How to Be Saved in the World. Life in the Family. #
I have spoken about parents, mothers-in-law, daughters-in-law, but said nothing of children—of their duties to the family, to father and mother. On this subject, if I find time, I shall speak in detail. For now, just a word or two.
More and more often now one hears such talk: “I owe nothing to my parents. I did not ask them to give me life. I am not obliged to them for anything…” Evil, corrupt words. True, they are not new. Even in the works of the Greek writer Aristophanes, who lived before the Nativity of Christ, a son justifies his right to beat his father by saying that a young rooster beats the old one—his own father. “Therefore, it is natural.” Such reasoning is, of course, natural… in the kingdom of beasts. And if a man esteems himself no higher than an animal, then let him reason as a brute.
But you are not beasts; you are human beings, endowed with an immortal soul.
I believe the children I knew in a certain Moscow family thought more like human beings. They used to call themselves (they even signed their letters) “little pieces”… “Your little pieces.” That is, little pieces of their mother—flesh of her flesh. They reasoned thus: “A mother’s sufferings are so great that every mother is a saint, and her children, for the sake of those sufferings, must give her their whole soul…” A wise and pure thought.
Be that as it may, parents are willing to give all to their children. They give their labor, their sleepless nights—sometimes even more than a Christian ought to give. They sin for their children. They sacrifice their conscience, their soul, for their children’s sake. So is it not a grievous sin to repay such love with ingratitude?
Even if parents sometimes err, even if, against the Apostle’s word, they foolishly “provoke their children to wrath,”—it is not for the children to judge. For even these faults arise from love and are committed out of love.
I have already told how the church bell rang out in accusation of the sin of violence against one’s wife. But still louder should the alarm bell sound against the sin of children who deny the sacred duty of gratitude. I recall a story close to one I told previously.
Sunday. Noon. In the village, all is silent as a grave: no human voice is heard, not a leaf stirs, not a dog barks—everything seems frozen. Suddenly, a deep rumble is heard: they have rung the alarm bell. Like ants from a disturbed anthill, people rush from their huts, asking fearfully: “Fire? Where?” But the bell drones on, as if to say: here! here! All rush to the bell tower. There, on his knees, bareheaded, stood old Ostap, pulling the rope with his dry, bony hand. His gray hair was disheveled, his eyes fixed on the ground.
“Why, grandfather, are you ringing? Where is the fire?” the people asked. The old man was silent. Someone touched his hand and asked loudly: “Do you hear? Where is the fire?” Ostap slowly raised his head and firmly declared:
“Truth has died—I am tolling for it.”
This was a father, cast out of his home by his children. Yes, he was truly tolling for the funeral of truth—her highest crucifixion.
Our Time — A Time of Great Misfortune, a Time of Deep Estrangement Between Parents and Children
From every side one hears complaints:
“My son looks the other way… My son is turning away from the faith of his fathers. He mocks the traditions of his forebears.”
Or words like these:
“He’s getting into trouble… I don’t even know where the temptation came from. But he’s gone down a bad path. There’s drink, and tobacco, and worse things still…” Less often, but still at times, there are complaints about daughters.
Where, indeed, does this moral breakdown of children come from? First of all, from us—from the structure of life within the family.
Let me speak first about religious upbringing.
Not long ago, a father complained that his children—still quite young—already tried to avoid bows and prayers. Instead of reading the appointed prayers, they hastily make three bows, and then sit down at the table.
“And do you yourself always pray as you ought?”
“No, sometimes I hurry through it…”
“Well then, how can you insist on strict observance from your children? You don’t even have the right to correct them! The whole matter rests on example. Yes, of course you may insist, command, supervise; and the children may say their prayers properly—but without your example, the very order you impose becomes false. You will not prevent your children from thinking that your demand is unjust—that you are being a hypocrite, demanding from them what you yourself do not consider binding, laying upon them burdens grievous to be borne. And this silent judgment, growing in their thoughts, will destroy their religiosity, their faith.”
Submit yourself strictly and without leniency to the order established by the Church. Demand three times more from yourself than from your children, and they will follow you willingly. They will accept the religious order as something binding.
“If you wish to bring your little ones to conscious obedience, then let no arbitrariness be seen in our actions, but rather let it be clear that we ourselves are obedient to a higher law.”
