Yakov Krotov: Christmas Freedom

Demand gives rise to a proposal only when the manufacturer is not free.

The most tragic case is despotism. There is no demand for freedom, there is a demand for the philistine life, but such a philistine life so that it is, as it were, not by philistine, but even noble, human -loving.

Great - despotism has a recipe. We need to lose money that the layman pays for medicine, spend on bombs, throw these bombs on the townsfolk, and present to the survivors of the victims of bombing. Look: a boy without a leg, and there is no money for a prosthetics! To donations, citizens! Citizens are quite sacrificed. Money, of course, is a pity, but why not buy peace of mind? I sacrifice - therefore, I exist in the normal world where there are problems and there are ways to solve problems. There is a civil initiative from below, there is self -organization, that is, it seems, we generally have freedom!

Dudks! Is Jesus by chance in his whole life, nobody sacrificed a penny? He did not call to sacrifice - he called to distribute the property to the poor, and this is a significant difference. It’s like throwing money into the fire. And very often - into the fire of the war, into a fire that will only flare up more.

Demand for spiritual peace in itself is a great thing. Like the liver - a great thing until a crustacean has started up there. Problems begin when there is a demand for calm, but there is no demand for freedom. What is the demand for freedom? And what is the "demand" in general? This is not when they go with the laziness along the Christmas bazaar and choose gifts. It’s like libido, when you want sex so much, you want sex so that it is impossible ... Just rush to the marble statue.

Freedom is born because freedom is free, and freedom wants to freely be born and be with people

Demand for kindness - not when you unfasten several blood banknotes to help the baby, and when you pour your head in the wall, so that the country has good and free medicine for everyone. Demand for freedom-not when you rejoice that you can drive abroad without the permission of the party committee, and when you are ready to unite with another (and the “other” is always not very pleasant and usually not very understandable and not too reliable a person-but still unite) to build freedom, and not receive it from the casing table, crumbs.

The demand for kindness without freedom, the demand for security without law, the demand for stability without justice, the demand for knowledge without conscience is the holiday of Satan, the Christmas of the Antichrist.

But the Christmas of freedom is possible. Freedom is not born because it was in great demand - if so, freedom would be slavery, human fiction. Freedom is born because freedom is free, and freedom wants to freely be born and be with people.

Freedom itself forms demand, overcoming the resistance of both slaveholders and slaves. But why be a slaveholder or slave? That is, it does not quite depend on a person whether he is a slave or not, but it depends only on a person whether to accept an offer from freedom or not. And that man who accepts uninvited, uninvited freedom as his child, although freedom is not an orphan and not a cripple and can do without us. We cannot do without her. We cannot and should not, and do not wait until a request for freedom is formed in us. It is enough to listen to how freedom requests us to the holiday of Christmas - his and ours.

Yakov Krotov - historian and priest, author and host of the Radio Liberty program "from a Christian point of view"

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