When I was about fourteen years old, we had for the first time a room (in Bois-Colombes) where all three of us could live: grandmother, mother and I; My father lived on the way out—I'll tell you about that in a minute—and before that we lived as I told you, who was where and who how. And for the first time in my life since my childhood had ended, when we were driving from Persia, I suddenly experienced some possibility of happiness; To this day, when I have dreams of blissful happiness, they take place in this apartment. For two or three months it was just cloudless bliss. And suddenly something completely unexpected happened to me: I was afraid of happiness. Suddenly it seemed to me that happiness was worse than the very difficult happiness that had happened before, because when life was all about struggle, self-defense, or an attempt to survive, there was a goal in life: you had to survive now, you had to make sure that you could survive a little later, you had to know where to sleep, you had to know how to get something to eat, in that order. And when it suddenly turned out that all this minute-by-minute struggle was gone, it turned out that life was completely empty, because is it possible to build your whole life on the fact that grandmother, mother and I love each other – but aimlessly? That there is no depth in this, that there is no eternity, no future, that all life is in captivity of two dimensions: time and space, and there is no depth in it; Maybe there is some thickness, it can be some centimeters, but nothing else, the bottom at once. And it seemed that if life was as meaningless as it seemed to me – meaningless happiness – then I would not agree to live. And I made a vow to myself that if I did not find the meaning of life within a year, I would commit suicide, because I did not agree to live for meaningless, aimless happiness.

     My father lived apart from us; he took a peculiar position: when we found ourselves in emigration, he decided that his class, his social group, bore a heavy responsibility for everything that happened in Russia, and that he had no right to enjoy the advantages that his upbringing, education, and his class gave him. And so he did not look for any job where he could use his knowledge of Eastern languages, his university education, Western languages, and became a laborer. And within a fairly short time he undermined his strength, then worked in an office and died at the age of fifty-three (May 2, 1937). But he instilled a few things in me. He was a very courageous, firm, fearless man before life; I remember once I came back from a summer vacation, and he met me and said: "I was worried about you this summer." I half-jokingly answered him: "Were you afraid that I would break my leg or crash?" It would be all the same. I was afraid that you would lose your honor." And then he added: "Remember: whether you are alive or dead must be completely indifferent to you, as it should be indifferent to others; The only thing that matters is what you live for and what you are willing to die for." And about death he once told me a thing that remained to me and then was reflected very strongly when he himself died; he once said: "Death must be waited for as a young man waits for the arrival of his bride." And he lived alone, in extreme poverty; I prayed, was silent, read ascetic literature, and really lived completely alone, mercilessly alone, I must say. He had a tiny little room upstairs in a tall house, and on the door he had a note: "Don't bother knocking: I'm home, but I won't open it." I remember once I came to him and knocked: "Dad! This is me!.. No, he did not. Because he met with people only on Sundays, and all week long he walked home from work, locked himself up, fasted, prayed, read.

     And so, when I decided to commit suicide, I had behind me: these two phrases of my father, something that I caught in him, the strange experience of this priest (incomprehensible in its quality and type of love) – and that's it, and nothing else. And it so happened that during the Great Lent of some year, I think it was the thirtieth, our leaders began to take us, boys, to the volleyball field. Once we got together, it turned out that we had invited a priest to hold a spiritual conversation with us, savages. Well, of course, everyone shied away from this as best they could, those who managed to escape, ran away; those who had the courage to resist to the end, resisted; But the manager persuaded me. He did not persuade me that I should go, because it would be good for my soul or anything like that, because if he had agreed on the soul or on God, I would not have believed him. But he said: "Listen, we have invited Father Sergius Bulgakov; can you imagine what he will spread about us around the city if no one comes to talk?" And he also added a wonderful phrase: "I'm not asking you to listen! You sit and think your thoughts, just be there." I thought that perhaps I could, and I went. And everything was really good; only, unfortunately, Father Sergius Bulgakov spoke too loudly and prevented me from thinking my thoughts; and I began to listen, and what he was saying put me in such a state of rage that I could not tear myself away from what he was saying; I remember him talking about Christ, about the Gospel, about Christianity. He was a wonderful theologian and he was a wonderful man for adults, but he had no experience with children, and he spoke as one speaks to small animals, bringing to our consciousness all the sweet things that can be found in the Gospel, from which we would just shy away, and I shied away: meekness, humility, quietness – all the slavish qualities of which we are reproached, from Nietzsche onwards. He put me in such a state that I decided not to return to the volleyball field, despite the fact that it was the passion of my life, but to go home, to try to find out if we had a Gospel at home somewhere, to check and finish it; It didn't even occur to me that I wouldn't end it, because it was quite obvious that he knew his stuff, and so it was...

