For My Yoke is Easy...
The Rough Road made easy by experience
St. Diodochos of Photiki uses plain language to help those of us who are making a beginning on the path to salvation. So many different spiritualities, philosophies, and religions cry out for our attention. Worldly, self-help methods come and go with every recently discovered technique offering itself as the key to our wellness and peace of mind. Even the popularity enjoyed by the teachers of these methods is as temporary and short-lived as an Instagram feed. They appeal to some extent, to feelings many of us share. These words seem to correspond with our feelings and experiences. Self-love, self-care, and me-time are the things we have been deprived of, which will help heal us. We just need a safe space we can flee to where we can pump our deflated selves back up, Egotism through and through.
In the circus of these competing and nearly identical self-help options, one will be hard-pressed to find the categories, without which healing is impossible, self-denial, self-restraint, self-accusation, and self-knowledge. When we say that the Church is a spiritual hospital, we should be clear, there is no other hospital. When we say that, in the Church, healing is available for mankind, let us not be mistaken, outside of the Church, there is only sickness and death!
Since this is the case, those of us in the Church should be experiencing that healing. There should be those who have progressed to such a degree that they can pass that knowledge on to others for their benefit. And we should expect, given the innumerable hosts of Saints who have successfully passed through these stages of perfection, the path to be clearly marked for our use.
The Philokalia contains many such examples of clarity.
St. Diodochos’s teachings and methods are more well-known than his name may be. He is a transmitter of the therapeutic science called holy Orthodoxy. He uses concise language that enables the would-be practitioner to traverse the path. In one example of this, he says, “When the heart feels the arrows of the demons with such burning pain that the man under attack suffers as if they were real arrows, then the soul hates the passions violently, for it is just beginning to be purified. If it does not suffer greatly at the shamelessness of sin, it will not be able to rejoice fully in the blessings of righteousness.”
To distill that down a little, he says that the purification of the heart begins in earnest when we fight against our passions with such ferocity that the spiritual anguish we experience translates to physical pain and suffering. We read things like this in the holy Scripture, but we sentimentalize it. For example, when we read in the epistle of St. Peter, “Forasmuch then as Christ hath suffered for us in the flesh, arm yourselves likewise with the same mind: for he that hath suffered in the flesh hath ceased from sin…” But apart from the Asceticism of holy Orthodoxy, we have no way of making sense of this. We equate suffering with not getting the things we want, the job, the car, the paycheck, the girl, the guy, etc. In doing this we show that we have Oprah Winfrey as our mother and not the Church.
It is worse than that. We take what has been said about suffering and force it to fit our egotistical, religious experience and we say that that kind of suffering is for priests, monks, or, at least for the spiritually advanced! The Saint corrects us though, the soul is “just beginning to be purified.” We should mention here a Greek word that is translated as “sin” ἁμαρτία, (ham-ar-tee'-ah) can be translated as failure or “missing the mark.” There is one Orthodox life.
Elsewhere, St. Diodochos explains that we can progress beyond the beginning stages of suffering because of our inexperience. Often when we embark upon the spiritual work required of us, we can be tempted to give up because of our failures. He says, if we push forward, it gets easier!
He reveals to us that “To those who are just beginning to long for holiness, the path of virtue seems very rough and forbidding. It appears like this not because it really is difficult, but because our human nature from the womb is accustomed to the wide roads of sensual pleasure.” There are a couple of things we should take into consideration here; the reason the spiritual life seems difficult and the danger of spiritualities foreign to holy Orthodoxy.
First, honesty requires that we rid ourselves of any excuses. We have lived our lives in pursuit of comfort, ease, entertainment, and satiety. Of course, the introduction of true spirituality is going to feel like a heavy burden. There will be spiritual and physical suffering. But this is normal and necessary because of the hardness of our hearts. The saint makes this comparison, “As wax cannot take the imprint of a seal unless it is warmed or softened thoroughly, so a man cannot receive the seal of God’s holiness unless he is tested by labors and weaknesses.” When difficulties present themselves, we should know that God is softening us so that we can be shaped.
Moreover, he says it gets easier. Once we begin to hate our passions and see what a retched estate they have brought us to we will gladly do whatever is necessary to purify ourselves. “For when a bad habit has been subjected to a good one through the energy of grace it is destroyed along with the remembrance of mindless pleasures, and thereafter the soul gladly journeys on all the ways of virtue.”
Second, we must emphasize, with great sorrow, the deception of so-called evangelicalism with its once saved always saved doctrine, its emphasis on a private, they say “personal” relationship with Jesus, the insistence intrinsic to it that works are not only unnecessary for salvation but that they are contrary to it.
It is clear that the holy Scriptures can in no way be honestly used to produce or inspire the doctrine of eternal security as they have it. The entire Old Testament teaches that God extends His Love to man with great prodigality, but that He will neither be mocked by man’s spurning of that graciousness nor will He ever countermand the freedom He originally endowed man with. This fact is reinforced in every Gospel parable and every properly understood teaching of the Apostles.
That the Lord our God intended no private relationship with man is evidenced as well by the entire testimony of Scripture. Not only did He perform all His works for all to see, but His holy Apostles also received the Holy Spirit in the midst of those gathered from the corners of the earth at Pentecost! He prayed for the unity of the society of His people, of His Body, the Church!
Possibly the greatest deception of evangelicalism is the rejection of the clear teaching of our Lord, “Whosever shall come after me, let him take up his cross, deny himself, and follow me.” We could multiply examples such as His teaching about the requirement to fast, the requirement to embrace poverty, the teaching of stability, exemplified by the Apostle who taught the slave to “remain in the estate in which he was called” and on and on. The lifestyle suggested by evangelicalism in all its forms is a denial of reality after the fall and a wholesale denial of the painful method employed by our Lord and God to provide our salvation!
Salvation is in the Church. It is a painful process. If we wish to be saved, there is no path but that given by our Lord. May He help us all!
