Gumerov pavel small church. The family is a small church. On the development of moral consciousness in children

The expression "family is a small church" has come down to us from the early centuries of Christianity. The Apostle Paul in his epistles mentions Christians especially close to him, the spouses Akila and Priscilla, and greets them and "their home church" (Rom. 16:4).

There is an area in Orthodox theology about which little is said, but the significance of this area and the difficulties associated with it are very great. This is the area of ​​family life. Family life, like monasticism, is also Christian work, also "the path to the salvation of the soul," but it is not easy to find teachers along this path.

Family life is blessed by a whole series of church sacraments and prayers. In the "Trebnik," a liturgical book that everyone uses Orthodox priest In addition to the order of the sacraments of marriage and baptism, there are special prayers for a mother who has just given birth and her baby, a prayer for naming a newborn, a prayer before the start of a child’s education, an order for consecrating a house and a special prayer for a housewarming party, the sacrament of unction of the sick and prayers for the dying. There is, therefore, the care of the Church about almost all the main moments of family life, but most of these prayers are now read very rarely. In the writings of the saints and the Fathers of the Church, great importance is attached to Christian family life. But it is difficult to find in them direct, concrete advice and instructions applicable to family life and the upbringing of children in our time.

I was very struck by a story from the life of an ancient hermit saint who fervently prayed to God that the Lord would show him real holiness, a real righteous man. He had a vision, and he heard a voice telling him to go to such and such a city, to such and such a street, to such and such a house, and there he would see real holiness. Joyfully, the hermit went on his way and, having reached the indicated place, he found two female laundresses living there, the wives of two brothers. The hermit began to ask the women how they were saved. The wives were very surprised and said that they live simply, amicably, in love, do not quarrel, pray to God, work ... And this was a lesson to the hermit.

"Elderhood," as the spiritual guidance of people in the world, in family life, has become part of our church life. In spite of any difficulties, thousands of people were and are drawn to such elders and old women, both with their usual everyday worries and with their grief.

There have been and still are preachers who are able to speak especially intelligibly about the spiritual needs of modern families. One of these was the late Vladyka Sergius of Prague in exile, and after the war, Bishop of Kazan. “What is the spiritual meaning of life in the family?” Vladyka Sergius said. In a non-family life, a person lives with his front side - not the inside. In family life, every day you need to respond to what happens in the family, and this makes a person seem to be naked. "This is an environment that makes us not hide feelings inside. Both good and bad come out. This gives us the daily development of a moral feeling. The very environment of the family is, as it were, saving us. Every victory over sin within oneself gives joy, strengthens strength, weakens evil. .." These are wise words. I think it's harder than ever to start a Christian family these days. Destructive forces affect the family from all sides, and their influence on the spiritual life of children is especially strong. The task of spiritual "nurturing" the family with advice, love, guidance, attention, sympathy and understanding of contemporary needs is the most important task of church work in our time. Helping a Christian family truly become a "small church" is as great a task as the creation of monasticism was in its time.

About the family mindset

As believing Christians, we try to teach our children the Christian doctrine and the laws of the Church. We teach them to pray and go to church. Much of what we say and teach will be forgotten later, flowing away like water. Perhaps other influences, other impressions will force out of their consciousness what they were taught in childhood.

But there is a foundation, difficult to define in words, on which the life of every family is built, a certain atmosphere that family life breathes. And this atmosphere greatly influences the formation of the child's soul, determines the development of children's feelings and children's thinking. This general atmosphere, difficult to define in words, can be called "the worldview of the family." It seems to me that no matter how the fate of people who grew up in the same family, they always have something in common in their attitude to life, to people, to themselves, to joy and sorrow.

Parents cannot create the personality of their child, determine his talents, tastes, put into his character the traits they want. We do not "create" our children. But through our efforts, our own lives and what we ourselves have taken from our parents, a certain worldview and attitude to life is created, under the influence of which the personality of each of our children will grow and develop in its own way. Having grown up in a certain family atmosphere, he will become an adult, a family man and, finally, an old man, bearing its imprint all his life.

What are the main features of this family worldview? It seems to me that the most essential thing is what can be called a "hierarchy of values," that is, a clear and sincere consciousness of what is more important and what is less important, for example, earnings or vocation.

Sincere, unintimidated truthfulness is one of the most precious qualities that come with a family atmosphere. The untruthfulness of children is sometimes caused in them by fear of punishment, fear of the consequences of some misconduct. But very often, children of virtuous, developed parents are insincere in expressing their feelings, because they are afraid of not meeting the high parental requirements. A big mistake of parents is to demand from children that they feel the way their parents want. You can demand compliance with external rules of order, the fulfillment of duties, but you cannot demand that the child consider touching what seems funny to him, admire the fact that he is not interested in loving those whom his parents love.

It seems to me that in the family worldview, his openness to the outside world, interest in everything is very important. Some happy families are so introverted that the world- the world of science, art, human relations - they are, as it were, uninteresting, they do not exist. And young family members, going out into the world, involuntarily feel that the values ​​that were part of their family worldview have nothing to do with the outside world.

A very significant element of the family worldview is, it seems to me, an understanding of the meaning of obedience. Often adults complain about the disobedience of children, but in their complaints there is a misunderstanding of the very meaning of obedience. After all, obedience is different. There is an obedience that we must instill in the baby for his safety: "Don't touch it, it's hot!" "Don't climb, you'll fall." But for an eight-nine-year-old, another obedience is already important - not to do something bad when no one sees you. And even greater maturity begins to manifest itself when the child himself feels what is good and what is bad, and consciously holds back.

I remember how amazed I was by a seven-year-old girl whom I took with other children to church for a long reading service of the 12 Gospels. When I invited her to sit, she looked at me seriously and said: "You don't always have to do what you want."

The purpose of discipline is to teach a person to control himself, to be obedient to what he considers the highest, to act as he considers right, and not as he wants. This spirit of inner discipline should pervade all family life, there are even more parents than children, and happy are those children who grow up in the consciousness that their parents are obedient to the rules that they profess, obedient to their convictions.

Another trait is of great importance in the overall family life. According to the Saints Orthodox Church The greatest virtue is humility. Without humility, any other virtue can "spoil," as food without salt does. What is humility? It is the ability not to attach too much importance to yourself, to what you say and do. This ability to see yourself as you are, imperfect, sometimes even funny, the ability to laugh at yourself sometimes, has a lot to do with what we call a sense of humor. And it seems to me that just such an easily perceived "humility" plays a very large and beneficial role in the family worldview.

How to pass on our faith to children

We, parents, face a difficult, often painful question: how to pass on our faith to our children? How can we instill faith in God in them? How to talk to our children about God?

There are so many influences in the life around us that lead children away from faith, deny it, ridicule it. And the main difficulty is that our faith in God is not just a treasure or wealth, or some kind of capital that we can pass on to our children, how can you transfer the amount of money. Faith is the way to God, faith is the road along which a person goes. The Orthodox Bishop Kallistos (Ware), an Englishman, writes wonderfully about this in his book " Orthodox Way:" "Christianity is not just a theory about the life of the universe, not just a teaching, but the way we go. It is, in the fullest sense of the word, the way of life. Find out the true meaning Christian faith we can, only by embarking on this path, only by fully surrendering to it, and then we ourselves will see it." The task of Christian education is to show children this path, put them on this path and teach them not to stray from it.

A child appears in an Orthodox family. It seems to me that the first steps towards the discovery of faith in God in the life of an infant are connected with his perception of life with the senses - sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch. If a baby sees how parents pray, crosses themselves, baptizes him, hears the words "God," "Lord," "Christ is with you," takes Holy Communion, feels drops of holy water, touches and kisses an icon, a cross, little by little enters his consciousness the notion that "God exists." In an infant there is neither faith nor unbelief. But with believing parents, he grows, perceiving with his whole being the reality of their faith, just as he gradually becomes clear that the fire burns, that the water is wet, and the floor is hard. The baby understands little about God with the mind. But from what he sees and hears from those around him, he learns that there is a God and accepts it.

In the next period of childhood, children can and should be told about God. It is easiest to talk to children about Jesus Christ: about Christmas, about the gospel stories, about the childhood of Christ; about the adoration of the Magi, about the meeting of the Child by the elder Simeon, about the flight to Egypt, about His miracles, about the healing of the sick, about the blessing of children. If the parents do not have pictures and illustrations of the Sacred History, it is good to encourage the children to draw such illustrations themselves; and this will help them perceive the stories more realistically. And at the age of seven, eight, nine, a process begins that will continue for many years: the desire to understand what they see and hear, attempts to separate the "fabulous" from the "real", to understand "Why is this so?" "Why is that?" Children's questions and answers are different from those of adults, and often puzzle us. Children's questions are simple, and they expect the same simple and clear answers. I still remember that when I was eight years old, I asked the priest at the lesson of the Law of God, how to understand that the light was created on the first day, and the sun on the fourth? Where did the light come from? And the father, instead of explaining to me that the energy of light is not limited to one luminary, answered: "Don't you see that when the sun sets, it's still light around?" And I remember that this answer seemed unsatisfactory to me.

Children's faith is based on children's trust in any person. A child believes in God because his mother, or father, or grandmother, or grandfather believes. On this trust, the child's own faith develops, and on the basis of this faith, his own spiritual life begins, without which there can be no faith. The child becomes able to love, pity, sympathize; a child can consciously do something that he considers bad and experience a feeling of repentance, he can turn to God with a request, with gratitude. And finally, the child becomes able to think about the world around him, about nature and its laws. In this process, he needs the help of adults.

When a child begins to be interested in school lessons about nature, which talk about the emergence of the world and its evolution, etc., it is good to supplement this knowledge with a story about the creation of the world, which is set out in the first lines of the Bible. The sequence of the creation of the world in the Bible and modern ideas about it are very close. The beginning of everything - an explosion of energy (Big Bang) - the biblical words "Let there be light!" and then gradually the following periods: the creation of the water element, the formation of dense masses ("firmaments"), the appearance of seas and land. And then the word of God gives nature a task: "... let the earth bring forth grass, grass that yields seed..." "let the water bring forth reptiles..." beasts of the earth according to their kind .... "And the completion of the process is the creation of man ... And all this is done God's word by the will of the Creator.

The child grows, he has questions and doubts. The child's faith is also strengthened through questions and doubts. Faith in God is not just a belief that God exists, it is not a consequence of theoretical axioms, but this is our attitude towards God. Our attitude towards God and our faith in Him are imperfect and must be continually developed. We will inevitably have questions, uncertainties and doubts. Doubt is inseparable from faith. Like the father of a sick boy who asked Jesus to heal his son, we will probably say for the rest of our lives: "I believe, Lord!" The Lord heard the words of the father and healed his son. Let's hope he will hear all of us who pray to Him of little faith.

Conversations with children about God

The responsibility for instilling faith in God in children has always rested with the family, with parents, with grandparents more than with school teachers of the Law of God. And the liturgical language and sermons in the church are usually incomprehensible to children.

Children's religious life needs direction and nurture, for which parents are ill-prepared.

It seems to me that we need, first, to understand the distinctive feature of children's thinking, children's spiritual life: children do not live in abstract thinking. Perhaps this realistic character of their thinking is one of those characteristics of childhood about which Christ said that "of such is the Kingdom of Heaven." It is easy for children to imagine, to imagine very realistically what we are talking about in the abstract - the power of good and the power of evil. They perceive any sensations with particular brightness and fullness, for example, the taste of food, the pleasure of intense movement, the physical sensation of raindrops on their faces, warm sand under bare feet... Some impressions of early childhood are remembered for a lifetime, and it is the experience of sensation, and not reasoning about it, that is real for children ... For us, believing parents, the main question is how to convey in such a language of sensations, in the language of concreteness, thoughts about God, faith in Him. How can we give children a childlike experience of the reality of God? How can we give them the experience of experiencing God in our lives?

I have already said how we introduce the concept of God with ordinary life expressions - "Thank God!" "God forbid!" "God bless you!" "Lord have mercy!." But it is very important how we say them, whether we express a real feeling with them, whether we really experience their meaning. The child sees icons around him, crosses: he touches them, kisses them. The first, very simple concept of God lies in this consciousness that God exists, as there is heat and cold, a feeling of hunger or satiety. The first conscious thought about God comes when a child is able to understand what it means to do something - fold, blind, build, glue, draw... Behind every object there is someone who made this object, and the concept of God as the Creator is made available to the child quite early. At this time, it seems to me, the first conversations about God are possible. You can draw the child's attention to the world around him - insects, flowers, animals, snowflakes, a little brother or sister - and arouse in him a sense of miraculousness God's creation. And the next topic about God, which is made available to children, is the participation of God in our lives. Four and five year olds love to listen to stories that are accessible to their realistic imagination, and there are many such stories in Scripture.

New Testament stories about miracles impress young children not with their miraculousness - children hardly distinguish a miracle from a non-miracle - but with joyful sympathy: “Here a person has not seen, has not seen anything, has never seen. Close your eyes and imagine that you are nothing "You don't see anything. And Jesus Christ came up, touched his eyes, and he suddenly began to see... What do you think he saw? How did it seem to him?" “But people were sailing with Jesus Christ on a boat, and it began to rain, the wind rose, a storm ... It was so scary! And Jesus Christ forbade the wind and the waves of the water, and it suddenly became quiet ...” You can tell how the people gathered listen to Jesus Christ, were hungry and there was nothing to buy, and only one little boy helped Him. And here is a story about how the disciples of Jesus Christ did not allow small children to see the Savior, because they were noisy, and Jesus Christ was indignant and ordered to let small children come to Him. And, embracing, blessed them ... "

There are many such stories. You can tell them at a certain time, for example, before going to bed, or show illustrations, or simply "when it comes to the word." Of course, for this it is necessary that there be a person in the family who is familiar with at least the main gospel stories. It may be good for young parents to re-read the Gospel themselves, looking for stories in it that will be understandable and interesting for young children.

By the age of eight or nine, children are already ready to perceive some kind of primitive theology, even create it themselves, coming up with explanations that they observe that are convincing for themselves. They already know something about the world around them, they see in it not only good and joyful, but also bad and sad. They want to find some kind of causality in life that is understandable to them, justice, a reward for good and a punishment for evil. Gradually, they develop the ability to understand symbolic meaning parables, such as the parables of the prodigal son or the Good Samaritan. They begin to be interested in the question of the origin of the whole world, albeit in a very primitive form.

It is very important to prevent the conflict that often arises in children a little later - the conflict between "science" and "religion" in the children's sense of these words. It is very important that they understand the difference between explaining how an event happened and explaining what the meaning of the event is.

I remember how I had to explain to my nine-ten-year-old grandchildren the meaning of repentance, and I invited them to visualize the dialogue between Eve and the serpent, Adam and Eve, when they violated God's prohibition to eat fruits from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And then they presented in their faces the parable of the prodigal son. As the girl accurately noted the difference between "blaming each other" and the remorse of the prodigal son.

At the same age, children begin to be interested in such questions as the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, life after death, or why Jesus Christ had to suffer so terribly. When trying to answer questions, it is very important to remember that children tend to "grasp" in their own way the meaning of an illustration, example, story, and not our explanation, an abstract train of thought.

Growing up, by the age of eleven or twelve, almost all children experience difficulties in the transition from childish faith in God to more mature, spiritual thinking. Only simple and entertaining stories from the Holy Scriptures are no longer enough. From parents, from grandparents, the ability to hear that question, that thought, that doubt that was born in the head of a boy or girl is required. But at the same time, it is not necessary to impose on them questions or explanations that they do not yet need, to which they have not matured. Every child, every teenager develops at their own pace and in their own way.

It seems to me that the “theological consciousness” of a ten or eleven year old child should include the concept of the visible and invisible world, of God as the Creator of the world and life, of what is good and evil, that God loves us and wants us to be good what if

we have done something bad, then we can regret it, repent, ask for forgiveness, correct the trouble. And it is very important that the image of the Lord Jesus Christ be known and loved by children.

I have always remembered one lesson given to me by believing children. There were three of them: eight, ten and eleven years old, and I had to explain to them the Lord's Prayer - "Our Father." We talked about what the words "who art in heaven" mean. Those skies where astronauts fly? Do they see God? What is the spiritual world - heaven? We talked about all this, argued, and I invited everyone to write one phrase that would explain what "heaven" is. One boy, whose grandmother recently died, wrote: "Heaven is where we go when we die ..." The girl wrote: "Heaven is such a world that we cannot touch or see, but it is very real ..." And the youngest in clumsy letters deduced: "Heaven is kindness ...."

It is especially important for us to understand, feel and penetrate into inner world teenager, in his interests, his worldview. Only by establishing such a sympathetic understanding, I would say respect for their thinking, one can try to show them that the Christian perception of life, relationships with people, love, creativity gives all this a new dimension. The danger for the rising generation lies in their feeling that the spiritual life, spiritual faith in God, the church, religion, is something else that does not concern "real life." The best thing we can give to teenagers, youth - and only if we have sincere friendship with them - is to help them think, encourage them to look for the meaning and reason for everything that happens in their lives. And the best, most useful conversations about God, about the meaning of life, we have with our children not according to plan, not out of a sense of duty, but by chance, unexpectedly. And as parents, we need to be prepared for this.

On the development of moral consciousness in children

Along with concepts, with thoughts about God, about faith, children also develop their moral consciousness.

Many infantile sensations, although they are not moral experiences in the literal sense of the word, serve as a sort of "bricks" from which the moral life is later built. The baby feels the parents' praise and joy when he tries to take the first step, when he pronounces something similar to the first word, when he himself holds the spoon; and this approval of adults becomes an important element of his life. essential for development moral consciousness a child and a feeling, a feeling that he is being taken care of. He experiences pleasure and a sense of security in parental care for him: the feeling of cold is replaced by warmth, hunger is quenched, pain calms down - and all this is connected with a familiar, loving adult face. And the infantile "discovery" of the surrounding world also plays a big role in moral development: everything must be touched, everything must be tried ... And then the baby begins to realize from experience that his will is limited, that it is impossible to reach everything.

