Life as suffering or life as pleasure?

Ibland beror sa mycket pa hur vi tar emot vart liv:

There lives a man over thirty, with serious cerebral spastic infantile paralysis, who plays chess perfectly and has a good sense of humor. At the age of six months he was left by his father, a high-ranking Soviet official who never showed any interest in his son since then. He and his mother led a rather poor life with no luxuries. The son tried to help his mom by typing, though he couldn’t type more than one sheet a day. He was subject to an incredible lot of mockery and humiliation in the neighborhood. He could hardly walk, yet he was often tripped up by boys.

A person with cerebral spastic infantile paralysis is not usually a person whom everyone would pity, quite on the contrary, such people live under constant oppression. The government doesn’t care about them, people around them do their best to keep away, they can’t use public transport and so on.

Once that man told me with affection, “Father, I am so grateful to God!” – “For what, Seryozha?” I asked. “I’m a very venturesome person. And if I were normal and had normal hands and feet I would certainly become either a drug addict or a fornicator, a drunkard anyway. And the Lord saved me from it all.”

– ur Natalja Smirnovas intervju ”Life as suffering or life as pleasure” (rekommenderad lasning – flera lasvarda kommentarer, anekdoter m.m. fran denne prasts mun. Eftersom det ar en intervju, och ej en avhandling eller liknande, sa ar den mycket lattlast.) med Fr. Igor Fomin, kaplan i kapellet i Moscow State Institute of International Relations.

Fr. Igor Fomin