The blood cries out

People have different characters, different tastes, needs and views, but there is one thing everyone seeks, one thing everyone lacks and needs — love — even a murderer. Love is a strange feeling; it warms the soul wonderfully. The shadow and reflection of divine love, if one may put it so, is born and kindled in a family built on Christian, Gospel principles. Such a hearth is warmed by the love of husband and wife, and their love in turn has faith in the living God laid as its cornerstone; such families are even like oases in that dead desert over which the drought of civilisation has passed; and if the Church is a pillar of fire, the family is a small candle lit from that great fire.

The holy apostle Paul called the family a church in the home. The family is the first school for Christian children. Satan is trying to destroy the Church: he fights it both from outside and from within. The devil wars against the families of Christians too, trying to take from them their nourishing spirit, love, warmth and comfort, and to break them up. Sadly, in families blessed for the multiplying of Adam's race, a satanic method often takes root very easily: to deal with “domestic” problems, so-called “birth control,” the regular killing of infants, helpless beings, becomes necessary… Such a hearth, of course, has nothing in common with the families the apostle Paul called a church in the home. Along with the killing of infants, married love dies too; the union splits in two, and their moral fall begins; each one's egoism grows. Their relationship turns into lust and naked sex. Neither the one nor the other gives warmth, love or joy — murderers cannot love one another. Can you love the murderer of your children? Blood wipes out and destroys every kindly feeling and drives people apart. That is why the number of abortions and of divorces are so “symmetrically” matched. Science has already recognised the fact that children inherit from their parents not only physical but even mental dispositions, and when a parent kills “some” child of his, to the one who “inexplicably” remained alive he passes on in the genetic pool the disposition of a murderer, which will certainly torment the child's psyche. Sooner or later, consciously or unconsciously, the children will certainly discover the potential of a murderer in themselves, and the real murderer of their brothers and sisters in the person of their parents, from whose mercilessness their own life “inexplicably” escaped. Perhaps here lies the cause of the sharp conflicts between children and parents, of inexplicable mistrust, disrespect and lack of love — the root of our distorted relationships.

Nor do we care that destroying a being killed in its mother's womb is the killing of a soul not washed by the grace of baptism: such a soul passes into eternity as if blind, and carries with it the seal of its forebears' sins.

Many storms have raged over Georgian land, but little in the history of Georgia can compare with the black days that Tamerlane brought on the nation. Seven times he made war on Kartli and Kakheti, raising a whirlwind of fire over Georgian land. There is even a tradition in Georgia about Tamerlane: that he was born with wolf's fangs and grey hair, drew blood from his mother's breast and drank buffalo's milk. You probably remember what Tamerlane, enraged at King Simon, did in Tbilisi: he gathered together children of every age, had them tied up like sheaves of grain, ordered his executioners to smash the little ones with stones and clubs, and made rivers of blood flow… Right beside it he had a tent pitched and held a feast with his favourites. On the place where this horror happened the Kedisubani church was built. Later this church was buried in the ground, and the Rustaveli cinema was put on top of it (!). But the most terrible thing is that Tamerlane's work has still not been consigned to history today; it has not ended. Georgian mothers have supported his “undertaking,” and the blood of helpless beings is shed with impunity. Do not take this “parallel” or comparison for an artificial passage made to heighten the effect; nothing here is exaggerated; what really happens is truly more than what has been said; and what more is there to say: the methodical killing of infants goes on, a real genocide is under way for the sake of “family planning,” the war between parents and children goes on in that slaughterhouse which today is watered with the blood of infants and which to this day is not called by its real name. For this crime they have found some vague, shamelessly disguised term — abortion. Yet this word in its content means the killing of an infant, the ashes of egoism, cruelty, cowardice, hypocrisy. And in the maternity homes, which should be full of the voices of newborns and the joy of mothers after childbirth, special rooms are set aside for the professional examination and destruction of helpless beings, children. In the maternity home these rooms bear black signs reading: “Abortions.” And this is an ordinary thing, because the cold “justice” of our “civilised” society is today paltry and cruel. And by the norms of our impoverished morality, the killing of helpless, rational beings is acceptable not only in the maternity home, but in any place “suitable” for this crime.

