神父马克西姆：心念与心理健康——东正教的视角

Thank you. Let’s try that again. Your Grace, Bishop Christoforos, Father Maximus, Reverend Fathers, distinguished guests, family, and friends, good evening. My name is Evagelos Sotiropoulos, and I want to welcome you. It’s a great honor to do so to this beautiful Church of Saint Nicholas here in Scarborough. With the blessings of His Eminence Metropolitan Sotirios, we’re very fortunate and blessed to have our Second Annual Lenten Spiritual Homily that will be delivered this evening by Father Maximus on the subject of “Our Thoughts and Mental Health: An Orthodox Perspective.” Just as a housekeeping matter, our Parish Council will distribute small sheets of paper in the next few minutes for the question and answer session that will follow the homily. Feel free to write any questions that you may have, and we’ll circulate them for the Q&A following Father’s homily. I would like to now call upon Father Fanourios, our parish priest here at St. Nicholas, to introduce our keynote speaker and our distinguished guest. Thank you.

Thank you. Theophilestate, panosilogiotati. Dear brothers and sisters, dear children, as the frozen tree, especially in Canada, seeks the spring sun, like the dried flower seeks the fresh water of the rain, like the hungry stomach seeks the bread, like the bird seeks its prey, so in the same way, God, You have entrusted our souls. He seeks through this blessed period of the Great Lent; He seeks the warm sun, the great rain, her food, our soul that is so hungry and thirsty and so hungry with her care. And yet we are so much in awe of her need, this blessed period of the Great Lent. And this is the reason, O Lord, that I believe and feel that we share the same feeling and the same need, the same hunger and the same thirst. And this is what brought us all here tonight, gathered here. As a group of people with the same need, the same hunger, and the same spiritual thirst, you have come to fulfill this hunger and this thirst, and to fulfill it tonight. And we thank and bless God for your presence, that we have you in the blessed Temple of Saint Nicholas, to be able to express ourselves in comforting, theological, academic, and prayerful words so that we may be able to take a little of the food we need from your lips in order to reach and complete the journey of the Great Lent. So, the blessing and the Seventh Dias of the Honourable Prime Minister. We have you here tonight. We welcome you to Canada, to Toronto, and to Saint Nicholas, and we invite you all together, homophonously, to the… Welcome, Your Excellency. I will read only in English your biographical note.

The Very Reverend Father Maximus Constance. He is a senior research scholar at Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology in Boston. He holds a Ph.D. in Patristics and Historical Theology from the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. For many years, he was a professor at Harvard Divinity School, after which he became a monk at Simonopetra at Mount Athos. He is the author of The Art of Seeing: Paradox and Perception in Orthodox Iconography, an edition and translation of Maximus the Confessor’s Ambigua, and Proclus of Constantinople and the Cult of the Virgin in Late Antiquity, as well as numerous articles and translations. His work focuses on the patristic and Byzantine theological tradition, Orthodox spirituality, the history of the reception of biblical and patristic sources in the late Byzantine era, and the theological study of Byzantine art, icons, and iconography. Archimandrite Father Maximus was ordained deacon on the Feast of Saint Nicholas in 2015 and shortly after was ordained a priest. Both ordinations were presided over by Archbishop Geron Dimitrios of America.

Your Grace, it’s good to see you again. Father, thank you for those kind words of introduction. And Vangelie, I don’t see him. I’m sure he’s there. He is managing certain things. Thank you for your hospitality and for helping arrange this event. Of course, I’m happy to begin by thanking His Eminence, Metropolitan Sotirios, who, because of other business, could not be here with us this evening. But I would like to publicly thank him for this opportunity and for his friendship and for his support over the years. Some of you might remember that I was here—was it a year ago? I don’t remember exactly—but there was an event in this church actually, and it’s a blessing to be back. As Father Fanourios mentioned, I was ordained to the diaconate and the priesthood on the feast day, while I was ordained a deacon on the feast day of Saint Nicholas. And before I became a monk and received the name of Maximus, my name, my baptismal name, was Nicholas. So it’s a double blessing for me to be in this Church of St. Nicholas. I’ve been to your church before, but this is the first time that I’ve been here for an actual service. And it’s such a lovely environment. It’s such a beautiful environment. It’s such a peaceful environment that I feel a little reluctant to shatter the silence of the beautiful Vesper service with my words, but this is what you’ve invited me here to do, and that’s what I will do and

As you heard, I’ve been asked to say a few words about the whole question or the whole problem of our thoughts. Now, thoughts in English, I suppose, means one thing, but in Greek, there’s a very specific word here, logismi. It’s not skeptis, it’s logismi. So the thoughts that we’re talking about here are logismi, which are a very particular kind of mental phenomenon, let’s say. They’re not thoughts that we ordinarily have; there’s something very different, and often they’re translated as negative thoughts. Logismi can often be translated as negative thoughts or thoughts that emerge or arise from our passions. Logismi—we’ll say more about what the passions are, or if the logismi are not coming from passions. They are leading us to the passions. They are the thoughts that are promoting us in some way towards sin and towards passion. So those are the kinds of thoughts that we are going to be speaking about this evening. Is there a problem? Can everyone hear me? Am I audible? It sounds good from where I’m standing. I flew up from Boston this morning and my head is a little stuffed from the air travel, so I hope you can hear me a little better than I can hear myself.

It seems fair to say, it seems clear to say that we live—and this is really, it’s our curse and it’s our blessing—we live in a troubled world. We live in a troubled world. It’s hard to turn on the news or look at a newspaper and not be upset, not be unsettled. The source of the troubles that we see, the origin of the troubles that we see, the root of the troubles that we see, is our own troubled self. Everything that we see externally, everything that we see outwardly in the world, is a manifestation, is a projection of the things that we have within us. If there is greed within us, if there is hatred within us, if there is resentment within us, if there is anger within us, if there is whatever it is, this is what will be manifested within the world. So I can only attribute the troubled nature of our world today to the troubled nature of the self, to our own inner—it’s our own inner turmoil—that has been projected out into the world, into the things that we see. Apostolos Pavlos—I’m sorry, Apostolos Iakovos—in the letter of James, James asks the question, what is the source of the wars and the conflicts among you? Is it not your lusts? Is it not your passions that are at war in your members—in other words, in your own self? You desire and you do not have, so you kill. And you covet, but you cannot obtain, so you fight and you wage war. Πόθεν πόλεμη, από πού η πόλεμη, και πόθεν μάχαι εν ημίν, από πού είναι αυτά που βλέπουμε μέσα μας, ούκεν δεύθεν, δεν είναι από εκεί, εκ των ιδωνών ημών, των στρατευομένων εν της μέλεσης ημών. You desire and you don’t have. You want things and you don’t have them. You don’t have them and you shout. And you will have to say it, Apostolos.

