I have received your letter. I feel a deep sympathy for Father Pavel. By no means you should reproach him, but each time you remember him, sigh for him and appeal to God, saying: ”Lord, help your servant an save him!.” He indeed needs our compassion and prayers. If one member hurts, so does the whole body. We must together ask for a Liturgy to be served for him and ask the Father Superior of the Laura that prayers for him to overcome his present temptation be offered in all the churches there.
His situation is fruit of the wrong approaches to education at the theological school. First of all, it is necessary to offer all possible assistance for the students to gain a foothold in the living faith in God, before demanding from them to know by heart a lot of raw data. Does any subject reach out to their mind, let alone their heart? Do they “feel at home” with at least one subject? I seriously doubt it. All their studies are confined to learning a bunch of facts, a raw, undigested material. Moreover, dealing with spiritual truths by the fleshly “fictitious” mind in the absence of firm belief in God leads to the degradation of the significance of these truths. Their mysterious implication and the depths of God’s wisdom become lost on the students. These truths become a subject of “linguistic” debates about the terminology, alien to the students. Their faith weakens and may even die. As a result, quite a few of the most venomous atheists come out from theological schools.
The students are overburdened with the subjects to study. They have no time to think. The objectives of the Theological School are: 1) to strengthen students’ faith in God; 2)to teach them praying; 3)to teach them to cognize themselves as fallen creatures; 4) to teach them fighting with sin and temptations on the examples of the Holy Fathers; 5) to teach them to perceive the works of the Holy Fathers –and through their works to perceive the Gospel; and accept them not as a subject of study, but making them close to their heat, living, belonging to their life as the sources to satisfy all the demands of their soul; 6) to teach the students to look on the commandments of the Gospel not as an impediment to a free life and exclusively as a set of moral rules for public life, but as a means for finding here, on earth, the precious pearl, having seen which, man will voluntarily following the draw of his soul towards this pearl and give up everything he has – his secular habits, interests and pleasures – all the worldly valuables of this world. Everyone believing in Christ and striving to live in accordance with the commandments of the Gospel can find this pearl.
This brief and far from being complete enlistment of the tasks of the Theological School shows how far from these tasks the contemporary school stands. It needs an all-out restructuring – from its curriculum to the administration and premises. There might be voiced an objection that the timing is wrong. If a complete change is not possible yet, some things certainly could be improved. It is important to have this goal in view and do whatever we can to move towards it and to deplore what is not yet possible for us. Then the very attitude to the students would not be as it is now; they would be treated as human beings, to whom the entire school personnel – from the Rector to the technical staff – should feel indebted and unable yet to cover the debt in full.
There are so many useful and interesting things for the students to learn from and about the New Testament. It is more useful for them to know, for example, the Holy Fathers’ interpretation of the parables and other difficult passages, especially the ones in the epistles of St. Paul, as well as the teaching about the “new” and “old” man; the foundations of the spiritual life and the implications of salvation and many other things, instead of wasting time on critical studying of different texts and other useless activities that have nothing to do with the main goal, for which the Lord came to the world and established His Church and for which theological schools exist. This goal consists in the healing of man’s soul and ensuring his salvation.
The main obstacle is the absence of proper, fit for the job people: “the faithful have vanished from the human race.” Jesus Christ, Son of God, be merciful to me, a sinner. God keep you safe!
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