Бесстрастие

Premature dispassion is dangerous! It is dangerous to receive the pleasure of Divine grace prematurely. Supernatural gifts can destroy an ascetic who has not learned weakness through his falls, who is inexperienced in life, inexperienced in the fight against sinful thoughts, who is not thoroughly acquainted with the cunning and malice of demons, and with the adaptability of human nature. A person is free to choose good and evil, even if this person were a vessel of Divine grace: he can abuse the very grace of God. Because of it, he can exalt himself above his neighbors, because of it, he can be subject to arrogance, the consequence of arrogance is usually negligence, weakening in the feat, abandonment of it. Following negligence, carnal lusts suddenly and furiously rise up in the soul and body of the sanctified, carrying them away like a stormy stream, casting them into the abyss of fornication, often into the very death of their soul. “God, a lover of mankind, who wants all people to be saved and to achieve the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:4), allowed His servants and His beloved to struggle with external and internal sorrows throughout their earthly journey. The struggle with passions and the suffering of those vegetating from this struggle are incomparably more painful than all temptations from the outside. The languor and feat into which a Christian is elevated by an invisible internal struggle, their meaning goes back to the feat of the martyrs. “Give blood and receive the Spirit,” we repeat the saying of the fathers who have experienced this struggle. The yoke of such feat is borne only by the careful fulfillers of the commandments of the Gospel, only by the true servants of Christ... The entire edifice of salvation is based on the knowledge and awareness of weakness. Those who, being under the power of passions, demand dispassion from themselves act very wrongly. With such an incorrect demand on themselves, which stems from an incorrect concept of themselves, they come into extraordinary confusion when the sin living in them manifests itself in some way. They become despondent and hopeless. Because of their incorrect view of themselves, the manifestation of sin seems to them to be something unusual, something happening out of order. Meanwhile, the manifestation of sin in thoughts, feelings, words and deeds (here we are not talking about mortal sins or voluntary sins, but about hobbies) is a logical, natural, necessary manifestation. In a state of dispassion, a person achieves pure love and his thought begins to constantly dwell with God and in God. The soul, feeling the overshadowing of the spirit, seeing itself as a conqueror of sinful thoughts and dreams, begins to feel the inexplicable joy of salvation. This joy has no resemblance to ordinary human joy, which is born only from vanity, is composed of self-satisfaction, when a person flatters himself, or when others flatter him, or when earthly success flatters him. Spiritual joy, which announces salvation, is full of humility, full of thanksgiving to God, is accompanied by abundant and constant tears, unceasing prayers, is not satisfied with condemnation and humiliation of oneself, and is poured out in confession To God, in the praise of God, is marked by mortification to the world. She is a foretaste of eternal life! She is the living knowledge of God, which mysteriously cries out: “the voice of joy and salvation in the villages of the righteous: the right hand of the Lord has shown strength. The right hand of the Lord has exalted me, the right hand of the Lord has shown strength. I will not die, but I will live and tell the works of the Lord. The Lord punished me by teaching me, but did not put me to death. Open the gates of righteousness for me: having entered them, I will confess to the Lord. This is the gate of the Lord: the righteous will enter into it. I confess to You, for You heard me and You were my salvation” (Ps. 117:15-21). The Gate of the Lord is grace-filled humility. When these gates of Divine truth open before the mind, he ceases to condemn his neighbor, to be angry with him, to blame both him and circumstances, ceases to justify himself, recognizes the incomprehensible truth of God in everything that happens, and therefore rejects his own truth as an abomination. Through these gates, in confession of the countless blessings of God and his many sins, washed with tears of repentance and tenderness, a person enters with pure prayer and spiritual vision before the face of God. Adam, created dispassionately from the earth, Eve, borrowed dispassionately from Adam, were dispassionate in accordance with the dispassionate beginning of their existence. They were so dispassionate and innocent that with close fellowship and constant contact with each other, they did not need clothing, they did not even understand their nakedness, despite the fact that they constantly saw it (see Gen. 2:25). You might be interested in: