Thanks to the hundred or so of you who joined us live last night. Because of its richness, we spent all our time talking about a single entry in All Life Comes from Tenderness.
Here is that homily:
Given the texts for the day, I have to talk about spiritual warfare.
I will begin with a story told by Saint Sophrony. It is the story of his teacher, Saint Silouan the Athonite (who died in 1938). These are the book’s opening lines:
There lived a man in the world, a man of godly desires. His name was Simeon. He prayed long and his tears were unrestrained: “Have mercy upon me.” But God did not hearken unto him.
Many months went by in this prayer, until his strength was exhausted. He despaired, and cried out, “Thou art implacable!” And when at these words something foundered in his soul grown weak from despair, suddenly for an instant he beheld the living Christ. His heart and body were filled with fire of such force that had the vision continued for another instant, he must have expired. Afterwards he was never to forget the inexpressibly gentle, infinitely loving, joyous gaze of Christ full of peace, and during the long years of his life that were to follow he tirelessly bore witness that God is love, love immeasurable, love incomprehensible.
Simeon was borne along, for a little while, by the light of his vision. But, as happened with Moses and with Solomon—if you don’t know that story, see the first reading for the day and the chapters that follow it—, the glory faded, so that he soon fell under a new weight. His deliverance did not come for many years.
It was fifteen years after the Lord had appeared to him, and Silouan was engaged in one of these nocturnal struggles with devils which so tormented him. No matter how he tried, he could not pray with a pure mind. At last he rose from his stool, intending to bow down and worship, when he saw a gigantic devil standing in front of the ikon, waiting to be worshipped. Meanwhile, the cell filled with other evil spirits. Father Silouan sat down again, and with bowed head and aching heart he prayed, “Lord, Thou seest that I desire to pray to Thee with a pure mind but the devils will not let me. Instruct me, what must I do to stop them hindering me?” And in his soul he heard, “The proud always suffer from devils.” “Lord,” said Silouan, “teach me what I must do that my soul may become humble.” Once more, his heart heard God’s answer, “Keep thy mind in hell and despair not.”1
Simeon became Saint Silouan, we might say, just as he learned to recollect himself in humility. There, in that posture of yieldedness and submission, he found the same peace Saint Anthony discovered in the desert and Saint Paul received with his chains—a peace that passes understanding, a peace which the world cannot give because it fails to recognize it as peace at all.
Silouan was not spared from affliction or shielded from trouble; he was graced in and through temptation, kept steady in the midst of his trials. The same, Lord willing, will be true for us. But our struggle has a different shape. Our problem is that we can’t find our demons to fight them. We keep getting in our own way, tripping over our own shadows. Some of this can be attributed to what people call disenchantment, but more of it, I believe, results from the fallout of extreme individualism and the privileged way of life that buffers us against reality, making us forget how good it is that we are dependent on others for everything that really matters, and how good it is that we do not live forever.
What I’m saying is that our successes and comforts have made it harder for us to live life as it comes to us, to really reconcile ourselves with reality. Almost despite ourselves, we keep trying to force life to yield to our needs and wishes. As a result, we are increasingly desperate and in denial, and often end up falling headlong into one kind of unreality or another.
Some of us are swallowed up by this crowd or that one, consumed by conspiracies and online drama. Others become ensnared in the mirror of self-reflexivity, obsessively turning inward without finding the insight we actually need in order to live simply and joyfully. We are eaten up with anxiety, reactive rather than responsive, and sensitive without being truly tender. In a word, we’re touchy—easily hurt but difficult to reach. And we’re also dizzy—reeling, off balance, blacking out under the stress of it all. The upshot is, our shadows loom larger and larger, monstrous and menacing, and our hearts faint.
