Passions 7

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

~ Introduction to the Passions ~

Part 8: The Trouble with passing the Buck

Dear Inmate:

You’ve probably heard the story of Prometheus, in ancient Greece, Zeus was said to rule the heavens, and Prometheus worked for him. It seemed to Prometheus that Zeus was very hard on human beings. So one day Prometheus decided to revolt against the rule of Zeus and do something on his own to help humanity. He stole fire from heaven and gave it to mankind, so they could warm themselves and cook their food. Zeus was furious, because Prometheus had taken this heavenly “glory” and given it to mere human beings. So he had Prometheus bound to a rock, where it was cold and windy, and an eagle came and ate some of his flesh each day.

The more Prometheus suffered, the more he hated Zeus and plotted against him. Prometheus was convinced he’d done a good thing, and that Zeus’ punishment was unjust. Friends came and tried to get him to repent. One said “You have not learned humility yet; and you are only making things worse. Stop rebelling; there are rules in heaven and a high monarch, who does not have to explain to you all his reasons for doing what he does.” Some other friends said, “the trouble is that you don’t respect Zeus. You are full of self-will, and you give way too much glory to mortals.” But Prometheus only hated Zeus and revolted him all the more. It didn’t do any good. Terror and madness struck Prometheus. In the end, still bound to terrible agony, he exclaims, “ I have done a wonderful and generous thing, but look what injustices I have to endure!”

The spirit of Prometheus lives in every one of us. We all feel at times that our good intentions (and sometimes we think are intentions are even better than God’s) are not appreciated, that we are innocent victims of injustice; and we feel like yelling and protesting about things that we think are unfair… Maybe we were born into a family that can’t afford the really nice things in life, so through no fault of our own we weren’t included in the social groups we would have liked. Or we were born black, so that all kinds of people reject us and hurt our feelings for no good reason. Or we are born into a family so full of passions that we end up in mental confusion and feel helpless to get ourselves straightened out and live a normal life. These are the kind of injustices most people see and hate and rebel against.
There are many other things that seem unfair too, like not having had a chance to go to college, or ending up in prison, or having drunken parents or divorced family that ruins your sense of security and maybe even embarrasses you, having people gossip or lie about you or accuse you wrongly. Or having people put you down whenever they get the chance. All of these things cause the spirit of Prometheus to rise up inside of us and make us angry, because we feel we have been innocent victims of unfair or humiliating treatment.

Walk along a street in almost any big city, and you’re likely to get some dirty papers blown against your legs, a lot of soot in your face, and a cinder or to in your eye. Life is like that, windy, with a lot of garbage blowing around. And plenty of it is going to hit you as you walk along through the years. You will always have to be disentangling yourself from some sort of garbage, some kind of mistreatment, injustice, humiliation, personal offenses. Vanity, which always wants us to look clean and innocent and wonderful in everyway, nearly goes frantic at the sight of garbage. When a vain person is hit by some injustice, he thinks it’s outrageous. He has no idea it is only a natural part of everyone’s life. He keeps thinking and thinking about it. As the years go by, he piles up all of the unfair things that have happened to him and spends many hours mulling over them in great detail. He remembers everything unkind or unjust that people have done to him and he remembers every unlucky break he has ever had. It’s as if he’s collected all the garbage that ever blew against him. He gets sadder and sadder , and madder and madder, which anyone would do if he were living in the middle of a garbage dump. The fathers of the church are very alarmed when people do his, because it is the first step toward losing all contact with God.

The ways of those that remember injuries are unto death. Prov, 12:31 (Septuagint LXX) [Note: King James Version only goes to vs 28]

"Remembrance of wrongs is the consummation of anger, hatred of righteousness, a worm of the mind, a nail stuck in the soul, continuous sin, unsleeping transgression, hourly malice". (Icon of John Climacus)

The second step toward losing God is blaming others for everything that goes wrong, everything that is wrong with us, or everything that isn’t going well in our lives. We all know what blaming others is like. Someone comes up and accuses us of something. We say, “it’s not my fault; he told me to do it that way, or they made me do it, or you wouldn’t give me a chance to do it the right way!” Do you see that whenever we blame others, we do it for only one reason, in order to proclaim that we are innocent and have no guilt in us?

