Live through Your Tribulations, Fight Bad Thoughts, & May Grace Work according to the Holy Spirit
by St Sophrony
Feast of the Holy Seven Maccabee Children, Solomone Their Mother, & Eleazar Their Teacher
Anno Domini 2020, August 1
Everything that has happened to you until now is not so bad, and is even useful. I think the wise thing will be to ask the Lord to give you strength and understanding to bear the tribulations, and to be victorious against the temptations which have come upon you, rather than ask Him to free you from them. The reason for this is that if you stand before the throne of God crushed to the last degree by the weight of the tribulations, adding to them your own inner broken-heartedness and repentance, without any self-pity, then without fail divine Light will shine upon you. But if you approach this mystery after being put at ease by other people, and well-provided for on the material side, your soul, full of fleshly pride, will be incapable of receiving abundant grace. And again, unless you (either now or later) pass through a whole series of great storms, when waves “mount up to the heaven; and go down again to the depths” (cf. Ps. 106/107:26); unless you know how much the soul of man can suffer, when it stands at the border between eternal salvation and eternal perdition; unless you taste in part the torments of hell; unless you, a future shepherd of the sheep of Christ, know all this through the experience of your own soul, then neither will you ever know divine love. And on the contrary, if you now live through all these tribulations and trials and storms, your soul will of a sudden be enriched beyond expectation by true wealth, spiritual and incorruptible. Later, having lived through all this, and learned from within yourself just how incapable our soul is, how meagre our wisdom, how powerless we are without the help of grace—not only to set out on the right path, but even to understand where it is, and generally to resist sin or to achieve anything good whatsoever… as I say, later, you will have a merciful heart which condemns no one for anything; instead, with great love you will desire the salvation of every man without partiality; you will pray for people, for the whole world. Whoever comes to you in the future—criminal, depraved, heretic, Jew, unbeliever—you will receive each one with an open soul with a heart full of love and compassion. Then you will be empowered to save people, to perform miracles, raising dead human souls unto eternal life. For someone to fulfill the law of Christ, especially a pastor, it is necessary to acquire this love. Father John of Kronstadt had such great love for people, such a compassionate heart, that for him it was harder to see the sufferings or downfalls of others than to suffer himself. That is why he prayed as he did for each and every person in need. That is why he worked countless miracles. The same is true of St. Seraphim of Sarov and other saints. When what I am speaking about comes to pass in you in some measure, you will understand why St. Paul suffered distress and unceasing pain of heart (“for I could wish that I myself were accursed from Christ”) for the salvation of his neighbors (Rom. 9:3). You will understand why Father John of Kronstadt took upon himself the vows of others, their sins, the labor of repentance for other people’s sins (I could cite many examples, but there is no need, because you know all this incomparably better than I). […]
My dear brother, accept my advice about how to fight against bad thoughts [logismoi]. And keep it all your life (as I too have been taught). Bad thoughts are “demons” (demonic energy). There are people whom it is impossible to convince about anything: it is like that and even more so where the demons are concerned. If you dialogue with the thoughts, if you argue against them, in the best case you will force them to withdraw for a certain (brief) while. But later they again present their own suggestions, repeating the same thing stubbornly, persistently, unceasingly, and stupidly, until they lead man astray into sin. When they succeed in one thing they carry on drawing man off course, until they lead him to perdition. Thus at all costs act as our holy Fathers teach us. (Read attentively the Patericon, chapter 23 [entitled “Questions to a young man to Staretz Theveanin on how to remain in one’s cell, and on contemplation” in the 1891 Russian edition referred to here].) Give yourself over to the will of God and do not enter into any kind of dialogue with the thoughts. Every thought which gives rise to trouble in the soul and disturbs the peace of the heart comes from the enemy. (On this theme, if it proves necessary and if God is so pleased, we shall speak a little more another time.) With the co-operation of God’s grace a clear path, or goal, has been indicated to you, to which you must now proceed, putting aside decisively every thought that opposes it.
But you find yourself in difficulty, and you cannot resolve the question about where the grace of God is and where are the machinations of the enemy. Remember how, on the day of your departure from Athos, in spite of the extreme seriousness of the step which lay ahead of you—which would have many consequences not only in this temporal life, but also in the future age—you remained at peace in the depths of your heart and you were happy. All this could not be the fruit of impressions created in you by various people. I bear witness to you before God that on that day on the shore where we bade farewell, I told you many times that you have become completely different, because I saw the grace of God resting upon you to such a degree that it was actually visible. I could point out also other moments when grace visited you, but if this is necessary I will do so on another occasion. I persist in turning your attention to [these visits of grace] so that you may learn to distinguish the working of grace, telling it apart from the action of the hostile powers. I am certain that the Lord will soon grant you to experience incomparably more than this; however, we must not intervene arbitrarily in the workings of grace. May grace itself work, according to the will of the Holy Spirit, in a way that He alone knows, because its action varies with each man, according to his spiritual make-up and his cast of mind. In some people grace is manifested with stormy power, but in others, on the contrary, in a very delicate and gentle way. In some people grace gradually rises from a lesser to a greater measure, whereas in others it appears right from the beginning in great strength and afterwards as it were forsakes them. So, in order not to spoil the action of grace by our intervention, it is best that, praying to the Lord for mercy, and awaiting this mercy with patience, we ourselves meanwhile keep to a somewhat ordinary order of spiritual activity: to repent, to pray, to read the holy Fathers, the Gospel, to keep our mind watchful (preserving it from sinful thoughts), to give alms. As the Lord Himself said, “the Kingdom of God cometh not with observation” (Lk. 17:20), and: “Pray (constantly, without imagination, with the. Mind and with the feeling of the heart) and do not faint” (cf. Lk. 18:1).
