It is much more difficult with those who know exactly what true Orthodoxy should be like, who want to put not only one willow, but an entire local Church, or at least a parish or monastery, in its proper place. How and for what he should pray, how he should build relations with the authorities and society, what he can talk about and, most importantly, in what language – almost everyone has an accurate opinion on each of these issues, and sometimes it seems that every second person is in a hurry to declare it apostolic and patristic, obligatory for universal fulfillment. No, in fact, there are not too many such demanding people, but their voice is sometimes too noticeable...

"I don't go to that church, there..." – these words I have already become accustomed to hearing from the time of my church youth. The funniest incident was back in the twilight of Soviet power, when a certain gentleman came up to me, a curly-haired blond-haired young man with a clearly Nordic character, right in the Church of the Resurrection of the Slav in Bryusov, and began to explain that I, as a Slav, should not go to a church where there were only Jews. But then his wife and daughter stood next to him (they went to venerate the icon) and, looking at the Middle Eastern, I would even say biblical features of my dear girls, he immediately realized that this round of the struggle for the purity of the Slavic race was already hopelessly lost. So it was not only the Slavs who were on the icons.

How many times since then have I heard about the wrongness of my own and other people's Orthodoxy! At first they were annoying, then amusing, now they sound like a familiar background. How many times have I heard about someone's most Orthodox Orthodoxy, in which there was so much of the adjective "Orthodox" that the noun "Christianity" was completely lost behind it, became somehow invisible... And at such moments you begin to yearn for the garage, where people come to the liturgy exhausted by a week, they simply have no time and no need to prove anything to each other. But they understand that "Christ is in our midst" is not just a beautiful phrase for those who are in the altar (and the boundaries of the altar space are only marked there), but the reality for which they come there. And if it does not exist, there will be no sense either in adjectives, or in verbs, or in all rhetorical constructions and exercises.

I will not say that there are no problems of this kind abroad, in émigré parishes. On the contrary, it is characteristic of people to transfer the function of a cultural center to the church, to gather in it for the sake of communication, maintaining traditions and simply speaking the language of their distant homeland. But they are too different there, and when a Siberian, a Ukrainian, a Muscovite and a Moldavian stand side by side, and a European who has converted to Orthodoxy at a distance, and sometimes a Serb, a Greek, an Ethiopian, an Armenian, and anyone else, and half of them are in mixed marriages, these people are really united by faith. It will not be possible to isolate oneself either on national or any other grounds, it will not be possible to present one's demands to the church.

And how to present it? The country is foreign, you have to learn its language, obey its laws, get acquainted with its customs. A person gets used to adjusting to the world around him, and he no longer has time to adjust church life to his own expectations, he would like to find the main thing for himself. And therefore it is really easier there, abroad, to build parish life from scratch... I guess. I haven't tried it, I can't say for sure.

But I can well imagine such a situation... If we do not stop bickering over petty issues and demonstrating our superiority to each other, one day we will get – and perhaps our children – a chance to start from scratch in some completely different country, in which Orthodoxy will no longer be considered a traditional religion, and the majority of opinion polls will no longer identify themselves as such. However, based on the current demographic realities, such a development of events is quite likely in any case, but the question is not in demography, but rather in our own readiness to deal with the main, the only thing that is needed. What will come, we cannot know for sure, but how we will meet the future depends to a large extent on us. And if we keep silent about the main thing, others will say it for us, and then we will have to try on not the ceremonial jacket of the discoverer, but the grass skirt of an unreasonable native.

20. Why are we to the youth?

I gave a lecture at the House of Journalists under the program of public Orthodox lectures. And after the lecture, a film crew from the Soyuz TV channel came up to me: a girl and a guy in his 20s to take an interview. I thought that they would ask about something that I understood better than they did—well, for example, about biblical texts. But the questions turned out to be unexpectedly difficult, I would like to get an answer to them myself. "There are a lot of young people in the hall, what attracted them here?" they asked me. And they added: "Why is all this important for young people at all? Why does she need it?"

Of course, I wanted to answer another question: why do we need youth, why does the Church need them? I know the answer to it, and how can I not know: all people are mortal, if there is no change of generations, we will simply die out like dinosaurs. Though... after all, you can also come to the Church in different ways. In Khrushchev's time, there were practically no young people in the church, it was too dangerous: they could be expelled from the Komsomol and the institute, they could not be given a decent job. It is worth looking at the photographs of those times to see that there are almost all pensioners in the church.

However, even to this day, in many churches, the basis of the parish is elderly women. So, they came to the church just in the Soviet years? And grew old in the Church? Not necessarily. Usually it was like: youth, middle age - a time of activity, work and creativity. And by old age, as soon as you retire, as adult children scatter around the world, it will be time to think about your soul, to pray to God. At the end of the Soviet regime, new people constantly came to churches, and most of them were not young at all, but those who had already done everything in this life, and it remained for them to repent of what they had done.

In short, even if the young do not come to church today, this does not mean that they will never come to it. They will live, console themselves, understand how much a pound is worth, and then in their old age... But for some reason, I don't like this prospect at all. In the Soviet years, everything was clear: they deliberately tried to make the Church a community of illiterate old women, since it was not possible to get rid of it. But today there are more and more young and children's faces in the churches of big cities, and pensioners are already in the minority, and they themselves feel it, they themselves are no longer so much teaching young people as learning from them: after all, today's people are literate, not like we once we...

And in this, in fact, I see hope for good changes in our church life. When people come to church to repent for the life they have lived, you can't change it... And then it turns out that Christianity is tired and disappointed, a kind of quiet refuge in the declining years. But if a young person comes to the Church, he, on the contrary, wants to live this life with God in order to change something in himself and around him, and this is a completely different matter! True, it often turns out that parish life itself is already set in a different mood, that, in fact, all that is expected of him is to grow old and calm down as soon as possible. But when there are a lot of young people, this trick does not work so easily with them.

I myself was baptized as a 17-year-old freshman a quarter of a century ago. This, of course, was an escape from the dull late Soviet reality, from total propaganda, from the senselessness of official communism. We, students of the 80s, came to the Church literally at random, because there was nowhere else to go. And the beginning of our church life was largely determined by whom we would meet in the nearest church, who would talk to us or, on the contrary, who would refuse to talk. How many disappointments, how many mistakes then stemmed from simple ignorance... Prayer books were copied by hand, and there was nowhere to get the Bible at all.

Today, the situation has become completely different. A person who comes to faith makes a conscious and thoughtful choice, he can get access to any information, meet with a variety of people, visit any parishes. And most importantly, he grew up in completely different conditions, he was used to personal freedom. One can argue for a long time and persistently about how things are in our country with democracy and the rule of law, but there is no doubt about something else: in private life today a person, especially a young one, is quite free. He is not driven to party meetings or prayer services, and he is very high. In fact, he appreciates his freedom, although he does not always think about it. It's like air: while we breathe it, we don't think about it, but if we start to lack it, it is impossible not to notice it.