It is hard for a child to obey demands that seem like whim or caprice; but it is not hard to submit to a firm law—especially one respected by the parents themselves. Herbart says rightly: the more firm order a child sees around him, the more readily he submits to it. Servants and children alike in a household should know what each person is to do, with the same certainty and firmness as a crew aboard a ship. We see that people accustomed to naval discipline often serve as examples of proper order and sound structure in domestic life. This is no coincidence.
“People are drawn by example,” says the Latin proverb.
Where the parents’ conduct leaves no doubt that a given religious order is binding, the very air of the home becomes filled with the sense of duty. And to disobey it becomes almost psychologically impossible. Where there is no example, commands are barren.
But even when a firm religious order has been rightly established in the home by the parents themselves, and the children obey it, it is still fitting—for God’s sake—to sometimes, voluntarily, condescend to their childish weakness. It is dangerous to terrorize children, to frighten them with the strictness of the order. It is dangerous to place upon them a burden heavier than they can bear. We must be cautious, in the work of religious upbringing, not to fall into the error of Saul.
When Saul sent the youth David against the giant Goliath, he dressed him in his own heavy armor:
“And Saul clothed David with his armour, and he put a helmet of brass upon his head; also he armed him with a coat of mail. And David girded his sword upon his armour, and he assayed to go; for he had not proved it. And David said unto Saul, ‘I cannot go with these; for I have not proved them.’ And David put them off him.” (1 Chronicles 17:38–39)
The armor of a grown warrior proved too great for the young shepherd. He could not move freely in it.
Just so, a child cannot move freely within the form of an adult’s religious practice. And yet some parents are ready to clothe their children in “heavy armor too great for their shoulders.” I know families where children developed an outright hostility to God—a true spirit of rebellion against religion—because their souls were too mercilessly crushed by formal religious discipline.
In the manuscripts of the Volga newspaper Simbirsk News, I found an interesting psychological sketch titled Vasya’s Faith. It is a simple and terrifying story about the upbringing in a family of the very sort described above. With the author’s permission, I will allow myself to note what is most essential in this sketch. It would be a great pity if this authentic human document were not preserved.
“Vasya’s father was a small-time merchant. Vasya feared his father. Most of all, he feared his eyes; it always seemed to him that they were watching him ceaselessly and could, at any moment, catch something improper or unseemly in him, after which Vasya would hear:
— Vasiliy! You mustn’t do that.
— You must not drink water before the Liturgy. Absolutely not. Do you hear?
And in such cases, Vasya’s father would add:
— It’s a sin. God will punish you. Do you hear?
— Fasting is the most important thing, he liked to say, without it there’s no salvation. That’s it—no exceptions.
On Christmas Eve, Vasya’s father would strictly forbid anyone in the household to eat before the first star appeared in the sky. And if Vasya, in such moments, asked for a piece of bread, he would be told:
— What are you doing? What are you doing? Are you a heathen? Look out—God will punish you.
In the deep of night, Vasya—five years old—would be awakened for Matins. His eyes glued shut, red circles around them, and still he stood… But in church, what wore him down was not so much the service itself as the stern “surveillance,” the watchful eye of his father. And the burden of the service was too much to bear. Vasya couldn’t hold out.
— Papa, oh Papa! I’m tired… My legs hurt…
— That’s not allowed. You must stand. Get down on your knees and pray. It’ll be easier that way. Otherwise, look out—God will punish you.
Vasya would kneel and pray that his legs would stop hurting. He expected that at any moment they would feel better and he’d feel joyful. But his legs kept aching, and he wondered: why is God so cruel? After all, Vasya keeps the fasts, obeys his father, and prays. It was as if some silent resentment was being born.
The merciful God of the New Testament—the One who so loved children, who preached on soft, fragrant green grass—this God is closer to children. And love for Him, if it can be instilled, will make even the long Matins vigil not burdensome to them. But above all, one must plant in a child’s soul firm religious seeds—rooted in the will, in feeling—and for this, a mere command to pray with greater zeal is not enough.
Mere submission to church order is not enough. There must be that very atmosphere of upbringing in which, for instance, St. Stephen of Perm was raised. And how was he raised? In the same way that the upbringing of Lisa Kalitina’s deeply Christian soul is described in a secular novel (A Nest of Gentlefolk). He was not told fairy tales, but the life of the All-Pure Virgin, the lives of hermits, of God’s saints, of holy martyrs. He was told how the saints lived in the deserts, how they were saved, how they endured hunger, cold, how they feared no kings and confessed Christ; how birds brought them food, and wild beasts obeyed them; how flowers would grow where their blood fell.
