St. Isaac, Dickens and Eating Away Gehenna

It is difficult for some of us who were raised on a theology of substitutionary atonement, those of us Protestant converts to holy Orthodoxy, it is difficult for us to accept that our final judgement will involve anything more than the forgiveness of sins. But the Church teaches us otherwise. Parables such as the Rich Man and Lazarus, and the Separation of the Sheep and the Goats play a huge role in the hymnology of the Orthodox Church and in its understanding of what our judgement before God will look like. That is, judgement before God is not merely about forgiveness of sin. But rather, the judgement of the Age to Come is also about comfort and torment; or as Christ puts it in the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Father Abraham speaking to the Rich Man who is in torment), “Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things; but now he is comforted and you are tormented.”

A significant aspect of the torment of the Age to Come is connected to how we have reveled in comfort while those around us have suffered. Yes, forgiveness is part of it.  Christ is the propitiation for the sins of the whole world, St. John tells us in his first Epistle (2:3), and while we might debate the role of faith or acceptance in the experience of the forgiveness of our sins, one thing is certain: the problem is not on God’s side. God has forgiven all. And yet, though we are forgiven, there there may still torment.

Certainly, some of this torment of the Age to Come—a torment that begins in this life, just as eternal Life begins in this life and continues into the Age to Come—some of this torment has to do with struggling to accept that God has forgiven us for our sins, that the abyss of our sins is not greater than the ocean of God's love. However, another aspect of the torment of the Age to Come has to do with what we have left undone: the good we could have done but didn’t, the help we could have given but held back, the good life we enjoyed (materially, socially, spiritually) refusing to reach out to and love those suffering from want of material blessings, from want of functional family or social support, or for want of a healthy church community and sound (Orthodox) teaching about the nature of God, man and the universe. Some of the suffering of the age to come will have to do with our failure to love.

One of the best depictions in English Literature of this torment over what is left undone, this refusal to care about those around us, and how it might be experienced in the Age to Come is found in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. After the ghost of Jacob Marley shakes up Ebenezer Scrooge and warns him of the three Christmas ghosts who will visit him, Marley’s ghost leads Scrooge to the window where Scrooge sees “the air…filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went. Every one of them wore chains like Marley’s Ghost; some few (they might be guilty governments) were linked together; none were free. Many had been personally known to Scrooge in their lives. He had been quite familiar with one old ghost in a white waistcoat, with a monstrous iron safe attached to its ankle, who cried piteously at being unable to assist a wretched woman with an infant, whom it saw below on a doorstep. The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power for ever.

The night is bitterly cold, we are told earlier in the story, and this poor woman is huddled on a doorstep with her infant trying not to freeze. And Scrooge’s departed friend, with an iron safe chained to his ankle, now wants to help, now wants to use the wealth of his resources, what is now bound to him as a burden, to help this poor woman and her baby. And this is the torment of the Age to Come. These are the flames and the gnashing of teeth and the worms that do not cease of the Age to Come. Freed from the voluntarily chosen blindness caused by sin, the old ghost in the white waste coat now feels human compassion, now loves the sister and brother whom he had for a lifetime ignored, now he cares, but now it is too late. Now he can do nothing.

And of course this torment isn’t merely about money and how it might have been better used to help others. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the torment of the Age to Come has nothing directly to do with money. It has nothing to do with money and everything to do with love. It has to do with seeing other people, seeing their pain, loving them and suffering in some small way with them, in some small way lessening your own comfort for the sake of someone else. And you don’t need to spend a dollar to do this. Who do you sit with at lunch break at school that others don’t want to sit with? Who do you hang out with at a party? Do you look for someone who would otherwise be standing alone? Who do you talk to on a bus? Are you willing to listen politely to an old man or woman who is desperate to talk to anyone? Who are you willing to see that you would rather not see? Who is hard to love whom you could try a little harder to love? You don’t have to have any money to love, to care, or to see. You just need to be willing to be a little uncomfortable, to feel a little compassion, to weep a little with those who weep.

