Mother Siluana Vlad: How can we reconcile with ourselves and with God?
What I really want deep inside me is to become a saint. Let’s not play with half-measures here, that it is not for me. It is! It is for you - and becoming aware of this is a comfort for your soul.
Question:
How can we reconcile with ourselves and with God?
Mother Siluana:
Yes. A very deep question. We are not the way we’d like to be. Each of us has in us a wish, a yearning to be somebody, and we try to cover up this wish by becoming a member of Parliament, a college provost, or a Ph.D. student…We want to become somebody - somebody who is loved, known, recognized; and we need to understand that this yearning, this wish can only be fulfilled by God, the only One Who values me - at the start of my path when I am almost good for nothing, then along my path, until the end when I will become a saint.
I need to become aware of this yearning I have. So what I really want deep inside me is to become a saint. Let’s not play with half-measures here, that it is not for me. It is! It is for you - and becoming aware of this is a comfort for your soul. You realize that you are chosen by God for this: to become a saint.
The next step is to go inside me and feel the pain that not only am I not a saint, but I am actually lazy, mean, gossiping, and so on. When I do these things, when I commit these sins, the inner part of me which yearns for holiness suffers - there is a pain there. We run away from this pain through passions: we don’t think about the pain, we start drinking or smoking, we do things that please us, we get angry at other people, we get upset, we become victims, we accuse others that it is because of them that we are the way we are. All these sins are in fact strategies for running away from the pain that we are not saints yet.
Your path is to accept the pain that you are the way you are. Don’t get upset at yourself. You are not guilty of being the way you are. We don’t blame ourselves for being stupid, because we just have not been aware of it. I didn’t suddenly make the decision: “Fine, today I will be stupid!” Don’t blame yourself for telling lies. Did you ever make the decision: “I want to tell a lie"? No, you discovered that you are doing all these things, so you discover that you are ill. You don’t dare to say the truth, and so on. And so I am not guilty - I am ill.
Looking at sin as an illness cures us of guilt and of being upset at ourselves. Then the next step is to say: “Lord, heal me! Lord, save me! Lord, comfort me! It hurts inside me because I lied today! Lord, comfort my soul, heal my soul of this cowardice, of what hurts inside me!”
This is how I reconcile with myself - by accepting that I am small, I am a sinner, I am stupid. And it is not about “Siluana the sinner” as a metaphor, but about Siluana who says she is a sinner and who knows exactly what she does and what her sin is. When I am sick, I don’t say: “I suffer" but “I have a runny nose, or I have chest pains, or I have a cough”, and so on. And so I look at my sins as illnesses and I don’t blame myself, because that is the devil’s deed - he teaches us to run away from repentance by blaming: either I blame someone that it’s his fault I am the way I am, or I blame myself. And if we give up this blaming, then there is no reason for us to be upset at ourselves.
The self-hate that the Savior mentions, and of which our Holy Fathers teach us, means hating the self which identifies with sin. There is in us a dimension, an ego, a psychological construct that identifies itself with sin. I am a homosexual, I am stupid - this is identification with sin. I have done stupid things, I have moments when I am very dumb, but I am not stupid, I just do stupid things. I don’t identify with my stupidity. We need to understand this thing so that we reconcile with ourselves.
Take a blank sheet of paper, not a tablet, and make a list, write down: I don’t like this, this, and this in myself. I am upset at myself for this, this, and this. Then you say a prayer. You say: “Lord, I found out that I am not able to change if I am upset at myself. I found out that all these negative traits are my illnesses, of which I need healing. Heal me, Lord, of stupidity, heal me of immorality, heal me of idle talk”. Say a prayer along these lines.
Note:
Translated from Romanian: