May the Lord preserve us from what I once saw. You know that we priests often go to the homes of dying people whose souls are struggling to leave their bodies. I witnessed the torments that a woman was going through for several days because her soul just wouldn’t part from her body. It got to the point—and I saw this with my own eyes—that she knelt before me and shoved her hand into her mouth, trying to “pull” her soul out. What a tragedy her agony was! It was only when we read the prayer of absolution over her that her soul was liberated from her body and she died. This happens because your passions keep you in this earthly reality. We’re not talking about simple human weaknesses, but about the vices through which you collaborate with the devil. Hatred, malice, slander against one another, staining one’s conscience, debasing a person—this is how your egotism tries to get the better of someone. These are grave sins.
Therefore, remember that everything is temporary. And there will come a time when you’ll have to go through this ordeal.
Once, after a talk with Elder Vasilios (Gondikakis), a young man stood up and said:
“Father, I don’t believe in God! Your talks are good, but I don’t believe in God!”
The elder told him:
“Don’t worry. The ways of the Lord are inscrutable!”
That is, he told this unbelieving man:
“Don’t object; stay where you are now. And God will see it.”
Another complained:
“Father, I’ve forgotten how to pray!”
“It’s not a problem! Return to where you prayed, and keep quiet, saying nothing but these words: ‘Jesus Christ, I’ve brought You the wreckage of myself.”
I’ve brought You my bleeding essence. I have nothing; I don’t know what to say to You; I don’t know what to ask of You, how to express myself.
Stay there, wait; learn to wait for a change, for grace. Learn to wait for the grace of the Holy Spirit and it will come.
Also, we have to understand that if we constantly protest what’s happening to us, nothing will change. There are people who protest throughout their whole lives, but this does nothing to change their lives. Okay, you learned to protest, but aren’t you tired of it? Can’t you see that it’s getting you nowhere? That it won’t change your life? Try to change yourself. You can’t? You have to prepare yourself for change, because you’re not ready for it yet. Change doesn’t happen in your life because you block it, unconsciously pushing it away. That’s why it doesn’t happen.
It seems like it says, “Jesus, I want to be with You!” on the surface of your soul, but deep down that’s not what we want. Our soul has different layers. You know the upper layers, and remaining there, you say, “Jesus, I want to get rid of this passion!”
But in the depths of your soul, your “I” says, “Leave me alone. Everything’s fine! I’m having a good time!”
You don’t want to get rid of your passions, because you haven’t learned to live “differently,” that is, you haven’t learned to live spiritually. Elder Aimilianos says that an angry person doesn’t want to get rid of his anger because he thinks he can’t live without it. He tells you:
“If I don’t get angry, people will take advantage of me. If I don’t yell at my wife, she’ll turn up her nose at me! If I don’t show my power over my subordinates, they’ll use me.”
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Let’s open ourselves up for a change. It doesn’t happen because we ourselves unconsciously push it away.
Paradoxical though it may sound, in such moments we should think about how our wounds and traumas are our strength. Wounds are our strength. Franz Kafka said, “The only possession of my life and my being are my wounds. They are my wealth, because it’s thanks to them that I’m learning, growing, becoming wiser, and sanctifying myself.”
If you take a closer look, you’ll see that behind a creator hides a wound. No one has ever written or painted anything for any reason other than to get themselves out of hell; and no Christian or person has devoted himself to prayer other than to get out of his hell. What is the mystery of the saints? That they took their darkness, their childhood wounds, and filled them with light. This is a transfiguration. St. Porphyrios said that “there is darkness within us, but don’t stay in the darkness; don’t look at it, don’t go deep into it. Open the door so light can come in, so Christ can come.” This is important.