I find it interesting that twice in the book of Revelation (chapters 7 and 21) it speaks of God wiping the tears from from every eye. In both contexts, the texts seems to be talking about saints who are already in heaven, already experiencing the blessing of the Age to Come. So here’s the question: where do these tears come from that God wipes away? I don’t know, but I wonder if those tears have something to do with this sudden awareness in the Age to Come of the people we refused to see and of the suffering in others that we did not allow ourselves to share. But as I said at the beginning, it is hard for some of us to conceive of a world to come in which one does not experience either Paradise and only Paradise or Gehenna and only Gehenna. But St. Isaac the Syrian suggests that the experience of the Age to Come may not be as segregated as we suspect.  

St. Isaac emphasizes that there is no middle place between Paradise and Gehenna, there is no Limbo or “lesser heaven” or “higher hell.” However, for St. Isaac, both heaven and hell, Paradise and Gehenna, can be experienced in the human heart, in the same human heart. For St. Isaac, and some, perhaps many, Church Fathers, hell or heaven are referred to as places only metaphorically, in a way that makes sense in this current age of time and space as we know it. However, more precisely heaven and hell refer to experiences, or better, they refer to how one experiences continued existence in the Age to Come. The great gulf fixed between the Rich Man and Lazarus spoken of in the parable does not refer to a literal amount of space (as though it could be measured with a long-enough ruler).  What it exactly refers to we do not know, for it is part of the mystery of the Age to Come. However, I suspect that the great gulf has something to do with the life lived and that is now over, a lifetime on earth that cannot be changed for it has been lived, it is what it is and it’s over, just as I cannot change yesterday for it is gone: a great gulf is fixed.

But so long as I continue to live in this world, change is possible. I cannot do anything about yesterday, but I can love today, right now. I can open my eyes now and see the Lazarus at my gates, the poor, the lonely, the stranger, the hard to love. And St. Isaac says (in Homily 32), that one who suffers to love others, as one is “chastised” or suffers in his or her struggle to love God and neighbor and to avoid sin, as one suffers now for righteousness sake, for the sake of mercy and love, St. Isaac says, “He who is chastised here eats away his own Gehenna.” For St. Isaac, there is no contradiction between the experience of heavenly rest and the experience of punishment for pleasures that we allow ourselves through sinful and selfish licentiousness. These are experienced by each of us now, in time and space as we know it, generally sequentially: “Every rest is followed by hardship, and every hardship endured for God is followed by rest.”  

How hardship and rest, Gehenna and Paradise, may be experienced in the Age to Come, we don’t know; but St. Isaac assures us that the rest (or perhaps what we would more likely call peace) that we experience as a gift from God now is only an earning that “does not eat away its own capital.” That is, when God grants us peace, comfort and encouragement now in this age, it takes nothing away from the peace, comfort and encouragement of the heavenly reward. It’s just a foretaste, a bit of interest paid out that in no way diminishes the capital of the heavenly blessing God has stored up for those who love Him. But suffering for Christ’s sake, suffering to avoid sin or to love our neighbour, suffering for righteousness sake is actually a gift of God’s “rich mercies” because suffering now “eats away” the Gehenna, the suffering that may await us in the Age to Come, especially those of us like me who love God with only part of my heart, part of my soul, part of my mind and part of my strength. 

This is not a theology of works righteousness, not exactly.  Past sins cannot be undone. Only God forgives sin.  However, that I recognize that I have sinned against God and my neighbor (which, by the way, is the same thing) and that I attempt to do something about it to the extent that I willingly suffer somewhat for love, for righteousness sake, this is a great gift to my own conscience.   

As I have said before, some of what St. Isaac writes is controversial, mostly because he is not a systematic theologian. He is a mystical theologian who speaks of what he has experienced and known in his relationship with God, who speaks in a way that has for more than a thousand years helped millions of holy men and women (mostly Orthodox monastics) grow in prayer and the knowledge of God. St. Isaac did not write to be systematized, he wrote to help men and women meet God. He writes in paradox and parable about the actual experience of a life in God, what the Orthodox Church often calls theology, but nothing like the rational explanations you find in academic books, what popularly passes for theology. Therefore, it would be a mistake to hear anything I write as I reflect on St. Isaac’s homilies as a challenge to Orthodox dogma. Everything St. Isaac says assumes Orthodox dogma. Everything he says fits squarely in the teaching of the Orthodox faith—even if sometimes it is a fit that cannot be rationally squared. It is a mystical fit, a fit that mystically resonates in the hearts of millions of holy men and women who have come to actually know God within the Orthodox Church.

