Mother Siluana: How do I stop controlling and being controlled by others?
"...we need to be careful and understand that we are nobody’s master and that nobody is our servant."
I would like for us to think about and most of all pray for freeing ourselves from the spirit of dominance. It is a very perverted spirit, and many times we think we don’t have it, but it creates havoc in our lives. Let’s see concretely - and I am thinking about myself, about monks, not about all people, but maybe this will be useful to other people as well.
The Savior’s coming abolished the condition of the servant, and even more the condition of the master over people. No man is a master over any other man anymore - if he lives in Christ. Without Christ, people fight constantly over who is the master and who is the servant. This fight happens even between parents and children, as experts tell us. Children, from the moment they are born, once they start being aware of their surroundings, seek to be in charge, to be the master, and they use certain techniques towards this goal. Parents need to be both loving and firm so that they are not the servants of their children. Many parents however are the masters, and children are the servants.
This however is life in sin, life mastered by the spirit of dominance. As the Holy Fathers say, the spirit of control is a demon that masters us and acts upon the power of our soul which is made for serving, for keeping our impulses under control and serving the will of God. This demon of dominance takes over this power we have and makes it into its own instrument.
And so: I choose life in Christ. And then I declare and I confess and I sigh: “Lord, You are my master! You are my only master. You are the master of my life, and I am Your servant!” Servant means someone who works and submits to someone else for remuneration. A servant is not a slave. Slaves have no remuneration, they don’t get anything back in exchange for their work, whereas servants are paid for their work.
In spiritual terms, if the Savior says we are servants, it means that we don’t obey Him for nothing, we don’t obey him as our master for nothing, but we are remunerated for this. And He gives us life, eternal life, eternal joy, and this is our remuneration. Similarly, the master of my fallen life, the demon, also remunerates me; that is to say, I also have a serious payment from him. As I was saying before, the first paycheck from the demon is the pleasure, the satisfaction, and the final paycheck is death.
And so I rejected Satan and I joined Christ, Who is the king. And I am the servant of this king. He is my only master. I need to do two things here so that I cleanse my life. The first thing is to always remember that I am the servant of the Lord, and as such I want and I do His will only and I completely sacrifice my own will, which is a diseased will, wounded by the spirit of dominance, which has different forms: “You should do as I tell you to do, because it is the right way.” And so here we need to be careful and understand that we are nobody’s master and that nobody is our servant.
But what about obedience? If I am the abbess and I have others under obedience to me, if I am in charge, then I can experience a great fall - that is, in the name of obedience to God I can satisfy my passion for dominating others: “You do this because you have this obedience!” And I turn obedience into a form of enslavement, of dominating others.
Keeping this in mind, I will always need to be careful: whose interest is it? When I tell you: “Do this!”, who put me in this position to be a servant of God? If I am an abbott, if I am a spiritual father, if I am a leader in that particular walk of life, I am the servant of my only master - God, I am also the servant of my superior, the Bishop or the Metropolitan, and as his servant, before him, I tell you what to do. Because this position is given to me through a mandate - not through an election, but through a mandate. There is a special service and the superior is empowered by the Church, and thus by God, to convey God’s will - in this concrete case, to convey it to the persons under obedience to the superior. Anybody can realize - I, for example, can realize when I serve in this sense, or when I use this position to impose my will on others.
And here, there is a great danger, because sometimes we impose our will on others thinking it is the right thing to do. In monasteries, within monastic communities, there are rarely people who are sadistic and do this out of hate, out of a desire for others to suffer, out of a desire to take revenge. Here, everyone works, everyone repents, and there are very few people who behave like this - God preserve us from them! But there are people here who want to impose “the right thing” on others: “Yes, this is good; yes, do it this way!” And the other people are thus cut off from their freedom, from the possibility of saying “No.”
I can tell you what to do so that you cut your will, so that you grow spiritually, and if you want to do it, you do it. If you don’t, then you take responsibility for abandoning your obedience, for stepping off of the path that leads you to repentance, to holiness. The problem is that in communities - especially in larger communities, but also in small communities - everyone is influenced by the spirit of dominance, which manifests itself in different ways. For example: “This is the right way to do it. Do it this way and not that way…” You get into other people’s business and tell them what to do. What can you do then in this case? You say: “Lord, forgive me, this is not You, this is the spirit of dominance, save me!”
Let’s say I need to do something and I need help, and I ask the abbess or someone else for help, and somebody comes to help me. At that moment, that person can become my servant. “Do this in this way, do the other thing in that way…because you are under obedience to do this for me” This is the spirit of dominance. What do we do in this case? We don’t order people around. So, when I say: “Give me that hammer”, or “Give me that knife”, I can do it with a spirit of dominance, or I can do it without this spirit. It can be in the spirit of asking a favor and collaborating, or it can be in the spirit of commanding.
