Happy New Year in a Christian way. Happy New Year greetings from Patriarch Kirill

When preparing cards for the New Year, you go through dozens of New Year greetings - in poetry, in SMS, in prose. And all of them are superficial - Happy New Year, new happiness in your personal life and at work. We invite you to think a little about the upcoming New Year and read deep and wise words about the holiday. It is possible that they will help you write your real Happy New Year greetings!

Looking back at the past, we see how much we failed to accomplish during this year: due to powerlessness, forgetfulness, inertia, and our bad will. And before entering a new time, let us repent before God, admit our mistakes and collect life experience from last year that will allow us not to repeat them and not make other similar mistakes. The whole meaning of life is to love God, to love one’s neighbor, and for everything to be done only in the name of this love.

Happy New Year greetings from Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh

What is the most important time in life?

An old tale says that a certain wise man was asked: “What is the most important time in life? Who is the most significant person in your life? What is the most important thing to do?” And the answer was:

– The most important time in life is the present moment, because the past has flown away and the future has not yet risen; the most significant person in your life is the one who is now in front of you and to whom you can do good or evil; and the most important thing in life is in this moment, to give this person everything that can be given to him...

Let us enter the new year with this sense of responsibility and inspiration; let us enter this new year with the faith that the power of God is made perfect in weakness: in our weakness, as it was made perfect in the weakness of the saints, who were strong only by the power of God; Let us believe that all things are possible for us through the Lord Jesus who strengthens us...

And on the eve of the New Year, I would like to repeat the words spoken at the beginning of the war by King George VI to his people: “I asked the guard who stood at the door of the New Year:

-Give me light so that I can confidently enter safely into the unknown...

And he told me:

“Put your hand in the hand of God - it will be better for you than light, and more faithful than the known path”...

Let us also enter with such trust and with such faith in New Year; and when we pray that the Lord bless him and us, we will turn our prayers to Saint Stephen of Sourozh, whose memory we commemorate now, on the first Sunday after the calendar day designated for the celebration of his memory; let him be that guard, that goalkeeper who will reveal the new year to us, who will enter it with us and bless us, so that, like him, we make this year a year of God’s will and grace.

There are many crooked paths left behind

We entered this year as one enters a boundless snowy plain: not a single spot, not a single trace, everything was snow-white. And when we look around, we see that we have laid many, many crooked paths. And we must repent of this before God, but repent creatively: not only to regret what was wrong, but having learned to enter the new year with new wisdom, with new understanding.

But besides this - how much bright and good there was in the past year, how much good people gave us, how much good God did to us! And before entering the new year, let us thank both God and people, bless those through whom so much bright and good things in life have come to us. The fruit of life, in the end, is only love and gratitude, joy and humility. Let us draw from the past year all the gratitude that we can extract from it, gratitude to the kind, gentle people who were merciful to us, and gratitude to God, and with this we will enter the new year.

The New Year is creeping before us again as an opportunity as yet untouched by anything. Let's bring inspiration into this year, let's enter this year in order to creatively walk the straight path throughout the year. Let's walk together, let's walk together, let's walk boldly and firmly. We will meet difficult things, and we will also meet joyful things: the Lord gives us both. Difficult - because it is the dark, bitter, painful that the Lord sends to us in order to bring light, joy, and silence into it; and light - so that we too can join the light, be children of light.

Let us walk together, carefully, without forgetting each other, and then by the end of the year, when we look back, it will turn out that one straight path has been laid, that no one has fallen on the edge of the road, no one is forgotten, no one is bypassed, and that many have to our small community and through us - throughout the world - love, light, joy. Amen.

What is happiness?

When we celebrate the New Year, we greet each other with the words: “Happy New Year, happy new happiness!” And often we think of happiness only as material well-being, about affectionate, happy relationships in the family and with friends, and we forget that happiness can sometimes be demanding and strict. One Russian poet defined it this way:

What is happiness? On life's journey,

Where your duty tells you to go;

Don't know enemies, don't measure barriers -

Love, hope and believe.

