Passions 2

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

~ Introduction to the Passions ~

Part 3: “What is covering up the real you?”

Dear Inmate:

If you merely watch an actor play several different roles, you don’t get much of a clue as to what he is really like, do you? Before we come to God for self-knowledge, that’s what we are in a way, actors whose real lives are still pretty much a mystery. We are playing some roles too. You see, there are other thoughts and expressions coming through us besides our own. We think they’re coming from our real selves, but they’re not. The holy physicians of the Church call them “passions”. These passions are in all of us. They act through us and keep us confused about what we are really like. We assume that whatever we say and do comes from our own thinking. But not at all! A whole lot of it is coming from one passion or another and hasn’t got a thing to do with our real selves or our own thinking. If you want to know yourself, the first thing that is necessary is to find out what yourself is not. And the way to do that is to get to know what the passions are, because they keep you from seeing your real self just exactly as thick weeds can keep you from seeing the flowers that are growing under them. If you get the impression that these passions are parts of your own personality, it’s like mistaking a lovely flower garden for a weed patch just because no one has bothered to pull out the weeds and expose the flowers. One saint, after he was converted, realized that he had previously thought the passions were part of his own self, and that made him become discouraged about ever becoming a good person.

"I used to be held down by the errors of my previous life, from which I did not believe I could possibly be delivered. I used to think that my passions were
actually parts of me, and belonged to me"! (Icon of Cyprian)

Most passions are ordinary, natural feelings that get out of control, like a campfire
that flares up and finally destroys a vast forest, or a stream that swells into a devastating flood. Loving yourself, for instance, is a normal and important feeling to have. Self-love is given to us by God, to help us to take care of ourselves, work for the things we need, care for people who mean a lot to us, and most of all to make us go to God, because that is the greatest benefit we can give ourselves. But when that normal self-love becomes excessive, it gets completely unreasonable and uncontrollable. It makes people want to eat until they’re sick and fat, drink until they’re drunk, lie around until they get weak. They hate work and want everyone else to do their work for them; they want massive amounts of money, so they can live in luxury and not have to move. They become willing to kill anyone who threatens to take something away from them, or who keeps them from getting whatever they want. That is not the healthy self-love God gave us. It is what we call the passion of self-love, a huge emotional force that destroys humanity.

Hate is another example of a natural feeling which can become a passion. Hate is not the bad thing it is made out to be. Normal hate is nothing more than a reasonable desire to avoid what hurts us, to turn away from things that are not helpful to us. The fathers say that God has given us hate in order to turn us away from sin, have a strong dislike of it. Hate turns us away from anything or anyone that could stop us from getting to God. But when this natural dislike goes further than that, it makes us get excited, stamp our feet and yell, want to get even with someone or smash something. When it stirs us into a fury so that we are ready to attack our fellow men like enraged animals, then it is no longer normal hate. It is the passion of hate. Once it is in someone, he hardly knows what he is doing anymore. All the passions disturb us like this and keep us from being, or seeing, our natural selves.

"Passion is an excessive feeling or appetite, going beyond what is reasonable. Passions are a disturbance of our soul contrary to our nature, in disobedience to reason. Passion is not natural, and it ruins our nature instead of fulfilling it". (Icon of Clement of Alexandria)

"When we speak of all the passions together, we call Them “the world”. So when
Christians speak of Renouncing the world, they mean renouncing the Passions". (Icon of Isaac of Syria)

Now, I want to talk especially about pride. The same thing I have said about self-love and hate turning into passions is also true of pride. Normal pride is a wonderful feeling. It is often a feeling of triumph. We take pride in something we have done well, either alone or as a group. We are proud of our football team, our school, certain personal achievements, the way we’ve handled things in a crisis, and so on. That feeling of pride is a very deep satisfaction with what we have done or with something we’ve been a part of. When a woman makes a dress that turns out perfectly, she is filled with satisfaction. She is proud of it! A man who builds a beautiful boat feels the same way. He is fully satisfied with his work; he is proud of it! That is what pride is like when it’s healthy. When we know ourselves well, use ourselves in a good way, and do our best in life, we quite often have those wonderful moments when we feel totally satisfied and proud of what we have done, and we should thank God for helping us. But when people want just the feeling of pride without the right reason for it, without having done anything that could actually make them feel proud, then they are getting into the passion of pride. Instead of taking pride in how they keep themselves, they take pride in the looks they were born with, something they had nothing to say about. They take pride in the money their families have, when they did nothing to earn it. They take pride in being related to influential people, although they did not make those relationships. And worst of all, they take pride in purely imaginary things. They get a feeling of pride from imagining they are big shots like God and can do works that really only God can do.

