This collection includes seventy articles that were published in 2010-2012 in various publications (mainly online): "Orthodoxy and the World", "Neskuchny Garden", "Thomas", "Russian Journal", "Tatiana's Day", as well as on the website of the Church of St. St. John on Presnya. Some of them have been edited because a book publication is always a little different from a magazine publication, even if both are electronic.

But most importantly, they were put together, and I hope the reader will agree: they were not collected randomly. The genre of this book is Christian journalism. In other words, these are reflections on different topics and on different occasions, they are united by the desire to find meaning, and to find it on the path of the Christian faith. This is not a conversation about the peculiarities of church life (how to pray and fast), not a sermon or a theological treatise, although in some articles there will be a little bit of the first, second, and third. But these are primarily personal reflections. The reader can agree with them or not, but if he thinks about these questions, if he tries to find his own answer to them, then he has not read this book in vain.

The book has five sections. The title of the first "I believe" speaks for itself. But this is not an exposition of dogmas, not an explanation of liturgical texts, but a conversation about Orthodox Christianity here and now: what it can be, what it gives to our contemporaries, and what questions it poses to them. The articles in the second section, "In Private," talk about personal things, about something that is usually discussed by two or three friends, and the third section, "The Planet of People," is devoted to social problems, primarily to current Russian life. The fourth section, "In the Squares", could have been part of it, but it is still highlighted as too "hot" and specific, including articles written in the winter and early spring of 2012 during the elections and everything that followed. Finally, the fifth section, "The Present Past," contains reflections on those pages of history (from biblical to modern) that remain relevant today. At the same time, there are no articles on biblical studies (my main specialty) here, they were included in another book, "Forty Questions about the Bible".

What else can I say? Read to your heart's content! And if you want to send feedback, you can do it at a.desnitsky@gmail.com.

Believe

1. In Search of Meaning

There was such a person - Viktor Frankl. He studied psychology with Sigmund Freud himself, practiced as a psychoanalyst - and during World War II he ended up in a Nazi concentration camp. He managed to survive, and he wrote several books about it. The most famous of them is called "Man in Search of Meaning". In the concentration camp, the prisoners experienced a lot of torment, but the most terrible thing was not hunger, beatings, cold and humiliation - but the meaninglessness of everything that was happening. Soldiers in the trenches were just as malnourished, frozen, subjected to cruel and not always reasonable discipline, and finally dying of wounds - but they understood that this was the price of victory over the enemy. Prisoners suffered without any rational purpose, and meaninglessness became the most terrible torture for them.

"A person should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather should realize that he himself is the one to whom the question is addressed," Frankl himself concluded from his observations. In other words, each person decides for himself what meaning to fill his life with, no one will give him this answer in a ready-made form.

Outside of extreme circumstances, the desires of most people are simple and understandable: to provide themselves and their loved ones with a comfortable existence. Eat better, live more and more comfortably, have more and more sophisticated entertainment... And there is no limit to this race for comfort and pleasure. We may live much better today than our ancestors lived a hundred or fifty years ago, but we are much worse off than some of our neighbors on the planet! And even a multimillionaire will envy a billionaire.

And at the same time, there were always those among people who left their comfortable homes and embarked on long and dangerous journeys in search of new lands, or settled among the poor in distant lands to alleviate their sufferings, or went into the barren desert to converse alone with God... Why was it worth giving up such natural human worries? People discovered a very important meaning for themselves — and in comparison with it, comfort and prosperity no longer meant anything.

In Soviet times, almost all residents of our country indulged in forced asceticism, except for the very top. Food and almost everything in general had to be obtained through connections or stand in queues for these goods, and it was possible to travel around the world only with the permission of the party committee. And then the Soviet system fell, and the former Soviet people discovered that the "national property" was instantly privatized by someone, and they got practically nothing. Children fainted from hunger during lessons, highly qualified engineers sold Chinese consumer goods in the bazaars... People seemed to have no time for high meanings – they simply had to survive.

But even then, for some reason, not only stalls with beer and snacks multiplied, but also book publishers, people went not only to the markets, but also to preach about God. People were baptized en masse. The old idols had collapsed, and it was necessary to take care not only of food and clothing, but also of a new meaning for a new life.

However, the times of the initial accumulation of capital are long gone. Of course, there are a lot of really poor people in the country, but residents of big cities have already mostly got used to the new conditions of the game, dressed up at seasonal sales, went to relax by the warm sea, tried various delicacies... Young people no longer understand how it was possible to stand in line for doctor's sausage, darn socks, wash plastic bags.

But the anguish and bewilderment remain. Why is there still so much indifference, cruelty, greed and hypocrisy around – people are indignant. Why are we deceived and manipulated at every step, why don't we live like in the prosperous West? It seems that our country has everything: talented people, rich culture, wonderful nature, and almost all possible minerals in the bowels. What do we lack?