Part 3

“No one who has left house or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or lands for my sake and for the gospel will fail to receive a hundredfold now in this time,” and in the age to come “eternal life” (Mk 10:29-30). Why? Because all who have clung to this age are like leaky wells that cannot hold living water, and often perish by a terrible death.

The form of this world passes away like something corruptible, with all its beauty, wealth, sweetness, glory, and honor. Only eternal goods remain—treasures, eternal life, righteousness, love with holiness and peace from God. Turn your heart’s eyes there, go there, “from where help will come” (Ps 120:1).

“Grant that I, too, along with all Your chosen, be a partaker of Your incorruptible goods, which You have prepared for those who love You, O Lord!” Incorruptible goods are ready, yet I do not strive to receive them through faith and hope, through zeal for virtue. Woe is me, O Lord!

We pray and glorify the great saints of God daily, who have left to the Church their prayers in writing; we think their thoughts, we feel their feelings, we grieve over our sins with their sorrow, we strive to rise to their love for our common Creator and God. We are joined with them as one Church, one flock of Christ, and may we be pitied and saved. Only let us not weaken, let us not grow lazy in life, but let us compel ourselves toward repentance and all good deeds. The saints lived, labored, struggled, endured trials, conquered in the name of the Lord the enemies within and without, and were saved. By God’s mercy, so shall we be saved.

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A Christian must not only abhor all sins but must not allow sinful thoughts to approach him. Holiness is the realm of the Christian; without it, a Christian is not a Christian. “Whoever does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him” (Rom 8:9). “Be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy” (Lev 11:44). It is necessary to always repent, always struggle against sin, pray to God for help—and help is ready. Give thanks for it, for it is said: “Without me you can do nothing” truly good (Jn 15:5).

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The saints of God gazed steadfastly with their heart’s eyes upon the future eternal life and strained toward it unwaveringly all their lives. So do you.

Everywhere in the world we see the triumph, strength, joy, and playfulness of life: creeping things, insects, birds, fish of countless kinds, countless animals, beasts, and the king of earthly creatures—mankind; all live, strive toward comfort of life and joy, toward labor. Look how joyfully insects fly and play—butterflies, grasshoppers, flies; birds, fish, kittens, puppies, lambs, calves, foals—and marvel at the joy and triumph of life in them. But this is fleeting life; it does not last long before all this play and joy cease: soon they are no more, yet new ones are born in their place—and so life turns like a wheel. Who gave them and gives all of them life? Life without beginning, eternal, personal, all-wise, all-good—God. But this coveted earthly life with all its goods passes quickly for the wordless creatures and ends for them. Therefore the all-good personal Life has willed and determined to give to the rational human being eternal life in heaven together with God, and for achieving it has given man all the means. This is your goal, O man: strive toward eternal life and eternal joy!

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Draw near to the Savior and God’s Mother as a sincere son or daughter, draw near, I say—reading heartfelt canons, akathists to Jesus the Sweetest and to God’s Mother, draw near also to the saints with fervent prayers and the appointed canons and akathists, and you will not be put to shame; soon you yourself will feel in your heart a caress from heaven from the Holy Spirit. But do not lose heart if your heart is cold through dark temptations from the bodiless enemy. The Lord sees all, and no one goes away empty from Him, and He soon gives each according to his merits. Endure, for it is said: “By your steadfastness save your lives” (Lk 21:19).

When praying to God and the saints, you must compel yourself to set aside all worldly attachments to people and things, or all partiality for people and things, and compel yourself to love everyone as brothers and sisters with all goodwill, as yourself.

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Incessantly, joyfully, and without ceasing the heavenly angels, innumerable in multitude, glorify the Lord Almighty Creator, and so also do the holy people, yet we, earthly and earth-bound, dull, are so lazy at prayer, glorification, and thanksgiving! Because we have grown attached to the earth, to carnal pleasure and laziness, to earthly possessions and various sensual delights. To worthily glorify and love the Creator, it is necessary to uproot sinful self-love, self-centeredness, egoism. “If anyone wants to come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Mt 16:24).

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Long sleep cools the heart and dulls it to prayer. O, how carefully one must yield to sleep. Indulgence in food and drink also cools our heart to prayer.

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Relate yourself to every person sincerely, lovingly, with simplicity of heart, without hypocrisy, regardless of appearance, as you wish that others would treat you. With great reverence and love relate to the saints of God, pray to them, especially to the Mother of God and all the saints. God willing, you will see them face to face in the age to come—their radiance and glory which God has granted them—and will be convinced that you did not honor them in vain and did not call upon them here on earth while in the flesh and in the Church of God, to which they, like you, belong as members of one Body of Christ, whose Head He is.

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“Hallowed be Your name, Your kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Mt 6:9-10). Do you, sinner, wish for holiness sincerely, do you strive for God’s peaceful kingdom (first in yourself and then in all people), seized by the enemy, the destroyer-devil? Do you sincerely want to fulfill God’s righteous, all-good will, and do you ask and pray to God that all people come to know and fulfill the will of our Heavenly Father? We speak these words of the Lord’s Prayer every day without deep understanding of their meaning and throw them like wind, and so there is no good change in us, and we remain the same sinners, careless and wicked.

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With what attention, with what reverence, with what love, peace, and thanksgiving should we always pronounce the name of God and the Lord’s Prayer: “Our Father…,” and all other prayers. God’s name is great, holy, awesome, and for the believer the mere naming of it is a blessing.

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In heaven they receive only the sincere tongue of a faithful, praying, repentant, merciful, and compassionate heart—one that is pure and chaste. From a deceitful heart the Lord turns away His face.

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When you pray before an icon of the Lord or the Mother of God or the saints, ask yourself inwardly: are you sincere, do you gaze with love at the holy icons, with faith, with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your hope? Is your heart sleeping, is your mind asleep?

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When we pray for our neighbors, the Lord looks upon our hearts—whether we sincerely wish salvation and all good for our neighbors as for ourselves. Secondly, whether we sincerely abhor sin and love repentance and virtue. Thirdly, whether we sincerely love the Lord and are wholeheartedly devoted to Him. Fourthly, whether we are angry with anyone or have enmity with anyone.

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“Rejoice, Full of Grace, the Lord is with you” (Lk 1:28). The Lady received all the fullness of grace from the Lord as the Mother (in her humanity) of the all-perfect Creator—the fullness of righteousness, holiness, goodness, mercy and compassion toward sinful and suffering mankind, the fullness of power and strength, blessedness, glory eternal and preeminence over all heavenly powers. She received all ten mysteries of grace, and because of the incomprehensible abundance of grace, like countless waters of the sea, can abundantly pour forth and does pour forth to all who come to Her with faith all graceful help in misfortunes, sorrows, illnesses, and in every sorrowful circumstance. Come therefore to Her with unshakeable faith and hope.

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Turn to the holy and all-powerful prayers of the Mother of God; do not deprive yourself of this grace—Her prayer suffices to appease for all and for you. Amen.

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“Rejoice, Full of Grace, the Lord is with you” (Lk 1:28). All in You is grace, O Lady: and the conception, and the birth, and the upbringing, and the annunciation, and the conception from the Holy Spirit, and the birth of the pre-eternal Infant; and all Your life is full of grace.

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Face to face, mouth to mouth do we, Orthodox Christians, converse with the Lord, the Mother of God, the holy angels, and all the saints. This is what it means according to the Orthodox-Christian custom to pray reverently before the holy icons “in spirit and in truth” (Jn 4:23). This is why we set them in temples and prayer houses (chapels) and in our dwellings. We believe in the closeness of the Lord and His saints to us and that we are one spiritual body with them, one Church, as we have one Head, our Lord Jesus Christ. With such faith in the holy icons and in the Church, will you, iconoclast heretics, cast stones of slanderous condemnation at them? We are right, and you are wrong and false.

