As many of you know from our very recent annual parish meeting, we are reading this book ‘God, Where Is The Wound’ in various small groups during Lent,2026. I’ve chosen one of her three lectures to share with you. I was especially inspired by this talk which is referred to as Lecture II in the book. My hope is that sharing this will encourage more of us to participate in these book discussions during Lent.
You can get the full Kindle version of this book by clicking here. Below is the text for this talk which is entitled ‘The Suffering Of The Soul In Relationships”.
Eparchial Assembly – Nuremberg, Germany, 2012
His Eminence Serafim, Metropolitan for the Romanian Orthodox Archdiocese of Germany and Central and Northern Europe:
We welcome Mother Siluana, it is a great honor and a great help to have her with us today. God, bless her and give her words full of power! Please pay attention, Mother Siluana’s speech is quite rapid and dense, as it was last night, so it’s not easy to follow and understand it – but if we make an effort to focus our attention, we will understand and benefit greatly from it. And most of all, we will understand Mother Siluana’s spirit.
Mother Siluana: I prayed so I could speak more slowly and more clearly.
His Eminence Serafim: Good, very good.
Mother Siluana:
Last night my thought was to focus more on the effects of our ill relationships on the body. Today I would like to talk about the suffering of the soul in relationships. If our soul is ill, our relationships will also be ill. Therefore, if we take care of the health of our souls, we will have healthy relationships.
Many people believe they will be happy if the government will change, or the president, or the world, or the people close to them. And they believe this very sincerely. Yes, something can indeed change to good if something bad gets annihilated, but I can be just as unhappy in this new situation. Why? Because the source of joy, the source of health is within me, within us. It is never outside of me.
We all want to be happy, we ask others to make us happy, to do something for us, to help us become happy. And we are even convinced that they must take care of our happiness. But because not everybody wants to do this, or they do something else than what we want, this gives us cause to complain that we are not happy. This is something we learn in our families, when, as children, we are dependent on our parents.
Yes, children are dependent on their parents, their joy and their health are dependent on the parents. But gradually, as they grow up and become more mature, they become their own masters and realize that they want a different “happiness” than the one offered to them by their parents. This is the process through which they become independent. It is a troubled and tormenting stage called adolescence. It is a stage necessary for becoming mature, during which the children “abandon their parents” – but, when they do it without God, this abandonment will be chaotic, driven by impulses suggested by the models of this world, centered on seeking pleasure, power, and money.
If adolescents stay or enter into a living relationship with God and have living models in their families and Church, only then will they attain the autonomy in which they will learn and want to give themselves freely to God as the source of their joy, and not as an external authority which commands them what to do and what not to do.
It is very important for adolescents not to project the authority of their parents on God. God is not a parent who tells you: “If you don’t behave, I won’t love you anymore!” He is not an external authority, He is Someone perceived by our spirit as an internal loving power. He is Someone who loves us deep within us and gives us all the joy and health we need. With one condition: we need to go into those depths.
Yes, the condition is for us to go within ourselves, to that place where God is in us. But how many of us have learned this in our family or our parish? Or at the Theological Seminary? We know and we believe that by uniting the mind with the heart, by going deep within ourselves, we find that joy that cannot be taken away from us – but we don’t know how to go there, deep within. Because of this, our heart remains sick and many times opposes our rational decision of becoming good Christians.
Yes, unfortunately not only relationships in the world are ill, but also relationships in the Church. They are and they will be ill as long as we are and will remain ill.
I don’t want to talk now about passions as illnesses of the soul and of the havoc they cause in our relationships. You know these things very well and you struggle with them internally and externally. I will only try to point out some aspects of our day-to-day world that generate and maintain a great number of psychological illnesses.
– First of all, I would like us to understand that much of our unhappiness stems from conflicts caused by the orientation of our interests. Relationship experts say that people come into conflict in their relationships because they are centered differently: some are centered on goals, some on persons. What’s more, people can be egoistic or altruistic. What is certain is that these orientations dictate our behavior which will then generate conflicts when we live or work with people who are centered differently from us. The Lord teaches us about this aspect when He says that where our treasure is, our heart will be also. That is, where my treasure is, that’s where my interest will be – and my heart is and always will be bonded with my interests.
Let’s start from what I mentioned before: some people are focused on a goal or a task, and others are focused on a person. We have a task to do: some people consider that we must accomplish that task no matter what – whether we think we can do it or not, we keep our focus on the task. Some other people are centered on the person: “Look, that man over there is tired, maybe he’s sick, he needs a little attention – we need to think of people too!” Then the people who are centered on the task, on “let’s do this!”, get into a conflict with those centered on the person, on “look at him, he can’t work anymore, he needs some rest!”
Also, the one who wants to get the job done may be selfish – he does it for money, for a reward, or praise. Or maybe he is altruistic – he wants to do it for the benefit of somebody else. The one centered on the person may be selfish, wishing to seem like a good person, or to “look good” to the one he is defending…Or he may be altruistic – he truly cares about the other’s suffering. But again selfish, because he is not thinking about the people who need that task to be done. You see how difficult it is to harmonize such a team…
Now, starting from this model, let’s look a little at “our backyard”, at our parish. The Church is the only place and way of life in which all activity is meant to be centered on the person: on God and our neighbor. Any word, thought, or deed which is not centered on loving God or our neighbor – and thus on the person – is a sin. And we forget this in the whirlwind of our life. We build churches, we establish missions, we serve just for the sake of meeting some goals. We forget about God and our neighbor.
And what is even sadder is that we forget about the people closest to us. I was very happy when I found out about a priest who built a church together with his whole family – and at the same time, his family was a small church in itself. Unfortunately, I have met many priests who built churches, created missions, while at the same time they had serious problems in their families, with their wives, but especially with their children.
