Introduction
In our modern life, in the reality surrounding us, there is nothing that could inspire Christ's faithful, as there was in ancient times: the conversion of entire nations to the true faith, the flourishing of monasticism, zeal for holy Orthodoxy. On the contrary, we see around us things that can cause us to lose heart and give up. One might ask, why are there no great saints today, like the ancient saints? Historically, this is quite understandable. There was the apostolic era, a time when entire nations did not yet know the true faith, and apostles were sent to convert them. In our time, virtually the entire world has heard of Christ, and very few completely pagan tribes remain on earth that have not been reached by the Word of God. We occasionally hear of the preaching of Orthodoxy to the wild tribes of East and Central Africa. But in most parts of the world, people are spiritually and morally exhausted and worn out. They've heard of Christianity before, but now they're bored and tired of it. It's hard to be inspired by all this. However, here and there, a few converts appear who see something fresh in Christianity, something different from the common perception. And yet, there's very little, very little, that inspires in this world when viewed through the eyes of Orthodoxy.
1. Conditions of modern life
Of course, there are certain reasons for all this.
Living conditions in the modern world are very different from those of the past. The very phenomenon of apostasy, the phenomenon of falling away from the truth, lies in the fact that people cannot perceive the Gospel with a fresh mind. They have already heard it and are inoculated against it. Therefore, very few of them, having heard the preaching of Orthodoxy, convert to it.
Another reason, another characteristic feature of the spirit of the times, different from the past, is the Mickey Mouse atmosphere. Seriousness is what's missing from the spirit of the times. And this lack of seriousness has become a habit and a way of life: relax, take everything lightly, nothing important happens; no matter what happens, don't take it to heart.
The youth of our time are absorbed in the fantastical world of television. Our entire spiritual life, even our religious views, are sometimes influenced by this atmosphere. In Florida, there lives a very honest, very serious Protestant fundamentalist. He owns a large plot of land right next to Disneyland. And he intends to build on this land an exact replica of the Temple of Jerusalem in order to distract Disneyland visitors from the worldly and attract them to the spiritual, but... on the same level. Visitors will ooh and aah, because it will be something like those magical castles they saw at Disneyland. This whole atmosphere—this whole unreal movie atmosphere—is not only in the spirit of the times; it has entered our homes. It influences how seriously we take life, and how we raise children. However, children are no longer raised. The very idea that they need to be raised, that they need to be nurtured in a certain spirit and principles—that very idea is missing. They grow naturally, undergoing all the influences of the surrounding world, and the result is something very frivolous. This is the main reason why, when children grow up, many of them simply go crazy, join various wild and horrific religions, become drug addicts, criminals, and commit many insane acts. As children, they did not experience real, earthly life, either spiritually or simply in terms of a serious approach to living day by day. This is one of the main reasons that makes our lives so different from the past and much more difficult for spiritual work.
Another reason is modern household conveniences, which undoubtedly lead to depersonalization, dehumanization, and encourage people to worry less about each other and more about things, machines, and comfort devices. The very idea of a telephone means you can immediately contact someone to send them a message—and this, too, is a dehumanizing factor. If you have to travel a long distance to see someone, your state of mind will be different than if you simply dial a phone number. All this makes our times very different from those of the past and greatly complicates any spiritual activity, be it apostolate, missionary work, the ordinary spiritual life of a layperson, monastic asceticism, and so on.
Moreover, there is something else in the atmosphere of our times that we Orthodox should bear in mind: the power of tradition. If we decide that everything the Church gives us is already complete, self-contained, self-sufficient, requiring no effort on our part—that is, something we can take for granted—such an attitude is spiritually deadening. Thus, anything lofty requires struggle, requires effort to achieve. This is one of the reasons why modern conveniences lead to depersonalization. The attempt to make everything in the world more convenient than God created it deprives the world of the element of struggle, which is the fabric of life.
For all the above reasons, the modern atmosphere is oppressive for spiritual life. Here's an example of a realistic view of life: the worst people simply descend into sinful lives, while the best lose their meaning in life due to a lack of spirituality. There's nothing left to strive for, everything has been taken away, materialism triumphs, there's no hope left for the world, and "the beast is coming to be born"—the Antichrist is coming. The world is hopelessly spiraling downward, and there's no way to stop this downward spiral.
