Candlemas means a meeting

Print Mikhail Rezin

Experience of church guardianship of juvenile prisoners in Ardatov

Next to our temple, just five hundred meters away, there is an educational colony for teenagers. There are 250 boys sitting in it who wanted to take something that does not belong to them, but which is advertised everywhere, which is presented as an example of real life: beautiful cars, houses, clothes, jewelry, food and drinks. Our until recently old-fashioned life has been filled with new, criminal content. Now the heroes are bandits, mafiosi, tricksters, and women of easy virtue. Those who live without conscience live beautifully.

The scary numbers of today's statistics speak volumes. According to official data, 30 thousand children and teenagers disappear without a trace in Russia every year. According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, there are from 500 thousand to 2.5 million street children in the country. Every year, 2 thousand children and adolescents commit suicide, 2 million children are illiterate.

The educational colony is located on the territory of the former Intercession Convent, which was closed in the 20s by the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks fought for freedom. In particular, for freedom from religious prejudices. In particular, for the liberation of those who voluntarily lived in the monastery.

Since 1992, visiting the colony and working with the inmates after their release, we came to the conclusion: we must do everything possible so that they do not end up there again, and the “difficult” guys from the Ardat streets do not end up there at all. Negative experience eats into the brain and heart, penetrates the cells and blood, lives in the subconscious and obsessive dreams. Even having created a family, the young man will for a long time feel the weight of “wasted years” and his heart will beat in time with his feet marching along the Kolonsky parade ground. Therefore, back in 1996, we began to think about creating an organization that could implement preventive programs to work with difficult and street children and adolescents, at least in Ardatov. In 1997, such an organization was created and is called “Sretenye”, which means “Meeting”.

After the liberation, pupils from the colony who worked on the restoration of the temple came to thank us and light a candle. Some asked to stay because there was nowhere to return or returning home meant the same vicious circle, from which there was only one outcome - to the colony. But we also had nowhere to receive them. Some were taken in by the same parishioners-grandmothers to live with them, others whiled away a night or two in the lodge. But this did not solve the problems. Then the idea arose to create something like a shelter, a temporary shelter for the orphaned and homeless.

After some time, people were found who gave money to purchase a comfortable house on Meditsinsky Lane next to the district hospital. True, the residents of the alley, having learned who would live in this house, complained and began to write letters to the authorities. They were categorically against proximity to former criminals. It took a long time to convince people not to make hasty conclusions and not to interfere with helping the unfortunate. But time does not heal such ulcers. A year has passed, and the residents of neighboring houses are convinced that nothing threatens their lives or property, that they can let their children go for walks without fear for their health and morals.

The first settlers were three former pupils from the Ardatov colony, and their teacher was Boris Zykov from St. Petersburg. He was blessed for this by Father Alexander Stepanov, who heads the brotherhood of St. Anastasia the Pattern Maker and has many years of experience working in adult and juvenile colonies.

Unfortunately, the first experience was not entirely successful. We came to the sad conclusion that even a small number of former prisoners of the colony, gathered in one, even the most comfortable place, is a mini-colony with all its unwritten laws and asocial relations. Boris Zykov had a very difficult time. The wards did not want to obey, refused to wash the dishes, and did not follow the simplest hygiene rules. At first, Boris courageously and humbly, like the hero of the ancient patericon, tried to do everything himself: he washed the dishes and floors, washed clothes, took out the trash, and cooked food. However, this did not shame the teenagers living with him. Mockery and ridicule were the answer to his zeal. Moreover, the teenagers began to demand that Boris serve them and began to threaten. One had to be sent to his previous place of residence, and the other to take courses in Nizhny Novgorod in order to disperse the unruly population of the Center.

Desolation

We are experiencing a crisis of consciousness. The worlds that humanity has been trying to create for thousands of years with varying degrees of success are collapsing. We are talking about conservative traditions and views, say, on children as a precious gift. For childhood as the brightest and most productive period in life. Crystal castles are collapsing. Fairy tales in which good invariably wins and evil is punished are crumbling. The culture of basic values ​​is collapsing. I don't feel sorry for anyone or anything. There is no reliance on memory, on morality, on taboos.

