St. Seraphim’s Fellowship
P.O. Box 351656
Jacksonville, Fl. 32235-1656
~ Part 5 Introduction to the Passions ~
“Don’t buy any False Guilt”
Dear Inmate:
Have you ever had a guilty feeling that you couldn’t easily shake off, or maybe a lot of regret about something that you can’t do anything about? If so, you may have had those feelings for a right reason, perhaps for something you did that was really wrong. But the chances are greater, if you haven’t yet unloaded the passion of pride, that you had those feelings of guilt or regret for a wrong reason, for something you think you should have done but something that God wouldn’t expect of you at all. You see the passion of pride gives us a lot of imaginary obligations and then puts a false sense of guilt in us when we can’t live up to them.
If you’ll think of pride as a yappy little person egging you on into all sorts of trouble, you’ll see what I mean. When we’re young, “yappy” hangs around getting all excited about our possibilities. Sometimes he shouts, “Oh, are you ever going to be an OK person! You’ve got some great ideas and really good natural instincts.” (Then he whispers about certain things he’s pretty sure we’ll be able to do.) “Yes, just use your head, and I think you can make life a real ball,” he concludes. All that time he’s been careful not to let us see God, of course, so he’s left us very elated with the thought that we can do these pleasant and worthy things by ourselves. As you know from my last letter, these are thing that only God can do. So naturally we fail to be as wonderful as pride had us dreaming we would be.
After we find out we weren’t so wonderful, and we are sitting there feeling bruised and disappointed about it, along comes pride, full of scorn. “What a big jerk! What a loser! What a dummy! Look at you! What good are you? What use are you to anyone?” Then he harps endlessly on the things you do worst and the things that humiliate you. After he has insulted you to his satisfaction, he walks off and abandons you for a time, leaving you to worry and feel miserably depressed about yourself. When the passion of pride gets a fairly good hold on a person, it repeatedly gets a person unrealistically and emotionally high with unreal hopes and then dumps him down into the depths of despair and feelings of unworthiness. It causes what is referred to as a manic-depressive behavior pattern, in which people are first way up in the clouds and unbelievably exhilarated and then feel so low they don’t even see much reason to live.
The thoughts that make people this abnormally hopeless don’t come from our real selves. They come from the passion of pride acting in them. And when pride has a really powerful grip on a person’s real self, it can do more than just produce high and low emotional experiences, it can bring in actual voices and demons that people can hear and see. The demons that come through as a result of a huge amount of pride are real; they are from the devil. They are never produced by human imagination or faulty human chemistry or anything else that is in human nature. A human being couldn’t produce a demon if his life depended on it. Christ said that demons are real. Every apostle and disciple and every Christian saint in history believed in them, not only believed in them but in many cases saw and heard them and cast them out of people. Anyone who claims that demons are a product of human imagination, as some people have claimed, is saying that God and all the great men of God are liars. There are times when demons even bother holy, healthy-minded people for some specific purpose of God’s. But usually the appearance and sound of demons come only as a result of overwhelming pride. Virtually all the fathers agree that..
"Pride is eventually followed by the final evil of going out of one’s mind, hearing voices, frenzy and visions of demons in the air". (Icon of Abba Evagruis Ponticus)
When pride can’t get people to expect extravagant things of themselves, it does something that may be even worse. It makes them feel that they ought to be doing certain fine and marvelous things, and makes them feel hopeless and guilty because they aren’t doing any of them. Like a cruel man overburdening a horse, pride piles heavy false obligations on us until we are nearly crushed beneath the load. These false obligations are our “shoulds”, the things we have become convinced we “should” do by ourselves. We should avoid offending any other human being. We should make something of ourselves in the world. We should be tolerant and understanding. We should be considerate, generous, kind and self-sacrificing. We should love and take care of everybody. We should accept full responsibility for everyone who’s unhappy. And so it goes, one devastating obligation after another. Pride makes people condemn and punish themselves unmercifully when they can’t meet such obligations. Many of the things that pride may suggest to you are alright in themselves, but there things which are impossible for you to do with your particular personality, or impossible for you to do without growing a great deal spiritually, or impossible for you to do because God has something different in mind for you. And of course every one of them is impossible for you to do without God. That’s the real catch with false obligations.
