Passions 9

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

~ Introduction to the Passions ~

Part 10: “You’re more important than you think”.

Dear Inmate:

Self-importance is a funny thing. We all have a tremendous thirst for it. It’s one of the hardest of all things to get along without. And strangely enough, it’s a thing we don’t believe we’ve got unless we can feel it. When our toes are numb inside ski boots or skates, we still know we’ve got them. But when we can’t feel our importance, we don’t think we have any. Do you know why? It’s because we get our sense of importance from other people instead of from God, where we’re supposed to get it. So when other people aren’t treating us as if we’re important, we actually don’t think we are!

To God, each of us is infinitely important. God closely watches and cares about everything you say and do and every single breath you take. It’s absolutely impossible to make ourselves either more or less important than God has already made us. No other human being can add to our importance or subtract from it, no matter how they treat us. Our importance is always with us, whether we are successes or dropouts, whether we are accepted by others, or rejected by them, whether we are saints or criminals. The only reason we are all important is that God thinks so, and says so. The whole Bible is a record of how important every human being is to God.

Have you ever heard the word “redundant”? It means overdoing something and making it clumsy or grotesque. If you put another mouth on your face, or added two more eyes to your head, that would be redundant. And anytime you try to be important, that would be redundant. That’s adding something clumsy and grotesque to yourself, something you’ve got enough of already. You see, you already have perfect importance from God, and it will show up best if you leave it alone and never try to do anything more to it. Whenever we try to be important, all we do, both spiritually and psychologically, is detract from the wonderful importance we already have. If you pray, you will realize this and will become able to stand up with the importance you already have from God. You never feel that you need any other importance.

Wanting to be included by others is natural and healthy; it’s not the same as wanting to be important. We are supposed to be included by other people, and to include them in our lives. But we do not get included by acting important, at least not by the people it’s a pleasure to be with. People who try to add importance to themselves beyond what God has given them are full of vanity, which makes them secretly envious and cruel and bitter, the worst sort of friends. They include one another in their social and intellectual groups, and if you want to add something redundant to the importance you already have from God, you will probably be included by them too. But that whole life is a fake, and if you’re a sincere person, you won’t like it. People who only use each other to boost their vanity and self-importance become boring after awhile, because they’re so self-centered and shallow and insincere. Better, much better, to skip their company and let God take care of how important you are, and not give it another moment of thought yourself.

If you pray to be delivered from the passionate human urge to be important in an ugly, redundant way (and it takes quite a lot of prayer), then God will begin showing you how important and dear you are to him, and he will greatly increase your faith in him. Whenever you give up trying to look important to people, you always get in return the experience of discovering how extremely valuable you are to God. Among holy people, no one tries or wishes to be any more important than anyone else. The Bible says that such people, all doing the work God gives them, are like the parts of your body, your hands and feet and eyes and all the rest. The parts of your body belong together and work together and help one another. If you function the way God tells you to in his Body, you will have the secure feeling of being important among his people and really belonging with them. You will be necessary to them, and they will be necessary to you, just as your hands and your feet and your eyes are all necessary to your body and to one another.

God has made you different members of his body. The eye can’t say to the hand, I do not need you; nor can the head say to the feet, I have no need of you. No, all the members of the body are needed, and especially the parts that may not look most attractive. You are the body of Christ. You are individual members in it (1Cor.12:18,27)

People who do not become obedient to God can never be assured of their importance, and are therefore never quite able to get rid of the urge to look important in an ugly and redundant way. Don’t worry if God hasn’t made his whole for you clear yet. You’re like a jigsaw puzzle, and you have to keep praying and wait until God puts the pieces together for you before you’ll be able to see the full picture of your special calling. You may have a special talent in art or writing, but that by itself is really nothing. Many people have gifts like that and use them only to try to make themselves redundantly important. The only natural abilities that can become real offerings among the members of Christ are the ones you go ahead and develop entirely in obedience to God. And a gift that may look very small to you when it first appears can have great consequences when God has fully developed it. Obedience to God is where bigness is, so any gift you’ve got is going to be big if it grows out of doing what God tells you personally to do. The saints, who gave precious offerings to their people (and to all of us) later on, started out simply by obeying God.