2. Timeless spiritual life
All these are the negative aspects of our reality, which make up a significant portion of the atmosphere we are forced to breathe.
On the other hand, we have the Revelation of Orthodoxy, that is, the Revelation of God to His Church. This Revelation, given to us for two thousand years, is very rich. It includes the testimony of Holy Scripture and the writings of the Holy Fathers. It helps us develop a specific spiritual perspective, a specific law of spiritual life. Spiritual life and its goals do not change with the times. We know that from the first preaching of the Gospel until now, citizens of the same city have gathered from all corners of the world to become children of the Kingdom of Heaven. All citizens of this city speak the same language, all understand each other, because they have lived the same life in Orthodoxy, endured the same struggle according to the laws of spiritual life.
The Holy Fathers spoke of the end times as very weak, when there would be no such great signs as those performed in the early apostolic times and by the first monks in the desert, when many miracles were performed. The great Fathers raised the dead, and many miraculous phenomena occurred. And these same Holy Fathers asserted that a time would come when such wondrous miracles would cease, that before the end of the world there would be almost nothing similar, that those who would walk the path of salvation would be in no way different from others, except that somehow the struggle against all these temptations would not die within them. Simply preserving the living spark of the true Christian faith, without performing miracles or anything special, would already make them, if they endured to the end, as great or even greater than those great Fathers who performed extraordinary miracles.
Thus, in our time, external activity for Orthodox Christians seems to be quite limited compared to times past. This seems to be true. And yet, internal spiritual work is as possible as ever for those who are willing to withdraw from the struggle. And indeed, looking around, we see astonishing examples: St. John of Kronstadt , who performed thousands of miracles—perhaps more miracles than anyone else in the history of the Church; St. Nektarios in Greece, a most humble man, despised for the poor management of his diocese, but a miracle worker, especially after his death; and our Archbishop John [Blessed St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco (1896–1966). – Ed.], who lived on this very land, walked upon it, blessing the surrounding area, especially blessing it with the Kursk Icon of the Mother of God. And we are convinced, looking at these people and seeing in them the pillars of spiritual life, that it is possible to be an ascetic even in our weak times.
3. Don't be blind
All this allows us to draw some practical conclusions regarding the qualities necessary for a true spiritual life. First, we must be able to see things as they are; that is, we must not be blind, not strive, and not live blindly, oblivious to what is happening in the world. We must recognize that we live in a time of apostasy, that there are many people in the world who call themselves Christians but are not Christians; they are very diverse and often hostile to each other and to us. We must know that it cannot be that they are all right and on the right path. We know from history what a multitude of distortions, erroneous views, and incorrect actions have been mixed into Christianity. We are witnessing a terrifying revolutionary democratic movement in the modern world—a movement completely alien to Christianity, the goal of which is the construction of a worldwide, God-fighting empire, the first herald of which is communism. Moreover, this movement is widespread not only among non-believers, not only among non-Orthodox, but also among the faithful themselves. Looking around, we see that many Orthodox are simply completely worldly and don't think about the higher aspects of their faith. They treat it as something self-evident. They seem to be saying, "In our religion, everything established is carried out automatically. There's always a priest somewhere. If he's not in this city, he's in another. He has the Sacraments and Holy Communion. We simply go to him and receive everything we need. Then we return home. That's it... And our religious needs are satisfied."
Reading about the lives of Christians in the past, we see that even the most simple believers didn't consider this sufficient. They always did something beyond this automatic level. They rose very early in the morning. In every village, daily services were held. The hours began at four or five o'clock; people woke up and went to church every morning, and in the evening, to the evening service. Reading the lives of many saints, we learn about the feeling with which they listened to the ringing of church bells as children. If a child showed a particular zeal for God, they would often be the first to rise in the morning and wake their parents to go to the service. If the father couldn't go because he had to work in the fields, the child would wake the mother and go to church with her. Sometimes he would go alone. The entire atmosphere was permeated with the spirit of the church. And our atmosphere is permeated with the world. In the entire world, we won't find many places where even daily services are held. People are losing the very need for daily church services. And so, in view of all this, we are confronted with a phenomenon of enormous significance: the secularized attitude toward life of those very people within the church walls. We must assess this phenomenon realistically—for what it is: apostasy, distortion, evil, demonic activity, and secularization on a scale never before seen in the history of the world. All of this is anti-spiritual, anti-Orthodox. All of this leads downward; and those who follow this path will not find salvation.
