II. "Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God" John 3:5

The grace-filled rebirth from the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is a necessary condition for entering the Kingdom of God and the Church founded by the Lord on earth, for fulfilling the commandments of Christ and for knowing the mysteries of His teaching. If we decide to follow in the footsteps of Christ, rejecting the power of the regeneration of the Holy Spirit. In the Spirit, we will soon see all the futility of our strivings. If we try to fulfill His commandments, relying only on our own strength, on our natural, unregenerate man, then at first the burden seems unbearable for us, and we will fall in despair, overwhelmed by its weight. The law of Christ is beyond the power of the natural man; it is much heavier than the law of Moses, because it refines and strengthens its requirements; it is absolutely impossible to realize it in life with our weak and sin-prone forces. The law of Christ is designed exclusively for a person who has been blessed with grace; only with the help of the power of the Holy Spirit. Through the renewal of our old nature by the new element of grace-filled life, He becomes easily fulfilled, and His commandments are only a form of revelation and development of this heavenly element, and the mysteries of His teaching are the mysteries of our own inner spiritual life, which we experience.

At the present time, Christian societies seem to bow down before the moral requirements of Christ's teaching.

And the reason for all this lies in the fact that the grace-filled power of the regeneration of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit has ceased to serve as a source for the consciousness and freedom of modern man in his everyday, private, and public life and activity; everyone thinks to be a Christian with the help of only their natural powers and considerations. It is clear that nothing reliably good can ever come out of this, and before our eyes are the inevitable consequences of such a false path: the ever-spreading dissatisfaction with life and its ever-increasing sufferings... And how painful it is to look at these sufferings of people, it is bitter and difficult to realize that nothing from outside can help them! Everything you do is just one drop of water that falls into the sea of fire. Suffering penetrates into the very depths of life, into its daily trifles; like a heavy bitter sediment, they eat the very bottom of the human heart. A man walks, talks, laughs, takes care of himself and others, and look at what he is inside: all eaten away by the sorrow of life, like caustic rust, all broken and devastated by its aimlessness and uselessness, like invisible moths and aphids. Everything around us and we ourselves are only tumbled coffins...

And so it was, is and will always be, everywhere and everywhere. It is a pity to see how people, like small, foolish children, try to heal the evil of their lives with self-invented medicines and measures. Is it possible that it is not clear to all of us that the evil of the world lies in the very root of our life, that it cannot be cured by any private, earthly human efforts, that the whole culture, the whole civilization is only the flower of the same root and a poisonous color, although seductively beautiful, although constantly refined in its aroma? The Romans were smarter and more thoughtful than we are: before the coming of Christ, they clearly realized that nothing can be done with the evil of life by the means that man has at his disposal. Evil is so radical that it can be cured only by a radical means, i.e., the very root of life must be renewed, a new vital element must be created, a new seed of its development must be laid. If this is not the case, because it is not in the power of man, if it cannot be, because it is impossible to imagine how it is possible, then there is no and cannot be deliverance from the evil of life; man and the world must perish, must burn in the fire of suffering; everything must disappear in the abyss of insignificance, infinitely ridiculous and monstrously cruel... And the Romans consciously plunged themselves into this insignificance, forcibly breaking the thread of their lives...

But what man could not have imagined, it was actually done by the Son of God, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. He then came, so that through the sending down of the Holy Spirit. To give people a new life, to renew its very root, to lay in them a new seed for its further development. In this He also considered the essential task of His divine mission on earth.

About 2000 years have passed since then; In dozens of generations of ancestors we call ourselves Christians, and yet look inside and around you: how unreceptive we are, how stupid we are to assimilate the divine idea and the power of rebirth and renewal! How frivolously, and sometimes deliberately, we do not want to see that only in this alone is the way out for us and for the whole world from the abyss of suffering and ultimate destruction! How we still rely on our own strength and fuss in vain, trying in every possible way either to hide or to heal from the outside the ulcer that grows inside and eats away at the very root of our life, making us completely powerless in organizing its joy and its salvation! How to marvel at this, how to mourn, how to bring our insane light-mindedness to reason! We have become so shallow in the vanity and complexity of external, superficial, ostentatious life that the very thought of our radical, complete rebirth seems to us something impossible. We feel dizzy when we try to look into the depths of our souls and believe in the new life laid down in it by the Holy Spirit. By the Spirit in Christ; we lack the moral courage and determination to tear ourselves away for a while from the noise of life that captures us and descend there, into this calm silence, where the very fountain of life beats, where its very creativity takes place, where man remains alone in silence with himself and with the invisible God. And yet all Christian thoughts, feelings, deeds and deeds must arise and grow solely from that new seed which is laid at the bottom of this spring of the unchanging powers of our soul, from that life-giving breath of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit that breathes at the beckoning of God in this mysterious area... Will we continue to be deaf to our Lord's call to be reborn and renewed? Shall we still consider the very idea of renewal and rebirth to be inappropriate for our continuously and rapidly flowing time, which, the farther we go, the more and more deeply it captures us with the whirlwind of its vanity? Is it possible that we will all only gasp and groan, exhausted from the aimless hustle and bustle of life, from our sufferings and infirmities, from our fatigue and powerlessness, and at the same time reject our only medicine given to us by God?! Oh, God forbid that it should be so! Let us repent of our past, let us repent of our frivolity, of our presumptuous pride, of our passions and sins, let us decide, with God's help, to begin a new life! Let us direct all our attention, all the freedom of our heart and mind to the grace of regeneration granted to us! Let us constantly pray to God that He would germinate in us the seed of a new spiritual life that He had planted in us! Let us cherish and nourish this seed with good dispositions of the heart, good thoughts and deeds for the good of our souls and for the good of our neighbors! Let us constantly remember in our hearts and minds that we are a new creature in Christ, and, in accordance with this, in everything, both inside and outside ourselves, we must act according to the will of God, according to the renewed man, according to the power of the grace of the Holy Spirit, which is always called upon and always helps us. Spirit! Let us reject the old and old, let us enter into a merciless struggle with it, and begin to grow in ourselves and around us the new, Christ's. And most importantly, let us cease to rely only on ourselves, and put all our hope in the power of God acting in us, in the grace of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit, which regenerates us and constantly gives us a source of new strength for the creation of good in ourselves and others! Let us cast aside our self-conceit and self-will, and submit wholly to divine guidance... And then salvation will be near us; then we will understand what life in the Church is, then life will be easy and joyful for us, then all its commandments and statutes, the entire law of Christ will be only a desirable and joyful path to the Kingdom of God, to the inheritance of eternal blessed life, then we will find the strength to accomplish all that is predestined for us for the glory of Christ, then the joy of life will embrace and seize us, as a cloud of heaven, to meet our Lord... O Lord! Wake up, wake up..