If I get upset that you didn’t give me the hammer when I needed it, that you didn’t do this thing right, that you didn’t do that thing the way it was supposed to be doned, etc., then this means that the spirit of dominance has great power over me, and I urgently need to repent. If I expect the person helping me to always be at my beck and call, if I don’t allow the person to even use the bathroom, it also means I am in great danger. If I expect that person to anticipate my wishes, if I expect the person to know what is and what is not the right thing to do, then again I am enslaved by a very aggressive spirit of dominance.
What will I do then? I will pay much attention to all these aspects, and I will say every time: “Lord and Master of my life, take from me the spirit of dominance and give me the spirit of gentleness, of love, or respect for the other”. It is not easy, because, as Olivier Clement says somewhere, we see our superiors as tyrants, and we all have a tyrant inside us. This demon has had dominion over the human species for a long time. And in a way, it has set us, through the circumstances of our birth or our education, in positions of tyrants or slaves.
The tyrant in us doesn’t disappear if we are overpowered either. If I am humiliated, if I don’t have the power to escape from your tyranny, that’s fine, I will also tyrannize you as your victim: I won’t do what you tell me or what you want me to do…and so I also torment you and tyrannize you in any way I can. Or I endure all that you want to do to me…There are many nuances here. But prayer will help us.
There is in us this need - so says Olivier Clement - a need to have slaves and enemies. Because there is this evil in us, because we are wounded by the evil spirits, we are not able to bear this reality in us, and so we need others to project our dirt on. And because I am enslaved to the spirit of evil, I need a slave outside of me, I need someone to make into my slave outside of me so that I can get rid of the pain that I am evil inside. Olivier Clement says - and I quote him now - “We need slaves and enemies, we invent them ourselves, we even sanctify them, as Rene Girard showed.”
And so, I invent an enemy for myself: “You harmed me, I wasted my life because of you, you made me do this, etc.” This is an invented enemy. Nobody can harm me without my will. And even if somebody harms me without my will, I am in Christ, and things can be seen in a different light. And so, we invent our enemies, and we also invent our slaves. Why? So that we can dominate - I go back to Olivier Clement, who says: “To dominate means to feel like you are God. And to have enemies means to hold them responsible for your fears.”
When I dominate you, even just a little: “Give that to me, do this for me, go sit over there, don’t do it like this…”, all this is the spirit of dominion. I am a small god. And it doesn’t matter whom I dominate, even the cat, and I still feel like a god, if I don’t cleanse myself from this terrible spirit. So when I dominate, I feel like a god. And when I have enemies, I hold them responsible for my fears, for my great anguish. I go back again to Olivier Clement: “By torturing the other because he is always the guilty one, by violating his body and maybe his soul, by keeping him under your thumb, at the edge of the abyss, but without letting him find an escape in death - you experience quasi-divine omnipotence. Through my enemy, I hate myself as a mortal being. By mocking the other, I am mocking my death.”
Now, Olivier Clement is referring to torture, to concentration camps. Let’s go back to our dimension of small little monastics and see to what degree the enemies I’ve had and still have are my creation, the creation of my soul and my mind, which I produced so I could get rid of my fears. Most of all - and I go back to the spirit of dominance - let’s pay attention to all the movements by which we try to dominate others, control others, make others do what we want and what we say.
Right…so what are we to do in these situations? Let’s say I am ill and someone cares for me. How can I eliminate my fear of turning the other into my servant? Because that person is serving me. Or, let’s say I am paying a clerk for an official document and he gives it to me. “This person is my servant!” Some people look down on clerks, on waiters, on doctors, on anyone they pay. “I am paying you, so you do what I tell you!” “You didn’t do it right!” “You didn’t bring it back fast enough!” All these things belong to the spirit of dominance, because through this we seem powerful in our own eyes.
What can we do in this situation? We need to exercise our patience and especially our gratitude. Nobody needs to do anything for us. If somebody does something for me, it is a gift, it is God’s gift through that person’s hands, through that person’s will and care. And when we turn everything into a gift, the tyrant dies. The demon of dominance dies.
We say thank you: “God, thank You!” Instead of saying: “Give me some water…take this over there…”, we turn it into: “Give me some water, please” and “Thank you”. And in the evening, we say: “God, thank You, that person did something for me today - thank You, God!” Everything is a gift. And slowly, everything changes, everything that happens to me is amazing and becomes a gift from God. And nobody owes anything to me anymore.
And if I serve someone, and that person has no patience - it can happen that because of an illness that person momentarily loses patience, strength, discernment - then I can fall prey to the spirit of dominance at that moment, and I can start talking abruptly, or I can fall prey to other spirits, I can start gossiping about that person, instead of praying and being patient. At that moment I need to pray for patience, I need to thank God that “It is You, God, that I serve!”. If, while I serve someone, I say: “Lord, Jesus Christ, it is You I serve by serving X” - then the other person will feel that I am not his servant, but I am the servant of Christ.
If you have other questions referring to our practical life - how to reveal other aspects of the spirit of dominance and how to free ourselves from this spirit - I will be lovingly waiting for your questions. Thank you.
Translated by Grig Gheorghiu
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