So, soberly assessing all this, we must wage war against evil correctly, and to do so, we must be able to choose the right battlefield. Each of us must learn to recognize how and where to wage these battles. This is crucial, because it's very easy to be completely led astray in the early stages, accidentally stumbling upon and reading a book that discusses spiritual life, hesychasm, and the like.
4. Imitation of spiritual life
Bishop Theophan the Recluse (†1894), quoting and translating the Holy Fathers, intentionally omitted those passages that speak of the physical aspect of prayer. He did so knowing that even in his time—the 19th century—many would take these aspects for the ultimate goal and imitate them without understanding the essence. Therefore, Bishop Theophan simply excluded all of this from his translations. Now, however, many of these works have been translated and are beginning to be published, and you can read about what posture to adopt, sitting on a chair, bowing your head, and so on. And people begin to imitate. They begin to think, "This is it!" And inevitably, if you fast for a long time and do certain exercises, something begins to happen to you. But this is not spiritual life. On the contrary, one can be certain that we are dealing with demonic activity. True spiritual life is much more deeply rooted in reality and cannot be attained through such superficial imitation. It's usually easy to recognize people who don't take spiritual life seriously, but rather try to imitate it. We even have an example from the history of our brotherhood.
In San Francisco, there lived a man who was inflamed with the idea of the Jesus Prayer. He gradually increased the number of prayers until he reached five thousand. Living in the world, in the midst of a bustling city, every morning, before doing anything or eating, he would stand on his balcony and recite five thousand Jesus prayers, feeling amazingly refreshed and uplifted. But one morning, as he was beginning the last thousand, a man appeared under the balcony, busy with his own affairs. Our prayer-maker was so infuriated by this appearance that he began throwing dishes at the man. From what perspective should we evaluate him, engaged in spiritual life, reciting the Jesus Prayer, if suddenly, in the middle of this prayer, he could start throwing dishes? This means that his passions were unleashed within him, because he harbored a certain kind of delusional idea or opinion regarding what spiritual life is. He acted on this basis, not soberly, that is, based on knowledge, and at the first opportunity, passions burst forth. In such a case, it is far more useful not to recite five thousand prayers, but to do something else, something spiritual. Therefore, this should not be our battlefield. We must begin it precisely on the level of a sober view of the world, without any blindness, by recognizing that we are surrounded by the forces of this world. We must combat them by constantly keeping our minds above, not below—that is, by seeing the heavenly, and not burying our minds in earthly things (I will explain what this means later). From the perspective of practical secular life, this means that we must be a little crazy, that is, out of step with the majority of Church members. We will be considered at least a little strange, if not downright abnormal. However, this is a necessary and fundamental condition, and I will return to it later.
5. Look up
Holy Scripture and the writings of the Holy Fathers, the Lives of the Saints, and church services—all of these are not aimed at our everyday worldly life, but rather point the way to heaven. If we direct our gaze toward this lofty goal, we acquire zeal, that is, the ability to see something higher than this vain worldly life, which bores, weakens, makes us lose heart, and does not lead to salvation. But this is something of a higher order: church services, stories of people who have been to the other world and returned to life after death (see, for example, Father Seraphim's book "The Soul After Death" – Ed.), the Lives of the Saints, the writings of the Holy Fathers, Holy Scripture , and the Holy Fathers' commentaries on Holy Scripture (which are distinguished by their profound insight)—all of this arouses zeal in us, if only we possess within ourselves the spark of God's love. We want to remain constantly in this state in order to attain heaven. But this zeal must not be a passionate impulse that then vanishes. It must be able to endure. And for this to happen, it must be characterized by moderation, stemming from something deeper—what St. Seraphim calls "determination." That is, zeal that is constant and enduring represents a certain, ever-present foundation in your life. It compels you to move forward even in the face of setbacks, because you sense that there is something higher than what you are currently striving for—something independent of your moods and opinions, something you must constantly possess. It is your resolve to attain heaven. And this resolve, or, better yet, this zeal that has become determination, must be constant—that is, it must not soar, fall, or burn out.