One can speak of the beginning of a genuine moral life when a child awakens consciousness about himself, the consciousness that "here I am" and "here I am not" and that "I" want, do, know how, feel this or that in relation to to "not me." Small children up to four or five years old are egocentric and very strongly feel only their feelings, their desires, their anger. What others feel is uninteresting and incomprehensible to them. They tend to feel that they are the cause of everything that happens around, the culprits of any trouble, and adults need to protect young children from such trauma.

It seems to me that the moral education of children in early childhood lies in the development and encouragement in them of the ability to sympathize, that is, the ability to imagine what and how others feel, "not me." Many good fairy tales are useful for this, causing sympathy; and caring for beloved animals, preparing gifts for other family members, caring for the sick are very important for children ... I remember how one young mother struck me: when fights broke out between her little children, she did not scold them, did not get angry at the offender, but she began to comfort the offended, to caress him until the offender himself became embarrassed.

The concept of "good" and "evil" we lay in children very early. How carefully one must say: "you are bad" - "you are good ..." Little children do not yet reason logically, they can easily become infected with the concept - "I am bad," and how far this is from Christian morality.

Evil and good are usually identified by young children with material damage: breaking a big thing is worse than breaking something small. And moral education is precisely this: to make children feel the meaning of motivation. To break something because you tried to help is not evil; and if you broke, because you wanted to hurt, upset, - this is bad, this is evil. By their attitude to children's misdeeds, adults gradually bring up in children an understanding of good and evil, teach them truthfulness.

The next stage of children's moral development is their ability for friendship, for personal relationships with other children. The ability to understand what your friend feels, to sympathize with him, to forgive him his fault, to give in to him, to rejoice in his joy, to be able to put up after a quarrel - all this is connected with the very essence of moral development. Parents should take care that their children have friends, comrades, that their friendly relations with other children develop.

By the age of nine or ten, children already understand well that there are rules of conduct, family and school laws that they must comply with and which they sometimes deliberately violate. They also understand the meaning of fair punishments for violating the rules and endure them quite easily, but there must be a clear consciousness of justice. I remember one old nanny told me about the families in which she worked:

“They had almost everything "you can," but if you really "can't," then you can't. And for those, everything was "impossible," but in fact everything was "possible."

But the Christian understanding of what repentance, repentance, the ability to sincerely repent, is not given immediately. We know that to repent in personal relationships with people means to be sincerely upset that you have hurt, hurt the feelings of another person, and if there is no such sincere grief, then it’s not worth asking for forgiveness - it will be false. And for a Christian, repentance means pain because you grieved God, were unfaithful to God, unfaithful to the image that God put in you.

We do not want to bring up our children in the spirit of legalism, that is, compliance with the letter of the law or rule. We want to instill in them the desire to be good, to be faithful to that image of kindness, truthfulness, sincerity, which is part of our faith in God. Both our children and we, adults, commit offenses, sin. Sin, evil breaks our intimacy with God, our fellowship with Him, and repentance opens the way for God's forgiveness; and this forgiveness heals evil, destroys every sin.

By the age of twelve or thirteen, children achieve what can be called self-awareness. They are able to reflect on themselves, on their thoughts and moods, how fair adults treat them. They consciously feel unhappy or happy. It can be said that by this time the parents had invested everything they could in the upbringing of their children. Now teenagers will compare the moral and spiritual heritage they have received with their environment, with the worldview of their peers. If teenagers have learned to think and we have succeeded in instilling in them a sense of kindness and repentance, we can say that we have laid in them the right foundations for moral development that continues throughout life.

Of course, we know from numerous modern examples that people who knew nothing about faith in childhood come to it as adults, sometimes after long and painful searches. But believing parents who love their children want to bring into their lives from infancy the graceful, all-revitalizing power of love for God, the power of faith in Him, the feeling of closeness to Him. We know and believe that children's love and closeness to God is possible and real.

How to teach children to attend worship services

We live in such a time and in such conditions that it is impossible to talk about church attendance by children as a generally accepted tradition. Some Orthodox families, both at home and abroad, live in places where there is no Orthodox church and children go to church very, very rarely. In the temple, everything is strange, alien, sometimes even scary to them. And where there is a church and nothing prevents the whole family from attending services, there is another difficulty: the children are languishing with long services, the language of services is incomprehensible to them, and it is tiresome and boring to stand motionless. Very young children are entertained by the external side of the service: bright colors, a crowd of people, singing, unusual clothes of priests, censing, a solemn exit of the clergy. Small children usually take communion at every Liturgy and love it. Adults are condescending to their fuss and their spontaneity. And the little older children are already used to everything they see in the temple, it does not entertain them. They cannot understand the meaning of worship, even the Slavic language is little understood by them, and they are required to stand calmly, decorously ... One and a half to two hours of immobility is difficult and boring for them. True, children can sit for hours in front of the TV, but then they follow the program that captivates them and is understandable to them. And what should they do, what should they think about in church?

It is very important to try to create a festive, joyful atmosphere around visiting the church: prepare festive clothes from the evening, clean shoes, give them a particularly thorough wash, clean the room according to the festive, prepare dinner in advance, for which they will sit down after returning from church. All this together creates a festive mood that children love so much. Let the children have their own little tasks for these preparations - other than on weekdays. Of course, here parents have to refine their imagination and adapt to the situation. I remember how one mother, whose husband did not go to church, came on the way home from church with her little son in a cafe and they drank coffee with delicious buns there ...

What can we as parents do to "make sense" of our children's presence in the church? Firstly, we need to look for more reasons for children to do something themselves: children of seven and eight years old can prepare notes “for health” or “for repose” by themselves, inscribing there the names of the dead or living close to them, for whom they want to pray. Children can submit this note themselves; they can be explained what the priest will do with "their" prosphora: he will take out a particle in memory of those whose names they have written down, and after everyone has taken communion, he will put these particles in the Chalice, and, thus, all those people whom we wrote down how they would take communion.

It’s good to let the children buy and light a candle (or candles) themselves, decide for themselves which icon they want to put it in front of, let them venerate the icon. It is good for children to take Communion as often as possible, to teach them how to do it, how to fold their hands, and say their name. And if they don't take communion, they should be taught how to approach the cross and receive a piece of prosphora.

It is especially useful to bring children to at least part of the service on those holidays when a special rite is performed in the church: the blessing of water on the feast of Baptism, having prepared in advance a clean vessel for holy water, to Vespers on Palm Sunday, when they stand in the church with candles and willows, on especially solemn services Holy Week- reading of the 12 Gospels, the removal of the Shroud on Holy Saturday, at least for that part of the service, when all the vestments in the church are changed. Night Easter service makes an unforgettable impression on children. And how they love the opportunity to "shout" in the church "Truly Risen!" It is good if the children are present in the church at the wedding, christening, and even at the funeral. I remember how my three-year-old daughter, after the funeral service in my mother's church, saw her in a joyful dream, telling her how pleased she was that her granddaughter stood so well in the church.

How to overcome the boredom of children who are used to going to church? You can try to interest the child by offering him different topics for observation, available to him: "Look around, how many icons of the Virgin Mary, Mother of Jesus Christ, can you find in our church?" "And how many icons of Jesus Christ?" "And over there, the icons depict different holidays. Which ones do you know?" "How many doors do you see in front of the temple?" "Try to notice how the temple is arranged, and when we return, you will draw a plan of the temple," "Pay attention to how the priest is dressed, and how the deacon is, and how the servant boys; what differences do you see?" etc., etc. Then, at home, you can give explanations of what they noticed and remembered; and as the children grow up, they can be given fuller explanations.

In modern life, there almost always comes a moment when teenage children begin to rebel against the rules of behavior that their parents are trying to instill in them. Often this also applies to going to church, especially if it is ridiculed by comrades. Forcing teenagers to go to church, in my opinion, does not make any sense. The habit of going to church will not keep the faith in our children.

And yet, the experience of church prayer and participation in worship, laid down from childhood, does not disappear. Father Sergius Bulgakov, a wonderful Orthodox priest, theologian and preacher, was born into the family of a poor provincial priest. His childhood passed in an atmosphere of church piety and divine services, bringing beauty and joy into a dull life. As a young man, Father Sergius lost his faith, remained an unbeliever until he was thirty, was fond of Marxism, became a professor of political economy, and then ... returned to the faith and became a priest. In his memoirs, he writes: “Essentially, even as a Marxist, I always yearned religiously. At first I believed in an earthly paradise, and then, returning to faith in a personal God, instead of impersonal progress, I believed in Christ, whom I loved in childhood and carried it in my heart. It imperiously and irresistibly drew me to my native church. Like a dance of heavenly bodies, the stars of impressions from Lenten services once lit up in my childish soul, and they did not go out even in the darkness of my godlessness ... "And God grant us to lay in our children such inextinguishable flames of love and faith in God.

Children's prayer

The birth of a child is always not only a physical, but their spiritual event in the life of parents ... When you feel a tiny human being born from you, "flesh of your flesh," so perfect and at the same time so helpless, before which an infinitely long road to life opens, with all its joys, sufferings, dangers and accomplishments - the heart is compressed with love, it burns with the desire to protect your child, strengthen it, give it everything it needs ... It seems to me that this is a natural feeling of non-selfish love. The desire to attract all that is good to your baby is very close to a prayer impulse. May God grant that every infant be surrounded by such a prayerful attitude at the beginning of life.

For believing parents, it is very important not only to pray for the baby, not only to call on God's help in order to protect him from all evil. We know how difficult it is in life, how many dangers, both external and internal, a newborn being will have to overcome. And the most correct thing is to teach him to pray, to cultivate in him the ability to find help and strength, greater than can be found in himself, in turning to God.

Prayer, the ability to pray, the habit of praying, like any other human ability, is not born all at once, by itself. Just as a child learns to walk, talk, understand, read, he also learns to pray. In the process of teaching prayer, it is necessary to take into account the level of spiritual development of the child. After all, even in the process of speech development one cannot memorize verses when a child can only pronounce "dad" and "mother."

The very first prayer that an infant unconsciously perceives as nourishment that he receives from his mother is the prayer of his mother or father over him. The child is baptized, putting to bed; pray over it. Even before he begins to speak, he imitates his mother, trying to cross himself or kiss the icon or cross over the bed. Let's not be embarrassed that this is a "holy toy" for him. To be baptized, to kneel - in a sense, it is also a game for him, but this is life, because for a baby there is no difference between play and life.

With the first words, the first verbal prayer also begins. "Lord, have mercy ..." or "Save and save ..." - the mother says, crossing herself and naming the names of loved ones. Gradually, the child begins to enumerate everyone he knows and loves; and in this enumeration of names he must be given great freedom. With these simple words, his experience of communion with God begins. I remember how my two-year-old grandson, having finished listing the names in the evening prayer, leaned out the window, waved his hand and said to the sky: "Good night, God!"

The child grows, develops, thinks more, understands better, speaks better... church prayers? Such prayers as the Lord's Prayer "Our Father" remain with us for life, teach us the right attitude towards God, towards ourselves, towards life. We, adults, continue to "learn" from these prayers until our death. And how to make this prayer understandable for the child, how to put the words of these prayers into the consciousness and memory of the child?

Here, it seems to me, you can teach the Lord's Prayer to a child of four or five years. You can tell your child how His disciples followed Christ, how He taught them. And once the disciples asked Him to teach them to pray to God. Jesus Christ gave them "Our Father..." and the Lord's Prayer became our first prayer. First, the words of the prayer should be spoken by an adult - mother, father, grandmother or grandfather. And each time you need to explain only one petition, one expression, making it very simple. "Our Father" means "Our Father." Jesus Christ taught us to call God Father because God loves us like the best father in the world. He listens to us and wants us to love Him as we love Mom and Dad. At another time it can be said that the words "who art in heaven" mean the spiritual invisible heaven and mean that we cannot see God, we cannot touch Him; how we cannot touch our joy, when we feel good, we only feel joy. And the words "Hallowed be Thy Name" can be explained as follows: when we are good, kind, we "praise," "holy God," and we want Him to become king in our hearts and in the hearts of all people. We say to God: "Let it be not as I want, but as You want!" And we will not be greedy, but ask God to give us what we really need today (this is easy to illustrate with examples). We ask God: "Forgive us all the bad things that we do, and we ourselves will forgive everyone. And save us from all the bad things."

Gradually, children will learn to repeat the words of a prayer after an adult, simple and understandable in meaning. Gradually, questions will begin to arise. One must be able to "hear" these questions and answer them, deepening - to the extent of a child's understanding - the interpretation of the meaning of words.

If the family situation allows, you can learn other prayers in the same way, such as "Virgin Mother of God, rejoice," showing the children an icon or picture of the Annunciation, "King of Heaven ..." - a prayer to the Holy Spirit, whom God sent to us when Jesus Christ returned On sky. You can tell a small child that the Holy Spirit is the breath of God. Of course, it is not necessary to introduce new prayers all at once, not on the same day, not in one month or year, but it seems to me that first you need to explain the general meaning, the general theme of this prayer, and then gradually explain individual words. And most importantly, these prayers should be a real appeal to God of the one who reads them with children.

It is difficult to say when that moment in a child's life comes when children begin to pray on their own, on their own, without the participation of their parents. If the habit of praying when going to bed or getting up in the morning is not yet firmly rooted in children, then it is good at first to remind them of this and take care that there is an opportunity for such prayer. In the end, daily prayer becomes the responsibility of the growing child. It is not given to us, parents, to know how the spiritual life of our children will develop, but if they enter into life having behind them the real experience of daily turning to God, this will remain in them with an incomparable value, no matter what happens to them.

It is very important that children, growing up, feel the reality of prayer in the life of their parents, the reality of turning to God at various moments of family life: to cross the departing person, to say "Glory to God!" with good news or "Christ is with you!" - all this can be a short and very fervent prayer.

Family holidays

It seems to me that in our attempts to build a Christian family life there is always some element of "struggle for joy."

The life of a parent is not easy. It is often associated with tedious work, with concern for children and other family members, with illnesses, financial difficulties, conflicts within the family ... And they illuminate our lives, give us the opportunity to see her in her real, bright image, moments of special joy, especially strong love. These moments of "good inspiration" are like hilltops on the road of our life, so difficult and sometimes incomprehensible. These are, as it were, peaks from which we suddenly see better and more clearly where we are going, how much we have already passed and what surrounds us. These moments are the holidays of our life, and without such holidays it would be very difficult to live, although we know that everyday life will come after the holidays. Such holidays are a joyful meeting, a joyful event in the family, some kind of family anniversary. But also from year to year they live with us and church holidays are always repeated.

The Church is not a building, not an institution, not a party, but life - our life with Christ. This life is associated with work, sacrifices, and suffering, but it also has holidays that illuminate its meaning and inspire us. It's hard to imagine life Orthodox Christian without the bright, joyful Easter celebration, without the touching joy of the Nativity of Christ.

There was a time when folk life was connected with Christian holidays when they determined the calendar of agricultural labor, the fruits of this labor were consecrated. Ancient, pre-Christian holiday customs were intertwined with Christian holidays, and the church blessed them, although it tried to cleanse these customs from pagan elements of superstition. But in our time it is difficult to celebrate church holidays. Our life in this sense has become empty, and church festivity has gone out of it. Thank God, the holidays have been preserved in our church services, and the Church prepares those who pray for them and observes the memory of the holidays for several days. Many devout, unemployed adults go to church on holidays.

But are we bringing the holiday spirit into our family life? Can we convey the festive mood to our children? Can church holidays become a living experience for them?

I remember a wonderful lesson that my twelve-year-old daughter taught me. France. We have just experienced the years of the German occupation, survived them in great need and even danger. And now, returning from school, my Olga says to me: "You know, mom, it seems to me that our family has more "spiritual life" than my friends!" "What kind of childish expression is that?" I thought. Yes, I don't think I've ever spoken to children like that. "What do you want to say?" I asked. “Yes, I know how difficult it was for you to get food, how often everything was not enough, but still, every time on name days, on Easter, you always managed to bake us a pretzel or Easter cake, make Easter ... How long did you take for such saved up for days and took care of food ... "Well, I thought, it was not in vain that I tried. This is how the Lord reaches children's souls!

God grant that our children have the opportunity to attend services during the holidays. But we, parents, are well aware that children's joy, festivity are given to children not by the words of prayers often incomprehensible to them, but by joyful customs, vivid impressions, gifts, and fun. In a Christian family, it is necessary to create this festive mood on holidays.

I have lived all my mother's life abroad, and I have always had difficulties with the celebration of the Nativity of Christ. The French celebrate Christmas according to the new calendar, and the Russian Orthodox Church - according to the old one. And now Christmas is celebrated both in schools and in institutions where parents work, Christmas trees are arranged with Santa Claus, shops are decorated, or New Year even before our church Christmas. Well, on our Christmas they go to church. What will be a real holiday for children, which they are waiting for, dreaming about? I did not want to leave my children as if destitute when all their French comrades receive Christmas gifts, but I also wanted their main joy to be connected with the church celebration of the Nativity of Christ. And so "on French Christmas" we observed French customs: we made a cake called "Christmas log," hung stockings on the children's crib, which they filled with small gifts at night, lit electric lanterns in the garden. On New Year's Eve they arranged a New Year's Eve meeting with comic fortune-telling and games: they poured wax, floated a nut on the water with a candle that set fire to notes with "fate." It was all a lot of fun and felt like a game.

But our home tree was lit on Orthodox Christmas, after the festive vigil and under the Christmas tree, real, "big" gifts from parents were placed. On this day, the whole family, relatives and friends gathered for a festive dinner or tea. On this day, a Christmas performance was staged, for which we had been preparing for so long, carefully learning the roles, making costumes and scenery. I know that my grown-up grandchildren have not forgotten the joy and excitement of these "grandmother's performances."

