Library › St John of Kronstadt › My Life in Christ

My Life in Christ

St John of Kronstadt, tr. Goulaeff, 1897

Part 1, 2. pp. 21–40

It is incomprehensible how Jesus Christ is united with the sign of the Cross, and gives it the wonderful power of driving away passions, demons, and to calm the troubled soul. It is likewise incomprehensible how the spirit of our Lord Jesus Christ is united with the bread and wine, transforming them into His own Flesh and Blood, and manifestly cleansing our soul from sins, bringing into it heavenly peace and tranquillity and making it good, gentle, humble, and full of hearty faith and hope. This is partly explained by the fact that the Almighty, creating spirit of our Lord Jesus Christ is everywhere, and that everywhere He “calleth those things which be not as though they were”;¹ and therefore much more can He make what exists other from what it was. And in order that the unbelieving heart should not think that both the sign of the Cross and the name of Christ act miraculously by themselves, apart from and independently of Christ Himself, this same Cross and name of Christ do not perform any miracles, until I see Jesus Christ with the eyes of my heart, or by faith, and until I believe with my whole heart all that which He has accomplished for our salvation.

“I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.”² So it is, Master: Thou art with us throughout all days; we are not a single day without Thee, and we cannot live without Thy presence near us! Thou art with us especially in the Sacrament of Thy Body and Blood. O, how truly and essentially art Thou present in the Holy Mysteries! Thou our Lord in every liturgy takest upon Thyself a vile body similar to ours in every respect save that of sin, and feedest us with Thy life-giving flesh. Through the Sacrament Thou art wholly with us, and Thy Flesh is united to our flesh, whilst Thy Spirit is united to our soul; and we feel this life-giving, most peaceful, most sweet union, we feel that by joining ourselves to Thee in the Holy Eucharist we become one spirit with Thee as it is said: “He that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit.”³ We become like Thee, good, meek and lowly, as Thou hast said of Thyself: “I am meek and lowly in heart.”⁴ True it is that often our evil and blind flesh, or the prince of this world, who dwells in our simple flesh, whispers to us that the Sacrament contains only bread and wine, and not the very Body and Blood of our Lord Himself, and sends sight, taste and feeling as his crafty witnesses to this. But we do not allow ourselves to listen to these calumnies and reason thus. To Thee, Lord, everything is possible: Thou createst the flesh of men, animals, fishes, birds, reptiles, of all creatures, Is it possible that for Thyself, Thou, “Who art everywhere, and fillest everything,” wilt not create flesh? Not only this, Thou changest a dead substance into a living one — as, for instance, Moses’ rod into the serpent —and there is nothing impossible for Thee. Canst Thou not, therefore, create flesh for Thyself out of bread and wine, which are so near to our flesh, being used for our food and drink, and thus being converted into our own flesh and blood? Thou dost not test our faith more than it can bear, for Thou dost not transubstantiate a lump of earth into Thy most-pure Body, but white bread, soft, clean, pleasant to the taste; and Thou dost not create Thy Blood from water, but from wine, called in Holy Scripture the blood of the grape,⁵ corresponding in colour to that of blood, agreeable to the taste, and rejoicing the heart of man. Thou knowest our infirmity, the weakness of our faith, and therefore Thou condescendest to employ in the Sacrament of Thy Body and Blood the substances most suitable to them. Let us, therefore, firmly believe that under the form of bread and wine we communicate of the true Body and of the true Blood of our Lord; that in the mystery of the Holy Communion, Jesus Christ Himself will dwell with us “alway, even unto the end of the world.”⁶

Our soul is, so to say, a reflection of God’s countenance, and the brighter this reflection is, the clearer and calmer is the soul; and the less bright this reflection is, the darker, the more disturbed is the soul. And as our soul is our heart it is necessary that every truth of God should be reflected in it through feeling, through gratitude, and that there should be no reflection in it of any lie. Feel God’s love in the most pure mysteries, feel the truth of all prayers. Our heart is a mirror; as the objects of the outer world are reflected in an ordinary mirror, so ought the truth to be reflected with all exactitude in our hearts.

It is good, very good indeed, to be virtuous; the virtuous man is at peace himself, is pleasing to God and agreeable to other people. The virtuous man involuntarily attracts everyone’s attention. Why is it so? Because fragrance involuntarily attracts attention and makes everyone wish to breathe it. Look upon the very appearance of the virtuous man, upon his countenance. What sort of a countenance is it? It is the face of an angel. Meekness and humility overspread it, and involuntarily captivate everyone by their beauty. Pay attention to his speech; from it there comes still greater fragrance: here you are as if face to face with his soul, and are enraptured with his sweet converse.

Love calms and agreeably expands the heart and vivifies it, whilst hatred painfully contracts and disturbs it. Those who hate others torture and tyrannise over themselves; therefore they are the most foolish of the foolish ones.

When you see your body wasted through sickness, do not murmur against God, but say: “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”⁷ You are accustomed to look upon your body as upon your own inalienable property, but that is quite wrong, because your body is God’s edifice.