In everything that happens, we must see the higher side, that is, the spiritual side. Because if we sometimes look at the higher side and sometimes at the lower, we will go up and then down. And the lower side is very powerful. It can even act through bishops, that is, through those who are supposed to be the first and foremost shepherds of their flock on the path to the Kingdom of Heaven. They, too, are human and can fall under the power of sin. In our time, the situation is, of course, even worse than before. Therefore, if we sometimes look up and sometimes down, take one step forward and one back, and then one forward and two back, then we will never reach the gates of the Kingdom of Heaven.
Here is an interesting quote from Abba Dorotheus that will help us understand the above thought: “It is good for you, O brother, as I always instruct you, to place all hope in God in every matter and say to yourself: nothing happens without God’s will. Of course, God knows that this or that is good and beneficial for you, and therefore He does so, although what happens has some visible reason of its own. For example, I could tell myself that because I dine with pilgrims and force myself to overeat so as not to be inhospitable, my stomach becomes heavy, my legs go numb, and I feel ill. I could find other reasons. For those who seek reasons, they are always in abundance. But it is useful and correct to say to yourself this: God knows that this is good and beneficial for my soul, and therefore everything happens this way. For of all that God has created, nothing can be said to be bad. "Because in the beginning He created everything good—and everything was truly good. Therefore, one should not grieve over what happens, but place one's hope in Divine Providence and be at peace" (Instructions of Abba Dorotheus, Part 12).
6. Look for the true reasons
There's a very interesting book written during the time of Abba Dorotheus (6th century) by Saint Gregory of Tours, "The History of the Franks." It recounts life at the royal court and the Christians of the time. The book includes fascinating lives of many saints and descriptions of the lives of kings. The monarchs of that time were by no means paragons of virtue. They constantly poisoned each other... The women were even worse. There was a certain Brunhilda and her sister Fredegund. They sought to place their sons and grandsons on the throne. What didn't they do to achieve this! They tied people to horses' tails and killed them that way; they were monstrous perjurers and knew how to weave fantastic webs of lies and deceit—not at all an inspiring spectacle. But this bishop, Saint Gregory, he lived then and wrote the history of his people, and he wrote it in such a way that it turned out to be very inspiring. There is a "meaning" behind all phenomena in the world. Saint Gregory constantly observed comets, earthquakes, and similar phenomena. When a king commits something evil, an earthquake occurs; or if he kills a man or executes an entire village unjustly, a famine occurs. Saint Gregory senses that God sees everything, and that behind every phenomenon lies some spiritual meaning—be it a comet, the death of a king, or anything else. He always sees a connection between what happens in the world and the moral state of the people. Even in the most deplorable moral state, constant earthquakes, famines, and the like remind us that we are behaving badly and guide us on the right path. Historians today say that this way of thinking is terribly outdated, that it is "strange," "naive," and "unrefined," and that, of course, no one can think like that today. They find it quite interesting and instructive to view the past through the prism of our time and learn how people then understood the world. "But, of course," they say, "we, serious scientists, must see the true causes." By true causes, they mean what a person ate and how that food affected their behavior and actions. The Christian point of view, however, is that these are not the true causes, but secondary ones. The true cause is the soul and God: the action of God and the action of the soul. These two factors create history. All other, external factors—what treaty was signed or the economic reasons for the masses' discontent, etc.—are completely secondary. Indeed, if we look closely at modern history, at all these revolutionary democratic movements, it becomes obvious that it is not economic factors that drive them, but the various ideas that have taken hold in people's souls about the possibility of building an earthly paradise. As soon as such an idea takes hold in the soul, unimaginable things happen, because it is a spiritual factor. Although even this idea is from the devil, it belongs to the realm of the spirit, and it is in this realm that history is made; External factors mean absolutely nothing.
