"My son, keep your father's commandment, and do not reject your mother's teaching..." When we were little, we sometimes thought: when I grow up, I will not have to obey Mom and Dad; I will be an adult, I will do what I want, and I will eat a whole mountain of candy at once. Then we grow up, and we no longer want a mountain of candy; we do not even want one piece, but we want something else. And again it turns out that we cannot. So where is that vaunted freedom?..

Here is what the well-known Protestant thinker of the middle of the last century, Karl Barth, writes: "freedom can be defined as a person's independence from any inner compulsion." In reality it turns out to be the opposite: it is not what cuts us off from the object of our desire that deprives us of freedom, but this very desire, arising within us, that becomes the cause of our suffering and deprives us of the blessed freedom to be ourselves. This puts everything in its place. But still, what are we to do with these endless external limits, all the way to the limit of the very span of our life? Okudzhava once put it wonderfully: "The whole world is made of limits, / So happiness will not drive us mad". Ironic, funny? In fact, very deep.

Here is what Barth writes: "The fact that limits are given to us does not testify to the imperfection of the world; limits are not the chains of an evil fate. We are given the freedom to know what we are permitted to know, to accomplish what we are permitted to accomplish. In this freedom is God's will, God's blessing to His creation." But why was it God's will that we should suffer from the unrealized state of our desires? So that happiness would not drive us mad. The ancient Romans also said: "whom Jupiter wishes to destroy, he deprives of reason." But God certainly does not want to destroy us.

"From my youth many passions war against me,
but You Yourself defend me and save me, my Savior"
(Antiphon, Tone 4)

In our age of permissive morals, the cautionary tale of the treachery of another man's wife may seem naive. Yet it is worth considering that adultery is not portrayed by chance as an image of evil that goes beyond ordinary human relations, and that apostasy is associated precisely with this sin. Nor is the matter simply that we have too readily agreed to call something else “love.” It is no coincidence that the woman hunting for young men has covered her bed with Egyptian linen, recalling the land where the people were enslaved. Whoever falls under her power becomes a slave, senselessly squandering his spiritual strength in bondage to his own illusions. We should use the word “love,” one of the descriptions of God, with greater care...