Each church holiday can somehow be celebrated in domestic life by customs that are pious in essence, but translate the meaning of the holiday into the language of childish impressionability. At Baptism, you can bring a bottle of "holy water" from the church, give the children a drink of holy water, bless the room with water. You can prepare a special bottle in advance, cut it out and stick a cross on it. On the Meeting, on February 14, when it is remembered how the Baby Jesus Christ, brought to the temple, was recognized only by the ancient elder Simeon and the old woman Anna, you can honor your grandmother or grandfather, or another elderly family friend - honor old age. On the Annunciation, March 25, when in the old days it was a custom to release a bird into the wild in memory of the good news brought to the Virgin Mary by the Archangel, you can at least tell the children about it and bake "lark" buns in the shape of a bird in memory of this custom. On Palm Sunday, you can bring a consecrated willow branch to the children from the church, attach it over the bed, tell how the children greeted Christ with exclamations of joy, waving the branches. How much it meant for the children to bring the "holy light" home from the 12 Gospels, light the lamp, make sure that it does not go out before Easter. I remember how upset my five-year-old grandson was when his lamp went out, and when his father wanted to light it again with a match, he protested indignantly: "Don't you understand, dad, this is a holy light ..." Thank God, my grandmother has a lamp did not go out, and the grandson was consoled, having received again the "holy light." There are so many Easter customs, so many goodies associated with the holiday, that it’s not worth listing. The memory of "rolling eggs" is still alive. Paint testicles, hide in the garden Easter eggs or gifts and give them to look for ... And once, in the old days, it was allowed for boys on Bright Easter Sunday to ring the bells all day. Maybe it's recoverable. And on Trinity Day, 50 days after Easter, when the Holy Spirit descended on the apostles, the Spirit of God, Who gives life to everything, you can, according to the old Russian custom, decorate the rooms with greenery, or at least put a bouquet of flowers. In the month of August, at the Transfiguration, it is customary to bring fruits, fruits consecrated in the church, into the house.

All this, of course, is trifles, our home life. But these little things and this life make sense if the parents themselves understand and joyfully experience the meaning of the holiday. So we can convey to children in a language accessible to them the meaning of the holiday, which we perceive in an adult way, and the children's joy of the Holiday is as great and also real as our joy.

I cannot fail to mention one more incident from our family life. It was in America, on the day of Christmas Holy Mother of God. The day was a weekday, my daughter and son-in-law were at work, the grandchildren of six and eight years old were at school. We, grandparents, went to church for Mass. Returning, I thought: "Lord, how can I make the children feel that today is a holiday, so that the joy of this day will reach them?" And so, on the way home, I bought a small cake - the same as they do in America for a birthday, inserting candles into it according to the number of years. I put the cake in the kitchen on the table in front of the icons and hung the icon of the Mother of God. By the time the children arrived, and they always entered the house through the kitchen, I inserted a lit candle into the cake. "Whose birth?" they shouted as they entered. "It's Her birthday!" - I answered, pointing to the icon. And imagine on next year my granddaughter reminded me that I needed to bake a cake for the Mother of God, and two years later she baked it herself, and she went to the vigil with me.

And how (!) one of the most cheerful people I knew, the late Vladyka Sergius (Prazhsky in exile, and then Kazansky in exile) spoke about joy: “Every day is given to us to extract at least a minimum of that good, that joy, which in essence is eternity and which will go with us into future life... If I direct my inner eye to the light, then I will see it. Strive, intensify, force yourself to find the light and you will see it..."

Raising love in children

No one will dispute that love is the most important thing in family life. The theme of maternal love, the love of a child for mother and father, the love of brothers and sisters for each other, as well as the theme of the violation of this love, often inspired writers and artists. But each of us, parents, experiences love in our own way in family life and thinks about what love is and how to cultivate the ability to love in our children. And we must practice this love practically in our family life, in concrete relationships with those people, adults and children, with whom we are connected in our family.

Love between people is the ability to sympathize, rejoice, sympathize with another. Love is affection, friendship, mutual trust. Love can inspire a person to self-sacrifice, to a feat. The task of parents is to create a family life in which children are surrounded by love and in which their capacity for love is developed.

Children do not learn to love immediately, not “by themselves”, just as they do not immediately learn to speak, communicate with people, understand them. Of course, each of us has a need to communicate with other people. But education is needed to transform this need into a conscious and responsible love for others. Such love develops in a person gradually, over many years.

How early does a child's moral development begin? In the 30s of our century, the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget drew up a whole scheme of human intellectual development, connected with the adaptation of a person to the environment, with his gradually developing understanding of the causality of events and their logical connection, with the development in a person of the ability to analyze specific situations. Piaget came to the conclusion that in most cases teachers and parents impose on children moral concepts that children are still absolutely unable to perceive, which they simply do not understand. Of course, there is a certain truth in this: children often call something "bad" or "good" only on the basis that adults say so, and not because they themselves understand it. But it seems to me that there are simple moral concepts that a child perceives very early: "I am loved," "I love," "I am glad," "I'm scared," "I feel good," and the child perceives them not as some kind of moral categories, but simply as a feeling. Just as he perceives the feeling "I'm cold," "I'm warm." But it is precisely from these sensations and concepts that the moral life gradually develops. I recently read with interest an article in an American scientific journal about the first manifestation of emotions, feelings in infants. Research on this topic was carried out in the laboratories of the National Institute of Mental Health (National Institute of Mental Health). Their authors led to the conclusion that the infant is able to emotionally sympathize with the sensations, feelings of another from the earliest years of life. The infant reacts when someone cries in pain or distress, reacts when others quarrel or fight.

I remember a case from my communication with children. A three-year-old boy, playing in the house, stuck his head between the balusters of the railing on the stairs and turned it so that he could not pull it out. Frightened, the boy began to scream loudly, but the adults did not immediately hear him. When the grandmother finally ran up and freed the boy's head, she found his two-year-old sister there: the girl was sitting next to her brother, crying loudly and stroking his back. She sympathized: there was nothing else she could do. Was it not a manifestation true love? And what a big role later brotherly and sisterly love plays in life.

The education of the ability to love lies in the development in children of the ability to sympathize, to suffer, and to rejoice with others. First of all, this is brought up by the example of surrounding adults. Children see when adults notice each other's fatigue, headaches, poor health, senile infirmity, and how they try to help. Children unconsciously absorb these examples of empathy and imitate them. In this development of the ability to sympathize, caring for domestic animals is very useful: a dog, a cat, a bird, a fish. All this teaches children to be attentive to the needs of another being, to care for others, to a sense of responsibility. The family tradition of gifts is also useful in this development: not only receiving gifts for the holidays, but also preparing gifts that children give to other family members.

In the process of cultivating love, the family environment is very important, because in this world there are several people of different ages, at different stages of development, different characters, in different relationships with each other, with different responsibilities for each other. In a good family, good relations are created between people, and in this atmosphere of benevolence, the still undiscovered spiritual forces of a person come into play. Vladyka Sergius, whom I mentioned earlier, said that from loneliness a person almost always becomes poor, he is, as it were, cut off from the common life of the whole organism and dries up in this “selfness” ...

Unfortunately, in family life there is also a distortion of love. Parental love sometimes turns into a desire to have children. They love children and want the children to belong to them completely, and after all, every growth, every development is always a gradual liberation, a search for one's own path. From the moment of leaving the mother's womb, the development of the child always consists in the process of moving out of the state of dependence and moving step by step into greater independence. Growing up, the child begins to make friends with other children, leaves the closed circle of the family, begins to think and reason in his own way ... And the final stage of his development is leaving his parents and creating his own, independent family. Happy are those families in which the love that binds all its members becomes mature, responsible, unselfish. And there are parents who experience the growing independence of children as a violation of love. While the children are small, they take care of them exaggeratedly, protect the child from all sorts of real and imaginary dangers, they are afraid of any outside influences, and when the children grow up and begin to look for that love that will lead them to create their own family, such parents take it hard as a kind of betrayal to them.

Family life is a school of love for children, spouses, and parents. Love is work, and it is necessary to fight for the ability to love. In our family life, we must react every day in one way or another to everything that happens, and we open up to each other as we are, and not just as we show ourselves. In family life, our sins, all our shortcomings are revealed, and this helps us to fight them.

In order to teach our children about love, we must ourselves learn to love truly. A surprisingly deep description of true love is given by the Apostle Paul in his Epistle to the Corinthians: “If I speak in the tongues of men and angels, but do not have love, then I am ringing bronze ... If I have the gift of prophecy, and I know all the secrets, and I have all knowledge and all faith, so that I can move mountains, but have no love, I am nothing..." (1 Corinthians 13:1-2).

The Apostle Paul speaks about the properties of love, about what love is: “Love is long-suffering, merciful, love does not envy, love does not exalt itself, does not pride itself, does not behave violently, does not seek its own, is not irritated, thinks no evil, does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth, covers all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things" (1 Corinthians 13:4-5).

It seems to me that our main task is to work on applying these definitions, these properties of love to every little detail of our everyday family life, to how we teach, how we educate, punish, forgive our children and how we treat each other. to a friend.

On obedience and freedom in raising children

How often do we hear the word "obedience" when talking about raising children. People of the old generation often say that our children are disobedient, that they are badly brought up because they do not obey, that punishments for disobedience are needed, that obedience is the basis of all education.

At the same time, we know from experience that abilities and talents are not developed by obedience, that every growth, both mental and physical, is associated with a certain freedom, with the opportunity to try one's strength, explore the unknown, seek one's own paths. And the most wonderful good people do not come out of the most obedient children.

No matter how difficult this issue is, parents have to solve it, they have to determine the measure of obedience and freedom in the upbringing of their children. No wonder it is said that it is not given to a person not to decide. Whatever we do, no matter how we act, it is always a decision one way or the other.

It seems to me that in order to understand the issue of obedience and freedom in the upbringing of children, one must think for oneself what is the meaning of obedience, what is its purpose, what it serves, in what area it is applicable. And it is also necessary to understand what freedom means in the development of a human being.

Obedience in early childhood is, firstly, a measure of safety. It is necessary that Small child learned to obey when they say "Do not touch!" or "Stop!" and every mother will not hesitate to force a little child into such obedience in order to avoid trouble. Man learns to limit his will from early childhood. For example, a baby sits in his high chair and drops a spoon on the floor. So funny! What noise! Mother or grandmother raises a spoon. The baby soon abandons her again. This is his creative act: he made this wonderful noise! And every reasonable adult will understand this joy of creativity and let him drop the spoon again and again. But there will come a moment when an adult will get tired of picking it up, and he will remove, take away this object of infantile creativity. Scream! Roar! But in this and in hundreds of similar cases, the infant learns that his will is limited by the will of others, that he is not omnipotent. And this is very important.

Obedience is essential. Without obedience to certain rules, neither a peaceful family life, nor any social structure, nor state, nor church life is possible. But in obedience there must be a certain hierarchy, gradualism: who should be obeyed, whose authority is higher. Moral education consists precisely in developing in the child the ability to consciously submit himself - not to violence, but to a freely recognized authority, in the end, to his faith, his convictions. The ability to recognize the highest authority is given only by education directed towards freedom, that is, education of freedom of choice, education of the ability to decide for oneself: "That's good!" is that bad!" and "I will do it because it will be good!"

I remember how I was struck by the case of a boy of four or five years old. His parents were waiting for guests, and a table with refreshments was set in the dining room. Through the half-open door, I saw how the boy, standing alone in the room, stretched out his hand several times to take something tasty from the table and each time pulled it back. None of the adults were there. Knowing his parents, I was sure that no punishment threatened him if he took something, but it seemed to him that he shouldn’t take it, and he never took it.

We parents need to work hard to teach our children to obey certain rules. But even more we need to work to develop in children the ability to understand - which rules are the most important, who and what should be obeyed. And this is what children learn best from their parents. You must obey not because "I want so!" but because "So it is necessary!" and the obligation of such rules is recognized by the parents for themselves. They themselves act one way or another: "Because it is necessary," "Because God said so!" "Because it is my duty!"

The scope defined by obedience and punishments for disobedience is very limited. This is the realm of external actions: not putting something back in its place, taking a forbidden thing, starting to watch TV when lessons are not prepared, etc. And the punishment should be the consequence of breaking the rules - immediate, quick and, of course, fair. But obedience is not applicable to the tastes and feelings of children. It is impossible to demand that children like that book or that program that parents like, that they rejoice or be upset at the desire of their parents, one cannot be angry with children when what parents think is touching seems funny to them.

How to bring up this moral taste of children? It seems to me that this is given only by example, only by the experience of life in the family, by the way and behavior of loved ones surrounding the child. I remember how my son, then a healthy thirteen-year-old boy, once helped an old American woman, our neighbor, to drag a heavy suitcase up to the top floor. In gratitude for this, she wanted to give him a dollar and then, with a laugh, told me how seriously he refused to accept the money, saying: "We Russians do not accept this!" - Oh, how children absorb both good and bad things that are "not accepted" in the family.

Every time I am struck by the story of the Evangelist Luke about the twelve-year-old boy Jesus (Luke 2:42-52). His parents went with Him to Jerusalem for the feast. At the end of the holiday, they returned home, not noticing that Jesus Christ remained in Jerusalem - they thought that He was walking with others. For three days they searched for Him and, finally, they found him talking with the disciples in the temple. His mother said to Him: "Child! What have You done to us? Your father and I have been looking for You with great sorrow." And Jesus Christ answered: "Did you not know that I must be in the things that belong to my Father?"

Obedience to the Heavenly Father was higher than obedience to earthly parents. And adding to this are the words immediately following this in the Gospel: "He went with them and came to Nazareth; and was in subjection to them ... and prospered in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men."

These few words contain the deepest meaning of human education.

About parental authority and friendship with children

How often do we talk about the crisis that the family is going through in our time? modern society. We all complain about the collapse of the family, the fall in the authority of parents. Parents complain about the disobedience of children, their disrespect for elders. In truth, the same complaints and conversations have been in all ages, in all countries... And St. John Chrysostom, the great preacher of the 4th century, repeats the same thoughts in his sermons.

It seems to me that in our time another circumstance has been added to this age-old problem, especially affecting religious parents. This is a conflict between the authority of believing parents and the authority of the school, state, society. In the Western world, we see a conflict between the moral, moral convictions of religious parents and the non-religious, I would say utilitarian, attitude towards moral life, which dominates in school and in modern society. Very strong is the conflict between the authority of parents and the influence of peers, the so-called. youth culture.

In the conditions of life in the former Soviet Union, the conflict between the authority of believing parents and the authority of the school and the state was even more acute. From the very first years of life, the child - in the nursery, in kindergarten, at school - was inspired by words, concepts, feelings, images that denied the very foundations of the religious understanding of life. These anti-religious concepts and images were closely intertwined with the process of school education, with trust and respect for teachers, with the desire of parents that their children study well, with the desire of children to succeed in school. I remember how one story struck me. A little girl told in kindergarten that she was with her grandmother in church. Hearing this, the teacher gathered all the children and began to explain to them how stupid and ashamed it was for a Soviet girl to go to church. The teacher invited the children to express their condemnation of their friend. The girl listened, listened, and finally said: - Stupid, but I was not in the church, but in the circus! In fact, the girl was with her grandmother in the church;

and to what subtle cunning the conflict between the authority of the family and the authority of the school has brought a five-year-old child.

And parents often face a terrible question: isn’t it better to give up your authority, isn’t it better not to burden the minds of children with such a conflict? It seems to me that we, parents, need to think deeply about the question: "What is the essence of parental authority?"

What is authority? The dictionary gives a definition: "common opinion," but it seems to me that the meaning of this concept is much deeper. Authority is a source of moral strength, which you turn to in cases of uncertainty, hesitation, when you don’t know what decision to make.

Authority is a person, an author, a book, a tradition; it is, as it were, evidence or proof of the truth. We believe something because we trust the person who tells it to us. Not knowing how to get somewhere, we ask for directions from a person who knows the way and whom we trust in this regard. The presence in a child's life of such a trusted person is necessary for normal child development. Parental authority leads the child through all the seeming disorder, all the incomprehensibility of the new world around him. The daily routine, when to get up, when to go to bed, how to wash, dress, sit at the table, how to say hello, say goodbye, how to ask for something, how to thank - all this is determined and supported by the authority of parents, all this creates that stable world in which a small person can easily grow and develop. When a child develops his moral consciousness, the authority of the parents establishes the boundaries between what is "bad" and what is "good," between disorderly impulses, random "I want!" and sober "Now you can not!" or "That's right!"

For a happy and healthy development of a child in a family environment, it is necessary that there is room for freedom, for creativity, but the child also needs the experience of a reasonable restriction of this freedom.

The child grows, develops morally, and the concept of authority also takes on a fuller and deeper meaning. The authority of parents will remain effective for teenagers only if they feel that in the life of their parents there is an unshakable authority - their beliefs, convictions, their moral rules. If the child feels and sees that the parents are honest, responsible, really faithful to the truth, duty, love in their Everyday life, he will retain trust and respect for parental authority, even if this authority is in conflict with the authority of the environment. An example of their sincere obedience to the Highest Authority recognized by them, that is, their faith, is the most important thing that parents can give to children.

And the conflict of authorities has always been and always will be. In the days of the earthly life of Jesus Christ, when the Jewish people experienced their submission to Roman power with such bitterness, Jesus Christ was once asked, "Is it permissible to give tribute to Caesar?" that is, to the Roman emperor "He said; Why are you tempting Me? Bring Me a denarius so that I can see it. They brought it. Then he said to them: Whose image and inscription is this? They said to Him: Caesar's. Jesus said to them in response: Give Caesar's to Caesar, but what is God's to God" (Mark 12:15-17).

This answer of Jesus Christ remains an eternal and valid indication of how we should define the boundaries between our duties to the society in which we live and our duty to God.

It is necessary for us, parents, to always remember the other side of parental authority - friendship with children. We can influence our children only if we have a live communication with them, live connection i.e. friendship. Friendship is the ability to understand a friend, the ability to see a child as he is, the ability to sympathize, compassion, share both joy and sorrow. How often parents sin by seeing their child not as he is, but as they want him to be. Friendship with children begins from their earliest childhood, and without such friendship, parental authority remains superficial, without roots, remains only "power." We know examples of deeply religious, very prominent people whose children never "entered the faith of their parents" precisely because neither father nor mother was able to establish sincere friendship with children.