We are faced with amazing paradoxes more and more often. It turns out that it is not enough to want to help a person. It is not enough to have such an opportunity. It is necessary that a person can receive this help for his own benefit. It is with benefit, because in our crazy times, help can be turned to harm oneself and to the harm of the giver.

Ivan Zhilin came to our church several times and asked for help with work, food, clothes and shoes. Autumn. Cold wind. It rains every now and then. He has broken sneakers on his feet and an old jacket on his shoulders. He was released about three months ago and is wandering, poor fellow, with neither stake nor yard. Still looks strong. There is mind in the eyes. Okay, Ivan, we’ll find you a job, we’ll find you a place to live. Come in the morning, and now here are your new shoes from the aid, a sweater, a jacket. Ivan came and did not deceive. They got a job as a helper in a carpentry shop and found a hut in the village in which a lonely man lived. They gave me an old bed, a mattress, a blanket. Ivan worked all day, had lunch, dinner, and went to rest. And the next morning the owner did not find any aluminum cookware in the kitchen, and everything that even remotely resembled non-ferrous metal was missing from the neighbors’ barns and bathhouses.

Previously, in times of troubles and trials in Rus', the people imposed fasting on themselves, repented of their sins, prayed, and tried to forget their selfish interests. Can we now forget ourselves and see our neighbor who grieves and suffers? Will we be able to see homeless children on the streets of our cities, destroyed factories and farms, fields overgrown with weeds, girls selling themselves along Russian roads, boys behind barbed wire?

Today there are 15 teenagers in our Rehabilitation Center, about 250 need care in the educational colony. In addition, we have three needy families under our care. The situation in the country is not improving. Crime victims number in the millions every year. A wave of drug addiction is rolling into Russia. Ardatov is located in the center of the country, just 430 kilometers from Moscow. And at the same time, this is the outback. Life in Ardatov and the region is a reflection of the processes that take place from Smolensk to Vladivostok. And drugs have already arrived here. The school is losing or has already lost its authority, teachers receive a tiny salary and are forced to earn extra money, keep livestock, and spend time and energy on their plots. The utility service is falling apart, there are more and more frequent water supply and sewerage accidents, and more and more frequent power outages. At the same time, a lot of people drink themselves to death, but do not want to work. They beg, beg for money at the temple, show their holey shoes, but as soon as they are offered a job, they disappear, muttering curses. We are trying to help the boys who still have time to live. We teach them, dress them, give them the opportunity to earn money, send them to the army and expect them to leave the army as if they were our own children. Lots of failures and disappointments.

A disabled person has appeared in our Center - Sasha Muravyov. On crutches. He is 17. He lived without his father and mother in Nizhny Novgorod. Mother died four years ago. The father (he is forty years old) is a complete alcoholic. Lives in some abandoned house on the outskirts of the city. Sasha collected alms on the porch of the temple, lived among the poor and beggars. We still can’t wean him from swearing, although he has become much more restrained, he doesn’t scream or rush at the guys with a crutch when he doesn’t like something. The boys gave him the nickname “boxer” because without crutches he walks with great difficulty and waddles from side to side, like a duck or a boxer in the ring. For a whole month, Sasha studied at the computer club on courses for personal computer users. They even gave me a diploma. But not because he passed the exams well, but because the examiners simply could not give him a bad mark. The hand did not rise. Although I heard that he doesn’t even know the alphabet firmly. It will be necessary to instruct one of the guys to study basic Russian with him. Later, maybe we’ll give him an apprenticeship to a shoemaker. And after some time we will be forced to part with him. We do not have a boarding school for the disabled and we cannot take him on for lifelong boarding. I feel sorry for the boy though. He sits all day in the refectory, peels potatoes, writes letters to someone unknown and where (we know that he has neither relatives nor friends), does not refuse work that is feasible: he clears snow from the church, saws and chops wood for the lodge. We can’t imagine how we’ll part with him.

Children come to our Rehabilitation Center in unexpected and intricate ways. Their destinies are broken and terrible, filled with events of such force that they can be measured in TNT equivalent. They are all different. But one thing unites them. They all lacked love since childhood. And then there are toys, sweets, high-calorie food, beautiful clothes.