I will give you an example out of my own heart – my first spiritual Father, my dear Fr. Galeriu. I was once at his house for his birthday – there were several of us there, spiritual sons and daughters of his, together with his four sons. And at some point, one of his sons starts yelling at us as Fr. Galeriu’s spiritual children: “I hate you! I hate all of you! All of you debauched, thieves – and my father loves you so much, he falls on his knees, cries and prays for you, and he never once held me on his knees!” We all knew how much Fr. Galeriu loved his children. I think they knew too. But this child needed his time with his father, needed that love which is transmitted by holding someone in your arms, on your knees…
Many parents say today: “I don’t know what is going on with my child! I don’t recognize him anymore!” And I ask them: have you really known him, or have you just imagined him the way you wanted him to be? A very good priest came to me once (he was also doing counseling work in the areas of education and mission work) and told me that his daughter, who was in second grade, “is very naughty: she leaves her socks in the silverware drawer, she leaves her underwear on my desk, she is behaving very strangely. I brought her to a psychologist, then to a psychiatrist, and they said there is nothing wrong with her. And I don’t know what to do with her. I brought her to you, maybe you can find a solution…”
I listened to the priest, then I listened to the little girl, then I asked her: “What would you like your dad to do so you make peace with him? Or what would you do if you were the boss of the family so that it would be good for your child?” To our surprise, she said: “A meeting!” And I asked her: “What do you mean, a meeting?” She replied: “Yes, a meeting, so I can get a chance to talk too. So I can talk and so I can be heard too!” I turned to the father and said: “Father, do you listen to her?” He said: “Mother Siluana, I don’t listen to her too much, because she is talking nonsense! I ask her about what they did in Science in school and she tells me what little Johnny or little Billy said! I am not interested and I don’t have time to listen to what Johnny or Billy said!” I told him: “Well, her life is full of Billy! Her life is full of lego games, of the teddy bear who broke his paw…”
If parents have their interests in mind when looking after their children, the children will not be seen as living human beings. If a parent goes into a child’s room and starts yelling: “What is this mess? You’ll never amount to anything! What are all these toys doing all over the place?” and then the parent starts “lovingly” putting everything in good order for “this child who never wants to learn good from bad”, then the child will experience a real tragedy. There, in that mess, was that child’s life: there were traffic accidents there, there was a sick person there waiting for the ambulance, the teddy bear was looking for a honey pot that could only be found in that room…and mom comes and throws all these things around without understanding seeing or understanding anything!
Children need to be sought and found right where they are – in their reality. Parents trample over their children with their own adult minds and feelings. If a child says: “I’m afraid!”, a loving parent can say: “there is nothing to be afraid about!” and if the parent is more attentive, he can ask: “What are you afraid of?”. And the child can say: “There is a crocodile under my bed!” Then, if the parent is task-oriented (“my child needs to go to sleep”), he can tell the child: “Are you crazy? What can a crocodile do under your bed! Go to sleep now!”. This way, the child can form the impression that he is crazy.
Another way – centered on the task of teaching the child – would be to tell the child: “No, darling, let mom show you there is no crocodile under the bed. Look, we have a flashlight here and we can look together under the bed – see, there is no crocodile!” In this case, the child can start thinking he is not normal, since he is afraid, but there is nothing to be afraid of – because there is no crocodile under his bed.
But if the mother can focus on the child’s person, on the child’s feelings and experience, she can go to the child’s level and ask: “Well, if there was a crocodile under your bed, what could it do to you?” “It could bite me!” “And if it bit you, what would happen?” “I will go to the hospital!” “And if you went to the hospital, what could happen there?” “I could die!” “And if you would die, what would happen?” “I would go in the hole like grandpa!”
In fact, the child’s grandfather had passed away not too long before, and the child, who faced death for the first time, was unsettled, needed to process and integrate in his mind this situation…But in the mind of a five- or six-year-old child, this integration happens through scenarios, through stories, and not through logical explanations and ideas.
Another source of unhappiness in our relationships is love. Yes, yes – love! We all want to be loved and to love. Many people believe they are focused on love, meaning on the person of the other. “I do this thing for you!” or “Mother Siluana, I have three jobs so that my wife and kids don’t lack anything!” And I ask the children and the wife when they come to me for counseling: “What do you lack in this situation?” “Our dad, my husband…He is never with us, and when he comes home, he is very tired. And when he is not tired, he watches TV. He is never with us.”
Why do you think that man has three jobs? Don’t you think he wants to “run away” from his family? Even if his choice is unconscious, that is the reason. He runs away from them – from them as living human beings. He runs away from himself. He doesn’t know what to do with his children, he doesn’t know what to do with his wife, he thinks that “if I give them money they will be happy”. And so his relationship with them is ill. Maybe, as a child, he wanted to have money and he imagined that money brings happiness…
But these are pretexts that we invent with our conscious minds, because deep within, in our unhealed soul, we are afraid. We are afraid of relationships because we don’t know how to love. Nobody taught us how to love. We need to pray so that the Holy Spirit can teach us true love. And a first step is being aware of our powerlessness, assuming it, and wanting to learn about our deep fears and defeat them.
Another type of ill love is one founded on “positive” feelings. We need to understand that love is not a feeling or a complex of feelings. Yes, we have feelings set afire, activated by love, but they don’t represent love. They only “color” it. Even though things here are much more profound, I would only like to mention now that the organ which we use to love God and our neighbor, as the Lord commanded, is an organ of the deep part of our mind, the deep part of our heart – what is called nous.
When people become aware of the action of this organ, their whole lives change. But to start with, for the spiritual level we reached, it’s sufficient to believe that the Holy Spirit works in this deep part of us when we participate actively in the divine services, when we confess and receive Communion, when we observe the commandments according to our strength, and when we pray at all times, in everything we do.
If we choose to get off to a good start in this sense, the first step would be to learn to use our attention, this wonderful but often so diseased power of our nous. Attention is a power of our mind (nous) to which we have access through our willpower. It is with attention that we embrace others and we love – and not with our affective powers which were reduced to feelings and emotions after the Fall. Feelings are like the weather, they come and go. Storms come and go, the atmospheric pressure rises and falls…These are powers that serve us during certain moments, they color our experiences, they involve our whole nature – but they don’t represent the deep part of love.
And so, to have a healthy relationship with our neighbor, we need to pay attention to him as a person, and not to his attributes which could be either useful or harmful to us. We embrace him and we pay attention to him as he stands before us in his reality. This is a difficult thing to do even for those “spiritually advanced” people who focus on the good of the other, as they perceive it.
I will give you an example from my own life. Before starting the monastery where I am now, I had reached a “very high spiritual level”. I was doing many prostrations each day, I was saying hundreds of “Lord, Jesus Christ…”, I loved the poor, the imprisoned, the ones who strayed…I was “perfect” in other words! But I didn’t have any direct relationship, in my day-to-day life, with anyone. I was the one who strayed, thinking I was a missionary – which, in a way, I was. Yes, I was helping the ones I worked with, but I wasn’t helping myself, I wasn’t growing…
God arranged things so that I became an abbess – that is, for a few nuns to gather around me, and for me to receive the grace to “shepherd” them. I started to work with a lot of zeal, and I was convinced that in a short time they will also be “perfect” like me! Oh God, great are Your wonders! What do you think happened? Well, the “holy” one became, forgive my expression, the devil incarnate! I couldn’t believe it! So much anger, so much impatience, so much disbelief: “How can you set the glass down here? Aren’t you thinking when you do that? You never do that!” And the wet glass was indeed set down on some piece of furniture, leaving a mark which couldn’t be removed – and this would arouse in me great indignation. I wasn’t even focusing on the person – I was focusing on the furniture! And I wanted to “set things right”.
