Beloved brothers and sisters,
Every journey has a beginning. And, even though we sometimes take it as a joke that we always begin with Adam and Eve, maybe it seems futile, maybe it seems boring to always return to the story of the first people, but I believe that we do not have another way to understand ourselves, to understand what happens to us, to understand the world and what happens in it. Maybe we can even say that perceiving what took place with the first human beings as something exterior, as a story, as the aura of a legend, is a sign of our fallen state, of fragmentation, disunity, discord. I am thinking of discord, which appears when we slip into a subtle thought, a thought which destroys our union with God and people, a thought that says: “What am I guilty for if Adam sinned?”
On the other hand, I believe that perceiving the biblical history of the first two people as our own story, as our own life, can be a sign of healing, a sign that the spiritual journey from the mind to the heart has been traveled. Let us try to clarify, to plumb the depths of these thoughts.
We have more experience of our nature’s fallen state than its healed state. A great difficulty, however, seems to be that we are not fully aware of what this state actually is. That is, we see that something is not going well, but we do not interpret it correctly, we do not find the true significance of this state of things. Or maybe truly seeing, being fully conscious that something is not going well is a long path. I am referring to the situation in which we live in apathy, a hardness of heart, in a state of complacency, but we struggle, run, and maybe make great efforts, yet we somehow run in circles, and we find ourselves in the same spot. We find ourselves in the same spot, but, on the other hand, we kid ourselves and say: “Next time it will be better,” or “I didn’t struggle enough. I will do it, and I will succeed.” I mean to say that it is a long journey even just to be fully aware that something is not going well. I am talking about the difficulty in seeing our fallen state.
More concretely put, what we live, maybe, from day to day looks like this: we know that we need to humble ourselves, but in fact, we keep returning to the same point of the vicious circle, or the circle of vices, of passions. That is, we know that we must humble ourselves, but we react strongly to the smallest insult. We vehemently contradict and retaliate if someone has a different opinion than us, or if he does not agree with us. We appear extremely sensitive to any slanderous word which we hear said about us. We hide our faults and weaknesses and are quite preoccupied, sometimes very preoccupied, with making a good impression on others, even though we know that we must humble ourselves.
Then, we know that we need to pray. But how many times does it happen for an entire day to pass without us at least remembering God; how many times do we pray formally, not finding ourselves within the words of the prayer we say, but everywhere else? How many times do we not find pretexts of being tired, having a multitude of occupations or obligations, so as to give up on prayer, shorten it, or postpone it? And when we succeed in praying, at home or at the Church services, how easily we return, possibly immediately, to the things which are not at all fitting for prayer: evil, gossip, irritation, annoyance, envy, idle talk, or bodily pleasures.
Then, we know that we must love our enemies and turn the other cheek when we are struck. But, in fact, do we succeed, not in loving those who wrong us, but at least in not returning evil for what was done to us, at least not hating those who wrong us, not speaking badly of them, but rather forgiving them? We do not.
See, this is kind of how our spiritual life looks. We live a fragmentation, a dispersion, a kind of empty struggle. We plan to do one thing and something else comes out. We think one thing and say another. In our mind, we judge someone, but we say beautiful words to him. Or, we think one thing and say and do something completely different. For example, we think that it is good to be united, that we must be united, and we talk about love for others, but, through what we do, not only do we not work for unity, but we work, most of the time, for division. All of these things, in one way or another, resemble what I named fragmentation, in the sense of a loss of integrity. We discover that we are not honest people, whole people, but fragmented, made of pieces. Our mind, heart, will, and words are not one. The powers of our soul work in disunity.
And, as a small parenthesis, to give you some rest for your souls, I will tell you a kind of joke, which is not a joke but illustrates our twisted state–I do not know how else to call it–in which, the majority of the time, we live and find it difficult to know ourselves–how convoluted we are within. The great Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow, a Saint of our sister the Russian Orthodox Church, once asked three young monks: “What do you think we are saved by?” The first answered: “By humility.” The metropolitan said: “And, do you have much of this?” And he went to the second one–they were at a kind of exam, I think for the theological seminary. That one said: “Through Your Eminence’s prayers.” The metropolitan said: “Who taught you to be such a hypocrite?” He asked the third one too. That one responded: “By the blood of the Saviour Jesus Christ, through His sacrifice on the Cross.” And the metropolitan said to him: “Remember this response. Embed it deeply within yourself.”
We are rather tangled up, rather convoluted. Many things are mixed together in us. The things said before refer especially to what is within us. But also in the life of the world, in history, we can easily observe the dynamic of the fall from God in the sense of dissolution, in the sense of the world’s automation, in the sense of its fragmentation, the dynamic which grows to its final consequence, to its last ounce of unity, to the perdition of the world, to the end of the world. In the Romanian Patericon, I believe Father Ioanichie Balan noted the saying of a spiritual man from Moldova who, being asked when the end of the world would be, responded: “When there will no longer be a path from one neighbor to another.” There is no need to be preoccupied with this dynamic of the fall. Whoever has altitude sickness has observed that when you look over an abyss, you almost feel attracted to it; it absorbs you. The same thing can happen to us that, if we pay too much attention to this vortex, we are absorbed by it. There is no reason to fear the end of the world; we fall into all kinds of preoccupations related to chips, biometric documents, and all kinds of conspiracies.