Blaming others in order to make ourselves look innocent is called “self-justification,” because we are blaming them in order to justify ourselves. Adam started it all. When God caught him hiding in the bushes after he’d eaten the forbidden fruit, Adam glibly explained, “That woman you gave me handed me the fruit, so I ate it” (Gen 3:12). Then Adam relaxed and felt perfectly innocent. It was all Eve’s fault, in fact, it was all God’s fault for giving him Eve in the first place. So Adam made himself feel innocent of the whole business. Then God asks Eve about what happened, and she does the same thing. She blames it entirely on the serpent and doesn’t take any blame herself at all.

"What is self-justification? Self-justification is when a man denies his sin, as we
See in the case of Adam, Eve, Cain, and others who sinned but, wishing to justify
themselves, denied their sin". (Icon of Barsanuphius)

Why does self-justification take us a second step away from God? Can you see that if we blame others for everything, it makes us conclude that we’re innocent of any sin ourselves? And can you see what a terrific lie we’re telling if we say we have no sin, when we are actually full of passions? Just that lie alone is a whopper of a sin! But the worse part is that if we start imagining we’re innocent and haven’t any sin, if we sell that line of goods to our own selves, we won’t even think about going to Jesus. The only reason anyone goes to Jesus at first is to be forgiven and healed of his sin. If you don’t think you need to be saved, you certainly aren’t going to look around for a Savior. Do you remember, in my last letter, that I pointed out that people with too much vanity are quite often never healed? Now you can see why. It’s because they won’t believe they need healing, so they never go to God and ask for it. If you won’t believe you have any sin, you can’t possibly repent, because...

“repentance is the renunciation of sin and the acquisition of virtue.” (Icon of Nicephorus)

And repentance is the only open door to God that we have; there is absolutely no other. People who repent are constantly being changed and enriched by God all through their lives, even when they are old. But people who refuse to repent never change, which means they never grow psychologically, no matter how long they live. In fact they hate change. After all, why should they change if they have not been guilty of anything, if they are innocent and perfect as they are? They just can’t see it.

"Repentance is the door to mercy, open to those who seek it diligently; by this door we enter into divine mercy, and by no other entrance can we find this mercy". (Icon of Isaac of Syria)

Realizing we are sinners who need to repent is not especially difficult. All we have to do is pray for deliverance from pride, the passion that blinds us to the truth about ourselves, and very soon we see other passions and sins and various unholy (unhealthy) things we are doing. Some people think we are innocent, and then only become sinners when we sin. But that’s like thinking we get a rash first and then the chicken pox moves in later. Actually, we break out with sins because sin is already in us, just as we break out in a rash because the chicken pox virus is already in us. We are sinners until, by living our lives in God, we become saints. And the only thing that can take away our whole chance to live a life in God is self-justification, denying our sin and therefore refusing to repent and go to God for healing. God has promised he will never reject any person, however sinful, who comes to him. And the Bible tells us he never fails to answer anyone who calls to him.

And it shall come to pass that before they call, I will answer; and while they are yet speaking, I will hear them. (Is. 65:24)

Does it seem kind of depressing to think of yourself as a sinner, unworthy of blessings and honor and all that? Well, I have to say that almost nothing is more restful and peaceful than finding out that you’re a sinner. It may not sound appropriate, but you actually feel like celebrating! You see, just getting at the truth is so great, because then you’re not going around in the dark worrying about a lot of things you can’t do anything about. If you smashed your arm and couldn’t move your fingers, you wouldn’t want to keep worrying and wondering whether it was broken for weeks and weeks, would you? You’d want to have it x-rayed, even if it turned out to be broken. You’d want to know the truth about it, because then you could take the right action and not have any more doubts and worries. Discovering through prayer, that you are a sinner is like seeing yourself under an x-ray machine. As long as you don’t get to the x-ray machine and don’t know you’re a sinner, you build up worries and anxieties about yourself every year you live. You can get really tense that way. But when you find out for sure that you’re a sinner, then you know exactly what to do about it. And the main thing is, you know you’re curable. You know God cures you as you repent. Besides making your life so much simpler, finding out that you’re a sinner makes you happy and optimistic about yourself, because now you know that the sins and passions aren’t the real you. And you can see that when the real you gets out from under your sins, it’s going to have to be an OK person. God wouldn’t have created it any other way. So once you understand that you’re a sinner, you can know that every least little thing you dislike about yourself is going to go if you keep praying about it faithfully.