I was noticing with astonishment how all those “methods of education” used by my mother and father were now awakened in me – even though I had left my parents telling myself that I will never do what they did! And I was doing exactly what they did. I was telling myself: “My blessed father had his method, and my blessed mother her method, and here I am now with both methods!”
I had to go through a sort of death to be able to escape from this way of loving and living. With the help of my spiritual Father, I stopped, I chose to die to that life and I started all over. I said: “Lord, heal me, create me anew, make me new, I don’t want to live this way anymore! Yes, this is who I am, but You can change me! Help me!” This was after I wanted to give up, after I told the Metropolitan that I am not meant to be a good abbess. And he said: “Do you think anyone is good? God makes people good! Ask God to make you good, and you just hate the bad that is in you!” And I started to do this. It’s not easy, and it would be impossible if it were only up to us.
Our most important task is to look at our powerlessness, accept it, and call God and receive Him in this very powerlessness.
We need to enter into a living relationship with God’s Saints who healed themselves and who help us on our path both with their prayers and with their teachings. The Holy Fathers from Philokalia give us teachings that help us even if we read them only to get healed. The Holy Spirit, Who acted in them, lives and acts in us too. We don’t read their teachings to copy them exactly, but to enter into their spirit. This way, we can do what is in our power to do in our lives, but with their spirit.
We will thus discover within ourselves a war between the powers of our soul, which fight amongst themselves for different objectives. The first battle is between mind and heart. My mind wants to love and my heart says: “No, I don’t like him!” My mind wants patience – which is a virtue, isn’t it? – while my heart says: “How long will I endure this! That’s it, I can’t bear it anymore!” This is how I discover that my heart is driven from its depths (“For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come” – Mark 7:21) by desires which contradict themselves, and also contradict my rational ideals. We have in those depths convictions that dictate our behavior, and which contradict our conscious, ideological convictions (ideological because they are made out of ideas).
Nobody changes by listening to preaching that is based only on ideology. People are influenced only by the energies of the heart, by thoughts that come out of the heart. Scientists from Cardiology Institutes in the USA and Canada performed experiments that showed that the energy of the thought covers a much smaller distance (5 feet) compared to the energy of the heart (from 20 to 200 miles)…We Orthodox Christians believe that these energies of our hearts cover the whole of Creation and influence it towards good or evil, depending on whether they are good (which means they are united with God’s grace) or evil (that is, parasitized by demonic energies).
When my heart emits something evil, experiences something evil, these energies go out from me as vibrations with a specific frequency, and they will attract waves of similar quality. And I will meet evil people like me – even though I might believe that I am unlucky, or that someone put a curse on me, because I am not aware of the evil in me. Some people are astonished and ask themselves if the evil people they have met at different times have talked to each other because they have all acted the same way. No, those people haven’t talked to each other, they’ve talked to me. I tell everyone what to do, how to behave – through the energies hidden in my heart.
So what can we do?
There is only one solution: to heal our hearts with God’s grace. For example, when I choose to say: “Lord, have mercy on my neighbor!”, my heart is filled with uncreated energy, with God’s grace, and it annihilates the evil stored in its depths. All curses are loosened through blessings. The Lord says: “Bless those who curse you” and His word is a power that heals and creates. But we “don’t feel like” blessing those who curse us, because we think it’s not right. And so, looking for righteousness, we suffer evil and we react with evil, thus doubling the evil (because I am evil and you are evil). This is the secret of our ill relationships.
And let’s also pay attention to this: the quality of our relationships can only be tested by our relationship with God, with ourselves, and with the ones closest to us (family, community). We will behave in the world the same way we behave in these relationships.
Let’s say I start doing missionary work. If I left my room (cell) with tension, if I went out into the community with tension, then my community got on the same wavelength with me and is now tense. If I am upset and I don’t solve my problems through prayer, blessings, forgiveness, and love, everything I do in my missionary work – talks, conferences, seminaries – will have no effect. Absolutely no effect. If my heart is not pure, I can’t touch another heart. I can’t bring light anywhere if there is darkness in my heart. Don’t imagine that you can bring – forgive me, that we can bring Orthodox faithful into the church if we don’t love our wife and children. And not sentimentally, but in Christ. If we don’t bring our light there first, we will live in darkness and we will preach darkness.
Let’s not imagine that we can do something – spiritually speaking – outside our monastery, or when someone comes into the monastery, if we don’t love one another. Elder Sophrony of Essex insists: if you learn how to love the person next to you, in that intimacy, then you learn how to love any type of person. Let’s not deceive ourselves: it’s easy to love (in reality, to imagine that we love) someone far away from us or someone we rarely meet. It’s easy because we each show only our good parts to the other. We show only our valuable parts to each other. But when we live together, life becomes more complex and our hidden parts come to the surface.
And so, only when I cleanse my heart and when I have inner harmony will I also have harmonious relationships. The way I resolve conflicts within me, between my mind and my heart, is the same way I will resolve conflicts with my fellow human beings. If I learn how to love an “impossible” person, then, as Elder Sophrony says, I will love 10,000 people of this same type. And they are all impossible from my point of view.
To do this, we need first of all to heal all the psychological illnesses we received from our childhood, from memories, from wounds that entered our cells as toxic memories, as I was telling you last night. We need to heal the illnesses nested in what I was referring to last night as “cellular memory”, or genetic memory (epigenetic, as modern science calls it).
Our ancestors embodied both the good and the bad – things that they were not able, or were not willing to offer to God for healing. We received these things from their bodies, from the seed of life which comes from them. These things are written in our DNA, in this “Book of Life”, from where they can get activated or not, they can become conscious or not. We also need to heal the memories we received involuntarily, in our mother’s womb and the first years of our life, when we didn’t have the mental capacity to process rationally the data from the world, we just received it and “downloaded” it (even though we understood certain things and we had a certain willpower). We need to heal the memories we formed by storing and embodying experiences that we participated in freely and responsibly when we were more than seven years old.