Seven to eight million abortions are registered in medical institutions. And who can tell the number of secret, hidden abortions?! A telling fact: the Second World War took a vast number of lives, yet over the same period the average number of abortions exceeded the number of those killed at the front — a staggering mercilessness.

Every sin is first prepared inside a person. For a mother to be able to kill her child, she must first destroy in herself the natural love that binds her, whether she will or not, to her own infant. At that moment she already renounces Christ and sins, for: “Love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love” (1 John 4:7–8). Then she tries to suppress her maternal instinct entirely, to become a creature more terrible than a beast (though an animal often even sacrifices its life for its young). Then she gradually becomes estranged from the child, then inwardly and categorically refuses to acknowledge it, and insists on the unnatural: the one who in her womb is fed by her own blood she declares a foreign body, a tumour, which it is inadmissible not to cut out. After all this she easily stifles the voice of conscience, shares in the spirit of Satan, and inwardly everything will be ready for the physical destruction of the child: her own firstborn will have been cast out completely from her heart, her thoughts and her mind. And all this, it turns out, is felt by the little one in its mother's womb, organically bound to her; it feels it instinctively, because it is not a scrap of flesh, as some think, but a rational being, which has both a sense of pain and the desire to live. The cause of its imperfection is that it is not allowed to form and become a human being. Indeed experiments have shown that the foetus is capable of the most complex reactions, so that even before physical death and torment, the infant in its mother's womb already feels the mercilessness of its mother's sentence, the horror of death.

For “the good” of the family and of the children already born, the mother kills the child to come in her own womb — she shares in the spirit of Satan… In his time Joan of Arc's closest friend and comrade-in-arms, the duke Gilles de Rais, also sold himself to the devil, and he too had his “justification”: the son of a brilliant family, a man of excellent education and fabulous wealth, whose domains, unheard-of palaces and country houses were open to the most eminent society of France, where there was no end of feasts and receptions — the time came when his fortune melted away and money ran short. He could not give up his accustomed pleasures; soon he came across a sorcerer-alchemist who promised him riches: “I know the secret of getting gold from human blood and will reveal it to you,” he promised, but set a condition: “You must sell your soul to the devil; otherwise it will not work, otherwise we shall not get the gold.” De Rais agreed: a ten-year-old child was kidnapped in the nearest village; they cut off his right hand, gouged out his eyes and tore the beating heart from his breast. With the blood of that heart he wrote Satan a bond: “I give you my soul.” Then, together with the sorcerer, he sang a hymn to the devil. He came to hate his wife and children, drove them out of the palace and plunged into magical practices. In the nearby villages first one child vanished, then two; gradually the cases of children disappearing without trace grew more frequent. The villagers grew alarmed; nothing escaped the mothers' intuition: suspicion fell on the duke's deserted tower… The bishop summoned the duke; de Rais did not come… Then the king's army took the castle by storm. The duke and the sorcerer were seized. The court investigated this case with special care, and it came to light that the “experiments” of the duke and his alchemist had cost the lives of 700–800 children! Many documents and records connected with this case are kept in the French archives to this day.

The story of Gilles de Rais, to our misfortune, is not a myth or a legend but a real, historical fact — an exposure of our mercilessness, which in the future found its continuation and was “refined” in the form of abortions: the killing of infants is today declared a custom, a norm; it is no longer a crime. That story took place in the 15th century; this one is happening today, in the 20th. There the duke stole and killed other people's children; we kill our own children and take their souls from God. And the crime was committed then, and is committed now, for one thing — earthly well-being. The duke was sentenced to be burned at the stake. Before his death, standing at the edge of the blazing fire, de Rais begged with all his heart and with tears the forgiveness, the pardon, of the mothers whose children he had killed… He understood the depth and weight of his crime. The alchemist, however, mocked the repentant duke and met his death cut off from God. Today at least some mothers probably grieve over their degeneration, over the horror of what they have done, like Gilles de Rais; but a great many, hardened and turned to idols like that alchemist, meet death unrepentant — and that is the misfortune.

In former times, as world literature and ancient tradition tell us, murderers suffered terribly; the pangs of conscience were their punishment. Now perhaps murder is no longer felt with such emotional force, but blood still demands vengeance. The murderers of our time first of all sacrifice and destroy their own soul, and that is why they freeze in spiritual emptiness and cold. And why should we be surprised that the number of abortions, of mental illnesses and of broken families “match” one another so closely?

