The Orthodox Family: From Death to Life

“Christ is the new life! The light and joy of the family. He is everything! Let us love Him with all the strength of our soul and, when problems press us, let us direct our inner man to God. Look! Christ is waiting for us, and as soon as we make a little room for Him in our heart, He enters at once, and then we have everything.

As far as family problems are concerned, it is not the removal of them altogether – which is impossible, but the way we face them – that matters. The despondent becomes sad, loses his mood and strength, while the hopeful moves forward. God takes care of even the smallest details of our lives. He is not uncaring of us, we are not alone in the world! He loves us very much, has us in mind at every moment and protects us. Let us understand this and fear nothing!” – Saint Porphyry the Kavsokalivit

“Zoraya ter Beek, a 28-year-old Dutch woman suffering from depression asked to be euthanized due to mental suffering” – is one of the news stories that attracted some international attention last month. It is not about the sudden death of a young person vaccinated against COVID so that he can keep his job, nor about the euthanasia of a terminal cancer patient who can no longer bear the pain. Young Zoraya is an ordinary Dutch girl who is depressed because she doesn’t know who she really is in a world without identity. He does not find his meaning, and perhaps he also suffers from a disorder of an organic nature that modern medicine, which boasts that it can completely replace God, cannot solve. In fact, the doctors encouraged the gesture by declaring themselves powerless. And others approved, so as not to deprive the poor girl of the right to be lawfully killed, after they had deprived her of the right to be somebody in this world and to enjoy life.

Her psychiatrist told her that he had tried everything and that “there is nothing more we can do for you. It will never be okay.” In other words, you only have euthanasia left. Even one of the members of the Dutch Euthanasia Committee in 2014-2015 concluded that “doctors and psychiatrists have come to consider euthanasia as a kind of acceptable option, when previously it was a last resort”. In those years (when he was a member of the committee) he saw the Dutch practice of euthanasia evolve from death as a last resort to death as a default option. “I see the phenomenon,” observes Stef Groenewoud, “especially in people with mental illness and especially young people with mental disorders, where the doctor seems to give up more easily than before.”

In fact, we are witnessing the biggest failure of humanity, both medicine and science, but especially humanity. The culture of death spread abundantly through all means of mass communication celebrates its victory by euthanizing Zoraya. In fact, this young woman is not an isolated case. In the Netherlands alone, around 9,000 people are euthanized every year, and believe us, this is just the beginning. Spain just legalized euthanasia in 2021 and, step by step, all countries in the so-called civilized world will follow this path, because we are all united by the same European legislation. In other words, more people are killed by euthanasia in the Netherlands alone than died in the past in a year during a war. In 2022, 5% of all people who died that year were euthanized.

If the legalization of the euthanasia of depressed people is to begin already, we believe that soon we will be able to have hundreds of thousands who will euthanize themselves in Europe alone, at the level of a year. This in the conditions where Europe can boast of a rate of over 7% of the population in chronic depression, that is 54 million inhabitants of Europe. If only 10% of them opted for Zoraya’s solution, which has been forbidden until now, you could see that we are not exaggerating at all when we say that the danger that looms over humanity in the future is not atomic war, but killing by euthanasia.

Why are people depressed?

In the age of mass media, the phenomenon of euthanasia of depressed young people may experience an explosive growth, as bioethicists in the Western world have come to fear. Young people are encouraged to commit suicide not only by doctors, the implicit option of any treatment, but also by social networks or the justifying narratives of the small screen, by debates, by human rights activists. Thus, we are not far from a mass contamination of depressed youth through the hypermedia coverage of such assisted suicides, a phenomenon named by the sociologist David Phillips since 1974 as the “Werther effect”.

Why are people depressed? Why do I despair? Of course, there are a thousand reasons, but one of the most important is that we live in a world that has forgotten God. More precisely, the world of our days, through social, economic, cultural and religious public policies, is increasingly moving away from the reasons that God placed in his creation. People are practically at war with God when, for example, they no longer recognize the immutable identity of male-born man and female-born woman. They mock God when they mock their bodies through sins against nature, when they cultivate pornography that transforms women or men into objects for the satisfaction of animal pleasures, when they fight against the family and all its values, wanting to legalize the concubinage of two homosexuals under the title of family. In fact, the entire public discourse that assaults us by all means is dominated by this culture of death, which here shows its signs in Zoraya’s decision to allow herself to be killed by euthanasia.