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.

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."

Fear, Doubt and Closed Doors

While the tomb was sealed, You shone forth, O Life. While the doors were closed, You came to Your Disciples, O Christ God, renewing in us through them an upright spirit, according to the greatness of Your mercy, O Resurrection of all.

Dismissal Hymn for Thomas Sunday

As I have sung this hymn over and over again for the past few days, I have begun to think about what it means for Christ to come to us through closed doors.  The disciples were in an upstairs room with the doors shut, the scripture says, “for fear of the Jews.”  Now since all of the disciples were Jews, probably it refers only to the Jewish leaders, their own leaders, the leaders of their people. They were afraid of their own leaders because the leaders had not, and in some places in the Gospels it says “could not,” see in Jesus of Nazareth what they had seen. But later on, many of these same leaders, would believe. In the ferment of the earliest days of the Church, after the Holy Spirit had come into the disciples and they had struggled through their first several weeks as a Christian community (not even yet called “Christians” but just “Followers of the Way”), once the Church had got going, then we are told that also “a great many of the priests were obedient to the faith.”

But at the very beginning, the Jewish leaders didn’t see, couldn’t see, what the disciples had seen. Consequently, the old persecuted the new. Those who had drunk the old wine could only say that the new wine was better. The old guard could not, at first, make room for something new.  John’s Gospel tells us that a big part of the reason why the old guard rejected Jesus was because they didn’t want the Romans to take away “their place and their nation.”  At first blush, this seems to be a selfish motivation; we read it individualistically, we read it as we ourselves perhaps would mean it if we were to say the same thing: “I don’t want to lose my place, I don’t want to lose my position of power and privilege.” However, it can be read a little more compassionately. The Jewish leaders knew very well that the uneasy peace between them and the Roman authorities could easily fall apart. There had been recent attempts at insurrection (Barabbas, who had been released instead of Jesus, was being held for murder committed during a recently attempted rebellion). And the Jewish leaders knew that the Romans would spare neither women nor children, nor distinguish between combatant and civilian. Jerusalem would be crushed if the Romans thought that rebellion of any sort was stirring.

The Jewish leaders—in their blindness, for sure—may have been sincerely looking to what they thought was the best and safest way to move forward to protect their people from the vicious Roman authority. As Caiaphas says, “it is expedient…that one should die…and not the whole nation perish.” After the fact, we find out that he is unintentionally prophesying, but at the time, he may have indeed been expressing sincere concern for the safety of the entire Jewish nation. And so, after the resurrection, like mad men trying frantically to stop one leak after another in the wall of a dyke, the Jewish leaders persecute the followers of Jesus, trying to save their nation from what they fear the Romans might do. And that’s why the disciples are hiding, they are hiding because of fear, and Christ comes to them.

As I have thought about my own spiritual journey in the light of this early Christian narrative, I have come to wonder if this story of misunderstanding and persecution of the new by the old doesn’t represent a common, even perennial Christian experience, maybe even a perennial human experience. The old guard just doesn’t see what the new kids see. And because those in authority have the ability to do so, they persecute or belittle or shun or just don’t take seriously the ideas, concerns and insights brought by the younger, the less educated or the socially less important.  

Sure, it may be because those in positions of authority and power don’t want to let any of their authority go—I know that is what I have generally thought whenever I was the junior team member and I felt my voice wasn’t taken seriously. However, it may be that there is a kind of blindness, a kind of deafness, an inability to conceive of a different scenario without it suggesting danger to the health of the community or institution that those who are in charge feel responsible for. That is, those with authority may indeed have in mind what they sincerely think is best for the whole when they shut down and shut out the minority voice, the new kid on the block.