The feeling of universal injustice, as best as I could, hangs over every working-class neighborhood, over every dying village. Over the past years, many have lost faith in the justice of power, in the morality of the state, the faith with which generations of Soviet people lived, and with it the meaning of life and death. At the same time, faith in Christ the Savior only touched hearts, without changing stereotypes, without touching everyday life, remaining the last and secret refuge of a confused person. But in visible reality, we have become accustomed to the abomination of lawlessness that surrounds us, we ourselves have joined the race for wealth, fame, comfort to the extent that is available to us, and we do not understand that we are not following the guiding Light of the Star of Bethlehem, but the swamp lights of obsessions. The saddest thing is that, to paraphrase Bulgakov’s hero, we do not understand that poverty is not in wallets, but in souls. Today millions of children do not study and are homeless. Today, drunkenness and drug addiction are mowing down the people like machine guns of enemy punitive detachments. Today everyone, even the church, is silent about the fact that a government that does not prevent the extinction of a million people a year is, at best, immoral, and at worst, criminal. Vladimir Solovyov once said that the state does not exist to create heaven on earth, but to ensure that there is no hell on earth. And our state cannot cope with this minimum task.

Kolya Kolov already lived with us two years ago. Then he came to us from a Nizhny Novgorod boarding school for children with mental disabilities. The mother is a drunkard, two older brothers take turns going to prison, and the sister married a drug addict. Everyone lives in a three-room apartment, drinks regularly, and does not disdain drugs.

The first time Kolya lived with us for more than six months, then he decided to return to Nizhny Novgorod. I got a job in a small private plastic processing workshop. He worked, rented a house, did not drink, did not communicate with relatives. The mother found herself a man, moved to live with him, one brother was imprisoned, the sister went with her husband to the village to improve her health. Kolya moved into a three-room apartment and began to live with his second brother, who from time to time stole money from him and drank with his drinking buddies.

Then Kolya met a young woman who had a child. The mother returned, the brother was freed. A woman and child settled with them. Kolya started drinking. There were scandals. Recently, a drunken mother jumped from the balcony and died. Kolya drank for a week out of grief, quarreled with his partner, beat up his neighbor, and he called the police. Kolya managed to escape to Ardatov and called us from a friend. Now he works as a cattleman in the village of Obkhod, where the subsidiary farm of the Rehabilitation Center is located, and dreams of finding housing here for himself and his unmarried wife and child. True, she never answered his letters, and her cell phone is silent.

Denis Zhemoytel was released from the Ardatovsky correctional colony in March last year. He wrote a statement asking to be admitted to our Rehabilitation Center. Accepted. He spent almost two years behind barbed wire for burglarizing a grocery store. He dropped out of school a long time ago and stole to feed himself and his younger sister. Often, convicts tell heartbreaking stories about themselves, full of sentimental anguish. But in this case there was no reason not to believe him. While he was in prison, his parents died a terrible death.

It was a dysfunctional drinking family. In addition to Denis, the family had two more children - the youngest Alena and the eldest Alexander. Now Alena is in a boarding school.

Denis does not remember his mother sober. Even when my sister was born, my mother still drank and smoked.

The apartment in which Denis’s parents lived was located on the first floor of a large panel building at the Avtozavod in Nizhny Novgorod. This apartment was always crowded with strangers. We slept on the floor and drank whatever we had to. The tobacco smoke layered up to the ceiling and never went away. They played cards, fought, and indulged in dirty debauchery. From early childhood, Denis and his sister Alena were allowed to drink and smoke as a joke. The apartment door did not lock because the lock had been broken long ago. At night, rats scurried across the floor. Almost everything was taken out of the apartment and sold, even the gas stove. The food was heated on an old electric stove. This is where the fire started at night. The drunken father, mother and older brother suffocated in the smoke. Neighbors called firefighters, who put out the fire. The police arrived late. The rats managed to eat the father's face.

The colony learned about what happened from a friend of Denis’s mother. She called and told about everything. The deputy head of the colony for educational work invited a psychologist to visit him, and they thought for a long time about how to tell Denis about everything. They were afraid that he would commit suicide. Having been released, Denis asked to go to the Rehabilitation Center. Where else was there to go? He began going to church with the boys on Sunday services, behaved quietly in the refectory, and was taciturn. But another sad circumstance became clear: Denis arrived at the colony with a diagnosis of chronic alcoholism and drug addiction.

