Passions 10

St. Seraphim’s Fellowship
P.O. Box 351656
Jacksonville, Fl. 32235-1656

~ Introduction to the passions ~

Part 11: “God will never close the door on you”

Dear Inmate:

Our third basic passion is probably the one that most often makes people turn to God for help. It is the passion of self-love. It leads to alcoholism and drug addiction, and other debilitating habits that make so many of its victims unable to function well physically. The fathers say that the passion of self-love is the irrational love of one’s body, an unreasonable attachment to flesh, which interferes with our spiritual and psychological and physical life. They often tell us that every Christian needs to be a good athlete, so we can “run with endurance the race that is set before us” (Heb. 12:1). You can’t be a good athlete without hard training. If you stuff yourself with unhealthy foods, choke your lungs with smoke, or drown your strength in liquor, you’re certainly not going to win any medals. And unless you work out regularly, sometimes under uncomfortable conditions, you won’t get very far either.

Keeping yourself fit for the Christian life requires exactly the same sort of self-control. If you indulge in too many bodily pleasures just for the sensation you get, and not because they are necessary for your health and a normal enjoyment of life, you become spiritually unfit and unable to keep up with the activity of God’s Holy Spirit. You especially become unable to pray (which is the “working out” part) with any interest or regularity. Then you lose touch with the Great Coach, who is our only source of energy, and you begin to fall into both spiritual and physical weaknesses that can really cut you down. You begin to lose the spiritual matches you could be winning if you’d stayed in training.

"The Christian must follow after those pleasures which are both natural and necessary. The pleasures which are considered healthy are those that are not bound up with pain, and bring no cause for repentance, and result in no other harm, and keep us within the bounds of moderation, and do not draw us away from serious occupations, and do not make slaves of us". (Icon of St John of Damascus)

Out there in the wilderness, the devil tempted Jesus only with the three passions which were in Adam and Eve and are in all of us, pride, vanity, and this third one, self-love. After Jesus had fasted for forty days, the devil came up and said;

“If you are really the Son of God, command that these stones be made into bread” (Matthew 4:3)

Jesus answered him that Scripture teaches us not to live by bread alone, but to live by the Word of God. Can you imagine starving for forty days and still not giving into the hunger of your body? But Jesus was being nourished by God’s work. He was able to live on his Father’s will, he even called it food. He said that the meat that fed him was doing his Father’s will.

When a person is free of self-love, like Jesus, he is free from every pressure the world or the devil or anyone can put on him to force him to do anything. If you avoid being overly self-indulgent, your reward is terrific freedom to go ahead and do anything God gives you a chance to do. Great spiritual adventure comes only to people who become good athletes for God and can put up with discomforts, when they have to, in order to stay close to God. The passion of self-love is so ground down in holy people that they know they will stick with God regardless of the worst things that could possibly happen to them.

Rom 8:35-39 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter. Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us. For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

People who have not become filled with the Spirit of God and trained to resist the passion of self-love are controlled almost entirely by their bodily needs and pleasures (I say almost, because they are also controlled by other passions, as well as being controlled by the devil to some extent). Most of their concern is to avoid hunger, thirst, disease, and pain. Without God, we are all the same as animals, the only real purpose we have in life is to get comfort and avoid pain. But when God comes into our lives, we see that this is a kind of meaningless way for human beings to live.

"Freedom from pain cannot be the proper end for man, for this they would have in common with beings utterly devoid of reason and sensibility".(Quote from Athenagoras)

As Christians grow in the Spirit of God, they become able to endure more stress physically as well as spiritually. They gradually put behind them their old animal concerns about obtaining comfort and avoiding pain. Finally they are not even afraid of imprisonment or torture or death. They are beyond the control of all men. They have at every moment the perfect freedom to be everything God made them to be. No one can affect their love, or their faith, or their deep joy, or anything that is important to them. The saints on their way to martyrdom praised and thanked the Lord and had good will toward their murderers. The blessed Bishop Polycarp (who, as a little boy, was greatly influenced by knowing St. John the Evangelist) was threatened with being thrown to the lions, “Call them, then,” he answered, “for it is good for me to go from mortality to eternal life with God.”