Therefore, Saint Gregory views history from the correct perspective, for he knows that there is a first cause—how God acts in world history and how the soul responds to this action—and that visible events are a secondary cause. Therefore, when he observes some significant phenomenon—a comet or an eclipse—he tries to discern its meaning. In one place, when he recounts a strange sign in the sky over Gaul, he simply states, "I have absolutely no idea what this could mean." Of course, we know, scientifically, that such phenomena can be predicted, that some are caused by the shadow of the moon, and so on, but from Saint Gregory's perspective, we must ask: why did God choose to frighten us in such a way? What is the moral significance of this? Saint Gregory constantly looked up, not down.
7. Always be happy
The entire modern worldview is based on looking downward and finding causes, secondary causes. The Christian worldview is looking upward. And so, as we can see from reading their writings, people like Saint Gregory are constantly filled with joy. This doesn't mean they are happy with some superficial, fleeting happiness, but rather they are in a state of profound happiness, because their gaze is constantly directed upward, and their spiritual mind is fixed with steadfastness and determination on a specific place they desire to reach—that is, heaven. And so they view all things in the world in this light. If what they see has anything to do with evil, the wiles of the devil, the lures of this world, depravity and corruption, or simply ordinary material things and phenomena, they consider all this secondary and never give it priority. Indeed, the Holy Fathers teach us that we must see in everything something useful for our salvation. If you can see like this, then you can be saved.
Let me give you a prosaic example. You're working at a printing press, watching with satisfaction as the neatly and cleanly printed pages emerge. This fills your soul with a pleasant sense of satisfaction, and you dream of missionary work, of sending out as many copies as possible. But suddenly, something happens to the machine. It breaks down, starts scattering pages left and right; the pages crumple and tear each other, and the object of your satisfaction turns into the cause of your torment. You see that some of the copies you were counting on have destroyed each other, and in the end, all you can do is stay by the machine, say the Jesus Prayer, and try to fix things. Although this doesn't fill your soul with the satisfaction of fresh, neatly printed sheets emerging from the press, it can be even more beneficial spiritually, as it forces you to focus, concentrate, and give you a reason to fight. But if instead you despair to the point of powerlessness and anger at the machine, then you've lost the battle. Winning the battle doesn't depend on how many copies your machine can make per hour, but on the state of your soul. If your soul is capable of being saved and producing words that can save others, so much the better. But if you produce words that can save others while simultaneously destroying your own soul, what good is that to you?
8. Daily spiritual food
And again, I want to say the same thing: we must look upwards, not downwards, at everything, and not at the details of earthly life. More precisely, the details of earthly life should take a backseat, and this striving for heaven must be filled with zeal, determination, and constancy. Constancy is a quality developed through a special regimen of spiritual life, based on the wisdom of the Holy Fathers, and not simply on tradition for the sake of tradition. In other words, it must be based on the assimilation of what the divinely inspired wisdom of the Holy Fathers offers us in their works. On the other hand, this constancy is developed through prayer. All the fundamental prayers have come down to us in liturgical texts. Of course, in different places and under different circumstances, prayers are offered to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the opportunity and strength.
Consistency includes regularly reading spiritual literature, for example, during meals, because we need a constant inoculation against the spirit of the times. We must constantly partake of this spiritual nourishment, provided to us through church services and reading, in order to fight the spirit of the world that oppresses us and constantly seeks to subjugate us. If we stop receiving the words of Holy Scripture and the Holy Fathers for even one day, it means the world begins to dominate us. If we live without them for one day, the world becomes ingrained; two days, it takes hold even more. We soon discover that we are increasingly beginning to think in worldly terms; and the more we begin to think this way, the more we lose our spiritual mind.
This practice, the daily intake of spiritual food, is the external side of the matter, while the internal side is spiritual life. Spiritual life does not mean remaining in the clouds, reciting the Jesus Prayer, or performing certain bodily movements. It consists of discovering the laws of spiritual life in a way that applies to a given person in their situation, in their circumstances. This is developed over the years through attentive reading of the Holy Fathers, with a notebook in which we write down those quotations from them that seem most important to us, study them, determine the extent to which they apply to us, and, if necessary, find parallel passages in other Holy Fathers, compare them, ponder them, and more deeply comprehend the meaning, etc. If you want to find a ready-made and exhaustive answer to any question and, with this goal, undertake to study the Holy Fathers, then your intention is doomed to failure. True, there are a few pointers to the works of the Holy Fathers, but this is not the path to entering the spiritual life. You must enter it gradually, absorbing the teachings of the Holy Fathers to the extent that you can, returning to the same texts over time, grasping their meaning more deeply, and ultimately arriving at a clear understanding of how the laws of spiritual life apply to you. If you do this, then when reading the same Holy Father, you will discover more and more new things. You will penetrate him more and more deeply.
