Of Course There Are Many Inconsistencies

St. Theophan the Recluse is today one of the most popular spiritual writers of 19th century Russia. In many ways his great gift is that he was able to summarize the whole Orthodox teaching on inner growth and spiritual life and apply it to the very specific context of 19th century Russia, especially 19th century Russian monasticism. Like his near contemporary, St. Ignatius Brianchaninov, St. Theophan recognized that the monastic institutions of his time were broken in many ways but were nonetheless 

“springs of sweetness…by which the soul is filled!—the Word of God, and daily church services, and the reading, and the fasting, and the guidance of the elders, and God’s enlightenments, both secret and open warnings, the ceaseless state of prayer from which come all goodness and [spiritual] gain.”  

And while all of this is what is wonderful, or potentially wonderful, about a monastic life, about a life intensely focused on the inner life with God, while it is this that draws us to the monastery or to a disciplined ascetic life in the world, the reality of our lived experience, whether in the monastery or as a pious Orthodox Christian in the world, the reality of our experience is that much of the time, most of the time, the “springs of sweetness,” as St. Theophan calls them, seem to be hard to find and separated by long dry stretches.  

The book, Kindling the Divine Spark: Teaching on How to Preserve Spiritual Zeal, is a collection of talks, letters mostly, given by St. Theophan to women monastics. In one of his talks, in the talk that I quote above, St. Theophan speaks of the glories of life in a monastery and then he makes a the following statement: 

“Of course, many inconsistencies occur here, too…”  

Ah, there’s the rub. There’s the bit that throws us off, “many inconsistencies occur here, too.” And the saint says, “of course,” as though we should have never expected things to be consistent. But we do. We do expect things to be consistent and we are offended when they are not.

Part of the spiritual journey of our life with God is the work of uniting the mind and the heart. This is a dominant theme in St. Theophan’s various writings. This is an aspect or teaching of the spiritual life that I have found is relatively popular. People like to talk about bringing their mind into their heart. It’s an inner spiritual practice that takes a certain amount of attention and discipline, but with a little practice it often quickly brings peace, and (more to the point I want to talk about today) it is something I can do by myself, in my own private, little inner world.  However, another aspect of the spiritual life, an aspect we touched on a little while ago when we spoke of Abbess Thasia’s struggles at the beginning of her monastic journey, another essential aspect of spiritual life is inner crucifixion, or as St. Isaac put it, the unseen martyrdom.

We each of us want to have a certain amount of control over our life and circumstances. We want to understand what is happening to us. We want to see how what we are experiencing right now fits into what we call God’s plan for our lives, but what often turns out to be our own version or vision of what we think or want God’s plan for our lives to be. And we know this is so, we know that it really isn’t God’s plan for our life that we are concerned about by the very fact that we are so disturbed by the inconsistencies—or as St. Theophan puts it, “Of course, [the] many inconsistencies.”

We all in various ways and at various seasons of our life fall prey to the temptation to think that we know how our life is supposed to go, how important people in our life are going to behave, how we are going to, or how we are supposed to, feel when certain things happen or don’t happen in our life. We think we know, and then we are so surprised, often scandalized, sometimes even offended to the point of turning away from God in some small or large ways, when our life is inconsistent, when spiritual leaders, church leaders, holy elders of the monastery, when men and women we trusted in and hoped in, when the people and institutions we trusted in are inconsistent. But inconsistency, many inconsistencies, St. Theophan tells us, are “of course” an essential part of our spiritual journey.

Why is that? Why must people disappoint us? Why must institutions (churches, monasteries, hierarchies of various sorts and orders) why must they “of course” be inconsistent? Why is this an essential part of our growth in Christ? Well, the first and most important answer to this question is that I do not know. I do not know why it has to be this way, but I do know that it is this way. I don’t know why people fail. I don’t know why I fail. I don’t know why sometimes I can say a word that sets someone free, and two days later say a word that offends and deeply wounds someone I love and want to help. I don’t know why I can do the right thing in one situation (and be praised unworthily for it, for I really didn’t know what I was doing); and in another situation do the wrong thing and be despised or even reviled for it (though I really didn’t realize I was doing the wrong thing at the time). I don’t know why I am so inconsistent—except for the fact that I am a sinner and that I am, at a deep level, very seriously broken.  