What a great personage a priest is! He is in constant converse with God, and God constantly replies to his speech, as whatever the ceremonies of the Church may be, whatever his prayers, he is speaking to God, and whatever the ceremonies of the Church may be and whatever his prayers, the Lord answers him. How, under these circumstances, when assaulted by passions, can the priest forget that such passions are base, impure, especially for him, and that it is impossible to let them enter into his heart, which Jesus Christ alone ought to fill entirely? A priest is an angel and not a man; everything worldly ought to be left far away behind him. O Lord, “let thy priests be clothed with righteousness”⁸; let them always remember the greatness of their calling and do not let them be entangled in the nets of the world and the Devil; let them be saved from “the cares of this world, the deceitfulness of riches, and the lusts of other things entering into their hearts.”⁹

There are innumerable and various ways by means of which the Devil enters into our soul and removes it from God, pressing upon it with all his being, dark, hateful, and destroying. Whatever the motion of passion may be, he finds a way, and does not neglect the least opportunity of entering the soul. Likewise there are innumerable and various ways for the Holy Ghost to enter it: the way of sincere faith, of true humility, of love to God and to our neighbour, and so on. But, to our misfortune, the destroyer of men from time immemorial makes every effort to obstruct, by all possible means, all these ways for the Holy Ghost to enter the soul. The most usual way to God for us sinners, who have strayed from Him into a far-away land, is the way of painful suffering and bitter tears. Both the Holy Scriptures and actual experience testify that, in order to draw near to God, it is necessary for the sinner to suffer, weep, shed tears, and to amend his deceitful heart: “Draw nigh to God.... be afflicted, and mourn, and weep.”¹⁰ Tears have power to cleanse the wickedness of our heart, and sufferings and affliction are necessary, because through suffering the sinful expansion of the heart is salutarily contracted, and when the heart is thus contracted, tears more easily flow.

When the Devil is in our heart, then we feel an unusual, overwhelming load and fire in the breast and in the heart. The soul contracts extremely and darkens, everything irritates it, it feels an aversion to every good work; the words and acts of other persons in reference to ourselves we interpret falsely and see in them ill-will and designs against our honour, and therefore we feel a deep, deadly hatred towards them; we are infuriated and long for vengeance. “By their fruits ye shall know them.”¹¹ There are days when the spirit of evil disturbs me.

Men have fallen into unbelief because they have either completely lost the spirit of prayer, or never had it at all, nor have it now — in short, because they do not pray. The prince of this world has full scope for action in the hearts of such men; he becomes their master. They have not asked and do not ask God’s grace in prayer (for God’s gifts are only given to those who ask and seek), and thus their hearts, corrupt by nature, become dried up without the vivifying dew of the Holy Ghost, and at last from their extreme dryness they take fire, and blaze with the infernal flame of unbelief and various passions, and the Devil only knows how to inflame the passions that keep up this terrible fire, and triumphs at the sight of the ruin of the unfortunate souls that were redeemed by the blood of Him who has trampled the power of Satan under foot.

A morning prayer. O, God! Creator and Master of the World! Mercifully protect Thy creature, adorned with Thy Godly image, in these morning hours: Let Thine eyes, millions and millions of times brighter than the rays of the sun, vivify and enlighten my soul, darkened and slain by sin. Deliver me from despondency and slothfulness, grant me joy and vigour of soul, so that with a glad heart I may praise Thy mercy, Thy holiness, Thy boundless greatness, and Thy infinite perfections, at every hour and in every place. For Thou, Lord, art my Creator and the Master of my life, and to Thee Thy reasonable creatures every hour ascribe glory and praise, both now and for ever and to ages of ages. Amen.

From the time when man, by his own will, fell away from God, he, like an animal that was once domestic, but afterwards grew wild in a thick forest, reluctantly looks back upon the place of his former abode, preferring the darkness of the forest — that is, of this world — to the light of the former place —that is, of God’s paradise. It is difficult for him to unite himself to God, and when so united, he often falls away again from Him. It is difficult for him to sincerely believe in God, and in all that He has opened to him, and he does not constantly strive to preserve in his heart the Heavenly gift of faith.

If God does not leave a blade of grass, a flower, or a small leaf of a tree without His good providence, will He leave us? O, let every man be convinced with his whole heart that God is true to Himself in His providence for even the least of His creatures. Let him understand that the Creator invisibly dwells in all His creatures. In the words of our Saviour, God clothes the grass of the field, feeds the fowls of the air.¹² In how many ways does not God rejoice us, His creatures, even by flowers? Like a tender mother, in His eternal power and wisdom, He every summer creates for us, out of nothing, these most beautiful plants. Let us enjoy them, not forgetting to glorify the goodness of the Creator, our heavenly Father; let us on our part, too, reply to His love by loving hearts.

He that does not believe in the God Who saves us in difficult circumstances, but is faint-hearted; he that does not wish to render glory to God, that represents Him as not vigilant, but sleeping, not all-powerful and not merciful, thinks falsely of the God of truth, and thus sins grievously. Especially inexcusable are faint-heartedness and unbelief in the man who has already been deemed worthy of often receiving marvellous help from God the Saviour. O, how great a sinner I am!