Our employees went with Denis to Nizhny Novgorod to secure a burned-out apartment for him, from which for some reason he and his sister were discharged while their parents were still alive. As soon as Denis was left alone for half an hour, he ran away. For two weeks we did not know what happened to him or where he was. He had some money and was dressed decently: new trousers, a checkered shirt, a leather jacket.

At our request, Denis was found by a religious woman who knew a friend of Denis’s mother. He drank, took drugs, swallowed pills, communicating with his friends, and spent his nights in a burnt-out apartment on a pile of charred garbage. He didn’t remember where he lost his release certificate - the only document he had and for which we were trying to get his passport.

At our police department they said that Denis could easily have pawned the certificate or drunk it on drink. These certificates are valued among persons who have been in prison. You can re-stick the photo and get a passport. Our district police department made a request to the region to see if Denis was involved in any crimes while he was walking around Nizhny for two weeks. He was given a duplicate certificate only after he wrote a statement under the dictation of an operative and promised to leave Ardatov forever after receiving the certificate. Nobody needs extra problems. For two months, the head of our church with Denis traveled to Nizhny Novgorod almost every day (which is 300 kilometers round trip), breaking through the departmental walls of cold and misunderstanding. She managed to register Denis and his sister in their burnt apartment. Between trips, Denis hid from the police in the village. And we were forced to do this. Without documents it’s not easy for a normal person, but for Denis it’s death. Denis received a passport. Our plans included clearing the apartment of debris and fumes, renovating it, installing windows, and helping with the work. But Denis left. He said that he would make his way himself. Where he will make his way, having neither housing nor money, we know with sad clarity. But we couldn’t stop him from leaving. We have free entry and exit.

The plant dies if the sprout does not get enough sun. A person dies if he lacks love in childhood. What has been said may sound banal. But the law of gravity or the daily falling of night are just as banal. We are experiencing the last world revolution. A rebellious humanity overthrows platitudes and replaces them with vulgarities. And everyone feels uneasy about this replacement. Because everyone, if not with their hearts, then with their skin, feels that vulgarity is not a canvas with a well-known painted hearth, but the last curtain, behind which is the genuine fire of the underworld.

In the distorted consciousness of modern man, everything is mixed up: science and religion, knowledge and power, old signs and the new era, wealth and poverty, low and high, beautiful and ugly, truth and lies. There seems to be nothing to grab onto, nothing to lean on. No landmarks. Only your own sensations, your feelings. Physiology is the level at which everything is reliable. The conclusion seems indisputable, but it is not human. This conclusion is needed by those who hate the human in man.

There is a prayer room in the colony. Alexey Koloskov volunteered to be on duty. A nimble and evasive guy. All the time I tried to help with little things: painting the baseboards, cleaning the candlesticks, making lists of those for whom to pray at the service, arranging books on the shelf in order, handing out crosses and belts with the 90th Psalm. I asked for a ring with a prayer and to take it to our Rehabilitation Center after release. And suddenly Ganin, the colony’s senior operative, invites us. Unpleasant message. Koloskov tried to commit suicide in the prayer room. Most likely, he was playing theater in front of the employees and his authorities from the detachment, but that didn’t make it any easier. Recently released, I did not go to church.

The clerk Kostya is also a cleaner in the prayer room. Murderer. He killed a man who constantly humiliated and persecuted his father. That's what he said. They gave me ten years. I turned 18. Now I’ve been transferred, “raised,” as they say, to an adult colony.

Kovalev Alexander is another cleaner of the prayer room. After Kontorschikov, he volunteered to help. Also a killer. He killed a man who had abused him as a child, when he was barely seven years old. Alexander could neither forget nor forgive. Moreover, the man lived in their yard and was a frequent drinking companion of his father. Once, while drunk, he began to beat his father in their apartment. Alexander grabbed a kitchen knife and stabbed him in the back. They gave me four and a half years because he had epilepsy. He is released after three months. Asks to come to us.