*Excerpted from “Letter 1” in Striving for Knowledge of God: Correspondence with David Balfour
(Essex: Stavropegic Monasery of St John the Baptist, 2016), 40-46. Available for purchase at Eighth Day Books.
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Inside the head of my three-month-old granddaughter, Lucy, said G.K. Chesterton is, "a new universe, as new as it was on the seventh day of creation...a new system of stars, new grass, new cities...and new seas." And this is because, he adds: The gravity of astonishment at the universe...dwells in the eyes of a baby three-months-old [and] the universe is put upon its trial and forces us actually to remodel our conduct...we seem to be dealing with a new race, only to be seen through a microscope...[with] delightful bulbous heads, three times too big for the body. But Chesterton's central thesis in this essay is not that babies are so marvelous, but that our treatment of each other as adults, in contrast, is so broken. "It is our attitude towards grown-up people that is wrong," he writes, because we no longer see each other with astonishment and wonder (unless, that is, we are falling in love). But babies remind us that humans really are astonishing, and this "revolutionary theory of the marvelousness of all things" should force us to "remodel our conduct" toward everyone we meet. A baby seems to be a necessary icon for us, correcting our eyesight which grows old and struggles to see "the weight of glory" in each other as teenagers, adults, and perhaps especially, as old people. Even though he did not reference icons in his essay, we seem to drift very easily into what could be called a type of iconoclasm, an inability to see each other as image bearers of God Himself. William Wordsworth describes us as "trailing clouds of glory" when we first arrive here "from God, who is our home." But soon, he says, "shades of the prison-house" begin to smother us, and we forget. "We bow to grown people," says Chesterton in this same essay, "take off our hats to them, refrain from contradicting them flatly, but we do not appreciate them properly." God speaks to us, like we are working through in St. John of Damascus , through the "cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology," or literally from the spoken word (cataphatic) or unspeakable word (apophatic). Apophatic I noticed has the same root in Greek as Infant does in Latin. Both mean "unspoken." God has given us both bibles and babies, speechless wonders through which He means to unglaze our eyes and fill us with astonishment. MARK C. WATNEY is professor emeritus at Sterling College, assisting in its newly established C. S. Lewis Center. He has given papers at Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies and Dordt College
"God became man, so that man might become God." St. Athanasius the Great, On the Incarnation (54:3) These words from St. Athanasius may sound, at first blush, provocative. However, St. Athanasius is restating, perhaps more simply, what St. Peter says in his second epistle: the promise of being united to Christ is that men and women made in His image will partake in His divine nature (2 Peter 1:4). Paul Kingsnorth's latest book, Against the Machine, inverts this idea and opens our eyes to the world emerging at a rapid rate, the world dominated by what he calls The Machine. The new mantra of The Machine age is, instead, this: Man will become God by Man's own self-creation. Reading Kingsnorth is not for the faint of heart. It's easy to be overcome by despair. The goal of the Machine age is "transhumanism", to be liberated from the constraints of the body. For the transhumanist (self-described), the future is disembodied. The future is limitless. But this is not liberation. Because the Machine is not limited to the physical world, it follows naturally there is a spiritual nature to this lifestyle, what he ultimately identifies as a manisfestation and/or manipulation of the demonic. Whether or not you agree with his ultimate conclusion, we can see its effects. An entire generation, and many across generations, addicted to screens. Disintegration of communal life, most disastrously in the breakdown of the family. Increasing rates of loneliness, depression, and suicide, especially among children. It's clear we need a Savior, and the Machine isn't it. Instead, Kingsnorth encourages us toward a revival of community, men, women, and children living embodied lives in the same space and time: working together, eating together, worshipping together, loving each other, carrying each other's burdens. If this sounds like Eighth Day Institute...if this sounds like what the Church is meant to be, it is because this is exactly what the Church is. We are saved together in Christ. MICHAEL SIMMON currently serves as the Secretary of Eighth Day Institute Board of Directors and Coordinator for Hall of Men. He resides in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and four children.
"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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