“Wealth without work Pleasure without conscience Science without humanity Knowledge without character Politics without principle Commerce without morality Worship without sacrifice. https://vidjambov.blogspot.com/2023/01/book-inventory-vladimir-djambov-talmach.html … The train is our life, lived in artificial conditions, devoid of any living breath and true joy, fenced off by various kinds of soft and hard partitions and double frames from the world of God. We look at this world through glass, admire its beauty, but we preferred it to cramped plastic cabins, foam rubber beds, suitcases, bales, shaking to the silly grumbling of the radio ... /// And so, just as for the completeness of reality, a flat picture lacked spatial depth and this space itself would lack the passage of time, so for all this world around us, with all its beauty and wealth, with all our many deeds, searches in it requires one more dimension, one direction, movement, one more essential depth - this is the entry into the spiritual world, the approach to God, the union with Him by grace. Without this deepening, or rather, elevation in the degrees of spirituality, our life remains the same flat bright picture without space for life - one dream. Without this ascent into another world, our being is just a frozen, dead space devoid of life, like a motionless sculpture - again, one illusion, again just a landscape running through the glass, at which we gaze with boredom from the cramped compartment of a passenger carriage. /// A Christian does not quickly and easily achieve true love for God. Here is what Saint Bishop Ignatius says about this: /// “Quite often we begin to serve God by means of such a method that is contrary to the ordinance of God, forbidden by God, which brings harm to our souls, not good. So, some, having read in the Holy Scriptures that love is the highest of virtues, that it is God, they begin and intensify immediately to develop in their hearts the feeling of love, by them to dissolve their prayers, divine contemplation, all their actions. God turns away from this unclean sacrifice. It requires love from a person, but true, spiritual, holy love, not dreamy, carnal, defiled by pride and voluptuousness. It is impossible to love God otherwise than with a heart purified and sanctified by Divine grace. Love for God is a gift from God: it is poured into the souls of God's true servants by the action of the Holy Spirit. On the contrary, that love, which belongs to our natural properties, is in sinful damage that encompasses the entire human race, the entire being of every person, all the properties of every person ... /// A Prayer [to] St. Bishop Ignatius: /// O Lord! /// Grant us to see our sins, so that our mind, drawn fully to the attention of our own faults, ceases to see the faults of our neighbors - and would thus see all our neighbors as good. /// Grant us to behold, in the light of Thy Grace, the various ailments living in us, which destroy the spiritual movements in the heart, and introduce into it blood and carnal movements, hostile to the Kingdom of God. Grant us the great gift of repentance, preceded and born of the great gift of the seeing of our sins. /// Protect us with these great gifts from the abysses of self-delusion, which opens in the soul from its unnoticed and incomprehensible sinfulness, and is born of the action of voluptuousness and vanity the soul does not notice and does not understand. /// Preserve us with these great gifts on our way to You, and grant us to reach You, who calls on sinners who are aware of being such and rejects those who recognize themselves as righteous; /// may we forever praise Thee in eternal bliss, the One True God, the Redeemer of the captives, the Savior of those perished. Amen.