One of the most painful sights in the world is funerals performed by atheists. Now everyone has come home from a fresh grave. The eldest gets up, raises his glass... And at this moment everyone simply physically feels that they can and should do something for the one to whom they just said goodbye.

Prayer for the departed is a need of the heart, and not a requirement of church discipline. The heart demands: pray!!! And the mind, crippled by the school lessons of atheism, says: “There is no need, there is no one to pray for and for no one: the heavens are full only of radio waves, and from that person with whom we lived three days ago, there is nothing left except that ugliness, which we have just covered with earth.”

And even this internal error is reflected on people’s faces. And such unnecessary words are heard: “The deceased was a good family man and social worker”...

We were not there - we will not be. So isn’t a person whose life flickers absurdly between two abysses of nothingness nothing more than a “dead man on vacation”?.. I will die, and the world will remain complete, like a brand new egg. Boris Chichibabin once gave a ruthlessly precise definition of death as it appears to an unbeliever:

How few bright days there are in life,
There are so many blacks!
I can't love people
Crucified God!
Yes - and that one! - is of no use to them
Only meat in the pit
Who doomed the tender sky
Hungry and shame.

What do people take out of the cemetery? What could the deceased himself gain from the experience of his dying? Can a person see the meaning in last event of your earthly life - in death? Or is death “not for future use”? If a person crosses the border of time in irritation and anger, in an attempt to settle scores with Fate, this is exactly his face that will be imprinted in Eternity...

That’s why it’s scary that, according to Merab Mamardashvili, “millions of people not only died, but did not die a natural death, i.e. one from which no meaning for life can be derived and nothing can be learned.” After all, what gives meaning to life gives meaning to death... It is the feeling of the meaninglessness of death that makes the funeral of atheists so difficult and unnatural.

For comparison, compare your feeling in the old cemetery, where the peace of people is guarded by grave crosses, with what your heart feels when visiting Soviet star cemeteries. You can walk with a peaceful and joyful heart—even with a child—through the cemetery of, say, the Donskoy Monastery. But there is no sense of peace in the Soviet Novodevichy...

In my life there was a case of such a direct meeting. . They were buried in the Zagorsk city cemetery. And so, for the first time in decades, priests came to this cemetery - openly, in vestments, with a choir, with prayer.

While the students were saying goodbye to their classmates, one of the monks stepped aside and quietly, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, began to walk among the neighboring graves. He sprinkled them with holy water. And there was a feeling that a word of gratitude was coming from under each mound. The promise of Easter seemed to dissolve in the air...

Or here is another example of human indestructibility. Try to pick up a book and pray for its author. When you pick up Lermontov, say to yourself, opening the page you need: “Lord, remember Your servant Michael.” When your hand touches Tsvetaeva’s volume, sigh about her too: “Forgive, Lord, Thy servant Marina and accept her in peace.” Everything will be read differently. The book will become bigger than itself. It will become a meeting with a person.

Pushkin (God rest your servant Alexander!) among the circumstances that make a person human, named “love for the tombs of their fathers.” Each person is waiting for departure " on the path of the whole earth "(Joshua 23:14).

One who has never been visited by the thought of death, who has never, in the recesses of his heart, repeated the words that he said: “Cannot be fully human. Lord, how will I die?

The event of death, its mystery is one of major events throughout a person's life. And therefore, no excuses like “no time”, “lack of leisure”, etc. will not be accepted either by conscience or by God if we forget the road to our parents’ graves. I hope we will never live to see the years when Helena Roerich’s dream comes true: “cemeteries in general should be destroyed as breeding grounds for all kinds of epidemics.”

For Eastern mysticism, the human body is just a prison for the soul. Once released, burn and throw away. For Christianity, the body is the temple of the soul. And we believe not only in the immortality of the soul, but also in the resurrection of the whole person. That is why cemeteries appeared in Rus': the seed is thrown into the ground in order to rise with a new cosmic spring. According to the word ap. Paul, the body is a temple of the spirit living in it, and, as we remember, “a temple that is desecrated is still a temple.” And therefore the bodies dear people It is customary for Christians not to be thrown into a fiery abyss, but to be placed in an earthen bed...

Before the beginning and in the days before we take the first step towards Easter, the word of our love for all those who walked the path of life before us sounds under the arches of churches: “Rest, O Lord, the souls of your departed servants!” This is a prayer for everyone, because, in the wonderful words of Anastasia Tsvetaeva, “there are only believers and non-believers here. All believers are there.” Now they all see what we only believe in, they see what they once forbade us to believe in. And, therefore, for all of them our prayerful sighing will be a precious gift.