The invisible, all-pervading God often and sensibly touches my invisible soul, which, from this touch, enjoys wonderful rest and heavenly joy. It is not the eyes which give me tidings of my God (ordinary feelings are destined for the lower objects of creation), not the hearing by means of words or sounds of the voice that carries to me the message of the Incomprehensible, but the soul itself becomes, so to say, dissolved in God.

When you are disturbed and depressed by the wickedness of men, remember how boundlessly you are beloved by the Almighty and All-righteous God, Who suffers the evil until the time comes, and then will justly punish it. You cannot master yourself, your tongue, or one single member of your body. Judge by this what He must be, Who governs the whole world, Who keeps it in such wonderful order, Who governs the whole of mankind, evil, perverted as we are, ever ready as we are to destroy each other, and yet meanwhile more prosperous than needy under His sovereignty. How almighty and wise must He be to govern such heterogeneous multitudes! Trust in Him entirely.

When the matter relates to God’s Mysteries, do not inwardly ask: how can this be? You do not know how God created the whole world from nothing; you cannot and may not know here either how God mysteriously works. God’s mystery must remain a mystery for you, because you are not God, and cannot know all that is known to the eternally Wise, Almighty God. You are the work of His hands: His most insignificant creature. Remember that there was a time when there was nothing and that afterwards all that now exists was created out of nothing by the Word of God. “Without Him was not anything made that was made.”¹³

You who pray, give God your heart, that loving true heart, with which you love your children, your father and mother, your benefactors and friends, and in which you feel the sweetness of pure unfeigned love.

Sometimes during a long-continued prayer only a few minutes are really pleasing to God and constitute true prayer and true service to God. The chief thing in prayer is the nearness of the heart to God, as proved by the sweetness of God’s presence in the soul.

“Let it be as I will, and not as thou wilt.” Such is the mighty voice of God, which our soul ever hears when it has fallen into sin and desires to emerge from a state of spiritual, sinful affliction. “Let it be as I will: either repent from the depths of your heart in proportion to the sin, and return to the road that leads to life, shown by Me; either bear the punishment, corresponding to the sin and determined by My justice, or your sin will torment you as a deviation from My laws.” And only then will our soul enjoy peace when we truly repent from the depths of our heart in proportion to the sin, or bear the punishment due from God. O! Almighty and most just power of our God, invisibly governing our invisible souls, all glory to Thee, glory to Thee, God our Saviour! Thy will be done in us!

How easily and speedily the Lord can save us! — instantaneously, unexpectedly, imperceptibly. Often during the day I have been a great sinner, and at night, after prayer, I have gone to rest, justified and whiter than snow by the grace of the Holy Ghost, with the deepest peace and joy in my heart! How easy it will be for the Lord to save us too in the evening of our life, at the decline of our days! O! save, save, save me, most gracious Lord; receive me in Thy heavenly Kingdom! Everything is possible to Thee. “To his own master he standeth or falleth. Yes, he shall be holden up: for the Lord is able to make him stand.”¹⁴

That which is especially important and constitutes the life of the being the Creator has placed and concealed far away in the very depths within that being; we see this everywhere. Thus in the man the soul is in the very midst of his being — in the heart; and therefore the soul is often called the heart and the heart the soul. “Therefore is my spirit overwhelmed within me, my heart within me is desolate.”¹⁵ “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.”¹⁶

Our God is “merciful and gracious, slow to anger and plenteous in mercy.”¹⁷ He is not a God of torments and punishments. Our torments are the fruit of our sins and the work of the incorporeal fallen spirits. Therefore if you suffer grievously, only blame your sins and the Devil, but chiefly yourself, because the Devil would not do you any harm if he did not find anything in you that he could fasten on to.

“I the Lord thy God am a jealous God.”¹⁸ “My glory will I not give to another.”¹⁹ These words of the God of glory are fulfilled every time when in my heart I ascribe the glory of my God’s works, accomplished in me by the Holy Gifts, to anything or anybody else and do not ascribe them with my whole heart to Him. He instantly becomes jealous of the glory of His righteous, ever-miraculous, vivifying Mysteries, and in His justice punishes my soul with His Fatherly rod! O then my soul clearly hears the voice of its God: “My glory will I not give to another. As you do not ascribe to Me the glory due to Me, so evident to you in my Mysteries, I strike you inwardly with the rod of My truth so that you may thus know and heartily believe that I never will give My glory to another. I cleanse your sins and make your soul whiter than snow by My blood; I visit your soul with peace and joy; I warm and cherish you as a mother cherishes her child, and I instil within you My meekness and humility; I pour love into your heart; I completely transform and change you — to your own wonder into a new man — and to whom else shall I give the glory of My works? I am eternally unchangeable. ‘God is not a man, that He should lie; neither the son of man, that He should repent.’”²⁰

The invisible God acts upon my soul as if He were visible, as if He were present here before me, knowing all my thoughts and feelings; every inward slothfulness, stubbornness, or other passion is always accompanied by a corresponding punishment. In general, if my inward disposition is unworthy of God, of His holiness, then I suffer punishment for it in my heart, a devouring fire; and if it is a worthy one, then I am joyful and at peace.

