There are not so many unshakable truths in the Church. Strictly speaking, they all fit into the dogmatic foundation of Christianity - the Symbol of Faith. Everything else is rules, canons, traditions that may be subject to change. It is another matter that sometimes these foundations are so firmly rooted in the church consciousness that deviation from them seems to be a real revolution. Especially when it comes to an important question, a terrible question and, it would seem, once and for all resolved. The Church does not pray for the salvation of the souls of suicides! Or is it …
Suicide, in the Christian sense, is not just a sin. This is the only sin in which it is impossible to repent and, therefore, receive forgiveness from God and salvation of the soul.
The church sees off the suicide on his last journey with truly deathly silence. It is impossible to sing "rest with the saints" over the body of a person who, in the last hour, directed all his will, all his striving to close the soul from God forever.
The Church has shied away from suicide from the very beginning of its existence. It is not for nothing that Judas Iscariot, who repented of betrayal and committed suicide, is more condemned for suicide than for betrayal. And it is not for nothing that the English apologist-writer GK Chesterton wrote in his essay "Orthodoxy" that suicide is the opposite of the Christian hero-martyr, suicide is an insult to everything that stands for and values the Church.
A person who has taken his own life cannot be commemorated in the temple. For a suicide, you cannot submit a memorial note. A priest serving the Liturgy will not take out a particle from the prosphora for it. The only thing that remains standing at his tomb is to pray at home, but even then - many clergy say that such a prayer can drive the praying person crazy.
And this is partly true. It is impossible for an ordinary person alone to accommodate the pain, horror and fear of someone who made a disastrous decision to commit suicide. And the Church's reluctance to pray for a suicide leads the one who nevertheless decided to ask the Almighty for the repose of the soul of the deceased, to a feeling of guilt and fear. No matter how God blames the prayer for a sinful soul. And it turns out a vicious circle: a person prays, but instead of consolation and empathy for the departed, he earns himself only a feeling of all-consuming guilt before the Lord. Begins to fear God, who (as supposedly should be logical) will only punish for the fact that it hurts and wants to pray and cry. How can you not go crazy?
Few can withstand the one-on-one unity with a quiet abyss of grief, despair and guilt. Therefore, by hook or by crook, the relatives of the suicide try to enlist the support of the Church. To find at least some loophole, so that they would still sing like a human, and remember it later, and give at least a glimmer of hope that everything will be fine with a person in the next world.
One of these fully legalized loopholes is evidence that the one who took his own life was in a deranged state and could not be responsible for what he was doing. If there is confirmation of this, the suicide is allowed to sing. But here there are many "crooked" moves - someone begs for a certificate from a psychiatrist and with its help deceives the bishop blessing the funeral service. Somewhere under a mental disorder agree to understand alcohol and drug intoxication or a state of passion. But until now, the Church did not have a common understanding of when it is possible to sing a funeral service, when to pray.
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For centuries, the Church has fenced off from this issue, either closing its eyes to obvious connivance, or vice versa - showing excessive severity, destroying after the suicide of his family and friends. The priest writes in his Live Journal about how the souls of those who cannot pray for a loved one in the church burn out:
"… I hear a call on my phone and a woman's voice, interrupted by sobs, is trying to tell about her grief." lowering her head down, looks down at her feet, and the mother, trying to touch the priest, like a straw, sometimes falls to you, presses her head to her chest and cries. Lord have mercy, how terribly they cry. This is not a cry, but as if a little dog, offended by everyone, is sobbing and howling.
And you cannot do anything, most importantly, you cannot pray for him, and you cannot comfort him in any way. You can only stroke her hand and cry with the person. Then the suicide is buried, and a new parishioner appears in the church, who comes to all services, because prayer is the only way to keep her from going crazy. She cannot, like her husband, go into a binge, she goes into prayer. Black clothes are now her clothes for years. She often confesses, blames herself for everything that happened to her son. We have to constantly drive away from her the thought of going after her son.
This struggle lasts seven to eight months. Then the woman comes less often. A few more months pass, the mother comes to her senses, again begins to reason sensibly, her life is no longer threatened. And she leaves the temple, usually forever. But I do not judge anyone, because it is unbearably difficult not to be able to pray for the past."
It’s unbearably difficult not to dare to pray. And the Church, in the end, decided to share the terrible burden together with the relatives of the suicide, to lend a shoulder where no one else would support.
“All ruling bishops have to deal with such a phenomenon when grieving relatives of a person who committed suicide ask for his funeral service. I believe that it is necessary to introduce a unified practice here in order to avoid abuse - both in the direction of excessive strictness and in the direction of unjustified indulgences. A special rite of prayer for suicides has been developed in Moscow,”Patriarch Kirill said in 2011 on the eve of the bishop's council.
It is worth noting that, in a sense, the Church already has a "rite of prayer for suicides". This is a prayer to the martyr Uaru, to whom, bypassing all the rules, they pray for both suicides and unbaptized. But one should make a reservation - these are the prayers that everyone reads strictly alone, in private - that is, not in the Church-wide. And the priest will not bless everyone to read these prayers.
Some experts were quick to declare that the Church is adapting to the modern world, in which the problem of suicide is very acute.
“This is a new solution for the Russian Orthodox Church,” says Nikolai Mitrokhin, a researcher at the Center for Eastern European Studies at the University of Bremen, in this spirit. - Before that, there was a strict division: if a person committed suicide, the church stops praying for him. The church realized that she was living in a new world. It was a rare thing in the 19th century, and now Russia has one of the highest suicide ratings. This is a problem that affects many families, which should not be neglected in an environment where people rarely attend church. At the level of local communities, priests have long been trying to figure out how to adapt this problem to modern realities."
This is the opinion of a person who does not understand very well how the Church is oriented in our world. She cannot “realize” that she lives in a new world, especially since in the sense of sins the world has not changed at all since the fall of Adam and Eve. And he cannot make a kind of "PR action" out of this to lure those who rarely go to church. And it does not matter at all how many suicides occur - one or a million, the quantity does not turn into quality in the sense of the church's attitude to the problem. If a million people commit suicide, suicide will not cease to be a mortal sin.
It is unlikely that the position of the Patriarch has changed since then for the sake of "realities". It is not the Church's attitude to mortal sin that is changing. The decision, which was ultimately made by the Holy Synod, contained something other than "adjusting the problem to modern realities."
At a meeting of the Holy Synod of July 27, 2011, it was decided to approve the "Rite of the prayerful consolation of relatives who have died without permission" - that is, a prayer for the relatives of suicides. Archpriest Vladimir Vigilyansky, the press secretary of the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, explains: the prayer was created for those cases when a person's funeral service is still against all the canons, but one wants to give relatives church consolation and support in their grief. It is especially emphasized: this is not a prayer for suicide, it is a prayer for those survivors who are dying of grief and do not know where to run with him, are afraid to offend God with their prayers and drown in despair.
“But not with Your fury of reproof, punish us with Your anger, Human-loving Master, weaken, heal our heart's sorrow, may the multitude of Your mercies of our sins conquer the abyss, and Your countless goodness may cover the sea of bitter tears of our tears” together with the relatives of the person who committed suicide.
In addition, the relatives of the suicide, however, only with the blessing of the confessor, are allowed to pray in private with the words of the Monk Leo of Optina: “Seek, O Lord, the lost soul of Thy servant (name): if it is possible to eat, have mercy. Your fates are invisible. Do not make this my prayer a sin, but Thy holy will be done."
Still, prayer is not only a tool of consolation. Perhaps, to some extent, this is an attempt to distance himself from passing a suicide sentence in absentia for all eternity. Cases are too frequent when it is impossible to determine how "hard the mind and good memory" of the one who passes away from life is.
Of course, the church's words that suicide is a renunciation of God's love, and therefore a direct path to hell, sound frightening. But only not when you think about how much pain and fear experienced by the one who committed suicide. What horror was he running from? And can anyone reject God's love who has never really known it? And in this case, is there any hope that suicides - even those who deliberately climbed into the noose - in the eyes of God will be those who “did not know what they were doing”?
I really want to believe that, wholly condemning suicide here, the Church in it nevertheless delivers the final judgment to God, who nevertheless knows better what the soul of the suicide felt a second before death. What if he did manage to repent, even at the very last moment?
DARIA SIVASHENKOVA