Mother Siluana on chopping onions

How sad and painful it is when evil spirits contaminate our work. Every call and invocation of the evil one, or every evil thought that we receive and dwell upon in our mind and heart, causes our work to be a human-demonic activity. It is co-working with the devil. If, while chopping onions, I curse my husband who “is not home yet; he is surely drinking somewhere in a bar because he got paid today…”—this chopping of onions becomes a work through which I become demonized, together with the objects I touch. That is why, when my husband eats the soup I made, he will have a stage of agitation, of “I don’t know what got into him!”

And I think I told you already because I tell everyone—why is the monastery food better than the food at home? Because at the monastery, no matter how bad the nun or the monk who cooks might be, they will still say: “Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”  And these words, and the One called through them, enter into my onions, my soup, the potatoes I peel, and I am sanctified, and all these objects are sanctified. And people who eat from this food eat something that is sanctified, and they unite themselves with God who came into our soup, into our onions; yet other people unite themselves with the devil.

Many women maintain and cultivate this evil in their husbands through this poison that they put in the food they cook with repulsion, without love or prayer. Let us pay attention to the fact that every word of ours is an action that is not purely human. Our soul was made by God as a cup, as a chalice that is our spirit, our heart. God’s life-giving “breath” resides in this chalice. The human spirit is a power of the soul that is like a chalice, or like a parabolic antenna, if you will, in more modern terms, ready to receive these waves, the uncreated energy of God, with which it will then enhance its other powers and works. If you breathe together with God, it is a human-divine breath. If you breathe without God, His place will not stay empty, but it will be filled with either demonic energies or animal energies. Then your work and your life will be human-demonic or animal-like.

Therefore, if we choose not to become spiritual, we choose to become either demonic or animal-like. Yes, I can chop onions like an animal, without knowing what I do or why I do it. And I can live like an animal. And this is the more fortunate situation among the two because we can repent and cry out saying: “I was like a beast before You, Lord!” And when I say this to God, I become aware of my fallen state through this very confession, and I make room for God, Who comes and works in me according to His holy promise.

From an upcoming book by Mother Siluana Vlad, titled “Theology of the Ordinary”, soon  to be published by St. George Press