But to those of us who have been or who are shut out, those of us who are persecuted or who are forced to conform to patterns that don’t make sense to us, to rules and regulations that seem to us to cause more harm than good, for those of us who are hurt or offended or just squashed by the heavy hand of those who are in authority (be they priest or politician; parent, police or principal), those of us who are hurt may be likened somewhat to the disciples hiding in an upstairs room with the doors tightly shut.  

We don’t want to be hurt again. We are afraid we will be misunderstood again, we will be belittled and persecuted again. We don’t want to be told yet again to shut up because we don’t know what we are talking about. It hurts too much, and we are afraid it will happen again; so we close the doors, the doors to keep out the Jewish leaders (whomever they may represent in our lives). But when we shut the doors, we start to push everyone away because when we live in fear of being hurt, just about everyone can be a potential abuser.

But no door can keep out Jesus. No fear can keep Christ from coming and speaking peace to us. This is certainly one of the points John is making for us when he tells us this story. And yet it is one of the ironies of life that the persecuted is also sometimes a persecutor.

Now that I am an older man, a priest and a grandparent, now that I have almost a whole lifetime of experience and experiences to back me and often too, too settled opinions about life and how best to embrace it, now that I am often the one in authority, the one with responsibility, it seem that I regularly find myself in the position of the one who is feared, the one who misunderstands, the one who persecutes. I’m the Jewish leader that the disciples feared.  

And whether I am actually fearsome or not matters little.  Those hiding in upper rooms out of fear only have to see that I look like or sound like or have the same position of authority as someone else who has hurt them in the past to keep their doors tightly shut against me. Someone, for example, who has a few bad experiences with teachers in elementary school will find it very difficult to trust and engage whole-heartedly any teacher for many years to come, perhaps for a lifetime. One bad experience with a religious leader or an overly zealous relative can cause a person to hide for the rest of his or her life in an upstairs room with all the doors shut anytime a priest or pastor comes near.  

My wife’s paternal grandfather, for example, was quite a foul-mouthed man who hated anything to do with religion.  However, he loved his granddaughter, even though he regularly, and with the language of a sailor, lamented her religious inclinations. They loved to spend time together on weekends working around his avocado and citrus farm and doing art projects together. When she was a little girl, my wife asked her grandfather why he didn’t love God, and he told her this story:  When he was about 14 years old, he had to walk many miles somewhere and along the way a preacher offered him a ride on his buggy (automobiles hadn’t yet made it to California at that time). Once he got up with him on the buggy, the preacher went on and on about how sinful and wicked he was and how he need to repent and go to church. After a while, her young grandfather couldn’t take it any more and hopped off the buggy cursing the preacher and swearing that he would never be set foot in a church again. And he kept his word, not even for a wedding or funeral. The doors of his upstairs room were shut tight. He wasn’t going to let himself be verbally abused by a religionist again.  

And here’s the question I keep asking myself: Can Christ even appear there, in my wife’s grandfather’s upper room, with the doors all shut from fear?  Can Christ come into the heart and mind of anyone who has been hurt, who is afraid, who has shut the doors tight for fear of being misunderstood, hurt and rejected again? Can Christ come to the fearful and the doubting and show them the wounds in his hands and side, and invite even the ones afraid, even the ones who don’t want to be deceived or lied to or hurt again, can Christ even invite these to touch and see and know that despite the fear, despite the misunderstanding and persecution and lies and even abuse, despite it all, Christ carries our wounds in His own body?

I think so. I think Christ comes even to those hiding in upstairs rooms and who shut the doors tight for fear of the religious leaders.  

So what’s my takeaway? What have I realized through this refection on the dismissal hymn of Thomas Sunday? Two things: first, I am in the position of the Jewish leaders.  Even without realizing it, even thinking I am doing the right thing, doing my best to guard the faith and institutions entrusted to my care, I can be the one ignoring or belittling or even persecuting the disciples of the very One who has saved and called both them and me. Care is called for.  Gentleness is called for. Humility is called for.

