Passions 3

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

~ Introduction to the passions ~

Part 4: “Everybody plays God”

Dear Inmate:

All of us get the feeling that we can take over God’s place when we are very, very young. Even as babies, we expect to get heavenly results when we make demands. When God says, “let there be light,” then there’s certainly going to be light. We fully expect to operate on that same basis ourselves. We expect our teddy bears to stay put and our blocks to stay balanced even when we don’t pile them up very strategically. We expect people to accept us or pick us up whenever we smile and reach for them. We expect to have all of our needs met, to be protected, and generally to continue in a sort of blissful state. This infant ignorance actually comes from the first trickling of the passion of pride. Since none of us can actually see God, as infants we assume that we ourselves must be God.

As we grow older, we make more and more plans. We expect our plans to turn out well, the way that all of God’s plans turned out well when he created everything. Pride makes us feel so much like God that we can’t imagine being unable to carry out our innermost plans. So we go ahead as if we were all-powerful and all-wise, able to make beautiful and perfect lives for ourselves. We set up ambitious schedules and high goals, and we assume we shall live up to these aims all alone, without any help from God. We also assume that all of our ambitions are good, that we know the difference between good and evil, just like God, and that everything we want is absolutely fine and beneficial. We haven’t got a clue that God is out there trying to get it through our heads that…..Isa 55:8-9 For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.

We have all seen many people who make very ambitious plans for their personal lives, or for their business or careers. Now there is nothing wrong with having a goal you hope to achieve in life, or with working hard to accomplish things that you believe are God’s will for you. In fact it’s important to do those things. It’s only when you set your mind on something and count on it as if you can positively make it happen that you’re in trouble. The passion of pride often makes people so sure that everything is going to work out the way they’ve got it figured out, that it detaches them from reality. They can’t even see the possibility of things not turning out the way they expect. They feel so utterly like gods that it never occurs to them that they could fail in anything they’re counting on. The Bible tells about such a man and what happened to him.

Luke 12:16-21 And he spake a parable unto them, saying, The ground of a certain rich man brought forth plentifully: And he thought within himself, saying, What shall I do, because I have no room where to bestow my fruits? And he said, This will I do: I will pull down my barns, and build greater; and there will I bestow all my fruits and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry. But God said unto him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided? So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.

The main thing the passion of pride does then, is fill us with expectations of being able to accomplish a lot of aims without God. One of the passions with which the devil tempted Jesus in the wilderness was this passion of pride. He tried to get Jesus to go after worldly power by making a deal on his own and leaving his heavenly Father out of it.

Matt 4:8-10 Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; And saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me. Then saith Jesus unto him, Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.

So anytime you leave God out of any plan, and out of your fondest dreams, it is because the passion of pride is acting in you. Anytime we hope to produce heavenly fruits by ourselves, that is pride. The true heavenly fruits are; love, wisdom, justice, peace, kindness, compassion, patience, every beautiful and every perfect quality you can think of. Whenever you see these qualities in people, they have come from God, not from people by themselves. Now look at yourself and see whether you have been expecting something of yourself that really only comes from God. God has to put these qualities into us before we can have them. Were you expecting to be fair and just to people? You can’t until God shows you, in your own personal life, how real justice works. Were you expecting to be friendly and kind to others? You can’t until God has delivered you from certain fears and insecurities, until His Holy Spirit has strengthened you, and until you have recognized God’s kindness in your own life. Were you expecting to love someone with all your heart? You can’t until Jesus first comes into your own heart and teaches it what love really is, and gives you the power and understanding to love someone else.

All of the beautiful feelings and virtues and experiences we naturally yearn for are such that we can’t have even one of them without God. But the passion of pride makes us expect to have them all, by ourselves. Trying to run on our own steam like that, as if we didn’t need divine help, is the same as putting ourselves above God. So the Bible says pride makes us “exalt” ourselves. Because this passion makes us expect such beautiful, lofty things of ourselves, we are heading for a bad fall. The things we want and expect to happen, don’t. And remember, all people have the passion of pride, so everyone, sooner or later is destined to have this fall and all of the disappointments that go with it, even if their power failure is delayed until they grow fairly old. Expecting so much of ourselves is partly what causes so much sadness in all of human life.

