Like an ant - a grain of sand to a grain of sand - Father Vasily built his life: he married, became a priest, gave birth to a son and daughter. Seven years later, life crumbled to dust. His son drowned in the river, his wife began to drink with grief. Father Vasily does not find peace in the temple either - people shy away from him, the elder openly despises. Even the name day comes to him only clergy, the venerable villagers do not honor the priest attention. At night, a drunken wife demands affection from him, hoarsely praying: “Give me your son, pop! Give it, damned! ” And her passion defeats her chaste husband.

A boy is born, in memory of the late brother they call him Vasily. It soon becomes clear that the child is an idiot; life becomes even more intolerable. Before, it seemed to Father Vasily: the land is tiny, and on it he is one, huge. Now this land is suddenly inhabited by people, they all go to confession to him, and he, ruthlessly and shamelessly demanding from every truth, repeats with restrained anger: “What can I do? What am I - God? Ask him! " He called for grief - and grief comes and goes from all over the earth, and he is powerless to reduce earthly grief, but only repeats: “Ask him!” - already doubting God's desire to alleviate human suffering.

Somehow, by Lent, a beggar cripple confesses to him.He makes a terrible confession: ten years ago he raped a girl in the forest, strangled her and buried her. The villain told his secrets to many priests - and no one believed him; he himself began to think that this was an evil tale, and, telling it the next time, he came up with new details, changed the face of the poor victim. Father Basil is the first who believes what he heard, as if he had committed a crime. Having fallen to his knees before the murderer, the priest shouts: “Hell on earth, hell on heaven! Where is heaven? Are you a human or a worm? Where is your God, why did you leave you? Do not believe in hell, do not be afraid! There will be no hell! You will find yourself in paradise, with the righteous, with the saints, above all - I tell you this ... ”

That night, on the eve of Good Friday, Father Basil admits to his wife that he cannot go to church. He decides to survive the summer somehow, and in the fall to take off his dignity and leave with his family wherever they look, far, far ...

This decision brings peace to the house. For three months the soul rests. And in late July, when Father Vasily was haying, a fire breaks out in his house and his wife burns alive.

He wandered around the garden of the old deacon for a long time, serving with him and sheltering his daughter and son after the fire. And the thoughts of Father Basil are wonderful: the fire - wasn’t the pillar of fire the same as the one that showed the Jews the way in the desert? God decided to turn his whole life into the wilderness - was it not so that he, Vasily of Thebes, would not wander more along the old, traveled paths? ..

And for the first time in many years, bowing his head humbly, he says that morning: “Thy holy will be done!” - and the people who saw him in the garden that morning meet a stranger, completely new, like from another world, a man asking them with a smile: “What are you looking at me like that? Am I a miracle? ”

Father Vasily sends his daughter to the city to his sister, builds a new house where he lives together with his son, reading the Gospel aloud to him and as if for the first time listening to the healing of the blind, the resurrection of Lazarus. In the church he now serves daily (and earlier, only on holidays); imposed monastic vows, strict fasting. And this new life of his is even more alarming to his fellow villagers. When a man dies, Semyon Mosyagin, defined by his father Vasily as a worker to the church headman, everyone agrees that he is to blame - pop.

The elder enters the altar to Father Vasily and directly declares: “leave from here. There are only misfortunes from you here. The chicken, even for no reason, dares not die, and people die from you. ” And then Father Vasily, who had been afraid of the headman all his life, the first to take off his hat when he met him, expelled him from the temple, like a biblical prophet, with anger and fire in his eyes ...

The funeral service of the Seed is performed on Spirits day. In the temple - the smell of decay, the windows are dark, like at night. An alarm runs through the crowd of worshipers. And a thunderstorm breaks out: interrupting the reading of the memorial prayers, Father Basil laughs soundlessly and triumphantly, like Moses, having seen God, and going up to the tomb, where an ugly, swollen body lies, he proclaims with a loud voice: “I say unto you, rise!”

His dead man does not obey, does not open his eyes, does not rise from the grave. "Do not want?" - Father Basil shakes the coffin, pushes the dead man out of it. The people ran out of the temple in fear, believing that demons had infused their quiet and absurd shepherd. And he continues to cry to the dead man; but rather, the walls will collapse than his dead obey ... Yes, he does not fight with the dead - he fights with God, in whom he believed infinitely and therefore has the right to demand a miracle!

Overwhelmed with rage, Father Vasily runs out of the church and rushes through the village, into a clean field, where he mourned more than once his bitter fate, his incinerated life. There, in the middle of a wide and bumpy road, the next day men will find him - spread out in such a pose as if he were still running dead ...