RTE No 20 Interior - Road to Emmaus Journal

SOULSIN MOTION:THESPIRITUAL LIFEOF TEENAGERSFr. Artemy Vladimirov, Moscow Patriarchal priest of All Saints Church in Moscow, Russia,shares his pastoral experience of helping hundreds of Orthodox teenagers find their way tofaith in the contemporary world.RTE: Father Artemy, you once said that to raise a child properly, you shouldbe attentive to his upbringing from the first day you discovered you wouldgive birth. How do parents go about this?FR. ARTEMY: St. John of Kronstadt says that raising children is best illustratedby a bird that sits on its eggs, protecting them with its own warmth.The moment the mother abandons the eggs, if the break is too long – somefive or ten minutes – the chicks will never hatch. They will perish. This isquite a good analogy for raising children. When children appear from thewomb, they may be quite normal physically, but in their moral and spiritualaspects they are like embryos; they are incapable of self-growth, they donot have the power to develop independently. If children are not warmed bypersonal, parental love from the top of their head to the bottom of their feet,they risk remaining morally dead to eternal truth, to the laws of God, and toHis service. According to St. John this is the “axiom of love,” and he addsthat, “these very generations, abandoned by their parents and deprived ofpersonal love, will be organized by Satan for the struggle against JesusChrist and His Church.” He said this in 1908, only a decade before theBolshevik Revolution.Psychologists and doctors know that a future mother begins to form theSt. Nina’s Way, Georgia.3