We’re distracted by things around us. We’re distracted by the news and by the troubled times that we live in and all of the unusual and disturbing things that we see. And I think this is a dangerous thing for us because it distracts us from our own self. It distracts us from our own inner depth, and we end up living externally. We end up living superficially and not from our own inner depth. Somebody once said—I don’t know the source of the quotation, but somebody once said—that every depth has a surface, but not every surface has a depth, which is why we should attend to the depth of things and not to the surface. Right? God got the vassals epiphany. So this is, I think, part of the Christian life, part of the spiritual life, and not even just part of the Christian or the spiritual life, but it’s part of a normal and a healthy, I think, human life. A normal, human, healthy, psychological, emotional, and spiritual life does not involve being externally oriented all the time, and living outside of yourself, and being distracted and reactive and all these kinds of things. But it means to live from your center. It means to live from your inner depth, to live richly and deeply and with deliberation from your own self, and not to be at the mercy of—right, what’s the… galemos? I don’t know the quote. We read… that’s blown about by every wind of change that comes through. We can’t be that person. We can’t be that person. We have to have an inner stability. But we have a problem. We have a problem when we try to enter into ourselves. We have a problem when we try to move from the external to the internal, from the outward to the inner. And what is that problem? That problem is that our minds are easily distracted. Our minds are easily distracted. We often find it difficult to pay attention for more than a few minutes. We often find it difficult to pay attention.

As can be seen, for example, in the precipitous rise of various attention deficit disorders, which were largely unheard of five or ten or fifteen years ago, and now millions of people of all kinds of ages—not simply children or adolescents, but older and older people—are being diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and related kinds of disorders. This is a disorder that’s not… It’s ADD, ADHD. It is not caused by a virus, right? It’s a social problem. It’s not a genetic or a chromosomal or a viral. It’s not caused by a microbe. It’s a social disorder. And of course, if you put children in environments where they’re distracted by all kinds of electronic gadgets, of course they’re going to have a hard time focusing. Of course, they’re going to have a hard time concentrating and focusing. But we have this weakness. We’re always seeking something. The mind is always in motion. The mind is always striving, seeking, searching, demanding, wanting, craving. Most of us have

Televisions probably with remote controls and other gadgets that give us access to maybe more than 100 channels, and you can sit there and channel surf—that’s the phrase, right?—and go through hundreds and still not find anything worth watching. Or you go to… we go to our refrigerators, and our refrigerators are filled with food, and there’s nothing in there for us to eat. Or you go to, I don’t know, Netflix to find a movie, and you spend 25 minutes looking for a movie to watch and you don’t find anything. So all of this excess, all of this abundance, actually doesn’t fulfill us, but it actually leaves us feeling more empty. A refrigerator full of food and there’s nothing to eat. A television full of movies and there’s nothing to watch. I mean, we’re all hungry. We’re all hungry. And all of this searching, all of this craving, all of this wanting, all of this restlessness, and we never seem to ask ourselves what… Are we seeking? We just accept the fact that we’re craving creatures, that we’re looking, searching, striving, wanting, never happy, never satisfied, always wanting. We never ask ourselves why or what exactly are we looking for? Why are we so restless? Why are we always searching? Why are we… I mean, take the channel surfing as a metaphor or an allegory for your life, right? How come you can’t find the channel that’s supposed to be your life? Why is it all right? It’s this built-in kind of discontent or unhappiness. Why is it so hard for us to remain quietly at home? Why is it so hard for us to remain at home, let’s say, in our room? Why is it so difficult for us to take a solitary walk without the gadgets and the telephones and the earbuds and that, right? Why do we find it so difficult? What prevents us from being at rest? What prevents us from being at rest? Why are we so restless? We simply accept the fact of our restlessness. We never question it. And I think we need to.

Another question: why are we so enamored? Earlier I spoke about the depth and the surface, the batheos and the epiphaneia, right? The depth and the surface. Why are we so enamored of surfaces? Why are we so enamored of surfaces? We have become very superficial people. It’s all about appearances, right? Whether it’s politics, whether it’s in our own self-presentation to other people, we look… we seem to be fixated, focused on, enamored of, obsessed with surfaces. Surfaces: the way things look, not the way things are. And we’re easily deceived, time and again, by surface appearances. Even in relationships, we look at people and we see the surface of them. Sometimes people fall in love with other people because of the way their eyebrows look, or because of the color of their hair, or some other superficial physical characteristic that brings people together. But there’s no foundation for a relationship there. The surface is just the surface. It used to be an old saying, “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” That’s exactly the kind of society we’ve become. I’m not Canadian, I’m not from Canada. I think maybe what I’m saying is more relevant to the US, where I think America is supposed to be ahead of Canada all the time, and we’re certainly ahead of you in terms of being superficial and shallow in terms of our culture, and our aesthetics, and our politics, and many other things. So much of what I’m saying comes from an American kind of background, but I think it’s also a very human problem, a very human problem. And my question is: why are we so enamored of the surface? Why are we so attached to surfaces?