We also see the healing of the state of fragmentation throughout history. And, when we say this, we are referring to the Church. A re-creation of the world, of the human being, takes place through the Church and within it. What was made into pieces, fragments are remade whole. The unity or unification which is given to us by the Church is so tightly held, so true, that it is similar to the limbs of a body, the head of the body being the Lord Jesus Christ. He built this body, the Church, through His Incarnation, through His Cross and Resurrection, and by sending His Most Holy Spirit. As members of this body, we are healed of our fragmentation, of the disunity in which we live as humans, and the inner fragmentation of the soul’s powers, described in what was said a bit earlier. This healing is a re-creation of ourselves and the world. If in the first creation, when God brought everything from nonbeing to being, our participation was not required, then our re-creation is a gift that we must make truly our own by our free choice. It is given to us to participate in our re-creation, in our healing.
In this sense, the Church has grace-filled means of influencing our souls in a beneficial way. That is, personal prayer, the prayers we do according to prayer books; reading the word of God, going to Church services and holy places, and especially receiving the Holy Sacraments. Confession and Communion with the Most Holy Body of the Lord leave deep and beneficial traces in our souls.
However, a very grace-filled way of influencing our soul, a way of inner healing incomparably precious because we always have it at hand, is contained in the inner prayer of calling–in repentance–on the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ. I am talking about the Jesus Prayer. And, in what follows, I will read Igumen Chariton of Valamo [from The Art of Prayer, an anthology of writings on the Jesus Prayer] which, being rather concentrated, offers us the essence of teachings on the Jesus Prayer.
The Jesus Prayer–he says–must be approached with reverence and a spirit of repentance, and it must be done attentively, without hurry, and with great simplicity, without trying to produce a certain feeling in your heart. It is better to realize that you do not have [the feeling] than to create a counterfeit experience.
We do not need to force ourselves to produce a certain feeling in our heart just because we know that we should have it. We need to [pray] with great simplicity. Prayer is called oral when it is uttered with words either out loud or without making a sound. It is called mental prayer when it is inseparably tied to the attention of the mind. We do not have mental prayer when it happens that we are attentive for a few moments and then we are no longer attentive, or we are attentive for a day, a week, and then we again pray without attention. It is called mental prayer when we have attention of the mind that is inseparable from [the prayer]. And it is called the prayer of the heart or the mind in the heart when it is done in the heart.
When we say the Jesus Prayer, Igumen Chariton continues, the quantity is not so important as the quality. Nevertheless, you must decide on a certain number of prayers as a permanent rule so that we do not leave it to whim and chance. As a parenthesis, Elder Sofian Boghiu of Antim Monastery recommended not to say a certain number of prayers daily, but to have a time of prayer that we stick to with seriousness–three-four times a day for a quarter of an hour to say the Jesus Prayer. It can be a point of reference, it can give us an orientation in regard to finding a kind of prayer rule. But each person knows his strength and needs to turn to the guidance of his spiritual father.
He who practices the Jesus Prayer must remember that through this [prayer] he settles into a certain closeness to the Lord, and, befitting this standing before the face of the Lord, by invoking Him frequently, by frequently calling on Him in prayer, he will have to change his life, to refrain from all that is not worthy of this state, of this nearness to the Lord, and to do all that is within his power to be worthy of it.
Settling into such an inner state, we must patiently practice our asceticism of prayer, leaving ourselves totally in the will of the Lord, without thinking about who knows what imaginings, but always considering ourselves unworthy servants. See, in short, says Igumen Chariton, the essence of the Jesus Prayer.
He tells us something else:
We must begin with spoken prayer, which, being uttered with reverence and without rush, with compunction of heart, passes to the mind on its own.
That is, he tells us that we cannot skip steps.
…It progresses to the [prayer] of the mind on its own, and from that of the mind to that of the heart. Gradually, prayer takes over the soul and brings it to a state of peace, calm, rest, purity, order, joy, and an inner state of being continually before the Lord.
What he describes here is a healed state of being, the state of an honest human being, the state of a whole human being.
