One Should Not Have Scandalous Books and Pictures in One’s Home
October 1
(From the Lemonarion, concerning why the Most Holy Theotokos did not enter the church of Kyriakos the priest.)
By Archpriest Victor Guryev
(From the Lemonarion, concerning why the Most Holy Theotokos did not enter the church of Kyriakos the priest.)
By Archpriest Victor Guryev
In your homes one sometimes encounters very unpleasant things. On the walls, beside the holy icons, one sometimes sees pictures of the most scandalous kind, while in the homes of literate people, on the shelves among the sacred books, there are often songbooks or immoral books. How sinful and destructive to the soul this is, you can see from the following account.
The Presbyter Kyriakos, who served in the Kalamon Monastery near the Jordan, relates:
“I saw in a dream a woman, reverent in appearance, dressed in purple, and with her two men. They were all standing near my cell. In the woman I recognized the Most Holy Theotokos, and in those accompanying Her, John the Baptist and the Evangelist John. Rejoicing at such a visitation, I rushed to the feet of the Intercessor for the world and began asking Her to enter my cell and offer prayer there to God on my behalf. But She would not agree. When I continued without ceasing to entreat Her with tears, She said to me: ‘You keep My enemy in your cell; how then do you want Me to enter your cell?’ With these words She departed, and the vision ended.
Awakening from sleep, I began to grieve and ponder: who could this enemy of the Most Holy Theotokos be in my cell? I found nothing in myself for which I was guilty before Her, and there was no one else there. After grieving for a long time, I finally thought to distract myself by reading some of the books I had, and at the end of one of them I found a teaching of the heretic Nestorius, who was condemned at the Third Ecumenical Synod because he called the Most Holy Virgin not Theotokos, but Christotokos, claiming that a mere man, and not God in the flesh, was born from Her.
Only then did I understand who the enemy of the Most Holy Theotokos in my cell was. Taking the books, I immediately brought them to the brother to whom they belonged, told him my vision, and, filled with zeal, cut out and burned in his presence the pages containing the false teaching of Nestorius, saying: ‘Let the enemy of the Most Holy Theotokos no longer be in my cell from this moment onward!’”
Therefore, brethren, throw out the rubbish from your homes! To read sacred books and, alongside them, immoral ones; to gaze with reverence upon the holy icons and at the same time delight in scandalous pictures is the same as building a house with one hand and destroying it with the other, building up your salvation while at the same time destroying it.
And consider how much evil comes from this! You begin to pray, and suddenly your eyes unintentionally fall upon such a picture. What thoughts might arise in your mind? Will you be able to raise a pure mind and heart to heaven, to collect yourself, to enter deeply into yourself, and to detach yourself from everything worldly?
Or consider this: your young son or daughter, through ignorance, may pray before a morally corrupt picture instead of an icon. Upon whom will their sin fall? And, worse than all, what terrible contagion from these pictures or immoral books might strike their young, innocent heart and corrupt it forever! Who, then, will answer for their stumbling? Judge for yourselves. “Woe,” says the Lord, “to the man through whom the stumbling block comes” (Matthew 18:7). “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were drowned in the depths of the sea” (Matthew 18:6). Amen.
Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.
Therefore, brethren, throw out the rubbish from your homes! To read sacred books and, alongside them, immoral ones; to gaze with reverence upon the holy icons and at the same time delight in scandalous pictures is the same as building a house with one hand and destroying it with the other, building up your salvation while at the same time destroying it.
And consider how much evil comes from this! You begin to pray, and suddenly your eyes unintentionally fall upon such a picture. What thoughts might arise in your mind? Will you be able to raise a pure mind and heart to heaven, to collect yourself, to enter deeply into yourself, and to detach yourself from everything worldly?
Or consider this: your young son or daughter, through ignorance, may pray before a morally corrupt picture instead of an icon. Upon whom will their sin fall? And, worse than all, what terrible contagion from these pictures or immoral books might strike their young, innocent heart and corrupt it forever! Who, then, will answer for their stumbling? Judge for yourselves. “Woe,” says the Lord, “to the man through whom the stumbling block comes” (Matthew 18:7). “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were drowned in the depths of the sea” (Matthew 18:6). Amen.
Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.