Don’t constantly bother with sins, the devil, one thing, another. We talk about the devil more than we do about Christ. We don’t talk about Christ, about light, about Paradise, about the Holy Spirit, about the joy of the Holy Spirit, about the joy of peace, about beauty; instead, we constantly think about something else. Have you committed a sin; have you slipped spiritually? Forget it; don’t dig into it, but go to the Light. Pray with your prayer rope, go for a walk, meet with a friend, take a walk in nature, don’t sit at home. Why do we sit at home? Because our ego is wounded because we’ve fallen spiritually and tarnished our image; our perception of our “self”—an idealized perception—has deteriorated; because we believe that we’re amazing, good, strong, powerful, the best, the holiest. And now you can’t accept that you’re committing so many sins, and you keep complaining about it. Here, selfishness has taken hold, because if your soul truly wept in Christ, you would go to Christ, and not dig into the evil that creates problems for you when you constantly dwell on it.
And also, we shouldn’t allow all of this to scare us. You’ll see that we often repeat the customs and behaviors of our parents; we react to problems, to sicknesses the same way our parents did. What does that mean? That we’re hearing recordings of some kind of audio cassettes that at some point must be erased, with our desire for Christ being “recorded” instead, because we automatically repeat someone else’s behavior.
When you’re little, you say:
“When I grow up, I’m not going to act like my father or mother, who were cowardly, afraid, and insecure.”
But you often do the same thing in the worst possible way. Because you have this cassette, this mechanism, these reactions recorded in you. If you change them, then your life will change.
I’m going to read you an extract from my beloved Elder Aimilianos of Simonopetra, who says something very good on this topic. He talks about unforeseen situations:
Unforeseen circumstances will constantly occur in our lives. You go to a monastery to encounter the spiritual life, but you meet bad people there. You weren’t expecting that. You go to church and see difficult people there. You didn’t expect to see such people. You believed these places would be perfect. It’s something unexpected.
You want to live in a cell in the part of the monastery where there’s no dampness; you get there and you realize it’s the sea that causes your allergy. And you tell the abbot:
“Geronda, give me another cell.”
Thus, you can’t rejoice in the holy monastery, day or night. A thought immediately comes and tells you: “Get up and leave this monastery.”
It’s something unexpected. I approach you thinking that you’re a good person, but in the end, I realize that you’re a cranky person.
“You weren’t like this when I married you; you’re completely different now.” “I married a happy girl, and now you’re constantly sour.” But you don’t ask her why she turned “sour.” Because you have to ask yourself why she became like that, why she lost her sweetness. Probably you are also to blame to some extent. Why doesn’t she have a desire to do anything now? If earlier she wanted to go to a museum, for a walk, then now she doesn’t even want to go out into the yard. Why?
Unforeseen circumstances constantly arise before us, because we have demands and desires.
That is, we want to control events; we want them to go the way we imagined, because we think we know what’s correct and useful. And we say everything should go this way so we can be happy. Isn’t that right? We’re upset. Because we trust God’s providence, because He knows what we don’t.
Unforeseen situations are contrary to God’s will and our desires, and that’s why they seem unforeseen to us. But in fact, they’re not unforeseen.
You can often see how one simple event—you didn’t have time to get in a taxi, on a boat, on a plane; you go or don’t go on a date—changes your entire life. You went somewhere and met a man there and he offered you a job. Or you didn’t go and were saved from something else. There’s nothing accidental.
What the Church has been saying for centuries is confirmed now by quantum physics, which teaches that we’re playing in a universe of probabilities. That is, I’m going down the steps, and there’s a high probability that I might fall, slip, roll, stumble, or go down the stairs normally. “The Lord,” says St. John of Damascus, “always chooses the best probability for us. We just couldn’t understand at the time what happened—but years pass and we can solve the mystery and understand why something happened in our lives then.”
A man who loves God expects everything and always says:
“God’s will be done!”
It rains, thunderstorms, hails, thunders. He says:
“Blessed be the name of the Lord.”
Since these things come at a high cost to our carnal thinking, we consider them unexpected.
In order not to be embarrassed and upset every time, not to worry and not create problems, we have to be able to endure all the bad things that happen in our lives.
Always say:
“Welcome, sickness! Welcome, misfortune! Welcome, suffering!”
It’s hard, but I have to do it in order to see what lies behind the sickness and the temptation. And if I can’t see it, then I’ll gather my patience and wait to see what’s behind it all.
This brings meekness, without which there can be no spiritual life.