We cannot impose, using our parental authority, "feelings" on our children.

As parents, we have been given the responsibility by God to be the educators of our children. We have no right to refuse this responsibility, to refuse to bear the burden of parental authority. This responsibility also includes the ability to see and love our children as they are, to understand the conditions in which they live, to be able to distinguish what is "Caesar's" from what is "God's," to give them experience of good order. in family life and the meaning of rules. The main thing is to be faithful to the Highest Authority in our life, the faith in which we profess.

Children's independence

Usually, when it comes to raising our children, our greatest concern is how to teach them to be obedient. An obedient child is good, a naughty child is bad. Of course, this concern is quite reasonable. Obedience protects our children from many dangers. A child does not know life, does not understand much that is happening around us, cannot think it over and reasonably decide what can be done and what cannot be done. For his own safety, a certain amount of training is necessary.

As children grow up, the simple demand for obedience is replaced by a more conscious, more independent obedience to the authority of parents, educators, older comrades.

The moral upbringing of children consists precisely in such a gradual development, or rather, rebirth.

Schematically, this process can be imagined as follows: first, a small child learns by experience what it means to obey, what it means "it is possible" and what it means "it is impossible." Then the child begins to have questions: who should be obeyed, and who should not be obeyed? And, finally, the child himself begins to understand what is bad and what is good, and what he will be obedient to.

All of us parents should strive to protect our children from the dangers that really exist in our society. The child should know that one cannot always obey adults unknown to him, accept treats from them, and leave with them. We teach him this and thus we ourselves place on him the responsibility for an independent decision - whom he should obey and who not. Over the years, the conflict of authorities becomes stronger. Whom to obey - comrades who teach to smoke and drink, or parents who forbid it, but they themselves smoke and drink? Whom to listen to - believing parents or a teacher respected by children who says that there is no God, that only gray, backward people go to church? But don’t we sometimes hear about the opposite conflict of authorities, when the children of convinced communists, brought up in atheism, grow up, encounter manifestations of religious faith, and they begin to be irresistibly drawn to the spiritual world that is still unknown to them?

How can one make a practical transition from "blind" obedience to obedience to self-recognized authority?

It seems to me that from early childhood it is necessary to distinguish between two spheres in a child's life. One is the sphere of obligatory rules of behavior that do not depend on the desires or moods of the child: brush your teeth, take medicine, say "thank you" or "please." Another sphere is everything in which a child can show his tastes, his desires, his creativity. And parents should make sure that enough freedom and attention is given to this area. If a child draws, paints, let him give full rein to his imagination and do not tell him "that there are no blue hares," as Leo Tolstoy recalls in Childhood and Adolescence. It is necessary in every possible way to encourage the development of children's imagination in their games, to provide them with the opportunity to carry out their undertakings and projects, which are not always successful from an adult point of view. We must encourage their ability to choose between several solutions, listen to their opinions, discuss them, and not just ignore them. And one should try to understand their tastes. Oh, how difficult it is for a mother to put up with unexpected fantasies when it comes to hair, clothes, or even cosmetics for a teenage daughter. But we must remember that these are the girl's first attempts to find herself, to "find her image," her style, and one cannot but sympathize with this desire to "spread her wings."

We want our children to grow up kind, sympathetic, but neither kindness nor responsiveness develops by order. You can try to evoke the ability to empathize by involving children in caring for animals, in preparing gifts, in helping a sick or old family member. And this will be sincere only if we give children more independence, if we let them think for themselves, decide for themselves what they want to do. They need to see around them an example of caring for others, empathy for other people, and at the same time, children should be involved in thinking and discussing what they want to do. This is why we need to devote both time and attention to talking with children, always remembering that talking is a dialogue, not a monologue. We must be able to listen to our children, and not just lecture them. It is necessary to call them to the thought, to the "judgment:" "What do you think?" "Yes, but you can also say ..." "Maybe it's not quite so?"

Such conversations are especially important in the area of ​​our faith. I recently read in a book a saying that I liked very much: "Faith is given only by the experience of faith." But experience is your personal, direct, independent experience. The development of such true independence of spiritual life is the goal of Christian education. Maybe the goal is unattainable? None of us parents can be

confident that we will be able to give such education. I have always been encouraged by the encouraging words of a wonderful poem by Nikolai Gumilyov:

There is a God, there is a world, they live forever,

And the life of people is instantaneous and miserable.

But a person contains everything,

Who loves the world and believes in God.

The next petition, “Thy will be done,” is very important for cultivating a basic Christian attitude towards our lives. Children, and not only children, often turn to God with specific requests, ask God to fulfill one or another of their desires, important or unimportant. The ability to know that in life one must seek not the fulfillment of one's random desires, but the fulfillment of God's higher will, God's plan for us, is the foundation of the Christian attitude to life. I often had to tell children an example from the life of two holy hermits who lived in the desert. They agreed to plant a palm tree at the entrance to their cell, so that it would give them shade in the heat of the day. They meet after a while, and one hermit says to another: “Here, brother, I pray to God that He sends rain on my palm tree, and every time He fulfills my request. I pray for sunny days and God sends me the sun. But, look, your palm tree grows much better than mine. How do you pray for her? And another hermit answered him: “And I, brother, just pray: Lord, make my palm tree grow. And the Lord sends both the sun and the rain when needed.

Older children should be explained that the petition "Thy will be done" is not only the ability to accept the will of God, but, more importantly, the desire to carry it out.

The petition "for our daily bread" teaches us not to worry about our many needs, about what we only think we need. Both by your own example and in conversations with children, it is important to teach them to understand what we really need in our life “like our daily bread”, and which desires are temporary and insignificant.

"Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors." When we sin, we are guilty before God. And if we repent, God forgives us our sins, just as a father forgives a son who has left his home. But often people are unfair to each other, offend each other, and each is waiting for the other to become more just. Often we do not want to forgive another for his shortcomings, and with these words of the Lord's Prayer, God teaches us to forgive the sins and shortcomings of others, since we want God to forgive our sins.

And, finally, the last petition “Do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one” raises the question of evil, temptation, and the struggle against evil that takes place in the soul of each of us before the growing child. To educate a person in a Christian concept of evil and good, it is not enough just to explain the words of this petition of the Lord's Prayer. Narrative after narrative, lesson after lesson, parable after parable, we find in the Holy Scripture, which helps us gradually understand that there is evil in the world, evil force resisting the good, good plan of God's creation. This evil force is constantly trying to attract us, subdue us, "tempt" us. Therefore, we often want to do something bad, although we know that it is bad. Without God's help, we could not fight temptations, so we ask for His help in order not to succumb to evil desires.

Christian education of morality comes down to the development in a person of the ability to recognize the bad in himself - bad. And when repenting, to know that God always forgives the penitent, always meets him with love, rejoices in him, as the father in the parable of the prodigal son rejoices in the return of his sinning and repentant son. In Christian morality there is no place for despair or despondency.

Teaching children church prayers

In Slavic, this prayer is read like this: To the King of Heaven, the Comforter, the Soul of Truth, Who is everywhere and fulfills everything. Treasure of the good, and life to the Giver, come and dwell in us, and cleanse us from all filth, and save, O Blessed, our souls. Amen.

Translated into Russian: King of heaven, Comforter, Spirit of truth, Who is everywhere and fills everything, Treasury of all good things, Giver of life, come and dwell in us and cleanse us from everything bad and save our souls, Good One. Amen.

It is good to add stories from the Holy Scriptures to the explanation of this prayer if there is a Bible at home or an adult who knows these stories. In the 1st chapter Old Testament it is said how at the creation of the world “the earth was formless and empty, and darkness was over the abyss, and the Spirit of God hovered over the waters”, and in the 2nd chapter (7-1) - “And the Lord God created man from the dust of the earth and breathed into the face his breath of life; and man became a living soul. The Gospels tell of the manifestation of the Holy Spirit during the Baptism of Jesus Christ by John the Baptist, and in the Acts of the Apostles - of the descent of the Holy Spirit on the apostles. In the light of these stories, prayer to the Holy Spirit becomes clearer and closer to children.

The third prayer, which, it seems to me, should be taught to children, is the prayer of the Mother of God. It is based on the gospel story of how the Virgin Mary was announced that she would become the Mother of Jesus Christ:

“The angel Gabriel was sent from God to the city of Galilee, called Nazareth, to the Virgin, betrothed to a husband named Joseph, from the house of David; the name of the Virgin: Mary. An angel, having entered to Her, said: Rejoice, Blessed One! The Lord is with you; blessed are you among women. She, seeing him, was embarrassed by his words and wondered what kind of greeting it would be. And the angel said to her: Fear not, Mary, for you have found grace with God; and behold, thou shalt conceive in the womb and bear a Son, and thou shalt call His name: Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High…. Mary said to the Angel: How will it be when I do not know my husband? The angel said to her in response: the Holy Spirit will find on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you ... Then Mary said: Behold, the servant of the Lord, be it to me according to your word ”( ).

Expecting a baby, Mary went to visit her relative Elizabeth, who at that time was also expecting her son, John the Baptist. Seeing Mary, Elizabeth greeted her with the words: “Blessed are You among women, and blessed is the fruit of Your womb!”

From these greetings, a prayer was composed, with which we turn to the Mother of God:

Virgin Mother of God, rejoice, Blessed Mary, the Lord is with you; Blessed are You in women, and blessed is the fruit of Your womb, as if the Savior gave birth to an ecu of our souls.

All the gospel stories about the Mother of God - about the Nativity of Christ, about the flight into Egypt, about the first miracle at the marriage in Cana of Galilee, about the Mother of God standing at the cross of the Lord, and about how Jesus Christ entrusted the care of Her to His beloved disciple John.

If we manage to pass on to our children a living and prayerful understanding of these three prayers, a strong foundation of the Christian Orthodox faith will be laid.

How to explain the sacrament of Holy Communion to children

Jesus Christ showed that physical fellowship, physical closeness to Him, is just as real as intellectual or spiritual fellowship, and that infants' lack of understanding of "the truths about God" does not prevent actual closeness "with God."

For centuries, Orthodox mothers have brought their babies to the church and communed them, and no one was embarrassed when the squeak and cry of babies were heard in the church. I remember how a young mother of three children told me that her three-month-old Tanya loves to go to church: “I always have no time at home, I’m always in a hurry, fussing, but in church for an hour and a half she lies calmly in my arms, and no one tells us hinders…”

But there comes a moment, about two years old, when a child, especially if he is not used to taking communion, needs to be explained what communion is and how to start the sacrament. It seems to me that it’s not worth being smart here, it’s enough to say: “Here the priest will give you a holy bread, tasty ...” or “Father will give you communion - holy, good, tasty ...” Gradually, thanks to the attitude of adults towards the child-participant - how they congratulate him , praise, kiss, and because on this day they try to dress him in a festive way, he begins to understand that communion is a joyful, solemn, holy event.

If a baby has never received communion, and when he is brought to the Chalice, he is afraid of communion, as something incomprehensible, perhaps reminding him of the discomfort associated with taking medicine, it seems to me that there is no need to force him. It is better to let him see how they take communion other children, give him a piece of prosphora, bring it to the priest for blessing when they venerate the cross, and say that he will receive communion next time.

By the age of 3–4, it is possible and necessary to explain to children the meaning of the sacrament of communion. You can tell children about Jesus Christ, about His Nativity, about how He healed the sick, fed the hungry, caressed little children. And so, when He found out that He was about to die, He wanted to gather for the last time with His fellow disciples, to have dinner with them. And when they settled down at the table, He took bread, broke it and distributed it to them, saying: "This bread is I Myself, and when you eat this bread, I will be with you." Then He took a cup of wine and said to them: "In this cup I give you Myself, and when you drink from it, I will be with you." So Jesus Christ for the first time communed people and bequeathed that everyone who loves Him should also partake.

Starting with a simple explanation, growing children can be told about the Last Supper in more detail and more fully, following the gospel text. During the Liturgy, they will hear the words: “Take, eat, This is My Body, which is broken for you for the remission of sins” and “Drink all of it from it, This is My Blood of the New Testament, which is shed for you and for much for the remission of sins.” And they need to be prepared for this. But no matter how we simplify the gospel stories, it is important that their meaning is not distorted.

As children mature, it is important to explain to them not only gospel events with which the sacrament of the sacrament is associated, but also what it means for us today. At the liturgy we bring our gifts - bread and wine. Bread and wine are our food and drink. Man cannot live without food and drink, and our simple gifts mean that we bring our very life to God in gratitude. In giving our life to God, we are not alone: ​​together with us and for us, Jesus Christ Himself gives His life. Explaining to children the meaning of the sacrament of Holy Communion, you can tell how the priest prepares our gifts: he cuts out particles from the brought prosphora-bread: one particle “Lamb” for communion, the other in honor of the Mother of God, particles in honor of all the saints, as well as in memory of the dead and the living for whom he is asked to pray. The attention of the children should be drawn to how they solemnly transfer the prepared gifts to the throne under the singing of the prayer “Like Cherubim”. To bring gifts means to give thanks, and the meaning of the liturgy is our gratitude to God for the gift of life, for our world, for the fact that God Jesus Christ became a Man, entered our life, took upon Himself our sins and sufferings. Therefore, the sacrament of the liturgy is also called the "Eucharist" - in Greek "gratitude". Understanding the meaning of the liturgy comes as we delve deeper into every exclamation, every act of worship, every hymn. This is the best school that lasts a lifetime, and the task of parents is to develop children's interest in knowing what they see and hear in the temple.

We have the responsibility to teach children how to approach the sacrament of Holy Communion. Of course, it is necessary to distinguish the most essential from the secondary. The rules of conduct in the temple are determined to a certain extent by the conditions of our life. No rules apply to babies, but, starting from the age of seven, the practice of the Russian Orthodox Church establishes confession before taking communion, fasting, that is, not eating or drinking in the morning before the liturgy. Pray on the eve of the vigil and try, if there is a prayer book, to read at least some of the prayers before communion. Usually the priest gives us instructions about the rules that we must try to follow.

We, parents, are called to teach our children how to approach communion: fold our hands on our chests, and when approaching the cup, do not cross ourselves, so as not to accidentally push the cup. You should tell the priest your name. After communion, we are given a piece of prosphora to eat and a little wine and water to drink - this is called "drinking". All these are external rules, and they should not be confused with the meaning and meaning of the sacrament, but the behavior established by tradition in the temple is of no small importance. It is important for children to feel in solemn moments that they know how to behave like adults.

"I give myself to Christ, and Christ comes into my life." His life in me is what the sacrament of Holy Communion consists of, and in this the meaning and purpose of our life is revealed.

On Faith and Superstition

Jesus Christ, having healed the possessed man, whom they could not heal, said to his disciples: “This generation (i.e. devilry who possessed a demon-possessed) cannot come out otherwise than by prayer and fasting ”( ).

For us, Orthodox laity, fasting means for a while, before the great holidays, to abstain from certain types of food and lead a more collected, concentrated lifestyle. Fasting means freeing ourselves from food and pleasures to which we become slaves. We want to free ourselves from this slavery in order to find life with God, life in God, and we believe that life in God will give us greater joy, greater happiness. To fast means to strengthen one's strength in the fight against weaknesses, to subordinate one's tastes and desires to one's will, to become a good master of one's own mental economy.

It is important for us, parents, to remember that no educational measures, no matter how hard we try, will guarantee that our children will grow up good and smart, as we would like, that they will be happy and prosperous in life. We try to put Christian seeds of concepts, feelings, thoughts, and moods into the souls of children. We are trying to grow these seeds. But whether children will perceive them, whether these feelings and thoughts will develop in them, we do not know. Each person lives and walks his own way.

How to explain to children what it means to fast? Here is an approximate outline of the “theology” of fasting that children can understand:

1. The main thing in life is to love God and neighbors.
2. Loving is not always easy. This often takes effort and labour. To love, you have to be strong. It is important to become the master of yourself. Often we want to be good, but we do bad things, we want to refrain from evil, but we cannot. Strength is not enough.
3. How can you develop your strength? It is necessary to exercise, as athletes and athletes do. The Church teaches us to fast, to train our strength. The Church teaches from time to time to give up something that you like: delicious food or some kind of pleasure. This is what is called a post.

In family life, fasting is perceived by children primarily through the example of their parents. Parents refuse smoking or any entertainment during the fast. Children notice the difference in what they eat at the family table. If there is no common family structure, then a believing father or a believing mother can talk to the children about some form of personal, inconspicuous fasting for others: refuse sweets or sweets for the duration of the fast, limit time spent watching TV. Fasting is not just about small hardships. It is important to intensify prayer, go to church more often. If there is a Gospel at home, read it with the children. There are also some household chores that are associated with fasting: clean and clean the rooms or house before the holidays, put the household in order, giving children the opportunity to participate in cleaning. In every family there are some good deeds - to visit someone, to write to someone, to provide some kind of help. Often these cases are postponed from month to month. Fasting can carry out these good intentions.

Church experience warns us of some of the dangers of fasting. These dangers exist for children as well. The first is to “boast” about fasting, to fast “for show”. There is a danger of a superstitious attitude to fasting - you should not attach too much importance to trifles: “I ate, but it was not fasting!” We can talk to the children again about the true meaning of fasting. Of course, you should not allow children to fast if it is harmful to their health. Experienced priests told me that when teaching children to fast, it is important to remember two rules: 1) in order to contribute to the development of children's spiritual life, fasting must be voluntary - a conscious effort of the child himself; 2) it is necessary to accustom fasting gradually, starting from the level of spiritual development at which the child is. The “ladder of fasting” in the spiritual experience of the Orthodox Church has no end. No one can ever say that he observes all the prescriptions of fasting, no one can consider himself a great faster. But if we, parents, manage to instill in the child the experience that it is not always necessary to do what you want, that you can keep your desires in order to become better for the sake of God and God's truth, we will do a great job.