     And so I asked my mother for the Gospel that she had, locked myself in my corner, looked at the book and found that there were four Gospels, and if there were four, then one of them, of course, should be shorter than the others. And since I did not expect anything good from any of the four, I decided to read the shortest one. And then I got caught; I have found many times after this how cunning God can be when He sets His nets to catch fish; because if I had read another Gospel, I would have had difficulties; there is some kind of cultural basis behind each Gospel; Mark, on the other hand, wrote for such young savages as I did, for the young men of Rome. I didn't know that, but God did. And Mark knew, perhaps, when he wrote shorter than the others...

     And so I sat down to read; And here you may take my word for it, because you can't prove it. What happened to me is what sometimes happens on the street, you know, when you walk – and suddenly you turn around, because you feel that someone is looking at you from behind. I was sitting, reading, and between the beginning of the first and the beginning of the third chapter of the Gospel of Mark, which I read slowly because the language was unaccustomed, I suddenly felt that on the other side of the table, here, stood Christ... And it was such a striking feeling that I had to stop, stop reading and watching. I stared for a long time; I did not see anything, I did not hear anything, I did not feel anything with my feelings. But even as I looked straight ahead at the place where there was no one, I had the same vivid consciousness that Christ was standing there, no doubt. I remember that I then leaned back and thought: if the living Christ is standing here, then this is the risen Christ. This means that I know for sure and personally, within the limits of my personal, own experience, that Christ has risen and, therefore, everything that is said about Him is true. This is the same kind of logic as that of the early Christians, who discovered Christ and gained faith not by telling what was from the beginning, but by meeting the living Christ, from which it followed that the crucified Christ was what is said about Him, and that the whole preceding story also has meaning.

     Well, then I read; But this was something completely different. I now remember my first discoveries in this field very vividly; I probably would have expressed it differently when I was a boy of about fifteen, but the first thing was: that if it was true, then the whole Gospel was true, that there was meaning in life, that it was possible to spend no more than to share with others the miracle that I had discovered; that there are probably thousands of people who do not know about this, and that they should be told as soon as possible. The second is that if this is true, then everything I thought about people was not true; that God created everyone; that He loved everyone unto death; and that therefore, even if they think that they are my enemies, I know that they are not my enemies. I remember that the next morning I went out and walked as if in a transformed world; I looked at every person I came across and thought: God created you out of love! He loves you! you are my brother, you are my sister; You can destroy me, because you don't understand it, but I know it, and that's enough... This was the most striking discovery.

     Further, as I continued to read, I was struck by God's respect and care for man; if people are ready to trample each other in the mud, then God never does it. In the story, for example, about the prodigal son: the prodigal son admits that he has sinned before heaven, before his father, that he is not worthy to be his son; He is even ready to say: accept me as a mercenary... But if you have noticed, in the Gospel the father does not allow him to say this last phrase, he allows him to finish to "I am not worthy to be called your son" and then interrupts him, returning him back to the family: bring shoes, bring a ring, bring clothes... For you can be an unworthy son, a worthy servant or a slave, in no way; sonship is not withdrawn. This is the third thing.

     And the last thing that struck me at the time, which I would have expressed in a completely different way, is probably that God – and this is the nature of love – knows how to love us so well that He is ready to share everything with us without reserve: not only creation through the Incarnation, not only the limitation of all life through the consequences of sin, not only physical suffering and death, but also the most terrible, what there is is a condition of mortality, a condition of hell: deprivation of God, the loss of God, from which a person dies. This cry of Christ on the cross: My God! My god! Why hast Thou forsaken Me? – this communion not only of God-forsakenness, but of God-deprivation, which kills a person, this readiness of God to share our godlessness, as if to go with us to hell, because Christ's descent into hell is precisely the descent into the ancient Old Testament Sheol, that is, the place where God does not exist... I was so struck that it means that there is no limit to God's readiness to share human fate in order to seek man. And this coincided – when very soon after that I entered the Church – with the experience of a whole generation of people who, before the revolution, knew the God of great councils, of solemn divine services; who have lost everything - both the Motherland and relatives, and, often, respect for themselves, some position in life that gave them the right to live; who had been wounded very deeply and were therefore so vulnerable, they suddenly discovered that out of love for man, God wanted to become just that: defenseless, completely vulnerable, powerless, powerless, contemptible for those people who believe only in the victory of force. And then one side of life was revealed to me, which means a lot to me. It is that our God, the Christian God, can not only be loved, but can be respected; not only to worship Him, because He is God, but to worship Him out of a sense of deep respect, I will not find another word.