No, whatever you may say, a man is sometimes too irritable and too evil to be so of himself, but he becomes so through the most zealous endeavours of the Devil. Only watch yourself or others at the time of irritation and wickedness, when you yourself or anyone else would wish to destroy the person who is inimical to you, really or in your imagination; compare this state with that which follows it (sometimes soon afterwards by the action of your Guardian Angel, tranquillity, meekness and kindness, either in yourself or in anyone whom you watch) with the former opposite condition, and you will say to yourself: “No, this seems quite a different man from him, who, not long ago, was so full of evil and rage; this man is the one ‘out of whom the devils were departed, sitting at the feet of Jesus [meek and humble], clothed and in his right mind.’²¹ In him there is not even a shadow of the former wickedness and the former foolishness!” Some deny the existence of evil spirits; but such phenomena in the human life clearly prove their existence. If every phenomenon has its corresponding reason, and if the tree is to be judged by its fruits, then who will not see in the madly-infuriated man the presence of the evil spirit, who cannot show himself otherwise than in a manner worthy of him? Who will not see the chief of all evil in the outpouring of anger? Besides this, a man subjected to irritability and breathing malice clearly feels the presence of a hostile evil power in his breast; it produces in the soul quite the reverse of that which has been said by the Saviour of His own presence: “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.”²² By the presence of the former spirit one feels ill at ease and oppressed, both in body and soul.

You hear in church oftener than anything the voices of the priests, deacons, readers, and singers praying God to have mercy upon us. What does this signify? It signifies that all of us who are in God’s Temple are deserving, by our sins, of God’s punishment, and that before everything — on our coming into the church — we must remember that we are sinners, and have come to the Lord of Heaven and Earth, to our Creator and Benefactor, Whom we have daily and hourly angered by our iniquities, to ask for mercy, each one for himself, and also, in accordance with Christian love, for others. The prayers asking for mercy are called in the Russian orthodox Church “great,” “small,” and “redoubled.” As there is not a single superfluous word in the church service, it is especially necessary at the time of the singing of the redoubled litany to pray to God most fervently, from the very depths of a most contrite heart, as we are reminded at the very beginning of the litany by the words: “Let us say with our whole souls and with our whole understanding.” At this time we must lay aside even the slightest coldness, the slightest inattention of heart, and, burning with the spirit of humility, becoming all attention, offer up to the Creator our most fervent prayers to have mercy upon us sinners. But what do we see at the time of the exclamations of the priest and the singing by the singers of the great and redoubled litany? For the greater part, the usual inattention and indifference on the part of those praying.

As after having unworthily communicated, so also after having prayed unworthily and coldly, our soul feels equally ill at ease. This means that God does not enter our heart, being offended at its unbelief and coldness, and allows the evil spirit to nestle in our hearts, in order to make us feel the difference between His own presence and its yoke.

A terrible truth. Impenitent sinners after their death lose every possibility of changing for good, and therefore remain unalterably given up to everlasting torments (for sin cannot but torment). How is this proved? It is plainly proved by the actual state of some sinners and by the nature of sin itself — to keep the man its prisoner and to close every outlet to him. Who does not know how difficult it is, without God’s special grace, for a sinner to turn from the way of sin that is so dear to him into the path of virtue? How deeply sin takes root in the heart of the sinner, and in all his being! how it gives the sinner its own way of looking at things, by means of which he sees them quite differently to what they are in reality, and shows him everything in a kind of alluring light! It is for this reason that we see that sinners very often do not even think of their conversion, and do not consider themselves to be great sinners, because their eyes are blinded by their self-love and pride. And if they do consider themselves sinners, then they give themselves up to the most terrible despair, which overwhelms their mind with thick darkness and greatly hardens their heart. But for the grace of God, what sinner would have returned to God? For it is the nature of sin to darken our souls, to bind us hand and foot. But the time and place for the action of grace is here alone: after death there remain only the prayers of the Church, and these prayers can be efficacious for penitent sinners alone — that is, only for those who have developed in their souls the capability of receiving God’s mercy or of benefiting by the prayers of the Church — that is, the light of the good works which they have taken with them out of this life. Impenitent sinners are undoubtedly sons of perdition. What does my experience tell me when I am the prisoner of sin? I am tormented sometimes the whole day, and cannot turn to God with my whole heart, because sin hardens my heart, making God’s mercy inaccessible to me. I burn in the fire, and willingly remain in it, because sin has bound my powers, and I — like one inwardly chained — am unable to turn to God until He, seeing my helplessness, my humility, and my tears, takes pity on me and bestows His grace upon me. It is not without reason that a man given over to sin is spoken of as “delivered into chains of darkness.”²³

Your spiritual life is clearly divided into two states, differing acutely one from the other: into a state of peace, joy, expansion of heart, and into a state of suffering, fear and contraction of heart. The causes of the first state are the actions of your soul when in conformity with the Creator’s laws; and the cause of the second state, the transgression of His holy laws. I always can and do notice the beginning of one or the other state; I have the consciousness of the one and the other state. Therefore it always happens that by doing away with the reasons from which the state of suffering and contraction of heart have proceeded, the consequences — that is, the suffering and the contraction of the soul — are also done away with.

“Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is in you, except ye be reprobates.”²⁴ Truly, Christ dwells in me. Meanwhile, I have until now been a reprobate; I did not think and was not firmly convinced that the Lord is in me. It is He, the All-Holy, that is so sensitive in me to the slightest impurity of heart; it is He Who incites me to drive away from my soul the very germ of sin in the heart. But, alas! Satan is also there, ready to devour me at every step, and contest me from God.

When you are struck by other people’s suffering, and the contraction of their souls, so that you are induced to pray for them with a pitying and contrite heart, pray to God to have mercy upon them and to forgive them their sins, as you would pray for the forgiveness of your own sins— that is, implore God with tears to pardon them; likewise pray for the salvation of others as you would pray for your own salvation. If you attain to this and make it a habit, you will receive from God an abundance of spiritual gifts, the gifts of the Holy Ghost, Who loves the soul that cares for the salvation of others, because He Himself, the most Holy Spirit, wishes to save us all in every possible way, if only we do not oppose Him, and do not harden our hearts. “The Spirit Itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.”²⁵

We often hear from others, or sometimes read in the works of others, what God has placed in our mind and heart, what we ourselves have cherished— that is, we often meet our favourite thoughts in others, and it seems to us as though they had been taken away from us, as though they had been new ones and formed our own exclusive property. Presumptuous thoughts! What? Is there not only one God, the Lord of all intellects? Is not His Spirit in all who seek for truth? Have we not one sole Enlightener, “which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.”²⁶ Glory to the one God, Glory to Him Who loves all and bountifully bestows upon all His spiritual and bodily gifts! Glory to Him who is no respecter of persons and Who reveals the mysteries of His love, omnipotence and wisdom unto babes!²⁷

God’s saints are near to believing hearts and, like the truest and kindest of friends, are ready in a moment to help the faithful and pious who call upon them with faith and love. We have for the most part to send, and have sometimes to wait long for earthly helpers, whilst we have not to send for nor wait long for spiritual helpers: the faith of Him who prays can place them close to his very heart in a moment, and he will as speedily receive through faith full spiritual help. In saying this, I speak by experience; by this I mean the frequent deliverance from affliction of heart through the intercession and patronage of the saints, and especially through the intercession of Our Lady, the Holy Virgin Mary. Probably some would say that this is the action of simple and firm faith, and a determined assurance in our deliverance from affliction, and not the intercession of the saints for us before God. No, it is not so. How can this be proved? It can be proved by the fact that if I do not call upon the saints known to me in hearty prayer, without making any distinction, if I do not see them with my spiritual vision, then I shall obtain no help, however great assurance I may have felt of being saved without their help. I recognise, I feel clearly, that I receive help through the names of those saints upon whom I have called, because of my lively faith in them. This happens just as everything happens in the usual order of earthly things. First, I see my helpers by means of earnest faith; then, seeing them, I pray to them also with my whole heart, invisibly but intelligibly to myself; after this, having received invisible help in quite an imperceptible manner, but sensibly to my soul, I simultaneously receive a strong conviction that this help has been obtained from them, just as a sick man, cured by a doctor, is convinced that he has been cured precisely by that doctor, and not by anyone else; that his illness has passed away not by itself, but through the help of this particular doctor. All this comes to pass so simply that it is only necessary to have eyes in order to see.

I am a man — and the grace, the truth and the righteousness of God are continually working within me. It is God Who at one time cherishes and comforts me, and at another punishes and afflicts me with sorrows for any inward motion of the soul adverse to Him. But the earth is full of men like me. Therefore, in them also God manifests His mercy, truth and righteousness, as in myself. “He worketh all in all.”²⁸

Let no one think that sin is something unimportant — no, sin is a terrible evil, that destroys the soul, both now and in the future life. The sinner in the future life will be bound hand and foot (meaning the soul) and cast into outer darkness. As the Saviour said: “Bind him hand and foot and cast him into outer darkness;”²⁹ that is, he entirely loses the freedom of his spiritual powers, which, being created for free activity, suffer through this a kind of overwhelming inactivity for every good work: in his soul the sinner recognises his powers and at the same time he feels that these powers are bound by unbreakable chains — “he shall be holden with the cords of his sin.”³⁰ To this must be added the terrible torment arising from the very sins themselves, from the consciousness of our own foolishness during the earthly life, and from the image of the angry Creator. Even in this present life sin binds and destroys the soul. What God-fearing man does not know what sorrow and oppression strike his soul, what torturing, burning fire rages in his breast when he has sinned? But besides binding and destroying the soul as it does temporarily, sin also destroys it eternally if we do not repent here of our sins and our iniquities from our whole heart. Here is also a proof by experience that sin destroys the soul temporarily and eternally. If it happens to any God-fearing person to go to sleep without having repented of the sin, or the sins, he has committed during the day, and which have tormented his soul, these torments will accompany him the whole night, until he has heartily repented of his sin, and washed his heart with tears (this is also from experience). The torments of sin will wake him up from sweet sleep, because his soul will be oppressed, bound a prisoner by sin. Now, suppose that the man who has gone to sleep in any sin and is tormented by it, is overtaken during the night by death: is it not clear that his soul will go into the other life in torment, and that as after death there is no place for repentance, he will be tormented there according to the measure of his sins? The Holy Scriptures also testify to this.³¹

Watch yourselves — your passions especially — in your home life, where they appear freely, like moles in a safe place. Outside our own home, some of our passions are usually screened by other more decorous passions, whilst at home there is no possibility of driving away these black moles that undermine the integrity of our soul.