They take pride in thinking they can judge other people, which only God can do. They take pride in imagining that they can make peace, whereas only God’s Spirit working in us can make peace. They take pride in thinking they can save the world with their knowledge, whereas no one but God can save even a single person. They take pride in thinking they can make men love and get along with each other, but only God can put love into human beings. The passion of pride convinces a person, down inside himself, that he can get along without God. He becomes like a little branch on a tree, thinking it can survive without the trunk and the root. He is ignorant of how life works. He doesn’t know it would all stop without God.

"The passion of pride consists of two kinds of ignorance; a person with pride is
ignorant of God’s help, and ignorant of his need for God. So pride is lack of
knowledge about God and about man". (Icon of Maximus the Confessor)

Now when the passion of pride makes someone think he can get along without God, that doesn’t mean without any god at all. No human being can stand to be without any god, because a god represents protection, safety, a way out of trouble. A god is like the captain of a ship. If the captain is swept overboard in a storm, someone’s got to hurry up and take his place and try to keep the ship afloat, whether he knows which way to go or not. Otherwise you have certain disaster. Obviously the true God never gets swept overboard. But people who are filled with the passion of pride think he does. They can’t see a sign of him anywhere, so they rush in and try to take over his place. They start believing that they are the ultimate power in the world, and that there is no being higher than they are. They feel that whatever things are done on earth, they will have to do them. This awful pride, completely mixing oneself up with God, actually make people go crazy, like the ones who think they’re Julius Caesar or Elvis or some other person. Imagining you’re God is about as crazy as it’s possible to get, only people aren’t always institutionalized for it.

Therefore are my people gone into captivity, because
they have no knowledge of God. (Is 5:13)

You will fall into utter madness if you think you are
loftier and greater than your Creator. (Icon of Ireneus)

"A person submerged in pride can scarcely avoid going out of his mind. He will be in extreme danger of suffering this" (Icon of Simeon the New Theologian)

When I first heard about this passion of pride, I wanted to understand it better. So one night before going to bed I asked God to explain it more clearly to me. He sent me a dream, a really fantastic dream. It was night, but you could still make things out slightly. There was a silhouette of a very small man walking out on a long ocean beach. He carried a dim flashlight and was bent very low over it, laboriously making his way around piles of rocks and stepping over big pieces of driftwood to avoid stumbling. Slowly the sun began to rise behind him, higher and higher, until at last it poured its’ dazzling light over the whole beach and across the water as far as you could see. But what was the ridiculous little man doing? He was still leaning down over his tiny flashlight, groping his way along just as he’d been doing during the night! He obviously had no idea that the sun had risen, and that the whole world was brilliant with light. He thought he was still guiding himself by the light of those feeble batteries. I heard someone say, “That is pride.” To be utterly unaware of the light from God, to think that the only light there is, is the light we make ourselves! That’s exactly what the Gospel says pride is like. It says , “And the light shines in the darkness, but the darkness does not see it” (Jn 1:5). Scripture says in many places that people who suffer from the passion of pride are like the blind. They cannot see themselves. They cannot see God. They cannot see God’s light.

They know nothing, neither do they understand anything; they go walking on and on in darkness. (Ps. 82:5)

Can you imagine what being blind is really like? Try blindfolding yourself for an hour and eating a meal, or cleaning your cell. You’ll feel awkward, stumble, possibly injure yourself. You’ll feel alone and unsure of yourself. Well, that’s how your poor brain has to stumble around when it’s blindfolded by those wrong convictions of yourself that we talked about. They come from the passion of pride, which if you remember is ignorance of God and ourselves. Ignorance for your brain, is a blindfold. When we are ignorant of what we are like, then our brain can’t see where it’s going. So it causes us to be confused and to stumble in life. To make serious mistakes and bump into very unhappy consequences. Any wrong convictions that you’ve got tied around your brain are going to cause you to feel your way painfully around. Instead of letting you operate freely and naturally. And these wrong convictions will never disappear by themselves. They are tied on, like tight blindfolds and wont just fall off. We normally get rid of them only when we ask God to heal us of the passion of pride, which is our blindness and ignorance.

