OpenTown Open city
I recently watched several reports from the Unknown Russia series made by Present Time journalist Vadim Kondakov. And such melancholy overwhelmed me, even to the point of noose. Because once, somewhere, I saw all this. Moreover, I lived in this place several decades ago. Maybe not specifically in the cities that were discussed in the reports, but how many of them are there, restless, scattered across our vast country? And nothing, nothing has changed. Which one is it! Every year it gets worse, not even a year, but an hour. One city, Berezniki, Perm Territory, made the richest people of the country, and indeed the planet, such monsters of the Russian oligarchy as Mikhail Prokhorov, Suleiman Kerimov, Dmitry Mazepov, each of whom was or is related to the city-forming enterprise of the region Uralkali, the world's largest producer of potash fertilizers This city is falling underground. Literally. Sometimes together with people on whose heads the roofs of their own houses are collapsing. So you’re sitting in the evening, drinking tea, and you hear a crash: either the refrigerator is sparking, or a mouse is scratching, but no, the walls of your apartment in a multi-story building are physically cracking. And not at the seams, but right in the middle of the kitchen, for example. The rails connecting the city with the country have long gone underground. And an elderly woman tells the correspondent how much she loves Putin. And the son, who came to visit his mother, and to check whether the half of the house in which she sleeps had not fallen into the ground overnight, only lowers his eyes: he understands everything, about the house, and about Putin, and about his mother, but what is there? will you say? How do you explain to an elderly person that like the priest, so is the parish? In another city, Nyagan, Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug, the main enterprise of which is a subsidiary of Rosneft, RN-Nyaganneftegaz, up to ten thousand people still live in carriage camps installed 30 years ago, when the city was just emerging. Is it necessary to list what Rosneft is, what it does, and who these same inhabitants of trailers, or, as they call them, beams, make or have made the richest people in the country and the world? Don't think. They started talking about this city and the trailers only when, by some miracle, a resident of one of these ravines, Angie Barsukova, broke through to a direct line to the president. The family, in my opinion, got it later. No, not housing, but what you usually get when you go to the Tsar over the heads of the boyars. What to the king? It was turned on and off on TV. And the boyars - here they are, nearby. It’s not without reason that I focused in detail on just two cities, and no, I haven’t been to them personally. I don't need it. When you look at all this, when you look at the endless rickety slums behind the backs of other naive petitioners, shaking their hats in front of the sleek, well-fed leader, you understand that physically you don’t need to be there - all this, alas, is in the subcortex, and there is a sucking pain under the shoulder blade. All this happened. It's all there. Failing cities with the richest industrial enterprises, people living in barrels and carriages in the largest oil-producing region, hospital wards in a children's department for 15 people with iron prehistoric beds in the capital of our homeland, Moscow. Disgraced Olympic medals, insulted athletes, a country disgraced and expelled from the Olympic community, separated families and friends, tens of millions of poor people, a cold war with America, a hot war with a neighbor, the reputation of European neighbors is below par and falling. And people who believe in the king. Putin - help! Plus, at eighteen, there are still six hopeless years ahead, and they will go and check the same box again. Wake up, finally! Dear parents, turn the hell off your TVs, no, hear, beloved ones, there is no fifth column, there are us, your children, or there are your grandchildren who want it like in Europe, or even, God forgive me, like in America itself , only better, so what? There is nothing rotten there, I assure you. There are people everywhere, problems everywhere, cities just don’t collapse when the oil price is a hundred dollars. My old, dear, beloved friend, open your eyes, you’re smart! Well, there is no one who would like to attack us, all their problems are through the roof, and people in other countries are out of their minds: well, who would attack a country with a button? And there are no sadistic crests, there are Ukrainians, beaten down by the problems that have befallen them, but not defeated. And who knows how things would have turned out for them if we hadn’t had a hand in it. Colleagues, former, respected and valued, judge for yourself, why are they suddenly