In the old days nobody counted the executioner a man: who would greet him or break bread with him?! But who would dare say a bad word about the executioners of our time, the murderers of their own children and the gangsters in white coats?

It is gratifying that the most morally sound part of modern medicine has recognised abortion as a terrible crime. But what is unknown and incomprehensible to a large part of society is that the Church is against not only abortion but every kind of contraceptive, and here is why: love, the life-giving power of the family, is sadly identified today with something quite different — passion. Yet Christianity has distinguished many aspects within love itself. The spiritual bond of two people, love, rests on a common outlook, one and the same religious faith, and the desire to help each other on the path of moral perfection. For love of the soul it is enough to share tastes, cultural needs, social conditions and professional interests. A child is the mystery of a new, future life, and man tries to turn this mystery and the God-given ability to multiply into a means of satisfying passions and lusts. The holy Church does not accept this, for it is precisely here that a person's steep moral fall begins. The relationship of husband and wife itself, when the spouses artificially guard themselves in advance against having a child, turns into soulless onanism. A person taken up with contraceptives will probably, to make things simpler, easily exchange even his partner for a rubber toy; so sex destroys love, strips it of its mystical purpose, and avoiding the “danger” of having a child will then be a sign that we have become the servants of sex and set it up as an idol. The content of every effort at “family regulation” is the wish to carry on fornication successfully; and if the effort fails, mothers do not even cover their own children with that covering which is the lot of everyone — earth — but send them down the sewage pipes.

The holy Church examined this question at her highest local and Ecumenical Councils and equated the killing of infants with the crime of homicide (Council of Ancyra, canon 21; Sixth Ecumenical Council, canon 91). And in the canon of Basil the Great we read: “She who deliberately destroys a child in the womb bears the penalty of homicide… Here not only the one guilty of destroying the one about to be born will be investigated and punished, but also its mother, who has raised her hand against herself… To this is joined the destruction of the fruit, as another form of homicide. Whoever dares to do this with premeditation is a murderer; yet her penance should not last until death, but she may be received after ten years.” In the Bible, in the book of Genesis, there is a noteworthy passage. It speaks of Onan, who with a certain aim guarded himself in advance against begetting a child. It was precisely for this act that “the thing which he did displeased the Lord: wherefore he slew him also.” This is how the fact of the killing of infants by their parents is judged in the canons of the holy Church; and how sad it is, and how much it should make us think, that this question has never been examined and judged in secular laws.

Until the killing of infants is forbidden by law, until society supports this terrible crime by its silence, all moral and legal codes of brotherhood, justice and love will be nothing but hypocrisy and lies! And if the law itself establishes outrageous injustice by snatching life away from the helpless, it is utterly vain to think of peace of soul or to seek it. Why should the life of an infant in its mother's womb not be protected? Why should every form of its destruction not be forbidden? Or why is the impunity of parents who kill their children understandable and justified? Why is every doctor who raises his hand to perform an abortion not declared an enemy of the whole nation, of mankind? The killing of infants is a crime against God, against human rights, against the family, nature, the nation and mankind!!! It would not be out of place to recall here one of the novelties that have lately “shone” in our press, offered to us by the technology created by progressive science. Thanks to modern equipment it is now possible to establish while the child is still in the womb how healthy it is, what disease it will have, and so on. The author of one such article zealously tries to persuade future mothers, advising parents to kill children with haemophilia while still in the womb, because their treatment, would you believe it, apparently requires a colossal sum. The author of the article went to a great deal of trouble and calculated that the treatment of such a child would come to roughly the kind of astronomical figure by which the distance between the earth and the other planets is measured. Shaken by this fact, the mind of the “humane” doctor — which, let us not hide it, ought to burn only with healing the sick — offered us a rational proposal: it declared laconically and “intelligibly” that in such a case, it seems, “the pregnancy must be terminated” without fail.

