Whenever someone walks into the church, I, a sinner, still find myself trying to guess their story. Not like a fortune-teller reading Tarot cards, of course, but more like an experienced paramedic who can tell what’s wrong with a patient just by the way he walks.
That red-faced fellow has probably come to atone for last night’s office party. That elderly woman with the shopping bag is about to explain, in painstaking detail, exactly where she should place a candle for her grandson the programmer. And that lady with the serene, slightly glazed expression and the suspicious little booklet, How to Negotiate with the Universe, sticking out of her handbag—ah, now that’s my favorite diagnosis. The diagnosis is: Natalia.
Natalia first appeared in our parish about two years ago. She didn’t drift in or timidly slip through the door—she entered with the firm stride of someone who knew the value of both wholesale building supplies and the salvation of the soul. She was about forty-five, though she was in excellent shape: yoga, celery smoothies, lunar-calendar detoxes, and absolutely no sugar.
Instead of a prayer book, she was often carrying an expensive leather-bound planner in which she recorded—I know it because she told me herself—her “weekly affirmations” and “gratitude practices.” I liked her immediately. Because she was a perfect mirror. Looking at her, I saw all of us, only in a more concentrated form.
Natalia’s first confession resembled the presentation of a business proposal. She came up to me, folded her hands in front of her, and began, enunciating every word with deliberate precision: “Father, I’d like to make a confession. But I should warn you right away: I’m spiritual, not religious. I respect all traditions, but I can’t stand dogmatism.”
I sighed. If a confession begins with the words, I should warn you, chances are the person hasn’t come to repent. They’ve come to brief you.
“I’ve heard confession here is like a psychotherapy session—only free?”
“You see,” she continued, “I’ve spent a long time searching for my path. I’ve been into Buddhism, Taoism, and I even attended an Osho retreat in India. But eventually I realized that all roads lead to the same summit. Christianity just happens to suit my mentality a little better. Besides, I’ve heard confession here is basically like psychotherapy—only free.”
Lord, have mercy. I had the distinct impression that somewhere behind me my Guardian Angel gave a quiet hiccup. Straightening my epitrachelion, I asked, “Natalia, have you been baptized?”
“Yes, as a child. My grandmother had me baptized in secret because my parents were Communists. But I think baptism is just an initiation. After that, it’s up to each person to work on their own energy.”
“I see. And what is it that you’d like to confess?”
“Well, I think I need to cleanse my karma. Lately my financial flow has been blocked, and my love life has completely stagnated. I suppose someone has put a curse or the evil eye on me. Could you perform an exorcism?”
I closed my eyes. Then I opened them again. She hadn’t disappeared.
She stood there, perfectly serious, waiting for me to start beating a shaman’s drum and drive out the evil spirits of economic recession.
“Natalia,” I said as gently as I could, “the Church is not an esoteric center. Confession is not karma cleansing. It is repentance. It is mourning over one’s sins.”
“But I don’t have any sins!” she exclaimed with such genuine surprise that for a moment I almost believed her. “I’m a good person. I didn’t kill anyone, I don’t steal. I even give up my seat on public transportation. I just need to restore my energy.”
There it was—the sweet poison of our age. The greatest heresy of our time: the conviction that one is “a good person.” That one doesn’t need a Savior, only a bit of cosmetic work on the soul. The plaster has cracked here, the wallpaper is peeling there—we’ll patch it up. Meanwhile, beneath the wallpaper the mold has already eaten through the walls to their very foundation, and we don’t even notice.
I tried to explain that being “a good person” is not enough. That without Christ there is no salvation. That karma is not an Orthodox Christian concept. She listened politely and nodded, but I could read the verdict in her eyes: “Poor priest. What a narrow worldview he has. Fossilized in his dogmas. That Buddhist monk understood me after only a few words.”
She left, promising to “think about it.” To my surprise, she came back. In fact, she began attending church regularly—albeit in in her own way. During the Divine Liturgy she stood with the expression of someone attending a symphony concert—pleasant, uplifting, but rather puzzled as to why the conductor kept waving his arms so energetically. During the Cherubic Hymn, while we were praying for the transformation of the Holy Gifts, she would close her eyes and—as she later told me herself—practice “womb breathing.” When it came time for Holy Communion, she never approached the Chalice because she “didn’t want to disturb her energetic balance.” After every service, however, she would invariably leave a small jar of honey on the memorial table “for the spirits of the bees that cleanse the space.” To this day I have no idea where the “spirits of the bees” came from in an Orthodox church. Presumably they had flown in from some variety of Slavic neopaganism.
“Father, what’s that ceremony with the oil? Is it for cleansing the chakras?”
But the crowning moment of my pastoral bewilderment came during a conversation about the Sacrament of Holy Unction. Natalia approached me with a question.