Sometimes pride will let a person think that he’s meeting these false obligations well for quite a long time, let him bask in a feeling of personal success, and only then will pull the rug out from under him and point out what a lousy job he’s really been doing. Then a feeling of worthlessness, and often a feeling of being hopelessly doomed to failure, will start building up in the person. Catching false obligations early is a big help. Anytime you have even a small feeling of guilt or failure or worthlessness that you can’t seem to get out from under, pray to be delivered from pride and false obligations, and keep praying, no matter how long it takes, until the false obligation that has caused your guilt or feeling of failure is revealed to you so you can dump it. Praying for deliverance from pride always finally exposes any false obligations you may have and shatters your tyrannical fake conscience. It will always show you clearly whether your guilty feelings are coming from false obligations or from real offenses. When Jesus invites those who are heavily burdened to come to Him and receive rest for their souls, he is including heavy burdens like these impossible obligations that pride puts upon us and the cruel guilt and hopelessness that come from them. Going to Jesus relieves us of pride and therefore gives us great mental and emotional rest. The false obligations, which cause constant failures, are wiped away. Then we start to be successful in whatever we do, because we no longer try to accomplish the impossible.
Hold only to what is your own, to what is human, and thus make your burden light. For he who through pride, makes his burden heavy shall indeed have to bear it himself. (Basil the Great)
"In all that we do, we must look to see not only if a thing is virtuous but whether it is possible, so that we not enter upon anything we cannot carry out". (Icon of Ambrose)
False obligations are all the kind of things that, if you could do them,
would make you abnormally wonderful, outstanding, quite a lot better and more sensitive-looking than other people with abilities and opportunities similar to yours. Our ordinary obligations, like cleaning our living spaces, faithfully doing the work we are assigned, being faithful to friends, praying faithfully, being cheerful doesn’t make us look especially wonderful or exceptional. People who are burdened with a lot of false obligations invariably fall short on what most of us consider to be normal obligations. They tend not to help others with anything. They make promises and then break them without giving it a second thought. They tell you that they will do something or promise they will be someplace at a certain time, and nine time out of ten they’ll back out at the last minute with a very convincing excuse. Even though they are constantly getting after themselves for not loving and being kind to everyone, they have almost no sense of obligation to other people and are completely inconsiderate most of the time. They rarely notice or feel guilty about the everyday obligations they could be living up to. But they feel terribly guilty and miserable about the false obligations they can’t live up to.
The way to get rid of guilt feelings, and also of our false obligations (because we all have some), is by prayer plus confession. There’s no getting around it. The fathers say that without confessing you can’t be healed of the passions. The Bible says the same thing in many places. Naturally we confess our sins and weaknesses to God when we pray. But we also have to confess to a priest or a monk or some other fellow Christian. You’ll notice that individuals who pray but never confess anything to anyone else usually don’t really change much in their lives. That’s because they don’t want to change very much, and the reason they don’t want to change is that they aren’t convinced that there’s much wrong with them. People who strongly believe something will let you know about it. They will “confess” that they believe it. And any person who really believes that he needs the help of God will confess that too. He will go to another Christian and confess his desire to be healed.
For instance, if we see symptoms of the passion of pride in ourselves and want to get rid of it so we can get straightened around and have more self-knowledge, we’ll go and confess these symptoms and confess that we see a lot of pride in ourselves. What are some of the symptoms of pride that we could confess? Making our own plans without having any idea what we are planning is something God wants us to do or not. Making important decisions without praying about them or asking fellow Christians for their advice. Thinking that we are superior to others (being conceited). Clinging to our families or spouses or girlfriends in a childish way. Thinking that we know a lot about everything. Putting other people down. Getting in with a wrong crowd (even if it seems accidental or unavoidable). Not doing our share of the work that needs to be done. Feeling frustrated in what we are trying to accomplish. Being bored or frequently despondent. Feeling hopeless about ourselves. These are all things that result from the passion of pride. And if you not only pray to be delivered from pride but also confess these symptoms, you’ll be much more quickly freed from this passion that causes so much mental and emotional disturbance to people.
Sometimes it’s hard to find another person in whose presence we can comfortably confess. The fathers said we should “confess the illnesses of our soul to a holy physician who is capable, with his advice and prayers, of healing us.” The early Church taught that we should confess only to a “Spirit-Filled” person. Holy confessors like the kind they were talking about could be either laymen or priests. They were people who were especially gifted as confessors. Many of the holy fathers were confessors. But other priests and laymen, who may not be so gifted in counseling, can hear confession and pray with you and God’s healing grace comes either way, with or without a gifted confessor. There are some people it is better to avoid confessing with. One is a person who subtly flatters you. That means someone who makes light of your sin and makes you feel slyly proud of yourself. A person of that sort would be like a doctor who won’t tell you that your appendix is about to burst, because he doesn’t want to upset your feelings.