The fact is that not all people die. After all, Plato asked: why, if the soul spends its entire life fighting with the body, then with the death of its enemy it should itself disappear? The soul uses the body (including the brain and heart) like a musician uses his instrument. If the string breaks, we no longer hear the music. But this is not yet a reason to claim that the musician himself died.

People grieve when they die or see off the dead, but this is not evidence that beyond the door of death there is only sorrow or emptiness. Ask the child in the womb - does he want to come out? Try to describe the outside world to him - not through the affirmation of what is there (for these will be realities unfamiliar to the child), but through the denial of what nourishes him in the mother’s womb. Is it any wonder that children come into our world crying and protesting? But isn’t this what the grief and crying of those who are leaving are like?

If only the birth was not accompanied by birth trauma. If only the days of preparation for birth were not poisoned. Just not to be born in future life"monster".

In general, unfortunately, we are immortal. We are doomed to eternity and resurrection. And no matter how much we would like to cease to exist and not carry our sins to the Judgment, the timeless basis of our personality cannot simply be blown away by the wind of time... The “good news from Jerusalem” was that the quality of this ever-being of ours can become different, joyful, extrajudicial (" He who hears My word does not come to Judgment, but has come from death to life » In. 5.24).

Or is it unclear what the soul is? Does she exist? What it is? - Eat. The soul is what hurts a person when the whole body is healthy. After all, we say (and feel) that it is not the brain that hurts, not the heart muscle - it is the soul that hurts. And on the contrary, it happens that during torment and sorrow, something in us rejoices and sings purely (this happens with martyrs).

“There is no death - everyone knows that. It became boring to repeat this. Let them tell me what they have…” asked Anna Akhmatova. Parental Saturdays, dating back to the holiday, speak about “what is.” Holiday... But this is the day of the death of the Mother of God. Why is it a holiday?

But because death is not the only way to die. Dormition is the antonym of death. This is, first of all, non-death. These two words, which differ in the language of any Christian people, mean radically opposite outcomes of human life.

A person cultivates within himself the seeds of love, kindness, faith, takes his soul seriously - and his life path crowned with the Dormition. If he brought destruction to himself and the world around him, wound after wound wounded his soul, and the dirt from it, unkempt and overgrown, splashed out - the final, mortal decay will complete his lifetime attenuation.

From now on (in the sense - from the time of the resurrection of Christ) the image of our immortality depends on the image of our love. “A person goes where the mind has its goal and what it loves,” said.

On the icon of the Assumption, Christ holds in his arms a baby - the soul of his Mother. She was just born in Eternity. "God! The soul has come true - Your most secret intention!” - one could say about this moment in the words of Tsvetaeva.

The soul “came true”, was fulfilled - and in the word “dormition” one hears echoes of not only “dream”, but also “ripeness” and “success”.

« Time to die "(Eccl. 3.2). Perhaps the most striking difference modern culture from Christian culture - in the inability to die, in the fact that the current culture does not isolate this time within itself - “the time to die.” Gone is the culture of aging, the culture of dying.

A person approaches the threshold of death, not so much trying to peer beyond its line as endlessly turning back and calculating with horror the ever-growing distance from the time of his youth. from the time of “preparing for death,” when “it’s time to think about the soul,” it became the time of the last and decisive battle for a place in the sun, for the last “rights”... It became a time of envy.

The Russian philosopher S. L. Frank has an expression - “enlightenment of old age,” a state of final, autumnal clarity. The last, sophisticated clarity, which is spoken of by Balmont’s lines, written off by “modernity” in the section of “decadence”:

The day is only good in the evening.

Believe the wise law -
The day is only good in the evening.
In the morning despondency and lies
And the swarming devils...
The day is only good in the evening.
Life is clearer the closer you are to death.

Here wisdom came to man. Wisdom is, of course, not scholarship or encyclopedicism or erudition. This is knowing a little, but the most important. That is why encyclopedists went to the monks - these “living dead”, who, when tonsured, seemed to have died to the vanity of the world and therefore became the most living people on earth - for advice. Gogol and Solovyov, Dostoevsky and Ivan Kireevsky, who personally talked with Hegel and Schelling, found their main interlocutors in. Because here the conversation was about “the most important things.”

The most important thing Plato, the father of philosophers, called this: “For people this is a mystery: but everyone who truly devoted themselves to philosophy did nothing else but prepare for dying and death.”

