You are your own
spirituality. What you do, what you say, how you work, and everything about you
is where you can find God. Nowhere else! Well, we might say in response to
this: "Where is God?". I don’t see God, I don’t feel God, and I certainly don’t
believe that I am spiritual. However, I do feel spiritual when I go to a certain
place or do certain things that are considered spiritual, like listening to
spiritual music or listening to spiritual teachings. Well, think about that for
a moment. We just said that doing this or going to this place makes us feel
spiritual. If we were blind or deaf, would going to a spiritual place or listening
to spiritual music or teaching make us feel spiritual? We might say, when we
realize what they are yes. If this is so, then we need to ask ourselves: where
does the origin of our spiritual experience come from, is it in the place or
object, or does it come from within ourselves and if it really is from ourselves
can we have it all the time? The answer that St. Isacc the Syrian gave, which
you can find in the Philokalia, was the following. He said, "Enter eagerly
into the treasure house that is within you, and so you will see the things that
are in heaven; for there is but one single entry to them both. The ladder that
leads to the Kingdom is hidden within your soul." For the Saint, we are the
source of our spiritual experience. That is how God designed us. We just need
to learn to find what already belongs to us and stop trying to find it in other
places or things.
I mentioned that St. Isaac
the Syrians teaching was in the Philokalia. The Philokalia are a collection of
teachings that promote a spirituality, called Hesychasm, that can help us
become the spiritual people that God has called us to be. These were originally
put together for monastic communities but in them, you will find spiritual
teachings that can help everyone. I know this personally because they have
helped me. I am not a monk. I have a busy life, I am married with 8 children, 2
of my children have disabilities that need my constant attention, and also a
member of the clergy. I have many obligations to my family and my parish and I
have very little time to myself. Like most people, I am stretched thin.
Nevertheless, through the spirituality of Hesychasm, I have found things helpful in
encountering God in my everyday. Things that I will now be sharing in this video.
In that, I want to make it
known that I am by no means an expert on this spirituality. I consider myself
just a promoter. In that, I am only going to be promoting the things that are to
be simple and beneficial. Things that are practical, that’s is why the title of
this is a practical spirituality. In that I want to begin with what Saint
Hesychios the Priest said, he said to “see Hesychia in all things”. This word
means stillness. That’s what hesychasm means, it means the pursuit of
silliness. Think of that word stillness, Hesychia, as what you read in Psalm
46:10 be still and know that I am God. Hesychia is not just being still it is
entering that meeting point between you and God and this meeting point is found
in 2 places in our mind and our body. Going back to the beginning question
that I had about finding a spiritual experience in going to a place or in
listening to something. We made the thing or place the spiritual experience by
how we used our mind or body. These things by themselves can not do that. We
made it that may. Take for instance, an icon people come into my church all the
time and get spiritual feelings from seeing this sacred art. If they were blind
this could not be so. The image awakened something in the eyes, in the body, in
our mind. It pointed the way. This event became Hesychia, that stillness, that
meeting point for us and God and what St. Hesychios the priest says to us is
that we don’t need an icon for that we can have that doing the dishes, driving
a car, eating dinner, and even spending time with people that otherwise not
want to be around.
What I will be sharing now
is how to find Hesychia in our body and minds and I'm going to start with the
body. St. Symeon the New Theologian: "The mind is the eye of the soul, but
the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit." That’s what the apostle Paul
said in the scriptures. Many people just read that figuratively but Paul meant what he said. If you were to
raise up your hand to the apostle and ask if God was in here, he would say yes God
is in there and if he is in there you can use your hands to experience God. You
will find in the fathers in the Philokalia a harmony that is needed with our
body and mind in order to experience God in our everyday. We are not used to
thinking like that. To us are hand is our hand but for St. Symeon and Paul, the
hand becomes gods hand. We struggle with that idea because there is not much
spirituality out there that includes the body in the equation. Many of us are
familiar with fasting with the body but often we are not taught how fasting
works. We are told to do. We are told that it’s a sacrifice or offering
ourselves to God and these are all true things. In essence, Fasting is seeking
to experience God with the body, and many people who have fasted, and prayer can
tell you that there was something that was not there before. There was
awareness of God in the body. This is a natural phenomenon because your body is made
for God. God is ultimately going to resurrect our body, it was made for God
but we don’t have to wait until the resurrection to encounter God now in the
body. Now the reason that we often don’t experience god with the body is
because we are letting the body run the show.