And if I am deeply broken and that is why I am so inconsistent, perhaps that is also the reason why the men and women and the institutions that I look up to and depend on often seem to hurt and disappoint me. Maybe it’s because we are all human and for some unexplainable reason God has chosen to put His Glory in such jars of clay. Always in jars of clay, earthen vessels. There is no Glory of God in this world not hidden in a jar of clay.

In my experience I have found the question, “why do bad things happen,” in all of its various forms, is not a very helpful question. It is not helpful because it keeps our focus outside us, as though the bad things that happen are “out there,” as though the thing God really cared about was outside me, what happens to me, rather than God caring mostly—and I might even say entirely—about what my response is, what my response to what happens outside me is. That’s what God cares about—at least as far as I am concerned. Yes, God’s providential care is over all that He has created, but in as much as God’s calling for me (and for every Christian believer) is to be formed into His image, I can confidently assert that how I respond to what happens around me, how I turn to God for help in times of need, how I repent when I see my own sin (not the sins of others—that’s their business), these are the only things God cares about as far as I’m concerned.  

And once we shift our focus inward, then everything changes. Once I see the darkness inside myself, then instead of asking why bad things happen to me, I begin to wonder why it is that anything good happens to me. Because I am so inconsistent, it is amazing to me that anyone shows any consistency at all. Because I am so easily confused, so self-obsessed and so tormented by passions, it is a bonafide miracle that I experience any Grace, any comfort, any love from those around me at all. If those around me are experiencing only one quarter of the inner conflict with depression, lust, selfishness, confusion and self-exulting pride that I do, it is truly a miracle of the Grace of God that I experience any good, any blessing, any encouragement of Grace through the people and institutions God has placed in my life.

In fact, we might even say that one of the reasons why there must, “of course [be] many inconsistencies” is because it is the very inconsistency of the world around us that forces us to go deeper into ourselves. When everything is going pretty much according to plan, when everyone is behaving pretty much as I expected, then it is very easy to stay stranded in a very shallow spiritual experience, a very shallow knowledge of God and of myself. So long as our spiritual life can be managed with nothing more than the rational aspect of our minds—as though progress in the spiritual life were somewhat like progress in mathematics or progress in the management of a construction project—so long as the spiritual life is mostly about just figuring things out, so long as this is the case, we will never grow to know God or ourselves very well. As many of the Church Fathers have pointed out, and as St. Theophan himself summarizes for us very neatly in the Book The Spiritual Life and How to Be Attuned To It, our true knowledge of God and of ourselves takes place at a deeper level of knowing than that which can be processed rationally.  

If it weren’t for the inconsistencies of our experience, we might never learn to lay aside (or put in its place) the rational aspect of our mind to go deeper and come to know God and ourselves at that deeper level, the level that the Fathers of the Philokalia call noetic (which is sometimes misleadingly translated as “intellect”). This movement to a deeper knowledge of God seldom comes to us without our first coming to the end of our rational systems and expectations. It seems that it is only through disappointments, often experiences that seem death-like to us, experiences that seem like inner crucifixions, like a martyrdom that no one sees, it is experiences like these that create in us a crisis, a crises that forces us to become aware of something deeper in ourselves, a knowledge of God that transcends even death, even the death of disappointment, betrayal and failure. The outer pain we discover functions as birth pangs within us giving birth to a deeper, more secure, more profound relationship with God.

