Listen to Father Pimen who tells us about the way of life, about the customs of our people, which existed in the past and which, unfortunately, today have almost completely disappeared.
Enjoy!
Here we are again, my dears! What are we going to talk about now? For a while I tried to talk to you about the saints and their lives, about how wonderful they are, and now I thought I would like to change the topic a little bit, not because there were no more saints left, the heavens are full, on the calendar we have so many wonderful lives, but we will talk about this on another occasion.
Now are the holidays, each one of you knows how you spent and how you enjoyed them: First Christmas, after which came January 1, the day of St. Basil the Great. Of course, at the same time there was the Circumcision of our Lord. I told you about Saint Basil the Great… there are so many beautiful traditions in our country, there have been the carols… I think there is no country in the world to have carols like we have, us, the Romanians… beautiful customs that connect us to everything that our grandparents and great-grandparents did!
Through these beautiful and wonderful things the people understood that they must glorify God, His birth, His coming to Earth. Now, for the New Year too, there are traditions, with going cheering from house to house… so many and so many… Some are not too orthodox, but God knows each of us, let’s not exaggerate in what we do!
Pay attention to over-drinking, which leads to sins, this habitude is not appropriate. Now there will be the Baptism of the Lord, once again a great feast. I will not go into details, but at the Baptism of the Lord all Christians should go to church, you should rest there the whole service, and if you can confess, you can also take the Communion. It is a great feast, the Savior who was sinless was baptized by St. John the Baptist to give us an example. For we enter also through Holy Baptism on the path to God.
Go now each of you with your own bottle and take the holy water and sprinkle all over the house! The priest also comes at this moment, the same as it was at Christmas with the icon, then at the Baptism of the Lord with holy water… it’s good to sprinkle at home everywhere, including the gardens, the trees, everything, because it’s God’s blessing! In the prayers when it is read, it is said that “today the nature of the waters is sanctified”, that is, all the waters in the world, holiness is felt in the air. We should sprinkle in the wells with holy water too! In my village, tradition that may still be preserved today, the priest would make the holy water outside, made a large cross out of ice and put a lot of straw on the ground in the area where he read and perform the prayers. After that, each person took 2-3 straws home and tied them through trees everywhere as a blessing. Beautiful traditions!
I wish for you to joyfully celebrate this feast day. Go to church, if possible, partake of the Holy Mysteries, of Holy Communion. And of course, we should all have confessed! And then everything becomes beautiful!
We must live the feast day in our soul and in our heart! And since we are talking about well-wishing at the beginning of the year, I remember one thing from my childhood that I want to tell you about.
I think I had finished 8th grade, I was about 14 years old and started going to church a little more often. We went with the children to well-wish, and when the priest came, we went before him to announce there how it was customary, with the cry “Chiraleisa!”.
Well, that year I said we wouldn’t go well-wishing, but after thinking once more with a cousin, a neighbor from there, we decided to go too. We got some sheep coats turned inside out, a lamb hat with the tradition, we found a whip, a ‘buhai’ (traditional vibration instrument from ox skin) from the past years, and we organized quickly.
I said that we should go to a few houses. As we were older, we thought about well-wishing where there were girls. But we didn’t know any cheers, because we hadn’t prepared ourselves. I said I knew one from my father, what could I still remember… and we decided to go! We were making a lot of noise, and because of the whips and the bells the words of the cheer of well wishes were difficult to understand, so you could get by! … And if at the “Hey, hey!” everyone shouted, it was a good job.
At one house the master, who had 2-3 daughters, came out into the porch and beckoned to us. He told us he didn’t want noise, no whips, no bells… he wanted to listen to the cheer. And I was saying the cheer, because the others knew none! “Oh dear, what am I going to do now?” the man was careful to listen in quietness to the cheer!
The cheer was longer, but here’s what I remember:
“The girls of our village, don’t know Our Father well, nor to beat the loom’s shuttle, but at the ball in all evenings! All day in the mirror, and the garbage up to the beam! Under the table, under the bed, they haven’t swept for three months…”… it was longer, but that’s all I remember.
You can see, the man had three daughters in the house, and we said what we said… I had become little out of fear that he would throw something at us. But he was an understanding man, he smiled, served us with something and we went about our business. But for us it was enough, we didn’t go too far afterwards. Memories from the childhood…
There was a saying from someone: “If youth knew and old age could! …”, that is, in your youth you are like a lion, you do anything, but you do not think much…
That’s why it is said “If youth knew”, that is, you would no longer do certain things that may not be good. And if “old age could”, then you have experience in old age and you look into the past and you would like to do certain things right, but you can’t, you no longer have strength. But this is what God has allowed, perhaps to give it beauty! In that madness, if you thought them too much you wouldn’t do them, I mean even good things, that sometimes involve a bit of risk.