And if we think this way about the happiness that we wish for ourselves and others, then we will see that the first thing that is offered to us is love. But love is both a jubilant joy and an ultimate feat. Just like jubilant joy lies in giving and receiving the most precious things from your loved one, and at the same time being ready to give your life for the loved and unloved. When I talk about the unloved, I think about those whom we do not love with natural love, but whom God loves so much that He gave His Only Begotten Son to die so that they could be saved.

Let’s think about what love means as rejoicing, love as a cross, and let’s enter the New Year with the intention of loving and hoping—hoping for everything. As the Apostle Paul says, love hopes for everything and believes in everything; love never fails. We hope for everything: for the correction of the person who hates us, and even for the correction of ourselves. He hopes that God will give us time to correct ourselves and will give others time to come to their senses and become a new person in the image of Jesus Christ who created him and saved him. And then we can say: yes, we believe - we believe in God’s love, we believe in the endless possibilities of every person, we believe that even we, in our weakness, in our unworthiness, are capable of being Christ’s disciples.

We are entering a new year. Looking back at the past year, we see so much terrible in the world and so much bitterness in the lives of many, many people, including ourselves. And so, entering this new year, let us bring to God sincere, heartfelt repentance for the fact that we turned out to be unworthy of His disciples. He loved us to death - and this was not enough to change our lives. And if you look at what the world was like during the last year or two thousand years, which have almost passed, it hurts! Think that in a little less than two thousand years, there have been about three thousand wars of some Christians against others, not to mention how much blood was shed by people who are not our same blood, not of the same faith. Did the Lord send us into the world for this purpose, or did He commission us to bring the Good News of new life? And now let’s think about what we did to God’s creation, how we disfigured the earth, how we desecrated it, how we disfigured all human relationships - both personal and public.

Looking at the past year, I think with pain in my heart about how I turned out to be a traitor to Christ, how I turned out to be a traitor before each of you and all of you and many, many other people. I ask you, pray that the Lord will give me time and shake my soul into repentance, and that this will happen to each of us, that each of us will be reborn. On the one hand, from horrors about the past, on the other hand, from rejoicing that we are so loved by God, and that it would be so easy to love each other, serve one another, be attentive, strict and affectionate at the same time. And let us enter this new year with the intention of becoming truly disciples of Christ and loving each other with our lives, with all our lives. Amen.

Happy New Year greetings from Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann

What should you make a wish for the New Year?

There is an ancient custom: on New Year’s Eve, when the clock strikes at midnight, you make wishes, turn to the unknown future with a dream, and expect something necessary and cherished from it.

And here it is again New Year. What do we wish for ourselves, for others, for everyone, for everyone? Where does our hope go?

It is aimed at one word that never dies - happiness. Happy New Year with a new happiness! This happiness is addressed to each of us in our own way, personally. But the very belief that it can happen, that you can wait for it, hope for it, is a common faith. When is a person truly happy?

Now, after centuries of experience, after everything that we have learned about a person, it is no longer possible to identify this happiness with one thing, external: money, health, success, which we know that it does not coincide with this always mysterious, always elusive concept - happiness.

Yes, it is clear that physical contentment is happiness. But not complete. That money is happiness, but also torment. That success is happiness, but also fear. And the amazing thing is that the greater this external happiness, the more fragile it is, the stronger the fear of losing it, not saving it, missing it. Maybe that’s why we talk about new happiness at midnight on New Year’s Eve, because the “old” never really succeeds, because it always lacks something. And again we look forward, with prayer, dreams and hope...

Winter day. photosight.ru

My God, how long ago the Gospel words were spoken about a man who became rich and built new barns for his harvest and decided that he had everything, all the guarantees of happiness. And he calmed down. And that same night it was said to him: “Mad! This night your soul will be taken from you; who will get what you have prepared?

And, of course, here, in this latent knowledge that nothing can be held back anyway, that decay and the end are still ahead is the poison that poisons our small and limited happiness.

This is probably why the custom arose - on New Year’s Eve, the clock begins to strike at midnight, make noise, shout, fill the world with roar and noise. It is out of fear to hear the striking of the clock in the silence and loneliness, this inexorable voice of fate. One blow, second, third, and so inexorably, evenly, scary - until the end. And nothing can be changed, nothing can be stopped.

So these are the two truly deep, indestructible poles of human consciousness: fear and happiness, horror and dream. That new happiness that we dream of on New Year's Eve is happiness that would completely pacify, dissolve and defeat fear.

