When God made human beings, he put in them a kind of divine faculty, more alive and splendid than a spark, to illuminate the spirit and show it the difference between good and evil. It is the conscience with that law which is part of its nature. The patriarchs and all the saints were able to please God by obeying the law of conscience. But people trampled on it and muddied it with their sinfulness.
Looking carefully at the liturgical wealth of our Orthodox Church, we note endless points in which watchfulness is mentioned or commented on: in the daily sacred services (Midnight Office, Orthros, Hours, Vespers, Compline), in the prayers of the Divine Liturgy, in the Great Canon, in the hymnology of the Octoechos, the Triodion and the Menaia. The worship of our Orthodox Church is a profoundly contrite worship, a worship of returning into our true, deeper self.
The antirrhetic method requires that we first observe our thoughts precisely, that we note whether they make us sick or healthy, whether they lift us up or drag us down, whether they correspond to the Spirit of God. Evagrius describes the process of testing thoughts with the image of the gatekeeper: “Be a gatekeeper of your heart and let no thought in without questioning it. Examine every single thought one by one and ask it:
A woman whose husband was an alcoholic had feelings of hatred toward him; she even thought of killing him. She accused herself of being thoroughly evil for even thinking such things. This happens to many people who blame themselves for their negative thoughts. The monks are more compassionate on this score. They say that the thought isn’t evil; it has a meaning. I just have to find the strength that lies within it. In the
By Grace Brooks I don’t know many languages, but in each one, there are words that I wish we had in English. The same is true in different dialects (for instance, I’m sorry that the word “y’all” isn’t commonly used by non-Southerners). But that desire to co-opt vocabulary is never more pronounced than when I consider some of the Orthodox words that I have read or heard. There are words from the Orthodox lexicon that
Conversations with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew by Olivier Clement Behind the “New Age” movement one can also discern a rediscovery of India, and particularly of Buddhism. Many westerners today report that they find true serenity in Buddhism. They learn that there exists a dharma (to use the Sanskrit word), a path of salvation, a world order; one could even call it Wisdom, almost in the Biblical sense of the word. And this dharma, not unlike the
We could say that the Lord’s entire Sermon on the Mount (18) is a neptic homily where our Theanthropic Saviour pinpoints for us the root of the passions, but at the same time He plants the root of the true spiritual life. This is where the work of watchfulness is to be found: where the finest pulsations of the heart are, the beats which move and direct everything: thoughts, words, memories, feelings, actions, and deeds.
While in sadness we react passively to our unfulfilled wishes, anger is an active response. Evagrius also identifies anger with a demon. For him anger clearly shows how humans can be utterly dominated by another force. “Anger is the most vehement of the passions. It is a welling up of the excitable part of the soul directed against someone who has injured us or by whom we believe ourselves injured. It unceasingly irritates our souls
Watchfulness and vigilance in thoughts, in feelings, and in our heart is the work of all Christians, and Holy Scripture itself has become the first source of inspiration and valuation of watchfulness. And Holy Scripture does not address monastics only. It addresses all Christians. If watchfulness be the lot of the monastics- ascetics because of the conditions of the physical and spiritual environment in which they live, it is equally true that the faithful, within
Evagrius correlates the emotional realm of human beings to the three logismoi of sadness, of anger, and of acedia. “Sadness can sometimes arise when a person’s wishes go unfulfilled. Sometimes it also appears in the company of anger. If it arises as a consequence of needs and wishes that have not been met, it usually occurs in this way: such persons think first of all of their homes, of their parents, or of the life
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