After Communion, cancer patients are healed from cancer, but still in the temple — not with a foot!
That Communion lifts a man from his bed, there is no doubt at all! And as a miracle, such examples in the stories do not distinguish at all. The miracle for me in these stories is the human reaction to the miracle of healing. They took you out of your grave and you still don’t believe God. That’s the miracle!
“Aunt Valya, my former neighbor, always went to the hospital and called me to take communion. She did not go to the temple, could not stand the service. One day, she, already in adulthood, came to the temple and stood all the service, without leaving her seat. The soles of her feet then burned, and after that she could not bring herself at least once again to come to the service.
«Is it possible to embrace the immense?» I asked her then. In the Church, it is impossible to run for a “race”, calculated for a lifetime, like a hundred meters. Just as it is impossible to grasp God with a broken heart and to judge the Church with a passion-stricken mind.
In the hospital, said Aunt Valya, the father himself must go. Every year the most severe bronchitis laid her in a hospital bed, and every time, only communing the Holy Mysteries of Christ, she returned to life. So it was for several years in a row, 3-4 times exactly, and in the end failed the heart, right on the Annunciation.
In one of these visits he took with him an extra piece of spare gifts. I ask the nurse, “Do you have anyone who is hopelessly ill, but only to have a person in your mind?” I think, “I’ll be singing it anyway, maybe I can prepare someone.”
With this case, we have a bad situation in the hospital, people do not want to die in a Christian way. Confession and communion are postponed for such a “because” that I have only to open my hands. They are afraid to invite Father, they say, bad. If you invite, you will die, and without him, you may get out, and with the priest — you are definitely not a resident in this world!
Sometimes you hear that the refusal to take communion is motivated by the fact that we disdain, they say, with one spoon. An old grandmother, over 80 years old, suffers from oncology, suffers from dropsy, decomposes during life. “Mother, let us invite your father, you need to repent, accept the holy thing.” «No,» he says, «I’m disdainful of one spoon.»
Take me to the room. In it separately, in order not to embarrass other patients, a person quietly died. A woman. Called her, I remember, Nina. The look is indifferent to everything, the voice is barely heard. My sister says to me, «She has bedsores to the bone.» I saw them later, Nina showed me. Back from the tailbone to the waist, and on the heels, like stripes from a wide officer belt. Since the person was fading away, she had nothing entertaining: there were no newspapers, no books, no TV, there were no small icons on the nightstand that were usual in such places.
I asked permission to sit next to Nina and asked her, “Do you believe in Christ?” She said she had heard a lot about him, but didn’t know exactly. I told her about Christ, about His love for man, about the church He founded and for which He died. She listened attentively to me, and when I asked her if she would like to receive Holy Communion (and it was impossible to delay the offer, no one knew: would she live to see tomorrow?), Nina agreed. He truly repented and repented. Before communion, I warned her that God was free to leave her on earth, but she had to promise Him that the rest of her life would be spent in the temple. Nina promised that if she survived, she would live a completely different life, and she cried.
Then I came to her again, brought the gospel. When I entered the room, I saw Nina standing by the window. Surprisingly, after Communion, her condition completely changed. She suddenly and sharply recovered, all she had to do was remove her bedsores and go home. Our doctors could not explain the reason for such an incomprehensible recovery actually doomed to death. A miracle happened before their eyes.
Since then I have met Nina several times in the village, and never in the temple. I reminded her of her promise before Communion, but every time she found a reason why she still hadn’t found the time to even go to the temple. For almost a year she reported to me about her successes in the country: “I have three men, father, I need to feed them all, so I work hard!”
Wherever we met, Nina always welcomed me. I hugged and kissed in plain sight, which was obviously wrong (to greet the priest in this way), but I did not show the sight, in order to remind of her words given to God on her deathbed.
“Do you not understand that if you do not keep your promise, you will die?” Nina always joked about my words, until, late in the autumn, after all the agricultural work was completed, she told me firmly and definitely:
“I will never come to your temple. Haven’t you figured that out yet? I do not believe in you or your Christ.
I don’t know how Nina lives or if she lives at all. But I never met her in the village again. I have never seen them again after those words…
priest Alexander Dyachenko
The Holy Land Charitable Foundation
Soul investment!
Orthodox stories from life
