The Holy Spirit - “Everything as it really is”
April 18, 2008 by kevinburt
Tomorrow, the Saturday of Lazarus, several of our good friends will be chrismated, receiving the “gift of the seal of the Holy Spirit.” My own chrismation last November is one of the most memorable parts of my reception into Christ by the Church. Hearing our priest say, “the gift of the seal…” as he anointed my head, my mouth, my hands, etc., made an eternal impression on me. In Orthodoxy, we have all found that God’s “gift” is repentance, which leads to Holiness. The Holy Spirit “convicts the world of sin.” Far from the merely charismatic, giddy and excitement oriented “Wholly (lacking) Spirit” of much of the “Christian world,” in Holy Orthodoxy, the Holy Spirit offers us the grace to truly make us holy, which includes a stripping away of our passions, a process always painful, but always joyous.
Pray for our friends who receive this seal tomorrow in their Holy Chrismation. It truly is a gift that is all the more blessed the more it destroys our flesh, as St. Innocent of Irkutsk clearly noted:
But when the Holy Spirit dwells in the heart of a person, He shows him all his inner poverty and weakness, and the corruption of his heart and soul, and his separation from God; and with all his virtues and righteousness. He shows him his sins, his sloth and indifference regarding the salvation and good of people his self-seeking in his apparently most disinterested virtues, his coarse selfishness even where he does not suspect it. To be brief, the Holy Spirit shows him everything as it really is. Then a person begins to have true humility, begins to lose hope in his own powers and virtues, regards himself as the worst of men. And when a person humbles himself before Jesus Christ Who alone is Holy in the glory of God the Father, he begins to repent truly, and resolves never again to sin but to live more carefully. And if he really has some virtues, then he sees clearly that he practiced and practices them only with the help of God, and therefore he begins to put his trust only in God.
awesome
“then he sees clearly that he practiced and practices them only with the help of God, and therefore he begins to put his trust only in God.”
We do nothing, good or evil without the help of God. We wouldn’t exist for a second if God did not exist.
We are his children, making pretend, making mistakes, doing good things, all while “He” watches, supports, maintains, and leads us to return home.
To emphasize our weakness and depravity is to emphasize our fictional otherness, which is an illusion. We have no being independent of God. We cannot exist without God, deny Him tho we may.
Thats why no sin, and no being can do anything but ultimately lead back to the ONE. Otherness is always a dead end experiment.
God is the only reality, and the sooner we recognize that, the sooner we relax and have union, peace, and joy.
Craig,
We truly are contingent beings, contingent upon the loving will of God. As you said, we do nothing without his “help,” in the sense that without his Grace, we would not even exist, much less be able to do anything.
In Orthodoxy, we emphasize our weakness and depravity because they are simply the way we often are. We do not refuse to acknowledge our oft repeated sins. We frequently hurt others, become angry, fail to forgive, allow ourselves to be ruled by our passions, etc. We emphasize our failings because only by repentance (which requires a recognition of our failings) can we be healed. The person who refuses to admit his sickness will not go to the doctor.
St. James said: “God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble. Therefore submit to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. Draw near to God and He will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners; and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Lament and mourn and weep! Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and He will lift you up” (St. James, 4.6-10).
Jesus told the story of the publican and the Pharisee, in which the Publican is praised for saying, “Lord have mercy on me, a sinner.” This is still the most used prayer by Orthodox Christians.
To refuse to admit and confess our sinfulness is to depart from the way of Jesus, St. James, and the entire Apostolic Faith. Confessing our sinfulness is not “dualism” in a bad sense. It is simply true, according to Jesus, that there IS a certain dualism: good and evil. When we do evil, we are called upon to repent of it and to begin to do the good. This is the way of Christ.
We emphasize our sinfulness NOT to revel in it, but because only by repenting of it do we reject “otherness.” The real problem, according to Holy Orthodoxy, is that sin is a delusion, the grand deception. It is believing that sin will make us happy, make us fulfilled, that we can be whole apart from God’s life, in which is no darkness or evil (St. John). When we sin, and then refuse to call it such (repentance), we actually then begin to succumb to the lie of “otherness,” for it is then that we begin to think (though self-deceived) that we can find life apart from the goodness of God (which leads us to repentance, per St. Paul, Romans 2).
Orthodoxy does not teach us that sin leads to God. Sin leads us away from God. Sometimes, sin can actually bring us to God, but it is only by us finally realizing how much we have been forgiven. Only by recognizing the depth of our sins can we know the depth of God’s love. Remember that Christ said the one who has been forgiven much, loves much. One cannot love much without knowing that he has been forgiven much, and that inherently and unavoidably involves a recognition of “much sin.”
We are taught in Orthodoxy not to “relax,” but to struggle. We are to press onward, fasting and praying and wrestling against spiritual darkness. God is there to help us, but he expects us (like any good parent expects of their child), to wrestle and struggle. Only through this struggle do does our tribulation produce patience, our patience, character; our character, hope (Romans 5).
As we are taught by God and trained by Christ to find our true character, then we have “hope,” which entails union, peace, and joy. As long as we persist in selfishness, there can be no union with God, for when we love the world we have enmity with God (St. James and St. John, and Jesus).
I like your statement: “Otherness is always a dead end experiment.” What we gain for ourselves through sin (which is otherness, an attempt to live apart from God) is death. Through repentance, we find God, and finding Him, we will never die, but have life everlasting.
Peace,
Kevin