Christ has ascended! Yes, I know I should have been inside; it is a Friday so we
are answering comments, and usually I'm inside in the monastery when I do this
video, but it's so beautiful outside and I'm not sure this weather will last for
long, so I decided to just come back to my favourite office by the ocean and
answer your comments from here. I've struggled a bit this time to decide
which of the comments I should approach. I've struggled simply because there's
been quite a good number of serious heartfelt comments, and I will try to
answer them at once, in a way, by addressing the underlying question there, which
has to do with positioning our hearts in the right place. If you want to skip
through this video, the first part will be about loving Christ over our own sin,
and that defines who we are spiritually; whereas the second part will be--oh, may
God help me--in some way or another about children, because there have been
comments and I have received emails as well and Facebook messages from parents
worried about the future, the spiritual future of their children.
And although children are not my particular favourite topic, as most of you
know, I do feel a responsibility to respond to what you want me to respond,
and I do trust that Christ will teach me where my own experience and lack of
wisdom cannot help me. Some of you, Larry for instance, have asked about the
importance of placing our heart in the right place, so to say, and I do
understand these comments, and they are perfectly correct: We do follow our
hearts, through our whole life we do follow our hearts, and Christ himself was
very much aware that we do this, and he did
warn us about positioning our heart in the right place, you know, 'Your heart will
be where your treasure is'. If your treasure lies with Christ then, your
heart will belong to Christ as well. If your treasure on the other hand belongs
to the world--and by the world I mean something negative about this temporary
life we we have to survive until we get into the kingdom--then of course your
heart is going to be linked very much with the world and the things of the
world. We do tend to define ourselves and to understand ourselves using the
language of our hearts. I am who I am is something that has become almost a motto
of our generation, and for many people, for most people really, this means that I
am whoever my sin, whoever my weakness or my passion has created me, has turned me
into being, and that is of course a way in which we define ourselves through, as
we were saying in the previous video, through our own dust: We take the lowest
part of our being, we take the part of our being which is furthest away from
Christ and we allow that part of our being to define ourselves: This is who we
are, I am this sin, I am this passion. St. John Chrysostom, whom I love so much
as any priest does, St. John Chrysostom writes somewhere that all a confessor
has to do regarding his spiritual children is to help them in any way
possible, to help them to fall in love with Christ. If we love Christ over our
own sin, then even without us directly fighting or addressing the sin, in time
as our love for Christ increases and takes over our heart, in time the
sinfulness in us will just wither away. There are some things in the Desert
Fathers that have helped me to understand this as well: They say that
our passions are like scorpions or snakes: If you keep
poking at them, if you keep approaching them, and if you just expose yourself to
them, of course you're going to get bitten; but if you manage to put them in
a corner of the house, or in a bottle, or in a jar and just leave them there
untouched, unfed, they will die out, they will die out in time, and they are going
to have no power over you anymore. Other times they compare our sins and our
passions with just old clothes, which if you leave your own wardrobe for a long
time, in years or sometimes in decades they will just turn into dust they will
rot away and fall back into being dust. The point is that we shouldn't touch
them we shouldn't give them strength. But as you fall in love with God, as you
fall in love with Christ, that thing which feeds the image of God in you, that
energy takes over, and you no longer focus on the sinfulness in you, you focus
on what is good in you, and almost without fighting, almost without opposing
the sin in you, simply by loving Christ more and more, and getting yourself more
and more in the direction in which your heart knows that Christ takes you, the
distance between you and your sinfulness becomes greater. If you think about it in
a geographical or visual sort of way--I tend to think visually a lot--if you've
got Christ over here and your sin over here, you are in between like my face. If
you if you're in between initially, the closer you get to your sinfulness and
you allow your sinfulness to define who you are, the further away you get from
Christ, and sometimes what happens is that you get so close to your sinfulness
that Christ comes out of the frame--you can't see my hand anymore--but the same process
can be applied the other way around: If by the grace of God and with the help of
your spiritual father you learn to love God more and more, and you approach
Christ more and more, you begin to just see yourself as his image more and more,
what happens is that eventually the sin is going to leave the frame of
your life--see you can't see my left hand anymore--though it is a silly way of
explaining it, but it works, it works for me at least and I pray it works for you
as well. You can fight you're sin if God gave you the strength, you can of course
use everything in your power and you can apply all the advice of the Holy Fathers
to oppose your sin directly. I'm not saying don't do that,
I'm simply owning up to the fact that in our generation that happens very
infrequently, and even when we do try it our attempts are rather pathetic.