In the middle of our century Patriarch of Constantinople Athenagoras I spoke about the time of dying:

“I would like to die after an illness long enough to prepare for death, but not long enough to become a burden to my loved ones. I would like to lie in a room by the window and see: Death has appeared on the next hill. Here she comes through the door. Here she is going up the stairs. Now she’s knocking on the door... And I tell her: come in. But wait. Be my guest. Let me get ready for the road. Sit down. Well, I'm ready. Let's go!..”

Placing life in the perspective of the end makes it precisely a path, gives it dynamics, a special taste of responsibility. But this, of course, is only if a person perceives his death not as a dead end, but as a door. A door is a piece of space through which one enters, passing through it.

You can't live in a door - that's true. And in death there is no room for life. But there is still life beyond her threshold. The meaning of a door is given by what it opens access to. The meaning of death is given by what begins beyond its threshold. I didn't die - I left.

And God grant that already on the other side of the threshold I could utter the words inscribed on the tombstone of Grigory Skovoroda: “The world caught me, but did not catch me.”

“Does it matter how you believe” - M., 1997.

Parents' Saturdays in 2016, Orthodox, have seven special days a year. In these special days The church encourages us to definitely go to a memorial service, where funeral prayers are read, and then go to the graves to honor the memory of people who have not been with us for a long time.

As a rule, most parents' Saturdays take place at the beginning of the year. As many as three such days are allocated during the pre-Easter fast, which takes place forty days before Easter. There are several memorial days in the summer and only one parent's Saturday falls in the fall.

Important! Despite the fact that people call such days “parents’ days,” this does not mean that you only need to go to the cemetery to visit your parents. Here the name comes from the words “genus”. They go to the graves to visit their ancestors and closest people. What can you do for a trip to the cemetery?

About universal days

If you carefully study the Orthodox calendar of parental Saturdays in 2016, you will notice that in the series of memorial days there are “ecumenical Saturdays.” These days in Orthodox churches Memorial services are held in which all the people who have already left this world are remembered.

The dates of such Saturdays change from year to year because they fall during the period of Lent. As you know, the dates of Lent are changeable due to the fact that the Easter holiday does not have a fixed date. In 2016, the fast will take place from March 14 to May 1.

There are three Ecumenical Saturdays in total during Lent. Even though they have every year different dates, the meaning and traditions of these days are the same. It is imperative to pray for those who are no longer alive and ask that God be merciful to the souls of the departed and forgive them their sins.

Birth calendar days for 2016

5.03 Memorial Saturday before Maslenitsa.

26.03 The first ecumenical Saturday always falls on the second Saturday of Lent.

2.04 2 Ecumenical Sub., falls on the 3rd week of pre-Easter Lent.

9.04 3 universal Saturday, which falls on the 4th week of Lent from year to year.

10.05 The day in honor of Easter, which is also called Radonitsa. Always falls on the second Tuesday after Easter Sunday.

09.05 Day of remembrance of military people. The date of this parental Saturday does not change from year to year.

18.06 – Trinity, which takes place on the eve of the holiday of the same name.

05.11 Dmitry genus. Saturday. As you can see, parental Saturdays in 2016, Orthodox Christians do not take place in October!

What is important to do on each of the designated memorial days? It is enough to go to the church where funeral services are held these days, you need to pray for the souls of the departed, ask the Lord to forgive them their sins, then go to the graves. A snack that travels well is.

On the eve of Trinity

If you carefully study the calendar, you will notice that parental Saturdays fall, as a rule, on the eve of big days. Christian holidays. As for this parent's day, it has its own differences. They pray not only for deceased people, but especially for criminals and suicides. Trinity, when they celebrate the event of the condescension of the Holy Spirit to people. With the goal of saving all sinful souls without exception. So, prayer for the departed this funeral Saturday has great power.

Radonitsa

After the festive St. Thomas week, on Tuesday of the next week, people go to the cemetery to bring the bright news of the onset of Easter, the victory of life over death, and a deceased relative. The church emphasizes that it is not recommended to go to the cemetery on Easter itself. Precisely, in order to share the joy of the Resurrection of Christ with loved ones who are already in the next world, you need to go to the cemetery in Radunitsa.

