If thou smokest tobacco, thou censest the demons
In 1905 Father Silouan spent several months in Russia, often travelling on pilgrimage to the monasteries. On one such journey he took a seat in the train opposite a merchant, who with a friendly gesture opened his silver cigarette case and offered him a cigarette. Father Silouan thanked him and declined to take it. Then the merchant began to talk: “Is it not because you hold this to be a sin, Father, that you refuse? But smoking often helps in an active life; it is good to break off from strenuous work and rest a few minutes. Over a cigarette it is convenient to carry on business or friendly talk, and it helps altogether in the course of life...” — and further, trying to persuade Father Silouan to take a cigarette, he went on speaking in favour of smoking. Then Father Silouan made up his mind to say: “Sir, before you light your cigarette, pray; say one ‘Our Father’.” To this the merchant answered: “Praying before a smoke somehow does not come off.” Father Silouan observed in reply: “Then every work before which an untroubled prayer does not come off is better left undone.”
At the beginning of the twentieth century, when the Turks drove out the greater part of the Orthodox Greeks from the districts of Asia Minor, the following happened near Smyrna. A certain Turkish meat-seller had an old icon of the Mother of God, which he used as a board for chopping meat. An Orthodox man, seeing this, resolved to put a stop to such open dishonouring of a holy thing, and bought the icon along with the meat, as an ordinary board. Having brought it home, he cleaned it and hung it on the wall of his sitting room. Unhappily, he was a smoker. A few days later the Most Holy Virgin appeared to him in sleep and warned him: if he did not cease dishonouring Her icon with cigarette smoke, it were better that he give it back to the Turk. The Mother of God chose rather that the Turk should chop meat upon it than that an Orthodox Christian should cense Her with the foul “incense of Satan”. The said Christian understood his sin and never smoked again.
The monks of the Kiev Caves Lavra saw this vision: smokers were being cruelly tormented by demons, who thrust extinguished cigarettes into their mouths.
Once a woman came to the elder to be received, and since the elder by reason of illness was not receiving visitors, she sent him a note with the question that troubled her. When Mother Seraphima handed the elder the note, he answered at once: “Open the door and repeat aloud together with me: ‘Woman, art thou not ashamed! Thou hast poisoned our stairway with the sickening smell of thy tobacco; leave this vice, repent, go to confession, receive Communion, and touch tobacco no more.’” She whom this instruction concerned remembers: “This was said by Mother Seraphima so loudly, before so many people standing in the line to be received by the elder, that I was greatly ashamed. I resolved to give up smoking tobacco — and according to the elder's word I have not smoked now for forty years.”