If I already told you about the new year cheer I remembered from my father, I will tell you something else!
My mother left this world much earlier, at 57 years old, almost 25 years before my father. I had been in Athos for almost three years. There was a secretary from St. Paul Monastery, of American origin, Father Seraphim. I was at the refectory, washing dishes and he called me and asked me: “How is your mother doing?” Why should he ask me that? Then the phones connection was not good, there were no cell phones… I looked at him and asked him: “But why, did she die?”. He made his eyes wide and asked me: “But how do you know?”, because he had just received at the monastery a telegram from home.
Then I said: “Glory to God! She’s gone to a better place.”
And he was looking at me like this, maybe expecting me to hit my head against the walls, and he said, “That’s all you have to say?” I answered him: “God took her to Him because she was ready.” He raised us, nine children! With sacrifice, with many difficulties during that period of the communists… how could she not have left prepared? When I went to Athos, my mother was so glad!
We hugged then at the parting and she said to me: “Go, pray for us there!” My father began to cry, he said: “Where are you going? Don’t you have what you need here in our country?” He was more sentimental, but my mother was glad. She knew that I was coming to the care of another Mother, to the Mother of God. And after that, a short time later she also went to the Lord. And how was her departure? A brother told me that she had become very ill.
She had water in her lungs, because she was more sensitive… it wasn’t easy for her to raise all of us at that time. And when she went to the doctor, they said it was too late and they had nothing to do, even if they kept her in the hospital.
Then she went home and for about two weeks she did not sleep much, but read the Psalter praying for all of us, her children, day and night. The day after Easter, when my father wanted to go to church, my mother said him: “Don’t go, stand by me, today I am going to leave!” and holding his hand, in this way she departed to the Lord. In her final days, my father asked Mom if he ever slapped her, even though they had been married for so long, and Mom said never.
Then my mother asked my father: “Have I ever spoken badly to you?” and my father replied: “Never!”. There was great respect between them. They never quarreled over anything. Maybe they sometimes contradicted each other because of the children when my father wanted to spank us a little bit, and my mother would take our side, but otherwise nothing! And Dad would not make a decision without her approval:
“But you, Aurelia, what do you say about this?” He knew that she was very calculated and she always took into account his opinion. And after my mother went to the Lord, for years my father was crying for her, that she had left so soon. Suddenly the person who was along him all the time disappeared, whom he consulted and asked for her opinion.
Dad continued his life, struggled with hardships, focused on work, working all day. He had horses, animals… he worked until he was 83 years old when he changed the horse to a more reckless one. It happened to found myself in the country, maybe I have already told this before, when the horse hit him with his hoof and broke his leg-femur, in three places. Of course, they took him to the hospital, put him a rod there… but by these means God gave him time to calm down because he worked all day. For two years he sat on crutches at the porch, on Sundays he would not miss church.
If someone drove him there, fine, if not he would go on crutches, but he would not be missing! That’s a reproof to those who are lazy to go to church. At the age of 84 he walked on crutches 2 km! Sometimes he went by car, but other times he would walk if there was no one to bring him.
He was going to mother’s grave… everybody saw his great love for mother and his desire to see her “Beyond”. And he left “on his feet”… standing at the gate he felt that he was dizzy, he entered into the yard, fell, my sister took him into the house and in half an hour “left”, at 85 years old.
Someone close to my family, who had prayed a lot for him, told me that he had seen Dad one night in a white light shirt. He was bright and thanked that person: “Thank you for everything you have done for me! I’m fine!”. He gave that person an answer for the prayers. So, he had “gone” there where we should all go. You see, each one according to how he leads his life, so his end will be.
And we get to where we all want, to joy. And you should know that there we will all meet again and we will continue our life in eternity! And if we have done the right thing, we will be in continuous, endless joy. We will live the joy of Heaven!
That’s why we have to try to do what we can in this sense. The new year has begun, let’s look back a little, think about what we did last year. Where did I go wrong? Let’s not repeat again! If we hurt certain people, let’s stop hurting them, especially those in the family! The husband may have drunk too much, behaved badly, the wife has also done certain things or offended him too badly… Let’s put love as the foundation of our lives!
Because love never falls and it is the only virtue that goes with us into eternity! Let’s take it as a basic virtue and you’ll see how beautiful life becomes! To be able to live in love, to offer love and kindness around you because God is love!
And if we have love, we are in God, and then we only do good!
Yes, my dears! May the Mother of God help us, may she always keep us in her guard and take care of us! May God help us!
And something else! If you look here around me, I don’t know how much you can see, it’s full of snowdrops! In our country, at the time of the birth of the Lord, the forests are filled with snowdrops and they last for about two months! This is a blessing from the Mother of God to us!
May God help us!
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May the Lord help us!
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