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As Elder Ambrose wrote, “tobacco enfeebles the soul, multiplies and strengthens the passions, darkens the mind, and destroys bodily health by a slow death.”
One of his spiritual daughters confessed:
“Batiushka! I smoke, and it torments me.”
“Well,” the Elder answered her, “it’s not a huge problem if you can quit.”
“That’s just it,” she says, “the trouble is that I can’t quit!”
“Then it’s a sin,” the Elder said, “and you must repent of it, and you must break free from it.”
In Optina Monastery, they used to speak about how intolerant Archbishop Gregory (Mitkevich), who headed the Kaluga Diocese from 1851 to 1881, was toward smokers.
Archbishop Gregory (Mitkevich) As Elder Nektary said:
In the days of Archbishop Gregory, a Spirit-filled man and lover of monasticism, the following occurred. A seminarian from Kaluga, who graduated as valedictorian and was personally known to Vladyka due to his outstanding gifts, was to prepare for ordination to one of the best positions in the diocese.
He went to the Archbishop for a blessing and to learn the date of his ordination. The Archbishop received him with exceptional kindness, spoke with him graciously, and having shown him fatherly affection, let him go, telling him the date of his ordination. However, before dismissing the candidate, he made sure to ask:
“Brother, do you smoke?”
“No, Your Eminence,” the man replied, “I do not.”
“Well, that’s good,” the Archbishop exclaimed joyfully, “what a fine fellow you are! Well then, prepare yourself, and may the Lord bless you!”
Then the candidate bowed to the ground before the hierarch, as is customary. His coat flew open, and cigarettes began falling one after another onto the floor from his inside breast pocket.
The Archbishop flushed with indignation.
“What possessed you to lie to me?” he exclaimed in great anger. “To whom did you lie? When did you lie? While preparing to serve God in holiness and truth?... Get out! There’s no place for you and there never will be...”
And with that, he drove from his sight the liar who had lost his trust forever.
***
Sergei Alexandrovich Nilus The religious writer Sergei Alexandrovich Nilus (1862–1929), who lived at Optina Monastery at the beginning of the twentieth century, once wrote about himself: “I continue my mental struggle with the vice of smoking, but so far unsuccessfully. But I must give up this vile and foolish habit: I feel it destroying my health, a gift of God, and that’s a sin. I must break free from it, but how? I’m comforted by the words of our elders, who promised me deliverance from this sin, ‘when the time comes.’”
In his journal, the writer recorded, “I had a severe attack of a suffocating cough last night. Serves me right! It’s all from smoking, which I can’t seem to quit. I’ve been smoking since third grade, and have so thoroughly saturated myself with this accursed nicotine that it’s probably become an integral part of my blood. I need a miracle to get me out of the clutches of this vice—I lack the resolve to do so. I’ve tried to quit smoking; I gave it up for two days, but I was overcome by such anguish and bitterness that this new sin became worse than the other. Fr. Barsanuphius forbade me to even try such things, instead limiting my daily allotment to fifteen cigarettes (I used to smoke endlessly).
“‘Not all at once, not all at once,’ the Elder told me. ‘Everything in its own time. Your hour will come, and you won’t smoke anymore.’
“Elder Joseph told me to pray to the Holy Martyr Boniface and said, ‘Hope, don’t despair. In due time, God willing, you’ll quit!’“Fr. Anatoly said the same thing and almost in the same words. And still, I keep smoking and smoking, even though my smoker’s cough is tearing my insides to shreds.
“There was an instance, in Sarov, at the spring of St. Seraphim, when I was healed for some time of my cough, but I didn’t quit smoking, although my Sarov spiritual father fervently insisted on it—and the sickness from which I suffer so painfully came back.”
***
Elder Ambrose wrote in detail to Alexei Stepanovich Mayorov about how to rid oneself of the pernicious passion of smoking. In a letter dated October 12, 1888, he advised the following spiritual remedies: “Confess all your sins in detail, for your whole life starting from age seven, receive Holy Communion, and stand and read the Gospel daily, one chapter or more. And when anguish strikes, read again until it passes. If it strikes again, read the Gospel again. Or instead, make thirty-three full prostrations in private, in memory of the Savior’s earthly life and in honor of the Holy Trinity.”
When Alexei received the letter and read it, he lit a cigarette as usual. However, he unexpectedly got a severe headache and an aversion to tobacco smoke. The next day, he tried to smoke several times but couldn’t do it. And thus he broke free from smoking. When he came to Optina Monastery to thank Elder Ambrose for deliverance from this severe affliction, the Elder touched his aching head with his staff, and his headache went away.