Ultimately, what we need is the same thing the young, inexperienced Simeon needed: to quiet ourselves down, settling into the here-and-now, making ourselves at home in the presence of the one whose name is Mercy. We have to learn to “let go and let God.” And, in the words of Elizabeth Baker, one of the founders of Elim Tabernacle (an influential church among early Pentecostals and the birthplace of the Latter Rain movement), we can and should do that because God is to be trusted:
The reproduction of the Christ-life is not done in an instant… He is patient with you and He wants you to be patient with yourself in all the unfinished work which is still so in evidence in your life… Are you one with God? All the rest is the Lord’s work. The trouble is that you worry; that you distrust Him and condemn yourself; that you resist His discipline because you know not what He is doing. But the Lord goes on rejoicing over you while He works away at you, and He wants you to learn the lesson of just being still in His hands…2
The worry Baker speaks of, the distrust of God that hides itself in the contempt we feel for ourselves, is a symptom of pride. A pride that is incredibly hard to discern and uproot. It was only after he had received the word that finally delivered him that Saint Silouan realized how his own vanity had opened him to affliction and conflict. He saw that having received that initial vision of Christ, he had been carried away from himself by pride: “I revealed this vision to four men wise in spirit, and not one of them told me that what I had seen was of the enemy, though vainglory had me in its clutches.”3
Silouan’s story forces us to face a hard truth: pride, even if it sometimes shows itself in self-contempt and self-harm, is rooted not in faithlessness or a lack of feeling but in what we make of our own faithfulness, the evidence (as we see it) of the intensity of our devotion. We can tell that that is happening in us because we begin to chafe against those experiences that make us look and feel small and weak in our own eyes. But the Lord loves us too much to let our vanity destroy us. In the words of the staretz:
Pride is difficult to detect in oneself but the Lord leaves the proud to be tormented by their impotence until they humble themselves. But when the soul humbles herself, the enemy is vanquished, and the soul finds profound quiet in God.4
Saint Augustine, in his sermon on this Psalm (for him, it was Psalm 83), says much the same. There are many in and around the church who are “so keen to be exalted, so enamored of their rank, that they are unwilling to acknowledge the truth!” But what they should do, what they would do if they could see clearly, even for a moment, is “throw away the trappings of rank and come running to the valley of weeping” where Christ continues to agonize, interceding for us and for the life of the world.5 Asked what counts as the most important virtue, Augustine (Ep. 118.22) answered: “humility, humility, humility.” And that three-fold affirmation reminds us that humility is the beginning, middle, and end of all we do because it is the name of the triune and thrice-holy God.
We are not ignorant of Satan’s devices. His strategy is to kill our spirit and destroy our heart by stealing our voice and turning it against us, tempting us to turn away from our own happiness. As Jenson explains,
The devil often speaks even with the voice of God—above all with the voice of God… We hear him everywhere, and just therefore he can speak not only with society’s voice or our inner voice; he can mimick God’s voice. And the temptation he brings in that guise is the one great temptation, the temptation of which Luther was the expert: the temptation to despair in the face of God’s holy will or to false confidence in the face of God’s holy will, the temptation to unbelief, the temptation to let go our grip on reality, to join the devil in his own lack of being.6
Spiritual warfare, therefore, is first and foremost the work of not turning on ourselves when things go wrong. “I can’t stand myself”—we say this when our heart is fainting, when our spirit is crushed. In this state, we cannot stand against the devil’s wiles—the accusations, the belittling, the shaming and humiliation.
Today’s NT reading urges us to stand against the devil’s wiles by being strong in the power of the Lord’s might. The Psalm tells us how—by setting our hearts on God, finding our way to where he is and abiding there. Believe it or not, his presence is here, now. Like the sparrows and swallows in the Psalm, we are nested by the sides of his altar. We cannot not be, because his presence dwells wherever he knows we will need him to be. This is the mystery of the gospel Paul gave his life for: through Christ’s passion, the valley of weeping has always already been made into the mountain of the Lord. Christ’s tears, and the tears of those who love him, are the springs that give the valley its true name. So, the revelation and transfiguration he wants for us comes not in some distant place and time, but in the depths of this present moment and under these very circumstances.
This, then, is how we defeat the enemy, how we repel evil’s attacks: we delight in our weaknesses, knowing God’s power is perfected in them, making ourselves as small as Jesus and as lowly as his mother, never letting the enemy steal our voice to use against us. And we pray for this above all else—to be humble as God is humble.
Let us pray:
Lord Jesus, you are meek and lowly of heart. Grant us, in your wise mercy, a humble spirit, and teach us to count it all joy, the many trials that come upon us. Deliver us from every evil and from all that would torment us, but do not rescue us from the tests we need to become like you in love. Let us take some part in your suffering, bearing our burdens without complaint, so that we at last may be numbered among those who, like your mother, know themselves to be your unprofitable servants, having done only what was theirs to do. To the glory of your Name. Amen.
1 Archimandrite Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1991), pp. 1, 42.
2 Elizabeth Baker, “Chronicles of a Faith Life,” Trust 9 (November 1915), pp. 3-9 (5).
3 Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, p. 429.
4 Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, p. 434.
5 Saint Augustine, Expositions of the Psalms Vol. 4: 73-98 (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2002), pp. 200-201.
6 Robert W. Jenson, “Evil as Person” in Robert W. Jenson, Theology as Revisionary Metaphysics: Essays on God and Creation; edited by Steven J. Wright (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014), pp. 136-145 (137).