Happiness, in which there would not be this horror, nesting somewhere in the depths of consciousness and from which we protect ourselves all the time - with wine, worries, noise - but whose silence conquers all noise.

"Madman!" Yes, in essence, the undying dream of happiness in a world stricken by fear and death is insane. And at the top of his culture, a person knows this. What sad truth and sadness the words of the great lover of life Pushkin sound: “There is no happiness in the world”! What lofty sadness pervades all true art! Only there, below, the crowd is noisy and bawling and thinks that happiness will come from noise and muddy fun.

No, it comes only when a person looks truthfully, courageously and deeply into life, when he removes the covers of lies and self-deception from it, when he looks fear in the face, when he finally learns that happiness, genuine, lasting, undying happiness - in a meeting with Truth, Love, with that infinitely high and pure that man called and calls God.

“In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And in this life there is light, and darkness cannot embrace it.” And this means: not to be consumed by fear and horror, not to be dissolved in sadness and despair.

Oh, if only people, in their fussy thirst for instant happiness, would find the strength to stop, think, and peer into the depths of life! If only they could hear what words, what voice are eternally addressed to them at this depth. If only they knew what true happiness is!

“And no one will take your joy away from you!..” But isn’t it about the kind of joy that can no longer be taken away that we dream when the clock strikes?.. But how rarely do we reach this depth. How for some reason we are afraid of it and put everything off: not today, but tomorrow, the day after tomorrow I will deal with the main and eternal! Not today. There is still time. But there is so little time! A little more - and the arrow will approach the fatal line. Why put it off?

After all, here, someone is standing nearby: “Here I am standing at the door and knocking.” And if we were not afraid to look at Him, we would see such light, such joy, such completeness that we would probably understand what this elusive, mysterious word happiness means.

Protopresbyter Alexander Shmeman

Happy New Year greetings from St. Barsanuphius of Optina

With joys and sorrows

Happy New Year to all of you gathered here. I congratulate you on the joys that the Lord will send you in the coming year.

I congratulate you on the sorrows that will inevitably visit you this year: maybe today, maybe tomorrow, or soon. However, do not be embarrassed and do not be afraid of sorrows. Sorrows and joys are closely connected with each other. This seems strange to you, but remember the words of the Savior: “ When a woman gives birth, she has sorrow, because her year is come: and when the child gives birth, who does not remember the sorrow for the joy that a man was born into the world"(John 16:21). Day follows night, and night follows day, inclement weather - a bucket; So both sorrow and joy replace one another.

The Apostle Paul spoke a terrible word against those who do not suffer any punishment from God: if you remain unpunished, you are illegitimate children. There is no need to be discouraged, let those who do not believe in God be discouraged; For those, of course, grief is heavy, since they have nothing except earthly pleasures. But believers should not be discouraged: through sorrows they receive the right to sonship, without which it is impossible to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

“The youths were educated in piety, heedless of the evil command, not afraid of the fiery rebuke, but standing in the midst of the flame, belted; Fathers, God, blessed are you."

(Irmos of the Nativity of Christ, tone 1, song 7.)

Tribulation is a fiery rebuke, or test, but we should not be afraid of them, but, like the reverend youths, sing of God in sorrows, believing that they are sent by God for our salvation.

May the Lord save us all and bring us into the Kingdom of the Unstoppable Light! Amen.

You have read the article. Read also.

When preparing cards for the New Year, you go through dozens of New Year greetings - in poetry, in SMS, in prose. And all of them are superficial - Happy New Year, new happiness in your personal life and at work. We invite you to think a little about the coming new year and read deep and wise words about the holiday. It is possible that they will help you write your real Happy New Year greetings!

What is the most important time in life?

And on the eve of the New Year, I would like to repeat the words spoken at the beginning of the war by King George VI to his people: “I asked the guard who stood at the door of the New Year:

-Give me light so that I can confidently enter safely into the unknown...

And he told me:

“Put your hand in the hand of God - it will be better for you than light, and more faithful than the known path”...