If we don’t heal these three layers of memories, we will remain enslaved to impulses that they dictate to us. In actuality, we are never free because we are thrust, propelled by these drives that come from somewhere deep within us and that we are not able to control. I want to add an important clarification here, which has been proven scientifically: indeed, we are not free to stop these impulses from assaulting us. It has been proven that the impulsive act gets triggered before we are aware of it. But we are free to choose not to do what the impulse asks us to do. We never lose this freedom, but we need power so we can make that choice. And the only power that makes us truly free is God’s grace, God’s uncreated energy.
I very much pity all people who seek healing without God, because they will be overwhelmed by the complexity of their illnesses…Humanly speaking, this healing is not possible, this liberation is not possible. This is why the Son of God became human. This is why we have the Holy Church, against which the gates of hell will not prevail. If we pay attention and participate in the work of the Holy Spirit in the Church, we will be healed from all these illnesses – assuming we become aware of them and we want to be healed.
Another cause of our psychological illnesses is not knowing our soul and its relationship with God. We believe in the work of grace, we believe in the uncreated energies, but we are not aware and we don’t take advantage of the fullness of God’s work in Church, in us, and through us.
Some of the more daring scientists, from universities in the USA and the UK, have discovered that at the root of our illnesses are issues related to energy – and they are now looking for forms of energy that will annihilate the negative energy which manipulates our lives. We can already see progress related to energy – surgeries with laser beams, seeing inside the body with energy – so we should be able to treat our illnesses more efficiently and more consciously through the work of energy. Now would be the appropriate time for the Church to meet these scientists and show them the truth about the true healing energy, which is the energy of grace, and about the capacity of human energy to unite with the divine energy.
You also, Reverend Fathers, could be more aware and more daring in using this healing energy of grace which you received through the Sacrament of Ordination into Priesthood, and which you have grown accustomed to using generally only in the Holy Sacraments. I noticed that many priests are not aware of the energy they transmit through their hands when they bless someone.
A priest was telling me that one night, when he returned home after an event where he had consumed some alcohol, a young gypsy woman with a baby in her arms knocked on his door and told him: “Say a prayer, Father, my baby is dying!”. The priest said: “I am not in a state right now to say a prayer, I can’t put my vestments on right now, come back tomorrow.” The woman yelled at him: “At least put your hand on the baby, otherwise I’ll slam the baby over your head!” The priest got scared, put his hand on the baby and said: “God have mercy on him, heal him, so she can leave me alone!” The next day the woman came back to thank him for healing her baby. Her faith healed the baby, but by the priest’s hand through which grace comes to us…
We need to learn how to use the grace that God gives us through His Holy Church. And we need to learn more about our illnesses, their causes, and our healing powers which become divine-human through our connection to God’s grace.
For example, we need to know that human beings have an extraordinary capacity (as a gift from their creation) to live, grow, be happy, be creative, enjoy life, and heal if they get sick. We all want to be healthy or to be healed if we get sick. But few of us know the “organ” which maintains or restores our health. And even fewer of us know that this organ needs to be cared for, needs to have its health maintained. And that our lifestyle, centered on comfort and pleasure, destroys this very organ. This organ is our immune system, the only instrument we have for healing ourselves. If we want to heal someone, we need to restore his immune system. But we also need to identify the enemies and the killers of this system.
I will mention only one of these enemies (even though there are many of them): stress. We all know the havoc that stress brings into our lives.
The state of stress arises when our organism is threatened by danger. In those moments, the brain commands the ceasing of the functions of maintenance, growth, waste elimination, creativity – so that all our vital energy can be targeted towards survival, through a physiological mechanism called “fight or flight”. All our strength is focused on our legs (so we can run away/take flight) and in our arms (so we can fight). When the danger passes, the organism is brought back into its normal state of functioning, into a “good” state. But if the danger lasts too long, or is greater than our capacities of defense, then the organism will enter into a state of crisis and will get sick – because its vital functions are working insufficiently.
This survival mechanism has developed in us from the time when our lives were much more threatened by natural dangers. Humans were constantly threatened by death. This physiological mechanism works in our days as well, even though our conditions of living have changed and we have built many “shelters” and protections for our lives. Modern man doesn’t fight wolves anymore – he fights instead with bank X or boss Y or task Z.
We get sick today because of unjustified, many times unreal cares and fears. Many of us live in a permanent state of stress caused by thoughts that we “chew on” as if they were chewing gum: “she doesn’t love me!”, “he is not listening to me!”, “they will mess it up!”, “they won’t be saved!”, “we won’t be able to build the monastery!”, “we won’t be able to finish the renovation of the church!”, “we have no money!”… All these are alarms that cause us to live in a state of siege and so we are not able to take care of our hygiene, of elimination of toxins, we are not able to take care of our health – and then we wonder why we are sick, or why we can’t sleep at night.
I want you to know that the sign of your faith in God is a good night’s sleep. When you fall asleep, you know that you are in God’s arms, and there is nowhere in the world that is safer or more comfortable. You lie there and you rest, because you know that He gives you rest and He wakes you up. And also your Guardian Angel, if you pray to him and you have learned how to listen to him. Instead of setting your alarm clock to wake you up and hitting Snooze all the time, you could say: “Holy Guardian Angel, when you think I got enough rest, give me a little shove so I can wake up and so I can say “Lord, Have mercy” a few times!” – and the Angel knows your level of stress and rest, so he will wake you up.
It is painful to realize that we do not put to use God’s grace, His holy teaching, and we choose to suffer instead. It is astonishing how skilled we are at creating our sorrows which could be avoided so easily. As if our hidden goal was to suffer! What are we focusing on when we choose risky behaviors or behaviors that proved to be dangerous? It seems we are addicted to a state of stress! We love our enemies, in a perverted sense. But if we wake up and we want to be free, we discover that we have a remedy against these enemies – if only we want to use it! We have the Lord, Who gives us His mercy, His care, His grace! Let’s use this remedy so we can uncover our hidden motives for these destructive choices represented by our passions: pride, vanity, gluttony, envy, rivalry…Let us uncover them and offer them to the Lord so He can heal them.
Let’s say someone comes to you and complains that he is in a lot of debt and can’t cope anymore. What can you do, since you don’t have money to give him, nor a job to offer him so he can earn more money? You can help him, through the Holy Sacrament of Repentance, to bring to light the passions which cast him into this situation. You can help him accept these passions, and accept the healing action of the Lord. And if he does that, he will be amazed at the change that will happen!
Another grave illness of our soul and a great enemy of our happiness is the remembering of evil, with all its “relatives”: hate, envy, resentments, lack of forgiveness, rivalry, etc.
Many illnesses of the body are actually symptoms of this terrible illness of the soul. Almost all of us are filled with resentments, especially those we are not aware of anymore, which we don’t feel anymore, but which determine our psychological states, and, through them, our behavior. Many people say: “I had a happy childhood!” But for a child, it can be traumatic if his mother praises his brother for getting an A, while telling him that he is stupid and he won’t achieve anything in life…For the mother, those heavy words can be just words, or they can be a way for her to relieve some frustrations that have nothing to do with that situation. But for the child, this statement can become a belief, a conviction accompanied by all the feelings he felt at that moment. In the same way, the “traditional” expressions used by our parents, such as “why did you have to be born!” or “go to…”, are not empty words, but words that penetrate our memory and act upon us as internal commandments.
In these situations, our souls are poisoned because of a blind and sick “faithfulness” to these words, which we turned into beliefs when we were children. We can see in ourselves or people around us how such convictions can manipulate us. For example, people who, so that they don’t upset anyone, make compromises and always focus on others, but in a perverted way, wanting to appease the others. They neglect their own needs until they become exhausted, just so they appease the others. They are people that everybody uses, but that nobody thanks, nobody looks at them and their needs…They are people who finish their tasks last because there is always somebody asking them to do something more.
These people “embodied” in them the belief that they will not be loved unless they appease everybody. This is a perverted way of having “good relationships”. These relationships are not good, they are bad. These people will end up suffering from exhaustion, victimization. depression…And when they become depressed this way, it will be very hard for them to find healing. The people around them are not happier either: they will become more and more selfish, unfeeling, they will have bad relationships themselves because they will always look for people who appease them.
For us to free ourselves from this enslavement to the beliefs stored in the depths of our hearts, we have the remedies of our Holy Church: we can cleanse our minds through forgiveness and through renouncing the comfort of conformism; we can receive God’s grace through the Holy Sacraments and we can use this grace consciously and responsibly. And we have the prayer! Praying with the name of the Lord is a wonderful remedy. And also the Psalms. Sometimes, repeating a verse from a Psalm can work miracles in our hearts. For example, we can say often, with a burning desire: “Bring my soul out of prison, that I may praise Your name” (Psalm 141/142). Or anything that moves our hearts when we read the Psalter.
The only condition is to pay attention to ourselves, to our thoughts and our words, and to choose to give up the remembrance of evil in our minds. We have to realize that we need to awaken and keep alive in us this special type of attention which is taking heed to ourselves.
Forgive me for always repeating this! I know from my own heart that we all wish to be happy and healthy, to have good, happy relationships. And I also know how much suffering we generate despite this wish – and especially despite this ocean of grace that overflows from God into the Church and into ourselves.
I said earlier that there are scientists who are looking for energies that counteract the destructive energies from our cellular memories and our negative beliefs – similar to how, using special headphones, external noise is counteracted by sounds with the same wavelength (Forgive me, my scientific language is only approximate or even inexact. But I hope you understand what I mean.)
And so, these scientists are looking for energy adequate for the energy in my body, in my heart, and they offer it to me as a treatment. In this way, if I suffer from pain or sorrow, I go to them, I lie down on the treatment chair or bed, and I get healed through this counteracting energy! Forgive me, I don’t mean to be ironic, and I am convinced that you’ll see devices like these and you’ll benefit from them. But what kind of benefit is it? What is my heart focused on when it wants this benefit? What is my “treasure” and where is it? It is a state of well-being through pleasure and comfort, isn’t it? And we all have enough experience to realize that this will not help us have good relationships, living relationships, relationships that will make us happy with God, with ourselves, and with our neighbor.
It is time for us to realize that we need to use God’s gift: His grace, His uncreated energy through which we not only receive healing, we not only learn how to love and have good relationships – but we also obtain deification! Because this is the purpose of our lives, isn’t it? Let’s focus on this purpose, let’s move our treasure There, and our hearts will be healed. We will not be able to live like the great Saints, but we will live with their spirit.
I am astonished at the lack of feeling that we have, especially those of us who are “church-goers”, when facing the infinite mercy of God! I am astonished how, when the Lord comes to us at every Divine Liturgy and calls us to draw near with “fear of God, faith, and love”, offering us the Remedy for immortality – how hundreds and maybe thousands of Orthodox Christians remain indifferent in their places…And the Lord leaves, goes back into the Holy Altar, and is consumed by the priest who goes back home full, while those people go back home empty…And then they wonder that nothing changes…
What can we do? Again: take heed to ourselves. Discover that inner hunger that torments all of us. It is the hunger for God, for Life. When we pay attention to it consciously, this hunger grows in us until it demolishes the “walls of separation” between us and the Holy Chalice. The important thing is for our desire to be lively – both the desire of the priest who celebrates the service and the desire of the people who co-celebrate.
Do we think that we don’t have this desire? It just seems like we don’t! We do, but it is perverted, it is broken up into desire for health, money, power, pleasure, etc. Let’s start with what we possess. Let’s take every thread of desire within us and offer it to the Lord so He can transform it into His desire. Our need to be happy, to rid ourselves of pain and sorrow, is the “raw material”, so to speak, for the desire to partake of the uncreated energy and of the presence of He Who gives it to us.
He, God Himself, comes down to our level and calibrates His infinite energy to our pain, our desire, our illness…And He makes all of these His and transforms them into a place of holy joyfulness! Do we believe this?
As His Eminence was saying today, our mission and your mission is to serve the mystical, healing, sanctifying dimension of our Church. To do this, we need to set our hearts on fire. We need to ask the Lord to set our hearts alight. Think about it: the Apostles set the hearts of the first Christians on fire, and then those people did the same to others. Faith catches on fire from one heart to another. Motovilov saw the grace, the uncreated light, in relation to St. Seraphim of Sarov. We all have the uncreated light, we all see it with the eyes of our hearts. It is only our minds that are not there, or not there all the time.
Father Romanides (who turns to the Holy Fathers) states resolutely that “we will not be saved if we have not seen the uncreated light”. But we shouldn’t despair, thinking that we need to see this light like St. Silouan or St. Seraphim of Sarov. This light is revealed to us gradually and in many forms. The first is faith – not the faith we confess in the Creed. That is only the expression of faith, the formulation of faith. It is the astonishing power of our reason-mind to confess what the depth of our heart-mind feels and sees and knows (this depth is the “nous” I was telling you about).
When the reason-mind is centered on the heart-mind, and when the heart-mind is united with God, then that person will confess and express the truth of the faith without learning it in school. As St. Silouan says: if the Bible and all the books of the Church were to disappear, the Orthodox faithful would be able to write them again. Why? Because it is the Holy Spirit Who writes them. Man’s rational mind expresses what the Holy Spirit says in the depths of his heart. But since we haven’t reached this measure of faith, we confess our faith by receiving the confessions of the Saints and living their faith.
Another form of seeing the uncreated light is to see our sins. Without this light, without God’s loving presence in us, we can’t see our sins. We can’t see our powerlessness. And we will go on living by projecting them on others, by judging, by remembering evil, by doing other similar things.
This is why a spiritual father is so happy when someone confesses grave sins. He sees and feels the work of the Holy Spirit and he rejoices for that soul, together with the angels. This is why it is important for our Orthodox faithful, adults and children, to learn these things from us so that they can want them and practice them. If we don’t preach the faith this way, in this dimension, people will come to Church to seek miracles and signs and magical solutions to their problems. And many of them will be disappointed, and will not understand what we are doing there in Church…But if they ask us, it’s good for us to have clear answers in our minds and hearts.
Forgive me for giving you another example from my own life: an officer of the Secret Police (“Securitate” in Romanian) asked me once why I am going to Church since I am so educated, and I don’t have any health problems…He asked me, marveling: “Why do you go there with all the old grannies? I don’t understand…You must have a reason…”. And I told him: “Yes, you’re right! I do have a reason”. And he said: “I knew it! Are you going to tell me the reason?” And I replied: “I want to receive the power to love you! Because otherwise, I am not able to…Since you’re ugly, bad, an officer of the Secret Police…it’s impossible for me to love you. So I go to Church because that’s where I can receive the power which allows me to love you!”
Yes! That’s what we are looking for in Church! And coming to Church and staying in it, that’s what I found! I found true faith! There is no doubt in this faith because it is vision, it is knowledge. Doubts come through our reason, through thoughts that are suggestions from the enemy. But as soon as we go deep into that vein of faith, we suddenly become confessors of that internal vision which is our faith.
Unfortunately, many Orthodox faithful run away from the first sparkles of the light in which we see our own spiritual misery. We run away because we are beset by a great sense of despair, a strong feeling of self-disgust…Before receiving the uncreated light from our Merciful God, we deceive ourselves, thinking: “my father did this to me, or the Communist Party, or the Secret Police, or my husband, my wife, my children, the weather, the cold…” These beliefs give comfort to our soul, offer us the illusion that we know where all our sorrows come from – or, if we don’t know, then we find comfort in the belief that we are innocent victims of occult forces…
Now, in this light, all of these beliefs have disappeared, and I see that everything happens because of me, everything is in me. My pride tells me to rebel, to excuse myself, to accuse everybody else, but the loving presence of the Savior (which my ration-mind doesn’t even feel) doesn’t allow me to do it – and I choose to accept and to offer myself wholly to the mercy of God. It is up to me to accept it, to assume it. I believe it was St. Cyril of Alexandria who said: “What is not assumed cannot be saved.” If I don’t assume my misery, then I can’t give it to God so He can free me up from its burden – and so I am not saved, that is to say, I am not freed up.
I would like to emphasize here something very important: we need to accept our life, accept the fact that we have this life, that we are alive. We confuse life with its events – but life is what is alive in us, it is this astounding capacity to be, to feel, to think, to act…When our attention will focus on our life in this sense, then we will be free when facing any event: we will be capable of saying “Yes” to life and experiencing fully everything that our circumstances offer us. And everything will be different – not dictated by events, but depending on whether we are connected or not to the Divine Life.
The first “Yes” we are called to say is when we enter life at the moment of our conception. The quality of our life will depend on how faithful we will be to this first “Yes”. To whom do we say “Yes” at that time? To God. Because we indeed come from our parents as far as our nature, but as a person, as “hypostasis”, as “someone” unique, we come from God. He brings us into existence then. We see Him then with our minds deep within us, we see Him and we feel His love. Then we forget, but we never forget that love which is not only infinitely great and powerful – but is also personal. I feel His love for me, personally.
We never forget that love, and we search for it everywhere, all the time. We can’t be satisfied with any other love, and that is why we keep searching for it. It is healing and soothing to always remember this search so that we don’t get lost in an ephemeral love that we consider absolute. The love that we feel amongst ourselves will then also have another dimension, another essence. It will become love from Love.
Then, so we can continue on the path of light, we need to say “Yes” to life again and again. But to do this, we need to free ourselves, to be freed up from the hell within us, and from the fear of death.
The path to freedom, the way to holiness is a descent – it is a descent into hell. As the Holy Fathers say, human beings lost God in Heaven and found Him in hell. God is waiting for us in hell – but not in the hell on the other side, but in the hell right here; not in the external hell, but our internal hell. This is, after all, the only hell: the hell in the heart separated by God. The Lord has descended and continues to descend into this hell to give us His power so that we can also become sons of God. This is an ontological reality that can be verified by anybody. We only need to descend with Him in the hell within us. It is a descent with multiple stages, because it requires our free will – and the liberation of our will from the slavery of sin takes a long time.
The first stage of this descent into our internal hell is our new birth through Holy Baptism. We see the uncreated light at that time, we feel the loving presence of the resurrected Lord and we receive Him with much joy into our hearts. This is why the Sacrament of Holy Baptism must be done and lived as the Holy Church teaches us, with no changes. As His Eminence said, let’s make sure that the water immersion is done three times. All the prayers that are ordained need to be offered not only by the priest who serves the Sacrament but also by the people present. Some people activated their deep memories and recalled their Baptism (and you all can also experience this in certain situations).
The Baptism is death and resurrection with and in the Lord. We believe this and we confess it. But we need to be more aware so that we can assume and benefit from another aspect of God’s work with us in our Baptism: our liberation from the fear of death, from this chain that the enemy used to enslave us. When we are immersed three times in the water of Baptism, we live death as the fear of death. We live the fear of death to such a degree that it surpasses our strength – to a point of dismemberment. The cells in our bodies are dismembered by this fear and stop communicating with each other, so to speak, those messages of protection against death that result in life as survival.