And one possible answer could be that it’s because we’re afraid of the depth. We are afraid of depth. It satisfies us with some surface, some external surface, and it is enough for this thing to be beautiful, to be good, to be relaxing. But don’t be afraid of depth. Which maybe we’ve never encountered it, maybe we don’t know who we are very well, and rather than get into that, we’ll satisfy ourselves with superficial and external distractions. Still worse, still worse than being afraid of the depth: maybe we’re afraid of finding out that we don’t have a depth. That if I’ve spent my whole life attending to external superficial things, my face and my hair and my appearance and my clothing and the details of my home and so on and so on, right? All of these external things. Maybe I’ve neglected my own inner depth. And that’s why I don’t want to look inside. Or, for example, not to see the flaws or anything. Why should we go into this psychism? Because this makes it easier. This makes it easier. To look inside of yourself… It’s one thing to look inside of yourself and see something you’re not happy with. But it’s another thing to look inside of yourself and realize that you’re empty. That’s a frightening thing. That’s a frightening thing. And I think our lives are very empty, living in a materialistic and consumeristic and sort of scientific kind of culture where everything is reduced to physical phenomena. There is no longer the spirit, only the material, the external material surface of things. So, this idea of the restless, this kind of restless mind that we have, this is a human dilemma, it’s a human existential kind of a problem, and it’s been exacerbated by our modern society, by our modern culture. Why? Because there’s a very real sense in which the culture that we’ve created, the culture that we’ve created—I’m thinking primarily of digital culture and all of the electronic gadgets. I think I see someone in the back holding up an electronic gadget. I mean, they’re everywhere. People, right? I’m not singling you out, but the culture that we have created is really a culture of organized distractions.

How can you possibly have a deep inner spiritual life if you’re constantly distracted by the 24-hour news cycle? Every 15 minutes, every day, there’s some new story, there’s some new event, there’s some new disruption, there’s some chaos. And it seems that the whole thing has been designed to distract us. One day it’s the missing airplane, the next day it’s some virus, the next day it’s some attack. And it’s in the interest of certain groups and others to keep us distracted from the depth of things and to keep us satisfied with superficial things. That’s a whole other issue; I’m not going to get into it. But it’s not by chance that society has evolved in this way. It’s to someone’s advantage that we’re being kept distracted and that we’re not encouraged to look within ourselves.

So let us think for a moment about what our mind is doing most of the time. Now, there’s a lot of people here in the church tonight, and I’ve been speaking for maybe 10 minutes or so, and you might want to take a quick self-check and ask yourself where you’ve been in those 10 minutes. Have you even arrived here yet? Some of you still haven’t arrived. Physically you’re here, but spiritually, mentally, maybe you’re still at home, maybe you’re still at work. Maybe you’re thinking about a conversation you had, or maybe you got here, body and soul, but then now you’re thinking about, I hope he finishes quickly because I haven’t had my coffee this afternoon or I’ve got to make dinner. You went to Paris, I don’t know. Rarely are we present. We are not present.

So if you think about it, all of the activity of the mind, it’s always moving, it’s always in motion, it’s always filled with thoughts and memories and images and anxieties and fears and resentments, and think of all of that turmoil that goes on inside of us, and either we’re mulling over things that happened yesterday, what they said in the office yesterday, or what my kumbaro said the other day, or what’s going to happen. All of these things are going to happen. Either we’re mulling about things in the past, going all the way back to my childhood, what did my parents do, or my grandparents, or where I was born, or what opportunity… It never ends. It’s like a cassette tape or a videotape that just plays over and over and over and over and over in our minds. So either we’re mulling over things that happened yesterday, or we’re anxious about tomorrow. What’s going to happen? What’s going to happen? What’s going to happen with this and that and the other thing?

So if you think about it, we’re sort of torn in two directions. Either we’re worried about the past, or resentful about the past, or daydreaming about the past, people that we knew, places that we went. Or we’re focused on some sort of imaginary future. What if this? What if that? How about this? How about that? And it turns out that we are almost never in the present. We are absent from the present. And we know what that’s like. You know what it’s like when you have a problem and you want to talk to someone, even a friend, and they’re not there. They’re not present. They’re not listening to you because they’re distracted by things. You know what it’s like. And we do that to them too. They’re telling you their problem. I tell you the good news of the heart, and you think about… what will you eat on Easter? That’s not the case. We are not present, neither in ourselves, nor in others. Where are we? That is the question.

But to be absent from the present—where is God? In neither our thoughts about the past nor in the fantasy future we imagine is God present. And if we are not present in the present, we are not with God. So if I’m living in my past, if I’m pining over my lost youth and how handsome I used to be and how I used to be able to run 10 miles and the friends that I had and the places that I went and how, or if I’m worried about the future, where am I, I don’t have enough money to retire, or where am I going to live and what happens if there’s an economic recession. If I’m living in the past or the future, I’m not living in the present. And God exists only in the present. God does not exist in my memories of the past, and God does not exist in my daydreams and my fantasies about the future. So if all I’m doing is mulling over the past and imagining things about the future, I’m not in the present, and that means I’m not with God. I’m not with God. God is not the God of my imagination, of my thoughts, of my memories, of my resentments. O theos zis tu paron. As I said before, if we’re absent from the present, we’re absent from God.

Think about it. Even when we’re sleeping, our minds are active. This is killing our anthropos. And from where comes this movement, this commotion, this action? It doesn’t correspond with anything. I think most of us are so distracted most of the time that we don’t really have a sense of what’s going on inside of us. From the minute we wake up in the morning, most of us now, from what I understand, the first thing people do is reach for their iPhone. They say the last thing you touch at night and the first thing you touch in the morning is your iPhone. It’s like that creature in the Lord of the Rings, Gollum, with the ring. It’s like, “My precious, my precious.” He couldn’t be apart from the iPhone. Which means all of our waking time, all of our waking time is spent hooked up to some sort of gadget or device or you’re emailing or you’re texting or you’re tweeting or you’re on the computer or you’re binge watching or you’re on the phone.