And, as a prolongation of the colloquium Encounter with the Elder, this year you know that the elder whom we met, through the testimonies that were given, was Elder Sofian Boghiu. As a continuation of this colloquium, which finished with my testimony, I will read some of Elder Sofian’s words which were preserved by a spiritual son, written down by him immediately or even during his conversation with the Elder. The words which I want to read from Elder Sofian also refer to this tangled, twisted state of our soul. This spiritual son of Elder Sofian was preoccupied with the issue of sincerity. He asked him: “Father, how far does sincerity towards my neighbor go?” Elder Sofian responded:
“Look how this problem of sincerity is: for a spiritual work, we need honesty, we need sincerity. Look at how this problem of sincerity is: You must be very sincere with yourself and God in the first place. Yet with others, you must act according to the instruction in the Gospel: “wise as serpents and harmless as doves” (Matt. 10:16). The serpent’s wisdom means prudence - to be very prudent with the person you are talking to; to be attentive to the point of nuances; to feel his pulse from the start; to understand when it is the case to talk about yourself. If you feel that you cannot be sincere with him to the end, be silent. To lie, however, do not lie to him; because when lying intervenes, the devil also intervenes. Do not appeal to lying in any way. Be silent. You are not obligated to tell the other everything, but you are obligated to not lie. This is wisdom: to know how to weigh every word, and every thought, to be a master of yourself, to always be able to control what you say and what you think…”
Behold, the man who is honest, the man who no longer says one thing and thinks another and does another; behold, the man who is whole!
“…to be wise, quiet, measured in your speech; to immediately feel the other’s pulse, because you cannot tell everyone everything. This was a big problem in prison. When they interrogated us, we would say: “yes, I know him.” They could not get anything else out of us. We did not say anything about what he did, because if we were totally sincere with them, with those interrogating us, then others would be taken to prison, and we did everything within our power to not cause them this misfortune. Thus, keep this in mind: learn to speak to each person in his language. Lying - in no way. Prudence - to the point of nuance.
“But what does it mean to be sincere with yourself?” the spiritual son asked Fr. Sofian.
Do you know what “sincere” means? Sin cera, that is, without wax. There used to be silver plaques which people engraved. And if they were somehow mixed with wax, nothing could be engraved on or read from them. They had to be sin cera, that is, pure, without wax, pure silver. This is what sincere means: without a shade of evil. To be honest with yourself means to measure yourself to see how faithful you are or how superficial you are before God; how much you know, and how much you do not know about what you should know; how much of what you know you actually do; when someone praises you, to ask yourself how much of this praise is correct in relation to the reality within you. Because you hold yourself in your hand and know exactly how you are. How honest are you before God? Are you not false, superficial towards God? For example, you gave alms. Did you not give it for others to see, or did you not regret it? Are you aware that all that you have is from God, or do you attribute merit to yourself?
This is what it means to be sincere with yourself: to be sincere with God, to know exactly how correct you are before God; to discover yourself as you in fact are. An elder said: “I said something to him with my lips, but in my heart I judged him.” God hears the words in your heart. He is very present in our life, in our heart, in our reins. This is what it means: to truly feel in your heart how you stand in relation to God. Do not forget this: just as our relationships with others are, so too is our relationship with God. Do not forget that you live under the new law, and not under the law of the Old Testament. If you have an enemy, you do not heal him with vengeance, or condemnation, but with humility and love.
There was a priest named Veniamin, a kind of peasant, very cultivated and full of advice. And once he was interned in a hospital and put in a shared room. And in his room there was someone else that was sick who could not bear him. Whenever Father approached him, that one spat in his face. He told him that he hated him, and many other such things. And that one could not get out of bed - he was bedridden. And without asking, Father Veniamin helped him with anything he needed. He took his chamber pot to the toilet - that one was immobile, he was bedridden - he put water by his side, he cleaned for him, he washed his clothes. He kept silent and acted. He did not dwell on the other one hating him, or spitting on him - and he also cursed him. And when Father Veniamin became well and left the hospital, that one cried: “Father forgive me! You defeated me. Know that you compelled me to have a good opinion of you, and now I cherish you very much.”
That is, I would like to tell you that this discrete, humble, silent attention to the one who wrongs you counts very much. And if someone humiliates you, instead of getting angry, think: “Am I not guilty of anything before God and others? How many times did I not harm others? How many times did I not desire evil for others, or I even blasphemed? Tuly, I deserve to be both rebuked and humiliated.”
I will conclude with a kind of testamentary word of Elder Sofian’s, even if it was addressed to a particular person, it is beneficial to us all:
I do not know what awaits you in life, or what trials God will lead you through, but keep this in mind as a rule: just as you want others to make your life joyful, so too should you make others’ lives joyful. When I was in Jilava, there was a doctor with us in the cell, and he was always mending others’ socks. He had made a needle out of a nail and thread from ragged socks, and he would repair all that could be repaired. And I asked him: “Why are you doing this?” And he responded to me: “I feel the need to bring joy to everyone - joy from myself. I have felt this all my life, for as long as I have known myself, from childhood. And now I cannot do otherwise.” And I rejoiced over him so much; I’m telling you the truth. This was the goal of his life: to bring as much joy as possible to others; even there, where evil was so well organized and you were not allowed to do anything good. If you did something good, you were immediately taken to the “black cell,” with water on the floor, frozen concrete, and terrible cold. And in this horrible place, he wanted to bring joy to others from everything that was within him. Do the same: things which make you happy, do to others, transfer them to others. And you will see how everything is transformed.
Amen.