There are two large houses in the village that belong to the Center. The third house is under construction. There is a carpentry workshop attached to one of the houses, where children learn to work with wood and acquire the specialty of carpenter. In the huge backyard of this house, we are building a hangar for our equipment (three tractors, their attachments, a combine harvester, a grain sorter, two trucks) and a grain storage facility. It must be said that we currently rent about 100 hectares of land on which we plant rye, barley, and potatoes. Some of the grain is ground and used to feed livestock, some is set aside for sowing in the spring, and some is sold.

A cattle yard was built near the second house last year, and this year poultry houses are being added to it. The inhabitants of the barnyard are three cows, eleven heifers, four bulls, three sows, a boar and from twenty to forty piglets. It is clear that such a farm can feed more than one person. But it requires a fair amount of work. Our teenagers work there. Especially in summer. With the onset of the school year, almost everyone moves to the Ardatovsky house, two or three remain in the village, and the rest, in turn, come to help them in their free time.

One of the basic principles of life at the Center is complete voluntariness and the desire to live according to simple laws: do not swear, do not bring people of the opposite sex into your house, do not drink alcohol, and work diligently. No one should live at the expense of another. If a person cannot overcome his own laziness and selfishness, sooner or later he leaves us without ever becoming one of us.

One more detail. Guys, when they come to us, especially after a colony, perceive us as a familiar state educational institution, where the indifference of the administration and the connivance of the teachers create the atmosphere of a semi-basement free community. At the same time, everyone comes with the firm conviction that no one will kick him out anywhere, that we are on someone’s payroll, and therefore are obliged to support him, please him and feed him well, that we are responsible to someone, as is usually the case, from superiors, that we have a plan, that we will be scolded if someone suddenly doesn’t get along with us and if we are forced to expel someone. And only after a while, sometimes quite a long time, they begin to understand that our entrance, as well as our exit, is completely free. That only their personal interest in their own destiny is the basis for their stay with us. Someone, of course, doesn’t understand and leaves. But such people are still a minority.

Some people take us, who are trying to help them, for suckers, for brainless cash cows who can’t be milked. But pretty soon they understand that they are not dealing with chronic patients who dream of sticking their neck out to someone, but with people who are aware of the measure of kindness and severity, the difference between freedom and permissiveness.

Here is one of the characteristic destinies. His name is Rodion. This is a conventional name. A lady from the police children's room brought him to us. Through complex and roundabout routes, he ended up in our area along with a construction crew that went to Moscow to work and somewhere picked up this poor guy. At first, based on the mercy and immediate readiness to help so characteristic of Russians, the men from the brigade housed him in turns with their families. But a deed of mercy is not a nickel handed to a beggar. This is a long and long chain of actions and decisions that requires time, effort, material resources, and most importantly, patience and willingness to see a stranger in your home. From day to day. From month to month. Only a few are ready for this. Therefore, Rodion ended up in the district police station, having neither funds nor plans. In his hands he only had a worn-out piece of paper - a birth certificate issued somewhere in the Chita region on the distant and once thundering BAM.

Just a few days later, Rodion turned sixteen years old and joined the staff of the rehabilitation center, having behind him the black experience of losing his parents, homeless wanderings, station vigils, theft and begging.

One day, after a long time, we were sitting in the common refectory and celebrating someone’s birthday. And they remembered their birthdays in the past, who remembered what. It was Rodion's turn. He, with his characteristic languid half-smile, told how his little one on his birthday - he was then five or six years old - was pulled in different directions by his drunken mother and father, arguing to the point of a fight over who he belonged to. How they scratched him until he bled, tearing him out of each other’s hands.

And in his actions, in his words, one can feel the sleepy lethargy of a man who cannot or does not want to wake up. He asks his interlocutor several times before answering. He is sluggish and lazy. There is no glow of young life in him, which is ready to break through the asphalt. Emptiness, lethargy, frozenness. And only in the very depths of the eyes is a frightened spark of curiosity and wariness. And at the same time, you can’t deny his intelligence. He willingly practices piano with one of the parishioners of our church. The fingers are long and sensitive. One of our boys, passing by the piano and Rodion playing something, casually said that his fingers were the fingers of a musician or a pickpocket. “Both,” noted someone passing behind.