Second, I have realized through this reflection that my friends and loved ones who seem completely locked up, who have been so hurt or offended or lied to or betrayed by religious leaders, so offended that they are mentally hiding in an upstairs room with the doors shut for fear of it happening again, that even these are not beyond the loving and peaceful power and presence of Christ. Those who doubt, those who fear, those who hide and shut the doors are not cut off from the One who appears in rooms with closed door, they are not hidden from the one who comes to those in fear, they are not beyond the touch of the One who invites those who doubt to touch and feel and see for themselves.

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. 

The Least I Can Do

One of the perennial struggles I have in the spiritual life comes from a form of pride that is lodged fast in me and manifests itself in an "all or nothing" attitude toward spiritual life and other life disciplines. It can take various forms in different arenas of my life, but it always follows a similar pattern. The pattern goes like this: I set a goal or rule or ideal for myself, one that I could easily achieve if I only apply myself a little. This goal could be a goal for work or for prayer; it could be a rule for conduct (such as how much computer time I will allow myself or how much and what I will or will not eat or drink); or it could be an ideal such as what a priest should look or act like. Any such goal or rule or ideal I set for myself I tell myself is reasonable and attainable if I only push a little, if I only apply myself.

However, what I don’t tell myself, what my mind never reveals to me in this process of creating “shoulds” for myself, what is so obvious but what I never see, is that my mind accepts these goals and rules and ideals for myself assuming a very idealized view of myself, of my abilities and my circumstances. That is, on a good day, on a day when I have had enough sleep, no recent crises, no interruptions to my schedule, no meltdowns in the people or things I depend, on such a day, such a perfect day that only rarely comes along, on such a day—if I only apply myself a little—I can indeed do most of the “shoulds.” On such a day I can indeed attain my goal, follow my rule and live up to my ideal. But such days are very rare. And then what? What do I do on the other days? Well often, I do nothing. I give up. I tell myself things like this:

• “If I can’t do my rule this morning, then I might as well just stay in bed.” 

• “ Since I’ve already broken the fast, I might as well eat the whole thing.”

• “If I can’t be as kind as I should be, then people will just have to get used to me being grumpy.”

• Since I’ve already sinned by watching or listening to something I shouldn’t, then I might as well continue doing it.

Does this sound familiar to anyone?  

I have, however, over the years discovered a strategy, a sort of trick I play on myself, that has helped me a great deal on most days, on days that are less than ideal. I discovered this trick when I was coming to terms with the fact that much of my despondency is rooted in pride, rooted in an idealized view I had of myself. I become angry with myself when I don’t live up to this, frankly, unrealistic self image I have. It is unrealistic because it only exists in my mind, not in the actual way I live my life. This was a frightening realization and I suspect is for everyone who experiences it. 'Will God love us?', we wonder.  Can we really come to God in the condition that the brokenness of our lives reveals to us—rather than in the idealized image of ourselves that exists only in our minds? Can we, unlike Adam and Eve, step out of the bushes without covering ourselves with the fig leaves of our idealized image of ourselves? Can we say to God, I am naked and I cannot clothe myself?

Of course, God already knows we are naked. God already knows that we fall miserably short of our goals and ideals for ourselves. God already knows: we are the ones who have to come to accept it. Jesus said of the Holy Spirit that when He comes, He would “convict the world of sin, righteousness and judgement.” I wonder if this realization of our miserable inadequacy is not actually the work of the Holy Spirit, the work of God, who already knows we are naked, the work of the Holy Spirit in us, convicting us of the idealized, worldly ways we think about ourselves and revealing to us the painful truth. The painful truth is that we are indeed the Laodiceans spoken of in the book of Revelation. We have not known that we are “wretched, miserable, poor, blind and naked.” Rather, we have struggled to ignore the cracks in the walls of our ego; we keep busy; we reassure ourselves that we are alright, or at least that we are not as bad off, not as broken, as some others. But the Grace of God is persistent. Like a dog owner house training a puppy: God keeps rubbing our nose in it.  God won’t let us go. God will not let us easily live in our own idealized view of ourselves.  

