Trusting God To Hold You

One of the struggles I have as I strive to pay attention to my heart, is that (at the same time) I perceive in my heart very sad things and joyful, hopeful things.  It’s as if two realities, or two reflections of the world around me are manifest within me.  When I first started to notice this reality within myself I found the concept of “bright sadness” helpful.  I first ran across this phrase, bright sadness, in the introduction of Alexander Schmemann’s little book, Great Lent: Journey to Pascha.  In that context, bright sadness refers to the feeling one has at the beginning of Great Lent: on the one hand, sadness as we contemplate our sin and brokenness, which will be the theme of our prayers for the next forty days; but on the other hand, we also feel a kind of joy, a joy at the anticipation of Pascha, but not just anticipation, a joy as I begin to meet the Resurrected Lord even as I intentionally descend into the shadows of my own brokenness and misery.  Christ is there, I find out, even in my shadows, even in the lowest pits of my sinful confusion and brokenness, Christ is there.

And perhaps we experience this bright sadness more intensely, or maybe just more easily, as Great Lent begins and as we are helped liturgically, guided by the hymns of the Church, to contemplate the brokenness and shadow in ourselves that we always know is there, but that we also always try very hard to ignore.  And as we discover each Lent, looking steadfastly into our shadow, into our sin and brokenness, we discover that even there, even in the darkest recesses of our heart, even here there is nothing to fear for Christ has descended even into this hell.

Some of us, however, may go through periods of our life when times a painful awareness of our brokenness are not a feature just of a particular liturgical season, but are perhaps overwhelming, even sometimes debilitating experiences that seem to stay with us much of the time, a kind of Great Lent with no Pascha.  When this happens, it is as though I cannot—or perhaps I refuse to—see Christ in my hell, it’s as though I am too ashamed of what I am, of what I see and what I know God sees so very clearly in me, I am so ashamed that I only look down at the mud on my feet and do not lift up my eyes to see my God, Master and Friend with a towel around his waist stooping to wash my feet.  Maybe we are somewhat like Peter.  We can’t imagine that our sinless Master would stoop that low, we can’t accept that we actually need our God to stoop so low, so low as to wash even our feet, to be with us in our shadow and sin.  We wanted to offer God something more, something better; but as it turns out instead of being better than others, we realize that we are indeed the chief of sinners, the worst of the worst.  

Have you ever noticed in the lives of the saints or in books about saints, that whenever they talk about themselves, which is not often, but whenever they do, they only have bad things to say about themselves.  They only see their own shadow, they only see their own sin, and in their own eyes, each holy man or woman sees himself or herself as the chief of sinners?  I’ve noticed it.  I’ve noticed that part of our Transfiguration, or becoming more like Christ, part of that process is learning to hold within ourselves both the painful awareness of the depths of our own sin, our complicity in the pain, suffering and brokenness of the whole world, the utter darkness stubbornly lodged not far from the centre of our hearts, coming to know and see this about ourselves is part of our metamorphosis, part of our change in Christ from mere human beings to sons and daughters of the Light.  This seeing of our darkness is part of the process.  However, this seeing of our darkness is accompanied by an awareness of God’s nearness, a thankful doxology or joyful exulting in the gifts God graciously pours out—despite our sin, despite our failure.  God draws near with the blessings and gifts of His presence and pours them out on us and around us even as we are deeply aware of how unworthy we are of even the slightest and smallest heavenly gift.  

Joy and sadness, light and darkness, exaltation and lamentation, despair and hope, looking down and looking up—all of these can exist in our hearts at the same moment.  Archimandrite Aimilianos seems to speak of this experience, this experience that I have sometimes likened to holding joy in one hand while also holding sadness in the other.  Archimandrite Aimilianos says the following:

Now, at this stage, you begin to sense that God rejoices over you…. Such a joy is a foretaste, an awareness that God is near, that He is coming.  It is also a feeling of gratitude, because before you receive God’s gift [the joys of heaven] you see Him emptying His pockets to give them to you.Together with the joy that the soul feels, there comes a second feeling, which is always bound up with it: a feeling of pain.  This is the pain of a soul which is so rich and yet so poor.  It is the pain of a soul which, in the face of God’s mercy, understands its own hardness, its tragic failure, the dreadful state that it’s in.  It understands how small and petty it is, and begins to feel pain. This pain is caused primarily by the soul’s consciousness of its distance from God….The soul is in pain because of its fall and exile.  When we reach this point, when our soul begins to feel this pain, we come to the second, extremely critical stage in our communion with God.  It’s what the Church Fathers call the “highest intellection.” What does it mean?  It’s as if you were standing on some great height, from which you could fall into an abyss, but from where you can also see all there is to see.  You’re conscious of having been seized and raised up to a place where you can look into the abyss of your transgressions and understand the depth of your fall.