So, I think for us living today a combination of the two would work best:
Oppose sin as much as you can, but at the same time do your absolute best to
understand how beautiful, and how loving, and how kind God is to you and to your
heart, and in that way your heart will fall in love with Christ. So on the one
hand you are going to oppose your sin and put some distance between you and
your sin, but really for us I do believe that the driving force will be to just
fall in love with Christ, and then that will make us be closer to him and
further away from our sin. And this is where what I wanted to tell you about
children comes in. Children don't know much about themselves, their own
understanding of who they are, and of their purpose and meaning in life is quite
limited, as it is absolutely normal it should be. They simply
the experience and the wisdom that comes with life to see themselves between
these two poles. Their self-understanding is extremely limited, and because of that,
because of that, until they grow, they are prone to making all sorts of mistakes. So
what I'm trying to say really, is that one shouldn't panic when you see your
beautiful child whom you've tried so hard to educate and instruct in the
teachings of Christ, and you've tried to help them love the church, and you've
taken them to church, and you've prayed with them, when you see all of that come
to almost nothing and passions taking over them, I wouldn't really panic;
I would patiently wait, and fight on their behalf by praying. Pray for them as
the adult that you are, but don't expect them at the very beginning of their
lives to behave in a way that you couldn't behave at the beginning of your
own spiritual life. We've all made the mistakes that they are making, and I do
get that it would be so beautiful, so good, such a blessing for them not to
repeat our own mistakes, but the reality is that without those mistakes they
cannot grow. I'm not saying that sin is unavoidable, or that mistakes are
unavoidable, of course there are Saints in the world today as they've always
been, who do not sin to the extent which we do, most of us; but for most of us, for
99% of us and for our children, sin is part of growth, and it's like you
telling them constantly not to touch something that is hot because they are
going to get burned; eventually, whether you see them do it or not, they are going
to touch that thing, and although it's painful for them and
although it leaves a mark on their fingertips, they do need to do that,
because otherwise later in life they lack a sort of spiritual vaccination.
They need to learn, and for most children they learn through experience, through
their own experience, and their own mistakes much more than what we tell
them. What you can do, and you can do so much, is primarily trust Christ, trust his
love. If he loved you, and if he took you out of your own fall, of your own sin,
and if he showed you a way forward to him, why doubt that God will love your
own children, just as much if not more? Trust God is the most important thing.
Then also trust his ability to do things that are impossible for us. 'Yes, if I were
born today, I would be completely smashed, crushed under the weight of the
sin that is so readily available in the world, it would be impossible for me
to survive', said I thinking through the limitations of my own mind and my own
experience; but if I were to be born today, God would work differently in me,
so that I survive today, not yesterday. Then of course you can pray. Fight on
their behalf through prayer, don't become one of those annoying, nagging
parents that keep on telling their children to do nothing except breathe,
and eat, and go to church, because it's not going to work. I'm not saying that
the instinct is wrong, I'm not saying that the teaching is wrong, I am just
saying that it's not going to work, and in most cases it has the contrary effect:
the more you push them in a direction the further away they are going to go
from that direction. And again it is in in the logic of this
fallen world in which we exist. I did the same, most probably you did the same, of
course they are going to do the same. Learn from your own experience, learn
from what worked for you, think of the people who inspired you when you were
young, when you were a teenager, a young adult, what worked for you? what saying?
what advice? which person? what was the approach of that person? and try to act
in the same way towards your children, and always always prioritise prayer. If
there is one thing you must as a parent, you must pass on to them, is a good heart.
Not so much following rules of fasting, and of prayer, and all of that: that will
come in their own time. But while they are still very young and impressionable,
the thing you must create in them is a feeling of love, and compassion, and
oneness with the weakest in humanity. It will be much more difficult when they
grow to be teenagers to influence their hearts, but while they are still young
children you can teach them how to love. You don't need to teach them any rules,
you don't need to teach them anything else, except how to love, how to have a
beautiful, kind, loving heart towards the people who need it. Teach your children
to have compassion to the weakest among us, teach your children to love those who
are fallen, teach your children not to be judgmental, teach your children to love
and try to feed the hungry, and to help those who need help, prepare food with
them for those who have no food, and then take them and show them that you
yourself care for those who are homeless, and who need your help, and make a
sandwich with them every, I don't know, every Thursday because it
is St. Nicholas's day, and take that sandwich with your child and feed
somebody is homeless, go and show your children how other children are living
in orphanages. Try to educate their hearts over their minds, try to grow the
love in their hearts rather than a sense of fear in their minds, because as we
were discussing at the beginning of this video,
love will drive them in the right direction, whether or not they want it.
Later on, if they have love in their hearts, and if that love takes them
closer to their brothers and sisters who need their help, if they love their
brother, they will be obeying to Christ's commandments, whether or not they realise
it, and this good heart, this instinct of their heart to love and to help the weak
will eventually kick in, and take them as far as to help them reach Christ.
Yes, their teenage years will make them fall; yes, as young adults they will make
mistakes; but if you put love in their hearts, that love will take them far away
from the sin and very, very close to Christ, in the right time when Christ
knows that he can work in their hearts. Don't despair, have trust in God, pray
for them, and feed the love in their hearts. That love is more important than
anything else. I think it's enough for today. Thank you
for all the help you've given us. Thank you for subscribing to this channel, and
thank you for continuing to support us. I feel embarrassed to keep reminding you
but my retreats to the US have been cancelled, and our pilgrimages
this summer to the Isles have been cancelled, so really, financially we are
entirely dependent on your donations, and I will include a link in the description
of this video just below the video, if you can and if you have the heart to do
so, please support us, it matters more than I can tell you. And may God bless
you beyond your wildest hopes, for your support, for your prayers, for your love.
May we be saved together, dear ones. Christ has ascended!