Saint Sophrony of Essex: Grace is Bought at a Very High Price
Grace comes only to the soul that has suffered to the end. I know very well the tragic situation in which you find yourself. I remember to this day the difficult struggles I had with the devil...
Saint Sophrony of Essex
“Grace is bought at a very high price”
From a letter translated into Romanian by Hieromonk Rafail Noica
My beloved brother in Christ,
A Christian can never attain love for God, nor true love for others, if he does not go through much difficult suffering. Grace comes only to the soul that has suffered to the end. I know very well the tragic situation in which you find yourself. I remember to this day the difficult struggles I had with the devil in the world. I will tell you part of it. Sometimes I was coming home from church, and I felt such a deep desire to go and see a friend, to talk, to have fun, that I almost didn’t have the strength to go back home and stay there by myself. Yet, with extreme willpower, I reached my room, and I almost fell down powerless because of the intense struggle, ready to claw the ground with my nails, ready to cry from the pain in my heart, and truly I was crying. Only prayer lifted me up again and brought back peace to my heart, but a peace I never could have imagined before, that had never come into my heart before. There were many other such events. Returning home from someplace, I wanted to go into a cafe, but I was fighting this desire. And what do you think? All of a sudden, in a way that I did not understand, I felt as if I lost my willpower, literally like an animal pulled by an unseen force into that cafe. It was frightening. Only the Lord knows, and those who have suffered such temptations, what pain and struggle I had to go through to overcome these animalistic desires. Or, as I remember, I was attracted with such strength to somewhere, to a movie theater or some such place, which in reality never attracted me. But if I did not give in to this desire and managed to return home, my prayer was like fire.
I understand so well what you are writing about to me. I would have done anything else but pray. That is when I understood the power in what the Fathers said that there is no work more difficult than prayer. But when man overcomes temptation through prayer, then prayer becomes sweeter than anything else in the world. And this way is truly painful, narrow, and few are those, as the Lord says, who find it (Matt 7:14).
My deep belief is that if you (and this is true for everyone) will not endure such things as disgust, mockery, humiliations, abandonment–both from people and even from God: “My God, my God why have You forsaken me?” (Matt 27:46)--then you will never know Divine Love. A heart that has not been crushed by pain, and that has not been humbled by poverty of all kind (both spiritual and physical), such a heart is not able to receive God’s Grace. This grace is bought at a very high price.
When our enemy fights us, using natural desires which arise from human love, both spiritual and physical, then like Mary of Egypt we will fall to the ground and ask God that through His mercy He gives us His Divine Love to replace the physical, human love that we renounced for Him. But when you pray like this, you need to pray only until this desire for physical love extinguishes, and you receive peace in your soul and body. Do not seek more than this, so that you do not fall into temptation.
If you can, endure all this, my beloved. Would you believe me that I dare talk to you like this only because I have endured similar pain?
If you want to reign with Christ, then overcome your passions. There is no other way–truly passions are nothing but temptations. I will never believe that something from this world can make you fulfilled. Theaters, movies, cafes, and other such places are good for children, for those with uncomprehending hearts…
A life following Christ’s Commandments is truly a Golgotha. And this way is such that whoever walks on it, if he will not overcome through prayer the difficulties which only increase, but instead will leave the way and turn around, then even if he goes back to his initial place in the world (the life of passions), he will never again even find that joy felt by men of this world who have never known God.
In the Great War, when they used to send soldiers to attack, the superiors would set machine guns behind attackers, or the officers would follow the attackers with two pistols in their hands so that whoever was beset by fear and turned around would be shot. So the situation of those who threw themselves in the attack was such that their salvation and their life was only forward, in overcoming the enemy. Our salvation, in all senses of the word, is only forward.
When the increasing pains of my soul had seemingly reached their pinnacle, then not through abstract philosophical thoughts, but through a feeling of the heart, alive and deep, I came to know the value of the human soul, I came to know that it is worth more than the entire world. Sufferings bring such great fruit that if we understood more, we would never want to “come down from the Cross”. One of our hieromonks had a dream in which God showed Himself hung on the Cross and told him, “You cannot come down from the Cross, others will take you.” And God repeated these words three times, then the dream ended.
Glory be to God for everything. We will be patient. This is our way. You stumble, you straighten up again. You fall, you get up again. And there is never a need to despair. Sometimes it is so difficult that man is ready to renounce eternal life if this is the only way to obtain it. When these clouds pass, then the sun somehow shines in an unimaginable way, and then man is happy that he endured these sufferings: “Make us glad as many days as Thou hast afflicted us, and as many years as we have seen evil” (Ps. 90:15).
Thank you for posting this, Ioan! Like a balm for the soul...I needed it.
"...this tragic situation...When the increasing pains of my soul had seemingly reached their pinnacle, then not through abstract philosophical thoughts, but through a feeling of the heart, alive and deep, I came to know the value of the human soul, I came to know that it is worth more than the entire world."
Because nowadays psychology took the front seat, I want to say that besides the abstract philosophical thoughts, I would add the current psychological thoughts, which many times, depending on the method and orientation (towards God or against) can split a person's understanding of the "tragic situation" one may go through. I think that we have to be very careful here so that we will be able to discriminate between what is philosophical, psychological or spiritual. Life without God is tragic. Life without purpose is tragic, too. Life in general has times of tragic situations, which draw one closer to God or not at all. Who can understand st. Sophrony's tragic separation from God? The desperate personal helplessness? The deepest desire of union with God? Such feelings are rarely understood in our society based on busyness, fun and chill. It may be easily interpreted as psychopathology of the worst kind. I think it is extremely difficult and also imperious that we pray for guidance, for discernment through the Grace of God, so that we will not "philosophize" or "psychologize" spirituality and not spiritualize psychology or philosophy. Let us aspire to reach this "feeling of the heart, alive and deep"- the deep inner guide St. Sophrony talks about.