Once Rodion cut his hair bald, imitating his older friend Ivan from the rehabilitation center. Multiple scars and healed abrasions were found on the head, which in ancient times our military ancestor would have been proud of. Now they are evidence of the crushing picture of our defeat in the war with Satan. Feeling his head, Rodion muttered: and this is father with a stool...

In secret, with frightening persistence, Rodion tells first one, then another the terrible story of the murder of his father. History, apparently, does not allow him to live in peace. My father drank and was rowdy all the time, as Rodion could remember. After another stint in the colonies, the father returned to their small town and vented his soul, tormenting his mother and young son.

The mother began to lose her sight. The beatings were not in vain. One day, after another drinking session and subsequent fight, my father decided to take a bath. Mother called Rodion and asked him to help her. The two of them went into the bath. And while the drunken father was yelling at them, throwing out water and choice obscenities, the mother plugged in the cord from the electric razor and threw it into the bath. Twelve-year-old Rodion brought a basin down on the head of his convulsing father, preventing him from getting out of the current-pierced water.

Then he and his mother went to visit relatives for several days, and when they returned, they reported to the police about their father’s corpse, which had decomposed in the bathroom. Nobody asked any unnecessary questions. Dad is tired of everyone in the town. Including the police. They were relieved to attribute his death to careless handling of electrical appliances.

Rodion and his mother did not live alone for long. They sold the apartment and left for distant Moscow to earn money. Without a doubt, the mother was prone to both drunkenness and an immoral lifestyle. For some time they rented an apartment from Moscow drinkers. And then, on a winter evening, the mother left somewhere and never returned. By this time she had almost completely lost her sight.

They made a living by begging in the subway and on the streets. They drank the money away with the apartment owners. This was the payment for housing. Mother sometimes dressed in black and hung a box with an icon around her neck, collecting money for the restoration of a non-existent monastery or temple. She collected, as we see, to pay for the elevator going to hell.

Rodion was soon thrown out of the apartment. For about a month he wandered near a familiar entrance, expecting that a silhouette would emerge from the electric twilight of the big city, blindly wandering along the walls. He never saw his mother again.

Prayer over the abyss

The most important thing is to introduce our teenagers to prayer, church, and the sacraments. And even if this is not the prayerful zeal of the ascetics known from the lives, but this is prayer before and after meals, this is fasting, albeit with indulgences, this is a visit to the temple, voluntary confession, communion of the Holy Mysteries, participation in religious processions around the temple and to Diveyevo. For example, this year, on July 31, on the day of St. Seraphim of Sarov, all our Sunday school students went with the parishioners to Diveevo. Almost everyone stayed for the night service.

Of course, when they come to us, the initial contact with the unknown sacred world, with prayer, icons, and the sign of the cross plunges them into quiet confusion. Some people start laughing when they see everyone standing up before eating, crossing themselves and singing the Lord’s Prayer. But after a week, a month, they also habitually get up, cross themselves and pray. And I am sure that the words of prayer, looking at icons, participating in the sacraments, even if they are still incomprehensible to them, produce changes at the deepest level. And this, without a doubt, will bear fruit in its time and place.

The American writer Salinger has a story called “The Catcher in the Rye.” The hero figuratively imagines childhood as a huge field of rye in which children frolic. But this field is on the edge of an abyss. And you won’t see any ripe rye falling behind the wall. The hero's task is to catch the child on the edge of the abyss and prevent him from falling.

What is prbpast? This is an endless number of temptations and dangers that await a child who is just beginning to live and, of course, does not know all the dangers and traps, starting with playing with matches and ending with the deceit of adults, for whom the child is often just a convenient means, and not a defenseless creature. heart. They will not stop him on the edge of the abyss, but, if it is beneficial, they will also push him.