"By being able to know and condemn what we are, we immediately become able to love what we shall be in God". (Icon of St.Cyprian)

After you realize you’re a sinner, you drop self-justification. You don’t pass
the buck anymore. As long as you can blame others for anything, it means you
still haven’t quite gotten the point about being a sinner. Once you get it, you’re
far more interested in tracking down your own sins and getting rid of them than you are with worrying about what nasty thing someone said or did to you. When someone puts you down or is unfair to you or lies about you, you don’t pay much attention to it. You walk through all the garbage that’s blowing around almost as if it weren’t even there. And if you suffer an injustice, you aren’t half so sure as you used to be whether it really is an injustice in the long run. I mean, if a person hurts you with injustice and then God uses that very experience to lead you to triumph over some passion that was causing you way more pain and trouble than any other person, which is it, justice or injustice? Human injustice is always pretty obvious. But God’s justice takes a bit of time to investigate. A simple approach is, when I look at myself, what do I see? A sinner. Have I done much to deserve anything good? Have I stayed away from evil, avoided doing anything wrong to a single person? Have I done a lot of good for people? Have I saved anybody? Of course not. Then when I look at Jesus, what do I see? I see someone who’s always kind to me and loves me perpetually. Someone who listens to hear about everything that troubles me and everything I need, then solves all the problems and meets all the needs. Someone who removes sins which would otherwise be with me forever, and who heals passions that would otherwise drag me into hell. The one person who has never inflicted injustice and never will, but who has truly suffered injustice himself, to give me the kingdom of heaven. Do I deserve that sacrifice and salvation? Of course not. When I look at myself and God, I don’t see any justice at all. All I see is mercy, the infinite overflow of his justice. And I’d certainly never want to see only his justice, heaven forbid! I’d be completely sunk, with justice and no mercy. It would be the end of me, and of you too, and of everyone. It’s a good idea to think about that before we get too stirred up about someone who has been unjust to us, and before we start demanding justice. If God were to take us at our word and give us straight justice, we’d all be in a total disaster! So until we get some idea of God’s justice and mercy working in our own lives, we should not make any quick decisions about the human injustices that hit us. As a wonderful early Christian, Athenagoras, said,” With creatures who have no notion of justice, how can there be any complaint of injustice?”

One thing you can do about human injustice, the attacks and deprivations that come to you from other people, is learn to use it to your own advantage. Once a very generous man had several people working for him. They were extremely disrespectful, frequently paying no attention to his instructions, which were perfectly reasonable and politely given. They did sloppy work, often didn’t even show up, and were rude and profane in front of the man’s wife and children. He fired three men, but those who replaced them were just as bad. He was very frustrated and hurt, and angry. Then he turned to God and said, “I will stop complaining about their disrespect. I am a sinner, so why do I think I deserve respect? Lord forgive me for thinking people should respect me. And show me why you have let this disrespect come to me. Show me my own sins, and deliver me from complaining about the sins of others.” Suddenly a question came to him, “Tell me how much do you respect others?” And the man was amazed, because when he thought deeply about it, he found that he was so secretly proud of himself that he did not truly respect other people at all. He felt miserable about it and repented. And God led him into such full respect for others that he gained many friendships from it, as well as inner happiness. So if you were to ask him, he would say that being treated disrespectfully by those workmen was a real blessing. But you see, he made it one by turning to God and repenting of his own sins.

One of the most beautiful Christians I know is a Black woman. Not long ago some of us were at her home for lunch, and we asked her to tell us the story of how she came to God. When she described what it was like, as a little girl, to be black and be shut out and avoided as if you had a terrible disease, and how deeply it hurt her feelings, we all had tears in our eyes. She has felt injustice and cruelty of a kind we had never experienced. But she had the courage and largeness of heart to turn to God and repent of her own sins. The longer she did this, the more God drew her out of human injustice and into his own divine justice, and mercy, and love. She has now become so filled with God’s Spirit that everyone who loves God wants her as a friend. Do you think she would exchange equality with fellow Christians, and sharing the Holy Spirit with the saints of God, just for equality with the white skins that cover so many filthy hearts and lost souls? I know she would not. So it is not injustice that makes or breaks us. It’s how we use it. We are meant to use it in such a way that we go from the resentment of Prometheus, bound to a rock and cursing Zeus, to the love of Jesus, nailed on the Cross and blessing his Father. That’s the trip we take when we sign up for Christianity. We take it by concentrating on our own sins, and on our own repentance, instead of on the unfair and unjust things others do to us. When we are under fire, we imitate the wise David.

