Saint Nikolai Velimirovich: Teach your children to pray, and only then to speak foreign languages and play the piano!
An answer to a certain sorrowful mother, concerning her «wicked» children.
You complain, alas, about your very own children!
Besides their school, you paid private tutors to teach them to play the piano and to speak French. And now they have driven you to distraction with the piano. And when they speak French among themselves, they mock. You feel that they are speaking ill about you.
One Saturday you wished to go to the cemetery to hold a memorial service (Trisagion) for your eldest son who was killed in the war. You announced this to your children, but they did not follow you to your memorial service; instead, they got up from bed and sat down at the piano and began to play. –Children, you said to them, today we do not sing, today we have the memorial for the departed Mirko. –But look, we are playing him the funeral march! they answered, and they laughed loudly. And you went alone, as you write, from one
cemetery to another cemetery, weeping and lamenting the whole way. If only you had taken care in due time to obtain for your children a private tutor who would teach them to behave according to the law of God! You would now have children and not monkeys and parrots. For monkeys too learn to play the piano and parrots to speak, but an upbringing according to the law of God can be learned only by the sons and daughters of men.
It is said that once a certain mother, the wife of a boyar, came to Saint Seraphim of Sarov and complained to him that the tutors were not teaching her children the French language well, asking him what she should do.
Then that holy man said to her: «You, my dear little mother, teach your children better how to pray to God, and they will more easily learn French later».
To children, then, we must teach first that which is most important, because what we learn in our youth we do not easily forget.
Secondary things we can learn later as well, and even if they are forgotten, the loss is not great.
But if we are not taught the more important things, or are taught them insufficiently, or learn them and then forget them, then the sounds of the piano drown out prayer and the French pronunciation is used to mock one's parents!
May the good God be your helper. It is now difficult to give you advice.
When the heart grows murky, it is harder to cleanse it than even the most turbid torrent. Endure and pray to God for your children. With patience, little by little you may perhaps succeed in bringing them to shame, and with prayer you will ask the help of the Almighty that the heart of your children be cleansed.
But before all else, repent before Him, because it was above all your children whom you did not teach His law. Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth, for the Lord has spoken: I have begotten and raised up sons, but they have rejected me (Is. 1, 2).
By Saint Nikolai Velimirovich, Bishop of Ohrid, 1956. INSPIRED TEXTS OF ORTHODOX SPIRITUALITY, «ORTHODOXOS KYPSELI» PUBLICATIONS