The child does not understand what “good” is and what “bad” is. The adults themselves who are supposed to teach this are hopelessly confused. They themselves lost their way, not knowing who to listen to and who to believe. A charlatan politician, a comedian who has taken root on stage or vicious artists, a deodorant advertisement or the dollar exchange rate, a weather forecast or the fact that all the evil on the planet is from terrorism. The Gospel, which speaks for all past and future times about the meaning of life and the purpose of man, about death and the primacy of moral principles, is perceived by many as yet another, in a long series of others, a monument of culture and writing. And since the child, neither at school nor at home, is taught to distinguish between good and bad, disastrous and saving, and the television remains the only tireless adviser, children without fear run straight into the abyss. And the adults step aside and stare blankly after them. The trouble is (and this is a bitter paradox) that children, falling into the abyss, do not die physically, do not disappear, but return different, mutilated on the island of “Lord of the Flies”, in places of oppression and painful struggle for the right to be. Yes, they return from there, but different. And in different places they solve the problem of “meeting” differently. In Brazil, they create “death squads” - secret police units to fight street children; in France, they allow young people to “frolic” by handing over neighborhoods and cities; in our country, they put teenagers who have committed cheap thefts in colonies along with murderers and robbers.

As best we can, we try to help the boys who come into our attention. Over the past year, 54 people visited our Center.

Some stayed to live and study. Some people earned money in the summer to buy shoes and clothes and returned to their family. We escorted some into the army.

On Saturday, in the prayer room in the colony, a nondescript, thin teenager was in confession. About 17 years old. Killed three. He doesn’t look him in the eye, he just watches the reaction sideways. He killed one because of drunken revenge. The other two were in the garage when he and his accomplice went in looking for a drink. One with the butt of an axe, the other with a small sledgehammer. Before this, they threw a jacket over my head and hit me on the head. He hardly repents, he says that the memories don’t particularly torment him. He just doesn't think about it. I can still see his bony face with sunken cheeks. How can one succumb to something so puny?!

On the outskirts of cities and towns, villages and railway stations, a terrible and rapid process of self-crimination is underway. They hastily cut metal and scrap it, dismantle buildings and take out bricks, slabs, lintels, boards, logs - everything that is and is not allowed. And all this is done with the silent connivance of the authorities. They shred what was recently built, what brought a piece of bread and was a component of the national economy. Now there are no people, no economy. It’s as if they are cutting a body that has not yet cooled down. Cannibals. Who will take it faster and sell it at a higher price? The leaders took money and things, leaving the body for the rest. When they finish eating the corpse, they will attack each other.

Previously, just a year or two ago, in our colony there were mostly boy thieves who stole out of prank or poverty; now heavy crimes predominate.

Murders, rapes, robberies. Many of the convicted teenagers were abandoned in infancy, often knew neither mother nor father, but only the street with its vices and the laws of the jungle. They were conceived by accident, born unwanted, raised without love at best, and hated at worst. One boy in the colony told me how in the summer he ran away from his house in the village and lived in Nizhny Novgorod, how he spent the night wherever he had to, was a witness and even a participant in crimes, robbed, drank, used drugs, and participated in dirty deeds. “You can’t even imagine the city at night,” he told me, “it’s some kind of Afghanistan.” I understand him. He did not mean a geographical Afghanistan, but a mystical one, as a place of endless war, violence, revenge, lawlessness and desperate attempts to survive.

Previously, in every yard, at every school there was a teenage club. Now there is none of this. But the need of adolescence to group and get together remains. Now they group spontaneously in the basement, and the outburst of negative energy occurs on the street. There is no ban for them. The number of violent, brutal crimes is increasing; 10-12 year old children find pleasure in torturing their victims. Increasingly, young mothers aged 14 to 18 leave their children directly in the maternity hospital or throw them out into the street - into trash cans, a landfill, or a river. In recent years, the number of parents from the most disadvantaged category - drunkards, drug addicts, sadists, pedophiles - has doubled.