For the soul of the pious, God-fearing man there is an invisible spiritual intercourse with God. Like a father or a stern teacher, the Lord at one time approves, at another condemns our thoughts, desires and intentions; at one time He says that this is good, and that bad. He rewards us for the good and punishes us for the evil; and all this is at once evident to the soul.

Begin to fulfil the commandments relating to small things, and you will come to fulfil the commandments relating to great things: small things everywhere lead to great ones. Begin by fulfilling the commandment of fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays, or the tenth commandment relating to evil thoughts and desires, and you will eventually learn to fulfil all the commandments. “He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much.”³²

A man that only dreams of this perishable life and does not think of the eternal, heavenly life! Consider — what is your transitory life? It is a constant laying in of fuel (meaning food) in order that the fire of our life may continue to burn and should not grow feeble, in order that our house (meaning the body) should keep warm, and that the continually changing life of our body should be restored by means of the nourishing parts of the organs of other living creatures, who are deprived of life in order to keep up the life of our body. Indeed, what an insignificant cobweb your life is, man! You are obliged twice daily to strengthen the interior of your body by means of supports to keep it sound (that is, you are obliged to fortify yourself twice every day by food and drink), and every night, daily, you must lock up your soul in your body, shutting up all the sensations of the body, like the shutters of a house, in order that the soul may not live outside the body, but within it, giving it warmth and life. What a cobweb your life is, and how easy it is to tear it asunder! Be humble and reverent before the Life eternal!

Truth is the foundation of everything that has been created. Let truth be also the foundation of all your works (both inward and outward), and especially the foundation of your prayers. Let all your life, all your works, all your thoughts, and all your desires be founded upon truth.

Take the trouble to spend only one single day according to God’s commandments, and you will see yourself, you will feel by your own heart, how good it is to fulfil God’s will (and God’s will in relation to us is our life, our eternal blessedness). Love God with all your heart at least as much as you love your father, your mother, and your benefactors; value with all your strength His love and His benefits to you (go over them mentally in your heart, think how He gave you existence and with it all good things, how endlessly long He bears with your sins, how endlessly He forgives you them; for the sake of your hearty repentance, by virtue of the suffering and death upon the Cross of His onlybegotten Son, what blessedness He has promised you in eternity, if you are faithful to Him); enumerate besides His mercies, which are endlessly great and manifold. Furthermore, love every man as yourself — that is, do not wish him anything that you would not wish for yourself; think, feel for him just as you would think and feel for your own self; do not wish to see in him anything that you do not wish to see in yourself; do not let your memory keep in it any evil caused to you by others, in the same way as you would wish that the evil done by yourself should be forgotten by others; do not intentionally imagine either in yourself or in another anything guilty or impure; believe others to be as well-intentioned as yourself, in general, if you do not see clearly that they are evilly disposed; do unto them as you would to yourself, or even do not do unto them as you would not do unto yourself, and then you will see what you will obtain in your heart—what peace, what blessedness! You will be in paradise before reaching it — that is, before the paradise in heaven you will be in the paradise on earth. “The kingdom of God is within you,”³³ says the Lord. “He that dwelleth in love,” teaches the Apostle, “dwelleth in God and God in him.”³⁴

“Worship God in spirit and in truth.” In truth, for instance, when you say, “Hallowed be Thy Name.” Do you really desire that God’s name should be hallowed by the good works of others and by your own? When you say, “Thy Kingdom come,” do you indeed desire the coming of God’s Kingdom? Do you wish to be the abode of the Spirit of God, and not the abode of sin? Would you not more willingly live in sin? When you say, “Thy will be done,” do you not rather seek your own will than that of God? Ay, it is so! When you say, “Give us this day our daily bread,” do you not say otherwise in your heart, “I do not need to ask this of Thee — I have enough without asking; let the poor ask for this”? Or else, do we not greedily seek for more, and are not satisfied with the little, or with that which God has given us? We do not thank God for what we have as we ought to. In the prayer: “And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us,” do you not think in yourself: “God knows that I am not such a great sinner. It seems to me that I do not live any worse than others, and there is no need for me to ask that my trespasses or sins should be forgiven”? Or else when you thus pray is there not any displeasure or anger in your heart against anyone? — for if so, you lie shamelessly to God in your prayer. You say, “And lead us not into temptation,” but do you not yourself rush impetuously into every sin, without even being tempted? You say, “Deliver us from evil,” but do you not live in friendship with the Devil or with evil of every kind, of which the Devil is chief? Beware, then, that your tongue is not in discordance with your heart; see that you do not lie to God in your prayer. Always keep this in view when you say the Lord’s Prayer, as well as when you say other prayers. Watch whether your heart agrees with everything that your tongue pronounces.

The purer the heart is, the larger it is, and the more able it is to find room within it for a greater number of beloved ones; whilst the more sinful it is, the more contracted it becomes, and the less number of beloved can it find room for, because it is limited by self-love, and that love is a false one; we love ourselves in objects unworthy of the immortal soul — in silver and gold, in adultery, in drunkenness, and such like.

