthen every believing soul and may His mercy visit every soul in general; to Him be glory forever. Amen.
Presenter: Sergey Yurgin Transcript: Yulia Podzolova