     Well, this was the end of the whole period. I tried to exercise my newfound faith in various ways; First of all, I was so overwhelmed with delight and gratitude for what had happened to me that I did not let anyone pass; I was a schoolboy, I was on the train to school and just on the train I turned to people, to adults: have you read the Gospel? You know what's out there?.. I am not talking about my friends at school, who have suffered a lot from me.

     Secondly, I began to pray; Nobody taught me, and I did experiments, I just got on my knees and prayed as best I could. Then I came across a study book of hours, I began to learn to read in Slavonic and read the service – it took about eight hours a day, I would say; But I didn't do it for long, because life didn't give it. By that time, I had already entered the university, and it was impossible to study at full speed at the university – and that. But then I memorized the services, and since I went to the university and to the hospital for practice on foot, I had time to read matins on the way there, to read the hours on the way back; And I did not seek to read, it was just the highest pleasure for me, and I read it. Then Father Michael Belsky gave me the key to our church on the Rue Montagne-Sainte-Genevieve, so I could go there on the way or on my way home, but it was difficult. And in the evenings I prayed for a long time – well, just because I am very slow, my prayer technique was very slow. I read the evening rule, one might say, three times: I read each phrase, remained silent, read it a second time with a prostration, was silent and read it for final perception – and so the whole rule... All this, taken together, took about two and a half hours, which was not always easy and convenient, but very nutritious and delightful, because then it comes when you have to respond with your whole body: Lord, have mercy! - you will say it with a clear consciousness, then you will say it with a bow to the ground, then you will stand up and say it in order to imprint, and so on one thing after another. From this I grew the feeling that this is life; as long as I pray, I live; Outside of this, there is some flaw, something is missing. And I read the lives of the saints from the Chetya-Menaion just page by page, until I read all of them, the lives of the desert dwellers. In the early years, I was very fascinated by the lives and sayings of the Desert Fathers, who even now mean much more to me than many theological fathers.

     When I graduated from high school, I thought - what to do? I was going to become a hermit – it turned out that there were very few deserts left and that with such a passport as I had, they would not let me into any desert, and besides, I had a mother and grandmother, who had to be supported somehow, and it was inconvenient from the desert. Then he wanted to become a priest; later he decided to go to the monastery on Valaam; and in the end it all came together more or less in one thought; I don't know how it was born, it probably consisted of different ideas: that I could take secret vows, become a doctor, go to some part of France where there are Russians, too poor and small in number to have a church and a priest, become a priest for them, and make it possible that, on the one hand, I will be a doctor, that is, I will support myself. Or maybe to help the poor, and, on the other hand, the fact that, being a doctor, you can be a Christian all your life, it is easy in this context: care, mercy... It started with the fact that I went to the Faculty of Natural Sciences (Sorbonne), then to the medical faculty – there was a very difficult period when I had to choose either a book or food; and in that year I was, in general, quite exhausted; I would walk some fifty steps down the street (I was nineteen at the time), then sit down on the edge of the sidewalk, sit back, then walk to the next corner. But, in general, he survived...

     At the same time I found a confessor; and indeed "found", I did not seek Him any more than I sought Christ. I went to our only patriarchal church in all of Europe – then, in 1931, there were fifty of us in total – I came to the end of the service (I had been looking for a church for a long time, it was in the basement), I met a monk, a priest, and I was struck by something in him. You know, there is a proverb on Mount Athos that you cannot abandon everything in the world if you do not see the radiance of eternal life on the face of at least one person... And so he came up from the church, and I saw the radiance of eternal life. And I approached him and said: I do not know who you are, but you agree to be my spiritual father?.. I contacted him until his death, and he was indeed a very great man: he is the only person I have met in my life in whom there was such a measure of freedom – not arbitrariness, but precisely that evangelical freedom, the royal freedom of the Gospel. And he began to teach me something somehow; Having decided to become a monk, I began to prepare for this. Well, I prayed, fasted, made all the mistakes that can be made in this sense.

     Namely?

     He fasted to the point of death, prayed to the point that he drove everyone crazy at home, etc. Usually it happens that everyone in the house becomes holy as soon as someone wants to climb to heaven, because everyone must endure, humble themselves, endure everything from the "ascetic". I remember once I was praying in my room in the most elevated spiritual mood, and my grandmother opened the door and said, "Peel the carrots!" I jumped to my feet and said, "Grandma, don't you see that I was praying?" She answered, "I thought that to pray was to be in communion with God and to learn to love. Here's a carrot and a knife."