In what family would Zoraya have lived, in what faith was she born and lived because she wants nothing more than for her lover to scatter her ashes in a beautiful place in the forest? Let’s not think of her as a monster. She is a young woman who was born to life, but can no longer find this way in the jungle of today. He is a man like all of us, but he lacks something fundamentally, and that something we believe is the feeling of God’s unspeakable love for man.

Those who are familiar with the notions of the psychology of raising children know that when the mother or father, but especially the mother, or someone close to the family stays close to the child in the first years of life, it develops the so-called secure attachment. It is a feeling that accompanies you throughout your life, that someone who loves you, your mother or father, or anyone else, is there by your side to support you, to help you overcome difficulties and above all to protect you in the face of evil, when it endangers your life. Through everything these people who are with the child undertake, he acquires a sense of security.

Such a feeling, but much deeper, beyond the human psyche, is the one that God’s grace bestows on every person born on this earth. We all set out on the road with courage, with joy, with a desire to live and with great curiosity. The world given to us by birth is a wonder and we are happy to discover it. Yes, every man comes to earth with a lot of hope, it is the hope of a better thing that is promised somewhere in the foretaste of grace. Of course, the closer you get to God, this joy and peace becomes an all-time state, the basis of existence, no matter what happens to us in life. But if we move away, the loss of grace is felt as an incomprehensible pain for which we look for culprits, arguing with those around us, warring with the world, without realizing that our greatest enemy, who saddens our lives, it is none other than sin that separates us from the Good God.

There is no hopelessness in the world that is not the expression of this waning of grace. You can be twenty years old, but if your reserve of grace has diminished too much, you can no longer find any joy in living. And on the contrary, you can be eighty years old and enjoy life as in childhood, as I saw the old monks of the Holy Mountain. The blame is thrown on organic problems, social anxieties, even climate, but in fact, the problem is only one. I have known seriously ill people, as one can hardly imagine. A good friend could no longer move in bed at all at the age of thirty-five, and until her death at thirty-eight, she was our greatest source of optimism and joy in living. I’ve known people with holes in their belly, colonostomy and ileostomy at the same time who struggled for years to survive colon cancer at a young age. Death caught them all with great peace, and when we remember them, we feel for our part that now they really are in their “resting place”.

Antichrist “critical” thinking

So, it is not physical suffering, nor the other reasons invoked by the same murderous media or well-paid “experts” to give their opinion, supporting the culture of death, that is the cause, but this very sick world, which is increasingly riven by the called in the Holy Scripture “killer of men from the beginning”. In Europe, the lowest rates of depression are in countries like ours, with 1%, and in Bulgaria, with 2.7% of the population, compared to Iceland with 15.7% and Portugal with 12.2%. These countries also had the lowest vaccination rate, and they are also the ones where people still go to church and pray to God. But in our country this rate is also increasing, also because people are directed to a greater extent on the paths of death than on those of life. Someone close to me, a student in Bucharest, told me last year that their critical thinking teacher is a great defender and promoter of euthanasia. But not only euthanasia, but also abortion, gender identity and scientific or non-scientific atheism. Did you know that the subject “critical thinking” was introduced in most humanities faculties in Romania? Why does critical thinking have to be antichrist? Why does critical thinking have to support the culture of death? Doesn’t this mean that the very public policies directed from somewhere, from the center, let’s say Brussels, cultivate death? And it is about that death that leaves man no chance for salvation, death by suicide.

Let us not be surprised where the world has reached today, because this is what the disciples of the evil one who rule it want, beyond “big finance”! Let us be surprised when we see a family with many children, a family of people with books who have retired to the countryside, working hard for every day, but who enjoy nature and the presence of God in their lives. They should be our role models, not actors or social media stars. The virtual world cannot be associated with life, because God did not make it, but it falsifies the real one. The more we understand that this world is only contaminating our soul with the infection of distance from God, the more we have a chance at life. Otherwise, our life will be more and more sad, and for the young people of the new generation who have come to live too little in the real world, euthanasia will become a solution.

In the Church, but with patience and hope, in all things according to grace, joy and peace will never decrease, because God Himself is the source of life and whoever abides in Him will have life and will have it abundantly cf. John 10: 10.

Orthodox Family Partnership

The MAI issue of the “Familia Ortodoxă” magazine is available both in print and online digital format.

“Orthodox Family” Magazine

Number: 184

Theme of the issue: Let’s conquer death!

Pages: 80+4

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