On sins
1. Pride — humility 2. Covetousness — almsgiving 3. Fornication — chastity 4. Anger — meekness 5. Gluttony — fasting 6. Envy — love 7. Despondency — hope
Forgive me, O Lord Jesus Christ our God, all my transgressions, by Thy countless mercy and by the prayers of the all-holy Virgin Mary Thy Mother, and of the holy angels and archangels, of the holy fathers and teachers, of the apostles and martyrs, and of all Thy saints.
Forgive me, O Lord, all wherein I have sinned with all my senses from my mother's womb until now — my transgressions committed according to nature and against nature: in word, in deed, in knowledge, in ignorance, willingly and unwillingly, open and hidden, seen and unseen, by night and by day, waking and sleeping, at every hour and every moment.
Forgive me, O Lord, all wherein I have sinned:
(After this the person lists his sins; but a believer should bring to confession not merely a list of sins, or only a judgement of the past, but should be aware that he is separated from the house of God and needs God's mercy, which he will receive through repentance.) Robbery — attack for the purpose of plunder; the evil eye — looking at someone with an evil eye; gambling — games and draws aimed at winning money or some other valuable; idle talk — chatter, senseless talk; pride — self-admiration, disdain for others; covetousness — love of money, bribe-taking; uncleanness — having no scruple about sin; flirting — impure love; breaking a vow — breaking a promise one has made; indignation — flaring up, getting angry; a foul kiss — kissing to satisfy lust; foul desire — thinking about every kind of wickedness (about gain, love of money, fornication); reading depraved books — reading books that praise and glorify violence, sexual licence and other sins; inciting to evil — leading another to do evil, or consenting to another's evil call; an evil dream — the arising of a dream does not depend on the person alone, but committing a crime in a dream (murder, adultery, other evils) shows that there is an inclination to sin in the person; there are also dreams from God, which point us to repentance, to humility; an evil thought — planning something bad in the mind; a bad habit — a person realizes the harm of a habit (smoking tobacco, for example) but does nothing to root it out; sulking — taking offence at someone; judging — speaking negatively about other people's private lives; anger — anger can be just or unjust; the Lord was angry with the traders and money-changers and drove them out of the temple; He was angry too with those who forbade healing on the Sabbath; but let anger not darken the mind; depravity — living only for carnal pleasure, immorality; insatiability — a person's unbridled striving after food and the gathering of property; rape — sexual violence against a person; love of delicacies — because of this sin a person cannot refuse tasty food; cursing — every kind of foul language; blasphemy — reviling God and Orthodoxy; distraction of mind — inattention; indifference — a careless, heartless attitude to any matter; resentment — a kind of anger; hot temper — lack of restraint, the same as indignation; coldness of heart — this sin turns a person into a living robot, incapable of love or of faith in God; rancour — sullenness; informing — denouncing; negligence — when a person does the work entrusted to him indifferently; swearing — swearing oaths over every trifle; yet the Lord teaches us: let every word be yea, yea and nay, nay, for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil; sabotage — spoiling another's work; defilement in sleep — in men, involuntary emission of seed in sleep; mockery — ridiculing another's failing, calling someone by a mocking name or giving them one; shirking — inventing an illness or another reason so as not to do one's work; love of glory — love of honour; not going to church for the Liturgy; plundering a church — robbing it or doing it any harm; tale-bearing — denouncing; believing the devil's suggestions — following tempting thoughts; doubt — about the existence of God, and about anything else; “woe-music” — Christianity does not oppose music; chants arose within the Church itself; but recently kinds of music have appeared whose song lyrics glorify the devil and call people to commit sins; music videos appear in which performers, by their singing and their behaviour, push people toward sin and corrupt the young; “woe-art” — Christianity does not oppose art, but recently works of art (films, paintings, theatre productions and others) have appeared which call people to commit sins and corrupt the young; not paying a debt — the same as love of money; treachery — abuse of trust; love of money — excessive care for gold and silver; reluctance to give to charity; laziness — every kind of idleness and sloth (“I can't be bothered”); telling tales — telling incredible stories; putting one's hope in oneself and in this world; insolence — a kind of bad manners; smoking tobacco — the devil's incense; you harm both yourself and others; not guarding the eyes — when you do not avoid an occasion of stumbling; hypocrisy — a kind of lying; self-will in faith — a wrong understanding of faith: I am perfect, I don't need the Church, I believe in God anyway; drowsiness — a kind of laziness; talismans — charms, a kind of witchcraft; secretly replacing something good with something bad; being ashamed to do good — a person is ashamed to do good for fear that unbelievers will laugh at him; doing good with regret — a person does good grudgingly; idolatry — making a god of something; hexing — harming living beings by magic or by chemicals, subduing their behaviour by spells; oppression — crushing godly people; flattery — seducing with sweet words; a disordered attitude to prayer — laziness about prayer, praying superficially, altering prayers, for example adding new words to the “Our Father” or leaving out old ones; malice — deliberately doing evil; sodomy — pederasty, sexual relations between men, and also lesbianism, sexual relations between women; breaking the fast — eating non-fasting food; showing off — every kind of desire to show oneself off by every means; sending a seductive message — seducing a