NOTES for Mat 20:1-16
In mastering a science, everything is based on many years of labor, constant labor, labor that accumulates knowledge in you. You cannot understand higher mathematics without studying arithmetic and elementary algebra. You cannot understand quantum mechanics without studying the basics of optics, and so on. The same applies to any sphere of human activity, whether a craft, an art, or a technology. This makes up our life, and we become used to such an order. But this structure of existence is very earthly. The law of gradual growth is extremely harsh: if you do not meet a series of formal parameters, you are not needed. This is inevitable, because here it is not the person that matters, but the progress of the field.
And there is an opposite law, the law of love, love for the person. Here everything is different. Instead of gradual accumulation, there are sudden revelations that turn one's whole life upside down. Here such paradoxes can occur, one of which is described by Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh, when yesterday's seminarians asked him how they could regain the sense of God they had had when entering the seminary. In other words, everything had happened to them in the opposite direction: instead of the gradual growth that was expected, there was a feeling of distance from God. Because there is no method for coming to God, however many methods may be found in the writings of the saints. God reveals Himself to whom He wants, and in the way He Himself finds necessary.
At the turn of the century there was a happiness helped along by the misfortune of the Soviet era: to see human souls that found God only in old age. And how much wondrous purity there was in them, how much burning ardor, how much truth...