However, all births in this fallen world are dangerous.  Death is real, but so too is the Life that can come from death. Isn’t that what the Resurrection teaches us? Three days in the tomb can seem like an eternity to the one in the tomb, to the one in the belly of a Great Fish. But like Jonah, we cry out to God from the belly of the Great Fish, like Peter we cry out as we sink, “Help, Lord!” And in our distress we let go of our rational expectations, all that we had figured we could depend on, all of that is let go and in a kind of terror, all that is left is only God and me, only His help and my death.

And God does help, in various ways at various times, almost always unpredictably. God lets us suffer, lets us stew, lets us wallow in the mire for a while, and when the time is right, when we are ready, when we have come to our senses, when we have come to the end of ourselves, then God makes a way of escape, opens a door or provides us with another opportunity. This is the way of salvation, the narrow way, the way that few find, for it is the way of crucifixion, it is the way of transformation from the old to the new, from earth to heaven. This way of inconsistency is also a necessary part of our salvation.

The Unseen Martyrdom

“This is the fiercest struggle, the struggle that resists a man unto blood, wherein free will is tested as to the singleness of his love for the virtues….It is here that we manifest our patience, my beloved brethren, our struggle and our zeal.  For this is the time of unseen martyrdom…”

What is this struggle that St. Isaac speaks of and how can it be overcome? Is it some dread mysterious experience that only the very holy or only monastics or only spiritually advanced strugglers experience? No, not at all. St. Isaac names two specific areas or perhaps better, arenas, in which this fiercest of struggles attacks believers, all believers, the young and the old, the spiritually advanced and the spiritually negligent, the married and the monastic. These two areas are, first, the struggle to maintain chastity and, second, the struggle with the feeling of abandonment.  Let’s take a closer look at these two areas of struggle and St. Isaac’s advice on how not to be overcome by them.

What is chastity and how do we maintain it? Chastity refers to moral purity generally, but specifically to sexual purity.  It does not necessarily refer to sexual abstinence. The hymns of the Church refer to Sts. Joachim and Anna as “chaste” even though they were evidently sexual active: they are the parents of our Mother Mary, God’s Birthgiver.  Rather, chastity, when it is referring specifically to sexual activity, is referring to properly ordered sexuality. The struggle with chastity is the struggle with disordered passion. Disordered sexual passion is desire that is inappropriate, untimely or perversely directed. And keep in mind that the word “perverse” doesn’t mean “bad,” but rather means “twisted,” diverted from its appropriate use and purpose. So when we speak of perverted sexual desires, we do not mean bad sexual desire, for sexual desire of itself is good as God created it. We are talking about sexual desire wrongly guided or directed, sexual desire that is uncontrolled.

Every human being, in my experience, struggles or has struggled with maintaining chastity. Tolstoy in the beginning of Anna Karenina says, “All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I think something similar can be said about chastity. We all know, at least approximately, what chastity looks like, but each one of us struggles to maintain it in his or her own way. Our struggles to maintain chastity are intensely personal, as personal as our own story, our childhood experiences and traumas, our secret indulgences and the bad habits of thought and action and the degree to which we have or have not resisted them. Each person struggles to maintain chastity resisting his or her own perversions.

But it’s not that sexual perversions are that unique. There is nothing new under the sun. It is rather that each person experiences his or her struggle uniquely, the particular form of the twisting or perversion he or she suffers from being influenced by a myriad of factors from DNA to social conditioning, from childhood experiences to the availability and kinds of pornography or other models of immorality.  All of these influence the exact sorts of perverse desires any one of us may experience and how each of us then struggles to maintain chastity. However, and this is very important, everyone struggles or has struggled to maintain chastity—you are not the only one.  Your struggle almost certainly is in secret, the unseen martyrdom as St. Isaac says, but your struggle in this area one of the common human struggles.