I am small and of no reputation; yet I do not forget thy commandments. (Ps 19:141)

Whatever God builds up in you, as a result of your strong determination to obey him, becomes your offering to other people. It is by making that offering that you are a functioning part of Christ’s body and are fully included among the right friends for your interests and your personality. When everyone has made an offering that comes from obeying God, and not from an urge to be stupidly important, you’ve got a circle of friends you can enjoy and trust and love. You’re all bound together by faith and joy, and by an unbreakable fondness for God and one another.

Behold, how good and joyful a thing it is for friends to dwell together in unity! It is like the fresh dew of the morning, which fell upon the hill of Sion. For there the Lord promised his blessing, and life for evermore. (Ps 133:1,3,4)
Lots of people look as if they’re not trying to act important at all. You can only
tell for sure whether someone is trying to be redundantly important if you watch to see what happens when he doesn’t get his own way on a number of occasions. If he really isn’t trying to be important, he won’t mind being crossed in what he wants. But if he is secretly trying to make himself important, he’ll be awfully upset, awfully angry or pained, at not getting his own way. Wanting your own way is the classic symptom of trying to make yourself redundantly important. And wanting our own way, like a spoiled child, is a passion that’s pretty deeply entrenched in all of us.

You may think it’s unmanly not to make yourself felt. You may think it’s good to assert yourself and demand your rights and get your own way. No, it is not. Everything we think up and want to do on our own and regardless of the will of God, no matter how noble or wonderful or just it may appear, is harmful to us because it keeps us from being joined to God’s perfect will. You can’t possibly be going after your own will and after God’s will at the same time, any more than you can be going after big game in Africa at the same time that you’re going after pearls in Japan. If you really believe in asserting your own will and demanding your rights, God will be of no help to you in what you desire. There is not a single father in all of Christianity who will tell you differently. The fathers say that being able to perform miracles, to conquer whole armies and nations, even being able to raise the dead, can’t compare with the courage and holiness of a man who has conquered his own self importance and willfulness.

"Let us flee from willfulness as from the poison of death". (Icon of Hesychius)

"Our will is a brass wall between man and God". (Quote from Abba Pimen)

"He who wishes to kill his own will must do the will of God, instead of his own will, introduce God’s will into himself, inculcate and implant it in his heart".
(Icon of Simeon the New Theologian)

"That soul that is perfect whose desiring power is wholly directed toward God. (Icon of Maximus the Confessor)

You can’t get over this passion of willfulness by deciding to reform, by using your own will power. You see, you don’t just have a single will in yourself. You have two wills. One is your higher, intelligent will. It wants God and everything good. The other is your lower will; sometimes the fathers call it your dumb sensory will. St. Paul said he had one will that delighted in God’s commandments, but another will that kept trying to draw him into sin (Romans 7:21,23) The more we pray, the more our higher will prevails and leads us into God’s perfect will. But when we don’t pray much, our dumb lower will takes over. It wants everything that is bad for us and nothing that is good for us. It is called dumb (or irrational), because it has no reasoning power. It’s just a “wanter.” All it does is want, want, want, without any judgment of any sort. When something looks beautiful, it wants it, even if it’s from the devil.

“Two wills existing in us fight against one another. One belongs to the intelligent part of our soul and is therefore called the intelligent will, which is the higher; the other belongs to the sensory part and is therefore called the dumb, carnal, passionate will. The higher will is always desiring nothing but good; the lower, nothing but evil.”

If this dumb sensory will is not cut off by wise training when we are children and by prayer when we are older, it gradually makes us want our own way in everything, even the smallest details. Life is such that we are going to get some opposition when we want our own will in everything. So this dumb sensory will releases energy into our bodies to help us fight the opposition. If you were suddenly confronted with a desperate emergency, like having to save a child’s life or fight off a wild animal, adrenalin would be released inside you and would give you abnormal strength with which to meet the crisis. The fathers say this is what happens in people who let their dumb sensory will run away with them. Getting their own way becomes so urgent that every least desire is an emergency to them. Merely getting a sweater they want, or going to a movie when they want to, or watching a favorite TV program, is such a hot issue to them that they release as much inner energy for it as if they were going to rescue a baby from a burning home or escape a grizzly bear.

