Orthodox Parables and Stories: The blind girl regained her sight!

Twenty years ago," recalled Elizaveta Pavlovna Ivanova, a resident of St. Petersburg, "I spent my summer vacation in the Krivozero Women's Hermitage in the Kostroma region. The hermitage is located on the shore of the Volga. Here I witnessed such a picture.

A passenger steamboat approached the pier of the Krivohezerskaya hermitage coming from Nizhny Novgorod. A mass of passengers came out to the wharf. And one middle-aged woman with a girl about nine years old, getting off the pier, went to the monastery. The girl climbed the stairs with a special sense of joy. Going from one side of the stairs to the other, she would throw herself on the railing and loudly exclaim: "Dear, dear Mommy! I'll look here, and I'll look here!" As mother and daughter climbed the landing of the stairs and leveled with me, I turned to the girl with the words, "My angel! As you climbed the stairs and darted from one side to the other, my heart ached for you. I was terribly afraid that you would fall from the railing and onto the piles of stones. For you could have been crushed to death!" Her mother, going after her, answered me, "I myself feared for my girl, but now are exceptional days of joy for her. I allow her everything, and I myself share her joy."

And in doing so, she told the miraculous story of her daughter's recent healing from blindness in Sarov, at the relics of St. Seraphim. "This is my daughter Vera, she was born blind and has been blind for nine years. I suffered limitlessly, knowing no rest day or night. I have been with her to the best eye doctors and everyone told me that her illness was incurable. I had only one hope for God's help and the help of St. Seraphim. It was only two weeks ago that we arrived in Sarov, at the holy relics of God's saint. For the whole first week we did not leave the cathedral, from the holy relics of the venerable Seraphim, and with tears we asked for his help and intercession before God to give Vera her eyesight. But it was as if St. Seraphim did not hear our tearful pleas.

After a week, I decided to return home. My heart was torn to pieces from unbearable sorrow, and at the same time I did not lose hope for the help of God and the Monk Seraphim. I took Vera for the last time to the cathedral. Here I put her on her knees before the reliquary of the Monk Seraphim and, with a sob, turning to Vera, I said: “Pray, fervently pray to the Monk Seraphim for the healing of your eyes. For him, everything is possible before God,” and she herself, with sorrowful tears, asked the saint of God to visit her soul with joy, not to let Vera and me go unconsoling. From grief during prayer, I was ready to die.

Suddenly Vera shouted to the whole cathedral: “Mom, I see! Mom, I see! " And in a burst of joy, she began to touch everything shiny - the shrine of the holy relics, the holy Cross, the Gospel. Everything amazed and interested her. I cannot convey my condition in words. I rejoiced with my daughter, and with her everyone who was in the church rejoiced, and cried out of emotion, praising God and the Monk Seraphim. "

When my mother finished her wonderful story, I went up to Vera to see her wonderful eyes, which burned like a precious emerald. On her eyelashes was noticeable, as it were, the thinnest pink thread, testifying to her incurable blindness. Mother and Vera stayed in the monastery for three days with me and went home."