Anthony Surozhsky

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How to achieve humility? Here is one of the advice of Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozhsky: we must learn to look at ourselves with a share of humor, which brings up life realism in us.

For example, the inflamed imagination suggests: "I am genius." And you answer with a calm smile: “Do not be a fool, you are a mediocre person” or “How funny are you, why are you puffing?”

“I remember, in a children's camp,” says Vladyka Anthony, “one of my comrades came into terrible rage. Our leader, instead of settling it, took and put a mirror in front of him. When the boy saw his face distorted by rabies, he immediately slept all anger. ”

A realistic look at oneself is the beginning of humility.

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Vladyka Surozhsky Anthony recalled how he first encountered someone else's death. It was a lesson for life. The future metropolitan was six years old at that time, and he lived with his parents in Tehran. Once they went to look at the garden to one person. In Persia, it was customary, it was possible to come to a stranger and say: "I heard, you have a wonderful garden, whether it is impossible to look at him."

This happened this time. The family of the Russian diplomat admired the roses, the owner kindly treated them to Shcherbet and ...

And only the next day it became known that at that hour his beloved son, just stabbed on the road, lay in the owner’s house.

“This was my first impression,” said the Vladyka, who lived a long, difficult life, “about how a person can become face to face and defeat his horror, his pain for love or, as the owner himself would say, for the sake of simple hospitality:“ Otherwise, people do not act. ”


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Metropolitan Anthony once recalled his communication with Oxford students. He helped everyone who wanted to take the first steps in Orthodoxy in the walls of this ancient university. But once a certain young man said that he leaves the lord, does not consider him a Christian. The saint spread his hands and finally suggested at least explain why he was not a Christian, and now he heard:

- You are not a pacifist!

About what happened next, Vladyka said:

“I say:“ No, I'm not a pacifist, I do not think that you just need to never react in any way. Are you pacifist? " He says, "Yes." “And you are ready to go to your pacifism to the limit?” - "Yes, to the limit." - “Here answer me such a question. You enter this room and find: some hooligan is going to rape your bride. What will you do? " He says: "I will try to convince him to abandon the evil intention." “Well, suppose that while you are holding it, he continues his job.” “I will kneel and will pray to God so that He does it impossible.” -"Well, if everything happens and he gets up and leaves-what will you do?" “I will pray God to make good out of evil.” I told him: "You know, I would be your bride, I would look for another groom."

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Mixedness is a wonderful quality in order to endure other people. But there is something above her. Vladyka Anthony Surozhsky once told the story that happened to him in his youth, in Paris:
- I remember the parish meeting. I was then seventeen years old. Our priests sat, between them Father Athanasius. There was a very brave, smart, educated woman in the parish, a great friend of Chekhov’s wife. She got up and began to criticize the abbot, father of Athanasius. I remember how I sat and boiled inwardly, I almost spread when she said about him with the whole coming: “This fool Athos cannot even build a parish properly!”, But silent.
And then we climbed the stairs with Father Athanasius, who during all this tirade sat like a statue, and I told him: “How could you sit so calmly?” He looked at me and said: “Yes, really! How she should love me, so that the truth is so true to all of me about me! ”

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In Paris, where Vladyka got a boy with his parents. “In one of the basements, we equipped the church: a three -consumer courtyard. People lived in such poverty that the priests ate pieces of bread, which parishioners put in cardboard boxes at the entrance to the church. Vladyka Veniamin Fedchenko often spent the night in the church on the floor, wrapped in a cash. And when once I asked him why he was sleeping like that, he replied: “One beggar is sleeping on my bed, and another sleeps on the rug by the bed. I got here. " As one Romanian monk said, there were times when the vessels were wooden, and they were golden. ”

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Metropolitan Anthony Surozhsky: “You wanted to know from me what my first meeting was with God and why did I become a believer? Let's start the conversation with what I know about the meaning of the word "meeting". A meeting is an event denoting a meeting of two people who did not know each other before. Or they knew, but suddenly met at some depths and there were together and one. Once I was struck by the words of one Serb, who said that in Serbian the word “meeting” means joy. And this coincidence of the meeting in the Russian sense of the word and joy seems to me very significant, important and simply beautiful. ”

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Metropolitan Anthony Surozhsky said: “When I just became a priest, one old woman came and said:“ Father, so I have been engaged in Jesus prayer for fourteen years, I’m repeating all the time, and I never felt that God is, what should I do? ” Well, I said: “Contact someone who knows how to pray!” “You know, I asked all the scientists, but they tell me that you are just ordained, maybe you don’t know anything, and you say from your heart ...” I thought: a reasonable old woman in a sense! - and I say: “You know, I’ll tell you from the heart: when to insert a word, since you are talking all the time?” - "What should I do?" I said: “That's what to do. Come to your room, close the door, put the chair more comfortably, so that the lamp is visible with the icon, sit down and fifteen minutes knit in the face of God, just do not think of anything pious and not prayed ... ”My old woman says:“ The old woman says so! ” I replied: "Try it, if you ask me, who does not know ..."