For Christmastide, the Sunday school children prepared the play “Cinderella” based on Schwartz. Scenes with a forester and his wife, a conversation with the king, a ball in the palace. We showed it to our children from the Rehabilitation Center, to all interested children and parents at the Ardatov Art School (there is a large hall there, and the auditorium of the House of Culture, where performances usually took place, is hopelessly smoky with electrical wiring that burned out in the fall). Then the artists were invited to the educational colony, where the young “slaves” stomped, screamed and whistled at the end (a sign of supreme delight). And recently with “Cinderella” we visited the “Solnyshko” kindergarten. A two-story, Soviet-era building. A major renovation is only in the director’s dreams, and on the large windows there is homemade tulle and frosty and sunny patterns. The same patterns are found in Kamchatka, Karelia, Tver, Moscow, and Canada. Everywhere, where there are houses, where there is light in the windows, where people live and can see these branches rising from the unearthly garden. Fifty or more little ones are constantly looking at Cinderella, the forester, the stepmother's daughters and the beautiful guests of the ball. Roman Telegin sits on a large chair next to the kids, towering above everyone. Long unwashed hair, dark gray eyes, fingers clutching his knees. He is twenty years old, he is from the village of Grange. The mother abandoned the child many times to the care of the grandparents in the village, showed up and disappeared again, the father left and has been living with another family for a long time. He is painfully touchy, quarrelsome, intractable, talks a lot and incoherently. He has an exemption from the army and some clause in his military ID, which, as he says, does not allow him to get a job at a factory. Now he lives in our Center, sweeps the temple courtyard, carries out simple tasks, but always with bickering and incoherent cries. He eats in the refectory. There were plans to take him to a psychiatrist and get him a pension, but he would never agree. How long will we stay? He looks at the children playing, at the dancing, and there is either a smile or a grimace on his face. He told how in his childhood, when he was eight or nine years old, his mother killed a drunken roommate with a shovel in front of his eyes, and then he helped her drag the corpse into the cold hallway. What patterns does he see on the window? What ball music is ringing in his ears?

“Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy,” says the Lord in the Gospel of Matthew (Matthew 5.7.) We believe and know that true happiness does not lie in taking, but in giving to those in need. But the modern world is built on opposite principles. Of course, there are many kind people whose hearts are not closed to love and sympathy. But they are, as a rule, elderly, sick and in need of support themselves. Those who are rich are rarely in a hurry to lend a helping hand. State programs for working with children and youth remain on paper. Meanwhile, the modern tyrant and molester of minds - television - implants examples of an unimaginable luxurious life. This gives rise to envy and an aggressive thirst to have everything without giving anything in return. This is an anti-Christian spirit that destroys the most valuable thing a person has - the soul.

Recently, the head of the children's department of the district hospital, Nikolai Vasilyevich Levin, called us at the church and asked for help. He always kindly helps our boys from the Rehabilitation Center, receives them without a queue and even outside of working hours. I had to go to the hospital. The furniture in the department is old, the heating is old, from Soviet times. Nothing has changed over the years. Nikolai Vasilyevich asked for help purchasing an inexpensive heater for the playroom. During the conversation they looked into the room. Inside a strange structure of two upside-down, net-covered children's beds, a boy of about five sat and stared blankly ahead. The doctor said that this baby was recently brought from a nearby village, where he lived under a bed in a cardboard box until he was four years old. He couldn't walk. The mother - a drinking, dissolute woman - gave birth to a sick son, rarely fed him, kept him in a box, and often left him alone. He grew up sick, completely wild, unable to understand human speech. They named him Artem. In the hospital they taught me how to walk. But where should he go if he never knows what the Road is? Sometimes you give up in helplessness when you see the immeasurable number of those who learned to walk with great difficulty and who wander through the rye, knowing neither purpose, nor fear, nor love...

Do you remember Andersen's fairy tale "The Little Match Girl"? The poor girl tried to sell several boxes of sulfur matches to bring her stepmother the proceeds from the sale. But no one bought them. People didn’t even notice her in the bustle of New Year’s preparations. And she walked barefoot in the snow and timidly looked into the windows, where the lights on the Christmas trees were already burning. The girl was frozen in some gateway, trying to warm her fingers with matches. Before her death, she dreamed of her kind deceased grandmother, who took her to heaven, where the holiday never ends. Millions of children in modern Russia are like this orphan. And Russia is like a stepmother, even more evil than in the fairy tale. She kicked the children out of the house without even giving them sulfur matches.

We see one thing with immutable clarity: if a person does not understand that the basis of his life and society is the “moral law within,” which Kant spoke about, if he does not feel the primacy of the Law of God over all other human laws and standards, then he will slide into the abyss of non-existence. inevitable and irreversible. However, there is hardly a chance to stop the catastrophe now. What to do? Remain human, remain true to the ideals of beauty and love, do good and remember that there is no death, that everyone will receive what they deserve. The Lord says: “In the world you will have tribulation; but take heart: I have overcome the world” (John 16.33).

For the benefit of those in need Development of the penal system of Ukraine