We’re constantly distracted; we’re constantly living outside of ourselves. Because as I said, we seem to be afraid to actually be alone. We seem to be afraid to not have these things on. Actually, a long time ago, Sigmund Freud, the famous psychologist, noticed—because in those days they had radio—he noticed that the moment that people walked into a room, they put the radio on. That was the first thing they did. They walked into the room, they put the radio on. I see this today. People get home from work, the first thing they do, put the TV on. Or the radio or something else. What did Freud say about that? He said, why do they do that? Or you go to the car, the first thing. God forbid there’s a two-minute period where there isn’t some distraction. Freud’s answer to that was because these people don’t want to hear or confront their subconscious thoughts or impulses. I wouldn’t put it exactly like that, but I think that’s generally right. If we can’t be alone with ourselves, that means we have a problem with ourselves. Either we don’t like ourselves. Why should we be uncomfortable being alone, going for a solitary walk, without the music and the gadgets and the… why? What are we afraid of? What are we afraid of? So I think we’re so distracted that we don’t even realize what’s going on inside of ourselves. And I think it’s only now, maybe when you’re waiting online somewhere in the bank or something like that, or people don’t even do that anymore. Say you’re trying to go to sleep at night and you’re dozing off and you’ve turned off the iPhone and the TV is off and you’re there by yourself now. And now you start: “Oh, what’s all of this? What are all these thoughts in my mind?” Now you see them. They’re not just there at 10:30 or 11 o’clock at night when you’re going to sleep. That’s going on all the time. And I think we’re running away from that, and we’re distracting ourselves with all of the gadgets and the music and the noise and the binge-watching and the constant checking of the email and the tweets and the text messages. But there are moments when you hear all of that internal noise. And some of us can’t sleep at night because of that. All of those thoughts, all of that anxiety, all of that turmoil, all of that… And it’s not an exaggeration. It can be torture. It can be torture. Whoever has had a sleepless night knows just how awful that is. To not be able to sleep because your mind is racing because of… Sometimes the concerns are real. Sometimes, “I lost my job today.” They put on a kimiko. But more often than not, the concerns are either imaginary or they’re magnified by our mind. And we know the power that these thoughts have. I can think of someone that I don’t like. There might be someone that I have a problem with, a family member or a colleague or a neighbor or someone like this. And we know there’s an issue there. And if that person comes to my mind, all of a sudden that person’s face, let’s say, or just the memory of them comes to my mind, I know that my blood pressure can start to rise. I can become physically upset just by the thought of someone. And if I allow myself to—if I indulge in that thought—I can become, I can actually become angry. I start remembering the negative things I think they did to me: “They said this to me, and they did that to me.” And you know that gets me mad. Now I think of the power of thought that can even strike a person as a crime, from a single thought, from a single word. Consider where our mind is here, our mind is there. Look, if you’re sitting here and your mind is somewhere else, that’s fragmentation. That’s a low-level form of psychological dissociation. You’re having a low-level out-of-body experience. You’re here sitting in the church, but your nous is right in the potemazisu, actually. Tonight and tomorrow we’re celebrating St. John of Climacus, St. John of the Ladder, who’s a church father and abbot of the Monastery of Saint Catherine’s at Sinai, who wrote a book called The Ladder of Divine Ascent. That’s why they call him Saint John of the Ladder. And he’s somewhere in The Ladder. He says, “If you could stay inside your body for one day, you can be saved.” If you can sit and keep your soul inside your body for one day. You might even say, μια ώρα, θα σωθείς. But are soul and body united for 24 hours? That is hard to… Look, you can’t even say one single Jesus prayer without being distracted. Ούτε ένα. Ούτε ένα. Κύριε Ιησού Χριστέ, ελέησόν με. Δεν μπορείς να πεις χωρίς διασπασμό, χωρίς περισπασμό. Πώς θα γίνουν 24 ώρες μετά; When for a second, a person cannot concentrate and stay inside himself, his soul flies and goes wherever he wants. When we do see some of these things inside of us, it can be very disorienting, it can be very confusing, and it can be very frightening. To get a glimpse, in other words, of your inner darkness, because everyone has some darkness in them. And we pretend it’s not there, or we think it’s going to go away, or other people see it, we don’t see it. But it’s there. And when you see it… it can be very upsetting, it can be very disturbing. For example, if you’re sitting in church on Sunday and a negative thought enters into your mind, you experience a blasphemy in your mind, inside the church. You didn’t want it, you didn’t ask for it. You don’t like it at all, but this evil thought comes to you. A blasphemy. Where does this come from? So you think, “Who am I to think like this? Where does this come from?” So.

Like I said, the blasphemous thought that comes, or the angry thought, or the violent thought, or the dark kind of sexual thought, or all of these things that pass through our minds. A person can see those things and become very confused, become very frightened by them, and they might think they’re having some sort of a problem. Which is why we need to know what is going on inside of ourselves. We need to know that. We need to know where all of this comes from. What is the cause of all of this inner turmoil? What does it all mean and how are we supposed to respond to it? What does one do? Having seen some of these things in myself now, seeing my own faults, my own arguments, my passions, my sins, my insecurities, and all that we have in common, Thank you. How should I answer now? What is the right way to deal with this situation? This is the mystery. And this is the mystery of life. Because if a person cannot fight properly with this situation, he cannot move forward. Why? Because if we don’t know how to face ourselves, in a sense, and the situation that we have, we can never make progress in the spiritual life. Why? Because these are the things that hold us back. Because if every time I think of you or you or you, I get angry, or if I remember what you did to me or what you said to me last year at Christmas or when you didn’t come to my house when I had Thanksgiving dinner or whatever it was, if every time those thoughts enter my mind, I become angry and upset, that means those are the places where I’m not free. Those are the places where I’m not free. It’s like you have a little dog and you have it on a rope and it’s tied to the tree, and the dog, it can kind of run around a little bit, but I can think that I’m fine, but then all of a sudden, don’t bring up this subject or don’t talk about that one, because I get to the end of my rope. And those are the places where I’m not free. I’m not free and I have no joy because of this. It ruins everything. It ruins me. It ruins my relationships with others. So I have to know what’s going on. So let’s maybe just spend a couple of minutes and enter a little more deeply into some of the psychological and spiritual dynamics that are operative here.

Now the first thing to say is that human beings are very complex creatures. They say the most complicated thing in the universe by far, it’s not anything in the solar system or in the galaxy, it’s the human brain. Just on a strictly physiological level, on a strictly neurological level, the human brain is the most complex and complicated thing that human beings know, and we know very little about it. We’re still learning about it. And the funny thing is that when we try, when neurologists and psychologists and others try to learn about the brain, it’s the brain trying to figure the brain out. Because it’s the brain of the psychologist or the brain of the neurologist trying to figure out essentially his own brain. So you wonder, can that even be done? It’s a little bit too self-referential to reach a conclusion. But the truth of it is that our experience of the world is extremely complex; we experience the world in complex ways. We’re not like little earthworms that see light and dark and heat and cold and react to them. Our response to the world, the way we look at the world, the way we perceive the world, the way we take in the world is extremely complex. And it’s not simply on the level of the senses, like a camera takes a picture of something because it takes in the external source of light and it records the image. The eye works like that, but the camera doesn’t have a mind, the camera doesn’t have feelings, the camera doesn’t have a memory. So we have all the optical machinery in a way, but we bring this whole emotional and cognitive and spiritual world to that act of perception. So we take things in from the world around us and we form ideas about them. I’ve been up here now for 20 minutes and many of you will have formed ideas about me by seeing me, by hearing me. This is the way the mind works. We make judgments, we make decisions, we size people up, we measure things up. Now all of that could be wrong because how can you say you know me? Maybe you’re seeing me now for the first time, but we do that.

