Photo: spbda.ru
What praises, what hymns soar up to Heaven from the numerous churches of our country today? These are the hymns of our holy faith. They now praise and glorify All the saints who have shone forth in the Russian land from ancient times to the present.
The saints of Russia shine like bright stars in the Church’s firmament. They shine upon us with the light of their spiritual feats, their moods, their holy words and deeds, inspiring us to imitate them. And we, as if standing on an immense meadow spangled with various flowers, don’t know which of the wondrous flowers to approach and which to admire, since it is difficult to behold the spiritual beauty of the myriad of the divine saints of Russia at once.
May the North of our land reveal to us, if only for a moment, the radiant images of Sts. Tryphon of Pechenga, Artemius of Verkola, Simeon of Verkhoturye, James of Borovichi, Zosima and Savvaty of Solovki, and Sergius and Herman of Valaam.
For its part, may the Holy Trinity-St. Sergius Lavra open its tombs with the relics of the righteous of Radonezh and reveal to us among them the ever-memorable faces of the venerable fathers, headed by our beloved Abba of North Russian monasticism—St. Sergius of Radonezh, and his true disciple, St. Nikon.
And who can count all the enumerable local branches from St. Sergius’ root, spirit and asceticism? And may the Russian wonderworkers from Moscow, Kiev, ancient Novgorod, Pskov, Yaroslavl, Kostroma, Chernigov, Tauric Chersonese, Siberia, and the South Russian lands mentally rise up before us from the depths of the centuries!
What can we say about all these Heavenly dwellers for our edification?
First of all, it should be noted that the saints of Russia labored for salvation in an environment of austere, tireless and persistent work. They drew the best content of their souls wholly from living, prayerful and grace-filled communion with God. Their purely national features are the high heroic labor of repentance, sublime Christian compunction, fervent striving for moral truth, profound humility and self-abasement, selfless simplicity, and serving others with their love. Neither their longing to be good, nor their departure from sin, nor their aspiration for morality, nor their desire to become kind precisely through the help of Christ the Savior and chaste through the grace-filled help of the Holy Spirit, has ever faded in them. And at the hour of their death, each of them found his or her soul in the garments of love for God and people, in gentleness of heart, righteousness, and with a pure reflection of the rays of the grace of God in themselves.
Dear brothers and sisters, in hearing these words about the character of the saints of Russia, which of you will not say inwardly: “And I, too, with all my heart thirst for my grace-filled enlightenment and improvement. But the struggle between the Spirit of God and sinful desires is strong inside me, and I am continually torn between good and evil. How I wish I could attain victory over sin and wholly change for the better!”
These words of yours are a sign that you are able to pray for your salvation sincerely. And if you persist in prayer, the Holy Spirit will guide you on the path of salvation, will not cease to pour out His power on you in your struggles with passions, and will not leave you without His help until He brings you to perfect reform. Just minutes of such contrition for sins and penitent prayer will make us all become better, closer to God and further from sin. As clearly as we see daylight, may our memory of God be as clear and our heartfelt pleas to Him as pure.
Like the apple of our eye must we keep inside us a continuous consciousness and sense of our sinfulness and regret for our shortcomings. We must ensure that the feeling of our sinfulness comes from the depths of our souls, and is not brought upon us purely externally by our thoughts or by words we have heard. And if anyone’s soul starts seeing someone else as lower than itself, it should harshly reproach itself for that and ask the Lord’s forgiveness. The foundation of the grace-filled warmth of our hearts is humility. But once humility lessens in us, there comes a cooling in the heart towards God and people. The Lord immediately departs from the soul that considers itself to be something special. That is why it is dangerous to lose consciousness of our spiritual poverty and our true worthlessness. Once we ascribe ourselves value in any respect, things have gone awry. Conversely, he who suppresses evil in himself and does good at every hour, who hopes for salvation from the Lord alone and who, without relying on himself, entirely commends his life to God, always has the Lord as his Helper and Protector. When we give ourselves up to the Lord, He is with us. And then it becomes light inside us, just like in a room with open windows, where sunlight spreads freely.
There is even this a detail in our spiritual experience: When we talk to someone for a long time and get distracted from the awareness of the Lord’s presence with us, we suddenly feel sad. By this sadness, the Lord gives us to understand that He doesn’t like it when we turn our attention away from Him. All the more the Lord abhors when we are proud. Just as bees are driven away by smoke, so the smoke of our pride, self-conceit and self-confidence removes from us the power of God that covers us. Turning our attention from the Lord in pride distorts our whole mood. Then the Lord departs from us, as if saying: “You rely on yourself. So remain with what you place you hope in.”
Our frequent cooling and feelings of God-forsakenness greatly undermine our self-confidence. They teach us to seek God’s help in everything. Seeing that the Lord has departed from our soul and it has lost the sense of grace without Him, each one of us begins to cry out and weep prayerfully, asking the Lord to return to us. And we don’t find peace until the Lord returns to us. Every time the Lord visits someone’s soul, and it is with Him and warmed by Him, it forgets its former inconsolable state.
May the spirit of repentance and humility never be extinguished in us—for saving grace is received from God, but is preserved by humility. Amen.
