With the way that we think and the way we act, we, the Christians of today, ultimately become rather futile and aren’t able to reach the point we desire to. We don’t feel that our soul is being freed, is being healed, or that it is becoming holy. We don’t feel the grace of God in the very depths of our being, in the way that God promised us. And this is not due to ignorance. Certainly we have unawareness, but it isn’t just a theme of unawareness. This happens, principally because after the fall man turned towards himself. Before the fall, man moved towards God without the slightest reservation and without being impeded by anything. His entire being moved towards God, as God was the center. God was everything. After the fall, however, man left God, and turning towards himself, made himself God. This, chiefly, is sin, and something which in our days has perhaps reached its worst point. Today, even a little child can say: “I don’t agree. I’m not doing what you say. I want to do what I want to do. I’m going to do what I like”.
Nobody is interested in the question: “What does God say?”, or the answer: “That we do that which God says.” People don’t think like this.
And naturally, children are informed of the will of God by their parents, their teachers, by grown-ups, and generally all of us are informed of the will of God by the Church. And if we sometimes show that we only allegedly respect the Church, only allegedly respect our elders and only allegedly take into account those who know more, this happens from some interest: not because deep within our soul we believe that, the more we are loosed from ourselves and give ourselves to the will of God, the more we are freed from our chief enemy, who is ourselves, and the more we become proper human beings.
And we believe who knows what we discovered and what great people we will become if we think and act exactly as we’re used to thinking and acting, while doing this, man sinks all the more into turmoil, i.e., into the dark basement of his soul. For this reason also we see marginal human beings (those using drugs or whatever else) having strange ideas, doing strange acts, their whole life having no relation to logic.
It is there that we see the extreme, though in some ways all human beings are like that.
Holy Hesychasterion “The Nativity of Theotokos” Publications.
Archimandrite Symeon Kragiopoulos