But there is a problem when we begin to ascend the heights—or at least I can say that I experience this problem.  The problem is that I am so used to looking down, I am so used to looking into the abyss, looking at my sin, that I fail to look up.  It is as though I am afraid to stop looking at my sin, it’s as though I can’t trust God to hold me as I seem to stand on the edge of that abyss, I can’t seem to trust so that I might relax, breathe deeply a bit and look up and look out at the gracious acts of God happening around me, at the presence of God even in the midst of the brokenness of the world.  Or to use a metaphor that I have used often before, to take my eyes off the dung in the dung pile and to look at the flowers growing up all around the dung pile.  Yes, my life is a dung pile; but it is a dung pile experiencing God’s grace.  Yes the world is a mess, yet still in this messy, messy world, beauty pokes through, kindness happens, gentleness and self-sacrifice out of love appear suddenly as if out of nowhere.  God is here.  God is present.  God has descended even into the dung pile of our world, even into the hell hiding in my heart.  

I wonder if this isn’t what St. Silouan was referring to when he said his famous aphorism: “keep your mind in hell and despair not.”  Or if it isn’t what his disciple, Elder Sophrony meant when he spoke of going to the edge of the abyss, looking in, and then taking two steps back and having tea.  I wonder if maybe these are ways of talking about the same spiritual experience.  When God draws near to us and raises us up so that we can see the sin we have been wallowing in, the sin and brokenness and hell that we were swimming in all along, but that only now we ourselves are beginning to perceive the depth and breadth of, when God lifts us up, then perhaps we are at first shocked and ashamed at how much more broken and sinful we are than we had ever suspected.  Perhaps we might even have the thought that God may not love us, may not want to be near us, now that we see how rotten we really are.  But the truth is, God has seen it all along.  God knew how broken we were long before we began to have an inkling of it.  God knew and loved.  And now, God has lifted us up a little so that we ourselves can see, or begin to see, the depth and breadth of our sin, not to lead us into despair, but to show us the greatness of His love, the immensity of His goodness.  

A real long time ago, when I began to climb rocks, it took quite a while before I learned to trust the equipment: the ropes and the anchors.  In the beginning, I could never take my eyes off of my hands, off of the rock itself and the next hand hold, the next place to grab onto.  The higher I was, the harder it was to enjoy the scenery. But once I learned to trust the equipment, once I wasn’t so afraid of falling, then I could look around a bit.  I could see for miles across the valley down below me.  I could see the top of eagles as they soared below me.  And maybe this is somewhat like our spiritual experience when God lifts us up and we see in frightening ways the depth and breadth of our sin.  But instead of equipment, it is God Himself holding us up and instead of focusing our attention on holding onto the rock, we continue to focus our attention on our own sin and brokenness instead of looking about, instead of relaxing a bit knowing that God is holding us up, relaxing a bit and looking about at what God is doing, looking about to see God’s wonders to see God’s nearness, to see the glories that can only be seen from this new and higher perspective. 

It is frightening to be held up by God.  It is frightening to look into the abyss of our own darkness and sin.  It is frightening and it is glorious.  Or at least it can be glorious, once you learn to relax in God’s embrace, once you learn to trust the One who has held you from the your mother’s womb, the One whose love never fails.  Once you learn to trust, then it can be glorious, then you can see not only your sin, but also the amazing and glorious works of God despite your sin.

On Needing God's Kneading

Archimandrite Aimilianos in a lecture entitled “On The State That Jesus Confers” says that the basic human problem is that we do not see God.  In fact, most people cannot see God, but can only seek Him.  This is because our eyes (both physical and the eyes of our souls) are earthly, they are trained to see, to think about and to contemplate only physical things and what can be deduced from physically perceptible things or what directly affects how we feel, that is, the emotional realities that are at work within us—although some people work hard to ignore even theses. 