Being all worked up that often, according to the fathers, actually affects our brain and our blood. It makes people unable to think straight or control themselves, even when they really want to. It can end in what the fathers call “frenzy” and what today we call insanity. So falling into the habit of wanting our own way all the time is no small thing. Even if it doesn’t lead us all the way into insanity, it certainly takes us in the direction of mental imbalance.

"In the words of a certain wise man, this frenzy is due to the passion of vainglory, which affects a certain place in the brain and disturbs all it’s tracts". (Icon of Nilus of Sinai)

"This spirit (of vainglory and willfulness) seizes upon the vessels in which the vigor of the soul resides. It overwhelms the soul with foulest darkness and interferes with its intellectual powers, as we see also happening from wine or fever or excessive cold and from other indispositions". (Icon of John Cassian)

Wanting our own way in everything is also the main cause of anger. If you don’t care about having your own way, there won’t be a whole lot to get mad at in life. If you feel angry frequently, it’s probably because you aren’t getting your own way often enough to satisfy your dumb sensory will. And if you want your own way so much that you’re getting mad about not having it, then it means you’re trying to make yourself redundantly important and aren’t content with the importance God has given you, because getting our own way primarily makes us feel self-important. So getting angry a lot (unless you’re in a situation that seriously threatens your spiritual safety, and need to be propelled out of it by the force of anger) means you want to feel important and have your own way more than you want to obey God.

People who are determined to get their own way in everything look peppy and strong-minded, especially in their earlier years. But the ancient Christians say that wanting your own way all the time uses up your energy and finally leaves you without much strength to go on. They say wanting your own way leads to chronic weariness and eventually makes you want to quit working and lie around all the time, many people keep pushing themselves and don’t give into the urge for rest, but it’s an awful strain. One saint says that your energy is kind of like the flowing power of a stream. When your dumb sensory will is in control, making you want everything in sight, it spreads the stream of your energy out over flat, wide land. The shallow water (your dissipated energy) soaks into the ground and disappears. Your higher intelligent will, on the other hand, channels the stream of your energy into what the Bible calls the narrow way (of obedience to God), forces it between the high banks of discipline that keep it running fast and finally push it into a gushing waterfall that generates real power. That’s why the fathers say that people, who wait for God to tell them what to do, and then obey him, never become easily worn out or lose their natural energy.

They who wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint. (Isa. 40:31)

Extreme vanity, with willfulness as its constant companion, gives us the stoics, people who seem to have fantastic will power and will nearly wipe out their whole personalities in order to look good. When vanity is a little less strong, so that people fail to be successful stoics, then willfulness goes into various defenses and escapes, like smoking and drinking and other destructive actions. We usually say such people have no will power, when the real trouble is that they have far to much (self) will, so much that they won’t give it up and let God’s will operate instead. A person who thinks he has weak will power needs to pray earnestly to get rid of vanity and willfulness. Then his natural power to obey God and say no to self-destruction will be restored to him.

I know only too well how hard it is to get over wanting your own way in everything. We grow up getting our own way so constantly that we think we’re supposed to have it. Nearly everybody you see is fighting for it. Because of the sickness we’ve inherited from our society, we think something is dreadfully wrong if we can’t have our own way. But if we don’t do something about it, we’ll become drained of our normal strength, to say nothing of losing our natural gifts and our real selves, actually our very humanity, by being seriously cut off from God. What can we do? Ask God to deliver us from vanity, and especially from the awful trap of wanting to feel important when we already are important. He will do it. And as soon as he does, you will naturally stop wanting your own way quite so much as you did before, because you won’t have any motive for being bossy and demanding, for throwing your weight around. When you get your first few experiences of deliberately not having your own way (because you have become interested in doing God’s will instead), it will make you unexpectedly happy about the control you feel coming into yourself. We tend to think self-control is unpleasant; but the truth is, you can’t possibly get inner contentment and happiness without it, just no way! When you get a good taste of it, you’ll realize that always wanting your own way is frustrating and painful, but obeying God is beautiful and gives you confidence. Then you’ll start asking God to deliver you even more from wanting your own way. And you’ll really mean it.