person by any means: letters, caresses, suggestion and anything else that leads to the corruption of the victim's behaviour; matchmaking — conducting negotiations between a woman and a man for the sake of gain; domineering — bossing others, loving to lecture everyone; such people poke their noses in everywhere; bribery — corruption; spying — this means classic informing, “spying”; drunkenness — drinking too much, weakening or losing control over one's behaviour and mind; murder — destroying a person both bodily and morally; fortune-telling — a kind of witchcraft; deception — giving false information, presenting events falsely; thoughtlessness — laziness of mind; not doing what the spiritual father says — disobedience; despondency — hopelessness; adultery — betrayal of one's spouse by those who are married; much talking — chatter; not praying for one's enemy — we must pray for enemies and opponents, that they may turn, repent and receive forgiveness of sins; procuring a miscarriage — abortion, or pushing someone toward abortion, killing the embryo by any means; not heeding the hungry and thirsty — not helping people in material need; dishonouring one's parents — insulting them in word and deed, not caring for them; breaking a commandment — breaking the Orthodox commandments; hatred — enmity; heresy — sympathy for, approval or acceptance of a false faith; not declaring what one has found — if the owner of a thing you found turned up and you hid it; gluttony — eating without measure, the same as making a god of the belly, which weakens every ascetic effort; double-heartedness — betrayal; day-dreaming — being absorbed in vain thoughts, which becomes a cause of neglecting real tasks, letting the present slip away; not visiting prisoners and the sick — not setting them free, but visiting and comforting them; breaking a promise — mercilessness; it is also weakness and treachery; fawning — a kind of treachery; punishing animals beyond measure; sexual relations with animals; wilfulness — a kind of pride; lewd dancing — movements of the body that arouse passion; betraying a secret — two-facedness, betrayal; despair — hopelessness; hindering spiritual things — hindering others from fasting, going to the Liturgy, receiving Communion and other acts of faith, and mocking these; caring only for this passing life — caring only for things of this world; love of weapons — a mad love for weapons; painting the face — senseless use of make-up; giving oneself up to sadness — absence of spiritual effort; passion for wealth — the same as love of money; putting off repentance — supposedly “I'll repent later,” and as a result a person meets death unrepentant; irascibility — a kind of anger; falseness — the same as lying; fornication — sexual relations between the unmarried; stinginess — a kind of love of money, attachment to things; greed — a kind of love of money; obstinacy — not heeding plain good advice; being charmed by the vanity of the world — delighting in every kind of glittering, worldly nonsense; blasphemy against the Holy Spirit — denial of God and of the soul, or, on the contrary, a senseless trust in God (as though God will save one anyway out of His love of mankind); appropriating another's property, or desiring to; unseemly behaviour in church — talking and making noise during the services; breaking the rules of the Typikon; boasting — a kind of pride; folly — every kind of foolish behaviour; every kind of unlawful appropriation — this includes every kind of theft, plunder and robbery; prayerlessness — deliberately not praying; disobedience — lack of obedience; idleness — every kind of laziness; lack of conscience — stifling the voice of God, every wicked deed; receiving holy antidoron unworthily — a person should receive holy things fasting, as holy things; receiving Holy Communion unworthily — without repentance, or if you bear enmity toward someone in your heart; Pharisaism — keeping the law outwardly, formally; making money on money — charging interest, usury; squandering money — spending money on sinful things and not on things pleasing to God; reluctance to give to charity — or not giving; leaving widows and orphans uncared for — not giving them help; losing hope in God — despair; indifference toward God — the same as unbelief; garrulousness — talking without measure; causing children to stumble — teaching them what is bad; refusing forgiveness — not pardoning the one at fault; insult — mockery, contempt; anathematizing — cursing, delivering someone over to a curse before an icon; not baptizing one's children; not clothing the naked — if you have the means and did not clothe the needy; envy — being grieved at another's good; revenge — repaying evil done with evil; malakia — onanism, masturbation; slander — denouncing with lies out of hatred; curiosity — love of news, including bad news, which becomes a cause of neglecting one's work; seizing — taking another's property immorally; eating and drinking after Matins and after supper; not repenting of one's sins — not going to confession; teaching sins — calling a person to sin; being unconquered by sin — negligence, a kind of laziness; boasting of committing sin — a classic example: “I'll do this, and what will God do to me?”; joy in committing sin — if you rejoice in doing sin or call someone else to it; superstition — when a person believes in a twitching eye, in a cat or a hare running across the road, in turning a coffin round, in lighting only an odd number of candles, in putting out candles only by blowing, and so on; bad clowning — amusing oneself with immoral stories; love of sleep — being a sleepyhead (sleeping without measure); love of gifts — the same as love of money; cursing — wishing evil on another; dishonouring the saints; gossip — the same as idle talk; dishonouring icons; not learning a trade — if you do not learn any profession; bodily luxury — excessive care for things and for the body; sorcery — white and black magic, astrology; venting one's spite — the same as revenge; spiteful rivalry — malice; love of rewards — striving for worldly glory; not making the sign of the Cross — dishonouring the Cross; dishonouring the Cross — blasphemy against God
Sin
Explanation