If, however, we want to see God, where do we begin?  Archimandrite Aimilianos says that we must begin with what we can do.  We can seek; we can come to God with longing.  In other words, if you want to see God, you have to want to see God.  I’m not being redundant.  There is wanting, and then there is wanting.  I can want to become a doctor, for example; but if I don’t want to become a doctor more than I want to play video games, more than I want to hang out with my friends and more than just about anything else, I will never become a doctor.  There is wanting, and then there is really wanting: wanting so much that it is pretty much all I want.  And so we might say that if you want to see God, you have to want to see God more than just about anything else.

Now I may be stating the obvious here, but I should probably make clear that the word “see” is a metaphor.  Archimandrite Aimilianos is not talking about physical sight, neither is he talking about some sort of inner vision or soul sight within our imagination.  Rather, by seeing God, he is referring to a knowing of and encounter with God that is so real that it is like seeing.  He is saying that one can know and encounter God with such clarity and force that “seeing” is the only adequate word to describe the experience.  Just as we say that we know something to be the case, to be true, if we see it ourselves, test it, feel it, try it and in many physical ways experience it, so also Archimandrite Aimilianos tells us we can encounter and experience and know God in ways that involve so much surety that this knowledge of God is more real to us than the evidence of our physical senses.  In fact, he would say, that this knowledge of God is indeed more real than the whole world perceptible through my senses and my logic, more real because the God whom we can come to know is not merely real, but is the source and ground of all reality.  All that is immediately perceptible through the physical senses or through logic or even human feeling are only contingent realities, realities contingent on the One, on the unperceptible God whom we can, nonetheless, come to perceive if we seek for Him.

And yet seeking God is not like seeking things that I can physically or logically see because in seeking for God, we cannot find God.  God is not to be found.  But, you might ask, if God is not to be found by seeking, why seek Him?  Actually the answer is quite simple.  God cannot be found, regardless of how diligently we seek Him, God cannot be found, but God does reveal Himself.  But when God reveals Himself, if we are not seeking Him, we will not see Him or know him.  There is a passage in the Prophet Jeremiah (17:6-8) in which the prophet compares those whose hearts are not turned toward the Lord to a shrub in the desert that doesn’t even know when the rain comes.  That is, when we are not seeking God, when we are not longing to see or be touched by God, then when God does come, when God does reveal Himself to us, we don’t see it, we don’t perceive it.  

And so if we want to see God, we must seek Him, but in seeking Him we will not find Him; but rather, by seeking Him, we prepare ourselves to see Him when He reveals Himself to us.  Someone once explained it this way, “You can do absolutely nothing to make the sun rise, but you can be awake when it rises.”

Similarly, we can be awake, we can be watching, looking, seeking God so that when God  reveals Himself we can perceive it.  However, it is not as though God is one minute revealing Himself and the next minute not, as though God were playing hide and seek with us.  God is continually revealing Himself to us, speaking to us and making Himself known to us in ways that can only be perceived as we allow our minds to be changed—or to use the biblical word—as we learn to repent.  To repent means to change your mind, to think and perceive differently.  In other words, God is only perceived by us as we change, or rather, as we allow ourselves to be changed.  And the very seeking of God changes us because wanting one thing more than anything changes everything.

When we begin to seek God, according to Archimandrite Aimilianos, we ask God to satisfy our desires; and when He doesn’t, we think that He is ignoring us.  We ask God to realize our hopes, and we are dismayed because they are not fulfilled.  We ask God to let us feel His nearness, and God seems to stay far away.  God does not answer these prayers because they are all, in a sense, requests to stay were we are, requests for God to strengthen what we already think, already envision, what we desire now.  In fact, Archimandrite Aimilianos goes so far as to say that God does not answer these prayers because we are asking God to strengthen the very things that God, through repentance, wants to lead us out of.  

And so we experience a kind of tribulation, a separating of the wheat from the chaff, a kind of suffering that takes us through what feels like a desert of God’s absence.  But God is not absent.  God is as near as He has ever been.  God is near and is helping us change our minds, helping us to let go of inappropriate or immature ways of thinking about God and ourselves, helping us to let go of ways of knowing and feeling the nearness of God that rely primarily on our more shallow feelings or external serendipitous events that confirm our expectations, our hopes and our desires.  God is forcing us to go deeper into ourselves so that we can come to know God more deeply.  God is taking away what is familiar so that we can reach out to perceive and know God more as God is and thus to grow ourselves. 

