In an interview with TASS, on the occasion of the January 7 Orthodox Christmas, Russian Patriarch Kirill noted that Russia had gained strength from the present crisis. The interview began with a general discussion of the revival of “traditional values” then led into a discussion of the effects of the present crisis. Kirill said: “There is such a text from the Holy Scriptures: ‘wisdom does not enter into an evil soul, nor does it dwell in a body guilty of sin.’ What does this mean? This means: in order to accept the grace of God, in order to accept a miracle, you need to be ready for it. Were we ready for this in Soviet times? No. Were we ready in the post-Soviet era, when all these ‘turbulences’ happened, when our consciousness was switched to something completely different? Now is a special time, I call it a time of concentration.”
“Russia has really gained strength, material, intellectual, scientific, military, a lot of strength. But Russia has undoubtedly gained spiritual strength; it has become the support of Orthodoxy throughout the world. Our church not only plays some kind of cultural role and is located outside the fields of public life, there, on the periphery serving pensioners, it is at the center of people’s lives.
“The Lord does not send the people trials that they are not able to endure,” Kirill said. “Even the Great Patriotic War, which was accompanied by enormous human suffering, was not capable of destroying the lives of our people. Likewise, the trials that befall us today, they, of course, hurt, but they are not capable of killing. They are unable to shake us as a people. They are not capable of crushing our worldview, which directly includes love for the Motherland and readiness to defend it.