Fasting does not mean despondency, fasting is work, but joyful work. At Matins, on the first week of Great Lent, we hear the prayer in church: “We fast with a pleasant fast, pleasing to the Lord. True fasting is alienation from evil, abstinence from the tongue, renunciation of anger, liberation from bad feelings, from excessive talkativeness, from lies ... "

On teaching truthfulness in children

The attitude of parents to the misconduct of children

None of us, probably, doubts how much the worldview of parents influences children. What parents say, the example they set, their relationship with each other leaves an indelible impression on the child's mind. Affects the child and what parents do not talk about. The fact of silence about a particular subject also affects the child. There is an area of ​​life that we do not usually talk about with children, about which parents are almost always silent. This forbidden sphere is the development of the masculine and feminine principles in growing children. Something that every boy and every girl between the ages of 9 and 11 must come into contact with. It is important to correctly answer the questions of young children about the beginning of a new life, about the birth of a new human being. But it is also important to help the growing child to correctly understand the process of his own maturation, to correctly relate to his manhood or femininity. It is better to do this in the preadolescent period, before it starts to worry them, before this issue becomes painful. By instilling a proper attitude in the minds of children, we will help them to safely survive the turbulent period of maturation. Each teenager is formed, matures, experiences the changes taking place in him. Questions arise, and the sphere of sex, relations between the sexes beckon with their mystery, excite him. Usually parents are silent, and everything that the child learns comes from outside - from comrades, from the street, from "indecent" jokes, anecdotes, pictures, from what the child accidentally sees himself and explains in his own way.

What is the relation to this area human life want to raise believing parents? It seems to me that, first of all, it is important for adults to resolve this issue for themselves. We believe that the world was created by God. Our physical, bodily being is a creation of God. The first chapter of the Holy Scripture says: “And God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply." ).

In the very act of human creation, in human nature the “image of God” and the duality of the male and female principles are combined - attraction to each other for procreation. The Apostle Paul writes to the Corinthians: “Your bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit who lives in you” ( ). With these words, Holy Scripture, as it were, “sets the proper tone” for our attitude towards sexual life: it is given to us by God, it is His good gift to us, therefore we are called to treat this gift with gratitude and respect, as to the temple of God. And we are called to value and keep ourselves pure.

There is a good old word "chastity". It comes from the words "tsel" - "whole" and "wise". In Church Slavonic and Old Russian, the word "tsel" meant "healthy" (hence - healing). Unchastity begins when a part of our life loses connection with the whole, that is, with everything that is healthy. That attitude to the body, to all its needs, which is part of the general understanding of our life, its meaning and purpose, is chaste.

I think it's important to teach children to respect their bodies. So that they understand what is happening in it. So that they know how we live, how we eat, how we breathe, how we are born, how we grow. This is important, necessary, pure knowledge, and it accustoms us to responsibility, protecting us from many dangers. It is good that children know how they will grow and develop, what changes will soon take place in them. By an open and serious attitude towards change, parents establish in their children a simple and chaste attitude towards their bodies. If the parents are silent, the children will still find out about it and, most likely, in the most vulgar form. Perhaps you should not intentionally start "instructive" conversations. Children absorb what adults talk about among themselves. Learn by listening to how they speak. They absorb how parents relate to issues related to love, marriage, relationships between men and women. We are called to answer the questions of growing children. Don't kid yourself: we are often not ready to answer children's questions. Often they themselves are not sufficiently informed or have not thought through the possibility of answers. I remember when my older girls were 9-10 years old, advice helped me smart woman, a gynecologist, on how to explain the process of menstruation to them. But the correct explanation given to the girl determines her attitude to motherhood.

But not always children turn to us with questions. Perhaps perhaps the most important thing in raising children is the creation of simple, open, trusting relationships with children. If an atmosphere of trust reigns in the family, any questions are asked easily. The growing child is sure that he will be understood, listened to, and attentive to him. It is important to learn how to talk with children, listen to them, discuss with them what they are interested in. Understand what they sometimes do not know how to express.

The knowledge about the life of the human body that children receive at school, in the lessons of natural science, anatomy or hygiene, cannot replace what parents give, or rather what they can and are called to give. The school provides factual knowledge, but does not bring up personal moral feelings and consciousness. The school is not able to organically fuse the "knowledge" and "life experience" of the child. Chastity lies in the fact that knowledge becomes part of a holistic understanding of the meaning of life, relationships with people, attitudes towards oneself, a sense of responsibility before God for oneself, for others - this is “wisdom”. For a Christian, love between a man and a woman is given by God the ability, and to realize it, to understand it, Christians are called upon in the light of the Christian vision of the meaning of human life.

In those countries where information about sexual life and sexual development is included in school curricula, the moral level of young students has not improved in any way. A failed lesson can even damage the natural integrity of teenage bashfulness. It is in the family that a healthy attitude of a teenager to everything connected with sexual development can be brought up. The family develops an understanding of what we call personal, intimate. Children learn to feel that there is in life their own, personal, dear, but, as it were, secret, about which we do not always, not with everyone, not with everyone speak. Not because it is bad, indecent, dirty or shameful, but because it is personal. We respect this "own" in others, and others respect our "own" in us. This should be the experience of a healthy family life. The words "shame", "modesty", which today seem so old-fashioned, reflect a deep organic trait human consciousness which has always existed and will always exist. In conclusion, I would like to emphasize one more thing - not to give up parental responsibility and to look for ways to implement it ourselves - always personal and unique ways.

How to talk to children about a new life emerging

When we parents worry about moral education children, we very often do it as if morality is an autonomous area of ​​life or some kind of "subject" that we should teach our children. Morality is really how we live, what animates our lives. moral doctrine It is effective only if it is embodied in life. Adults tend to talk about moral values ​​- truthfulness, love, responsibility, obedience, good, evil, but, unfortunately, as abstract concepts. We can bring up a holistic worldview of our children only under one condition - if these moral values ​​are embodied in the real experience of children's life. The child is called to experience in his life what truthfulness, love or obedience is, in order to realize the meaning of these moral values. Only in progress real life Only by experiencing everything that life consists of - birth and death, hunger and satiety, the attraction of one person to another or repulsion, joy and pain - the child begins to understand what we call moral values.

One of the main Christian moral values ​​is our recognition of the importance of human life. One cannot be a Christian and not feel that every human being is precious, that God loves every person, and that the greatest commandment given to a person is to love God and every person. The goal of Christian education is to be able to awaken love and respect for human personality, not only to your own, but also to the people around you. No wonder the Gospel says: "Love your neighbor as yourself."

In developing an understanding of the significance of the human personality, it is important to remember that a large place in the life of a child is occupied by the emergence of a new human being. Until now, there are still families in which it is not customary to talk with young children about the expected appearance of a brother or sister. Often the mother tries to hide her pregnancy. It seems to me that this is wrong. The child instinctively begins to suspect that they are hiding something shameful or terrible. The emergence of a new life in the family is a responsibility. In a normal loving family - a joyful responsibility. Even toddlers can experience this joy. The mother carries a new child within her. This is both understandable and rewarding. This can determine the child's attitude to birth, to the conception of human life, to human love for the rest of his life. Toddlers can even take part in this joyful expectation. I remember, expecting the third child, I somehow unsuccessfully fell. My older girls, 4 and 6 years old, ran to pray that "the baby would not break."

The experience of mother's pregnancy is connected with children's questions, which are sometimes difficult for us to answer. It seems to me that it is almost impossible and perhaps undesirable to take too much initiative in trying to explain to children the essence of the processes associated with the conception and birth of a baby. But it is very important to answer intelligently and truthfully as the children have questions. At the same time, understand the meaning of the issue, its boundaries. In each individual case, children do not want to know “everything”, but only what interests them, in the light of their understanding and knowledge of life. We tend to perceive children's questions within the boundaries of our adult experience.

For example, a five-year-old girl asks her mother how it happened that her mother had a baby in her “tummy”. The mother replies: “Why, it grows in me, like a flower grows from a seed.” This answer completely satisfied the child, and it seems to me that he is wise and correct, because there was no deceit or lie. Moreover, he was accurate. The mother answered only what the child wanted to know. And at the same time, he helped the child to know, within the limits of his experience, how human life is born.

It is important to help young children learn what might be called childish theology about the beginning of human life: God designed the world in such a way that every person grows out of a small seed that a mother carries within herself. It is important for every baby to have a father and mother to take care of him. Mom and dad love each other and love their children. If a child has faith in this, and it is based on the experience of the family, then the foundation of his moral consciousness has been laid.

Older children, 6–7 years old, can also be told that a baby who is about to be born contains many of the traits that he inherits from his parents - height, hair and eye color, voice, and talents. And on this example, it is possible to develop in children the concept of the significance of the family, clan, everything that we inherit from our ancestors.

It seems to me that it is useful for small children, in the family and in whose environment they are waiting for the birth of a baby, to know about this in advance. The careful preparation for the birth of a new family member is an example of a loving and joyful attitude towards a new human being. If a mother takes care of herself during pregnancy - does not smoke, does not drink, abstains from any medications - this will instill in children the concept of parental responsibility for children, of parental love.

It is good to read to the children the first chapter of the Gospel of Luke, which tells how Elizabeth expected the birth of John the Baptist. In a family that is expecting a new member, this story will create a Christian mood and help to correctly understand this event. It seems to me that such a serious and at the same time simple attitude is much more correct, much more consistent with Christian morality than the stories that “mother bought a baby in a store” or that “she found a brother or sister in cabbage”

About children's creativity and children's games

It would seem that what connection has children's creativity and children's games with religious education of children? However, such a connection exists. Christian upbringing is called upon to nurture and educate the abilities invested by God in the human soul - creative abilities, talents. How significant is the parable of Jesus Christ about the talents, which tells how the owner, going on a trip, gave the servants different amounts of money - talents, some more, some less. (In ancient times, talents were large monetary units - usually silver bars.) Returning, the owner praised and rewarded those servants who used this money and earned on it, but condemned the servant who, fearing responsibility, buried the silver in the ground.

The ability to love, empathize and understand oneself, one's abilities and capabilities, the ability to handle objects, think through and resolve emerging problems, create something - all this is an integral part of children's games. This is not just a game of imagination, but creativity. All these human qualities are an integral part of our spiritual life. Any Christian education is called upon to become full-blooded and comprehensive, preparing the child for life, in the fullest sense of the word.

What children do not imagine in their games! They are dads, and moms, and travelers, and astronauts, and heroes, and ballerinas, and doctors, and surgeons, and firefighters, and hunters. They build, they make, they dress up. Home furniture turns into cars, planes, spaceships... The world of children's play and fantasy is reminiscent of the primeval world that the Holy Scriptures tell about and that God entrusted to man in order to "possess and rule over him."

In games, the spiritual life of the child develops, a personality is formed, and his talents are gradually manifested. Children's play is a manifestation of the creative spiritual life, invested in man by God. Children deprived of play stop in their spiritual development. This is not a new pedagogical theory. Good educators have always felt and thought this way. I remember how my mother told me about her beloved governess, who said more than a hundred years ago: “The main duty of children is to play, to be able to play ...”

In our time, many things hinder the development of children's creative play. Television has a harmful effect on children's play. The child is hypnotized by a screen in front of which he can sit for hours without taking any part in the action, completely surrendering to what he sees. It sometimes acts like a drug. Television cannot be thrown out of our lives, and programs are often useful, interesting, and artistic. But it is too tempting to put a child in front of the TV, just to keep him busy, so that he does not interfere, does not spin under his feet! By doing this, we give it to the power of a bewitching force, which is very difficult to control later. American society is increasingly talking about the harmful effects of those television programs that promote violence, crime, and complete promiscuity. Any new achievement of civilization imposes a great responsibility, requiring us to be able to use these achievements without becoming their slaves.

Another obstacle to the development of children's games, especially in the conditions of urban life in Russia, is the cramped quarters, the lack of space for games. How can a child get carried away playing, build something - when there is no place, when he has not only a room, but also no corner of his own, when the main thing is that he "does not interfere with others."

When we, an immigrant family with 4 children, arrived from France to America, we had to spend 8 weeks homeless. For a short time we lived in a port hotel, waiting for the departure of the ship, which was delayed due to a strike. We then spent a week aboard the ship and, upon arrival, six weeks in an expat hostel while my husband and I looked for work and an apartment. And finally, we settled in a wonderful old house outside the city, in which we later lived for 35 years. Our four-year-old son got a tiny little room next to our bedroom. “Here, Yurik, this will be your room!” I happily told him. "Mine, all mine?" he asked. "Yes, absolutely yours!" "And I can make a mess of it?" I didn't have the heart to disappoint him after eight weeks of being asked all the time not to make a mess. “Yes, you can…” He entered his little room, closed the door with a latch and… turned the contents of the table and chest of drawers onto the floor, in which I so carefully laid out his things. How important it is for a small person to have “his” corner!

It is not always possible to provide a child with a separate room, but it seems to me that you can always give him your corner, your cardboard box for things, the owner of which he will feel and this “property” of his should be treated with respect and care.

Interferes with the creative individual children's play and congestion of school classes. The school is a collective, and there is little time left for individual creativity. Starting from nursery and kindergarten, all the attention of educators goes to teaching children discipline. All games and exercises teach exactly this. And if the mother works, then small children spend in the nursery or garden all day. Where is the development of personal creativity? Older children are busy not only with their studies, but also with numerous extracurricular activities - voluntary and obligatory: sports, meetings, circles, additional lessons. And our children grow up in urban conditions, where there is no place for a little world of personal fantasy, creative play, and individual development.

What can we, parents, do to help in this trouble?

Fantasy games should also be treated with sympathy and respect. If for a child at this moment a kitchen chair is a compartment of a spaceship, we must admit it. On the other hand, it is important not to spoil the game, not to interfere in it by asking or joking. Or, God forbid, telling other adults how "Peter played ...", or what he said or did. Children have the right to their privacy, a game in which it is better for adults not to interfere.

We can encourage children's creative play by choosing the toys we give to children. Very often expensive mechanical toys are the most unfortunate. The child will be presented with a clockwork clown, which adults find so funny. But how can a child play with it? Start and watch the clown walk? The more a child can do things on his own with a toy, the better it is. It does not matter if the child does not use the cubes given to him to learn letters, he will build a road, a bridge, a house out of these cubes, he will make a wall. For many years, my favorite toy was a wooden box depicting the inside of a hut, with a large Russian stove, table, and benches. I remember how at some period I painted it black, and it was a hangout for a gang of robbers. How many adventures were connected with this hut: both the rescue of the little Indian prince, and the adventures of four soldiers who were looking for their dead commander! If you give a doll, then it’s better to have one that can be undressed, washed, combed - this is much more interesting than if the doll can talk when you pull the string - “ma-ma”.

The most responsible and difficult part of education is not when we try to invest something of our own in our children, to teach them what we consider important, but when we carefully, with love and respect try to contribute to the growth of the “talents” invested by God in our children, we try to recognize them and give them the opportunity to open up in family life.

Sofia Kulomzina

1. What does it mean to have a family as a small Church?

The words of the apostle Paul about the family as "home church"(Rom. 16, 4), it is important to understand not metaphorically and not only in moral refraction. This is, first of all, ontological evidence: a real church family in its essence must be and can be a small Church of Christ. As Saint John Chrysostom said: "Marriage is the mysterious image of the Church". What does it mean?

First, in the life of the family, the words of Christ the Savior are fulfilled: "...Where two or three are gathered in My name, there I am in the midst of them"(Matthew 18:20). And although two or three believers can be gathered without regard to a family union, the unity of two lovers in the name of the Lord is certainly the foundation, the foundation of an Orthodox family. If the center of the family is not Christ, but someone else or something else: our love, our children, our professional preferences, our social and political interests, then we cannot speak of such a family as a Christian family. In this sense, it is flawed. A truly Christian family is this kind of union of husband, wife, children, parents, when relationships within it are built in the image of the union of Christ and the Church.

Secondly, a law is inevitably realized in the family, which, by the very structure, by the very structure of family life, is a law for the Church, and which is based on the words of Christ the Savior: “By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.”(John 13, 35) and on the words of the Apostle Paul supplementing them: "Bear one another's burdens, and thus fulfill the law of Christ"(Gal. 6:2). That is, at the heart of family relationships is the sacrifice of one for the sake of the other. Such love, when I am not in the center of the world, but the one I love. And this voluntary removal of oneself from the center of the Universe is the greatest blessing for one's own salvation and an indispensable condition for the full life of a Christian family.

A family in which love is a mutual desire to save each other and help in this, and in which one for the sake of the other restricts himself in everything, limits, refuses something that he desires for himself - this is the small Church. And then that mysterious thing that unites husband and wife and that can in no way be reduced to one physical, bodily side of their union, that unity that is available to church-going, loving spouses who have gone through a considerable path of life together, becomes a real image of that unity of all with each other in God, which is the triumphant Church in heaven.

2. It is believed that with the advent of Christianity, the Old Testament views on the family have changed greatly. This is true?

Yes, of course, because New Testament brought those cardinal changes to all spheres of human existence, designated as a new stage in human history, which began with the incarnation of the Son of God. As for the family union, nowhere before the New Testament was it so highly placed and so definitely not mentioned either about the equality of the wife, or about her fundamental unity and unity with her husband before God, and in this sense, the changes brought by the Gospel and the apostles were colossal. , and they live for centuries Christ Church. In certain historical periods - the Middle Ages or modern times - the role of a woman could retreat almost into the realm of natural - no longer pagan, but simply natural - existence, that is, relegated to the background, as if somewhat shadowy in relation to her husband. But this was due solely to human weakness in relation to the once and for all proclaimed New Testament norm. And in this sense, the most important and new thing was said exactly two thousand years ago.

3. Has the Church's view of the marriage union changed over these two thousand years of Christianity?

It is one, since it relies on Divine Revelation, on Holy Scripture, therefore the Church looks at the marriage of a husband and wife as the only one, their fidelity as a necessary condition for full-fledged family relationships, children as a blessing, and not a burden, and to the marriage consecrated in the Marriage, as to a union that can and must be continued in eternity. And in this sense, there have been no major changes in the past two thousand years. The changes could relate to tactical areas: whether a woman wears a headscarf at home or not, bares her neck on the beach or should not do this, whether adult boys are brought up with their mother or it is more reasonable to start a predominantly male upbringing from a certain age - all these are conclusion and secondary things that , of course, varied greatly over time, but the dynamics of such changes must be discussed specially.