Archimandrite Aimilianos gives us a helpful image to understand how we begin to see God when we are seeking Him.  He says that we do not begin by seeing God’s face or even his back, but we begin by first seeing God’s hands.  We see God’s hands as God kneads us like dough.  As our seeking brings us to Church, to the Tradition, to the people of God where we hope to find God, our expectations are thwarted in many ways, not the least of which are our expectations about what we expect from the Church.  Instead of the Glory of God, a lot of what we see at first are jars of clay, broken, cracked and misshapen.  We look to the place where God’s Glory dwells, and much of what we see in the beginning is the brokenness of others: foolishness, selfishness and hypocrisy—not greater than our own, mind you, if we are honest with ourselves.  But still, we had hoped to find something different, we had hoped that people here would be different.  And this very disappointment, for many, is the beginning of the kneading.

Disappointment leads to contemplation.  We begin to think more deeply, and consequently, we begin to look more deeply, to seek more deeply, and through this contemplation, our eyes are adjusted, we begin to see things differently, we begin, first of all, to see ourselves as we hadn’t seen ourselves before, and thus we begin for the first time to see God, we see God’s hands pushing and pulling and pressing us, kneading us, changing us.  Archimandrite Aimilianos puts it this way:

You contemplate the depths of your soul being kneaded by grace, like dough being kneaded into bread.  Your soul is now a malleable lump kneaded by the hands of God.  You see our soul being worked on, passing through His fingers…. All you see is His hand, as we see it in certain icons, emerging from a cloud in order to bless the saint standing below it.  And now you are standing next to God, watching His hand as it kneads your soul.

And this is the real beginning of the spiritual life, of a life with God.  Most of our spiritual journey is seeking, seeking and not finding much until we begin to see God: we see God’s hand.  We see God’s hand opposing us, pushing us, kneading us, making us into bread.  And when we can indeed begin to see God’s hand in all that we do not expect, in every disappointment, in every vicissitude of life, every uncomfortable change and unexpected outcome, when we see God’s fingerprints in everything that humbles us, everything that forces us to trust only in the mercy of God, when we see God’s hand here, we are now, according to Archimandrite Aimilianos, we are now beginning to see God, we are beginning to see the hand of God. 

I Am Naked, Clothe Me

Archimandrite Aimilianos of Simonopetra Monastery, in the first half of a transcribed (and then translated) speech called “The Progression of the Soul” speaks of stages to the beginning of the spiritual journey.  The beginning point for him is found in rightly negotiating the second stage.  

The first stage of the spiritual journey he calls the feeling of exile, the feeling that we are far from God, that there is a wall between us.  This feeling of exile is the feeling of Adam and Eve expelled from Paradise.  It is the feeling of pain, not necessarily physical pain; in fact, physical pain is not at all what he is speaking about.  The pain he is speaking of is the pain of longing, the pain that induced Adam and Eve to listen to the serpent.  Being lords of the universe, possessing everything, Adam and Eve came to feel they didn’t have enough, that somehow God was holding out on them.  Being very rich, they thought themselves poor and thus were easily deceived by the serpent.  This is the pain Archimandrite Aimilianos seems to be speaking of, the painful feeling that something very important is missing.

And of course, something very important is indeed missing.  We are children of the fall.  We are born in pain and raised among thorns and thistles.  Everywhere we turn we are poked and prodded by needles of want, envy, fear, and desire (just to name a few).  Yet we don’t want to admit it.  We want to explain it, explain it away.  We say, "It is someone else’s fault.  I’m not really that twisted, at least not as badly mangled as some others.  And besides, I could change if I really wanted to, if I only tried harder, if I only got a break."  And so we keep busy.  We keep busy so that our focus can stay outside us, so we don’t have to feel the pain, the inner pain, the pain of exile from God, the pain that Archimandrite Aimilianos says is directly related to nakedness.

The pain that we do not want to feel is the pain of our nakedness.  Having been clothed by God in the Garden of Paradise, clothed with God’s glory the Fathers and hymns of the Church teach us, having been clothed with God’s glory we intensely feel its absence, we feel exposed and unprotected, we feel the cold wind of our existential contingency: having been called into being from the dirt by God,  what are we now that we have lost His glory?  St. Augustine spoke of a God-shaped hole in our hearts.  The experience of the orphan or of a lost sheep are metaphors pointing to this inner feeling of exile, of pain, and of nakedness.  It is this very feeling, the feeling of this pain, this knowing that we are naked, that Archimandrite Aimilianos says the first stage of the spiritual journey.