Obad 3-4 The pride of thine heart hath deceived thee, thou that dwellest in the clefts of the rock, whose habitation is high; that saith in his heart, Who shall bring me down to the ground? Though thou exalt thyself as the eagle, and though thou set thy nest among the stars, thence will I bring thee down, saith the LORD.

The fall comes when things that we fully expect from ourselves don’t happen. We were expecting to have wonderful personality traits, but it turns out that they are not all that wonderful. We were expecting to be lovable, but it turns out that people don’t love us very deeply. We expected to be important, but it turns out that we don’t even attract much interest. We were expecting to be pretty cool in our way of handling things, but instead we were often stupid and awkward. We can’t manage to do some of the things we care about most, like fitting in with certain groups and getting certain people to like us. Whatever disappointments you feel in yourself, they have come because the passion of pride has made you expect something too perfect to be realistic, something that only comes from God and can’t be manufactured by human beings. The whole world today is heartbroken and sore and bitter, because it has expected too much of human beings. Your disappointments with yourself don’t mean that anything is wrong with you as a human being at all. They mean that something is wrong with your idea of what you are, that to some extent you are thinking of yourself as a god instead of as an ordinary human being. When you dream you are supposed to be something wonderful and then turn out to be just another ordinary human being, a person can be very upset at first. When it happens to us, we feel that we are absolutely no good at all. But what we should really be discovering is that we are no good as gods. In fact, as gods we are total failures. When we have this experience of finding out we’re not the gods we thought, it’s the beginning of breaking through the passion of pride and discovering that we are real human beings, which as you shall see, is not a bad thing at all.

"When people blinded by pride meet with failures, they are astounded, like people who meet with something un-expected, and they are thrown into confusion and grow faint-hearted, for they see, fallen and prone to the ground, that image of themselves upon which they had put all their hopes and expectations. A man free Of pride is also disappointed when he fails, but he is not thrown into confusion and is not upset, because he knows the failure came from his human weakness, which is nothing unexpected or new to him". (“Unseen Warfare” ) A classic Orthodox book On spiritual warfare.

When God lets us fall to cure our passion of pride, here’s what usually happens. Instead of expecting the wonderful things we used to of ourselves, we start expecting all the worst of ourselves. Or we may go back and forth a little, first expecting something marvelous and then expecting nothing but miserable failures. Mostly we expect to be failures, to be rejected by other people, to be left out of activities that interest us. We lose confidence in our own personality and in our own thinking and our own worthiness. More and more, we start going along with the thinking and behavior of any people who will accept us and include us in their group. When we lose confidence in ourselves and in our own thinking, we invariably allow people to lead us into directions that may not be wrong in themselves but are wrong for us personally. These can include; wrong educational pursuits, wrong pastimes, wrong careers, wrong social environments and the wrong friends. These wrong environments are like big nets being thrown over us, which prevent the real self from being able to move freely. Then we feel trapped, frightened, and hostile, just as any creature would.

"If someone dreams of reaching on high, moved by the suggestion of pride, Satan easily enslaves him in his nets". ( Icon of Gregory of Sinai)

Another thing that happens when people lose confidence because of the passion
of pride is that they reach a point where they undersell themselves, they constantly
talk themselves down. That makes them quit trying to do things they would be
interested in doing, and in a very sad way, it protects them from failures, because
if you don’t try anything, you won’t fail in anything. Some of the individuals most affected by pride are the most intelligent and gifted people among us. When they fall and lose their confidence, their productivity may start to go down. They may lose the common sense they used to have, and start doing and saying a lot of dumb things. If an opportunity comes along that would, let’s say, allow them to become a part of some great community or group, some opportunity like that that would raise their self respect and confidence, they will frequently shy away from it. In particular, they will shy away from people who are their intellectual, cultural and social equals. They will nearly always gravitate toward rather bizarre, mixed-up, uncreative and even low-life friends. They may claim they only want to help such people, but that’s never true, because they aren’t healthy enough to be moved by simple virtues like generosity and love.

