Hello, my dear ones! It is one of those days when I am dreadfully late---in about two hours
I should post this video for you---and also I've been blessed with a full-blown migraine today,
but by the grace of God I still want to record this, I still want to keep in touch with you, and
I pray God gives me something to tell you, and I had in mind to talk to you precisely about this,
about this sort of context when you find yourself in a dreadful moment, in a dreadful situation or
facing someone who's not particularly the nicest kindest creation of God, and of course the first
thing that comes to my mind is that story from I think Saint Paisius of the Holy Mountain who says
that we are naturally inclined to become either flies or bees, in the sense that someone who is
like a bee will go through life finding everything and everyone that is good and virtuous
and could potentially help one on one's path to salvation, and like a bee he or she will just
collect nectar from these beautiful people, these wonderful people; whereas those people who are
naturally inclined to be like flies will do the opposite and we'll find ourselves surrounded by
less virtuous, less beautiful people and we are going to end up collecting what flies usually
collect from the things on which they usually rest. But there is a problem there: there's
the problem that sometimes in life you don't get to pick and choose the people who surround you,
sometimes life just throws you into a context, into a given situation, with given
people who are either beautiful or not, either virtuous or not, and you can do very little,
at least for some time, to get yourself out of that place and find more beautiful,
nectar-filled people from whom you can learn. At least in my life that's been the situation
most of the times, I mean, when you enter a monastery, for instance, you don't quite
pick and choose who are your fellow monastics: a monastery is a very difficult place to be from the
very beginning, from the outset, because it's not a place where people have grown together,
it's not a family in which one's children are at least to some degree shaped by the
same values and the same ideas as their parents; a family, a family unit is somehow naturally alike,
whereas in a monastery, very much like in an office, people from all walks of life and with all
sorts of interests are gathered together, and they are already grown-ups and they are already formed
more or less, so it is a very difficult place and you don't really get to choose with whom you
interact, you're supposed to pray for everyone, love everyone, do obedience to everyone,
and what do you do in a monastery or in an office or, again, in any situation of life
when you don't get to select the people who surround you? There's another story
in the Ladder of Saint John of Sinai, the great Saint and the great monastic, who tells the story
of a monk who had trained his mind to always think positively no matter what he saw, and Saint John
of the Ladder gives this example of this same monastic passing by two cells of his brothers,
and the doors to these cells were open so he could see clearly the state of each cell, and
our monk passes the first cell and through the open door he sees this
incredible mess, you know, a pigs place with everything thrown about and completely dirty and
lacking any sense of order or cleanliness, and the mind of our monk immediately translates what
he sees as a sign of his monastic brother's complete dedication to the spiritual life,
'Oh,' he thinks to himself, 'my brother is so given to prayer, so given to to his life in
Christ, so absorbed by the Kingdom that he has completely forgotten about his surroundings,
he is so wholly raptured into the reality of the life to come that the reality of this life,
the cell in which he lives and everything in that cell, is completely lost to him';
and then he moves further and he passes the second cell and through the open door of this second cell
he sees perfect order, perfect cleanliness and discipline in everything, and the mind of our monk
immediately decodes this new situation as proof of his fellow monastic's complete obedience,
complete dedication and discipline in his spiritual life, in matters of the spiritual life;
'Oh,' he says again to himself, 'my brother is so exact in his spiritual life, his repentance
must be so striking and so deep, his obedience must be to the most minute detail towards his
spiritual father that this interior reality, this interior spiritual reality of his is reflected
onto this life by this outwardly discipline and cleanliness that I perceive and I see in his cell,
because naturally what we have inside will overflow on the outside, naturally if you
are someone who is ordered and disciplined on the inside in your spiritual life, that will
be reflected into the reality of your cell, of your monastery, of your office and so on';
and Saint John of the Ladder places before our eyes the example of this monastic
who sees two completely opposite situations, two completely opposite realities,
and yet we see in him the wisdom that he has acquired to translate, to decode both of these
opposing and contrasting realities into something good, into something positive, into something that
benefits him and benefits his growth spiritually. A different kind of monastic, someone like me for
example, would have passed that first cell and I would have thought, 'Oh, my God, what a dump!
My, my brother is, is a complete pig! He cannot clean his cell, he cannot pay
attention to anything around him; this is clearly a reflection of how careless and how chaotic his
spiritual life is as well', and I would have judged him and I would have condemned him.
And then moving forward when I see the cell of my second brother and the perfect
order and discipline in that cell, I would have said, 'Oh, my God, this monk,
he has absolutely no time left in his mind to give himself, to give his heart and mind to Christ!
