It is now customary to treat the superstitions prevailing among parishioners negatively-condescendingly – they say, they have already explained a hundred times that there is no difference over which shoulder and with which hand to pass a candle, and not to eat watermelons for the Beheading of the head of John the Baptist – a strange way to honor this event of the church calendar, but once someone is more comfortable to live with such beliefs, that's fine. We can see what the superstitious fascination with the Young Star can grow into later, for example, by the story developing in the Urals with the former schema-hegumen Sergiy Romanov. And in general, who will count how many people who tried to find their way to the church threshold were scared away by seemingly church-bound people who began to broadcast to those who came to the temple about another superstition as the ultimate truth…

Being outside the Church before, I could not imagine that there could be superstitions among the Orthodox. "How can you believe in them?" I thought. But when I came to Orthodoxy, I realized that not everything is so simple. Church superstitions, beliefs in something futile, in vain, spread so fast that you don't have time to keep track of them.

The ever - memorable Patriarch Alexy II said: "Without real faith, a person wanders in life as in the dark and often creates a lot of false landmarks for himself: various omens, prophetic dreams, fortune-telling, omens. If God wants to reveal something to you, He will do it in such a way that you will immediately understand. And when a person invents for himself a lot of some kind of rules and prohibitions based on nothing, these are pure superstitions, even if they happen within church walls. What they just don't come up with! Which hand should pass the candle. Or – you can't light one candle from another, so as not to catch someone else's trouble. And a lot of other things in the same spirit. All this is fiction and has nothing to do with faith."

But superstitions can also strongly scare away people who only come to God. I remember myself when I first started going to church: superstitious people stuck to me like that. You can't list everything, but I remember how one woman, as it seemed to me, a church member, told me that soon, very soon, literally in the next few days, something terrible will happen, and maybe the end of the world will happen… It is unknown to how many people she told her prediction, and how many people believed it.

Sometimes you have to hear during the all–night vigil that anointing is anointing, although the latter is one of the Christian Sacraments through which the gifts of the Holy Spirit are given to the believer, and it is performed immediately after baptism.

The widespread superstitions associated with the Sacrament of Confession are probably known to everyone. Also, according to the priests, people talk at confession not about sins, but about problems, believing that this way the problem itself should be resolved.

Or here's another case: when I started approaching the icon at the end of the service, a woman immediately ran up and said that it was impossible to kiss the images after communion. I have also heard that you should not brush your teeth before this Sacrament, since nothing should enter your mouth before Communion. Here is what Archpriest Dmitry Smirnov says to this: "In general, you need to brush your teeth in the morning, especially if you go to church. It would even be nice to comb your hair. It's not bad to put on the best clothes, and that they are clean and ironed. And as for the fact that nothing should go into the mouth, I have not read this anywhere. When we take a breath, doesn't air enter our mouths? And with this air – water? After all, 70% of water is in the atmosphere! Well, with a sigh, we also taste dust, and along with the dust, microorganisms. They can actually be perceived as a kind of food."

It is impossible not to say about candles here – for many people, the most elementary act of lighting candles in the temple is almost the most basic in their spiritual life. Especially "candle" superstitions can be found during big holidays, when there are many people in the church who are not familiar with Orthodoxy. Try to pass the candles with your left hand – most likely, you will hear an accusation. And one day, while working at the candlestick, I heard a woman who could not put a candle steadily in any way, say: "Oh, the Lord does not love me, apparently, since He does not want to accept a candle."

The church press has repeatedly written about the fact that in the list of church superstitions there is a special place for "gerontomania" – the search for elders, or rather, prophetesses and magi who would satisfy the thirst for spiritual slavery by taking care of someone else's salvation. Many people, for some reason, are sure that a person becomes a clergyman by virtue of the very fact of graduating from a theological seminary, I have heard this in our church.

As you can see, you can't list everything, but the fact that superstitions take place in the church environment is not encouraging. Archpriest Alexander Pikalyov wrote about this problem: "The best cure for lies and delusions is love for God, for His holy law and for the Church as a receptacle of Divine grace, and this love is achieved through repentance, awareness of sinfulness proper. Every believer needs to understand that he himself, by virtue of his sinfulness, is the cause of his spiritual and everyday problems, and not a witch living next door. The realization of one's sinfulness is the most unpleasant, but also the most necessary thing in the life of a Christian. It is this trouble that many run like fire. Undoubtedly, there is a great temptation to turn Christianity into a mystical household appendage, but Christianity is a religion of salvation. We must not forget about this."