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In the life-giving face of the Savior, the Mother of God, the Forerunner, and the saints is depicted the most holy righteousness, goodness, humility, mercy. With what love one must gaze upon the holy icons, the image of the holy Cross, the Gospel and other holy things that remind us of the great deeds and words of God and of the saints! Gaze thus, and do not bow your face to the earth, do not turn away in heart and sight, like Lutherans, Pashkovists, or Jews. Belong to the heavenly Church. You love monuments of people famous for something, you love to look at their portraits and photographs—why don’t you love to look at the faces of the saints? You are inconsistent and very, very foolish, false, and strange.

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Looking at the iconostasis in a church, chapel, or at home, remember the words of the Savior: “Now you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God’s people and members of God’s household” (Eph 2:19). And say: by God’s mercy we, Orthodox and faithful Christians, are fellow dwellers with the Mother of God and all the saints. This is why we use holy icons and honor them, and in them—the originals themselves, that is, the saints themselves—we comprise one assembly, one Church, heavenly and earthly. Honoring them, we remember and honor their deeds out of love for God, their faithfulness and devotion to Him to death, and we ourselves wish to imitate them in faith and self-denial for His name’s sake.

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The Orthodox Christian turns toward the holy icons of the Savior, the Mother of God, angels, and saints to show thereby his faith in their presence, in their closeness to him. In the holy icons we actualize our Orthodox faith; without the holy icons we hang, as it were, in the air, not knowing to whom we pray. When David the prophet prayed to the Lord, he said: “Seek his face evermore” (Ps 104:4); “Your face, Lord, I seek” (Ps 26:8); “The face of the Lord is against evildoers to cut off the memory of them from the earth” (Ps 33:17).

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The holy apostles and the whole innumerable assembly of the righteous and all the saints are heavenly minds and minded on heavenly things, not earthly things: in body they lived on earth, but in heart and mind were in heaven. Pitiable are the Christian communities that do not honor the saints—they deprive themselves of the holy example of their life and their intercession. The Lord Himself teaches us to call upon the saints as our intercessors. “The smoke of the incense, together with the prayers of the saints, went up before God from the angel’s hand” (Apok 8:4). Lutherans, what do you say to this?

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With faith and love I call upon all the holy apostles and prophets and all the saints and I bow to them, and in their faces to the one God who dwells in them and abides in them. I honor in them the unwavering love for the Creator, their holiness, their incorruptible life, the trampling down of all worldly snares by them, their heavenly mindedness, their perfect righteousness, their devotion to the Lord, their obedience to His commandments, their patience, their unshakeable patience in their labors, in their suffering as martyrs for Christ, their steadfastness in the truth, in the dogmas, in the commandments, in all instruction in virtue.

Sorrow takes hold of me about people who do not read God’s Word at all, but read only newspapers and secular literature without discrimination. Woe to them for their ignorance of God’s Word and God’s will concerning them. What account will they give to God at the judgment?

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The bodiless enemies employ all efforts to devalue in our minds and hearts the sayings of God’s Word and the words of church prayers and to give value to worldly, vain books and sheets filled with every worldly sin and temptation (songs, dramatic works, novels, and the like). Some have noticed in themselves how the enemies hindered them from speaking the words of Holy Scripture and familiar prayers, and how much sorrow, despair, darkness they caused them, confusing and killing their hearts (paralyzing them), and how much struggle they had—the most intense—to overcome the enemies and peacefully and sincerely read God’s Word and prayer.

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In our old nature there is a habit, when reading God’s Word or worship books or patristic writings and generally sacred books, sometimes secretly to oppose what is being said—that is, what is being said and written. This is the secret voice of the adversary—Satan, who was the first to learn and taught the fallen spirits and people to resist God, His holy truth and righteousness. Thus I have noticed and notice that even I, in my heart and mind, the devil opposes secretly when I read prayers, canons, stichera, the Creed, and I must struggle and cast him down for these thoughts. O wretched one, away from me, enemy of God’s truth and righteousness! You lead to lies, curses, and death those who listen to you, as you did Adam and Eve.