Let us also enter the New Year with such trust and faith; and when we pray that the Lord bless him and us, we will turn our prayers to Saint Stephen of Sourozh, whose memory we commemorate now, on the first Sunday after the calendar day designated for the celebration of his memory; let him be that guard, that goalkeeper who will reveal the new year to us, who will enter it with us and bless us, so that, like him, we make this year a year of God’s will and grace.

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh

Happy New Year to all of you gathered here. I congratulate you on the joys that the Lord will send you in the coming year.

I congratulate you on the sorrows that will inevitably visit you this year: maybe today, maybe tomorrow, or soon. However, do not be embarrassed and do not be afraid of sorrows. Sorrows and joys are closely connected with each other. This may seem strange to you, but remember the words of the Savior: “When a woman is in labor, she has sorrow, because her year is come: but when the child gives birth, he who does not remember the sorrow for the joy that a man was born into the world” (John 16:21). Day follows night, and night follows day, inclement weather - a bucket; So both sorrow and joy replace one another.

“The youths were educated in piety, heedless of the evil command, not afraid of the fiery rebuke, but standing in the midst of the flame, belted; Fathers, God, blessed are you." (Irmos of the Nativity of Christ, tone 1, song 7.)

(Irmos of the Nativity of Christ, tone 1, song 7.)

Tribulation is a fiery rebuke, or test, but we should not be afraid of them, but, like the reverend youths, sing of God in sorrows, believing that they are sent by God for our salvation.

Venerable Barsanuphius of Optina

There are many crooked paths left behind

We entered this year as one enters a boundless snowy plain: not a single spot, not a single trace, everything was snow-white. And when we look around, we see that we have laid many, many crooked paths. And we must repent of this before God, but repent creatively: not only regret what was wrong, but having learned to enter the new year with new wisdom, with new understanding.

The New Year is creeping before us again as an opportunity as yet untouched by anything. Let's bring inspiration into this year, let's enter this year in order to creatively walk the straight path throughout the year. Let's walk together, let's walk together, let's walk boldly and firmly. We will meet difficult things, and we will also meet joyful things: the Lord gives us both. Difficult - because it is the dark, bitter, painful that the Lord sends to us in order to bring light, joy, silence into it; and light - so that we too can join the light, be children of the light.

What should you make a wish for the New Year?

There is an ancient custom: on New Year’s Eve, when the clock strikes at midnight, you make wishes, turn to the unknown future with a dream, and expect something necessary and cherished from it.

And here it is again New Year. What do we wish for ourselves, for others, for everyone, for everyone? Where does our hope go?

And, of course, here, in this latent knowledge that nothing can be held back anyway, that decay and the end are still ahead is the poison that poisons our small and limited happiness.

Protopresbyter Alexander Shmeman

What is happiness?

What is happiness? On life's journey,

Where your duty tells you to go;

Don't know enemies, don't measure barriers -

Love, hope and believe.

Let's think about what love means as rejoicing, love as a cross, and let's enter the New Year with the intention of loving and hoping - hoping for everything. As the Apostle Paul says, love hopes for everything and believes in everything; love never fails. We hope for everything: for the correction of the person who hates us, and even for the correction of ourselves. He hopes that God will give us time to correct ourselves and will give others time to come to their senses and become a new person in the image of Jesus Christ who created him and saved him. And then we can say: yes, we believe - we believe in God’s love, we believe in the endless possibilities of every person, we believe that even we, in our weakness, in our unworthiness, are capable of being Christ’s disciples.

We are entering a new year. Looking back at the past year, we see so much terrible in the world and so much bitterness in the lives of many, many people, including ourselves. And so, entering this new year, let us bring to God sincere, heartfelt repentance for the fact that we turned out to be unworthy of His disciples. He loved us to death - and this was not enough to change our lives. And if you look at what the world was like during the last year or two thousand years, which have almost passed, how painful it is! Think that in a little less than two thousand years, there have been about three thousand wars of some Christians against others, not to mention how much blood was shed by people who are not our same blood, not of the same faith. Did the Lord send us into the world for this purpose, or did He commission us to bring the Good News of new life? And now let’s think about what we did to God’s creation, how we disfigured the earth, how we desecrated it, how we disfigured all human relationships - both personal and public.

I wish you all a Happy New Year
God's blessing!
Peace, meekness of consciousness,
Angelic patience to you.