"This is the cause of their perverseness, namely ignorance of themselves; and if anyone, having gained the knowledge of the truth, shall have shaken off this ignorance, he will know to what object his life is to be directed, and how it is to be spent". (Lactantius)

Sometimes people who have lost their confidence will try to cover up their feelings of inadequacy by pretending, to themselves as well as with others, to be loaded with confidence. They become positively obsessed with being right about everything and knowing more than anybody else. Usually they talk incessantly, and it’s very difficult to have just a short conversation with them or get a quick straight answer to a question from them. They tend to accept only their own opinions about everything and they are sure they have the latest dope on any subject you might bring up. They are, as some Christian writers have said, un-teachable. No one, however wise, can teach them anything, because they aren’t receptive to anybody else’s views. They seem to assume that other people don’t know anything that will be of value to them. So when they are quiet in a conversation, they aren’t listening as much as waiting for their turn to talk again. They can often analyze other people beautifully, but without any feeling or compassion.

"People full of pride are able to be superb critics of others, but they haven’t even
the faintest suspicion of how much is wrong with themselves". (Icon of St John Cassian)

People who have had and unusual amount of pride, and have therefore had unusually big disappointments in themselves, will nearly all go through this stage of thinking they know everything and criticizing others for awhile. So the Bible calls our attention to it, in order to make us realize that we have this unmistakable symptom of pride.

Matt 7:3-5 And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.

What you might call the classic symptom of pride, and you can see it in people of all ages, is a sort of abnormal clinging to one’s family. You see, the tendency to get ourselves confused with God, which is what the passion of pride basically is, is already in us when we are born. But the thing that dangerously reinforces it is having parents who look too much like gods to us when we are little children, parents who seem so adequate for all our needs that we are never lead or compelled to go to the real God, or parents whom we never see going to the real God themselves. That kind of environment strengthens in us the idea that a human being can be God. It makes us expect to be gods the way our parents seem to be gods. If we come from that kind of situation, we get an unusually strong case of the passion of pride, which means that we are going to have unusually big failures and disappointments in life. When these failures come, we are plunged into confusion and despair. A person in that kind of trouble reaches for a life buoy. If someone can persuade him to let God be his life buoy, then everything will eventually be straightened out. God will show him that things aren’t half as bad as they feel, that he only has to realize he’s a human being and not a god. Then he will recover a healthy self-confidence, although for someone very sick with pride, it may take a long time. But if God isn’t presented to him, he will grab at the only security he has ever known, his parents or those authority figures in his life.

I am aware that many of you have been estranged from parents and families for years. This security that I am writing about can also come from a spouse or girlfriend or other person, who may have in some emotional way, been providing that same kind of security that would have normally come from parents. No matter how often he fails, these people will usually encourage him. They will often have shared with him his high expectations of himself, so they will be sympathetic with his disappointments and failures. They may remind him of wonderful and promising things he has done in the past or even as a child, and that will comfort him a little now that he feels like a failure. Many times they will have offered money or other material help, their ability to do this is partly what has made them look like gods. Perhaps they kept some social connections alive that he felt he couldn’t do by himself. So it just seems to be a law of nature that the more anyone is a failure because of pride, the more he will try to live on the success and capabilities and reputation of his family, ancestors or others. Whatever they’ve done that looks good, he will claim and talk about almost as if he’d done it himself.