After some time, the old woman came again: “You know what, in fact, it comes out!” And he says: “... I took knitting, sat down and breathed, looked, and for a long time I did not notice that my room was warm and cozy. The lamp was burning; at first all the excitements had not subsided yet; then I started knitting, thoughts began to subside. And suddenly I heard the quiet tick of my knitting needles. I suddenly noticed how quietly around me and then I felt at all that this silence was not at all that this silence was that this silence was not at all. Because there is no noise ... This is not a void, but something I continued to knit further, and suddenly it became clear to me that in the core of this silence-someone: God ... "

So we are: we pray, as if we were doing some work, say, say - and do not hear anything. And we must first listen and realize: “I am.” If you don’t even smell yourself, then how will you see God that he is?!

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The hero of one of the novels Dickens asked the coachman how his thin miserable horse man was pushing to roll a huge Fiakr.
“Ah, sir,” the charioteer answered, “it’s not a horse, but in wheels.” They are so huge, well -lubricated; It is worth starting, starting to rotate, and what remains the horses? She has to run, saving her life. ”
This example was cited by Metropolitan Anthony Surozhsky when he was asked what to do when he does not want to live, they overcome fatigue and despair. “The only thing you can do is to live from obedience, likened this horse,” Vladyka answered. - The wagon still hangs on us, and it is necessary to run, rush forward so that the wagon does not crush. Time will pass, and we will note that we are already running easily, on our own ...
Fulfilling from obedience the incomprehensible will of God, sooner or later we will begin to translate the idea of ​​the Creator, his path with increasing joy and, finally, will enter the fullness of life. For “obedience” does not mean the position of a slave that is submitted. “To obey” first of all means “listening, listening” to the wisdom of God. ”

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Sometimes a person loses faith, because this is his only protection against conscience, ”says Metropolitan Anthony Surozhsky. Here is one story. Vladyka had a familiar father - a very thin, educated person. In the past, he was an atheist, but once he heard a priest from an acquaintance from the emigration:
- And you try, Sasha, to remember when and why you want God to be not.
Sasha returned home puzzled. He went through his mind all his life, and when he reached the age of six, he suddenly began to understand something.
He then lived in one of the cities of Russia, every Sunday was in the church. Parents gave him a penny for a beggar, and for a boy it meant a lot. He entered the temple with the thought that he had done a good deed, and had love.
But once Sasha terribly wanted to buy a horse - it cost only six cents, but my mother refused him money. And then on the next Sunday he decided that if he did not give the beggar six times to the beggar, his dream would come true. And he walked past the unfortunate. Then the second Sunday came, the third. For the fourth time, Sasha took possession of the thought to borrow a penny from a wretched hat. Then you can buy a horse even earlier.
He did so, but suddenly he felt that he could no longer in the Church to stand before God, and hid in some corner. And when once the boy’s brother returned from St. Petersburg with the words that there was no God, Sasha immediately grabbed this idea.
Subsequently, he fenced his unbelief with a wall of philosophy and the most reasonable arguments. Acquaintance with theology did not affect. The wall was growing and was ready to reach the sky when she suddenly collapsed from one honest, loving question of a rural priest. Not the mind needs to be woken up in an atheist, but a conscience.

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“When I lived with my grandmother and mother, mice started in our apartment,” said Metro. Antonius of Sorozhsky. - They ran in regiments, and we did not know how to get rid of them. We did not want to put the mousetraps, because we were sorry for the mice.
I remembered that in the Trebnik there is exhortation of one of the saints wild beasts. There begins with lions, tigers and ends with bugs. And I decided to try. He sat on the bunk in front of the fireplace, put on the epitrachil, took the book and said to this saint: “I don’t believe that something would come of it, but since you wrote it, you, then, believed. I’ll say your words, maybe the mouse will believe, and you pray that it turns out. ”
I sat down. The mouse came out. I crossed her: "Sit and listen!" - And read the prayer. When I finished, I crossed it again: "Now go and tell others." And after that we did not have a single mouse! "


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Metropolitan Anthony Surozhsky once noticed that when Neophy decided to climb the sky, to fasten to half to death and so on, everyone in his house becomes saints, because they are forced to humble themselves and demolish everything from the "ascetic".
There was a time when in childhood he himself simply drove everyone crazy in this state, but one day ...
“I remember,” he says, “somehow I prayed in my room in the most elevated state of mind when my grandmother opened the door and said:" Clean the carrots! " I jumped to my feet and said: "Grandma, don't you see that I was praying?"
Grandma’s answer was very simple:
- I thought that praying was to be in communication with God and learn to love. Here you have a carrot and a knife.