Mother Siluana Vlad - On vanquishing death and following Christ
We follow Christ and vanquish death by benefiting from His victory over death, by His death and Resurrection. This presupposes that we believe He vanquished death and that His victory is ours.
Question:
What is death and how can we prepare for it?
Mother Siluana:
Death is life without God. Death is a reality of the soul, when the soul is not bound, fed, infused by God, by God’s life, by God’s grace, by His uncreated energy. The soul is dead, moribund, sleepwalking. We Christian believers are indeed baptized, we partake of Holy Communion, we go to Confession, we receive grace and we are not dead - and yet, we often behave like dead or moribund people, because we don’t activate the grace received through the Holy Mysteries. Grace comes into us through the Holy Mysteries, but it gets activated and it works in us through our own work. That is to say, by activating grace, my words will combine my energy with the energy of grace, and my actions will combine my energy with the energy of grace. No movements of my soul and body will be only my thoughts, only my actions.
How do we activate grace? How do we metabolize it and manifest it in our lives, in our actions, in our words? Through the fulfillment of the commandments and prayer. Prayer, itself a commandment of the Lord, is what produces this activation in us.
When we pray and activate grace, we enter and live another dimension of death: the death of death. Our life without God is death, a gradual death, until our burial. By activating grace in us, however, this death dies in us. By dying to this way of life which is life toward death, we kill death. Therefore, we live this death, which is the separation of the soul from the body, as a birth into the life beyond, as our date of birth in Heaven. Then we will free ourselves entirely from the death that kills us, from the death that threatens us, and we will live death as birth into the true life. But for this, we need to struggle, we need to pass through the narrow gate and always dare to kill the death in us by dying to the passionate pleasures, by killing the passions which kill us.
How do we prepare for death? By choosing, moment by moment, to die to our greed, to our vain and wasteful attractions; to crucify our murderous appetites.
But, pay attention, it is not enough for us to die in this manner so that we resurrect in Christ. We need to want His life, to want Him, to feed ourselves with the food He gives us, to turn any food into a place of meeting with Him, with His mercy and loving-kindness. It is not enough for me to not eat something I crave - I also need to want Him with the same intensity that I directed to my cravings. I need to ask Him that I too may be fed with the will of the Heavenly Father. I need to choose to hunger for His will! And I need to choose to eat everything with Christ, in my thoughts, and in my mouth - to unite what I have in my mouth with His name, with His calling.
This is how we vanquish death - by metabolizing the Life which is our Lord Jesus Christ, His grace, His uncreated energy, which He gives to us and which itself teaches us how to use it.
Question:
How can we follow Christ, the One Who vanquished death?
Mother Siluana:
By eating Him, by embodying Him, by embodying ourselves in Him and embodying Him in us, by doing His will in our lives, by hating sin and cleaving to His mercy. This is how we follow Him, because we cannot vanquish death except through His victory. If we don’t cleave to His victory, if we don’t integrate ourselves into His victory, we will die a human death, a beastly death.
The first method to achieve this is to fulfill His commandments, because in His commandments we find His power, His divine energy, which penetrated our human nature which he united Himself with in His hypostasis, and which penetrates us as well if we, as persons, open ourselves to it by receiving Him.
We receive Him, first of all, through Baptism, through the Holy Mysteries. And by receiving Him, we receive His power. Then we activate this power in ourselves by fulfilling His commandments - that is, by doing, thinking, speaking, and living life with actions inspired by His energy, fed by His energy, fulfilled by His energy. In this way, we follow Him, because He as a person, as hypostasis, gives us His works which penetrate us, which become ours - and in this way, we follow Him.
I will say it again - we do this by vanquishing death, by benefiting from His victory over death, by His death and Resurrection. This presupposes that we believe He vanquished death. We believe that His victory is ours as well if we receive Him. By receiving Him, we obtain the power to also become sons in Him, the Son of God incarnate. Our most important work now is to receive Him, to receive His power, to ask for and to receive His power so we can do His will, hate sin, love good, and surmount our egotism.
This is what it means to follow Christ. It means entering into His victory - and this is the only way for us to vanquish death.