The second stage of the spiritual journey, according to Archimandrite Aimilianos, comes when we confess that we are sinners, when we know intensely that something is separating us from God, when we no longer deny our nakedness.  This, he says, is the most critical point 

because at that point one of two things will happen: either I’ll get up and get dressed or I’ll remain naked.  In other words, I’ll either present myself to God in my nakedness and say, ‘I have sinned,’ or I’ll try to hide from God like Adam and Eve.  And when God says: ‘Adam where are you?’ I’ll say: ‘Hiding because I am naked.’  And when I emerge from my hiding place, He’ll see my fig leaves.

Then Archimandrite Aimilianos asks why this is.  Why do we hide ourselves?  Why is it so hard for us to present ourselves naked and sinful before God?  The simple reason, he says, is “that it is a terrible thing for us to realize that we are nothing”:

Do you know what it means to go from thinking that you’re special and important, from being respected publicly, from thinking  that you’ve done great things, from being talented, wonderful, good-looking, charming and I don’t know what else besides, to recognizing that, on the contrary, you’re naked and of no consequence whatsoever?  It requires strength to accept that, a lot of strength.  And yet we can’t even accept the slightest blemish that we might have, or any fault, failure, error or sin that we may have committed, without covering it up with a lie, and then  cover up that lie with a second one, and then the second with a third.

A person may conceal his or her nakedness by means of an inferiority complex, by acts of aggression, by self-justification, by donning various masks, or by many other means…. Such strategies of denial also involve concealment from myself.  What does that mean?  It means that, even though I’m naked, I’ll live as though I were not, and thus live a double life.  Or I may refuse to grow and progress, as though I weren’t naked at all.  And this is something much more terrible, for it is the rejection of reality, and such a rejection can only have tragic consequences for me.  

Life is full of people like that  They know they’re sinners, they know they’re naked, and yet they go through life doing the very things which they hate, which disgust them, which they know are beneath them.  And they know that they must somehow silence the terrible cry of their conscience, which torments them.  

The soul’s alternative is to accept its situation and say: ‘I’ll do something about my nakedness.  I will declare my sin.  I will confess my sin and my nakedness.’  And naked though I be, I will nevertheless present myself to God. I’ll tell Him: ‘You clothe me.’  And that takes great strength.  To turn to God as if nothing else in the world exists requires tremendous honesty and authenticity.  

This is the crucial point: will I accept the painful reality of my nakedness or prefer my version of the lie, my version of the fig leaf?  I think many of us are confused about the appropriate role of strength and will in our repentance.  I think many of us invest a great deal of our will power and a great deal of our effort into sewing fig leaves.  We think that is what we are supposed to do, we are supposed to get better, supposed to be better, we are supposed to make ourselves less naked.  But we can’t, so we lie to ourselves; we shift our focus, assign blame, keep busy, and above all never spend much time alone and quiet, never give ourselves an opportunity to see and feel profoundly how naked we really are.  

You know one of the most common things sincere believers confess in confession is the sin of laziness.  However, much of the time I think the person has fallen prey to this confusion of the role of strength and the will in our journey to Christlikeness.  They confess they are lazy because they have not been able to cover their nakedness sufficiently, they have not been able to fast or pray or do good works to the level they think they are supposed to be at.  But I don’t think that is what strength and will power are for.  St. Paul gives us the clue.  He says, “When I am weak, then I am strong” and “I rather glory in my weakness that the power of Christ may rest upon me.”  

Archimandrite Aimilianos tells us that strength really is about standing naked before God and before ourselves.  Faithful application of strength and the power of the will is to deny our self-justifying delusions and unlike our forefathers and foremothers to step naked out of the bushes and to present ourselves to God without excuse, without prettying ourselves up first, embracing all of our weakness, all of our shadows, all of our inability and insignificance.   This is where strength is needed.  This is where the power of the will is redeemed.  

And if, like St. Paul, we can learn to glory in our weaknesses, if we can learn to accept the reality of our brokenness, of our impotence, of our lostness, if we can find the strength to look squarely in the mirror of our conscience and not turn away, then, then we have the possibility of being clothed by God, then we have the possibility of returning in some small ways to the relationship our foreparents had with God in Paradise.  It is a long road, but at least according to Archimandrite Aimilianos, this is the real beginning.  Everything up to this point is preparation.  Preparation is important.  The Holy Spirit is active in this preparation.  But the turning point, the beginning of the actual return to Paradise is here.  It is here in the acceptance of our nakedness, in the forsaking of the various fig leaves we sew and have sewn for ourselves.  This is the beginning.