“Father, what’s that ceremony with the oil? Is it for cleansing the chakras?”
My eye twitched. Whenever I hear the word chakras inside a church, my eye always twitches.
“Natalia,” I said, struggling to remain calm, “it’s the Sacrament of Holy Unction. In it, we prayerfully invoke God’s grace for the healing of both soul and body. It has nothing whatsoever to do with chakras. We don’t have chakras.”
“What do you mean, we don’t?” she exclaimed, throwing up her hands. “They’re part of the anatomy of the subtle body! There’s the crown chakra, the heart chakra, the sacral chakra... As for you, Father, your sacral chakra is definitely blocked. You seem so tense.”
Lord, grant me patience. And a sense of humor. Especially a sense of humor, because without it a man could lose his mind here.
“Natalia,” I said, taking her gently by the hand the way one takes the hand of a child who’s about to stick his fingers into an electrical outlet, “you see, we have a physical body. We have a soul. We have a spirit. But there is no such thing as a ‘subtle body’ or a ‘sacral chakra.’ Those ideas were invented by people who have never read the Holy Fathers.”
“But this is ancient wisdom!” There was steel in her voice now. “Yoga is five thousand years old!”
“And the Church is two thousand years old. Besides, Christ didn’t practice yoga—He cast out demons and raised the dead. There’s quite a difference.”
She pouted, took offense, and disappeared for a month.
When she returned, however, she didn’t come to me. Instead, she stopped by the candle counter and informed my assistant that she had attended a seminar entitled Orthodoxy and Reiki. She now knew for certain that Jesus Christ had been the first Reiki master and that the Apostles had been His disciples.
When I heard this, I quietly walked into the altar and stood before the Holy Table for about five minutes in complete silence, trying to digest this remarkable piece of “theology.” I believe my Guardian Angel was quietly weeping in the corner.
Still, Natalia was a kind, sincere, energetic heretic. She organized a parish discussion group called, “Spiritual Renewal through Acceptance.” At their meetings they would read an Akathist, then share their “insights” and lay out angel cards. She brought amulets purchased from some shamanic website for me to bless and was deeply offended whenever I refused. She even tried to place a Tibetan singing bowl on the kliros “to enhance the vibrations.”
Then the moment of truth arrived. The very moment, I think, for which the Lord had permitted all of this to happen. Natalia had a daughter. She was the only person in the world for whom Natalia would do absolutely anything. And the girl fell seriously ill. The illness was so grave that the doctors could do little more than shrug their shoulders. In such situations people usually say, “Medicine has done all it can. Now all that’s left is to hope for a miracle.”
Natalia decided to work miracles herself. She exhausted every remedy in her arsenal. First she paid for a “karma diagnosis” from a well-known online Tarot reader. The reader declared that her daughter was suffering from “an ancestral curse passed down the maternal line” and that removing it would require a series of cleansing sessions costing one hundred and fifty thousand rubles. Natalia paid. The cleansings accomplished nothing.
Next she visited an “Orthodox wise woman”—yes, such people unfortunately exist, and they disgust me more than anyone else, because they cloak themselves in the name of God like wolves in sheep’s clothing. The woman declared that the girl’s curse had to be “rolled out with an egg.” They rolled it out. It didn’t help.
Then came acupuncture, homeopathy, bioenergetic massage, the Buteyko breathing method, three spiritual retreats, five Tarot readings, and one extremely expensive “destiny matrix” prepared by a man who listed his profession as “certified magi.” Nothing helped. Her daughter continued to fade.
It suddenly dawned on her that in two years of “spiritual practices” she had never once addressed God directly.
Then, one night at three o’clock in the morning, Natalia came to the church. The doors were locked, so she sat down on the steps and began to weep. I learned about it only later from the watchman. There she sat in the rain, crying—truly crying, without affirmations or visualizations. As she later confessed to me, it suddenly dawned on her that in two years of “spiritual practices” she had never once addressed God directly. She had bargained with the Universe, cleansed her karma, negotiated with the “energies of abundance,” lit candles “to attract good fortune”—but she had never once fallen to her knees and simply said, “Lord, help me. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to pray. I am nobody. I am nothing. But Thou art God. Just help me.”
And there, on those rain-soaked steps, she finally did—for the first time in her life. Without a memorized prayer. Without the Our Father—which she never knew to the end because she always lost her concentration by the second petition. Without meditation or “connecting to the egregore.”
Just a cry. Just tears. And then she came to see me. No planner. No pamphlet. Only red eyes and trembling hands.
“Father,” she said quietly, “all this time I thought I was spiritual. I thought I was finding my own path to God. After all, I hadn’t stolen, I hadn’t killed anyone, I hadn’t wished anyone harm. I wanted to do what was right. But it turns out I was simply afraid. Afraid to trust. Afraid that if I surrendered myself completely to God, I’d lose control. But now I see that I never had any control in the first place. It was all an illusion. A puff of smoke. A soap bubble that burst at the very first gust of wind.” She fell silent. So did I.
Then she looked up and asked the question she should have asked two years earlier. “Will you teach me how to pray? I don’t know anything. I thought I knew everything, but I know nothing.”
And I, a sinful priest, standing before this broken woman who had suddenly become so utterly real, began to weep. Because this is precisely what the Lord expects from us. Not our “spirituality.” Not our chakras or affirmations. Not our “destiny matrices” or karma cleansings. He desires our honesty. Our poverty of spirit. Our acknowledgment that we are bankrupt, possessing nothing of our own. “Glory to God,” I said, wiping away my tears. “Now you’re on the right path.”
So we began to pray together. Or rather, we began to learn how to pray—because I myself have not yet learned perfectly. We started with the Our Father. But now she pronounced every word thoughtfully, weighing its meaning. The hardest words for her were: “Thy will be done.” “You mean,” she asked, “I have to accept that my daughter may die?” “I mean,” I replied, “that you must entrust her to the One Who loves her even more than you do. Even if you cannot understand it. Even if it frightens you.”
We prayed every day. She began to confess—not “bad karma,” but actual sins: judging others, pride, believing herself wiser than the Church, seeking salvation everywhere except from God. She wept during confession. Those were tears of repentance. And they have a very different fragrance.
What became of her daughter? I’ll say only this: the girl began to recover. Slowly. Painfully. But she recovered.
The doctors spoke of “a delayed response to treatment.” Natalia and I knew that it wasn’t the treatment. Or rather, it was—but a different kind of treatment.
Today, Natalia is an ordinary parishioner. No more “spirits of the bees.” No Tibetan singing bowls. Every now and then she still catches herself saying something like “energy flow,” but she immediately stops, blushes, and makes the sign of the Cross. She threw away all her Tarot cards, all her amulets, and all her books on “positive thinking,” replacing them with the Gospel and the Psalter. At first it was hard. She went through withdrawal, you might say—a kind of spiritual withdrawal. She told me that during the first few weeks without meditation she felt naked and defenseless. Before, she had enjoyed the illusion of control. She believed her rituals governed reality. Now she found herself one on one with God, and that was frightening. Because you cannot command God. You can only ask Him.
Not long ago she said something that struck me deeply. “Father, I’ve only just realized that I wasn’t spiritual at all—I was superstitious. I thought faith meant knowing the password and pressing the right buttons in the right order so that you’d receive your prize. I kept pressing the buttons—‘meditation,’ ‘mantra,’ ‘cleansing,’ ‘ritual’—and waited for the machine to dispense happiness. But God isn’t a machine. He’s alive. And faith is a relationship. Which means everything that relationships entail: crises, disappointments, silence, perseverance—and love.”
Now she found herself one on one with God, and that was frightening. Because you cannot command God. You can only ask Him.
As I listened to her, I found myself thinking, Lord, she’s just summarized half of the theology of the Holy Fathers—and she doesn’t even realize it. How often we who call ourselves believers remain pagans at heart. We look for incantations instead of dialogue. We want an instruction manual instead of God. We’re afraid to surrender ourselves into the hands of the living God because that means relinquishing control. And we love control. We love believing that we are the architects of our own happiness, that we hold the keys to the universe, that if we only “visualize” correctly and “work through” our issues, everything will happen according to our faith.
But faith is not a technique. It is throwing yourself into the abyss with the certainty that Someone will catch you. Natalia learned that. Through pain. Through fear. Through the collapse of her entire “spiritual empire.” Now when I look at her—an ordinary woman, imperfect, sometimes grumbling, sometimes laughing—I see a miracle. The miracle of a soul brought back to life. Out of the ashes of superstition and self-deification, a living person has arisen. Not a saint—no. But someone real. Someone honest before God and before herself.
And now, whenever I hear someone begin a confession with the words, “Father, my karma...” I no longer roll my eyes. I smile. Because I know that the Lord will reach them as well. Not through sermons. Not through rebukes. But through love and through suffering. Through circumstances that will shatter their house of cards.
For our God is a jealous God. He will not allow Himself to be confused with the Universe, with “energy,” with an “egregore,” or with the “cosmic mind.” He desires to be the one and only Lord of our hearts—not one item in a collection, not another exhibit in a museum of spiritual practices, but the One to Whom we run when there is nowhere left to fall.
“And karma...” Natalia said to me just the other day. “Father, there is no such thing as karma. There is only God’s providence and our freedom. And when I finally understood that, I could breathe again.”
So, my dear friends, let us breathe again. And let us live—not with “energies,” but with God. As for the “spirits of the bees”—well, let them fly back to their hive. They have no place in the church.
