5/4/2011
Archpriest Pavel Gumerov
Everyone is susceptible to the midlife crisis: both successful people who have achieved great results and have made a good career, and those people who feel that they have achieved nothing.
A bad mood overcomes you—force yourself, smile, say a kind word, don’t take your irritation out on others. You’re offended by someone, you consider him wrong and yourself innocent—force yourself, show love, and be the first to reconcile.
Pride is the sin of satan, the first passion that appeared in the world even before the creation of men. And the first revolutionary was satan.
St. Theophan the Recluse calls vainglory the “domestic thief.” It creeps up undetected and steals the work that we’ve undertaken for the sake of God and man and the reward for it.
Since a cooldown born of despondency and laziness is often coupled with forgetting God’s benefactions and losing interest in the spiritual life, we have to learn to see the presence of God in all everyday events and thank Him for the gifts He sends us. If despondency is battling us, the first thing to do is to prepare and make a detailed confession and receive Communion.
I’ll say a little about one of the necessary means for battling sorrow and despondency.
Although sorrow can be caused by some kind of grief or affliction, difficult events aren’t causes of sorrow—they only provoke it. The cause is always in the person himself, in how he perceives life’s events. A Christian always has a reason to live—to love God and others. A believer knows that God will never abandon him, that with God he’s not one-on-one with trouble.
It’s not without reason that the Holy Fathers compare the passion of anger, like lust, with fire, flames, a conflagration. Beginning with a small flash, anger can engulf the soul in a matter of minutes and lead to irreparable consequences.
One specialist on marriage and family issues once called anger a killer of love. He said this in relation to family life, but this expression can be applied to human relationships in general. Irritability and anger not only cause conflicts, but also kill the feelings of love, friendship, sympathy, and respect that we have for people.
Virtue doesn’t come by itself. A man who has a disposition towards avarice, miserliness, or greed, should compel himself, force himself to do deeds of mercy, to use his wealth for the good of his soul.
Avarice, love of money, the cult of material values—these are the scourges of our times. Our society is a society of consumption—consumption of material goods, pleasures, and entertainments. And every entertainment requires money.
Any normal man sooner or later understands that the path of licentiousness, permissiveness, and family destruction is a path to nowhere.
Why is the Church so strict about the sin of fornication and what’s the danger of this sin?
Satiety of the stomach not only keeps us from thinking about God and prayer but also makes it very difficult to keep ourselves in purity.
if he reduces his interaction with the media to a minimum. Actually, he’ll gain a lot: clarity of mind, reduction of temptations, and an abyss of free time that can be spent reading good literature, cultural activities, spending time with loved ones, and other necessary things.
St. Theophan advises putting up a shield at the very entrance to the soul after exorcising evil thoughts and not letting them back in: “And to this end, hasten to establish convictions in the soul that are opposite to those upon which the disturbing thought rests.”
Why do we repent if the Lord already knows all our sins? Yes, He knows, but He wants us to acknowledge them.
Many consider ascetic experiences and the battle with the passions to be purely monastic matters: “We’re weak people,” they say, “living in the world. We’ll make do as we are.” This, of course, is a profound delusion. Every Orthodox Christian without exception is called to the daily battle, the war with the passions and sinful habits.
Usually both spouses are burdened by the situation they’re facing and want to reconcile, but they don’t know how to do it.
Rating: 9.9|Votes: 51
Pravoslavie.ru asked several pastors to give a few words about what is the main thing, in their view, that should fill a Christian’s life in the days of Great Lent, to offer something from personal experience, to help those Christians engulfed by cares to determine their spiritual program—the maximum and minimum—during this time.
Rating: 9.9|Votes: 35
What forms of leisure are preferable in the Fast, to not lose your spiritual mindset? What to do if your name’s day or birthday falls during the Nativity Fast? Can we invite guests, and what should we feed them? Are the Fast and holidays compatible in general?
