Prelude.

In these recent years, our modernity has simply begun to terrify with its extreme ugliness all those who have not yet lost faith in God and a healthy moral sense has not dried up. For what is now being done everywhere in the world is nothing but a gradual return to the worst times of paganism – a complete and impudent rejection of everything that is prescribed to us by the Word of God, "dehumanization" in the most terrible sense of this very apt expression, and even "brutalization," one might say, almost "bewilderment." People who have begun to teach and believe that they are descended from an ape, as if they are striving in practice, by their lives, to prove this, trampling on their high human dignity by their most ugly behavior, trampling in the mud the image and likeness of God, which the Lord God vouchsafed man at his creation.

And this is not only in personal, social and political life, where conscience is already completely stifled and eradicated, but even where it must control all thoughts, feelings and actions of a person – in religious and church life. And if there are still religious societies and so-called "churches," it is very, very rare that their members and their leaders really act according to their conscience and listen to the commands of the Word of God, which they preach, sometimes even very eloquently, like good professionals who have learned their hands in this experience, but do not consider it necessary for themselves to obey these Divine commands.

That is why, in our terrible times, it is especially important and necessary to turn to the Word of God as often as possible and evaluate everything that happens in the world from the point of view of the Divine teaching of faith and piety left to us by the holy divinely inspired men, and first of all – to judge ourselves whether we are really Christians or whether we are only pretenders-hypocrites, Pharisees-hypocrites, and in fact just nihilists-atheists. for whom nothing is sacred.

God forbid any of us to succumb to this almost universal mood now, for this is the final death of the soul! And in order to preserve ourselves from such a terrible death, let us constantly heed the lofty teaching of the Word of God, absorb within ourselves the Divine teaching of Christ, sincerely striving so that it bears fruit in our souls and is transformed in our lives into salvific deeds of genuine Christian piety.

Not everyone who says to Me, Lord! God! shall enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but he that doeth the will of My Father which is in heaven (Matt. 7:21) – thus the Lord Himself testified. And this is necessary for everyone to always remember!

Archbishop Averky

With each new year...

 "Behold, I create all things new..."

(Rev. 21:5)