turning against Russian athletes in Europe and in the world? Yes, they take a sharp turn, yes, with excesses, yes, it’s a shame, many athletes are tarred with the same brush, but isn’t there a reason for it? Well, putting your hand on the most precious thing, can you say that all babies are pure? What kind of preparation did you have to make, at what level did you have to organize dances with urine in order to reach such a level of mistrust?! Dear fellow citizens, stop beating and humiliating yourself: your king will not help anyone. He is absent. And it wasn't. There was an unpleasant, unprofessional, vain man who took your wealth into his hands. And you all believe in his help. This is truly humiliation rather than pride, only in this case literally. Let him go. Forget about him. Take a look around. You don’t like Navalny, Sobchak, Yavlinsky, the Pope (although, they say, he’s a cool guy) - God bless them, offer yours. Only different. Let it go. He and his cooperative will squeeze you to the end, they will lower you into the Bereznyakov failures. What exactly did they give to the country? What did they unite with? Crimea? Fear God, families are breaking up because of this Crimea, friends are completely at odds, what kind of unification is there! And I’m silent about the economic effect. It will take decades for the country to strengthen this bond. Victory? Yes, this is not their victory, and never has been. What of the rest unites us Russians? Well, besides the beautiful language, delicious borscht, boneless dumplings, and vodka with a bathhouse? Space? Yeah. Especially lately. Who, without the help of Google, can name the names of the Russian cosmonauts now hanging between heaven and Earth on the ISS? I'm afraid no one. Sport? Don't make my Iskanders laugh. Although, they say that the hottest political battles and battles are now taking place on sites dedicated to biathlon - it’s about time, yes. Actually, Iskanders? A wonderful connection: who solves circadian cycles, who builds the largest solar panels in the world, who starts the engines of spaceships that have flown billions of kilometers from the Earth, and who, you know, churns out weapons and unites around them, intimidating the whole world. And the fact that, as I was recently told, most Russian hospitals now look and are equipped like in the series Doctor Richter, well, my dear people, this is for you. I have the impression that the state is bringing us to our knees so that we don’t see what they are doing there, Tatyana Razakova, a resident of one of the thousands of ravines, says above in a report about Nyagan. You couldn’t say it better, Tatyana, you couldn’t say it better. Let's choose or build another state, huh? Well, how can I get you going? What needs to happen for society to truly wake up? Opened your eyes wide shut? After all, all you need to do is not just look around, but really see. And then no revolutions will be needed, then you can just come on day X and check ANOTHER box.
Self-deprecation over pride
– I have problems with pride, I try to fight it by self-abasement. Until recently it helped, but now it began to seem to me that I was proud of the fact that I considered myself insignificant. I decided to perceive this secondary pride as the machinations of the enemy and use it as fuel for even greater repentance and self-reproach. Am I doing the right thing?
“It’s good, of course, to contact your confessor with such spiritual questions,” answers Archpriest Alexey Batanogov.
But what can be said with certainty is that this is not entirely correct. There is a saying that self-abasement is better than pride. This is just about this case. The author of the question noticed secondary pride in herself, and this really happens. And in self-abasement a person can console his pride.
Pride is a passion that is very difficult, almost impossible, to cope with. All our lives we struggle with pride: some do it better, some do it worse, some don’t succeed at all. But if you stop fighting it, then it immediately begins to flourish. This is constant spiritual warfare. And we must fight manifestations of pride. We must not let pride bloom in full bloom. You need to constantly pick off flowers, notice all manifestations of pride. Since the author has noticed that such secondary pride is again manifesting itself in the soul, then, of course, she will notice other manifestations of pride.
And it’s also very important that sometimes pride manifests itself inside. John Climacus deals in detail with the problem of fighting pride, and there is this idea: he trampled on pride and immediately became proud of it.
It is very important for us to learn to act not out of pride. Pride is a bad advisor. We cannot fully cope within ourselves, but we cannot act out of pride. There is no need to give advice on pride, there is no need to make decisions on pride.