He grew up in the air of sacred stories, but more than that—in the atmosphere of the Gospel, near the earthly Mount of Beatitudes. He did not memorize the holy book with his mind only, but received it with his heart. And the image of the Good God, with some sweet force, pressed itself into his soul, filling it with pure and reverent fear; and Christ became to it something near, familiar—almost kin.
And such a foundation is hardly one that the storms of life will be able to tear down.
People often complain nowadays that school kills the first stirrings of faith in children, that it makes them unbelievers. Unfortunately, our parents often lack the skill, the education, to resist the corrupting influence of the godless. But perhaps such a struggle would not even be necessary if, in childhood, love for Christ had been instilled—as the Teacher of life, as the One who speaks truth, as the One whose word is life. Perhaps then children would not be able to escape all religious doubt—but that doubt would never be able to destroy their love for Christ.
Korolenko, in his Notes of a Contemporary, tells of the assaults unbelief made against him. There were days when godlessness seemed to triumph—but his soul refused to surrender Christ, whom it had come to love. It defended Him—and held fast to Him. This was because what had been passed down to him by his mother was not mere loyalty to ritual and order, but a love for Christ.
Nevertheless, there remains a weapon in the hands of every parent for fighting for the faith of their children: prayer.
Let us remember Monica, the mother of Blessed Augustine. She shaped her child. She molded his heart. “Constantly fearing that unbelief would conquer him,” she followed him to Carthage, to Rome, to Milan. Everywhere, with the strength and perseverance of a man, she reminded him of God. And her brilliant son gave himself over to passions, rejected true doctrine, was captivated now by ancient philosophy, now by new heresies—and after many years, having exhausted his soul, tired of loving and falling, sad and sickened, he came to the greatest misfortune of all: doubt in everything. And all of this had to be endured, had to be seen, by his tireless guardian—his mother. And on the day when the danger became terrible, and a chasm yawned beneath his feet, this second Hagar found within herself a cry, a groaning so deep that God could not but respond to it.
“The child of such prayers cannot perish,” He said to Monica—and in her person, to all parents.
You complain that your children are morally corrupted. That they live according to the lusts of a depraved heart. But in this matter—it seems—you are entirely, or at least three-quarters, to blame.
“Man is what he is,” the materialists used to say.
“Man is what he sees,”—we would say.
The soul of a person is like a mosaic picture—pieced together from the earliest impressions of their surroundings. And no school will ruin a child if a solid moral foundation has been laid.
Samuel and his companions—the sons of the high priest Eli—grew up under the same conditions. And yet Samuel’s soul remained as white as his linen ephod, while the sons of Eli fell into corruption. Such a contrast may seem strange, among companions raised in the same school, near the same holy sanctuary.
Yet I believe the explanation lies in Samuel’s earliest years—even in the days before his birth.
Samuel, even before birth, was consecrated to God “for the work of the Lord”, surrounded by prayer. And for the first three years of his life, he lived in that same atmosphere of constant prayer. During that time, it was already instilled in him that he must await the Lord’s call to service, and respond to it—as indeed he did: “Here am I, Lord! I hear Thee.”
It is no coincidence that Dostoevsky forbade even a dark or evil person from walking past a child. Even the moods of those around him leave an impression on a child’s soul. And yet how little we attend to the atmosphere around our children! The very foundation of our upbringing is false. How—and for what—do we raise our children? I have spoken of this already.
Let me quote a few words from Ushinsky:
“What do we talk about with a child? In what direction are we forcing his thoughts to move? What are we preparing him for?” — asks the great pedagogue.
“Fathers do not know their children, and mothers corrupt them,”* answers Ushinsky. “They often imagine that the whole world, the entire structure of the state, the entire civil service exists solely to make things pleasant for their little darlings. Their family becomes, for them, the center of the universe, and even in religion they see only a means to ensure domestic well-being. They pray fervently—but their prayers are only for the happiness of their children; that is, for their health, their wealth, their future ranks, rewards, estates, and so on. The interests of the state, of science, art, literature, civilization, and Christianity are foreign to them—or rather, they matter only insofar as they can benefit their children.”
“Return either with him or upon him.”