If God communicates an invincible, incomprehensible Divine power to the Life-giving Cross, then why should it be wonderful that He communicates a similar incomprehensible power, in order to regenerate our nature, to the most pure, terrible and Life-giving Sacrament of His Body and Blood? O, how great art Thou, Lord! and how wonderful are Thy works! How endless is Thy omnipotence! Whatever is touched by Thy power and Thy grace becomes life-giving.

If you wish to correct anyone from his faults, do not think of correcting him solely by your own means: you would only do harm by your own passions, for instance, by pride and by the irritability arising from it; “but cast thy burden upon the Lord,”³⁵ and pray to God “Who trieth the hearts and reins,”³⁶ with all your heart, that He Himself may enlighten the mind and heart of that man. If He sees that your prayer breathes love, and that it really comes from the depth of your heart, He will infallibly fulfil the desire of your heart, and you yourself will soon tell, seeing the change that has taken place in him for whom you have prayed, that it is the work of “the right hand of God, the most High.”³⁷

Who is it that so wisely, delicately and beautifully arranges and transforms the ugly — that is, the sightless, formless substance of the earth into flowers? Who gives them their wonderful forms? Creator, grant that we may salute in the flowers Thy wisdom, Thy goodness, Thine omnipotence.

Our inward disposition, even when unexpressed by outward signs, strongly affects the inward disposition of others. This very often happens, though it is not everyone that notices it. Supposing that I am angry, or that I have unkind thoughts of another; he feels it, and begins likewise to have unkind thoughts about me. There is a certain communication between our souls, besides our bodily senses. As regards the action of our soul upon others through the senses, it would seem that one soul can act wonderfully upon another man through the sense of sight, even when he is at a distance from us, but as long as he is accessible to our sight, and is alone at the time when we direct our gaze upon him. Thus by the eye we can place another man in an awkward position, and confuse him. It has happened to me more than once to look fixedly out of the window of my house at the people passing by, and they, as if drawn by some power to the very window from which I was looking, looked round at the window, seeking to find a human face in it; whilst others became confused, suddenly quickened their pace, and set themselves to rights, readjusting their neckerchiefs, hats, etc.; there is some kind of mystery in this.

Observe the difference between the presence of the life-giving spirit and the presence of the spirit that deadens and destroys your soul. When there are good thoughts in your soul you feel happy and at ease; when peace and joy are in your heart, then the spirit of good, the Holy Ghost, is within you; whilst when evil thoughts or evil motions of the heart arise within you, you feel ill at ease and oppressed; when you are inwardly troubled, then the spirit of evil, the crafty spirit, is within you. When the spirit of evil is in us, then, together with oppression of heart and disturbance, we generally feel a difficulty in drawing near to God in our heart, because the evil spirit binds our soul, and will not let it raise itself to God. The evil spirit is a spirit of doubt, unbelief — of passions, oppression, grief and disturbance; whilst the spirit of good is one of undoubting faith, of virtue, of spiritual freedom and breadth — a spirit of peace and joy. Know by these tokens when the Spirit of God is within you, and when the spirit of evil, and, as often as possible, raise your grateful heart to the most Holy Spirit that gives you life and light, and flee with all your power from doubt, unbelief, and the passions through which the evil serpent, the thief and destroyer of our souls, creeps in.

Sometimes in the lives of pious Christians there are hours when God seems to have entirely abandoned them — hours of the power of darkness; and then the man from the depths of his heart cries unto God: “Why hast Thou turned Thy face from me, Thou everlasting Light? For a strange darkness has covered me, the darkness of the accursed evil Satan, and has obscured all my soul. It is very grievous for the soul to be in his torturing darkness, which gives a presentiment of the torments and darkness of hell. Turn me, O Saviour, to the light of Thy commandments and make straight my spiritual way, I fervently pray Thee.”

If you do not yourself experience the action of the wiles of the evil spirit, you will not know, and will not appreciate and value as you ought, the benefits bestowed upon you by the Holy Spirit: not knowing the spirit that destroys, you will not know the Spirit that gives life. Only by means of direct contrasts of good and evil, of life and death, can we clearly know the one and the other: if you are not subjected to distresses and dangers of bodily or spiritual death, you will not truly know the Saviour, the Life-Giver, who delivers us from these distresses and from spiritual death. Jesus Christ is the consolation, the joy, the life, the peace and the breadth of our hearts! Glory to God, the Most Wise and Most Gracious, that He allows the spirit of evil and death to tempt and torment us! Otherwise we should not have sufficiently appreciated and valued the comfort of grace, the comfort of the Holy Ghost the Comforter, the Life-Giving!