We see that incredible martyrdom only when people live in God so completely and constantly that at last they become indifferent to the comforts and pains of this world. Naturally we can’t accept discomfort and pain until we are sure something good is going to come of it. A dear holy father, Saint Isaac of Syria, says;

"No one can endure trials unless he is convinced that the sufferings in which he is prepared to share may lead to something worth more than bodily comfort".
(Icon of St. Isaac of Syria)

To athletes, a chance to win a game means more than bodily comfort. And most
of us, when we need or want anything enough, can accept whatever discomfort we
have to go through to get it. People who want to be with God also become willing to accept any amount of pain or material deprivation in order to live in his holy presence forever. They say they don’t even feel pain and loss of comfort to the extent that you and I would. Becoming freed of self-love makes them really like Jesus, dead to the comforts of the body but alive to the powerful and everlasting comforts of God.

When you have self-love, you live in the Land of Flesh; and when you don’t have it, you live in the Land of the Spirit. Wherever we live, that’s the scenery that becomes familiar to us and the climate to which we adapt ourselves. If you live in California, your winter wardrobe isn’t going to be anything like the winter wardrobe of people who live in Alaska. And if you live in England, your food isn’t going to be much like the food you’d eat if you lived in Mexico. Our clothing, our food, our customs and activities are very much affected by where we live.

When we live in the Land of Flesh, our surroundings are all physical, all material. Material things eventually disintegrate. When they are all we see around us, then no matter how firmly we think we believe in spiritual life and survival after death, we live as if there isn’t going to be any spiritual survival. That’s because we live in a land where everything rots away, and we just can’t completely believe that we aren’t going to rot away too, along with our surroundings. So people who are too full of self-love, too surrounded by material concerns and self-indulgences, can never in a deep and true way believe they are created for eternal life. They’ll try to believe it from time to time, but they can’t become established in the belief. They have never seen the land of the spirit, and they can’t imagine what it is like or even to be sure that it exists. Because of this uncertainty, such people are not able to have a very steady flow of hope, and they don’t have the natural optimism about life that we should normally feel. They often feel a need to drum up bodily enthusiasm, to look for physical kicks, to replace this natural hope which they have lost.

For people who live in the Land of the Spirit, it’s just as impossible to think this life is the whole end of everything as it is for people in the Land of Flesh to think that eternal life is the whole point of everything. Those who live in the Land of the Spirit clearly see that material things will disintegrate but spiritual things won’t. You don’t get the view of eternal life, you don’t see the vast spiritual landscape, until you move out of the Land of the Flesh and into the Land of the Spirit. When, by desiring and praying about it, we begin to make that move, we very soon realize how much more natural the spiritual life is. We recognize that we are born to live eternally with God.

The Bible tells us not to indulge in lusts of the flesh, because God knows how difficult it will be for us to recognize the truth about life if we do. When people in the Land of Flesh look around, they see nothing but death. But when people in the Land of the Spirit look around they see only life, nothing ever dies in the Land of the Spirit. Then what a foolish thing it is, really, to debate about whether certain unnecessary physical indulgences are harmful, to wonder whether a little marijuana will do any damage, or whether regular smoking and a little drinking binge now and then is going to matter much. Every physical indulgence we add to ourselves, and especially the ones that serve mostly to calm our nerves or lift our spirits (things that should never be done by anything material, but only by God), will just root us all the more inescapably in the Land of the Flesh, Where there is no life, no Kingdom of Heaven, no hope in God.

Righteousness comes when we walk, not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. For they who are after the flesh mind the things of the flesh; but they who are after the Spirit mind the things of the Spirit. To be fleshly minded brings death, but to be spiritually minded brings life and peace. If the Spirit of God is in you, you are no longer living in the flesh, but in the Spirit. (Romans 8:4,9)

God has made it possible, with his life giving Cross, for us to move out of the Land of the Flesh and into the Land of the Spirit, because he treasures human nature above all else. He made us to dwell with himself in all his holiness, and he sacrificed his own life to save it from death and corruption. As he has loved us, we are also supposed to love ourselves and one another. This brings us to the self-love that is not a passion. God gives each of us a strong, natural self-love. This love for ourselves Makes us desire life. It makes us desire God, because he is the Redeemer and the Giver of life. It gives us a craving for God, so that, wherever else we look for happiness, we shall always be dissatisfied and restless until we find it in God.