We know how powerless we are in fulfilling the commandments - we forget, we are incapable, we fall. Also, the pressure we feel from this world that moves away from Christ with maximum speed - this pressure is overwhelming. The pressure, the spirit of this world, acts very strongly upon us and enfeebles us, making us incapable of fulfilling the commandments. But there is a commandment that no power of this world, except my ill will, can prevent me from fulfilling, even if not perfectly. It is the easiest possible commandment, which, to start with, doesn’t require any effort, but which, amazingly, is the least fulfilled by us: this miracle is repentance.
“I am not able, Lord, to fulfill any commandment, I am not able to do anything worthy so I can be saved.” This is how the Holy Church sings, cries, and sighs, especially during Great and Holy Lent. The Saints too sigh and cry in this manner - of course, more for us than for themselves - they were also feeling this powerlessness to perfectly fulfill Christ’s commandments. But when I say: “Lord, I have done nothing worthy; Lord, I have no repentance; Lord, I am indifferent; Lord, forgive me; Lord, have mercy on me!” - then I make a start toward repentance. This is the easy way to repent. However powerless I am, I can still do this.
Yes, it is difficult for us to fulfill the other commandments. For example, to love my neighbor, I need to invest energies which I have directed elsewhere, into justifying myself, loving myself, feeling repulsion toward the other…I need to tear away my energy which is enslaved there, to tear it away in my powerlessness, and to turn it into love; I need to tear it away, give it to the Savior and say: “Lord, You Yourself turn this envy, this hate, this negative feeling, turn it into love.” And I can’t do this in the beginning. And we also can’t bring ourselves to do this because we have identified ourselves with hate and envy through our passions.
It is very difficult for us to fulfill the commandments because it is difficult to call to God in our powerlessness, because our power is held captive by passions, by sins. But we can cry out and say: “Lord, forgive me; Lord, I acknowledge that I am a sinner, that I have done nothing good, that I have nothing good inside me, that I deserve eternal punishment, that I am far away from You. I moved away from You and everything that is happening to me is just, because I ran away from You, Who are my life, my joy, my hope.” We can do this. We need a little bit of willingness to turn our minds to Him. My mind can easily turn from my sin to God’s mercy. It is an act of willingness, of saying: “Lord, forgive me! Lord, have mercy on me!” It is very easy.
Yes, it is very simple and easy, but at the same time, it seems impossible for us to achieve. Why? Because the demon intervenes with the anchor he has in us, the hook he has in us, which is our luciferic pride of not admitting that we are wrong - because for any mistake we make, our mind, which is darkened by sin and unbelief, but which is very smart, will find someone to blame. Yes, I did this, but it is because my mother beat me when I was a child, because I was born into a family of alcoholic people, because one of my ancestors was a murderer…because…because…This twisting, this warping of the human mind took place through the Fall, when Adam replied to God: “this woman You gave me told me to do it and I did it!” And we inherited this illness of the mind, this contortion, this moving away from assuming responsibility for our actions toward assigning responsibility to others by blaming them. This is how we actualize and repeat Adam’s fall, each of us.
This is why the Savior came to us and gave us repentance, the turning of the mind (“metanoia”), the renewal of the mind through His grace. I willingly turn my mind away from blaming others, from excusing myself, toward accusing myself. It is not necessary, to start with, for us sinners, for us powerless people, to say: “I am the worst of all people.” It is necessary to say only: “Lord, forgive me, I have done nothing truly good!”. Did you do some good deeds, did you pick poor people from the street and gave them the empty rooms in your house to sleep in? No? Then how can you praise yourself, how can you justify yourself that you gave a few coins to a poor man a few times? However much we might do, we still don’t do what the commandments require us to do. And if we keep justifying ourselves that we didn’t do evil deeds, then let’s think about how much good we didn’t do, and then we’ll have reasons to repent.
In order to follow Christ so that we can enter into His victory, we need this repentance, this turning of the mind. At first, we can only do it with our words. We cannot fulfill other commandments in words only. If we say “I love you”, this word has no power - but “forgive me”, “I am sorry”, “I made a mistake, forgive me”, these are words that cannot be formal, words that shake me up. That is why I don’t say them easily. They shake me up and they set me in the position of someone responsible, someone who assumes responsibility for his or her actions. Then, in this turning of our minds, we open ourselves to God’s mercy, which otherwise we don’t want to receive, because we don’t in fact feel guilty, but we feel that we are victims. By opening ourselves up in this way, we open ourselves up to Christ our Lord’s grace and victory. This is the true death by which we put our vanity to death, and by which we follow Christ Who gave us the power to free ourselves.