Archpriest Pavel Gumerov, Nadezhda Khramova, Farida Savelyeva
Rating: 9.2|Votes: 18
Divorces are a real disaster of our times. Broken lives, the loss of any hope of building personal happiness, unhappy children who are very likely to imitate the behavior pattern of adults, the inevitable diminishing of the role of family and family values in the society—these are the most evident consequences of divorces.
Rating: 8.7|Votes: 6
he task of family as “the little church” is the same as that of the universal Church—to enter into the Kingdom of God the Father together. It is not without reason that the apostle Paul says: Charity never faileth (1 Cor. 13:8). An attribute of true love is that it lasts forever.
Rating: 8.2|Votes: 15
Archpriest Paul Gumerov speaks about how family roles should be distributed, who should be the head, what are the responsibilities of husbands and wives, what a wife should do if her husband doesn’t want to take responsibility for the welfare of his family, and how husbands can become true husbands.
Rating: 10|Votes: 2
Archpriest Paul Gumerov speaks about what is most important in family life, which rules are necessary to obey to live long and happily, and what to follow and what to avoid.
Rating: 8.3|Votes: 4
Why is it necessary to get crowned in the Church? What is the symbolism of the rings and crowns? Why do the bride and groom stand facing east during the crowning? What does the phrase “to love as you love yourself” mean? What is the proper understanding of the words: “A wife should fear her husband?”
Rating: 8.4|Votes: 5
What helps to overcome difficulties in the first year of marriage? What habits should become the norm? Is it worth it to fear conflicts? How should we build relationships with our parents? And why should we study psychology? Archpriest Paul Gumerov speaks on all of this in this installment of our conversation.
Rating: 9.5|Votes: 11
Why is the candy and flowers phase of a relationship so important? What qualities are necessary for a future spouse—husband and wife? What must they discuss with one another? How to deal with the inadequacies of our chosen one?
Rating: 8.7|Votes: 9
The first conversation in the cycle is devoted to problems that young men and women ask themselves as they consider marriage: what is the purpose of marriage from the point of view of a Christian, how to choose a partner in life, whether to blindly succumb to the feeling of infatuation, whether they should necessarily get married, and whether marriage with the heterodox and others is possible for an Orthodox Christian.
Rating: 9.7|Votes: 6
Well, and now the most important thing. It is not enough to simply learn to bottle up anger and hold it back. This is important, but not enough.
Rating: 7|Votes: 9
In order to enter the fight with anger in your soul, to stop this “killdozer”, you must first of all recognize the danger of this passion.
Rating: 3|Votes: 18
Not long ago I heard about an incident that once shook America and became known far beyond the borders of the United States. This story took place in 2004 in a small town in Colorado. This episode inspired me to turn once again to the theme of anger and our struggle with it.
Irina Akhundova
I have witnessed the happy resolution of a very serious, pre-divorce, critical family situation more than once, and remarked that as a rule, when the spouses really succeed in getting out of this situation, they succeed in falling in love with each other again, they begin life all over again and forget all their resentments, they leave all their negative baggage behind, and they build their relationships anew, using the sad experience that they had.
Priest Pavel Gumerov
Rating: 7.6|Votes: 32
Once a certain priest went to visit the now reposed elder Archpriest Nicholai Guryanov and told him about the sorrows and problems he was having. Fr. Nicholai heard him out and said, “Rejoice!” “What is there to rejoice about?” The priest thought to himself.
Priest Pavel (Gumerov)
Rating: 7.9|Votes: 20
Let us begin with an explanation of the word, chastity. In Russian, the word is tselomudrie, which means literally, "integrity of thought," and consists not only in physical preservation (one can remain a virgin in body, but commit terrible acts of depravity in the mind; and to the contrary—one can live in a pious marriage and preserve his or her soul from sin), but also in a proper, wholesome, undisturbed view of the opposite sex, with purity of soul.