You can name such tools for fighting pride. The opposite of the passion of pride is the virtue of humility, the highest virtue. Only in a humble heart does love live. Until a person humbles himself, he will not be able to accommodate true love in his heart. You have to try, you have to want to see the advantage of being humble. And the shortcomings of pride are obvious - in fact, pride alienates a person from God. There are words that God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble. Now, the fear of God is not the fear of God, but fear, the fear of moving away from God, the fear of losing the grace of God. It turns out that the best weapon against pride is the fear of God.
It is very useful when we feel that pride is swelling, filling us, it is very useful to remember our sins. But this does not mean that you should somehow humiliate yourself. There are such very wonderful words, Orthodox people know them, especially those who read morning prayers. Psalm 50 says: My sin is taken away before me. When we feel that we are beginning to be proud, conceited, and exalted in front of other people, then it is useful to remember that there are sins and the Merciful Lord forgives us for them, therefore we should not be proud. But we must thank God and humble ourselves.
What is pride and how to deal with it?
PRIDE
The self-pity you complain about is dangerous and self-defeating. If you have to indulge yourself due to illness, then that’s okay. And if under the pretext of illness, then this is bad. Here you can see deceit in front of yourself - the most evil of all deceits.
You seem to look at self-pity very lightly, considering cases of yielding to it as unimportant actions. You have a big mistake here. Cases of self-pity, of course, are insignificant, but the presence of this self-pity in the soul is not insignificant. Because what does it mean? This means that self-pleasing in you and I is stronger than pleasing God. We decided to do this and that, recognizing it as necessary in the matter of establishing a saving life and therefore pleasing to God, and then we refuse this for no other reason than because this refusal is more pleasant for us - body or soul. This means that this time we are moving from pleasing God to self-pleasing. Conscience sees our wrongness and worries. She is right. I shouldn’t have tied myself down: I would do this and that in forms of asceticism when I didn’t have the confidence to overcome myself every time. For example: they decided not to drink tea, and then drank a cup. And you worry. It’s not a big deal to drink a cup, but the big thing is that your conscience is offended and that things are allowed to happen that violate your previous decisions. This destroys the internal structure and develops the habit of not listening to conscience when it indicates what is due. And then... fearlessness will come, and complete indifference to pleasing God! It is better not to bind yourself to the smallest detail with rules, but to have one thing in common: to act contrary to the demands of self-indulgence every time. And if we allow some kind of benefit to the body, then it is not out of indulgence, but out of awareness of the need for health. Not drinking tea is good and healthy. But as in other cases it gives vigor to the body, you can sometimes drink a cup. So it should be put: I will abstain from tea from time to time. Because sometimes it's very easy to get around. Otherwise, it’s best not to bog yourself down with such details. And keep the general thing: do not please the flesh; and act in this spirit, making decisions each time (2, pp. 186–187).
I used tea as an example, but this is how one must act in relation to everything: food, sleep, walking and rest, etc. Anything that interferes with the internal order should not be allowed under any circumstances (2, p. 187).
No success, you say. And it won’t happen as long as there is self-indulgence and self-pity. Self-pity and self-indulgence directly indicate that “I” predominates in the heart, not the Lord. Self-love is the sin living in us, from which all sinfulness comes and which makes the whole person sinful, from head to toe, as long as it takes place in the soul. And when the whole person is sinful, how will grace come to him? It will not come, just as a bee will not go to where there is smoke.
The presence of self-love is a sign that the first decision to work for the Lord was formed incompletely and unsuccessfully. This decision has two ends: one - let him deny himself, the second - let him come after Me. 31
... The first requires the complete suppression of egoism, or self-love, and, consequently, the prevention of self-indulgence and self-pity - neither great nor small. Consequently, in whomever they are, the solution was incomplete.
Such a decision makes a person similar to those persons about whom the Apocalypse says: neither warm nor cold 32
... neither this nor that... I want to be saved, but self-resistance is not allowed. God and mammon cannot work (2, pp. 187–188).
