Mother Siluana Vlad: Joy comes through the cross
The cross is not what we imagine it to be. The cross is not something exterior; it is not made from external events; the cross is the inner resistance to love.
The joy that the Lord promises us is the joy that comes through the cross. As we say every Sunday: “through the cross joy has come to all the world” (Sunday Orthros service.) And the cross is not what we imagine it to be. There are women who say: “My cross is my husband! He drinks, he curses, he beats me!” No! The cross is not something exterior; it is not made from external events; the cross is the inner resistance to love.
I curse, I judge, I scold. I judge and I do not forgive - these are two great tools we use to make ourselves unhappy. The Savior insists: do not judge, do not judge, forgive, forgive, forgive. And we do it automatically: as soon as we open our mouths, we judge. We don’t even realize we do it. But at least we have the Sacrament of Repentance, of Holy Confession. And we go to confess, and we start saying: “my husband came home late, he yelled at me and called me names; my mother-in-law locked the door to the kitchen and didn’t leave the key where I usually put it, and I had to wait for her in the dining room; the neighbor did this and that!” And this is how we confess, right? We don’t say what we did. And we confess the whole neighborhood. Then we wonder why we don’t have joy in our souls.
The cross is the death of my impulses and cravings that damage my joy. When I feel like doing something, at that moment, I ask myself: “is this bringing joy to me?; is what I am about to do going to make me a good and faithful servant of the little that God gave me?; or is this going to destroy my joy?” And then, I crucify it. With God’s help, I crucify that impulse. “I feel like strangling you!” And I don’t do it! So this is our cross - this inner willingness to stop (and not to deny) the wrong we feel the impulse to do.
Some people have a very heavy cross; others have a lighter cross. Some people are gentle by nature; others are quick to anger by nature. Some people learned to be violent in their families; others learned to go to Church, confess, take Holy Communion, and they have the Lord in their lives. Some people were abused physically and emotionally throughout their childhood - they have a much heavier cross.
It is in this sense that the cross is heavier. Not what my mother did to me, but the fact that my mother abandoned me produced in me greater desires for revenge and justice. Any gesture of humiliation, when I was entirely powerless, produced in me a desire to punish and take revenge on others, but mostly on myself, because I endured it. I consider myself guilty for what happened to me. Many abused children consider themselves guilty and blame themselves for not doing anything to stop their abuse. Of course, maybe sometimes they could have done something - yell, or run away, or refuse to do something - but now they consider themselves guilty, and they punish themselves by repeating what was done to them at first, and then taking revenge on innocent people.
When somebody calls you stupid, you should say: “Poor child! He was so humiliated and never heard a ‘bravo’ from his mother! He was constantly told that he was stupid…” And now he found you! And you should say: “Thank you! This is helpful to me, and I am grateful, and you are taking a weight off of your shoulders.” And if you see that he doesn’t stop, you can respond; you can’t let him have his pleasure at your expense. You talk to him a little; if he doesn’t stop, you defend yourself. We shouldn’t let other people abuse us - because the abused person will have a tendency to abuse others. But we have to receive such people in our souls with the understanding that they are powerless. The most aggressive people are those who have been aggressed. Because aggressiveness begets aggressiveness. Then their cross is much heavier.
Now you realize why Saints say they are the greatest sinners when they compare themselves with others who are violent and aggressive, with criminals, with wrongdoers. People I met who had committed crimes had such a childhood that would have turned any of us into criminals. There was no other way for them. Think about all the people who had reached a high spiritual level in their faith, and then when they were subjected to experiments in the Pitesti Prison (Note: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pite%C8%99ti_Prison) ended up committing terrible deeds. Only then do we realize that we didn’t do bad things because God protected us. So then, a single moment of forgetting God, for a Saint who has seen the Lord, who has received the Uncreated Light, who feels God’s love, is worse for him than when a criminal thrusts a knife into someone’s stomach; because that criminal was beaten and humiliated in the worst way as a child.
A long time ago, when I was young, I lived in an apartment building, and one day a child rang the bell at my door asking for bread. I went to look for some bread in the kitchen, and a neighbor got out of her apartment and told me: “Don’t give him any bread because his folks will feed pigs with it. His father is outside with a cart, and they will feed the pigs with that bread!” I gave the child some bread anyway; he was small and scared. And other neighbors got out of their apartments and started to yell at the child. They didn’t hit him, but he was verbally assaulted by all those people and ran out of the building. I looked out the window and saw his father outside with the cart. When he saw that the child brought only two pieces of bread, he started to beat the child. And then I thought: Can I ask this child to show me respect, or greet me politely, or bring me flowers at school? Or should he be interested in natural sciences, or do his homework in history? He hates me. When we go on a walk and see broken street lights, they are all children who shout: “Nobody loves me! You take a walk and want lights on the street, but nobody loves me! Nobody ever loved me! Why don’t you love me? I want somebody to love me!” And if a policeman catches him and pulls him by the ear, he thinks: “Finally, someone has paid attention to me! Someone has seen me!” And so, for this child to get to the point where he takes up his cross, he needs to crucify what he is able to, not what I am able to. I need to crucify my own, and he needs to crucify his own. And we shouldn’t compare one with another.
Translated from a conference titled "On joy":
Thank you so much for this article. Sometimes I get too caught up in the lives of the saints and think I and others are doomed because I can never reach their spiritual heights. This is very encouraging, that God wants me to realize whatever state am I in and do my best to grow throughout my life. I can never judge other people because I do not know their past, present, or future, and it is certainly not a competition.
Through the prayers of bătrâna Siluana! What a blessed and holy confessor we have+