The second arena St. Isaac points out as giving us the fiercest spiritual struggle is when we feel abandoned, abandoned by people, but most importantly, abandoned by God. Sometimes this feeling of abandonment is manifest as despondency or depression and is accompanied by a strong urge to give up, to just sit and do nothing, or not to get out of the bed in the morning. However, sometimes the feeling of abandonment manifests itself as an urge to cast off restraint, to give oneself over to wine, women and song; to eat, drink and be merry. And while both of these symptoms or manifestations of the feeling of abandonment are dangerous, the most dangerous in my opinion is when the feeling of abandonment leads to cynicism. A depressed Christian or an unrestrained Christian are both spiritually ill, but they are both usually aware of their sickness and, if they are willing, are relatively easy to help. I say relatively easy because even though both depression and licentiousness can have many possible causes and take a long time to understand and overcome, people who have the spiritual disease of cynicism often do not even realize that they are sick.  

A Christian who is cynical may consider him or herself to be in many ways a model Christian, a leader, someone who sees clearly and knows the dark side of every Christian leader, institution or tradition. Cynicism is very difficult to heal because it is very difficult for the cynical Christian to admit that he or she is very sick. But once recognized as a spiritual illness, cynicism can be healed. Keep in mind that the root of cynicism, very often, is the feeling of abandonment. Christians, Orthodox Christians, become cynical often because the people or institutions they had relied on failed them in some serious ways. They then become cynical because God seems to have abandoned them, God seems far away, God does not seem to come to their aid, does not help them in the ways they thought He would. But because they do not want to give up faith completely, because they perhaps cannot give up faith, they cope with their pain and the incongruities of their religious experience through cynicism.  

And so the cynical Christian is stuck in a kind of eddy at the side of the River Life. He or she moves in little circles, making what she or he considers to be insightful, cynical comments on the River as it passes by. But the cynic is stuck, not going anywhere out of fear, fear which can be seen only as they are willing to look deeply into themselves. The Christian cynic fears that the shadows he or she has focused on for so long are all that exist, that the Light has abandoned them.  

So what do we do then? How do we keep from being overcome by these struggles, these, “fiercest struggles” of the Christian journey, whether they be struggles to maintain chastity (in all of its various and possible forms) or struggles with abandonment issues (again, in any of its various forms or manifestations)? According to St. Isaac, all of these struggles are won or lost through thoughts and habits, and it is the struggle not to give in to our perverse sexual thoughts and the thoughts generated by (and generating) feelings of abandonment that he calls "the unseen martyrdom.”  But how do we control our thoughts and habits?

St. Isaac compares vice, be it sexual perversion or the depression, lack of restraint or cynicism that come from feelings of abandonment, to a potted plant or tree that one waters regularly. If you want the tree to die, you have to stop watering it. The more you water it by thinking about it, actively remembering it and doing it (in your mind, with your body or with your words), the stronger the tree becomes. The stronger the tree becomes, the harder it is to kill it. That is, the more you give in to thoughts that lead to sexual perversion, depression, lack of self control or cynicism, the more you associate that vice with yourself, the more you associate that vice with who you really are, who you think you really are. Often when people say to me, “That’s just the way I am,” I am tempted to say back, “No, that just the way you have become.” Actually, I seldom say that because the person I am talking to is not yet at a place where he or she can hear it, but it is true nonetheless.  

But just as it is true that we become who we are (or we think we are) by means of accepting certain thoughts as though they were our own, we can also become who we want to be, who we really are, by rejecting thoughts, by resisting images and turning our attention away from thoughts that lead us where we don’t want to go. I cannot become you, nor you me. We can only become ourselves, our best selves, our selves in Christ. And what St. Isaac seems to be saying is that our broken selves, our selves driven to unchaste thoughts and actions, our selves suffering from and trying to cope with feelings of abandonment, our broken selves are not who we have to be. Who we have become is not who we have to be. We can change, but change does not come easily or quickly. Habits of thought and action that have taken years to develop, with also take years to overcome. St. Mary of Egypt, for example, lived a life of wantonness for seventeen years, and so we read in the story of Her life that for Her first seventeen years in the desert, she suffered greatly with a desire to drink wine and to sing lewd songs. It took a while, after she ceased her immoral behaviour, a long while, for the habit of immoral thought to change.  