4. What does the owner, mistress of the house, mean?

This is well described in the book of Archpriest Sylvester “Domostroy”, which describes exemplary housekeeping as it was seen in relation to the middle of the 16th century, therefore, those who wish to refer to it for a more detailed consideration. At the same time, it is not necessary to study the recipes for salting and kvass cooking, which are almost exotic for us, or reasonable ways of managing servants, but to look at the very structure of family life. By the way, this book clearly shows how high and significant the place of a woman in an Orthodox family was then seen, and that a significant part of the key household duties and cares fell on her and was entrusted to her. So, if we look at the essence of what is depicted on the pages of Domostroy, we will see that the owner and mistress are the realization at the level of everyday, way of life, stylistic part of our life of what, according to the words of John Chrysostom, we call the small Church. As in the Church, on the one hand, there is its mystical, invisible foundation, and on the other hand, it is a kind of social institution that exists in real human history, so in the life of the family there is something that unites husband and wife before God, - spiritual and spiritual unity, but there is its practical being. And here, of course, such concepts as a house, its arrangement, its splendor, order in it are very important. The family as a small Church implies both a dwelling, and everything that is equipped in it, and everything that happens in it, correlated with the Church with a capital letter as a temple and as the house of God. It is no coincidence that during the rite of consecration of any dwelling, the Gospel is read about the visit by the Savior to the house of the publican Zacchaeus after he, having seen the Son of God, promised to cover all the iniquities committed by him in his official position, to cover many times. Holy Scripture tells us here, among other things, that our house should be such that if the Lord visibly stands on its threshold, as He always stands invisibly, nothing would stop Him from entering here. Not in our relationships with each other, not in what can be seen in this house: on the walls, on bookshelves, in dark corners, not in what is shamefully hidden from people and what we would not want others to see.

All this in the aggregate gives the concept of a house, from which both the pious internal dispensation in it and the external order are inseparable, which is what every Orthodox family should strive for.

5. They say: my house is my fortress, but, from a Christian point of view, isn’t love only for one’s own behind this, as if what is outside the house is already alien and hostile?

Here we can recall the words of the Apostle Paul: “... As long as there is time, we will do good to everyone, and especially to our own by faith”(Gal. 6:10). In the life of every person there are, as it were, concentric circles of communication and degrees of closeness to certain people: these are all living on earth, these are members of the Church, these are members of a particular parish, these are acquaintances, these are friends, these are relatives, this is family, the closest people. And in itself, the presence of these circles is natural. Human life is arranged by God in such a way that we exist on different levels of being, including on different circles of contact with certain people. And if we understand the above English saying "My home is my castle" in the Christian sense, this means that I am responsible for the structure of my house, for the system in it, for relationships within the family. And I not only take care of my house and will not let anyone invade it and destroy it, but I realize that, first of all, my duty to God is to save this house.

If these words are understood in a worldly sense, as the construction of an ivory tower (or from any other material from which fortresses are built), the construction of some kind of isolated little world where we and only we feel good, where we seem to be (however, of course, illusory) protected from the outside world and where else we think - whether to allow anyone to enter, then such a desire for self-isolation, for leaving, fencing off from the surrounding reality, from the world in the broad, and not in the sinful sense of the word, a Christian, of course, should avoid.

6. Is it possible to share your doubts related to some theological issues or directly to the life of the Church with a person close to you who is more church-going than you, but who, after all, can also be tempted by them?

With those who are truly churched, it is possible. There is no need to convey these doubts and perplexities to those who are still on the first steps of the ladder, that is, who are less close to the Church than you yourself. And those who are stronger than you in faith must also bear greater responsibility. And there is nothing improper in this.

7. But is it necessary to burden your loved ones with your own doubts and troubles if you go to confession and take nourishment from a confessor?

Of course, a Christian who has minimal spiritual experience understands that reckless pronunciation to the end, without understanding what it can bring to his interlocutor, even if it is the most native person, none of them benefit. Frankness and openness must take place in our relations. But the collapse of everything that has accumulated in us, which we ourselves cannot cope with, is a manifestation of dislike. Moreover, we have a Church where you can come, there is confession, the Cross and the Gospel, there are priests who have been given grace-filled help from God for this, and their problems need to be solved here.

As for our listening to the other, yes. Although, as a rule, when close or less close people talk about frankness, they mean rather that someone close was ready to hear them than that they themselves are ready to listen to someone. And then - yes. It will be a deed, a duty of love, and sometimes a feat of love, to listen, hear and accept sorrows, disorder, disorder, throwing our neighbors (in the gospel sense of the word). What we take on ourselves is the fulfillment of the commandment, what we impose on others is the refusal to bear our cross.

8. And should you share with your closest those spiritual joy, those revelations that you were given to experience by the grace of God, or should the experience of communion with God be only your personal and indivisible, otherwise its fullness and integrity are lost?

9. Should a husband and wife have the same spiritual father?

This is good, but not necessary. For example, if he and she are from the same parish and one of them went to church later, but began to go to the same spiritual father, from whom the other had already taken care of for some time, then this kind of knowledge of the family problems of the two spouses can help the priest give a sober advice and warn them against any wrong steps. However, there is no reason to consider this an indispensable requirement and, say, a young husband to encourage his wife to leave her confessor so that she now goes to that parish and to the priest with whom he confesses, there is no reason. This is in the truest sense of the word spiritual violence, which should not take place in family relationships. Here one can only wish in certain cases of disagreement, disagreement, intra-family discord, to resort, but only by mutual agreement, to the advice of the same priest - once the confessor of the wife, once the confessor of the husband. How to rely on the will of one priest, so as not to receive different advice on a specific life problem, perhaps due to the fact that both the husband and wife each presented it to their confessor in an extremely subjective vision. And so they return home with the advice they received, and what do they do next after that? Who is now to find out which recommendation is more correct? Therefore, I think that it is reasonable for a husband and wife in some serious cases to apply with a request to consider this or that family situation to one priest.

10. What should parents do if there are disagreements with the spiritual father of their child, who, say, does not allow him to study ballet?

If we are talking about the relationship between a spiritual child and a spiritual father, that is, if the child himself or even at the prompting of his relatives made the decision of this or that issue for the blessing of the spiritual father, then, regardless of what the parents, grandparents and grandparents initially had, this blessing is certainly one to be guided by. Another thing is if the conversation about making a decision turned into a conversation of a general nature: for example, the priest expressed his negative attitude either to ballet as an art form in general or, in particular, to the fact that this particular child would study ballet, in which case there is still some an area for reasoning, first of all, by the parents themselves and for clarifying with the priest those motives that they have. After all, parents do not have to imagine their child making a brilliant career somewhere in " Covent Garden,- they may have good reasons to give the child to ballet, for example, to combat scoliosis starting from sitting for many years. And I think that if we are talking about this kind of motives, then parents, grandparents will find understanding with the priest.

But doing or not doing this kind of thing is most often a neutral thing, and if there is no desire, you can not consult with the priest, and even if the desire to act according to the blessing came from the parents themselves, whom no one pulled by the tongue and who simply assumed that the formed their decision will be covered by some kind of sanction from above, and thus it will be given an unprecedented acceleration, then in this case it cannot be neglected that the spiritual father of the child for some reason did not bless him for this particular occupation.

11. Is it worth discussing big family problems with small children?

No. It is not necessary to lay on children the burden of what is not easy for us to cope with ourselves, to burden them with our own problems. It’s another matter to put them in front of certain realities of their common life, for example, that “this year we won’t go to the south, because dad can’t take a vacation in the summer or because the money is needed for my grandmother to stay in the hospital.” This kind of knowledge of what is really happening in the family is necessary for children. Or: “We can’t buy you a new briefcase yet, since the old one is still good, and the family doesn’t have much money.” This kind of thing needs to be said to the child, but in a way that does not connect him to the complexity of all these problems and how we will solve them.

12. Today when pilgrimages have become a daily reality of church life, a special type of spiritually exalted Orthodox has appeared, and especially females, who travel around monasteries from elder to elder, everyone knows about myrrh-streaming icons and about the healing of demon-possessed. Being with them on a trip is embarrassing even for adult believers. Especially for children, whom this can only scare away. In this regard, should we take them with us on pilgrimages and are they generally able to withstand such spiritual stress?

Trip trips are different, and you need to correlate them both with the age of the children, and with the duration and complexity of the upcoming pilgrimage. It is reasonable to start with short, one-, two-day trips around the city where you live, to nearby shrines, with a visit to one or another monastery, a short prayer before the relics, with a bath in the source, which children love very much by nature. And then, as they grow older, take them on longer trips. But only when they are already prepared for it. If we go to one or another monastery and find ourselves in a sufficiently filled temple for an all-night vigil that will last five hours, then the child should be ready for this. Just like the fact that in a monastery, for example, he can be treated more strictly than in a parish church, and going from place to place will not be encouraged, and, most often, he will have nowhere else to go, except for the temple itself where worship takes place. Therefore, you need to really calculate the forces. In addition, it is better, of course, if the pilgrimage with children is made together with your acquaintances, and not with people completely unknown to you on a voucher purchased in one or another travel and pilgrimage company. For very different people can come together, among which there may be not only spiritually exalted, reaching fanaticism, but also simply people with different views, with varying degrees of tolerance in assimilating other people's views and unobtrusiveness in presenting their own, which sometimes can turn out to be for children , still insufficiently churched and strengthened in the faith, by a strong temptation. Therefore, I would advise with great care to take them on trips with strangers. As for pilgrimages (for whom it is possible) abroad, here, too, a lot of things can overlap. Including such a banal thing that in itself the secular worldly life of the same Greece or Italy or even the Holy Land can turn out to be so curious and attractive that the main goal of the pilgrimage will leave the child. In this case, there will be one harm from visiting holy places, for example, if Italian ice cream or swimming in the Adriatic Sea is more memorable than prayer in Bari at the relics of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker. Therefore, when planning such pilgrimage trips, one must wisely build them, taking into account all these factors, as well as many others, up to the time of the year. But, of course, children can and should be taken with them on pilgrimages, simply without in any way removing responsibility for what will happen there. And most importantly - without assuming that the very fact of the trip will already give us such grace that there will be no problems. In fact, the larger the shrine, the greater the possibility of certain temptations when we reach it.

13. In the Revelation of John it is said that not only “unbelievers, and abominations, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, their fate is in a lake burning with fire and brimstone,” but also “fearful” (Rev. 21, 8). And how to deal with your fears for children, husband (wife), for example, if they are absent for a long time and for inexplicable reasons or travel somewhere and there is no news from them for an unreasonably long time? And what to do if these fears grow?

These fears have a common basis, a common source, and, accordingly, the fight against them must have some common root. The basis of insurance is lack of faith. A fearful one is one who trusts God little and who, by and large, does not really rely on prayer - either his own or others whom he asks to pray, since without it he would be completely scared. Therefore, one cannot suddenly stop being fearful, here one must seriously and responsibly undertake to eradicate and overcome the spirit of lack of faith from oneself step by step by kindling, trusting in God and a conscious attitude to prayer, such that if we say: "Bless and save", We must trust that the Lord will do what we ask. If we say to the Most Holy Theotokos: “Not other imams of help, not other imams of hope, except for You,” then we really have this help and hope, and not just beautiful words we speak. Here everything is determined precisely by our attitude to prayer. We can say that this is a particular manifestation of the general law of spiritual life: as you live, so you pray, as you pray, so you live. Now, if you pray, combining with the words of prayer a real appeal to God and hope in Him, then you will have the experience that prayerful intercession for another person is not an empty thing. And then, when fear attacks you, you stand up for prayer - and the fear will recede. And if you simply try to hide behind your prayer as a kind of external shield from your hysterical insurance, then it will return to you time after time. So here it is necessary not so much to fight head-on with fears, but to take care to deepen the prayer life.

14. The sacrifice of the family to the Church. What should be?

It seems that if a person, especially in difficult life circumstances, having hope in God, not in the sense of analogy with commodity-money relations: if I give, it will be given to me, but in reverent hope, with the belief that this is accepted, will tear something from the family budget and give Church of God, will give to other people for Christ's sake, then he will receive a hundredfold for it. And the best thing we can do when we don’t know how else to help our loved ones is to sacrifice something, even if it’s material, if we don’t have the opportunity to bring something else to God.

15. In the book of Deuteronomy, the Jews were prescribed what kind of food they could and could not eat. Is it necessary for an Orthodox person to adhere to these rules? Isn't there a contradiction here, because the Savior said: "... It is not what enters the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth defiles a person" (Matt. 15:11)?

The question of food was decided by the Church at the very beginning of the historical path - at the Apostolic Council, which can be read in "Acts of the Holy Apostles". The apostles, guided by the Holy Spirit, decided that it was enough for Gentile converts, which we all are, in fact, to abstain from food that is brought to us with the torment of an animal, and in personal behavior to abstain from fornication. And that's enough. The book "Deuteronomy" had its undoubted divinely revealed significance in a specific historical period when the multiplicity of prescriptions and regulations concerning both food and other aspects of the everyday behavior of the Old Testament Jews was supposed to protect them from assimilation, merging, mixing with the surrounding ocean of almost universal paganism.

Only such a fence, a fence of specific behavior, could then help not only a strong spirit, but also a weak person to refrain from striving for what is more powerful in terms of statehood, more fun in life, simpler in terms of human relations. Let us thank God that we now live not under the law, but under grace.

Based on other experiences of family life, a wise wife will conclude that a drop wears away a stone. And the husband, at first irritated at reading a prayer, even expressing his indignation, scoffing, mocking, if the wife shows peaceful perseverance, after some time he will stop letting go of the hairpins, and after some time he will get used to the fact that there is no getting away from it, there are worse situations. And years will pass - you look, and you will begin to listen to what kind of words of prayer are said before eating. Peaceful perseverance is the best that can be shown in such a situation.

17. Isn't it hypocrisy that an Orthodox woman, as expected, goes to church only in a skirt, but at home and at work in trousers?

Not wearing trousers in our Russian Orthodox Church is a manifestation by parishioners of respect for church traditions and customs. In particular, to such an understanding of the words of Holy Scripture, which forbid a man or woman to wear clothes of the opposite sex. And since by men's clothing we mainly mean trousers, women naturally refrain from wearing them in church. Of course, such an exegesis is not literally applicable to the corresponding verses of Deuteronomy, but let us also remember the words of the Apostle Paul: “... If food offends my brother, I will never eat meat, so as not to offend my brother”

The publishing house of the Sretensky Monastery published a book by Archpriest Pavel Gumerov “Small Church. Family life in the modern world. This is a reprint of the popular, very important work of Archpriest Pavel.

The book tells how to build a modern family so that it is morally healthy, long-lived and happy. The author specifically refers to modern life and talks in detail about how to protect the family from the dangers that have such a destructive effect on it.

Father Pavel writes: “Being a husband is a true male destiny, and the love and respect that is rightfully given to the head of the family are a reward for his labors. The Bible says about a woman: your attraction to your husband(Genesis 3:16). That is, in the female nature from God there is love, respect and attraction to her husband, head.

A father is such an authority for children that a mother cannot be, even if the children are spiritually closer to the mother. It is known that if the father in the family believes in God, children in 80% of cases also grow up as believers, and if only the mother, then only in 7%.

“Marriage is a responsibility; if you do not strive for it, then it is better not to create a family. Even a person with the most seemingly non-leadership character, due to circumstances (not only in the family), is forced to answer for someone or for something, to take care. Every person is called to this: about parents when they grow old, about children, about colleagues, about pets, finally. And every husband should strive to be a support and bear the burden of responsibility for his family, even if it seems to him that he is completely incapable of this. He took hold of the tug - do not say that it is not a hefty.

“No one will argue that irritability, anger, despondency greatly hinder marriage and you need to try to change your character for the better first of all for yourself. A person who behaves incorrectly and refuses to change anything in himself runs the risk of being left alone. The sin we commit is directed primarily against us.”

Is family happiness even possible these days? The Christian family is sometimes called a small church. And the mission of this Church is to bring light to people, to preach the truth that there are strong, happy families where people believe in God and love each other.

Bride and groom

Love and infatuation. initial love

Choosing a life partner (most important)

Acquaintance, courtship

About women's clothing

"Civil marriage"

The legend of Peter and Fevronia

family hierarchy

Who is the head of the family?

About the "heavy" male share

Family problems

Marital conflicts and their overcoming

Why "darlings scold"

Third wheel

Take care of women!

Appreciate men!

To mother-in-law for pancakes

Parenting

Freedom and prohibitions

Patience and work

Development of artistic inclinations

Once again about TV

Church parenting

Christening

Our parents

Teenager

Teenager and computer

Environment and friends

Serious conversation

Is profanity harmless? (Lesson at school)

Teenage church education

Education of the will

Love to motherland

Questions and answers

Instead of an afterword

1. What does it mean to have a family as a small Church?

The words of the Apostle Paul about the family as a "domestic church" (Rom. 16:4) are important to understand not metaphorically and not only in moral terms. This is, first of all, ontological evidence: a real church family in its essence must be and can be a small Church of Christ. As St. John Chrysostom said: "Marriage is a mysterious image of the Church." What does it mean?

First, in the life of the family, the words of Christ the Savior are fulfilled: “...Where two or three are gathered in My name, there I am in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:20). And although two or three believers can be gathered without regard to a family union, the unity of two lovers in the name of the Lord is certainly the foundation, the foundation of an Orthodox family. If the center of the family is not Christ, but someone else or something else: our love, our children, our professional preferences, our social and political interests, then we cannot speak of such a family as a Christian family. In this sense, it is flawed. A truly Christian family is this kind of union of husband, wife, children, parents, when relationships within it are built in the image of the union of Christ and the Church.