You know I have noticed something about the size of God, about the greatness or smallness of my view of God and His love and care for mankind. When I see myself in my idealized form, when I don’t seem so bad, when I’m pretty good, when I’m basically on the right track, God seems relatively small: it’s not hard to imagine that God could love me. However, when by God’s Grace I see my sins, when I see my failings and my brokenness, when I am forced by circumstances and experience to see, Oh so painfully, that I am much more miserable, blind, stupid and selfish than I realized --when I see myself as I really am, then God is huge, God’s love is amazing. God’s love must be amazing if God could love even me. And if God can love even me as naked, blind and wretched as I am, then it’s not so hard to see how God could love everyone. And if God loves everyone, then God must love me too. (I know this is a circular argument, but logic is just another ideal I try to put on myself. In reality my mind is seldom logical). 

In the past (and still every now and then), when I would see myself as strong, as someone who “should” be able to do it (whatever the “it” is), when I viewed myself this way and yet at the same time I fell miserably short in an area, I would often just give up, I’d often just cave in to my weakness and do nothing.  But when I start accepting that I am naked and that God loves and has loved me knowing all along that I am naked, then I can begin to pluck up the courage to step out from behind the fig leaves of my inflated view of myself.  I can look at my failures to meet my goals, keep my rules or live up to my ideals and say to myself, “Well of course. What else would I expect from someone as messed up as I am.” 

And here is where the little trick that I mentioned above comes in. The trick goes like this: When I sense that I am failing or am about to fail again, I ask myself, “Since I cannot offer God what I should, what is the least I could do in this situation?” For example, if I can’t seem to get out of bed to say my prayer rule in the morning, then I ask myself, “What is the least I could do?” The answer I give myself might be something like, “Well, at least you can get up and say the Trisagion prayers and then get back in bed.” Or I might say something like, “Well, the least you can do is say the Jesus Prayer in bed.” Or "the least you can do is reset your alarm with just enough time to get up and light your vigil candle and say the beginning and end of your rule.” I tell myself, "well it is the least I can do."

In such circumstances, I see myself as the fellow in the parable of the talents who received only one talent. The Land Owner tells him that the least he could have done, instead of burying the talent, was to give the talent to bankers so that it could collect interest. That’s me. I’m that fellow with the one talent. I cannot do what others do. I cannot invest and double my “talent of Grace,” as the hymns of Holy Week tell us to do. But I can at least do the least. That is, if I am going to break the fast because (well, because of any reason), then the least I can do is not give in completely to my craving: At least I can eat the cheese rather than the fish, or the fish rather than the chicken or the chicken rather than the steak. What is the least I can do? At least I can do that. And I have found that when I do this, when I offer to God the least, that God graciously accepts this.  

I can imagine that some of you are screaming, or something inside you is screaming, “but we should give God our best, not our least.” And of course, you are right. But here’s the painful reality that we are not willing to accept about ourselves: often the least is our best. Best is not defined by the idealized picture we have in our head about ourselves.  Best is defined by what we really are and what we really have and are able to do and offer God in the particular circumstances and reality of our life as it is, not as it should be or as we wish it were. What we really have to offer God comes from who we really are, not who we think we should be. And when we begin to offer to God the two widow’s mites of our reality, of who we really are, then we begin to really change. Then, I think, metamorphosis really begins.  Up to this point everything has been getting us ready, ready to see ourselves as we are, ready to accept God’s love for us in our miserable condition, ready to offer to God, not what we should, but what we are.

And this experience, this movement from should to be, has been for me one of the more painful transitions of my spiritual life. And it is on going. I sometimes amaze myself at the depth of self delusion when I see anew the height of my arrogance, the breadth of my selfishness, and my unwavering good opinion of myself even in the face of daily, hourly, evidence to the contrary. Daily I have to return to myself. Daily I have to step out of the bushes naked before God. Daily I have to humble myself and offer to God the least, offer to God so very much less than what I should, so much less than I imagined I would. And yet, this is what I have and what I am. It’s not much, but at least what I have, what I am, at least this little bit I give to God.  And God receives it, in his great love for mankind. And God receives it as he received the two copper coins of the widow. And God receives it, small as it is, taking the least and making it not just enough, but making it great, because that’s what God does.