When you pray to give up wanting your own way too much, remember that you’re doing it so God can take you over, not so that anybody else can. As you make progress in overcoming vanity and willfulness, the people who want to influence and use you won’t think you’re getting less will at all; they’ll think you’re getting more willful and stubborn than ever. You can’t afford to be naïve about this. Most people don’t want you to obey God; they want you to obey them. They like your dumb sensory will very much, because they can cater to it and in that way keep control of you. So as you pray to be freed from your dumb sensory will, pray also to enter fully into God’s will for you, and not into anyone else’s. And don’t worry about anyone who doesn’t seem to be pleased with it.

This is my last letter on vanity and the various things that come out of it. You can be delivered from them all by prayer. The fathers say we overcome our passions with two weapons, the Holy Spirit and the name of Jesus. So use the name of Jesus when you pray, and the Holy Spirit will drive out the passions we’ve been talking about. Here are the main symptoms of vanity, which you especially want to pray about and confess if you spot them in yourself. A tendency to show off and want people to praise you. A weakness for flattery, either giving it or taking it. Envy, jealousy, and gossip. Trying to look better than you are (being a fake). Blaming another person for something that’s happened to you. Being highly sensitive to criticism, or suspecting others of criticizing you when you haven’t any proof that they’re really doing it. Thinking you’re not a sinner and not guilty of anything. Feeling virtuous or noble or innocently victimized. Bitterness. Trying to look or act self-important. Feeling unable to realize how important you are to God. Wanting your own way in a lot of small things, Fighting for your own way in anything which is not clearly God’s will for you. Being unreasonably afraid of people or things or certain situations, cowardice of any sort. Feeling you are under the control of other people, that they can stop you from being yourself. Wanting to use other people for your own purposes. Letting something or someone else influence you more than God does. Feeling frequently angry, tired out, or unable to go on because things haven’t worked out the way you wanted them to. Being unable to feel strong affections or to love anyone. Being unable to believe in God (because God says, “How can you believe when you seek glory from one another?”). Being unable in due time, to see God’s will for you. Being unable to relax and enjoy things.

When you are somewhat freed of vanity and everything that goes with it, your reward will be warn human relationships, which come from getting much more faith and love and deep confidence in the Lord. Only then will you clearly see who other people are and what they are like. As long as you have vanity, you don’t see people the way they really are. You only see them from the standpoint of what they done to you or what they can do for you. As long as we use other people to admire us and praise us; as long as we let them be our idols and control us; as long as we use their offenses against us to justify our own sin and make us look innocent; as long as we depend on them to make us feel important, or use them to get our own way, we shall never actually know much about them. They’ll seem more or less like instruments to us.

When God delivers you from enough vanity, then you can see someone outside of yourself and clearly recognize who he is. You won’t be seeing a tool you can use, or someone who can use you as a tool. You’ll be seeing another person just as real and individual as yourself. And you’ll have a natural, spontaneous feeling of relationship to him. That’s when you’ll be able to answer the questions I have posed to you in my letters. Who am I? and Who are you? You be able to say “I’m me and you’re you” and understand, in a really profound way, that you’re talking about two equally important, separate human beings, both with the same basic passions in them and both urgently in need of salvation by the Lord, and both equally in need of loving the other person.

"For nothing that is endowed with reason and judgment has been created, or is created, for the use of another, whether greater or less than itself, but for the sake of the life and continuance of the being so created. (Quote from Athenagoras)

"He has equally created all and has died for all, in order to save all equally". (Icon of Callistus)

In Christ’s Mercy,
Brother Seraphim