Secondly, a law is inevitably realized in the family, which, by the very structure, by the very structure of family life, is a law for the Church and which is based on the words of Christ the Savior: “By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another. ”(John 13:35) and on the words of the Apostle Paul supplementing them: “Carry one another’s burdens, and thus fulfill the law of Christ” (Gal. 6:2). That is, at the heart of family relationships is the sacrifice of one for the sake of the other. Such love, when I am not in the center of the world, but the one I love. And this voluntary removal of oneself from the center of the Universe is the greatest blessing for one's own salvation and an indispensable condition for the full life of a Christian family.

A family in which love is a mutual desire to save each other and help in this, and in which one for the sake of the other restricts himself in everything, limits, refuses something that he desires for himself - this is the small Church. And then that mysterious thing that unites husband and wife and that can in no way be reduced to one physical, bodily side of their union, that unity that is available to church-going, loving spouses who have gone through a considerable path of life together, becomes a real image of that unity of all with each other in God, which is the triumphant Church in heaven.

2. It is believed that with the advent of Christianity, the Old Testament views on the family have changed greatly. This is true?

Yes, of course, because the New Testament brought those cardinal changes to all spheres of human existence, designated as a new stage in human history, which began with the incarnation of the Son of God. As for the family union, nowhere before the New Testament was it so highly placed and so definitely not mentioned either about the equality of the wife, or about her fundamental unity and unity with her husband before God, and in this sense, the changes brought by the Gospel and the apostles were colossal. , and by them the Church of Christ lives for centuries. In certain historical periods - the Middle Ages or modern times - the role of a woman could retreat almost into the realm of natural - no longer pagan, but simply natural - existence, that is, relegated to the background, as if somewhat shadowy in relation to her husband. But this was due solely to human weakness in relation to the once and for all proclaimed New Testament norm. And in this sense, the most important and new thing was said exactly two thousand years ago.

3. Has the Church's view of the marriage union changed over these two thousand years of Christianity?

It is one, since it relies on Divine Revelation, on Holy Scripture, therefore the Church looks at the marriage of a husband and wife as the only one, their fidelity as a necessary condition for full-fledged family relationships, children as a blessing, and not a burden, and to the marriage consecrated in the Marriage, as to a union that can and must be continued in eternity. And in this sense, there have been no major changes in the past two thousand years. The changes could relate to tactical areas: whether a woman wears a headscarf at home or not, bares her neck on the beach or should not do this, whether adult boys are brought up with their mother or it is more reasonable to start a predominantly male upbringing from a certain age - all these are conclusion and secondary things that , of course, varied greatly over time, but the dynamics of such changes must be discussed specially.

4. What does the owner, mistress of the house, mean?

This is well described in the book of Archpriest Sylvester “Domostroy”, which describes exemplary housekeeping as it was seen in relation to the middle of the 16th century, therefore, those who wish to refer to it for a more detailed consideration. At the same time, it is not necessary to study the recipes for salting and kvass cooking, which are almost exotic for us, or reasonable ways of managing servants, but to look at the very structure of family life. By the way, this book clearly shows how high and significant the place of a woman in an Orthodox family was then seen, and that a significant part of the key household duties and cares fell on her and was entrusted to her. So, if we look at the essence of what is depicted on the pages of Domostroy, we will see that the owner and mistress are the realization at the level of everyday, way of life, stylistic part of our life of what, according to the words of John Chrysostom, we call the small Church. As in the Church, on the one hand, there is its mystical, invisible foundation, and on the other hand, it is a kind of social institution that exists in real human history, so in the life of the family there is something that unites husband and wife before God, - spiritual and spiritual unity, but there is its practical being. And here, of course, such concepts as a house, its arrangement, its splendor, order in it are very important. The family as a small Church implies both a dwelling, and everything that is equipped in it, and everything that happens in it, correlated with the Church with a capital letter as a temple and as the house of God. It is no coincidence that during the rite of consecration of any dwelling, the Gospel is read about the visit by the Savior to the house of the publican Zacchaeus after he, having seen the Son of God, promised to cover all the iniquities committed by him in his official position, to cover many times. Holy Scripture tells us here, among other things, that our house should be such that if the Lord visibly stands on its threshold, as He always stands invisibly, nothing would stop Him from entering here. Not in our relationships with each other, not in what can be seen in this house: on the walls, on bookshelves, in dark corners, not in what is shamefully hidden from people and what we would not want others to see.

All this in the aggregate gives the concept of a house, from which both the pious internal dispensation in it and the external order are inseparable, which is what every Orthodox family should strive for.

5. They say: my house is my fortress, but, from a Christian point of view, isn’t love only for one’s own behind this, as if what is outside the house is already alien and hostile?

Here we can recall the words of the Apostle Paul: "... While there is time, let us do good to everyone, but especially to our own by faith" (Gal. 6:10). In the life of every person there are, as it were, concentric circles of communication and degrees of closeness to certain people: these are all living on earth, these are members of the Church, these are members of a particular parish, these are acquaintances, these are friends, these are relatives, this is family, the closest people. And in itself, the presence of these circles is natural. Human life is arranged by God in such a way that we exist on different levels of being, including on different circles of contact with certain people. And if we understand the above English saying “My house is my fortress” in the Christian sense, then this means that I am responsible for the structure of my house, for the system in it, for relations within the family. And I not only take care of my house and will not let anyone invade it and destroy it, but I realize that, first of all, my duty to God is to save this house.

If these words are understood in a worldly sense, as the construction of an ivory tower (or from any other material from which fortresses are built), the construction of some kind of isolated little world where we and only we feel good, where we seem to be (however, of course, illusory) protected from the outside world and where else we think - whether to allow anyone to enter, then such a desire for self-isolation, for leaving, fencing off from the surrounding reality, from the world in the broad, and not in the sinful sense of the word, a Christian, of course, should avoid.

6. Is it possible to share your doubts related to some theological issues or directly to the life of the Church with a person close to you who is more church-going than you, but who, after all, can also be tempted by them?

With those who are truly churched, it is possible. There is no need to convey these doubts and perplexities to those who are still on the first steps of the ladder, that is, who are less close to the Church than you yourself. And those who are stronger than you in faith must also bear greater responsibility. And there is nothing improper in this.

7. But is it necessary to burden your loved ones with your own doubts and troubles if you go to confession and take nourishment from a confessor?

Of course, a Christian who has minimal spiritual experience understands that reckless pronunciation to the end, without understanding what it can bring to his interlocutor, even if this is the most dear person, none of them benefit. Frankness and openness must take place in our relations. But the collapse of everything that has accumulated in us, which we ourselves cannot cope with, is a manifestation of dislike. Moreover, we have a Church where you can come, there is confession, the Cross and the Gospel, there are priests who have been given grace-filled help from God for this, and their problems need to be solved here.

As for our listening to the other, yes. Although, as a rule, when close or less close people talk about frankness, they mean rather that someone close was ready to hear them than that they themselves are ready to listen to someone. And then - yes. It will be a deed, a duty of love, and sometimes a feat of love, to listen, hear and accept sorrows, disorder, disorder, throwing our neighbors (in the gospel sense of the word). What we take on ourselves is the fulfillment of the commandment, what we impose on others is the refusal to bear our cross.

8. And should you share with your closest those spiritual joy, those revelations that you were given to experience by the grace of God, or should the experience of communion with God be only your personal and indivisible, otherwise its fullness and integrity are lost?

9. Should a husband and wife have the same spiritual father?

This is good, but not necessary. For example, if he and she are from the same parish and one of them went to church later, but began to go to the same spiritual father, from whom the other had already taken care of for some time, then this kind of knowledge of the family problems of the two spouses can help the priest give a sober advice and warn them against any wrong steps. However, there is no reason to consider this an indispensable requirement and, say, a young husband to encourage his wife to leave her confessor so that she now goes to that parish and to the priest with whom he confesses, there is no reason. This is in the truest sense of the word spiritual violence, which should not have a place in family relationships. Here one can only wish in certain cases of disagreement, disagreement, intra-family discord, to resort, but only by mutual agreement, to the advice of the same priest - once the confessor of the wife, once the confessor of the husband. How to rely on the will of one priest, so as not to receive different advice on a specific life problem, perhaps due to the fact that both the husband and wife each presented it to their confessor in an extremely subjective vision. And so they return home with the advice they received, and what do they do next after that? Who is now to find out which recommendation is more correct? Therefore, I think that it is reasonable for a husband and wife in some serious cases to apply with a request to consider this or that family situation to one priest.

10. What should parents do if there are disagreements with the spiritual father of their child, who, say, does not allow him to study ballet?

If we are talking about the relationship between a spiritual child and a spiritual father, that is, if the child himself or even at the prompting of his relatives made the decision of this or that issue for the blessing of the spiritual father, then, regardless of what the parents, grandparents and grandparents initially had, this blessing is certainly one to be guided by. Another thing is if the conversation about making a decision turned into a conversation of a general nature: for example, the priest expressed his negative attitude either to ballet as an art form in general or, in particular, to the fact that this particular child would study ballet, in which case there is still some an area for reasoning, first of all, by the parents themselves and for clarifying with the priest those motives that they have. After all, parents do not have to imagine their child making a brilliant career somewhere in Covent Garden - they may also have good reasons to send their child to ballet, for example, to combat scoliosis starting from sitting for many years. And I think that if we are talking about this kind of motives, then parents, grandparents will find understanding with the priest.

But doing or not doing this kind of thing is most often a neutral thing, and if there is no desire, you can not consult with the priest, and even if the desire to act according to the blessing came from the parents themselves, whom no one pulled by the tongue and who simply assumed that the formed their decision will be covered by some kind of sanction from above, and thus it will be given an unprecedented acceleration, then in this case it cannot be neglected that the spiritual father of the child for some reason did not bless him for this particular occupation.

11. Is it worth discussing big family problems with small children?

No. It is not necessary to lay on children the burden of what is not easy for us to cope with ourselves, to burden them with our own problems. It’s another matter to put them in front of certain realities of their common life, for example, that “this year we won’t go to the south, because dad can’t take a vacation in the summer or because the money is needed for my grandmother to stay in the hospital.” This kind of knowledge of what is really happening in the family is necessary for children. Or: “We can’t buy you a new briefcase yet, since the old one is still good, and the family doesn’t have much money.” This kind of thing needs to be said to the child, but in a way that does not connect him to the complexity of all these problems and how we will solve them.

12. Today, when pilgrimage trips have become a daily reality of church life, a special type of spiritually exalted Orthodox has appeared, and especially females, who travel around monasteries from elder to elder, everyone knows about myrrh-streaming icons and about the healing of the possessed. Being with them on a trip is embarrassing even for adult believers. Especially for children, whom this can only scare away. In this regard, should we take them with us on pilgrimages and are they generally able to withstand such spiritual stress?

Trip trips are different, and you need to correlate them both with the age of the children, and with the duration and complexity of the upcoming pilgrimage. It is reasonable to start with short, one-, two-day trips around the city where you live, to nearby shrines, with a visit to one or another monastery, a short prayer before the relics, with a bath in the source, which children love very much by nature. And then, as they grow older, take them on longer trips. But only when they are already prepared for it. If we go to one or another monastery and find ourselves in a sufficiently filled temple for an all-night vigil that will last five hours, then the child should be ready for this. Just like the fact that in a monastery, for example, he can be treated more strictly than in a parish church, and going from place to place will not be encouraged, and, most often, he will have nowhere else to go, except for the temple itself where worship takes place. Therefore, you need to really calculate the forces. In addition, it is better, of course, if the pilgrimage with children is made together with your acquaintances, and not with people completely unknown to you on a voucher purchased in one or another travel and pilgrimage company. For very different people can come together, among which there may be not only spiritually exalted, reaching fanaticism, but also simply people with different views, with varying degrees of tolerance in assimilating other people's views and unobtrusiveness in presenting their own, which sometimes can turn out to be for children , still insufficiently churched and strengthened in the faith, by a strong temptation. Therefore, I would advise with great caution to take them on trips with strangers. As for pilgrimages (for whom it is possible) abroad, here, too, a lot of things can overlap. Including such a banal thing that in itself the secular worldly life of the same Greece or Italy or even the Holy Land can turn out to be so curious and attractive that the main goal of the pilgrimage will leave the child. In this case, there will be one harm from visiting holy places, for example, if Italian ice cream or swimming in the Adriatic Sea is more memorable than prayer in Bari at the relics of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker. Therefore, when planning such pilgrimage trips, one must wisely build them, taking into account all these factors, as well as many others, up to the time of the year. But, of course, children can and should be taken with them on pilgrimages, simply without in any way removing responsibility for what will happen there. And most importantly - without assuming that the very fact of the trip will already give us such grace that there will be no problems. In fact, the larger the shrine, the greater the possibility of certain temptations when we reach it.

13. In the Revelation of John it is said that not only “unbelievers, and abominations, and murderers, and fornicators, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, their fate is in the lake burning with fire and brimstone,” but also “fearful” (Rev. 21: 8). And how to deal with your fears for children, husband (wife), for example, if they are absent for a long time and for inexplicable reasons or travel somewhere and there is no news from them for an unreasonably long time? And what to do if these fears grow?

These fears have a common basis, a common source, and, accordingly, the fight against them must have some common root. The basis of insurance is lack of faith. A fearful one is one who trusts God little and who, by and large, does not really rely on prayer - either his own or others whom he asks to pray, since without it he would be completely scared. Therefore, one cannot suddenly stop being fearful, here one must seriously and responsibly undertake to eradicate and overcome the spirit of lack of faith from oneself step by step by kindling, trusting in God and a conscious attitude to prayer, such that if we say: “Save and save “We must trust that the Lord will do what we ask. If we say to the Most Holy Theotokos: “Not other imams of help, not other imams of hope, except for You,” then we really have this help and hope, and we are not just talking beautiful words. Here everything is determined precisely by our attitude to prayer. We can say that this is a particular manifestation of the general law of spiritual life: as you live, so you pray, as you pray, so you live. Now, if you pray, combining with the words of prayer a real appeal to God and hope in Him, then you will have the experience that prayerful intercession for another person is not an empty thing. And then, when fear attacks you, you stand up for prayer - and the fear will recede. And if you simply try to hide behind your prayer as a kind of external shield from your hysterical insurance, then it will return to you time after time. So here it is necessary not so much to fight head-on with fears, but to take care to deepen the prayer life.

14. The sacrifice of the family to the Church. What should be?

It seems that if a person, especially in difficult life circumstances, having hope in God, not in the sense of analogy with commodity-money relations: if I give, it will be given to me, but in reverent hope, with the belief that this is accepted, will tear something from the family budget and give Church of God, will give to other people for Christ's sake, then he will receive a hundredfold for it. And the best thing we can do when we don’t know how else to help our loved ones is to sacrifice something, even if it’s material, if we don’t have the opportunity to bring something else to God.

15. In the book of Deuteronomy, the Jews were prescribed what kind of food they could and could not eat. Is it necessary for an Orthodox person to adhere to these rules? Isn't there a contradiction here, because the Savior said: "... It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth defiles a person" (Matt. 15:11)?

The question of food was decided by the Church at the very beginning of its historical path - at the Apostolic Council, which can be read about in the Acts of the Holy Apostles. The apostles, guided by the Holy Spirit, decided that it was enough for Gentile converts, which we all are, in fact, to abstain from food that is brought to us with the torment of an animal, and in personal behavior to abstain from fornication. And that's enough. The book "Deuteronomy" had its undoubted divinely revealed significance in a specific historical period, when the plurality of prescriptions and regulations regarding both food and other aspects of the everyday behavior of the Old Testament Jews was supposed to protect them from assimilation, merging, mixing with the surrounding ocean of almost universal paganism. .

Only such a fence, a fence of specific behavior, could then help not only a strong spirit, but also a weak person to refrain from striving for what is more powerful in terms of statehood, more fun in life, simpler in terms of human relations. Let us thank God that we now live not under the law, but under grace.

Based on other experiences of family life, a wise wife will conclude that a drop wears away a stone. And the husband, at first irritated at reading a prayer, even expressing his indignation, scoffing, mocking, if the wife shows peaceful perseverance, after some time he will stop letting go of the hairpins, and after some time he will get used to the fact that there is no getting away from it, there are worse situations. And years will pass - you look, and you will begin to listen to what kind of words of prayer are said before eating. Peaceful perseverance is the best that can be shown in such a situation.

17. Isn't it hypocrisy that an Orthodox woman, as expected, goes to church only in a skirt, but at home and at work in trousers?

Not wearing trousers in our Russian Orthodox Church is a manifestation by parishioners of respect for church traditions and customs. In particular, to such an understanding of the words of Holy Scripture, which forbid a man or woman to wear clothes of the opposite sex. And since by men's clothing we mainly mean trousers, women naturally refrain from wearing them in church. Of course, such an exegesis is not literally applicable to the corresponding verses of Deuteronomy, but let us also remember the words of the Apostle Paul: “... If food offends my brother, I will never eat meat, lest I offend my brother” (1 Cor. 8 :13). By analogy, any Orthodox woman can say that if, by wearing trousers in church, she deprives at least a few of those standing next to her at the service, for whom this form of clothing is unacceptable, then out of love for these people, the next time she goes to the liturgy, she will not wear trousers. And it will not be hypocrisy. After all, the point is not that a woman should never wear trousers at all, either at home or in the country, but that, respecting the church customs that exist to this day, including in the minds of many believers of the older generation, not to disturb their peace in prayer.

18. Why does a woman pray with her head uncovered in front of domestic icons, but goes to church in a headscarf?

A woman must wear a headscarf to a church meeting in accordance with the instructions of the holy Apostle Paul. And it is always better to listen to the apostle than not to listen, as in general it is always better to act according to Holy Scripture than to decide that we are so free and will not act according to the letter. In any case, the shawl is one of the forms of concealing the external female attractiveness during worship. After all, hair is one of the most noticeable ornaments of a woman. And the scarf that covers them, so as not to shine with hair too much in the rays of the sun peering through the church windows and not to correct them every time they bow to “Lord, have mercy,” will be a good deed. So why not do it?

