Nun Barbara (Khopovo)
The near total ignorance of the sin of suicide among contemporary young people is shocking. "You mean it's a sin to kill yourself? I can understand about killing someone else, but life now is so difficult and ugly.”
These are the thoughtless words of the young. One young woman who had been beset with grief recently admitted to me: "I wanted to poison myself. I have no one particularly near or dear to me on this earth. I just wanted to go be with my mother and my sister who died of tuberculosis at an early age. She was like an angel." I replied: "After committing the terrible sin of suicide were you really expecting to meet your deeply religious mother who patiently bore her cross to the end of her life, and your meek, angelic sister in the next life and to be with them in that blessed place?"