Every human wish, every undertaking, every action, has as its purpose the satisfaction of self-love, the seeking of man’s own happiness. But human spirit is not satisfied with anything that belongs to the senses, and the inborn love of self never lets up in its urgent pushing. The less the natural man succeeds in attaining happiness and the more he has it in view, the more his longing grows and the more he finds an outlet for it in prayer. He goes with a petition for his desires to the Cause of all being. So it is that inborn self-love, the principle element in life, is a deep seated stimulus to prayer in the natural man. The all-wise Creator of all things has given the nature of man a capacity for self-love precisely as an “enticement” which will draw the fallen being of man upwards into touch with celestial things. (Quote from the Way of a Pilgrim)

If you don’t feel that you love yourself, then pray to be delivered from vanity. Vanity is the main cause of all inability to love, including the inability to love yourself, you become vey open and honest, with nothing to hide. Anything we love, we tend to bring into view, don’t we? If it’s a favorite coat, we wear it. If it’s a favorite friend, we arrange to see him often. So when you love your real self, you bring it into view more and more. Instead of hiding it under a lot of pretenses, you let it show. That way, you get to know it much better and faster. You become a friend to yourself. Considering that we actually do have a natural urge to feel friendly towards ourselves, it is really dishonest to say we don’t love ourselves. You may think you can’t help that kind of dishonesty, because it’s the way you truly feel; but you can. All dishonesty comes from vanity, so all you have to do is pray to get rid of vanity. Then you’ll be an honest person and have honest love for yourself.

When you love a person, the first thing you generally do is avoid harming him. That’s also the first thing you do for yourself when you become a friend of yourself. You avoid harming yourself in any way. The ancient teachers say that’s the beginning of patience. St. John Chrysostom tells us that patience starts with a refusal to harm ourselves, especially right after we have been hurt by something or someone outside ourselves. Often when someone hurts us badly or rejects us, we want to run in and overeat, or do something nasty and violent in return, or sulk and miss a good time, or take a few drinks or smoke some pot or whatever. But if a friend of yours were attacked by some mean individual, can you imagine going over to him and beating up on him even more? Of course not. And it’s the same with you. If you are a friend to yourself, you won’t do anything spiteful to add to the damage someone else has already inflicted on you. You’ll do everything you can to try and make yourself comfortable again, just as you would for anyone else. When you truly love yourself, you may be hurt by others; but you will firmly refuse to harm yourself. What does it mean to harm yourself? According to the fathers, just one very simple thing. It means to break our connection with what is good, with God. When we love ourselves, we will never break that connection. And it is not possible for any other person to break it for us.

Healthy self-love also protects you from the misguided criticisms and judgments of other people. Only God’s judgments of us are entirely good and true and safe. When ignorant people criticize you, it usually makes you feel unacceptable and hopeless, depressed and confused; and you can’t see any way out of what they say is wrong with you. God’s judgment of us is quite different. He never points out something for us to repent until he’s gotten us ready to be cleansed of it. When he judges, he causes a great disturbance in our hearts, like the disturbance in the biblical pool of water just before a person could go into it and be healed. You never have a feeling of being unacceptable or lost when you are being judged by God. Others, when they judge us, often close doors on us and shut us out. But God never closes the door on anyone. He confronts us with a deficiency in ourselves only when the door to understanding and repentance and salvation is wide open.

Finally, to see how necessary it is to love yourself, look at God’s great commandment to love our neighbor as our-self. If you don’t love yourself, you can’t even get off the ground with that commandment. In the early days of Christianity, people were taught to try to obey that commandment until they had developed a healthy love for themselves first, and learned to protect and benefit themselves in many ways, One holy teacher said it’s better to be regarded as a destitute tramp than to try to benefit your neighbor before you have learned to benefit yourself. Running around doing a lot of charitable things for others when you still aren’t able to do anything charitable for yourself is a dangerous waste of time, because it nourishes hypocrisy and arrogance and resentment and cruelty. And you can’t possibly understand how to protect and comfort another person, how to meet his needs or lead him into a good life, unless you’ve learned to do those things first for your own self. So before you worry much about anything else or think about really benefiting any other people in the world, take hold of the natural self-love God has given you and become a faithful benefactor to yourself. Ask Jesus, and he will show you how to do it. He is the Way. Anytime you call on him, he’s there. He said, “I am with you always, even to the end of the world” (Matthew 28:20)

In Christ’s Mercy,

Brother Seraphim