9. Maintaining zeal
Anyone who keeps all this in mind and constantly receives spiritual nourishment will not say that the current situation in the Church is hopeless and that nothing can be done. In fact, the paths for action in our time can be surprisingly unusual and unexpected. What will come of this activity of yours, we do not know. There are many possible options. We must accustom ourselves to expect the unexpected, to be prepared for a path that is in many ways different from what might have been just recently, but which nevertheless lies within the realm and possibilities of true Orthodox Christianity. Seeing this path depends on the ability to look up, not down. We have before us an example of a man who constantly dwelt in this state. This is our Archbishop John. It is quite obvious that he was constantly in another world. I recall how he himself gave a sermon.about the spiritual life. He said this: “We have nothing like what is characteristic of the later saints of the Latin Church, who seemed to constantly dwell in the clouds, in some kind of sphere of sweetness and light, and in rosy clouds. This is ‘delusion.’ All our holiness is based on our feet being firmly on the ground and, being thus constantly on the ground, on our minds constantly directed upward.” It is quite obvious that Archbishop John himself was exactly like that. When he would come to our store, located next to the cathedral (in San Francisco), he always had something new and inspiring to say. He always carried a small briefcase with him, and he would sometimes open it and say, for example, “Look, this is a portrait of Saint Alban, and here is his life.” He found it somewhere. He collected such things: the lives of Romanian saints, for example, and all sorts of things that had nothing to do with everyday business or the administration of the diocese. Some considered him a poor administrator. I don't know. I doubt it, because I know that when someone wrote him a letter, they would quickly receive a reply in the language in which the letter was written. Therefore, he treated such matters with great care and attention. But he paid the greatest attention, the greatest care, to being constantly in the other world, constantly inspired and enlivened by it. The opposite path is to turn the Church into a kind of enterprise, to attend only to the administrative side, the economic side, or even lower—to ensuring that the life of the Church is structured and conducted not according to the laws of the spirit and truth, but according to the laws of this world. If such practices are practiced for a long time, the spark is lost, the higher side of reality is lost. Archbishop John gives us an example of how to constantly gaze at this higher side of reality, to look upward, to constantly direct our minds to things of a higher order. And the more you enter this higher order, the more convinced you become that there is no other path, no other possibilities. If you, as an Orthodox Christian, remain in this frame of mind, people will consider you abnormal, call you "touched," and so on, but you will have your own life, leading which you will reach heaven. The alternative is to be buried in this dreary world, completely filled with mechanisms, comfort devices, and opinions. It's astonishing how these opinions about what is good and what is bad, what should be done and what should not be done—how they are out of touch with reality, how they are not part of it. For example, the opinion has become widespread (and this is very characteristic of those in the Church who have stopped thinking about higher things) that when you go to church, you must be warmly dressed, because it is supposedly impossible to follow the service and prepare for communion if you are bothered by cold feet. “This is a great disadvantage,” they tell you. “If your feet are cold,"You will have neither spiritual life nor grace." That's the opinion. And it's absolutely false. The Holy Fathers lived in a wide variety of circumstances at different times, and while one shouldn't intentionally torment oneself with frozen feet, such a circumstance can nevertheless be beneficial: it can help you approach spiritual life more soberly and thank God for the earthly blessings that we can lose at any moment, rather than taking all this comfort, coziness, and so on for granted. In our time, if someone wants to do something in the Church but lacks constant attention and aspiration to heavenly things, they will lose the spark of zeal, interest in spiritual things, and become worldly. Worldly means dead, spiritually dead.