The Lord God, as Life itself and the superabundance of Life, everlastingly the same, as has been said by St. Gregory the Theologian, moves and remains in the Three Persons —that is, God is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. You ask how there can be Three Persons in God. I answer: I do not understand how; but I know that it must be so and cannot be otherwise. You further ask: why is the Third Person in God called the Spirit, and why is He a separate Person, when, without this, God is a Spirit? I answer: God’s Spirit is called Spirit in relation to His creatures. God breathed through the Third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Ghost, and there appeared at His call an innumerable multitude of spirits. “All the host of them by the breathing of His mouth.”³⁸ He breathed through His Spirit into the human structure, “and man became a living soul;”³⁹ and from this breath men were born and will yet be born until the end of the world, according to the commandment: “Be fruitful and multiply.”⁴⁰ If by His Holy Spirit God has created such separate individual creatures, then how can the Holy Ghost be other than a separate Person or an individual creating Being Himself? “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is everyone that is born of the Spirit.”⁴¹ You see that the Holy Ghost is called the Spirit as one of the Persons of the Holy Trinity. If there are innumerable multitudes of created individual spirits, then why should God Himself remain without a spirit, as without One of the Persons of the Trinity, separate and independent? Is not the Son the Wisdom of the Father, personal and living, indispensable to God? Look upon yourself. You are a creature; and even in you there is such wisdom that many wonder at it; sometimes you even create wonderful things, and you are extolled as the creator of these things. And yet this is only you, an insignificant, infirm creature. Then consider how can there not be a personal Wisdom in God? — how can God be a Creator without His own Living, Independent Wisdom? Look upon everything in the world, how wise everything is! — how in the smallest things you may notice the amazing wisdom and the wonderful work of the All-Wise thought with its marvellous accuracy and irreproachable neatness! How can God be without a Personal Wisdom? Consider, how can God, Who has created a multitude of reasonable, individual, wise, living creatures, not engender for Himself a Personal Wisdom? Is it possible? Is it reasonable? Is it in accordance with all the other perfections of the Creator? Thus in God there must be a Personal Wisdom, or the Personal Word of the Father, as well as the Life-giving Holy Ghost, Who proceedeth from the Father and Who resteth in the Son. In you there is breath, material and impersonal, while in God, as the Life Itself, there is a Personal Spirit, not diffusible, but single and giving life to everything.

The unnatural mastery of the flesh over the spirit is expressed, amongst other things, by the fact that the spirit is as though buried within the flesh, and is bound by it. This is especially visible when the matter relates to God’s service; then the man mostly draws near to God with his lips only — that is, with his flesh, falsely, and not with his heart, not with his spirit, and thus does not worship Him truly. Indeed, we often so live as though we had no spirit in us, and the highest degree of human depravity is manifested by the fact that the spirit is completely stifled and the man becomes as though he were flesh alone. “My Spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh.”⁴² Look more closely into the matter of men’s reverence for God; you will see how in this respect the flesh endeavours to dominate over the spirit. In the saints we see the dominance of the spirit over the flesh, because they live by the spirit and see the spirit throughout the whole world, the Wisdom, the Omnipotence, and Goodness of God; they see in every phenomenon, in every work, the impress of the spirit. In sensual men the dominance of the flesh over the spirit is shown by their only seeing that which represents itself to their senses; in fact, as the saying is, they do not see beyond their nose. The carnal, sensual man looks at the world and sees it like an unreasoning animal: he does not marvel at the Wisdom, the everlasting Power and the Goodness of the Creator, as shown in it; when he reads a holy book, he sees in it only the letters; when he prays he says the prayers mechanically, without penetrating into their spirit: he does not know the art of worshipping in spirit and in truth. The flesh predominates also in men’s education. (Look, are pupils in the schools taught that which concerns the Christian more than anything — Prayer? Are they taught to see God?) The flesh will prevail in the world until the end of ages. “When the Son of man cometh, shall He find faith on the earth?”⁴³ And unbelief is the work of the flesh, as it was in the beginning of the world.

It is pleasing to God when a man begins to notice His action in the heart, because He is the Light and the Truth, whilst the Devil especially fears this, being himself darkness and falsehood; and the darkness cannot come to the light for fear its doings shall be revealed. The Devil is powerful only through darkness, deceit, and falsehood; reveal his falsehood, place it before the light, and all will disappear. He induces men into every passion through deceit, and thus he lulls them to sleep and prevents their seeing things in their true light. The Devil’s covering lies over many things.

Why does not the sinful soul obtain remission of its sins before it feels all their foolishness, all their destructiveness, and all their falsity from the whole heart? Because the heart is our soul; as it committed the sins, finding them at the time pleasant and plausible, therefore it must now repent of them and recognise them as leading to destruction and entirely wrong. This repentance is accomplished painfully in the heart, as the desire to sin is also usually in the heart.

Do not be disturbed when malice rages within you and strives to discharge itself in words of bitterness, but command it to be silent and to die within you. Otherwise, being accustomed to see your obedience and to flow from your lips, it will master you. As water standing behind an earth dam, and finding an aperture, washes it wider and wider and filters through it, if we do not strengthen the dam, or strengthen it insufficiently, at last, with growing weakness on our part and with repeated efforts, the water gets through with greater and greater force, so that at last it becomes very difficult, and even impossible to stop it; so also with malice hidden in the heart of man: if we let it pierce through once, twice, and thrice, it will pour out more and more powerfully, and may at last break through and overflow your dam. Learn that in the soul there are waters of evil; as has been said by the Psalmist: “The waters are come in unto my soul.”⁴⁴

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