Orthodox psychotherapy. Metropolitan Hierotheos (Vlahos)

Every time we pick up a new book that is unfamiliar to us, we try to understand how much we need it, whether it is necessary to cut it out in a furious, ever-accelerating current of modern life, I will not even say a few hours, but minutes, to immerse myself in reading?

The title of the book that you, the reader, is holding in your hands, is interested: rarely one of us does not need (in fact, everything is needed!) In one way or another psychotherapy, that is, the healing of the soul.

An Orthodox person is even more interested. We all know about the spread in the modern society of so-called psychological help (in the West - psychoanalysts). Only methods for its believing people are often alien (I'm not talking about Orthodox psychologists - there are very few of them). I remember how the sick clinics in which I work were indignant when a psychotherapist came into their room and began to convince them that for the return of the peace of the soul, getting rid of anxieties, one must first of all ... love yourself above all others, subordinate all your life to your needs, break with a bad habit to try to help another. The patients did not want to be treated by this doctor. Thank God, it means that we are still alive in our souls and not completely drowned out by the thorns of cares and cares (including ourselves) the seeds of faith and love thrown in them by the Divine Sower.

But what should we do to make these seeds rise and bear fruit? I must say at once: among all the good and beautiful things that the Church and its ministers offer us, there is such - to read books like the one you unfolded.

Quite recently, people of my generation were not available any books about God, about faith, about the Church. Happiness was to buy the Bible, prayers, get a thin magazine of the Moscow Patriarchate, get for a few days cigarette sheets of Orthodox samizdat, read photocopies of foreign books on Orthodoxy. Now it's different: religious literature is plentiful; in each temple, on book shelves, in special stores, you can buy wonderful books.

One may ask: why do we need another work on the patristic teaching?

The thing is, and it has been said about it many times that most of us reading of the holy fathers is difficult to access: we are too weak, too immersed from birth in a modern vicious, sinful world, too many babies in their state of mind. Therefore, we are more accessible to the wise presentation of the thoughts of the holy fathers, a wise commentary on their writings. And most importantly: the book of Metropolitan Hierothea Vlachos is devoted to the application of patristic teaching to the needs of our modern man, to our spiritual needs. How often now sick people are looking for salvation from their mental and bodily diseases in bioadditives, strange diets, absorbing a huge number of new and new fashionable medicines, forgetting, and often not knowing about the spiritual nature of diseases! The soul burdened with sins, a sick conscience, life is not according to God's commandments, but according to one's own sinful will or under the dictation of others, often deliberately evil, striving to pervert, enslave the consciousness of a person who does not know about the divine meaning of life - that is the basis of many and many diseases . The spirit is damaged - the soul suffers and suffers. Soul is aching - out of obedience and the body becomes ill. Not flesh, but the spirit was corrupted in our days, "wrote Fedor Ivanovich Tiutchev.

Hence it is clear that healing the spirit is the first principle of all treatment. This does not at all deny the healing of the soul (psychiatry), nor the healing of bodily disease (somatic medicine). And give the doctor a place, for the Lord also created him, and he does not leave you, for he is needed. At other times and in their hands there is a success (C.38: 12).

But the spiritual diseases, in which the cause of diseases of the soul and body are often rooted, is healed by the Church, its ministers, and its fathers. Thousands and thousands of pages have been written about this.

The book of Metropolitan Hierothea is a concentrated guide to the treatment of spiritual infirmity, based on patristic writings, above all - Philokalia. Read it, perhaps, will not be so easy for the modern man: there are no extra lines in it, it concentrates on the few pages of wisdom acquired by many centuries. And the author himself warns that the book should not just be read but studied.

I also foresee: recipes for spiritual recovery to many of us seem difficult: we fell too low, the bar is too high, the level of requirements to us. But in Orthodox Christianity it does not happen otherwise. And the commandments of the Lord unequivocally say: Honor your father and mother, do not steal, do not commit adultery ... Without reservations. Crafty reservations came up man. And it is impossible, as we know, to live without sin, but if we are to approach the Kingdom of God, it is impossible to live without the realization of sin, without constant repentance.

That's why Metropolitan Hierophy advises not to read, but to study this book. To study - and start someone, and someone to continue a difficult, but salutary ascent of the ladder of spiritual healing.