Strength is called for, “tremendous honesty and authenticity,” as Archimandrite Aimilianos puts it. Strength is called for, but not the strength to change, but the strength to accept yourself and to accept God’s love for us as we are.  That’s the beginning.

Now a final word.  Archimandrite Aimilianos points out that this first step, this beginning, is not like the beginning of a journey in a straight line.  It is a journey of transformation that is circular.  That is, we are continually having to begin, continually having to gather the courage to step out of the bushes of our self delusions to stand naked and broken and sinful before God.  And even though we have experienced God's gracious love in the past, each new beginning has its own new insecurities and fears, shame and disappointment with ourselves.  Each new beginning requires strength, strength to stand before God again and say, "O my heavenly Father, again, I am naked, please clothe me."

We Must Not Must

“What must I do to be saved?”  This is a natural question when we reach the stage of our spiritual journey at which we begin to realize that something is wrong, something is wrong between me and God.  It is a natural question, but it is the wrong question, at least according to Archimandrite Aimilianos of Simonopetra (monastery on Mt. Athos).  Archimandrite Aimilianos says the following in a lecture called “The Progression of the Soul” that has been transcribed and translated into English and can be found in the book, The Way of the Spirit: Reflections on the Life in God. 

“Thus the first element we need in order to embark on our path is the feeling of exile”   

Archimandrite Aimilianos concedes a little later that words like “feeling” are inaccurate and perhaps misleading because they are words that we usually use to describe a huge range of passions and sensations: I feel hungry, I feel sad, I feel a pebble in my shoe.  However, he is intentional in using such words as “feeling” because he wants to emphasize the actual experience of the spiritual life as opposed to a metaphysical or philosophical speculation about the spiritual life.  He likens the spiritual journey to a walk to the corner store.  You know what you will encounter along the way to the store because you have actually experienced it before:  you have seen, heard, smelled and felt it.  Archimandrite Aimilianos says that it is the same way on the spiritual journey except you don’t experience it with physical senses, but you experience it inwardly.  And because one does indeed experience the spiritual life, “feeling” is an adequate word to use to begin to describe the experiences of the spiritual life.

And this initial experience, or at least the one that gets us moving with intention on the spiritual journey, this “first element” as Archimandrite Aimilianos calls it, is the feeling of exile, this feeling that all is not right between me and God, that there is somehow a barrier, a wall between me and God.

"Before us now is the shaken soul, the cast-away soul, closed in by four walls and unable to see a thing.  This same soul, however, is thinking about breaching the barrier, about breaking down the walls within which it has come to live, and to live instead with God.  How must it proceed?”

Archimandrite Aimilianos asks the question using the word “must,” and then he immediately makes the following statement:

"Here we need to know that, contrary to our expectations there is no “must.”  Such a word does not exist within the Christian life.  The idea that something “must” be, or “must” take place, is a product of the intellect; it is something that I arrive at as a logical conclusion, a deduction based on something in the Gospels, or which Christ taught in his parables, or with respect to His ethical teachings to do this or that.  But the word “must” has never moved anyone to do anything.  On the contrary, it makes you feel like a slave and discourages you from moving forward.  The force of “must” moves neither God, nor the [human] heart.  It pertains only to the logic of human deliberation, to the endurance of human determination, which as we all know is something that unravels and comes apart very easily."

Because “must” is a product of human deliberation and determination, it can never work in the spiritual realm because the human heart is so weak.  What I am convinced of today and determined with all of my heart to do can change in a moment.  New information, different circumstances, changing relationships, all this and more effect our hearts and minds.  Archimandrite Aimilianos puts it this way:

"The most fragile thing in the world is the human heart, along with all of its deliberations and determinations.  The things about you that I love, I may later come to hate.  And the things about you that I now hate may later cause me to fall in love with you.  I may condemn you, and on the same grounds proclaim that you’re the best person in the world.  I can exalt you to the skies, and at the same time wish you were in hell.  I may decide to become a saint, and at the very moment become a devil."

