Olesya Nikolaeva read for us Fyodor Vasilyuk’s book «Experience and Prayer».
Hope, appeal, prayer transform the experience from the inside, rearrange the accents in it, center the personality, endow what is happening with meaning, sublimate dark energies, collect disparate volitions into a single volitional impulse and provide new illumination of the very situation that caused the crisis. However, the matter does not end only with a psychotherapeutic effect …
In fact, the book by Fyodor Vasilyuk talks about how a person can comprehend the art of dealing with himself. To respond to one’s calling, to use the gift of creativity, to use one’s freedom, to accept the law of love and to live life with talent: to turn it into an artistic reality, elevate it to a sacred ceremony, saturate it with poetic meaning and fan it with the air of eternity.
This “excess of nature” for a person, who is struggling from the inside with mental and bodily ailments, passions, manias, phobias, and from the outside, overcome by difficult circumstances, becomes the only way to overcome life’s torment. But is it really possible for us, having become like Baron Munchausen, to pull ourselves out of the swamp by the hair? No, but you can turn to someone standing on a solid shore, to someone who is definitely higher, stronger than you, who “can do anything” — call him, ask for help, pray …
The experience of general psychological research by Fyodor Vasilyuk testifies that this very hope, appeal, prayer transform the experience from the inside, rearrange the accents in it, center the personality, endow what is happening with meaning, sublimate dark energies, collect disparate volitions into a single volitional impulse and provide new illumination of the situation itself that caused a crisis. However, the matter does not end only with a psychotherapeutic effect: it turns out that the Almighty, Standing on the shore, really responds to questioning. And that’s what I want to tell. In a moment of spiritual and life crisis, when the energy in me stalled due to multidirectional internal impulses, my heart turned to stone, and my soul shrank, I stood in the temple and prayed for my worthless life, for my helplessness and inability to change something myself. And suddenly — it happens when you feel that someone is looking at you — I looked to the side and saw Christ. He was depicted on a large crucifix, which I knew well and in front of which I placed candles in this temple for many years in a row, worshiping the Savior’s cross. But at that moment, it was not the cross, not the Calvary sacrifice, but only Christ’s open arms, love, the call … It was so obvious, so obvious and so in this case addressed to me personally, as an answer, as a symbol indicating both the direction, and dimension of life, that everything — both external and internal — was suddenly transformed, opening up new possibilities, and space, and a path …
The book of Fyodor Vasilyuk speaks about the psychological mechanisms that contribute to this miracle of personality transformation.