Our modern mother, in preparing her son for life, often thinks not of his moral dignity, but of his happiness—and frequently wishes him happiness even at the cost of humanity and his own moral worth.
How many of our parents are there who would seriously—and not for the sake of appearances—say to their son:
“Serve the cause of Christianity, the cause of truth and goodness, the cause of civilization, the cause of your country and your people—even if it costs you the greatest efforts and sacrifices, even if it brings you misfortune, poverty, and shame, even if it costs you your very life.”
And yet these words are nothing more than a Christian translation of the words of the Macedonian woman, and more than that—the idea expressed in these words is the only one upon which true Christian upbringing can be built.
“Seek ye first the kingdom of God,”* says the Savior, *“and all these things shall be added unto you.”
And what is the kingdom of God, if not the kingdom of faith, of truth, and of righteousness? But we do not act in this way: we prepare our children not for a struggle with evil, but merely so that they may float more easily along with its current. Even when we advise them to pray, we add: “Pray, and you will be happy”— that is, you’ll be healthy, intelligent, wealthy, honored, and so on—forgetting the words of the Gospel, which clearly state that all these things are sought by the Gentiles, and where the Christian understanding of happiness is forever separated from the pagan one.
Yes, we boldly declare: it is our family egoism that poisons our public education at its very root. This is its deepest wound, and from it, in our opinion, all other maladies arise—and these maladies cannot be cured by any egoistic philosophical theories or life philosophies.
It is not for lack of care for their children’s upbringing that our parents can be reproached. On the contrary, there is so much care that, if it were rightly directed, our education would reach a high level of development. But, springing from the source of family egoism, these efforts often hinder rather than help proper civic upbringing.
(Ushinsky, “On Moral Education”)
We not only fail to help our children grow up to serve the work of Christ—we actually destroy in them all their impulses toward living action. Children already have a desire to serve others. They are even eager to do something for Christ—for a feat, a sacrifice. And instead of helping them approach life and embrace it as a holy struggle, as a constant cross-bearing path in the battle for the Kingdom of God, we try to hold them back.
St. Paraskeva of Bulgaria, under the influence of the Gospel, as a child often gave away her clothes and shoes to the poor. Her mother did not scold her for this, but only pointed out how she might be even more helpful to the world than with her shoes. And from Paraskeva grew a great soul.
We, on the other hand, destroy in children every movement toward true Goodness, teaching them that the Gospel is not suited to real life, that it is too soon in childhood to think about life, about service to others, about doing good. And so the children grow up dead.
“I had a picture book in childhood,” one writer recalls. “It told stories—about heroic warriors who fought for truth, about attics and basements where starving children lay dying. I longed to follow the heroes, to go with them where they went, to rescue, to unearth the truth buried in the earth. I asked my elders: show me the way—where do I go to follow the heroes?
They told me: that’s just a story, it isn’t real. It’s only in the book.
I asked: where is that basement, where the children are starving? ‘Surely someone should help them, right?’”
It is no wonder, then, that under such conditions, children grow up spiritually empty. And such people are fertile soil for the sowing of tares—and Satan sows them.
In essence, what is the law that governs our life? We are martyrs of the world. Our lives pass in constant bustle, in a frantic chase after coins, all to provide wealth for our children. But does not such a life poison the children? Does not the very hustle, the sinful pursuit of gain, poison the air with evil—a kind of godlessness—in which our children grow up? We gather riches for them, while the devil steals their souls.
“There are fathers,” writes St. John Chrysostom, “who spare no expense to provide their children with instructors in pleasures and indulgences, treating them as wealthy heirs; but as for raising them to be Christians, as for training them in piety—this they scarcely care about.
This criminal blindness!—It is to this coarse negligence that we must attribute all the disorders from which society groans.
Suppose you have secured for them great wealth. But if they do not know how to live wisely, that wealth will not remain with them long. It will be squandered; it will perish along with its possessors; it will become their most sorrowful inheritance.”
“Your children will always be sufficiently rich,” he continues, “if they receive from you a good upbringing—one capable of governing their conduct and forming their character.
Therefore, strive not to make them rich, but to make them godly masters of their passions, rich in virtue. Teach them not to invent imaginary needs, and to value the goods of this world according to their true worth.”
And parents who care for their children’s bodies, who labor to leave them wealth, yet forget to bequeath them a living soul—such parents, says the holy father, are murderers of their own children.