He is obsessive about everything in his cell: look how the, all the books are perfectly stacked,
perfectly ordered; look how there isn't one sign of dust anywhere in his cell. This brother of mine
is completely taken with the outside world and he probably is completely dry on the inside.' Now
what do you see, the difference between the monk put before our eyes by Saint John of
the Ladder and the other monk which is an expression of someone like myself:
the first one has seen two completely opposite situations and has managed to train his mind,
he found the spiritual wisdom to find nectar no matter what he has before himself, a good person
or a bad person, a clean cell or a dirty cell, a good situation or a challenging situation;
he's trained himself and God has blessed him for his effort with the wisdom to decode
everything into a positive note and to find the good, the nectar in every single person,
every single situation: this is a proper bee, a proper spiritual bee who can gather nectar
from the most beautiful flowers and the most foul realities of this world; he has faced two
different realities and he has grown from both by blessing his brothers and interpreting his
brother's behaviour as examples for himself, by the end of this walk of his he has grown,
he has not condemned his brothers, and if he voiced out loud what he said, he has not
damaged or harmed his brothers either, quite the contrary. If the first monastic was indeed more
of a careless, sloppy sort of man, hearing his brother finding the good in his unclean cell,
that might bring him to repentance and that might bring him to clean his cell, the outside cell
and the inside cell of his heart; and similarly the second brother could also benefit from
hearing the thoughts of this good monastic, because maybe indeed he is so obsessed with
life in this world that he had forgotten to pay attention to his spiritual life, but when he sees
his life reflected onto such a beautiful mirror, that can bring him to repentance as well
and that can also bring him closer to a real spiritual life. Our good monk has found nectar in
two completely opposite situations and he has also benefited his brethren; whereas someone like me,
I've managed to gather nothing except condemnation upon my soul for judging and condemning my
brothers, I found nothing good in the same places in which my brother has found nothing but goodness
and spiritual nectar, and if I dare to voice my thoughts, to say my thoughts out loud, I've also
damaged both my brothers, throwing both into despondency or bringing them to anger and
making them speak bad words against me and thus pushing them into my sin, the sin of condemning
and judging. There is a way in which we can train our minds not not to see the reality,
because the monk of Saint John of the Ladder saw reality for what it was, he saw the the dirty
cell as a dirty cell and the obsessively clean cell as an obsessively clean cell, it's not that
he no longer perceived reality for what it was, but he made the choice and he used his free will
and he used his wisdom to decode reality in a way that benefits him and his brother,
whereas the second monk has used the same realities to decode nothing but condemnation, sin,
and passion, gathering condemnation upon himself and potentially upon his brethren as well.
The same situations, the same people, the same place,
two different people can grow in their spiritual life or can collapse in their spiritual life,
depending on how we train our thoughts to decode what we see in our lives.
If we are ready to always judge and condemn, if we are always ready to see what is bad
and condemnable in our brothers and our sisters, then we do nothing but to
feed the seeds of condemnation, the seeds that the evil one has planted in us, and we slowly but
certainly become this horrible spiritual being; but if we learn to let go, if we learn to hide the
mistakes of our brothers and our sisters, if we learn never to judge or to condemn, if we learn to
turn everything to the good, then we are going to slowly feed the image of
the Good One in us, of the Forgiving One in us, the divine Image of God in us.
You know on our island there are these waterfalls,
and sometimes---in winter in particular when the winds are so strong, when they get to 60-70
miles per hour---the water of the waterfall, there's one just close to us,
the water of the waterfall falls down from the cliff onto the ocean, and just before the water
falls into the ocean, the wind is so strong that it catches the water just before it hits
the ocean and it catches the water and just throws it back, it just turns it back, it
detours its natural course, and this is what we have to train our minds to do as well:
we are naturally created to think good about our brothers and our sisters, we are naturally
created to love and to forgive and to cover each other's sins and to carry each other's crosses,
and this is a given fact this is the truth that was revealed to us by Christ,
because when Christ tells us: 'Forgive each other. Do not judge so you are not
judged. Carry each other's crosses. Turn the other cheek and do not take further the evil of
your brother', He's simply describing to us Who He is and who we truly are; but because we've fallen
and because we live in a fallen world, a fallen culture and society, these natural
instincts of ours have been corrupted, and instead of naturally seeing the goodness in each other,
instead of naturally decoding everything to the good so we grow through this
decoding, we now naturally see the evil in each other, we naturally see where we make mistakes and
we naturally condemn and judge each other. So we have, with the same strength
of those winds, we have to learn how to catch our thoughts before they collapse
into the ocean, we have to catch them and throw them back, and when we notice our thoughts
condemning our brother, immediately cut them short, immediately cut them short and turn
that weight of the water, of the waterfall of condemnation, which is unleashed in us by the
evil one, catch it and turn it back until we learn how to control these courses of our thoughts;
and it can be done, my brother, it can be done, my sister, we see it in all the holy monastics
and the holy people in the world from the time of the Holy Apostles all the way to Saint Paisius
of the Holy Mountain and the Saints who live among us today as we as we live and breathe.
Oh, may God bless all of us, my brothers and my sisters,
by His grace and His love and His tenderheartedness towards us.
Amen, amen, amen.