Now I realize that some of my readers may not be aware that their heart is this fickle.  Some of you may be saying to yourselves, “Well, I know of some other people who are that fickle, who don’t stick to their commitments, who lack the inner strength or will power to determine what must be done and to stick to it.  But I am not like that.”  For those who are thinking this thought let me tell you something that my spiritual father once told me.  He said that every sin I see in others I am able to see because the same sin exists in me.  I may not express the sin in the same way, I may not have had, as the detectives on TV say, the same “means, motive and opportunity” as others to commit in bolder, more external ways the sins that also ensnare my heart.  But the sins are nonetheless there, and if I am willing to ask God to show me the sins in my heart, in this case the fickleness of my heart, mind and will, God will likely be gracious enough to show me.  The hymns of the Church teach us that it is a spiritually dangerous thing to say along with the Pharisee, “I am not like other men” (Luke 18:11).

But for Archimandrite Aimilianos, fickleness or changeability are characteristics of every human heart and mind which is why, for him, words such as “must” do not exist in Christian life.  Whatever I determine based on my understanding about the ways or principles or “laws” of the spiritual life cannot be applied in any categorical way.  Not to myself, and not to others.  This does not mean that we do not discover principles or laws or guidelines for the spiritual life, nor that these cannot be shared with others.  What it means is that they cannot be applied, either to myself or to others, as constraints, as “musts” that bind or enslave us.  When one attempts to make progress in the spiritual life constrained by “musts,” according to Archimandrite Aimilianos, “it makes you feel like a slave and discourages you from moving forward.”     

So if there is no “must” in the Christian life, then what do we have?  How do we teach and guide one another along the spiritual path?  Well I think Archimandrite Aimilianos would say, first, very humbly, carefully and based on our own actual experience.  To use his metaphor, it is like giving directions to the corner market.  If I myself have never been to that market, then certainly, I had best keep my mouth shut about how to get there—even if I have studied all the maps.  And if I feel I must speak, then I need to speak carefully, tentatively, realizing that much of what a person actually experiences along the journey will not be communicated by any map.  And even if I have made that journey myself a hundred times, great care is called for in giving the directions, for what is to me an obvious landmark along the way may be completely missed by someone else walking that exact same path.  Guiding someone along the way of their spiritual path to God is very similar.  The landmarks of my experience with God that stand out in my mind as most significant, may not be exactly the same landmarks that another encounters or finds significant.

It has happened to me several times in the context of a conversation with my spiritual father or some other wise person or in reading a book by a spiritual writer that I have had the “aha” moment when I realized that I have indeed had a certain inner experience that at the time I did not consider significant.  But when I hear or read someone else talk about the significance of what seems to be the same experience in his or her journey, then I begin to reflect on my own experience and begin to realize that there was indeed much more significance in that experience than I had previously realized.  I just didn’t see it, or notice its importance at the time.  Like walking to the corner store, even if everyone walks exactly the same route, everyone is likely to notice different landmarks and appreciate different sights and smells and sounds along the way.  This is why “must” is such a dangerous word in our spiritual vocabulary.

I’d like to end today by pointing out that “must” can be communicated in many forms without actually saying the word “must.”  Generally speaking, the word “should,” especially in the context of spiritual guidance, carries the same force as “must,” “have to,” or “ought.”  It has become a kind of red flag for me, this word “should.”  As soon as I hear the words “you should” forming in my mind, either to myself or to others, I take it as a sign that I have probably stopped having any real spiritual insight or helpful guidance, and I am probably just relying on my own rational analysis, my own deductions and conclusions.  When I start to hear the word “should” in my mind, I like to say to myself, “Speaking of “should,” you should probably shut up now.  Shut up and pray.”  

I don’t always. In fact, I don’t shut up nearly as often or as quickly as I would like.  Sometimes rational analysis is all I have, or all I seem to have.  And when that’s the case and the circumstances are such that I feel compelled to say something, then I try my best to couch my words in as much freedom as possible.  I don’t want my spiritual child or whoever it is who comes to me for advice to feel trapped, to feel enslaved, to feel as though they must do what I tell them; because if they do feel trapped and enslaved, then, according to Archimandrite Aimilianos, they will not move forward, they will remain stuck where they are.  Progress in the spiritual life, in the Christian life with God, is made only in freedom, only as we learn “to act and move forward on the basis of…a kind of vision, that is, on the basis of [the soul’s] inner perception and feeling for things.”  When we act this way, there are no “musts.”  There are only land marks noted by those who have gone before and bits of advice from seasoned travellers, those whom we call our spiritual fathers and mothers.