May it bring it into your souls
Lord joy, purity!
You will definitely feel it
Grace and kindness.

Happy New Year,
May the Lord protect you from troubles,
And following you through life
Let the good angel fly.

May God give you goodness and peace,
God grant bread on the table,
I wish you happiness in the New Year
I am to all people on Earth.

Happy New Year!
May the Lord protect you from troubles.
He will not give way to adversity,
He will protect sorrows!

Love your neighbors tenderly,
Help them always.
Take care of faith in your heart,
Let it shine like a star!

Happy New Year!
I wish you warmth,
May you be protected by God
May good luck come to you!

Live with faith in your hearts,
Be happy always.
Give to others
Lots of light and goodness!

Happy New Year,
I want to be closer to God,
Prosperity and light,
So that the soul is warmed with warmth.

May the Guardian protect
Let the bad things go away.
Let joy penetrate the soul,
Faith will save you from the cold.

May the New Year be happy,
May the Lord bless you,
Let all doubts be dispelled
And it will strengthen your faith.

I wish you health, peace,
Warm and kind smiles.
So that everything you wish happens
And the children rejoiced!

Happy New Year, dears,
Be happy always
May the Almighty protect you all,
Trouble will not come to your house,
Blessings to you, wisdom, patience,
Don't hold evil in your heart
From our hearts we wish you,
May life be long!

May the Lord surround you in the New Year
Love and care to all of you,
Let only happiness reign in the family,
And let all the work go on,
May the angel accompany you
And protects from adversity,
The year will be kind, peaceful, bright
For those who want it!

Thank you Lord for the New Year,
That we enter it healthy,
That it is possible for us to live without hassle,
That we find love in life.

May the Angel protect us all
From evil people, problems and misfortunes,
Let children's laughter be loud at home,
And we all lived without need and in happiness.

New Year is knocking on the window, happy holidays, dear ones,
We want to wish you, dear people.
May the Lord turn away sorrows,
So that you meet only joy.

Let him fill his heart with the Spirit,
But you can feel faith with your soul, not with your ear.
So that you throw off your sin like weights,
And all the people in the world were happy.

Let you drink a big sip of truth,
The Great Creator gave the source.
And see only the best examples in life,
So as not to lose precious faith.

Our sad planet, so beautifully created by God and so badly damaged by us humans, has completed another full revolution around the Sun. The New Year is coming, and the numbers are ready to shift on all calendars without exception. "With new happiness!" - you will soon say to each other, popping champagne corks, trying on all kinds of smiles on your faces - from sincere and natural to forced and routine - warming yourself with the hope of happiness, no matter how necessary, just as doubtful.

Let me say a few words about the holiday, and as you prepare to listen to these words, sit down for a moment.

Let me, first of all, remind you that nothing new awaits a person in the case when the person himself does not intend to change and renew himself. Such a person, who does not change for the better, is doomed to eternal vanity and offensive monotony. Not inheriting the wisdom of Solomon, he will still repeat with Solomon: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity” (Eccl. 1:1). This poor man will be sad, because he was not created for vanity, but he will seek salvation from melancholy in noisy madness, which will only intensify the melancholy, and life will obviously become absurd.

If something truly new comes to a person (and in this case only the grace and wisdom bestowed by God deserve the name new), then the person himself must be prepared for the newness, otherwise not joy, but destruction awaits him. “They do not put new wine into old wineskins,” says the Gospel. If not, if they nevertheless pour new grace into old containers, then the wineskins break and the wine spills. The inevitable bursting of old wineskins by new wine is the tragedy of a person who craves novelty, but does not want to renew himself and, therefore, is doomed to an old, dusty, ugly life.

We could, if we wish, provide death statistics for the past year. Even on the scale of one city, these figures will be formidable and sobering. Moreover, these figures are formidable on a national or global scale. But those who died in the past year, if not all, then very, very many, greeted the beginning of the year with the clink of glasses, words about “new happiness,” and an all-night vigil near the blue screen, feeding souls food that was both useless and nauseating. It was not old age alone that tore them out of the world, like a vegetable from a garden. Many were forcibly taken from this world by an evil human hand, a sudden incurable illness, an electric shock, a fall from a height, a road accident, a terrorist attack, alcohol, food or drug poisoning. How many people this year will greet January 1st with the hope of a miracle, but will be forced to leave the world and its flattering lures until the next December 31st? Where will we end up? Who can confidently say about himself that the future is open to him and does not threaten him?

