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.