So we too must struggle with thoughts. We too may find ourselves, like St. Mary of Egypt, struggling for days at a time with impure thoughts or with fears that God has rejected us. We too, for example, may be constantly tempted to make cynical comments, to think the worst of others, or to doubt whether it all makes any difference.  We may be tempted to stay in bed, not to get out of our chair, not to brush our teeth (someone once told me that, that was how he knew he was struggling with depression: he didn’t want to brush his teeth). However we personally experience this fiercest struggle of the Christian life, this unseen martyrdom, we must each through patience, through long suffering, learn to do battle in our minds, for there and only there will the battle be won.

There are two techniques that I have found helpful in this unseen martyrdom. The first is recommending by St. Isaac in homily 32: “Be on you guard against idleness.” St. Isaac goes on to point out that on the day of judgement, God will not judge us regarding our idleness, regarding what we did not accomplish (contrary to what the cultural theology of our capitalist society teaches us: God is not concerned with what we do or do not accomplish). Rather, God will judge us because by abandoning what He had given us to do to keep our minds active and busy in healthy pursuits, we have become idle thus opening “the door to the demons.” That is, the perverse thoughts and feelings of abandonment are able to enter our mind because we are not keeping our mind busy with what God has given us to do. In the case of the hermit monk (the specific person St. Isaac is addressing) this would be psalmody, prayers and handiwork. In the case of a mother or father, avoiding idleness may have more to do with caring for family members and their needs, along with personal spiritual disciplines.

You see disciplines like saying the Jesus Prayer, cleaning the house, or paying attention to your spouse and children are not only good in themselves, they are also good in that they keep our minds and hearts from being idle, thus limiting the ability of the evil one to plant perverse thoughts in our minds. And even when perverse or depressing thoughts and feelings enter our minds, we do not have to identify with them, we do not have to claim the thoughts or feelings as our own. Rather, we can say to ourselves, “Oh, that old thought again.” Or, “Oh, I know what that yucky feeling is and where it comes from.”  

And this leads me to the second helpful technique. It is something I picked up a long time ago from reading the life of St. Francis of Assisi. St. Frances used to refer to his own body as “brother ass.” For example, if he were hungry, he would sometimes say, “brother ass needs to be fed.” He also said things like (and here I don’t remember the exact quotation), we must be gentle with brother ass, but not allow him to lead us. In other words, when our mind or body is experiencing urges or feelings that we do not want, but that we cannot seem to control, it is helpful to give these thoughts or feelings a name and then to deal with the thought or feeling as though you were dealing with someone or something else, not yourself, but someone or something that has sort of hitch hiked a ride on you. If I have a cynical thought, I can say to myself, “Oh, that’s my high school science teacher talking again.” Then I can separate that thought from myself and move on to think more clearly about the matter. St. Paul uses this very technique in his epistles when he talks about the old man and the new man, the old Adam and the new Adam.  

When I am able to separate a depressing thought from myself by naming it, I am then more easily able to dismiss the thought—or at least to corral it somewhat, to put it in a box for a while so that I can ask myself more helpful questions such as, “what does Faith say?” or “What is the least I can do?” or “Is this lustful thought really loving?” or “what else could I be doing right now?” Taking the time to ask these questions often opens a door of escape, a door by which I can free myself for a moment from the thoughts that are oppressing me.

What does martyrdom look like? We all know about the martyrdom of blood, but few of us know about the unseen martyrdom, “the fiercest of struggles,” as St. Isaac calls it.  Every Christian is called to martyrdom, called to be a witness for Christ (after all, the word “martyr” comes from the Greek word that means to be a witness). Some are martyred publicly though the shedding of their bodily blood; most of us, however, are called to the unseen martyrdom, to “the struggle that resists to the shedding of blood [unseen].” Most of us take our stand for Christ in the arena of our mind, with our thoughts, and through the bloody inner struggle to learn to control them.