On the fourth day of the Nativity of Christ, January 10, 1975, Fr. Arseny asked everyone to come to him. Father Nikolai had to leave, which he regretted very much, but unexpectedly Olya and Nadezhda, Yuri's sister, who had long since become a secret nun, arrived.

Our doctors were displeased that Fr. Arseny had gathered us again. We sat down in all directions, today the priest looked much better than yesterday, even his voice was louder.

Yesterday I told you how I went to the community, how it was created, the rest you know, for you have lived in it and know its whole life. Now I will speak about the years that were difficult physically, but spiritually bright, for both in exile and in the camps I met people of the highest spirit, ascetics of faith, sufferers who helped people. You know, I have met people whose faith was so perfect and great that I dreamed that if you put a wax candle to them, it would flash with an unearthly light. I will tell you about these righteous men, for I have studied and learned from them. But I will return to my mother, Maria Alexandrovna. As I have already said, my mother was an unusual person. She grew up in an intelligent family of professors, where faith was recognized as one of the obligatory customs of the Russian people, something similar to folklore, and in this environment she herself came to faith and became a believer, led her mother and her father to the knowledge of faith. Her faith in the Lord was so great, and her knowledge of the Holy Fathers and spiritual literature was so extensive, that she amazed the spiritual philosophers of her time. Why am I talking about this? Because it was my mother who planted the seeds of faith in my soul, nurtured them, and I entered life standing on a solid foundation from which nothing could push me. The Optina Hermitage, the acceptance of the priesthood, the founding of the community, and the difficult path of camps and exile were all based on the faith given to me by my mother. Now I will talk about a third of my life spent in camps and exile, not about the physical difficulties I endured, but about the wonderful people I met there, who taught me a lot and passed on their spiritual experience.

The first such spiritual light was Priest Hilarion, in monasticism John, who served in the village of Troitskoye, Arkhangelsk region. Ksenia Vladimirovna wrote down good memories of him, and they tell in detail about the influence that he had on me. The second was Hieromonk Seraphim from the Nilo-Stolobensky Monastery, memories of him were recorded by Alexander Sergeevich. I suddenly met the third in his own camp barracks, Monk Michael. Each of them passed on to me, without even knowing it, a deep spiritual wisdom that enriched me.

The camp was physically overwhelming and terrifying, but the numerous meetings and confessions of the prisoners revealed to me, as a priest, the immeasurably high spirituality of the people. Do not think that all these people were bishops, priests, monks, among these ascetics of the faith there were simple laymen who had found such a fullness of faith in Christ that I, a hieromonk, was far from them. Their confessions were for me a revelation of God. I remember a simple collective farmer Ivan Sergeyevich. Always quiet, calm, he confessed three days before his death, he was overwhelmed with rock in the face. I listened to his confession, the story of his life, I listened to the words: Father, I will die in three days, they are sending me to the camp in the mine. He spoke distantly, with deep faith in the Lord, I listened, and tears flowed down my face.

I remember an elderly engineer, I remember only his name, Vyacheslav, I saw him in the barracks every day. One evening he came up to me: Father, I am a bad believer, but tomorrow there will be a cleansing of the camp, I will be shot, confess and absolve my sins. This bad believer was so spiritually high that I listened to him with trepidation. The next day he was shot. And how many such meetings there were, how many they gave.

There in the camp was the hierodeacon of the Pechora Monastery, John, who was not tall, had his hair cut like all the prisoners, like all the prisoners, with a sad face, but when he spoke, his voice thundered. Musicians from the prisoners said that he had the rarest bass profundo, and with such a voice he should sing in the Italian theater of Milan La Scala. Father John came to me for confession in the barracks, tried to speak in a whisper, but every word he said could be heard five meters away. Confession did not take place, it was agreed that he would confess at the logging site, in the forest, that year I was sent to harvest wood.

It was impossible to confess for a long time, and the conversation lasted about fifteen minutes intermittently. What I heard plunged me into spiritual trembling, a great righteous man stood before me, and by confessing Fr. John, I myself was immeasurably enriched spiritually. Everything he said about his life and behavior was a real revelation and a lesson for me for the rest of my life.

It is impossible to enumerate all the righteous men I met in the camps.

I will also dwell on questions related to confession. If the person who came to confession was full of desire to open his soul to the Lord and by the action of grace given to the priest, to cleanse it and ask forgiveness for what he had done, then this was always a joy for me and a step towards perfection. A person who came with great grief, the death of a child, wife, husband or other misfortunes, who asked for prayers and spiritual help, I received, prayed with him and perceived his grief as my own, and together with him I experienced and suffered, I was as if united with him in his sufferings, and if a person left after confession calmed down, who understood that everything was the will of the Lord, I was spiritually happy, and after confession I fervently prayed for the confessors.

Once I told one of Vladyka K. and a well-known archpriest from Nizhny Novgorod how I perceive confession, and received the answer: It is impossible to perceive the confession of a visitor so fervently, you will burn, your soul will not contain the sorrows of others. I did not agree. Once, perhaps more than once, I said, but I will repeat myself. I had to confess hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of people, and from each of them I took a particle of spiritually bright and good, which enriched me, and then I passed it on to other suffering and unfortunate people.

When I was still serving in church, there were parishioners who came during the days of Great Lent and asked to be absolved of their sins, according to custom. They came once a year, it was a formal custom, and my words to the confessors fell into emptiness, were not perceived, and I was sincerely upset.

Father Arseny was tired and fell silent, we got up and wanted to go out. Lyuda approached him and began to measure his blood pressure, having measured, she said: 90 to 60, low. Seeing that we got up, the priest said: "Don't go, I'll rest a little and continue about the confessions of the imprisoned criminals in the camp.

Over the long years of being in the death camp, that's how we, the prisoners, called the high-security camps, where we were sent not to serve their sentences, but to die, to die, I realized that the person who was there had no hope for anything, only death awaited him, so the definition of good and evil for most prisoners was completely different from what it used to be on the outside. Hence the attitude to each other, to someone else's and one's own life was measured in a different way: cruelly, rudely, uncompromisingly. The concepts of good and evil were reinterpreted in a demonic understanding: it is good when the other feels bad, and it is bad when the other feels good. In accordance with this, your actions were measured and those of others were perceived.