The fathers of the Church, the saints of the Church, make a basic distinction, which I think is helpful, between pragmata and noimata. Pragmata, the Greek word pragma, plural pragmata, in modern Greek we use it to mean things, but it also means realities or objects. So there are things in the world. There are trees, there are houses, there are people, there are automobiles, there are pragmata in the world, but there are also what the church fathers called noimata. From noima. To noima ta noimata, and the word nous, you can hear that word in there as well. So noimata are sort of the mental representations of the pragmata. The noimata are sort of the mental images that we form about things in the world. So a simple example. Let’s say I’m a little child. I don’t know a whole lot about the world because I was only born a short while ago. I’m still learning. And I go into the kitchen, I’m just learning how to walk, I go into the kitchen, there’s an oven there, I have no idea what an oven is, I’ve never seen an oven before, and I go up and I put my hands on it, and the oven is on and it’s hot and I burn my hands. I thought, “Oh, goodness, that’s an intense experience to have, put your hands on the outside of the oven.” A few days later, I’m back in the kitchen, and maybe I’m not a very bright boy, and I do the same thing again. They say it’s the old proverb, once burnt, a lesson learned. Sometimes you need to be burnt multiple times to learn our lessons.

But sooner or later, if that happens once or twice or three times, I will form, from the pragma—which is the pragma here is the hot oven—I will form the noima, the sort of general abstract idea in my mind now that ovens have a high possibility of being hot and I better exercise caution around them. You see now, not all ovens are hot, not all ovens even work, but now I have this idea that ovens are hot and I have to be careful around them. You see what happens? We have simple experiences of physical sensations in the world, but we end up forming these ideas about them. We end up forming these noema, ta noema ta tom pragmaton. And there’s a distinction between the two of them. This is a very simple idea because it involves heat and sensation and so on. But most of the ideas that we require are much more complex. Why? Because they’re tied not to just the sensation of heat or cold, but they’re tied to our feelings and our emotions and our whole selves and our personality.

I’ll give you another example that the Church Fathers use. They say gold; by gold they mean wealth, money, right? Gold, they say. It’s gold. It’s a stone. It’s something that comes from the earth, from the ground. Gold is just gold; it’s a mineral. Gold is nothing more than a mineral. There’s nothing bad about it. There’s nothing evil about it. It’s just something that comes out of the ground. So the pragma, the thing, is the gold. But I could come to realize that if I have a lot of gold, I have maybe a little more power to buy things, let’s say, and to make myself look superior to other people, or to buy a bigger home, or to take trips that I can tell my friends about and have them see just how much money I have. Think of the authority and the social status and the prestige and the power that the gold can…

So in my mind now… When I see gold, I don’t see a mineral. I don’t see a mineral anymore. I see power, the ability to impress other people, and all of the things that I think. You see the difference? Another example that the Church Fathers use, that the Saints use, is a beautiful face. The face of a beautiful woman, or the face of a beautiful… That’s just a face. That’s just a human face. There’s nothing inherently wrong or sinful about human beauty, but yet I can in my mind develop an image now, right? I can have the knowing mind, right? I can become impassioned; I can become attached to particular kinds of faces, so that when I see this woman’s face that I think is a beautiful face, I’m attracted to her, I open the door for her, I buy dinner for her, I’m talking to her, but there’s another woman who does not conform to the image of beauty that I have in my mind and I ignore her.

Now it could be that the woman who I don’t consider to be beautiful might actually be the better person. She might be the better wife, the better mother. But I don’t pay attention; I totally avoid her because she does not correspond to the noema, to the mental image that I have in my mind. And I’m attracted instead to the other person who I think is beautiful or who society tells me is beautiful, and that’s the one I end up with. It turns out that I’m so blinded by my own ideas that I can’t see that she’ll be a terrible wife and a terrible mother and she won’t be faithful to me or whatever. But we don’t see these things because our experience of reality is now interpreted by the ideas we have in our mind. Wives have images of their husbands in their mind, and husbands have images of their wives in their minds, and parents have images of their children in their mind, and so on.

Let me ask you something. If I’m relating to you—let’s say there’s a husband and a wife, or a wife and a husband—and let’s say the wife is relating to her husband through that idea, she wants him to be a certain way: “Don’t do this, do that, this is how you should be, that’s not how you should be, that’s not what good husbands do,” etc. So if the wife is relating to the husband through the idea, right? And if the wife is doing that, or if the husband is doing that, can the wife or the husband really be said? What is the wife or the husband relating to? They’re relating to the idea. So in a sense, there is no relation here. There is no relation here. If I’m relating to the people around me through the ideas that I have of them, right? I don’t know. I don’t know. Oh, don’t tell me about her. I know all about her. Let me tell you what she did to me 25 years ago. Five minutes 25 years ago and, you know, that’s who she is. And if I only relate to people through these images that I have in my mind, am I really relating to people? Am I free, first of all? Am I even free? I’m not free. I’m bound. I’m enslaved to these images that I have in my mind that interpret my experiences for me.

And we know we have images of ourselves, too. We relate to our own selves through similar images. For example, I could say, okay, myself. You know, I have a PhD, I’ve read a million books, I’m very smart, and I expect you to treat me a certain way, right? I have a beard, I wear a robe, I expect to be treated with a certain level of respect when I come to your parish, and you have to put the carpet down on the floor for me because you have to, right? All right. So I—because why? Because I have this image of myself, and I think the whole world has to correspond to it. Now, what happens? You come along now. You say, “Father, okay, this is a small speech, we won’t put the carpet out for it. You have to do it.” I come to your church and say, “Father, we usually put the carpet out when the speakers come, but we’re not going to put it out tonight for you. We just don’t have the time; we’re not going to do it.” So you’ve just come now, and you’ve wounded me. You hurt me, you insulted me, you offended me. Well, what did you actually hurt or insult? Me or the idea of me?