I became even as a man who does not hear, and in whose mouth are no reproofs. For I will confess my own wickedness, and be sorry for my sin. ( Ps. 38:14, 18)

People who go the repentance route have used their offenders to do good to themselves. They have used injustice to receive the mercy of God, the way a skillful surgeon can use a wicked-looking knife to save your life, and not to murder you. But people who blame others for their troubles and keep thinking about how much other people have hurt them, become full of poisonous self-justification and self pity. Anger builds up inside of them, and finally their desire is to punish anyone who has hurt them, to get even. They act as if they are innocent victims, wholly justified in all their complaints. But because they have never repented of their own sins, their hearts are filled with lies, rage, bitterness and destruction. Inside, they become every bit as cruel and unjust as the people who injured them.

Whenever you resent and rebel against another person, and allow him to be in your thoughts for a long time, you automatically get so you resemble him. People who rebel against tyrants tend to become worse tyrants. People who rebel against brute force tend to become more brutal than those they were rebelling against. People who rebel against greed become swallowed up by greed themselves. I think the main reason is that people who rebel, who proclaim their own innocence and set out to punish their offenders, are never people who are truly concerned with justice. They are interested in being gods, not in defending justice. They want to take the place of the people who are in power. By fighting, they only transfer the passions of the oppressors to themselves. It’s like two people fighting on a sinking boat. They both go down, and the injustice they were fighting about becomes very unimportant. We are always on a sinking boat in this mortal life, and there are always going to be people on it who will be unjust to us and tempt us to fight back. But God is holding out the lifeline, an opportunity for us to repent and be pulled up to him. The choice seems simple enough, turn your back on the injustice and the temptation to fight back, and grab that lifeline. There are so many injustices around that if we pay attention to them all; we won’t have room left for any spiritual life. We’ll go down in the sinking boat, without having been saved by God. The reason the Bible tells us not to fight against unjust people, and not to sue anyone, and not to take vengeance against anybody is simply to protect us from becoming just like them and sinking with them. St. John Chrysostom says that when we look at cruel, angry, greedy and unjust people, we ought to do everything we possibly can to avoid becoming that way ourselves. That means not blaming them for our troubles, not resenting them, not hating them passionately, and not getting involved with them in any way, but running just as fast as we can in the opposite direction. We do that by repenting and getting rid of the selfish tendencies and passion we have in our own hearts. The fathers warn us time and time again never to blame anyone else for our lot in life, and never to nourish anger or rebellion against anyone.

"If anyone reviles us, irritates, stirs us up to violence, tries to make us quarrel, let us keep silence. Let us not be ashamed to become dumb. For he who irritates us and does us an injury is committing sin, and he wishes us to become like himself". (Icon of Ambrose)

"If you are persecuted, do not persecute; if you are crucified, do not crucify; if you are slandered, do not slander. To seek justice against a man is not fitting in Christian life; there is no hint of it in Christ’s teaching". ( Icon of St Isaac of Syria )

The next time somebody hurts your feelings, accuses you of something you haven’t done, insults or rejects you, do what David has taught us. Be quiet and let it pass, don’t justify yourself in anyway. Then when you are alone, ask God to show your own passions and sins, and ask him to forgive and heal you. Soon you’ll realize that God does all the defending of us that is necessary. He justifies us in His perfect way, as long as we never blame a single other person for our troubles. Whatever damages others may do or seem to do to us, our own passions and sins are causing us infinitely more damage every day. So if we’re sensible, we’ll put first things first. We’ll attend to the cure of our own sins and not worry about somebody else’s. We’ll repent in the spirit of the early church, which began it’s evening prayer with…

Have mercy on us, O Lord, have mercy on us; for we sinners, void of all defense, offer unto thee, our Master, this supplication. Have mercy on us.

In Christ’s Mercy,

Brother Seraphim