As many of us know too
well we are born into the fallen world, and we develop things that the fathers
called the passions. These things affect our body and mind and they keep us on a quest for how we should be fulfilled and one of the biggest passions can be found
in our stomach. Most of the time we let our stomach determine how we will be
happy and if we are not following our stomachs our stomach will punish us. You
can see in this that harmony that I mentioned that fathers spoke about. The
stomach leads our mind, and our mind leads our very soul to find that bag of
chips and we won’t be happy until we have it. Now it’s not wrong to eat a bag
of chips or to be hungry. It’s wrong to make the chips our quest. A proper
pursuit of finding that bag of chips is to make that bag of chips an encounter
with God. To find Hesychia in body. The fathers would say make getting to that
bag of chips and eating them a prayer. You can eat and fast at the same time. You
can do this by not letting your stomach dictate to you how you will eat. The
stomach wants to gulf it down until your stuffed. Instead of doing that
eat slowly and think of god feeding you
with every bite. After all, God's original plan for eating was for spiritual
encounter. It wasn’t just to survive. It was to receive our survival, our
substance from the hand of God. That’s what food needs to be in this world.
Food needs to be Hesychia, a meeting point with God. Our stomach can be filled
with the experience of God. That’s what it was made for. That’s what our bodies
were made for.
In that, you will find in
the fathers of hesychasm many prescriptions on how to deal with the passions of
the body and in all of them it's learning to use our bodies to experience God in
what you are doing. I mentioned in the
begging working with your hands doing the dishes can be a spiritual experience,
if you learn to make those dishes your meeting point with God. With all work we
want to get it done as fast as we can, it might be difficult, but the main
reason why is that we are not getting anything out of it and this is going to
be my segway point to Hesychia of the mind because the number one thing that we
do in our work is to use our minds to get us out of it. We daydream, we use our
mind to get us out of it and our mind tells us that we won’t be happy until we
get home and we are on that Sophia eating that bag of chips. Daydreaming
claims to be our best friend at these times but it really is our greatest enemy.
We should know this from driving. One of the biggest causes of auto accidents is
daydreaming. You are not keeping your eyes on the road when you do it and bad
things happen. This is the same thing with finding God in what you are doing.
You will find if you sit
down in a quiet place to pray for a similar thing happening in your mind that
happens when you work. Your mind doesn’t want to be there. You are not getting
anything out of just sitting there! So
instead of that bag of chips and sofa, the daydream is about Jesus and the
saints and all of a sudden you are one of the apostles and now you are going on
a mission trip or you are doing this and that. The daydream makes you feel
like a spiritual person but just as daydream is in your work it's keeping you
from encountering God in what you are doing.
Hesychia of the mind is
making your mind the meeting place for God. You can’t have that if your mind is
in another place, even if it’s a good place. St. Evagrios the Solitary said
that we need to learn to make our intellect deaf and dumb so we can pray, so we
can really encounter God in the mind. That might sound strange. How can I
shut my mind off? He is not saying to shut it off but rather to use it properly.
The mind is out of control and its always going after things. It’s always
trying to find something, always trying to lead us. We think this is normal but
it’s not. Jesus tries to address this in something simple like how we start to
worry about something. We let our minds take us long trips of worrying that
sometimes last lifetimes. We think it's normal to do so but Jesus said we are
like people who don’t believe. Someone who believes has taken control of their
mind and has oriented their mind to finding God in what they’re doing.
This is a difficult thing
to do but its something we must practice. We need to retrain the mind. The mind
was designed for God but we have made it into something else. So now we need to
bring it back to what it was made for and the fathers have a word for this
called Nepsis which means Watchfulness. We need to learn to watch what goes
into our mind and learn to condition our response to that and the conditioning
comes from the repetition of turning the mind back to the memory of God through the use
of the Jesus prayer. They want us to replace our daydreams with a continual
invocation of the name of Jesus. Not focusing on any images of Jesus, just
saying the words themselves, letting words retrain your mind to focus on God.
This is a work that is ongoing but you
will find as you practice this that you won’t have always do the reptation.
There will be times when your mind will be doing what it was made for. St.
Seraphim of Sarov said there will be times when we don’t need to do the work of
repetition because we will be filled with the joy of the lord. There will be
times when you are doing those dishes that I mentioned with God.
Now I want to conclude
with some practical things that we can start to do throughout your day that
will be helpful. Many of the fathers talked about how breathing is the natural
means by which we receive the holy spirit. That was God's original plan for air
and breathing. Just as I mentioned earlier food was a way for us to
receive God. One father said to learn to breathe in God and this is where I find
a very simple way of praying throughout the day a way to be watchful by focusing
on our breath. To fast and breathe at the same time. A way to make our body and
mind work together in seeking God by how we breathe. As you take in air, as an act of faith believe it’s
the holy spirit, know that that air comes from God and as you take in that air
invoke the name of God with your mind. This can be done in various ways with
how you breathe. Find a way that works for you and when you do get to that
point in your day when you get to be alone with God make it more intense. Use
your body to pray. Don’t lie down sit up, develop a posture with your body that
makes it attentive to God being in it. Learn to use your mind and body together
in prayer. Seek that Hesychia of mind and body and become the temple of God
that you were made to be.
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