Perhaps you think that I decided to upset you and ruin the holiday? Due to your tendency to generalize, perhaps you dare to repeat in your hearts the words of others about the darkness of Christianity or about “opium for the people”? Don't rush to conclusions. Otherwise, you will have to scold the firefighters and doctors who, rushing to the call, turn on the siren. The siren interferes with sleep, its sound is alarming, but this sound is necessary, and it would be bad for a doctor going to a dying patient to the sounds of boogie-woogie.

Safety precautions are studied by those who climb the mountains and those who descend into the depths of the waters with scuba gear. Anyone who carries a weapon or operates dangerous equipment must be extremely serious and alert and must undergo and understand safety training. No one will reproach them for being overly cautious, no one will laugh at their foresight. And only life as such, life taken as a whole, frivolous people want to present as a merry stroll and a journey for pleasure. No, that's not how things are.

You cannot drive while drunk, and you must have a first aid kit and a fire extinguisher in the car. Is it really possible to live life in the fume of illusions and the drunkenness of sins, without fear of fire and without using medicines and antidotes? Isn't this crazy? Madness, and genuine and unalloyed. We would like you to be spiritually sober when setting out on a new stage of life’s journey, stock up on a fire extinguisher against hellish fire and a first aid kit against mental illnesses.

I understand that my words do not correspond well with your pre-holiday mood. I admit that many have already turned off the TV or changed the channel. But for those who have not changed the channel and continue to sit at the screen with unopened champagne and an open mouth, I will say: “Find chapter 13 in the Gospel of Luke.” It describes a conversation between the owner of the vineyard and the winegrower, that is, God the Father and the Son. The father says that he has a certain fig tree in the vineyard, that is, in the world, which has not produced fruit for a long time. “Cut it down: what does it occupy the land for,” says God. The fig tree, dear countrymen, is every person who does not bear any spiritual fruit. At the root of such a tree lies a threatening ax, which John the Baptist spoke about. What does the Son answer to the Father? “Mister! Leave it this year too, while I dig it up and cover it with manure, and see if it bears fruit. If not, then next year you will cut it down” (Luke 13: 8-9).

Here's a worthy read for the New Year! Here is worthy food for the heart and thoughts. We are sterile and can be cut down at any time. But the Savior of the world, Jesus Christ, is the High Priest, Who entered “into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us” (Heb. 9:24). He intercedes for us. Perhaps, for the sake of humility, He covers us with manure, that is, he humbles us and cures us of pride. He is not indifferent to us, he worries about our eternal fate. And therefore the Father endures people, but he does not endure until the end, but for a while, waiting for correction. Anyone who remains voluntarily deaf, cynically mocking and uncorrected, let him laugh now and wait for the hour when he will have to cry out and weep. That hour will be truly terrible!

Well, now, when the necessary word has been said, and inexorable time moves the hands of the clock, when the New Year has already walked across the planet, visiting country after country from East to West, it’s time for us to celebrate. Turn up the volume of the TV, let into your homes, if you really want, an army of talkers, clowns and mockingbirds. Drink and eat what God has sent, give each other gifts. Tomorrow, many of you will have a truly difficult day: sleeping until lunch, a disgusting taste in your mouth, a feeling of incomprehensible sadness, as if you were deceived. Some will wake up in an unfamiliar place. For some, it will be useless to piece together fragments of memories. It will be a pity to throw away the remaining food and tasteless to eat. In short, for many of you everything will be exactly as it should be for people longing for “new happiness” in the New Year.

But read the 13th chapter of the Gospel of Luke. This is one of the passages of the very words about which it is said that heaven and earth will pass away, but these words will not pass away. These words carry in themselves the true newness that is coming and about which it is said: “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no more sea” (Rev. 21: 1). Do you hear? “A new heaven and a new earth” is what is truly new. Until then, “there is nothing new under the sun” (Eccl. 1:9).

It might be useful to read: