Parental pharisaism drives children away from Church

Conversation about teenage problems. Photo: UOJ

There is a type of family misfortune that people in church circles don't like to talk about. From the outside, everything seems impeccable: the fasts are observed, the prayer rule is faithfully recited, the child goes to confession and receives Communion regularly. But inside, there is emptiness and alienation. The teenager endures the Sunday service as an obligation, then locks themselves in their room at home, and a chasm has suddenly opened between them and their parents, seemingly out of nowhere.

The first thing an ordinary parent does is to look for the cause outside. The smartphone, bad company, school, outside influences – those are the usual things we blame. It's a very comfortable position, one in which we ourselves bear no responsibility. That's why, when discussing such a difficult problem, it's better not to turn to someone who will simply indulge our excuses but to someone who used to speak plainly: Righteous John of Kronstadt.

For nearly a quarter of a century, Father John taught the Law of God at the Kronstadt Gymnasium and observed up close an entire generation that was outwardly Orthodox to a man – with compulsory church services and certificates of fasting and confession – yet inwardly was already drifting toward nihilism and non-belief. He stood at the very source of this fracture and understood its nature. He also kept a diary in which he recorded, with striking honesty, his own irritability and lack of love. As you read it, you recognize not a saint from an icon but yourself.

The Law of God that became just a grade

We ask the saint about the main thing: why do our children, raised in the church, leave it so easily?

“There is a kind of hypocritical self-deception in the educational system,” the pastor observes, “when the Law of God becomes nothing more than another subject on the school timetable. There is a teacher of religion, a prescribed curriculum, a grade to assess knowledge – and that is all. The fruits of such an approach to teaching are truly dreadful.”

He spoke about the gymnasium and its teachers, but his words strike directly at our own everyday church life. We have turned faith into an academic subject with a system of grades. Prayed, attended the service, kept the fast – credit earned. Acted stubbornly, wore the wrong clothes to church – failed and received a reprimand. A child quickly learns the rules of the game and masters the art of getting top marks in this subject without any inner commitment. We delight in our child's high marks and do not realize that we have given them a pressed flower instead of a living one: the petals are all in place, its shape perfectly intact, yet it has no fragrance and no life left in it.

Irritation under the mask of zeal for God

After all, we are doing it for the child’s salvation! We worry about their soul – is that not love?

The Kronstadt pastor answers in such a way that you want to look away from shame.

“Malice sometimes enters the heart under the pretext of zeal for the glory of God or for the good of one’s neighbor,” he writes in his diary. “Do not trust even your own zeal in such cases: it is false, or blind zeal.”

Here it becomes uncomfortable. It seems to us that we raise our voice at the teenager out of love for God. In reality, more often it's wounded parental pride speaking: he dared not to obey us, made us look like bad believers, and we punish the child for this, covering ourselves with piety. One may say all the right words. The trouble is that without love, even the most correct phrase reaches the child as a cold sound – he/she doesn't hear its meaning, only hears the irritation and recoils.

Children flee from coldness, not from Christ

And they leave the Church. They go to secular friends, to companies that we consider questionable. Why there?

There, in the secular world, despite all its imperfections, the teenager is accepted unconditionally. At home, however, love for them has been made conditional on following the rules. It turns out that the secular world gives the child warmth, while the believing family meets them with coldness and constant fault-finding.

The child chooses warmth, and who will cast a stone at him? It's important to hear one thing: he's not running from Christ, Whom we never showed him behind our lectures. He's running from the coldness of domestic pharisaism, mistakenly taking it for the true face of faith.

When a parent needs to be silent

What then should we do? Grab the child by the hand and forcibly drag him/her to the lectern?

Here the holy priest leaves us no loophole.

“In education, it is extremely harmful to develop only the intellect and the mind while neglecting the heart,” he writes. “It is the heart that most of all requires attention.” And he adds simply: “Above all, learn the language of love – the most living, expressive, and powerful language of all.”

It turns out that we'll have to start not with the child but with ourselves: to acknowledge our spiritual bankruptcy, to stop lecturing and keep silent. And perhaps, for the first time in many years, to ask the teenager for forgiveness – for having obscured God, replacing His living face with our own irritated one.

This is not a pedagogical technique with a guaranteed result. There are no guarantees at all that, after our words, the child will return to the Church. But it is often from a sense of parental helplessness that some changes for the better begin.

We came to righteous John for a recipe on how to correct a disobedient child, and we leave with with a rebuke of ourselves. It turns out that the change must happen not in the child's room but in our own heart, cooled by routine piety.

The last word remains with the saint.

“The life of the heart is love,” says Righteous John of Kronstadt, “and its death is malice and enmity. The Lord keeps us on earth precisely so that love may fully permeate our hearts: this is the purpose of our existence.”

The task of raising children is not to correct their behavior and insistently train them to attend services but to let our love finally penetrate where coldness has long settled. With this, and only with this, begins the path back to God, both for us and for our children.

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