10. The Mind of the Fathers
It's very difficult in our time to raise our gaze to heaven because of the heavy burden, the dead weight, of worldly things surrounding us. But even with a little struggle, if it's carried out consistently, a person begins to develop a perspective on life distinct from that of the world, a completely different way of acting. Any spiritual work that can manifest itself in the conditions of our time, any Orthodox missionary activity, apostleship, and so on, must be based on such a perception of life. They must be based on first determining what God wants from us, first looking upward, to the higher side, to what the holy fathers taught, and only secondarily downward, to practical means, financial problems, even to such things as illness, because illness is always sent for our benefit, and we must learn to profit from it. Anyone who cannot think and act in this way will be weighed down by the burden, especially in our day. And if a person looks back and first of all at people, he will see that ninety-nine percent of them will drag him down, because they have their own problems; and their passions, their confessions, weigh heavily on him. If this aspect of life becomes too important for a person, then it will simply drag him down, and he will not be able to lead others to heaven. Therefore, it goes without saying that a priest, a spiritual director, must first lead himself to heaven, and only then others, turning his gaze to another world. We do not need to imagine this other world or form opinions about it, because we possess this very treasure—the minds of the Holy Fathers, which, in the form of their writings, is now largely accessible to the reader. In recent times, we have had such great Fathers as Bishop Ignatius (Brianchaninov, † 1867), who was one of the most insightful exposers of apostasy and one of the best interpreters of the Holy Fathers. We need to understand their language, their worldview, because that is Orthodoxy. Of course, Orthodoxy doesn't change over time. When studying the Protestant or Roman Catholic world, we see that some spiritual writers become outdated. Then they can come back into fashion when others go out of fashion. This happens, obviously, because they deal with worldly things that appeal to readers at a particular time—or rather, appeal to the spirit of the times.
Not so with the works of the Orthodox Holy Fathers. As soon as we fully embrace the Orthodox Christian worldview—simply put, the Christian worldview that has been given to us by Christ and the Apostles to this day—then everything becomes contemporary. You read someone, for example, St. Macarius, who lived in the Egyptian deserts in the fourth century, and he speaks directly to you now. The conditions of his life were somewhat different, yet he speaks directly to you in your language. He goes where you go; he views his surroundings the same way you do; he experiences the same temptations and falls as you do, and there is nothing in him that is alien to you. The same can be said of other Fathers from ancient times to our own time, such as St. John of Kronstadt († 1908). They all speak the same language, the same kind of language—the language of spiritual life, which we must penetrate. When we achieve this, we will be able to save ourselves; and—more than that—in the words of St. Seraphim: "Acquire a peaceful spirit, and thousands around you will be saved." It is not for us to calculate whether thousands around us will be saved. Our task is to acquire a peaceful spirit—the Holy Spirit—and we will leave the rest to the Lord.
11. New opportunities
In our time, we can expect many surprising things. Therefore, we should not get the impression that everything is hopelessly bogged down, no one is seeking the truth, everything is perishing... All this is opinion, and opinion is the first stage of delusion. We must not become bogged down in opinions. On the contrary, we need to look at everything with fresh eyes, that is, with the eyes of spiritual life. Father Nikolai Deputatov, who greatly loved the Holy Fathers, read their works, underlined and made notes, said: “When I am in a bad mood, when I begin to lose heart, I open one of my notebooks and read something that once inspired me; and it inspires me again, because it was my own soul that was once inspired by it. And therefore I know that what spiritually nourished me before can produce the same effect now. So it becomes something like a mechanism for uplifting the spirit: opening and reading something that produced a similar effect before.”
Therefore, when we turn our attention to any of the Fathers, we should not think, "Aha, that was all a long time ago, it was inspiring then, but what use is it now?" On the contrary, in the work of the Fathers we should see the work of Christians of our time, the work of souls burning with zeal and love for God. They departed for the land of which we too will become citizens, if only we do not lose the strength of desire. We all belong to one nationality—the Orthodox Christian race. The Lives of the Fathers should be a familiar, contemporary phenomenon for us, something that relates to us now. What inspires us in them exists precisely for the sake of our inspiration, in order to benefit us. And how much fruit it bears depends on how much we love God and what opportunities He gives us. This inspiration is a free gift from God.
Source: https://azbyka.ru/otechnik/Serafim_Rouz/chelovek-protiv-boga/#0_18