Andrei Lemeshonka biography

Publications Radifier Archpriest Andrei Lemeshonok G. Father Andrei Lemeshonok began his conversations more than fifteen years ago. Then they took place in the St. Petro-Pavlovsky Cathedral of Minsk. A small premises of Sunday school was filled to capacity. To get there, it was necessary to come in advance. Everyone with bated breath listened to the words of Andrei's father. First, the priest spoke the word on a free topic, after which people handed notes with questions.

Each time, Father Andrei began his word in silence. Once he admitted that he is never preparing in advance, but he says, praying, that "the Lord will put on his heart." And from many people, I then heard surprised confessions: in the ingenuous words of the priest, they found answers to their innermost questions. Father Andrei was born in the year in Minsk, in a family of employees.

The painful search for the meaning of life led him from Hippism to Tolstoy, from enthusiasm for Eastern philosophy to Dostoevsky ... In the year he accepted baptism in the Orthodox Church. Father Andrei himself recalls that when he went to the Minsk Holy Stukhov Cathedral, “as if he was born again ... In the temple he felt that I could love! And no one will take this love from me. ” He left the theater and art institute, where he managed to study for a year, and got a job as a watchman in the cathedral.

So all bridges with the world were burned. For thirteen years, the future clergyman worked at the temple: guarded, sang in the choir, was a ringing ... One of the most important events in his life was a meeting with the elder Nikolai Guryanov. The elder, to whom Father Andrei traveled very often, supported him in the most difficult periods of spiritual life.

It was the elder Nikolai who blessed him to accept the Holy San. In the year, Father Andrei began to nourish patients in the Republican Clinical Psychiatric Hospital. In this ministry, spiritual children helped him.

Sisterhood arose. When some sisters decided to devote themselves to monasticism, Metropolitan Filaret blessed Andrei's father to build a monastery and appointed him the confessor of the monastery. Archimandrite Sofronius Sakharov, who is deeply revered by Father Andrei and whose experience is guided in his spiritual ministry, recalled after a meeting with the elder Siluan: "He [Elder Siluan] became for me the first and main support of my whole future life." I think that many of the spiritual children of Andrei’s spiritual children will say the same thing about him ...

As the nurse gently treats her children 1 Fes. How much patience, love is needed to take on all these human hardships, sorrows and illness! And this load is growing every year. The diligence of Father Andrei, performed by his spiritual obedience, is for all of us the most important evidence of the victory of Christ's love over all our weaknesses, which we load the priest daily.

And this is a victory that defeated the world, our faith 1 Thanks to the conversations of Father Andrei, many people discovered for themselves the essence and beauty of Orthodoxy, many of his word helped to meet the living god. We hope that each reader will find a spiritual seed in the proposed conversations sown for him.