What you need to do:

• Go to temple and pray. For God, all souls are alive, regardless of where the body is located.
• Gather at a memorial table at home or in a cemetery;
• Submit notes to the church about reading funeral prayers;
• Cleanse your heart and wash it of filth. To do this, you can read Psalm 118;
• You should not do household chores on parental Saturdays;
• Visit the graves, clean them, talk with your loved ones, remember what they were like during their lifetime;
• IN memorial days You can’t mourn and be sad. After all christian religion is based on the fact that the human soul is immortal;

As you can see, Parents' Saturdays in 2016, the Orthodox celebrate only one such day in November. This year's Sabbath date fell on November 5th. You now know exactly what needs to be done on this day, because this material contains clear church recommendations for the dates.

Commemoration of deceased loved ones and relatives who have passed away is a reverent Orthodox tradition, for which church calendar special days are allocated. The most important in its significance is Parents' Day after Easter. What date is Parents' Day in 2016? Each time it comes nine days after the Resurrection of Christ. This year Parents' Day is celebrated on May 10th.

What date is Parents' Day in 2016: how to celebrate this date?

Why is it customary to go to the cemetery on Parents' Day?

Visiting cemeteries on Parents' Day is not so much about paying tribute to our relatives who have died or died in different years. The memory of them is always alive as long as they are remembered. Visit to the cemetery at Radonitsa and others Parents' days- a great reason to clean up your grave loved one garbage, leaves, plant flowers, plants and trees there. While caring for a grave in a cemetery, believers mentally communicate with the deceased person, pray for the repose of his soul, and remember bright days spent with him, ask for forgiveness of his soul for all the insults that you have ever inflicted on him during his lifetime. Visiting cemeteries on Parents' Day supports believers' respect and love for those who have passed away, strengthens faith, and strengthens the desire to live and do something good in life. Only good things should be remembered about the dead, therefore drinking alcohol in cemeteries is not approved by the church and true believers. The best time spent in a cemetery is prayer, during which you clean up everything on the grave of your loved one, decorate it, correct the monument and mentally communicate with God.


What date is Trinity in 2016, find out

Now you know what date is Parents' Day in 2016. Meet him on May 10th as he recommends to us Christian church. Go to church in the morning and order a funeral prayer for the deceased person, light candles bought in the church for the repose of the souls of loved ones. During the day, visit the cemetery and clean up the grave. Radonitsa is a day of sorrow, so do not use foul language at this time, do not organize holidays and fun. Your thoughts should be bright and sinless.

Our readers ask When are Parents' Saturdays in 2016?. There are special days when it is customary to remember deceased relatives according to the Orthodox Church custom. These special days are called parental Saturdays, however, the dates of these days do not always fall on a Saturday.

In addition to parental Saturdays, deceased relatives are commemorated on the day of their birth and death, the day of the angel (the saint in whose honor a person was baptized).

Parents' Saturdays 2016 fall on certain numbers. These days, funeral services are held in churches, during which every believer can pray for the repose of the souls of their loved ones.

Throughout the year, there are 9 special memorial days, of which 6 fall on Saturdays. These days are called “Universal Parental Saturdays.”

Please note that these days may be different each year as

These dates are tied to the celebration of Easter.

>> June 16 - Semik (7th Thursday after Easter), when before Trinity Day they commemorate those who died a violent death, as well as drowned people and suicides, children who died unbaptized;

>> September 11, Sunday - Parents' Day in honor of the remembrance of Orthodox soldiers who died on the battlefield;

Parental Saturdays of Great Lent– days when love and warmth for the souls of deceased loved ones are especially manifested. According to the calendar, they fall on March 23 and 30, as well as on April 6. On this day, believers pray for loved ones who are dear and close to their hearts, so that the Lord does not leave them without his prosperity.

Since this year the last parental Saturday of Lent falls on the eve of the great feast of the Annunciation, it is cancelled.

Although, with the modern rhythm of life, everyday worries and routine, the once kind and warm feelings for those we love seem to be erased. Regardless of how a person feels about church holidays, whether he is a believer or not, in any case, one must gratefully honor and remember his loved ones. That's why parents' Saturdays are special days greatest respect and honor for each other.

Rules for memorial days

The rules on all memorial days are practically the same. These days it is customary to attend churches, in particular memorial services. Believers take Lenten food with them as a donation to the funeral table. They are distributed to all those in need: the poor and the needy. In addition to church, on Parents' Saturdays it is customary to visit cemeteries and remember deceased loved ones. It is considered a great sin to drink alcohol in a cemetery. The best thing you can do for the dead is to pray for the repose of the soul.

From the article you learned that the calendar has exactly eight days of commemoration of the departed and now you know what dates the main days fall on in 2019. By the way, in some regions of Russia, the Radonitsa holiday was equated to a day off, which once again suggests that parental Saturdays are important days when we pay tribute to loved ones.

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