Why should it matter to me if there’s a red carpet? I don’t know how we got onto the red carpet, but we are on the carpet. Why should it matter to me? Why should it matter to me if there’s a carpet here or not? Or why should it matter if someone didn’t open the door when I thought they should? Or if they put me in a four-star hotel and not a five-star? You see what I mean? It’s all because of this image that I have of myself, and so on with the images that I have of others. And the simple solution, of course, is to be done with the image. Get rid of it, don’t have the image, let it go. Why should it matter if somebody bumps into you or disrespects you? So what? Really? What happened? What happened? And the other person doesn’t feel pain? The other person doesn’t have his problem? We don’t know why the other person is talking like that. He has his own pain. People do things, they say things, they have their own problems, they have their own pain, they have their own difficulty. Most of the time they’re not out to hurt us; they’re trying to protect themselves. Those are sort of self-defensive things where the boss yelled at them and they can’t yell at the boss, so they yell at you. It’s all of this displaced anger. And if all of us are so hypersensitive because of the images that we have, our life becomes what it has become.

I read a study that was actually very disturbing. This has been replicated multiple times. Do you know that good-looking children, like in grammar schools, on average get better grades than the other kids? And it’s not because they’re smarter. It’s because they’re perceived to be better looking. And when the good-looking kid acts out and makes trouble, he’s very easily forgiven. “Oh, Johnny’s just having a bad day,” right? But if the not-so-good-looking kid acts out or makes trouble, he’s punished and scolded and sent home. Look at the way we judge people and relate to people and respond to people based on something as superficial and as insignificant as their physical appearance. And we do it all the time. We do it all the time. And it’s Hollywood, it’s the star culture, it’s everything together that combines and colludes to create this situation. There’s so many things that we can say, but we don’t have all night.

One last point that I wanted to add, because it is an important thing. Elder Porphyrius used to say—now Saint Porphyrius used to say—and I think last year you had the Yerondisan here from the monastery speak. He used to say that the devil will take a sensitive person and try to make that person hypersensitive. In other words, the devil will take a good quality that you have. The devil will take a good quality. It’s good to be sensitive, by the way. You don’t want to be unsensitive or insensitive. So the devil will try to take a good quality that you have and make it bad. So the devil will take a sensitive person and try to make that person hypersensitive. Hypersensitive is no good. Sensitive is nice. Sensitive is good. Hypersensitive? Nobody likes hypersensitive. So the devil actually tries to exploit our feelings and our emotions. I had more to say about that, but I want to jump ahead and talk about how we should respond to the situation that I’ve described.

One of the first mistakes we make is that—and I think this happens at a very young age, as children, certainly by the time we’re teenagers—we make the mistake of self-identifying with all of the negative thoughts that we have inside of ourselves. The anger, the resentment, the daydreaming, the fantasies, the lusts, all of these things that pass through our minds. At some point we begin to identify with them, and we say, “Oh, this is me. Yeah, I’m an angry person, or I’m this way, or I’m that way.” And we don’t know who we are, and we get confused by this flow of emotion and feeling and thoughts, and we lose ourselves in all of this. We lose ourselves in all of this. And look, we have to realize that not every negative thought that goes through our mind is us. The mind is always active.

And there’s an example of this. Years ago, I used to go to Greece. When you would fly into the country, I would notice that there were always clouds over this or that. There were no clouds in the sky anywhere, but there were clouds over some of the islands. And I thought, it’s summertime, there’s not a cloud in the sky, why should there be clouds over these islands? It was odd to me. Then when I went to Mount Athos, I noticed that on beautiful, clear summer days, there was almost always a cloud. Sometimes it was perfectly circular, like a saucer sitting right on top of Athos. So I thought, that’s exactly what happens with us, right? What I mean to say is not that you are all of the bad thoughts. That’s just bad. That’s a cloudy day. But you’re not the cloud. You’re the mountain. See the difference? Right? So we make the mistake of forgetting that we’re the mountain, and we end up living in the clouds, in the thoughts, and we don’t realize that these are just things that are there. That’s not who we are. They might be linked to us, they might be related to us in some way, of course, but they do not express our deeper identity. And from the minute I realized that very simple kind of meteorological situation, it was always very helpful because we do have rainy days in our minds and gloomy days and foggy days. But that’s not who we are. And even on a foggy day, the sun is still shining somewhere, isn’t it? Which is why the Christian…

A person who believes in Jesus Christ should never be upset. Not too much anyway. Because we know that even when the clouds come in, the sun is still shining somewhere, even if we can’t see it. The first thing to do is to not identify yourself with your thoughts. The other thing to do is simply, we have to—it’s a good Christian practice, it’s a good spiritual practice—to make a new habit now. And stop engaging those negative thoughts. Stop engaging those negative thoughts. Don’t entertain them. Don’t couple with them. Don’t welcome them in. Don’t dialogue with them. We do this all the time. We’ve gotten into the habit of doing it that we find it almost impossible to stop. I’m telling you, it’s not impossible. We don’t have to do that.

The other day, I’ll give you an example. It was early in the morning and I went somewhere to do something and a colleague, somebody that I work with, made a kind of passive-aggressive remark to me. It was sort of one of these rude things that people say, a kind of a dig, but it’s a veiled kind of a dig. And I thought about it. I said, “Gee, why are they saying that’s me? That’s not.” It was rude. It was offensive, but I didn’t have time to deal with it because I had to go to a meeting. Then I had to teach a class, then I had to go somewhere else, and the whole day went by. By the time I got home, it was 8 o’clock at night. And that thought waited for me all day. All day that thought waited for me. I got home. It was the end of the day, and all of a sudden, it was like I heard a voice, and the voice was saying, “Are you going to let him get away with that? Meta-po-or-des-di-la-vi.” And again, I’m like, “Oh yeah, that’s right, am I?” And then the voice, that voice, it says something like, “If you let them walk all over you, they’re going to think you’re weak and they’ll do it again.” And then I said, “Oh.” Makriya. I thought about it for a minute. I’m like, “I’m not going down that road.” You don’t have to engage those thoughts. I could have sat there and worked myself up into a fury that evening. And I’ll indulge in revenge. And I’ll get him and I’ll show him. And I’ll call people up. “What he said to me today?” On and on and on. I’ll drag other people.