An astonishing fact: a doctor advises a future mother: kill your sick child! Do only the healthy have the right to life? Is a woman — forgive the expression — breeding cattle, with the right to bear only sturdy offspring?! If so, why not do away with all haemophiliacs of every age, or with all the sick of every age altogether? And if the treatment of this disease is so hard on society's pocket, which, it seems, we must spare at the price of infants' lives, then let no one condemn Hitler and the Nazis either. They too, for this purpose, killed the mentally ill kept in psychiatric hospitals; the time has come to justify Hitler — what are we waiting for? Only let us not forget one thing: people tormented by illness often turn out to be remarkably gifted. It is precisely the illness that enables them to unfold their talent and abilities fully. Remember Homer, Milton…

I want to remind you of the book of Ecclesiastes: the history of mankind passes through certain similar cycles, and the events happening today and expected tomorrow are in some ways like what was yesterday, in the past. Of course, this does not mean that complete likeness and repetition — the closed circles so characteristic of mythological thinking — in which the future is entirely lost, because it is understood as a return to the past. We want to say something else: the elements that go with today and tomorrow may have been present in the past too, perhaps in a different combination, but present all the same. For the Lord says in the Gospel that the spiritual state of mankind before the Flood and at the end of this world will be alike. At the dawn of human history something terrible happened: Cain killed his brother Abel.

And at the end of this world, godlessness and fratricide will go beyond every limit; mercilessness, cruelty and falsehood will reign, and no one will remember repentance.

The Nativity of Christ brought a new era into the history of mankind. It is well known that the spiritual future of mankind is laid down in the Gospel events as in a genetic code. Now recall whom the Saviour chose as the first martyrs: 14,000 infants from Bethlehem — is this not significant! What was it, if you remember, that made Herod tremble — Rome, which threatened to crush Jerusalem under its iron heel, or the Arabs, who burst into their land like a hurricane? No, the bloodthirsty tyrant was consumed with fear at the thought of children, and that is why he let loose his army on Bethlehem. And those soldiers, who ought not to have given up hearth, the bones of their fathers and their native land to be torn apart by the enemy, became executioners and murderers. At their tyrant's order they had to plunge the sword into the very heart of their homeland: to wipe out every infant in Bethlehem and the country around. In the slaughter of the infants the soldiers were distinguished by particular mercilessness: the slightest pity would certainly have reached the ears of Herod, who, like every tyrant, considered pity and mercy the greatest crime. Is not the story of the infants slaughtered in Bethlehem like today — to some degree, of course, since what happens before our eyes against a background of habitual criminal silence and unconcern is, obviously, a far greater crime and a greater horror? In Bethlehem the mothers offered their breasts to the sword, trying to save their infants at the cost of their lives. Today, in an atmosphere of loathsome politeness and familiarity, a consultation takes place between the parents and the murderer of their child. Father and mother are ready to pay any sum, if only they can avoid the “danger” and not give birth to an “unplanned” child… In this terrible transformation the “plot” of the slaughter of infants is repeated today in the history of mankind.

Many churches have been opened lately, new ones are being built, old ones have been restored, the number of churchgoers has grown. And in spite of this, the statistical curve of abortions is not falling. A paradox? Perhaps the number of working churches and the size of congregations are only dry data, an outward marker, and say nothing about what is essential and consoling. Have the powers of darkness retreated; do they no longer fight Christianity? Perhaps they have retreated — but only because they have dug in on strategically advantageous positions.

The Church is the setting in which a person must seek and find communion with God. And when the Church is emptied of this content, even if churches were countless, nothing would distinguish any one of them from a gravestone. Yes, churches are opening, but with still greater intensity and energy sexual literature and shameful pornographic magazines and newspapers are being printed, obscene films and videos are spreading, future generations are being poisoned with all sorts of spiritual poison: children are like old men who have tasted every kind of corruption, and the old have turned into youngsters, forgetting their age.

People live in such an atmosphere of cynicism and immorality that chastity has been declared an atavism. Obscenity triumphs in shop windows and advertisements, on the front pages of magazines and newspapers. Poisoned by the venom of immorality and sex, a person comes to church half dead. The microbe of obscenity is treacherous: years of repentance and struggle are needed to get free of it and be able to come to God. Only a very small part of the people caught in the swamp of immorality, cynicism and refined obscenity see in the Church a place to catch their breath and be healed.

It was not by chance that Satan corrupted man's inner temple; he knew his business: he had to take from man the main thing — repentance.

Our spiritual state is coming more and more to resemble the spiritual state of mankind before the Flood. Who knows — perhaps what is happening to us is not by chance; perhaps it is a sign of the spirit of Cain, of extreme mercilessness, of the approaching end of this world. Who knows?!…