At the end of the excerpt of Saint John Chrysostom’s homily on the Sunday of the Paralytic, we read: ‘Even
now I can show you many who naturally hate having anything to do with
women, and avoid conversation with them as impure. Shall we call them
chaste; tell me, shall we crown them and proclaim them victors?’
This seems fairly simple. If you’re
not troubled by a particular temptation or sin, it takes no great effort
to avoid it. This is hardly a victory over temptation, since there was
none in the first place. By the same token, if we make a virtue out of a
necessity, it’s not the same as making a virtue out of temptation. Abba
Dorotheos gives an example of this, and goes on to demonstrate the
spiritual dangers involved in a lack of self-awareness.
There was a certain brother living at
the monastery before I left there and I never saw him put out or
troubled about anything, even though I saw many of the brethren
insulting him and treating him outrageously, in a variety of ways. The
young man bore everything that was done to him by everyone as if he
wasn’t bothered in the least. I used to wonder at his amazing tolerance
and wanted to learn how he’d acquired such virtue. So on one occasion I
took him aside, made a deep obeisance to him and begged him to tell me
what thoughts were always in his heart- either when he was being sworn
at or when he treated badly by others- that he should manifest such
patience. He answered naturally and simply, ‘I just keep my distance
from these filthy people and put up with it, just as good dogs do with
the way people treat them’. When I heard this I bowed my head and said
to myself, ‘This brother’s found his way!’ I made the sign of the cross
and left, praying that God would protect both him and me.
So it can happen, as I’ve said, that
people, through disdain, may not be troubled. This is obviously a loss.
Being upset with a brother who’s annoying us happens because we’re not
in a good mood at that moment or because we dislike him. There are many
reasons why this might be so and it can be explained in a variety of
ways. If we look at it carefully, the root cause of all these
disturbances is that we don’t censure ourselves, and so we have all
these upsets and never find any peace. It’s not to be wondered that we
hear from all the saints that there’s no other way but this. We can see
that no one ever trod a different path and found peace. Yet we reckon to
achieve peace of soul and take the direct route to it without ever
reaching the point of censuring ourselves. Indeed, if somebody achieved a
whole host of spiritual accomplishments but didn’t keep to this path,
they’d still never stop troubling others or being troubled by them, and
their labours would be in vain. As Abba Pimen says, how much joy, how
much peace of soul would people have- wherever they went- if they would
only censure themselves? If anything happened to them, some punishment, a
dishonour, or any kind of trouble, they’d accept it as if they deserved
it and would never be troubled. Would anyone be more free of care than
them?…
Two brothers came to me once, and they
were always quarrelling. The elder said about the younger: ‘I tell him
to do something and he gets upset, and that distresses me, because I
think that if he had faith and love towards me he’d accept what I tell
him with complete confidence’. The younger one would say: ‘Forgive me,
Master, but he doesn’t speak to me with the fear of God, but more like
somebody who wants to order me about, and this is why my heart’s not
easy, as the Fathers say’… Do you see the self-deception, brethren? God
knows how sorry I am about the fact that we bend the sayings of the
Fathers to our own evil will and lose our souls thereby. Each of these
should have taken the blame himself. The first should have said: ‘I
never really asked forgiveness from my brother from my heart and this is
why God hasn’t allowed him to feel at ease’. And the other, ‘I wasn’t
ready in my heart to forgive my brother before he asked me and this is
why God hasn’t allowed him to feel at ease’… But each put the blame on
the other.
You see, this is why we don’t make any
progress, this is why we find no benefit in anything, but spend the
whole of our time languishing in the thoughts we’re having about our
brothers and belittling them. Because each of us justifies himself and
excuses himself, as I’ve said. We don’t keep the commandments at all but
we demand that our neighbour should keep them. This is why we don’t
train ourselves to do good. Because as soon as we are in the least bit
enlightened, we immediately demand things of our neighbour. We censure
him, saying, ‘He should be doing this’, or ‘Why isn’t he doing that?’
Why don’t we require of ourselves to keep the commandments and criticize
ourselves for not doing so?…
For each little thing, we go and accuse
our neighbour, saying that he’s being contemptuous towards us and acting
against his conscience. And if we hear anything, we immediately distort
it, saying, ‘If he hadn’t meant to annoy me, he wouldn’t have said
that’…
But we can’t bear to say about our
brother that the Lord told him to do it. If we hear anything, we
immediately behave like dogs: if somebody throws a stone at them, they
forget about the thrower and go and bite the stone. This is what we do:
we forget God, Who allows us to be visited by trials in order to purify
us from our sins, and take issue with our neighbour, saying, ‘Why did he
say that to me?’ or ‘Why did he do that to me?’ And while we could
benefit greatly from these things, we actually do damage to ourselves
because we ignore the fact that everything happens through God’s
providence, for the benefit of each of us. Through the prayers of the
Saints, may God grant us understanding. Amen!
Source-Pemptousia.com
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