One sentence and as logismos. And I’m here to tell you that it’s very hard, but you don’t need to engage them, you don’t need to couple with them, you don’t need to entertain them, you don’t need to invite them into your heart, you don’t need to think about it. Like in biblical terms, they’re unclean things. You don’t touch things that are unclean. If you saw something on the street that was disgusting or gross, you wouldn’t. But yet with these thoughts? A piano man, a messos. Saint Hezekias of Sinai, another saint from Sinai, we’re celebrating John of Sinai tonight. He has a wonderful image. He says the mind is like a lamb. It’s like a young, innocent, almost naive kind of creature. It doesn’t really understand a lot. And the lamb is in the meadow. And at one point, this horrible beast, like a wolf or a dog or some ravenous creature, appears on the periphery of the meadow where the lamb is. And the lamb sees the creature. But it doesn’t know what it is because it’s a lamb. It has no experience of these things. And he says not only does the lamb not know what this beast is, what the wolf is or the wild dog… He says the lamb thinks that it’s its mother. And what does it do? It runs toward it. The innocent, naive lamb runs towards this horrible, ghastly. And he says in the real world we know what happens when little lambs run in the direction of hungry wolves. We know how that story ends, but in the spiritual world the story’s not over there, and this is the only thing the mind can learn from that experience.

In other words, a foul thought comes into your mind, an ugly thought comes into your mind, a dark thought comes into your mind, a blasphemous thought comes into your mind. The only thing he says you can learn by running toward that thought, by coupling with that thought, is just how foul and how awful that thought is. That’s the only thing you can learn from it. And if you think about it, you think about the ugly and the awful, but the thoughts that we have sometimes. Mark Twain once said, every man has secret thoughts that would shame the devil. There it is. No one wants to admit that, but he did. And it’s true of everyone. We have to now commit ourselves to the inner practice of not engaging these negative thoughts. We’ve done it for so long that it’s a hard habit to break. I’ve made myself an angry person, I’ve made myself overeat, I’ve made… whatever, because I’ve been giving in to the thoughts for so long. And the thoughts became actions and the actions became habits and I became habituated into ways of doing things, and now I can’t stop. Now all I need is the thoughts and the action follows immediately. Everything starts with thoughts, and that’s why the struggle is there on that level. We say the advice that we get in the monastery is: don’t think about your thoughts, and don’t think about not thinking about your thoughts, because if you’re trying to think about not thinking about them, you’re thinking about them. The idea is to simply think of it, think of the thoughts as sort of background noise, or they could be things on your peripheral vision. I have my hands here, I can see them in my peripheral vision, but I’m not looking at them.

The thoughts are going to come and go. You can’t prevent that. Thoughts come and go, but you don’t have to shine the spotlight of your attention on them. We’re all sitting in church sometimes; what more can we do? You could be in line; this is a classic occasion. You are in the queue, you enter the queue to communicate, and an evil thought comes to you. At this moment, what will you do? Will you leave the queue? Will you not communicate? No. Will you sit there? Will you move forward? Will you say, “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, forgive me, look at who I am and what I have inside me”? Right? Wow. But with your strength, Christ, with your love, I will move forward. I am ready to communicate, I will communicate. Even if I have this thought. Because if the devil can throw you out of the temple, then… Right?

I gave an image of, in church often you could be in line to receive communion, and that’s when the devil tries to tempt you. You think about someone in front of you, or you watch someone else, or very, very ugly thoughts can come into your mind. Some people get out of the line at that point, if they can. That’s the wrong thing to do. You just say the thing to do is you grieve over yourself. You say, “God forgive me, look at me, look at the kind of man that I am, that these kinds of thoughts go through my mind. What kind of a person am I?” And you feel sorry, you say your cross, you say, “God forgive me,” but you don’t engage the thought. See, that’s the difference. St. Isaac the Syrian says that the dispassionate man is not the man who has no passions, it’s the man who doesn’t act on them. See the difference?

The thought comes into my mind. Let’s say I’m shopping for a new watch. And the man in the watch store puts out five or six watches on the counter. And then he turns around to get something else, and maybe the thought comes to my mind. It doesn’t. This is not my particular problem. Maybe the thought comes to my mind and it says, “Take one of those watches.” I said, “I’m not going to do that.” So the thought can come. Let it come. But you don’t pay attention to it. You don’t act on it. You don’t act on it.

And maybe we can close with this because I think our time is coming toward the end. I think that if you live in your mind, if you live in this world of thoughts, you will be confused, you will be disoriented, and God will be nothing more than an abstract idea to you. If you are one of these people who rationalizes and intellectualizes and lives totally in your head, your thoughts are going to be like flies buzzing around your head, and God will never be a reality to you. God will just be a concept that you might have an opinion about, but no experience of. Because God doesn’t meet us, God doesn’t come to us on the level of our crazy thoughts, right? Which is why the church teaches us to descend from the mind into the heart. To live not from up here, but to live from the center of our being, from the core. Not from the mind, but from the heart. The heart is the center, not the mind, not the brain. The center of the person is the heart. That’s the core of us. That’s where we feel our guts. That’s where we feel things deeply. And if we live in our minds, as I said, we’ll never experience God, we’ll never know God, because God is not up there in all of that, the attic of the brain or the mind that’s full of all this clutter and junk. God is a reality that is deep within us, and deep within our center, and deep within our core. And when we get distracted and we find ourselves pulled out of ourselves into all of these thoughts, that’s where we need to recall our energies, recall our self, and enter that center place, enter the place of our heart. And there, not to just be idle, as they say, not to do nothing, but to say—when you get to that place—to say the Jesus Prayer.

In other words, if I’m troubled by thoughts, don’t think about the thoughts. Don’t let them overtake you like that. Saint Maximus the Confessor says, “Nobly endure the waves of thoughts that will come crashing over you.” That’s logizmi, the waves of logizmi. They come, they come, one after the other. He says, “Genios, sit there, don’t be afraid. Because you are the rock, you are the stone. And the thoughts will come, they will break, they will leave.” These are the moments. These are the moments. And to find that center, right, that deep part of yourself, and to know that that’s where you’re connected to God. Not in all of this madness that goes on in our mind, all the restlessness and the craving and the… We don’t have God there. The reality of God, the presence of God, is in us, in our hearts.

