Pain inside

The young man is full and healthy, but he is painfully sad.

The young man is well dressed and well-educated, but there is so much pain in his eyes that it is scary to watch.

What it is? What kind of new troubles? Does it mean “fucking fat” or is it something else?

This, precisely, is something else, proving that satiety, multiplied by a healthy and peaceful life, does not at all result in happiness.

Happiness is not equal to satiety, and sometimes even opposite to it.

And this is not an apology of hunger. This is just another of the paradoxical facts.

Total ideological materialism refuses to believe in it, but life boldly climbs out the window if it is pushed out at the door.

Well-fed and healthy everywhere are sad and unhappy. Because they never cried out in despair: Where are You, Lord?

Because nobody's tears wipe. Because they have not dedicated themselves to any cause, and they cannot find or choose this thing in any way. Because life, in the end, seems to them to be meaningless and hardly worth living.

“A person’s real problems will begin when he has guaranteed bread for every day.” The unforgettable Fedor Mikhailovich used to say something like this and was, as usual, shrillly right.

You can not neglect the soul. It is impossible to reduce all worries about a person only to human flesh.

The soul may be offended. Silence, clog up in a corner, make for a while the appearance that it is not there. And then he will take revenge. And revenge cruelly.

She will start to hurt.

Who knows the pain of the soul, he agrees: a person agrees to cut off his finger or gouge out his eyes, if only the heartache subsided. Yes, it still does not subside, as evil. You'll just be without an eye or without a finger, but with the same pain in the soul.

Fear of heights, fear of sea or river depth, fear of the wheels of a train retreats back when the soul hurts. And so, people tormented by heartache, fly from roofs, go to the seabed and lie on the rails, practically proving that the invisible can hurt more than the visible.

But we do not care anyway. As if wooden to the waist, we are trying to treat the soul exclusively with pills, or massage, or electric shock.

And the inexplicable sadness of a well-fed and healthy young man, in the meantime, irrefutably proves that the immortal soul, pushed backwards, neglected, put under a thousand doubts, lives in him.

I am talking about a young man. Because a mature, over-ripe and aged man is too busy with problems and sins to suffer from pure metaphysics.

And the young man is fresh, idealistic, uncompromising. He needs pure meaning in union with truth and truth. A sleeping pill and laxative he does not need.

Similarly, the Roman Empire, at the height of world fame, mortally mishaped the face of its best sons and daughters.

The Bolsheviks habitually lied when they said that Christianity was accepted mostly by slaves and other disadvantaged people. Christianity happily accepted absolutely in all sectors of society. They drank it like fresh water on a hot day. They drank both the rich and the poor. Just patricians are always hundreds of times smaller than laundresses and bakers.

Perhaps our time is the time of that particular heart fatigue, when, apart from the Gospel, nothing can help a person. And a person needs to re-understand that which seems deceptively famous.

Someone again, and most for the first time.

So, if you see a young man with unbearable sadness in his eyes, know that this is a good person. He longs for God and for eternal life, although he does not yet know about himself. The entire product line in the market of entertainment and pleasure does not bring him happiness. And he almost hates this fake and blatant world, as he hates a venal woman who promises bliss, and gave a bad illness.

Not everyone can talk to such a person. If you can't, just pray for him. Be sure to pray. Short, but sincere.

He is good, but he is at a crossroads. And he is not a knight. He is just a young man.

If in God his heart does not rejoice and does not calm down, he will go to the sect, where religious falsehood gives the illusion of truth.

He will just drown himself with some kind of chemistry, intravenously or intramuscularly. He just has few options left.

The immortal soul hurts too much in a young inhabitant of a materialistic civilization.

Archpriest Andrei Tkachev