And so, brothers and sisters, it is absolutely necessary for us to make friends with the saints. How can you buy their friendship? It can be acquired through reading their lives and works. If we read the lives and works of the saints, if we try to imitate them as much as we can, then we become their close and unanimous friends, continuers of their work on earth. If we are unanimous friends of the saints, then we will undoubtedly come in due time to where they dwell, that is, to heaven. That's when each of us will become one of the beautiful flowers in the garden of the Heavenly King, one of the eternal stars in the Kingdom of Christ and our God. Amen.

On non-condemnation

Is there an easy way to salvation? Of course, we immediately want to answer this question in the negative. After all, it is known that it is impossible to be saved without labor, without exertion of strength, and consequently there can be no easy path to salvation. However, the Holy Fathers answer it positively: yes, there is an easy way to salvation. What is this path? It consists in fulfilling Christ's words about non-condemnation: "Judge not, that ye be not judged." After all, it follows from these words that if we do not condemn, then we will not be condemned at the Last Judgment, and if we are not condemned, it means that we will be justified and thus be saved.

So, it turns out that there is a simple way to salvation: do not condemn others, and you will be saved. At the same time, it does not even require any special and extraordinary feats – strict fasting, night vigils with prostrations, and the like – only non-condemnation is required. It would seem that everything is simple, but, alas, we do not want to go this way, because we love to condemn people too much. We constantly judge everyone and everything: family, relatives, acquaintances, friends, neighbors, colleagues, rulers and bosses. We are so accustomed to condemnation that we no longer even notice it – it has become our second nature, as it were. It is not in vain that the Holy Fathers say that any habit, both bad and good, having taken root in a person through long-term adherence to it, acquires the power of nature, the force of nature. Folk wisdom tells us the same thing: habit is second nature.

If a person is used to condemning, then after a while it becomes a disease, so he can no longer help condemning. At the same time, something changes in the very mind of a person, the mind becomes damaged. The Fathers call this illness "corrupt thought." A person with a corrupt thought begins to suffer from morbid blindness: his mind becomes unable to see reality correctly, but presents it in a distorted form. He always begins to see only the bad in everything, and does not see the good. He sees the bad even where there is none, and does not see the good where it is obvious and obvious to everyone. Elder Paisios of Athos compares this state to a machine that pours bullets. No matter what material we load into this machine, it still pours only bullets - whether from gold, iron, plastic, clay or chocolate. He does not know how to produce anything else. The same is true for a person with a corrupt thought: in any situation, in any person, in any information received, he sees and finds only what can be condemned, for which he can be blamed. He does not see anything for which he can praise and approve. And if you try to point this out to him, try to correct him, then he refuses to admit his wrongness, his mistake and illness. He believes, he is absolutely sure and convinced that he is right, that he sees the truth clearly and accurately, and that others are mistaken and do not see it. This strange deception is somewhat reminiscent of the well-known cheating game of the thimble, when the person in front of whom the cheater spins the thimbles is absolutely, one hundred percent, sure that he knows under which thimble the ball is, but when the thimbles are lifted, it turns out that it is not there at all, and the person loses a large sum of money...

In the same way, the devil, a master of various subtle deceptions, strikes a person's mind with blindness, so that he begins to see things incorrectly. And then a person is completely sincerely convinced that he is right, because his mind with a corrupt thought shows him the world around him in exactly the same way – it shows him in a distorted and false way. It's as if we were looking at the kindest and most beautiful human face through a distorted mirror – of course, it would seem ugly and repulsive to us – not because the face is like that, but because the mirror is ruined.

Elder Paisios says that all people are divided into two categories. The former are like a bee, and the latter are like a fly. How does a bee behave? For example, she accidentally flies into some bad place, say, into the station toilet, where there is a lot of dirt and impurity. But the bee does not seem to notice all this, it flies past and finds a piece of marmalade in the far corner, forgotten by the child. A fly behaves completely differently. When she flies into a beautiful flowering garden, she does not notice fragrant flowers, but flies past them and, finding some filth in the far corner, sits on it...