Plant of ritual services

Priest Andrei Mizyuk - about how the church stopped resisting evil

Woe to the world from temptations, for it is necessary to come to the temptations; But woe to the person through whom the temptation comes.

(Matt. 18: 7)

Saratov. On the morning of February 24, 2022, I woke up in a dark from a terrible rumble outside the window. I have not heard him for a long time. Years since the 95th ... I woke my wife, she also heard him. And then I turned on the news, and it darkened in my eyes. This roar has stood for many days and weeks. And we knew where he came from and where. The sky roared by the death that crawled over him to another country. So it began.

I remember then we were all confused. We are many of my friends, friends, colleagues, priests. For some it was a shock. A few days before, everything around was in suspense and waiting, but I did not want to let go of hope, I really did not want to. And then…

No, in those first terrible days there was no victorious and memo for anyone with whom I talked. Everything will happen later.

And that's why it happened, why people changed, what broke in those whom I knew and know - for me a mystery still.

I do not solve her, I do not want to suffer. Each of us still made this or that choice. Those who did not wake up - no. The only difference is what they chose.

In 2014, a roof was changed in our temple of St. Seraphim of Sarov. This was done by Ukrainians, a construction team from Ternopol. They worked painstakingly, diligently. I noticed how their working day began with the fact that before climbing the roof they made a sign of the cross, stopped in front of the icon - and went to work.

Yes, then in the winter, at the beginning of the year, there was still nothing, no return to the “native harbor”, no rallies in the east of Ukraine. And there was already a feeling of broken reality. And the feeling that time is leaving, hopes, a familiar life.

When the roof work ended, they bought a large cake and a bottle of wine and brought it to the refectory. They completed the work. And for them it was also a holiday - the temple is updated! The work of God ...

How did it happen that today from the amvons of such churches of the inhabitants of Ukraine are called “Nazis”, “Satanists”, “foreign”? How did it happen that the conscience of many speakers from the department considered it possible to call what is happening-a feat in which “they believe for your neighbors” and protect some traditional values? How did it become possible to bless this?

In November it will be two years as I left. I look at a lot with the same eyes. The shock has passed, but there is no pain. One overweight on more than nine hundred days of February, in which the weather simply changes.

In my life, a lot has become different. But in it there was a lot of regret about how for many years he lived by inertia, it was thought that everything would work out, that something could be changed with an example. A quiet disagreement, silence, when it was necessary to beat the alarm - and those who were in the silence remained in it. Perhaps now alone.

It is difficult to blame. It is forbidden. With any attempt to perform the court will have to look at yourself and ask yourself questions. And they will be uncomfortable, because when it was necessary to do it according to her, you agreed with her.

A good friend told how Father Georgy Chistyakov ( priest, human rights activist, follower of Alexander Me. - Ed. ) After the Liturgy, he fled to the protest against the war in Chechnya. Only the cassock fluttered.

Other times? More freedom? And was it really more in the church? Didn’t they bite and then on the head whenever you walk in the leg? And what the officials think, but what about the symphony, but finally the times of the Renaissance, traditional values, scrapers, and so on.

The Fatherland included the Church in these asphyxiating embrace, so much so that something completely different fell out of the arms.

We think we thought about it? What happened after the beginning <***>? And nothing. Shock and confusion soon replaced by everyday life. A series of divine services, trembs, everyday life.

When we served in the months of quarantine, we got used to new realities. So here, apparently, are used to it. Then these mandatory (although why would be binding in the liturgical text?) Prayers, something slurred about the "adversaries who want to want" and "Holy Rus'." This not only did not want to pronounce it, but simply the text itself caused a ramp and pain. Where is the call to the world and the ceasefire? Anywhere that the deceased Patriarch Alexy was capable of, who appealed to the world and dialogue in 2008 after the Georgian patriarch? Neither managers in the Moscow Patriarchate, nor we are on parishes, were capable of this. And those who tried to say what happened to them?

Do we serve the word? And what do we say when reading these are all the "chosen" word construction? Would think about it. Who prevented us from living and serving in Chelyabinsk, in Yekaterinburg, in Saransk, in Kazan, in Novorossiysk? Is there someone from Odessa, Dnieper, Mariupol, Kherson, Lugansk and Donetsk interfered with us? We remember that this was the only church with us? Do you now consider her one? What will we say about the temples that are erased from the face of the earth now?

In response to many questions, there are standard explanations about the protection of Donbass. The reconstructor sitting in sewing workshops of the correctional colony, Girkin, honestly admitted that he and his accomplices fired this fire in eastern Ukraine. But who will remember this now?

What have we come to? Where does this desire come from in everything to echoing the nonsense of propaganda, where does the desire to disarm a false policy into holy words? Was there really nothing to restore in our abandoned and forgotten villages? And in the unforgettable too? Is the new temple in the next microdistrict of the Big City is exactly than the priest in the village, where the Liturgy takes place every few months? Is it exactly there, in this sleeping area, they waited for more construction than the arrival of a priest in the village?

We know the answers very well. As to the question of what we did in order to seriously, not loudly, to talk about traditional Christian values ​​and their importance for Russia. Seriously, this means, without fairy tales about the bright past and scarecrow about the dark future, this means honestly about the present. And it is unclear what really was more scared of us: either the present itself, or the word “honestly”.

And there would be honest thought

that years of sermons were spent on construction sites and various kinds of interaction with officials who had not been shaking away from Komsomol and nostalgia, in whom the dedication to stand twice a year with a candle on a special place on the clergy was spelled out in a working schedule.

And the present, in which the Church is perceived as a plant of ritual services or a naphthalin corner, completely bothered almost none of the participants in all this activity that creates the appearance of a symphony.

Is it scary to be a shame for the fact that we tell and repeat the sly tale of the enemies who were giving up on the Fatherland from the amvon, and whether we recall that among those who are now dying are co -religionists. At least on the fact of baptism.

What will we say to those who ask us uncomfortable questions? What did the church once again save? And from what?

Or did something worse in the world than the gates of hell, which, according to Christ, will not overcome it? Is it really the snort and outrage of the state?

The repressive car earned and spun, killing and breaking people's lives. What are we? We again hold round tables and give letters to the staff of the FSIN? In order to later find out with surprise that in the nourishment of the institutions in the presshats they break and rot people? Is it exactly in all this horror of Ecumenical - we are the Ecumenical Church? Or is it already easier and more honest to consider itself a department for spiritual and patriotic work?

I don't know. I want to not be able to think. And I know that there are many who would also like this. To think about whether the temptation that we deserved grief came through us through us, as it was said in the Gospel. Something must be corrected in yourself. This option is never closed to a person. And God is unconditionally and always saves the Church Himself.

It is difficult, turning into the temple, to say: “Peace to everyone,” when the agenda is completely different. The trouble is that the important and necessary words that were not said could not allow these terrible cemeteries over the horizon.

Could.