III. "Ye Are Not of the World" John 15:19

Our calling is not here on earth, our homeland and our goal is there, in the world to which the Lord has called us. With this thought, we are sometimes inclined to justify our inattentive attitude to what surrounds us, and our coldness towards those people with whom we live. By it we cultivate in ourselves that dreamy and objectless mood in which we place our heaven somewhere in a vastly unattainable distance and completely detached in all respects from our earthly life. We are ready, almost with a telescope in our hands, to find the world where we will suddenly be transported by a mysterious wave from above. From the height of distant celestial perspectives, in the imaginary grandeur of an inhabitant of a distant planet that is about to appear in the future, we at best only look condescendingly at that small sphere of activity and at that corner of nature that awaits us in our present life. People who do not sympathize with the Church use this to point out the Church's teaching about that life as some kind of dark and objectless mysticism.

Is this true? And are we right?

We, Christians, are not of this world. But this does not mean that our world is somewhere from here billions of miles away, somewhere beyond the endless starry worlds. Not at all. It is within ourselves, in the nature around us, in every place, in every soul. It is separated from us not by external distant spaces, but only by the surface of the same life that on this same earth envelops us on all sides. His light and breath are immediately close to us; they are blowing around me from the inner depths of the spirit at this moment, right here, in this place where I am writing, in my own soul, which I feel now, because of the same nature and environment that surrounds me at the moment.

To strive from this world to the next does not mean to rush and rush somewhere into the boundless starry distance, into the unknown spaces of suns and constellations. No, it means simply to enter into what is in ourselves and around us. In my soul, whatever it may be now, there still shines through something higher, noblest and holier, good thoughts, feelings and desires, the same soul, only in a more perfect and beautiful form of being. To go there, to that light, to become familiar with what is revealed through it, to get used to its atmosphere, to weave our own life threads from it – this means to go to that heavenly world to which we have been called by the Lord. There is much evil in my body, but in it, in its form created by God, in the waves of its vital energy, one feels the highest beauty, the highest good of existence, a reflection of the pure happiness of life. To bring our spirit and our heart down into this noblest element of our own body, into this perfection of its ideal forms contained in ourselves, to breathe into ourselves only the purest fragrance of life, which blows in its harmonious manifestations; To strain and concentrate one's vital attention only in this refined luminous area of one's own bodily self-perception, without letting oneself loose and not allowing coarse waves of lust to spill over, without succumbing to external and internal disharmonious influences, spiritualizing and enlightening one's every movement of life – all this means to go into the kingdom not of this world.

Nature is all around me, on this piece of space that embraces my eye. If I run carelessly over it with my consciousness, or treat it rudely outwardly, then it is nothing special for me: I either pass by it, or outwardly use it, or destroy it. But it is enough for me to look at it with love, with integral feeling and consciousness, in a childish way, in God's way, not scattering in all directions, but completely surrendering to it, and every leaf of a tree, every tiny flower, every blade of grass, every grass will suddenly shine for me with such radiant heavenly beauty, shower me with such warmth and light of life, such grace of every curve and every tone, that paradise will open to me with my own eyes... What does that mean? Where does such a wonderful transformation come from? Very simply: we have penetrated into what we have seen daily from the outside; with our integral feeling we have felt that integral life of nature, which we constantly fragment with our scattered external consciousness; In the contemplation of love, we gave ourselves for a moment wholeheartedly to this tree, to this flower, instead of selfishly thinking whether it was not possible to cut down one and pluck the other. In a word, at that wonderful moment nature remained the same, but we entered into that enlightened divine world of its being and its forms, which is contained in it, but which, due to absent-mindedness and coarseness, we had not noticed until now... To try to give our deep and integral attention to everything that surrounds us, to everything that exists around us, to every blade of grass and thing, to enter with our peaceful heart into that bright and beautiful being that penetrates into everything and is reflected in everything — to contemplate everything in God, renouncing oneself — means to go into a kingdom not of this world.

We are not of this world; But this does not mean that we have turned away from this nature, that we are looking into some kind of emptiness, into something dark and completely unknown. No, that world is only the enlightenment, the refinement, and the spiritualized flowering of it. We look at the same things that others look at, but we see in it the world that remains hidden for others. Apparently, in the dead, the inner spiritual life trembles for us; in the silent, heavenly words sound to us; in the accidental and the mechanical, a wonderful meaning and a higher rational beauty are revealed to us. Can we imagine what the inconspicuous flower, the lily, said to the heart and eyes of the Lord, when He prostrated all the glory of Solomon before it?