Many people have asked God to do this, and always with wonderful results. They just keep saying over and over, wherever they happen to be, “Lord Jesus Christ, deliver me from pride” or “Lord Jesus Christ, deliver me from pride and give me self knowledge.” Other than that, they don’t really do anything. The fathers say;

“Pray and do not labor much to conquer your passions by your own
strength. Prayer will destroy them in you” (Excerpt from: “The Way of a Pilgrim”

Why will prayer destroy them in us? Because God answers our prayer, whether we feel able to believe it or not. He has promised that always and everywhere he will answer anyone’s prayer for deliverance from pride.

I will heal the blind; I will lead them in new ways. I will make darkness light for them, and confused things clear to them. These things will I do for them, and I will never leave them without my help. (Is. 42:16)

If you pray persistently for deliverance from pride, you’ll start finding out about yourself in all sorts of ways. You’ll have dreams, sudden realizations about yourself, unusual experiences that show you what you are like, new ideas that occur in your thinking and immediately give you a deeper understanding of yourself. Some of your wrong convictions about yourself will start coming to light quite soon. All at once you’ll say, “Why, I always thought I didn’t like people, but now I see that I really do.” Or you’ll notice, “I’m awfully conceited and never even realized it before.” Or you’ll find, “I thought I wasn’t very bright all these years, but I obviously have an ability for good clear thinking.” Praying for deliverance from pride will remove the blindfolds of your wrong convictions about yourself, so that your brain will finally be able to see things clearly. Then instead of stumbling in blindness, you’ll be walking in the wonderful light of God.

When we speak of God’s light, don’t think that we mean only a light to see by and get things cleared up with. It is certainly that, but it is so much more, just as sunlight is more than mere illumination. God’s light is nourishment and strength, power and life. As sunlight makes plants grow, God’s light is the food that makes us grow. You know it would be impossible to live by feeding on your own limbs, or for mankind to survive and grow strong by eating itself, by cannibalism. Well that’s profoundly true psychologically and spiritually. We human beings cannot live on our own ideas and inspirations. You see? That would be mental cannibalism. So what we live on is divine food, given to us in God’s light. Some wonderful holy writers teach us about this; "Just as the life of the body does not come from itself, that is from the fruits of the earth, so God has arranged for the soul to have meat, drink and clothing, everything which truly gives life to the soul, not from itself, but from His own Spirit and Light". (Icons of Callistus and Ignatius)

"Now, our soul lives. But it lives not because it is alive
by itself, but because it partakes Of the divine
food from God". (Icon of Justin Martyr)

People who try to grow and live by eating their own human ideas simply never grow, and do not survive psychologically and spiritually. They gather lots of worldy knowledge, a large vocabulary, and countless thoughts to keep them busy and make them appear intelligent. But they merely keep chewing on these mental things, spitting them up and then swallowing them again, like a cow with its’ cud. They do not get the kind of nourishment that makes a person as strong and mature as we were all created to be. For any person who is without the light of God, it will take many years and plenty of rough going to make any progress at all in self-knowledge. They will still have only the psychological capacities of children long after you, if you use the light of God; have reached the power and richness and love of real maturity. In fact, many or most of the middle-aged people in our country, because they are blinded with pride and have not come into the light of God to be fed by it, are no more mature than children or teenagers are right now. David as a young man, moved into the light of God. God delivered him from pride and showed him what he was really like and what he would be able to do. Then God fed him and strengthened him with divine food, and made him grow into full manhood very early. David could see that, by living in the light of God, and being nourished by it, he had become more of a man than many people who were much older than he.

Lord, I have more understanding than my teachers, because I study (am nourished by) what you have told me. I am wiser than the aged, because I live on your teachings. (Ps 19:99,100)

If the people of this generation would simply pray to be delivered from pride and would move into the light of God right now they could absolutely revolutionize the world, because they would become filled with the Holy Spirit of God, with his love and strength and wisdom. But even starting with you, just you, you can revolutionize your own life. If you start praying right now, to be delivered from the passion of pride and to be led into the full light of God, you will become a person you would never otherwise have been. You will become a person greatly superior to what you otherwise would have been. You will find real peace and purpose for your life. You will be able to make sense out of everything that has happened to you. You will be filled with joy and regardless of your circumstances you will find real freedom.

In Christ’s Mercy,

Brother Seraphim