Everything we inherited from our parents, all our cellular memories, even though they are toxic, help us survive, teach us what to do so we don’t die physically, so that we survive until we meet Christ the Savior. That’s why God ordained for the body not to die – as the soul died when it separated from God by disobeying the commandment. He gave us this life for survival, for us to want Him, our true Life, again. And so in the Holy Baptism we don’t die of fear, but we die to the fear of death by dying and getting resurrected with the Lord. This might be hard to understand, but prayer will illuminate us if we will pay more attention to ourselves.
And still. After Baptism, many of us live and behave as if all these things never happened to us. Why? Because we don’t know how to live, which is to say we don’t know how to use the powers that were gifted to us. We don’t have, as animals do, an innate “instruction manual for living life”. We need to learn how to live. And even though, in the Sacrament of Holy Unction, we received the Holy Spirit Who “teaches us everything”, we continue to learn from our parents and our teachers who are still spiritual infants, carnal beings who didn’t honor being “born again” in the Spirit, who didn’t activate the power of God’s grace in their lives. Therefore, the fear of death still rules over us. That is why we need to make a new beginning, again and again.
For example, I feel fear – I am afraid of illness, of death, of being destitute. As I said before, I can’t choose freely and willingly to feel this fear. How do I make a new beginning? Simply by refusing to act and to think in the way the fear imposes on me, and by offering this fear to God. I call God into my fear. I accept it, I live it, I feel it with all my being and I turn this feeling into a vessel, a chalice in which I call to the Lord: “Come, Lord, and heal my soul of this fear!”
We have here a new step towards the vision of the uncreated light. It is the step of turning all our powerlessness, all our experiences (“our whole life” as we say in the Divine Liturgy) into a vessel of uncreated energies, a door through which the Good Shepherd can enter. Our relationships will cease being ill from the moment we will focus on knowing and healing our powerlessness. Knowing and assuming this powerlessness, and feeling the mercy of God, will open our spiritual eyes toward the one in front of us. Knowing that God loves us as we are (of course, so that we can become, through His mercy, what we are not yet), our attention will be united with His mercy so that we learn how to do His will.
The enemy keeps telling us that God cannot love us in our miserable condition – and that, if we want God to love us, we need to be “good kids”. And the enemy does this very often through those who raise us: “If you are a good kid, God will love you. If not, He will be angry with you! He will punish you!” And this is how we learn to either run away from God or to “negotiate” with Him, to buy His goodwill. This is a very incorrect way of relating to God and it comes from serious ignorance: we don’t know that sin is first of all illness. We don’t believe that God came to us, in us, to heal us, to forgive us, to free us from this illness. He lifts up our sins – if we give them to Him!
We are ill. Our relationships are ill. Lord, you have a lot of work to do with us! Come, Lord!
As for me, the first task I have is to look at my illness, to want to be healed, and to learn divine therapy. God gives us healing in our lives little by little, because this healing is also part of our becoming. If I look at myself, at my own life, I am amazed how God worked (and He still does, always different) for my healing, a long time before I asked Him consciously to heal me. He worked, and He also made me into my own therapist.
As I was saying before, a certain school of psychotherapy says that we are the victims of unconscious scripts “written” in our childhood, which we blindly obey. When I was suffering without God, I looked at my life and said: “What is this? This is a play with a bad script, written for an actor of genius. I am not going to perform from this script anymore, I will write another script for myself!” And for years and years, I wrote my own scripts…Not too good, but at least they were mine. Until I found the Screenwriter Who gave me His script, written especially for my genius! And I heal myself of myself time and time again, following the “rules of the divine play” which are always new and which constantly renew me as well. My iniquity and my stupidity seem to be (and maybe they are) bottomless, but His mercy and His goodwill are limitless!
Now, all that I read in psychotherapy books I know somewhat from my experience. They are valuable because they show the human soul which searches for healing, searches for some joyfulness. Before understanding that the Lord is the Path, and that joy comes through the cross, man runs frantically around, looking for a way out of suffering. I sometimes think that God allowed me to walk on paths of darkness just so I can understand human suffering and the human yearning for happiness. In a way, each of us covers the history of the entire human race so that we can be ready to receive Him not only for ourselves. And so that we learn to be respectful towards these human efforts which are not in vain, and which is also God’s gift to us.
Most of all, these efforts are useful to us because they prove that human science can’t save us. By becoming aware of the powerlessness of science, many people who are hurting will decide to choose the true Path. May we be the ones who give courage to the newcomers on this Path.
And so, we accept our powerlessness, we enter the hell within us. And then? We will first judge ourselves, so that “we will not be judged”, as the Lord teaches us. But to do this, we need to correct the way we understand this judgment – because we usually take the place of God the Judge. That is, we not only accuse ourselves (when we don’t excuse ourselves by accusing others or even God), but we also punish ourselves. The Holy Spirit teaches us through His Saints how healing it is for our souls when we accuse ourselves – when we assume responsibility, when we assume our actions, thoughts, words, lack of knowledge, powerlessness…when we accept that each of us is responsible for being far away from Him, and thus we suffer.
Let us not sink into neurotic guilt. And let us ask for His mercy, for His healing. Yes, we deserve the punishment which consists exactly of the suffering we endure. But we judge ourselves precisely so that we are freed from suffering – that is, freed from being dependent on the causes of this suffering, which are exactly our attitudes and our choices. Let us stop asking for our suffering to cease while we keep doing the same old things, we keep eating the wrong food, etc. But the most important thing, I repeat, is to not punish ourselves, but to accept God’s love and forgiveness.
This first step is hard to take because we were told all the time that we need to be good, we need to be different than what we were…”You shouldn’t be like this!” or “How can you behave so badly? Shame on you!” as a mother was yelling to her one-and-a-half-year-old daughter who wanted to stand up and grabbed the table cloth, thus spreading the fancy food from the table all over the floor. And then the little girl started to paint on the floor with all that yummy food…When her mother came into the room, both the little girl and the room were painted in bright colors. And the little girl was very excited and happy. But can you imagine the effect that the mother’s shouts and accusations had on this creative child? Was she able to feel shame? She was able to feel only fear and despair…and to form the belief that she is not good, and that she needs to be good.
This is how we learn that we should be good, instead of learning that we cannot be good without other people and God teaching us how to be good. This mentality is hard to change. I was helped by St. Nicodemus the Hagiorite when I read “The Unseen Warfare”. I learned from the Saint how to confess as well. I had received the book from Fr. Galeriu, who had told me that it would “build up my soul”. Usually, he would lend me books that would warm my heart, would strengthen my piety. And so I took this book home with me, thinking it would bring me to the peaks of ecstasy! But, alas, it brought me down directly into the hell within me! When I saw how many sins there are, and that, in one way or another, they were in me too, I said: “This can’t be true!” But I had already seen that it was true, that they were in me as well, not only in the book. I had a hard time accepting this, looking at my sins, shedding tears for them, asking for mercy and forgiveness.
