At Death to the World, Abbess Makaria of the Volsk-Vladimir Monastery writes:
There used to be a culture of Orthodox education. People understood well what is a sin, what is a passion. When a child gets used to confession from childhood, he learns to keep track of good and evil thoughts and has an understanding that he has to cut off the evil thoughts.
But now I see many young people who are burdened with passions while still quite young. They don’t have the slightest idea of the spiritual life, of spiritual battle, and they are blown about by evil passions like clouds by the wind.
Inexperienced and unaware of what is happening to them, true spiritual babies, having no concept either of confession or Communion, they lose their purity and health even in adolescence, allowing themselves to do all kinds of grievous things, stopping only sometime around twenty-five—twenty-seven, and then only because they already have no more strength or health to continue living according to the passions. Look: quite a young man, and completely exhausted by the passions.
They get married and then they get divorced, they have children and they can’t give them anything good, because they didn’t receive anything good themselves. They don’t know how to bring children to faith, how to teach them to fight with the passions, because they weren’t taught this themselves.
The decades of persecution against the Church did their job: Several generations haven’t the slightest idea about God, about spirituality, still believing that faith is the lot of old women and those who don’t fit into “successful” life. We need a real shake-up so these people would “wake up” and think about the meaning of life and about faith, not just float on the turbulent flow of everyday life, overwhelmed by numerous passions.
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