19. But why is a scarf on the head optional for female choir girls?

Normally, they must also wear headscarves during the service. But it also happens, although this situation is absolutely abnormal, that some kliros singers are mercenaries working only for money. Well, to make demands on them that are understandable to believers? And other singers begin their path of churching from an external stay on the kliros to an internal acceptance of church life and go their own way for a long time until the moment when they consciously cover their heads with a scarf. And if the priest sees that they are going their own way, then it is better to wait until they deliberately do this than to order them, threatening to reduce their salaries.

20. What is home dedication?

The rite of consecrating the dwelling is included in a series of many other similar rites, which are contained in the liturgical book called the Trebnik. And the main meaning of the totality of these church rites is that everything in this life that is not sinful admits the sanctification of God, since everything earthly that is not sinful is not alien to Heaven. And by consecrating one or another, we, on the one hand, testify to our faith, and on the other, we call on God's help and blessing for the course of our earthly life, even in its quite practical manifestations.

If we talk about the rite of consecration of the dwelling, then although it also contains a petition to protect us from the spirits of malice in heaven, from all sorts of troubles and misfortunes that come from outside, from various kinds of disorder, but its main spiritual content is evidenced by the Gospel, which at that time is read . This is the Gospel of Luke about the meeting of the Savior and the head of the publicans, Zacchaeus, who, in order to see the Son of God, climbed a fig tree, “because he was small in stature” (Luke 19:3). Imagine the extraordinary nature of this action: for example, Kasyanov climbing a lamppost to look at Ecumenical Patriarch, since the degree of decisiveness of the act of Zacchaeus was just such. The Savior, seeing such boldness, which goes beyond the scope of Zacchaeus's being, visited his house. Zacchaeus, amazed at what had happened, in the face of the Son of God, confessed his untruth, as a fiscal tax official, and said: "God! I will give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have offended anyone, I will repay fourfold. Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house…”(Luke 19:8–9), after which Zacchaeus became one of Christ's disciples.

Performing the rite of consecrating the dwelling and reading this passage from the Gospel, we thereby first of all testify in the face of the truth of God that we will strive so that there is nothing in our house that would forbid the Savior, the Light of God, to enter it just as clearly and it is tangible how Jesus Christ entered the house of Zacchaeus. This applies to both external and internal: should not be in the house Orthodox person unclean and nasty pictures, pagan idols, not all books are appropriate to store in it, unless you are professionally engaged in the refutation of certain delusions. When preparing for the rite of consecrating a dwelling, it is worth considering what you would be ashamed of, what would you fall through the earth from shame if Christ the Savior stood here. After all, in fact, performing the rite of consecration, which connects the earthly with the Heavenly, you invite God to your home, into your life. Moreover, this should concern the inner being of the family - now in this house you should strive to live in such a way that in your conscience, in your relations with each other there is nothing that would prevent you from saying: "Christ is in our midst." And testifying to this determination, invoking the blessing of God, you ask for support from above. But this support and blessing will come only when the desire ripens in your soul not just to perform the prescribed ceremony, but to perceive it as a meeting with the truth of God.

21. And if the husband or wife does not want to bless the house?

You don't have to do this with a scandal. But if it were possible for Orthodox family members to pray for those who are still unbelievers and non-church, and this would not cause a special temptation for the latter, then it would be better, of course, to perform the rite.

22. What should be the church holidays in the house and how to create a festive spirit in it?

The most important thing here is the correlation of the very cycle of family life with the church liturgical year and the conscious impulse to build the way of the whole family in accordance with what is happening in the Church. Therefore, if you even participate in the church consecration of apples at the feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord, but at home on this day again for breakfast muesli and chop for dinner, if during Great Lent a bunch of relatives’ birthdays are quite actively celebrated, and you still haven’t learned to refrain from such situations and get out of them without loss, then, of course, this gap will arise.

The transfer of church joy into the house can begin with the simplest things - from decorating it with willows for the Lord's Entry into Jerusalem and flowers for Easter to burning on Sundays and holidays lamps. At the same time, it would be better not to forget to change the color of the icon lamp - red to blue for fasting and green for the feast of the Trinity or the feast of the saints. Children joyfully and easily remember and perceive such things with their souls. One can recall the same “Summer of the Lord”, with what feeling little Seryozha walked with his father and lit lamps, while his father sang “May God rise again and scatter His enemies ...” and other church hymns - and how it fell on the heart . You can remember that they used to bake on the Week of the Triumph of Orthodoxy, that for the Forty Martyrs, because the festive table is also part of the Orthodox life of the family. To remember that for the holiday they not only dressed differently than on weekdays, but that, say, a pious mother went to church on the Nativity of the Virgin in a blue dress, and thus her children did not need to explain anything more, what color is the Mother of God, when they saw in the vestments of the priest, in the bedspreads on the lecterns, the same festive color as at home. The closer we ourselves try to correlate what is happening at home, in our small Church, with what is happening in the big Church, the smaller will be the gap between them in our minds and in the minds of our children.

23. What does comfort in a home mean from a Christian point of view?

The community of church people is basically divided into two numerically, and sometimes qualitatively, different categories. Some are those who leave everything in this world: families, houses, splendor, prosperity and follow Christ the Savior, others are those who, over the centuries of church life, accept in their homes those who walk the narrow and hard path of self-denial, starting with Christ himself and His students. These houses are warmed by the warmth of the soul, the warmth of the prayer that takes place in them, these houses are fine and full of purity, they lack pretentiousness and luxury, but they remind us that if the family is a small Church, then the home of the family - the house - should also to be in some sense, albeit very distant, but a reflection of the earthly Church, just as it is a reflection of the Heavenly Church. The house should also have beauty and proportion. Aesthetic feeling is natural, it is from God, and must find its expression. And when there is this in the life of a Christian family, it can only be welcomed. Another thing is that not everyone and not always feel it is necessary, which also needs to be understood. I know families of church people who live without really thinking about what kind of tables and chairs they have, and even whether it is completely cleaned, whether the floor is clean. And for several years now, the leaks that have appeared on the ceiling do not deprive their shelter of warmth and do not make it less attractive to relatives and friends who are drawn to this hearth. So, striving for a reasonable goodness of the external, let us nevertheless remember that for a Christian the main thing is the internal, and where there is warmth of the soul, crumbling whitewash will not spoil anything. And where it will not be, then at least hang the frescoes of Dionysius on the wall, this will not make the house cozier and warmer.

24. What is behind such purely Russophilia at the household level, when the husband walks around the house in a canvas kosovorotka and almost in bast shoes, the wife in a sundress and a scarf and on the table is nothing but kvass and sauerkraut?

Sometimes it's a public game. But if it is pleasant for someone to walk at home in an old Russian sundress, and for someone it is more convenient to wear tarpaulin boots or even bast shoes than synthetic slippers, and this is not done for show, then what can I say. It is always better to use what has been tested for centuries and is all the more consecrated by everyday tradition than to fall into some revolutionary extremes. However, it becomes really bad if there is a desire in it to designate some ideological direction of one's life. And like any introduction of the ideological into the sphere of the spiritual and religious in general, this turns into falsehood, insincerity and, as a result, a spiritual defeat.

Although I personally have never seen the sacralization of everyday life to such a degree in any Orthodox family. Therefore, purely speculatively, I can imagine such a thing, but it is difficult to judge what I am not familiar with.

25. Is it possible, even at a sufficiently adult age, to guide a child, for example, in the choice of books for him to read, so that in the future he does not have any ideological distortions?

In order to be able to guide the reading of children even at a fairly late age, it is necessary, firstly, to start this reading with them very early, and secondly, parents must read for themselves, which children certainly appreciate, and secondly, thirdly, from some age, there should not be a ban on reading what you yourself read, and thus there should be no difference between books for children and books for adults, just as there should not be, unfortunately, a very common discrepancy between children reading classical literature, encouraged by their parents, and swallowing detectives and all kinds of cheap waste paper: they say, our work requires a lot of intellectual effort, so you can afford to relax at home. But only solid efforts give a significant result.

You need to start by reading at the crib, as soon as the children begin to perceive it. From Russian fairy tales and the Lives of the Saints, translated for the little ones, to reading one or another version of the children's Bible, although it is much better to retell it to mother or father gospel stories and parables in their own words, in their living language, and in a way that their own child can better understand. And it’s good that this habit of reading together before bedtime or in some other situations is preserved for as long as possible - even when children already know how to read on their own. Parents who read aloud to their children every night, or whenever possible, are the surest way to instill in them a love of reading.

In addition, the reading circle is formed quite well by the library that is at home. If it contains something that can be offered to children, and there is nothing that needs to be hidden from them, which, in theory, should not be in the family of Orthodox Christians at all, then the reading circle of children will be formed in a natural way. Well, for example, why, as it was still preserved in other families according to the old practice, when books were difficult to access, to keep a certain amount of literary works, which, perhaps, are not at all healthy to read? Well, what is the immediate benefit to children from reading Zola, Stendhal, Balzac, or Bocaccio's Decameron, or Dangerous Liaisons by Charles de Laclos and the like? Even if they once got for a sacrificial kilogram of waste paper, really, it’s better to get rid of them, after all, wouldn’t a pious father of a family suddenly re-read “The Shine and Poverty of Courtesans” at his leisure? And if in his youth it seemed to him literature worthy of attention, or if, out of necessity, it was studied under the program of one or another humanitarian institute, today one must have the courage to get rid of all this burden and leave at home only what one is not ashamed to read, and, accordingly, one can offer to children. So they will naturally develop a literary taste, however, and a wider one - an artistic taste, which will determine the style of clothing, the interior of the apartment, and the painting on the walls of the house, which, of course, is important for an Orthodox Christian. For taste is an inoculation against vulgarity in all its forms. After all, vulgarity is from the evil one, since he is a vulgar one. Therefore, for a person with a cultivated taste, the intrigues of the evil one are at least in some respects safe. He just can't pick up any books. And not even because they are bad in content, but because a person with taste will not be able to read such literature.

26. But what is bad taste, including home interiors, if vulgarity is from the evil one?

Vulgar, probably, can be called two overlapping, and in some ways intersecting volumes of concepts: on the one hand, vulgarity is clearly bad, low, appealing to that in a person that we call "below the belt" both literally and figuratively. sense of this word. On the other hand, what apparently claims to have internal merits, to a serious ethical or aesthetic content, in fact does not correspond to these claims at all and leads to a result opposite to that which is externally declared. And in this sense, that low vulgarity, which directly calls a person to his animal nature, merges with vulgarity, as if fine, but in fact sends him there too.

Today there is ecclesiastical kitsch, or rather ecclesiastical kitsch, which in some of its manifestations can become such. I don't mean modest paper Sofrino icons. Some of them, painted almost by hand in some exotic way and sold in the 60s-70s and at the very beginning of the 80s, are infinitely expensive for those who had them then as the only ones available. And although the degree of their inconsistency with the Prototype is obvious, nevertheless, there is no repulsion from the Prototype Itself in them. Here, rather, the immensity of the distance takes place, but not the perversion of the goal, which occurs in the case of outright vulgarity. I mean a whole set of, as it were, church crafts, for example, under the Cross of the Lord with rays diverging from the center in the style in which Finnish prisoners made in Soviet times. Or pendants with a cross inside the heart and the like kitsch. Of course, we are more likely to see these "works" from near-church producers than actually in Orthodox churches, but nevertheless they penetrate here too. Let's say that the church should not have artificial flowers, many decades ago he spoke His Holiness Patriarch Alexy I, however, they can be seen near the icons today. Although this reflects another property of vulgarity, which the patriarch, without using the word itself, mentioned when he explained why artificial flowers should not be: because they say about themselves not what they are, they lie. Being a piece of plastic or paper, they seem to be alive and real, in general, not what they really are. Therefore, in the church, even modern, so successfully faked as natural, plants and flowers are out of place. After all, this is a deception, which should not be here at any level. Another thing in the office, where it will look completely different. So it all depends on the place in which this or that object is used. Up to banal things: after all, clothing that is natural on vacation will be blatantly unacceptable if a person comes to the temple in it. And if he allows himself this, then in a sense it will be vulgar, because in an open top and a short skirt it is appropriate to be on the beach, but not at a church service. This general principle attitude to the very concept of the vulgar can also be applied to the interior of the hearth, especially if the definition of the family as a small Church for us is not just words, but a guide to life.

27. Is it necessary to react somehow if your child was presented with an icon bought in the subway or even in a church shop, in front of which it is difficult to pray because of its pseudo-beauty and sugary gloss?

We often judge by ourselves, but we must also proceed from the fact that a huge number of people in our Russian Orthodox Church are brought up aesthetically differently and have different taste preferences. I know an example and I think that it is not the only one when in one rural church a priest, who replaced a blatantly tasteless in terms of categories of at least elementary artistic style the iconostasis on a very canonical one, painted under Dionysius by famous Moscow icon painters, caused real righteous anger among the parish, consisting of grandmothers, as is basically the case today in villages. Why did he remove our Savior, why Mother of God changed and hung these, do not understand who? - and then all sorts of abusive terms were used to refer to these icons - in general, all this was completely alien to them, before which it was impossible to pray. But I must say that gradually the priest coped with this old woman's rebellion and thereby gained some serious experience in the fight against vulgarity as such.

And with homemade one should try to follow the path of gradual re-education of taste. Of course, the icons of the canonical ancient style are more in line with the church faith, and in this sense - church tradition than fake academic painting or a letter from Nesterov and Vasnetsov. But it is necessary to walk the path of returning both our small and our entire Church to the ancient icon slowly and carefully. And, of course, we need to start this path in the family, so that at home our children are brought up on icons, canonically written and correctly located, that is, so that the red corner is not a nook between cabinets, paintings, dishes and souvenirs, which you can’t immediately highlight. So that the children see that the red corner is what is most important for everyone in the house, and not what you need to be ashamed of in front of others who come into the house and once again it’s better not to show it.

28. Should there be many icons at home or few?

You can revere one icon, or you can have an iconostasis. The main thing is that they pray before all these icons and the quantitative multiplication of icons would not come from a superstitious desire to have as much holiness as possible, but because we honor these saints and want to pray to them. If you pray in front of a single icon, then it should be such an icon as that of the deacon Achilles in The Cathedral, which would be the light in the house.

29. If a believing husband objects to his wife arranging an iconostasis at home, despite the fact that she prays for all these icons, should she remove them?

Well, probably, there should be some kind of compromise here, because, as a rule, one of the rooms is the one where people mostly pray, and, probably, there should still be as many icons in it as better than that who prays more, or to those who need it. Well, in the rest of the rooms, probably, everything should be arranged in accordance with the wishes of the other spouse.

30. What does a wife mean to a priest?

No less than for any other Christian person. And in a sense, even more, because although monogamy is the norm of any Christian life, but the only place where it is absolutely realized is in the life of a priest, who knows for sure that he has one wife and must live in such a way that even in forever they were together, and who will always remember how much she gives up for him. And therefore, he will try to treat his wife, his mother, with love, pity and understanding of her certain weaknesses. Of course, there are special temptations, temptations and difficulties on the way of the married life of clergymen, and perhaps the biggest difficulty is that, unlike in another complete, deep, Christian family, here the husband will always have a huge area of ​​spiritual care, absolutely hidden from his wife, whom she should not even try to touch. We are talking about the relationship of the priest and his spiritual children. And even those of them with whom at the household level or at the level friendly relations the whole family communicates. But the wife knows that she must not cross a certain threshold in communicating with them, and the husband knows that he has no right, even a hint, to show her what he knows from the confession of his spiritual children. And this is very difficult, first of all for her, but it is not easy for the family as a whole. And here a special measure of tact is required from each clergyman, so as not to push away, not to roughly interrupt the conversation, but also to prevent either direct or indirect transition of natural marital frankness to areas that have no place in their common life. And perhaps this is the biggest problem that every priestly family always, throughout their married life, solves.

31. Can a priest's wife work?

I would say "yes" if, other things being equal, it does not harm the family. If this is a job that gives the wife enough strength and inner energy to be an assistant to her husband, to be a teacher of children, to be the keeper of the hearth. But she has no right to put her most creative, most interesting work on the interests of the family, which should be the main thing in her life.

32. Is having many children a mandatory norm for priests?

Of course, there are canonical and ethical norms that require the priest to be very demanding of himself and his family life. Although nowhere is it said that a mere Orthodox Christian and a church clergyman should differ in some way as family men, except for the unconditional monogamy of a priest. In any case, the priest has one wife, and in everything else there are no special rules, no separate prescriptions.

33. Is it good for worldly believers in our time to have many children?

Psychologically, I cannot imagine how in a normal Orthodox family, whether in the old times or in the new ones, there can be attitudes that are non-religious in their inner essence: we will have one child, because we will no longer feed, we will not give a proper education. Or: let's live for each other while we're young. Or: we will travel around the world, and when it is over thirty, we will think about childbearing. Or: the wife is making a successful career, she must first defend her dissertation and get good position… In all these calculations of their economic, social, physical capabilities, taken from magazines in brilliant covers, there is an obvious disbelief in God.

It seems to me that in any case, the attitude to abstaining from childbearing in the first years of marriage, even if it is expressed only in calculating the days on which conception cannot take place, is detrimental to the family.

In general, one cannot look at married life as a way of giving oneself pleasure, no matter whether it is carnal, physical, intellectual-aesthetic or mental-emotional. The desire in this life to receive only pleasures, as mentioned in the gospel parable of the rich man and Lazarus, is a path that is morally unacceptable for an Orthodox Christian. Therefore, let every young family soberly assess what it is guided by, refraining from having a child. But in any case, it is not good to start your life together with a long period of life without a child. There are families that want children, but the Lord does not send, then you have to accept this will of God. However, starting family life by postponing for an unknown period of what gives it completeness is immediately laying in some serious inferiority in it, which then, like a time bomb, can work and cause very serious consequences.

34. How many children should a family have to be called a large family?

Three or four children in an Orthodox Christian family is probably the lower limit. Six or seven is already a large family. Four or five is still an ordinary normal family of Russian Orthodox people. Is it possible to say that the Tsar-Martyr and Tsarina Alexandra are parents of many children and are heavenly patrons large families? No, i guess. When there are four or five children, we perceive this as a normal family, and not as some kind of special parental feat.