"Those who pretend to be kind and fail to acknowledge your sins are actually sentencing you and laying plots against your true life". (Icon of Basil the Great)
The second kind of person to avoid confessing with is one who adds harsh judgment or criticism or stupid advice to your confession, so that you come out feeling disturbed or rejected or angry and definitely worse than when you went in. When we are truly repenting, we’re defenseless, we’re exposing our weaknesses. And God judges very severely anyone who attacks you when you’re weak, kicks you when you’re down. The fathers say that repentance is mourning; we should be mourning our sins and separation from the Lord. And the Bible says people who mourn are blessed, because they shall be comforted, comforted, not attacked, not lectured to, not rejected. So avoid confessing to anyone who looks coldly and judgmentally on our human weaknesses, and seek someone who is warmed by God’s compassion and love for sinners.
Some people don’t like the idea of repentance and confession because they figure they didn’t ask to be born and had nothing to say about what they were going to be like. They think that whatever they are is somebody else’s problem, that they were shaped by heredity and environment and there’s nothing they can do about it now. Let me show you how mixed up that kind of thinking really is. Say that a man, on the outside, was clean and neatly dressed early in the morning. He takes off for his job looking just fine. But it is pouring rain outside. A car splatters mud all over him, somebody’s umbrella snaps a button off of his coat, the water soaks through his raincoat and gets his clothes all wet, so wet that later on they look as though he has slept in them all night. When he gets home, he looks at himself in the mirror and sees that he is pretty messy. He says, out loud to himself, I’m not responsible for any of this, so it is not my job to clean myself up. [Now, put yourself in his place and ask this question of yourself…Would you just go to work the next day looking like yesterday’s rainstorm and explain to everyone that none of it was your fault? Why not? That would be true, wouldn’t it?] Yes, it would be true alright, but not in anyway reasonable and remember, according to the saints, anything that is unreasonable is sin.
[Now, you’re still in his place, remember…At home you’ve got soap and water, needle and thread, and whatever else you need to clean yourself up with. So if you were to go to work the next morning without having put yourself into presentable shape, you’d feel something was wrong with you, and something would be wrong with you. You’d be guilty of being utterly unreasonable.]
Spiritually we all have this very experience. We all inherit certain passions, and we all get messed up a little or a lot by our environments. Then when we go home, to God, we all have a mirror to look into. Do you know what that mirror is? It’s God’s law. Saint Paul the Apostle said;
Rom 5:20-21 Moreover the law entered, that the offence might abound. But where sin abounded, grace did much more abound: That as sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord.
You see? That means that when you look into God’s shiny law, reminding you of great you could be, you can easily see how messy and unholy you are by comparison. It’s the same when we look at the saints and see how far away we are from their holiness. Everything holy is like a big sparkling mirror with untidy us, all splattered with sins and troubles, looking into it. But go back and read that Bible verse again….Paul said that wherever sin abounded, grace did much more abound. That means that no matter how much sin there is, there is more than enough grace to wash it off with. It means that God is stronger than our environment, he can do more to clean us up than our environment, or our past lives have done to make us messy. So however we became unholy, however our past lives have hurt or confused us, however the passions got into us, doesn’t matter anymore. As soon as we look into God’s mirror and see what is wrong with us, our job is to use God’s grace to get cleaned up. Whatever has happened to us before may not have been our total and personal responsibility. But what happens to us now that we can see ourselves in God’s mirror, and now that we know about God’s grace, is completely and totally our responsibility. The first real guilt you could have would be to discover sin in yourself and then not use that grace of God to get it cleaned up. It’s called “abundant grace,” because it does infinitely more than just get us cleaned up. When we repent and confess, God’s grace doesn’t only repair a particular sin. It gives us a whole new wardrobe to wear, new knowledge, new strength, new affections, new interests, new confidence in ourselves, and a wonderful new love for Him.
“It is as if you were not only to heal a sick man of his disease, but were to give him also beauty, and strength, and fame. It is if you not only gave food to a hungry man, but were to put him also in possession of great riches, and were to set him up in a position of great authority.” (Icon of St .John Chrysostom ,explaining abundant grace)
Repenting and confessing the symptoms of pride over a period of time will absolutely
lead you out of confusion about yourself. It will give you as our holy counselors say, an alert mind. You may think it is unpleasant to look at weaknesses in yourself and to confess them to another person. You may feel that it is degrading, like putting yourself down. But you don’t feel that way when you go to a doctor! Do you? If you have pain, fever, a rash, you confess to a doctor that you have them. You tell him about your symptoms so he can cure you. The passions cause pain, just like any disease. They throw your thinking off and make you more or less delirious, just as a high fever does. They make you break out into a rash of actions that are wrong, uncomfortable and aren’t the real, normal you. Repenting and confessing them brings God’s healing. It restores you to good mental health.