Pride in one’s family, or ancestry has always been an extremely serious threat to spiritual and psychological growth. If you are going to boast about your family, or if you have done this in the past, then one thing is sure; you never have nor will you ever be in a position to boast about your relationship with God. St Paul repeatedly tried to show the other Jews that they must not depend on their ancestry for their salvation. The Jews were justly proud of Abraham and Moses and all their great prophets. Theirs was the one royal family of the whole world. St. Paul, and later several of the fathers, often told the non-Christian Jews that their God was the true God, that their Law was good and their prophets were saints, but all of these still couldn’t make them personally worthy of God’s grace. He told them that they would have to gain spiritual value of their own, and not depend upon their families or ancestors. People who are so full of pride that they become overly dependent upon their families are bound to resent them in the end, because leaning on one’s family keeps increasing the feeling of failure, a feeling everybody just naturally hates. The only reason so many people are full of resentment and anger against their parents or families or institutions or the establishment or whatever, is that they are so filled with pride, so mixed up about what God is and what human beings are, that they were or are expecting all of these figures to be gods. A lot of those figures had just as much pride and really tried to play God. But that’s their problem. The whole world is absolutely filled with pride. Your problem is only to get rid of the pride in yourself, so you don’t play God too, like they did. I want to remind you of something in the story of the Prodigal Son. There is a reference to the pig pen, which is a metaphor for the world..Luke 15:15-20 And he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country; and he sent him into his fields to feed swine. And he would fain have filled his belly with the husks
that the swine did eat: and no man gave unto him. And when he came to himself, he
said, How many hired servants of my father's have bread enough and to spare, and I
perish with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, And am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants. And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.

This is what happens in the pig pen, or world, that was described in the story of the Prodigal Son. It’s what I am trying to share with you. The pride and other passions just keep being passed down from one generation to the other, unless you come to yourself and return to The Father’s house as he did. Anyone who expects his parents or authority figures to be gods, and wants to lean on them as if they were, will end up hating them If you put these figures first, above God, you’ll hate them and also hate God because of the way things turn out. But if you always put God first and lean completely on him, you will end up truly loving both God and them. As I wrote to you in last week’s letter, you get delivered from the ignorance and confusion of pride simply by asking Jesus to take it out of you. You don’t do anything else about it. It’s a spiritual disease which only the Great Physician can heal. As he heals you, you will gradually see who you really are and who God really is. All of the little ways in which we secretly confuse ourselves with God will be weeded out. At first you will feel disappointed in yourself, when you discover for sure that you haven’t any of the virtues and powers you thought you’d have. But at the same time you’ll feel a sensational relief, because you’ll be starting to see the answer. It’s the real living God, standing by to give you, not just the wonderful traits and powers you were hoping to have, but even far better qualities. You see the things we dream of being and doing by ourselves look great to us because we are so ignorant. In comparison with the abilities and virtues the Lord will put into you if you let him, they are like so much rubbish.

There is no way to get really deep knowledge of who you are and what you are like except by praying to be healed of pride. This is a prayer that God has never failed to answer and will never fail to answer. It is the ancient formula for getting out of any confusion you have about yourself and moving into a really clear view of yourself. One of the first things you discover is a bit of knowledge you already have in your very nature, something that’s always been there that you didn’t know about. You discover that your real self already knows there’s a God and already knows that you need Him. That takes one load off your shoulders. You don’t have to work at drumming up some kind of faith on your own, because the actual knowledge that you are a human being and that you are meant to live with the Lord is right there like an instinct inside of you. The minute enough pride gets cleared away, you see that knowledge popping up without the least effort on your part.

"For the knowledge of God’s existence has been implanted by him in all of us.
It is in us by nature". (Icon of St. John of Damascus)

"When man was created, a certain knowledge of God was implanted in him, and in all men. That knowledge makes us tend to love God". (Icon of Basil the Great)

Later, sometimes much later, sometimes just a little later you meet the Son of God in your heart. You meet Jesus. When that happens, everything changes inside of you. All through your whole being, you realize that you never want to play God again for anything in the world, because having the real God with you is too great a thing to lose. With him there, you don’t have to worry about having any good traits of your own. He is so wonderful you can’t even look much at yourself in his presence. You don’t have to protect yourself, or care whether you’ve been a failure, or wonder what’s going to happen to you. You’re so carefree you can hardly believe it. God is everything and you know it. He is the complete and perfect answer to everything we are, everything we need, everything we love, everything we hope for. Once you meet him, you know you can’t live without him. You love his name and use it reverently all the time. That’s what it’s like when the passion of pride goes down in you as a result of your prayers. You know, you really know in your heart, who the Lord is and who you are. And you begin to live just at that point. As one of the holy fathers says, “Have you found God?, then you have found life!”

In Christ’s Mercy,

Brother Seraphim

P.S. Just to let you know, you are prayed for every week
in church, it is a part of our service. (Picture of our Church service)