Our whole modern outlook is to look below to find the causes, the secondary causes. The whole Christian outlook is to look above, and that is why such people as St. Gregory as we can see by reading their writings and their lives—are constantly cheerful. This does not mean that they are overly happy, but rather that they are in a state of deep happiness, because they are constantly looking above and keeping in mind, with determination and constancy, to get to a certain place, which is heaven, and thus they see all the details in the world in that light. If what they see has to do with evil, with the nets of demons, with worldliness, with boredom, with discouragement, or just with ordinary details of living, all that is secondary and is never allowed to be first. In fact, we are told by the Holy Fathers that we are supposed to see in everything something for our salvation. If you can do that, you can be saved.

In a pedestrian way, you can look at something like a printing press which does not operate. You are standing around and enjoying yourself, watching nice, clean, good pages come out printed, which gives a very nice sense of satisfaction, and you are dreaming of missionary activity, of spreading more copies around to a lot of different countries. But in a while it begins to torture you, it begins to shoot pages right and left. The pages begin to stick and to tear each other on top. You see that all those extra copies you made are vanishing, destroying each other, and in the end you are so tense that all you can do is sort of stand there and say the Jesus Prayer as you try to make everything come out all right. Although that does not fill one with a sense of satisfaction (as would watching the nice, clean copies come out automatically), spiritually it probably does a great deal more, because it makes you tense and gives you the chance to struggle. But if instead of that you just get so discouraged that you smash the machine, then you have lost the battle. The battle is not how many copies per hour come out: the battle is what your soul is doing. If your soul can be saving itself and producing words which can save others, all the better; but if you are producing words which can save others and are all the time destroying your own soul, it’s not so good.

Again, in everything one must be looking upward, and not downward, at the kingdom of heaven and not down at the details of earthly life. That is, the details of earthly life must be second, and this looking upward must be with zeal, determination and constancy. Constancy is something which is worked out by a spiritual regime based upon wisdom handed down from the Holy Fathers—not mere obedience to tradition for tradition’s sake, but rather a conscious assimilation of what wise men in God have seen and written down. On the outward side, this constancy is worked out by a little prayer, and we have this basic little prayer in the church services which have come down to us. Of course in different places they are performed according to one’s strength, more or less.

Whoever approaches the Lord Jesus Christ with obedience and humility will never want to be separated from Him. The beginning exercises of the newly-recruited army of Christ are the exercises of obedience and humility.

With obedience begins a new world, a new creature, a new mankind. The old world trampled upon obedience to God and humility before God, and thus destroyed the bridge between earth and heaven. The spiritual building materials for restoring this bridge are first of all, obedience and humility. As long as Adam was rich in obedience and humility, he could hardly introduce a difference between his own spirit and the Spirit of God, between his own will and the will of God, between his own thoughts and the thoughts of God. He could not feel, want, and think anything that could not have been in God and from God. Like the angels of God, so too did Adam stand in direct proximity to God, and because of this direct proximity he contemplated the Primary Source of light, wisdom, and love. Living within the sun itself, he had no need to light any candle of his own. His candle would not have burned or given off light within the sun.

But when Adam violated obedience and lost humility—and these are always lost or acquired at the same time—then his direct communion with God was broken, the bridge destroyed, and he fell into terrible darkness and rotten dankness, which he was forced to light up with his own candle given to him nevertheless by God’s mercy when God’s righteousness cast him out of Paradise. Then he not only began to feel the difference between himself and God, between his own will and God’s will, his own feeling and God’s feelings, his own thoughts and God’s thoughts—he not only began to be aware of the difference, but only in rare hours of enlightenment was just barely able to notice his own divine likeness.

Saint Laurence of Chernigov said that during ‘the little freedom’ (which we now know to be the period since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and which continues to this day – Ed.), ‘churches and monasteries will open and be restored. But all kinds of false teachings will appear, through demons and secret atheists (catholics, Uniats, self-consecrated Ukrainian schismatics). These will join the battle against the Russian Orthodox Church and her unity and sobornost in the Ukraine. The schismatics will be supported by an atheist government.

‘We must resist the invasion of ‘the civilized world’, that is, dark demonic forces, which will try and penetrate into spiritually undefended areas. They will seize church buildings from the Orthodox and beat up the faithful. Then the Metropolitan of Kiev (unworthy of his name) with his supporting clergy will shake the Russian Church to the foundations. The whole world will be astonished at his iniquity and stand in fear. But he will go to eternal perdition like Judas. All these assaults of the evil one and false teachings will disappear in Russia and there will be One Orthodox Church of All Rus’.

‘Kiev, without the great Russia and separate from it, is anyway completely unthinkable. Kiev has never had a Patriarch. Our enemies in Poland so much disliked the word ‘Rus’ that they changed the name of this area to Little Russia and then to ‘the Ukraine’ (meaning ‘the borderlands’), so that we will forget the name Rus and so forever be torn away from Orthodox Holy Rus. In those who have erred or fallen away from Orthodoxy there is no grace of the Holy Spirit, salvation or obtaining of the Kingdom of Heaven’.