But the most difficult thing was to confess: how was I supposed to tell Fr. Galeriu – who was telling other people what a cultivated person I was, and full of repentance – how was I supposed to tell him that I did all those trivialities? And I prayed to St. Nicodemus: “Holy Father, help me, I can’t say those things!” And the Saint replied to me with words out of his book: “Never say ‘How could I do such a thing?’ but say ‘Lord, thank you for allowing me not to do worse things!’”. This brought peace into my heart and turned my natural shame into courage. Yes, as a human being I can do much worse, I can commit every sin. And only God’s mercy protected me from the things I didn’t do, and only His love will teach me how to be good and pure.
If we understand that we cannot be good without God, then this will suddenly take the weight off of our shoulders. We don’t have to be different. We are how we are, we are just not ready. This filth within me is the place where God comes to heal me, to sanctify me. As Fr. Nicolae Steinhardt from Rohia used to say: God makes saints with “the customer’s material”. And if I don’t give Him my material, what will He do? He will let me keep my sick mind. He came to lift up the sin of the world, which means all our psychological filth. By giving Him my sin, I give Him myself. I turn myself into “prosphora” and I offer it to Him, I ask Him to make me into the human being He meant me to be. This is the permanent Liturgy where we put our offering on the altar of our heart. In the beginning, this offering is our sin. As monks say, and it is not a metaphor: “I didn’t bring anything to God except my sins”. But I give them to God. And God lifts them up, and heals me.
Another thing that hampers our growth is that we have a wrong vision of sin. First of all, we look at sin juridically, and not as an illness. Then we are mistaken, considering that our sins are our thoughts, our words, our actions. We confess that “we sinned by word, deed, or thought” – which means that the word, the deed, the thought are the “flesh” of the sin, its “raw materials”, its symptoms. When we have a physical illness, we don’t say that we are sick of a headache….Sin is an illness, and this illness is within me, in my heart. If I treat the symptoms, I can die, because the illness remains unhealed.
For example, when someone confesses, saying “I stole this and that”, and stops stealing, that person is not healed – because the problem is not in the things he stole, but in the perverted attitude of his soul when looking to satisfy his needs without consideration and mercy for the victim of the theft. Most often, people who steal do it for pleasure, not for riches. I knew thieves in prisons who were saying: “I was earning 20 million lei per day when I was stealing, and my salary was just 1 million!” And I asked them: “So why didn’t you stop after you stole the first 20 million?” And they said: “Well, I used to spend all the money in one day! I knew I could always steal more money, and I felt great pleasure in stealing and in the danger of being caught!”. So this was it, the pleasure! In other cases, the fuel could be fear or shame. These energies of our souls are ill and push us to commit sins. And God heals precisely these energies, by offering us His uncreated energy as the remedy.
When we confess our sins, when we repent, let us look carefully underneath our actions, our thoughts, and our words. We slandered someone…What is underneath that? The wish to make that person small in someone’s eyes, and make myself big. Which is to say – pride. Lord, heal my soul! And so on…
Only when we live our repentance in the Holy Spirit will we understand what great sinners we are, and how great is God’s mercy. And when we truly taste God’s mercy, there will be such mercy in our souls that we couldn’t imagine is humanly possible. An internal discernment will grow from this tasting, between me as a sinner and me as being powerless against sin.
Now I see clearly that without God, I wouldn’t be able to abandon sin. And so I feel in myself all human powerlessness, and I pray that everyone receives God’s mercy, as I received it. This is how love for enemies starts. But we’ll talk about this another time…
I will finish by synthesizing:
We are all ill, the powers of our soul are ill, our energies are ill and parasitized by demonic energies. But we have a Remedy! It is close to us. It is in your Reverend Fathers’ hands! It is in our mouths! We have God and His grace. And grace works according to the divine ordinance, and we receive it according to the divine ordinance, through the Holy Sacraments – we receive the fire which we keep alive through prayer, which we affix to our lives and our habits through the observance of the commandments. From here on you know better than me how to proceed, Reverend Fathers. Bless! Thank you!
His Eminence Serafim: I confess that I am simply fascinated, as I believe you all are, and I think we can all say that we have never heard in our whole lives the things we heard tonight, through Mother Siluana’s mouth. And yet Mother Siluana doesn’t talk about things foreign to our faith, to our Orthodoxy – she tells us about the specifics, about what is our Orthodox faith, but unfortunately, we are not familiar with those things. And I dare say that even if we are not familiar with them, we still experience them, each of us at our level. And even if we are not able to express them as well as Mother Siluana, we heard them as our normality, as something that we felt is true. Our conscience, our hearts tell us that they are true, even though we can’t express these things. And so, it seems to me that the synthesis of what Mother Siluana told us is that we, Orthodox faithful, especially here in the West, need to be more aware of the value of our Orthodoxy, of its depth, of its profound truth, of the fact that Orthodoxy is not intellectualistic or moralistic, it does not want to regiment us in one way or another. Orthodoxy is a profound opening toward God’s work, so that grace comes to us, so that we receive grace.
And so that we know ourselves, because, as Mother Siluana said, we can only know ourselves truly with help from God’s grace. And if we know ourselves, we need not despair. If you see yourself as a sinner, if you see yourself dirty, it doesn’t mean you get discouraged or you pity yourself, since I don’t think this would be of any use.
Mother Siluana: On the contrary, we are happy – we are happy that we can offer ourselves to God so that He can heal us.
His Eminence Serafim: Yes, on the contrary, you give God all your filth, you place yourself in front of Him. We are God’s creatures, in any case, we are His sons, and we are the way we are, as God knows us in any case – but God wants us to be aware that we are His creation, that He is our Father, that He loves us the way we are, and that He will take us out of our filth, little by little, and will heal us.
And so I think that our Orthodoxy has a very positive, very optimistic spirituality – the spirituality of the Resurrection, of course. Why else did St. Seraphim of Sarov greet everyone on any day of the year with: “Christ is Risen, my joy!”? “My joy.” Everyone was his joy. May God help us to feel that way too! We thank Mother Siluana, all of us who are here in Nuremberg, and enjoyed her presence!
St John’s Adult Education 