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."

     I graduated from the medical faculty before the war, in 1939. At the beheading of John the Baptist, I asked my spiritual father to take my monastic vows: there was no time to tonsure me, because there were five days left before leaving for the army. I took monastic vows and went to the army, and there I studied something for five years; In my opinion, it was a great school.

     What did he learn?

     Obedience, for example. I put a question to Father Athanasius: I am now going to the army – how am I going to carry out my monasticism and, in particular, obedience? He answered me: very simply; consider that everyone who gives you an order speaks in the name of God, and do it not only outwardly, but with all your intestines; Consider that every sick person who needs help calls is your master; serve him as a purchased slave.

     And then there was a patristic life. The corporal came and said: we need volunteers to dig a trench, you are a volunteer... The first is that your will is completely cut off and completely absorbed by the wise and holy will of the corporal. Then he gives you a shovel, leads you to the hospital yard, says: dig a ditch from north to south... And you know that the officer said to dig from east to west. But what do you care? Your business is to dig, and you feel such freedom, you dig with pleasure: first, you feel virtuous, and then the day is cold and clear, and it is much more pleasant to dig a trench in the open air than to wash dishes in the kitchen. I dug for three hours, and the ditch turned out to be excellent. A corporal comes and says: fool, donkey, etc., it was necessary to dig from east to west... I could have told him that he had made a mistake at first, but what did I care if he was wrong? He told me to fill up the ditch, and once I had fallen asleep, I would probably have started digging again, but by that time he had found another "volunteer" who had received his share.

     At that time I was very struck by the feeling of inner freedom that absurd obedience gives, because if my activity were determined by the point of application, and if it were a matter of meaningful obedience, I would first fight to prove to the corporal that it was necessary to dig in a different direction, and everything would end up in solitary confinement. Immediately, simply because I was completely freed from the sense of responsibility, my whole life was precisely that I could respond completely freely to everything and have inner freedom for everything, and the rest was the will of God, manifested through someone's mistake.

     Other discoveries related to the same period. One evening I was sitting in the barracks reading; next to me was a pencil of this size, sharpened on one side and eaten up on the other, and there was really nothing to tempt with; And suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I saw this pencil, and something said to me: you will never be able to say again in your entire life – this is my pencil, you have renounced everything that you have the right to possess... And (this may seem to you to be complete nonsense, but every temptation, every such attraction is a kind of delirium) I struggled for two or three hours to say: yes, this pencil is not mine, and thank God.. For several hours I sat in front of this stub of pencil with such a feeling that I don't know what I would give to have the right to say: this is my pencil. And in fact, it was my pencil, I used it, I gnawed it. And it wasn't mine, so then I felt that not having was one thing, and being free from an object was quite another.

     Another observation of those years: that praise is not necessarily for a deed and scolded is also not necessarily on the merits. At the beginning of the war, I was in a military hospital, and I was expelled from the officers' meeting. For what? For the fact that I got a hospital room in which the stove did not work, and the orderlies refused to clean it; I threw off the mold, cleaned the stove and brought coal. For this, my comrades made a scandal that I was "humiliating the officer's dignity." This is an example that is in no way majestic, ridiculous; And of course, I was right, because it is much more important that the stove warms the hospital room than all these chase issues. And in other cases they were praised, perhaps, and I knew that they were praised in vain. I remember – when it came to confession – when I was still a little boy, I was invited to a certain house, and several of us were playing ball in the dining room, and with this ball we broke some vase. Then we were quiet, and I remember my friend's mother praising us for being so quiet, and for being so beautiful, and for being such an exemplary guest. Then I went home with such a feeling - how to have time to get down the stairs before she found the vase. So here is the second example: they praised me, and I was quiet, extremely quiet, but, unfortunately, I managed to break a vase before that.