“Blessed is the man who realizes his weakness, for this knowledge becomes the foundation, the root, and the beginning of every boon. For as a man understands and truly feels his weakness, he immediately puts a restraint on the pride of his soul which obscures reason, and thus he gains protection”. (Icon of Barsanuphius)
We’ve talked about false obligations, but we haven’t said anything about what your real obligations are. Perhaps you are wondering what sort of morals Christianity demands from you. Well, if you have grown up in the city, especially a big one, you are going to have to change your thinking about morals very drastically in order to get lined up with the holy teaching of the ancient Christians. You probably think of morals as rules that you’re supposed to live by. And you may be trying to make up your mind whether living by them is going to save you or just make you a social misfit in your world there in prison. Possibly, too, you are discovering it’s hard to find good reasons for being moral and meeting certain obligations, because moral teaching is thrown out at us every which way, by so many people, and sound reasoning is hardly ever thrown at us along with it.
Now here is how morality really works, and here is how Christians arrive at their morals and obligations. Morals are simply a pattern of behavior, and they happen by themselves as a result of the way be believe and as a result of getting the Holy Spirit in us. The Bible says;
Matt 12:35 A good man out of the good treasure of the heart bringeth forth good things: and an evil man out of the evil treasure bringeth forth evil things.
And the fathers explain that “good treasure” means the Holy Spirit. The Bible also says that you will know good people by their fruits, the way they act and the things they do. The fruits of the Christian faith are Christian morals. To become truly Christian, you don’t think about morals and obligations first; you think about what you believe first. Christianity believes you can’t survive and be your real self without God. So that leaves you with only one real obligation, the one to yourself, which would be getting together with God. The obligation to survive and become what we were created to be was put into us by God, in the form of a powerful instinct. Nothing is more unnatural and weird than for a creature to be born and then not want to preserve and take care of itself. With us, this mans taking care of ourselves spiritually, because we are spiritual beings intended for eternal life with God.
“God, having promised you eternal blessing and given the pledge of the Spirit in your heart, commanded you to take care of your life, that your inner man, freed from passions, should even in the present life begin to taste these divine blessings.”
(Icon of Maximus the Confessor)
The one obligation you start with then, is to yourself. You must learn how to preserve and benefit yourself by uniting with God. That means you have an obligation to read and hear about God, to get together with fellow Christians, to pray and ask God to join your life safely with His. Until you meet that one obligation to yourself, you will never be any good at carrying out obligations to other people. A number of the fathers remind us, “First do the good that you know, then the good that you do not know will be shown to you.” So don’t let yourself worry about other obligations and commandments until you have first carried out this one great obligation to preserve and benefit yourself by being genuinely converted to God.
Then you will see other obligations coming along. They will still be obligations to yourself, even if they sometimes look like obligations to other people,. For instance, you’ll realize that you must not get mad and hate someone. That isn’t for his good at all, some people are bothered when you hate them, others simply aren’t, or just don’t care. It’s for your own spiritual peace and growth that you have an obligation and a commandment not to hate anyone. Or you’ll realize that you may not covet or steal something that belongs to your neighbor. That’s not primarily to protect him from losing anything. It’s to protect you from losing something, from losing self control, from losing faith that God will provide you with whatever you need, and maybe from losing salvation. Or you’ll realize (as I hope you do, at least somewhat by now) that you’ve got to do your fair share of assigned work in your community or with your friends inside.
That’s not because others can’t get along without you. It’s because you can’t get along and keep your emotional balance unless you’ve got work to do and are socially connected with others by sharing the load with them. All of the commandments given by God are considered by the saints to be “divine prescriptions for our mental and spiritual health.” So the faster you can take hold of them and use them, the healthier and stronger you’re going to become, and the saner you’re going to become. Do you know what the fathers say sanity is? Perfect obedience to God, because perfectly obeying God means that you are perfectly preserving and taking care of yourself. Some people even nicknamed Christianity “The Sane Way” So, you see, God doesn’t give us a list of things to do or ways to perform them just because he’d like us to look great on the outside. He gives us divine prescriptions for our health and preservation. When we fulfill the obligation of desiring our own health and preservation the way God desires them, it brings us together with God’s will. It brings us into obedience, even though what we are doing is for our own good. Fulfilling that simple and natural obligation finally makes us appreciate and honor and love God so much that we want to please him in everything we do. And that’s what Christian morality is, having enough wisdom and affection for God to make you determined to please him in everything you do.
In Christ’s Mercy
Brother Seraphim