What’s the image they say? If you look at a tree, a tree has branches, a tree has a trunk and it has roots. And when the storm comes, when the winds come, where is the tree most agitated? Exoterica. It’s the outer branches of the tree. That’s the mind. All the thoughts. That’s what the person is being agitated by. So what do you do? If you’re in a storm, you’re not going to climb up to the top of the tree. You’re going to go somewhere by the trunk. So we should always do this, but especially when we feel agitated. That’s when we know that we’ve left our center, we’ve lost our center, we’ve left the place of the heart, and we have to go back to the core, to the center, to the trunk of the tree, to the roots of the tree, because that’s where the life comes from, and that’s where the strength is, and that’s where our safety is, in a sense. I had many more things to say, but we had a Vesper service, and I think I’ve spoken for quite some time now. Lethal naskurazu katolu. But I don’t know if there’s still time for… Do you want to do the questions and answers? So, no? Yes?

We spend a lot of time—many of us spend a lot of time driving—and there’s this phenomenon of road rage. We can get pretty angry or worked up when we’re driving, and that’s because we look at the other drivers as our enemies. We look at the other drivers as if we’re in competition with them, and I think that’s a mistake. It’s because instead of looking at the red light… The red light is your enemy, right? “Oh, it’s been green long enough. It’s turning yellow now. I better hit the gas. I can, right? God forbid I’m stopped at a red light.”

The red light is not your enemy. The red light is your friend. The red light is telling you, “Stop.” What are you going to do? You are going to slow down. Stop at that red light. Slow down. Stop at that red light. How long are you going to be there for? Seconds. That’s where you can stop. Collect yourself. Think about God. Find your heart, enter the place of your heart, and then you go on your way. In other words, think of all of the opportunities that we have in the course of the day to turn our thoughts to God. And instead of doing that, we’re trying to run red lights. Are there any questions? If you have any, you can give them to me now; I can answer them. What do you have?

It’s like the Academy Awards; I’m waiting for the winner to be announced. You want to pick them too, so… Maybe we’ll start with one, and then I can pick up the rest. Do you want me to read it?

“How do you help your spouse that is not happy or at peace with themselves? How do you get rid of negative thoughts?”

I think I answered the second part. You really can’t get rid of the negative thoughts. You can’t get rid of the negative thoughts. The real response, the real solution is you have to stop engaging them. The thoughts are going to be there. It’s up to us whether or not we… Somebody said, even on Mount Athos, airplanes fly overhead, and they make noise sometimes. The thoughts are like the airplanes, but on Mount Athos, they didn’t build an airport. So the thoughts are going to come and go, but don’t build a runway for them. Don’t build a landing strip for them. Don’t welcome them into your heart, no matter what they are.

The older image that people used to use was the image of the fly. And if you’re sitting in the house and the windows are open in the summertime—and the windows could be the eyes or the ears or the senses—and of course if the windows are open, flies are going to come into your house. And the fly comes into the house, and what does it do? It buzzes around the room a few times. And if the fly doesn’t find anything to eat, it’ll leave. It gets inside the house, doesn’t find anything to eat, and leaves. But if the house is dirty, not only will the fly stay, it will leave its eggs, and then the house will be full of flies. So you can’t prevent the flies from buzzing into your mind, but you can create a pure environment within yourself that doesn’t welcome or accept these things.

The other question… All right, why don’t you try to pick some that are most appropriate for the talk? Yeah, another one. I didn’t answer the first question, I mean, about the spouse who’s not at peace. If I’m not at peace, I can’t make you… I mean, how can I possibly? The other thing is that we’re all in different places too, and we have to… You know, when I went to the monastery, I went to the abbot at one point, and I said… and he says, “Look, you want to know why you’re here in the monastery? You’re here to put up with everybody else, and they’re here to put up with you.” And that solved all the problems. You’re here to take care of others, and what about you?

When it comes to other people, look, just as sensitive… the most sensitive thing in the world is the heart. The heart of a person is the most sensitive thing. Just a little touch and it’s a disaster. So, we have to be gentle with each other, we have to be patient with each other. The other person is in pain. If the husband or wife is having a hard time, in Greek we don’t say “good patience”; we say “good patience.” Because many need it.

There were a number of good questions, so hopefully I do a good job, and if yours doesn’t get chosen, I’m sorry.

“With all the excess and abundance in our everyday lives, and a delusion of the idea of ourselves, how can someone humble themselves to look into the depths of their soul for their salvation?”

They say that the devil tries to destroy us through our virtues, and God tries to save us through our vices. The devil tries to destroy us through our virtues. What does that mean? Let’s say if I have a good voice. I’m a good psalter. I have a great voice. That’s a virtue. That’s something good. I have a beautiful voice. If I have a beautiful voice, I can become prideful. And the good thing that God gave me, the beautiful gift that God gave me, the devil will try to use that to destroy me. And we see that all the time. Your gifts, your virtues—that’s why they say you have to repent, not simply of your vices; you have to repent of your virtues sometimes, because you think you’re good, you think you’re right.

So as the devil tries to destroy us through our good qualities, God tries to save us through our bad qualities, and the difficulties that we have, the mistakes that we make, the failures that we have in our life, our passions—this is the amartia that God allows us to be humbled by our own weaknesses, person who has a character defect or a character flaw.

Let’s say someone who’s an alcoholic. That can be a potentially very dangerous and very damaging thing. And what do they say the person has to do? They have to hit rock bottom. And then there’s an opportunity for them to… “Okay, I realize now just how terrible this is, and I realize now that… this is done. I can’t do this anymore.” So that’s an example of how a vice, a passion, an addictive behavior, a self-destructive behavior reached a kind of limit and it became its own teacher in a way. “I can’t live with this anymore.” And God has a blessing. And people say, how about sometimes people get diseases and they understand that they’re blessings from God. They said, “The alcoholism was terrible, but I hit rock bottom and it was the best thing that ever happened to me. Or when the doctor told me that I had cancer, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. Because I wasn’t living my life properly. I didn’t know what was important in my life. My priorities were all upside down. And when the doctor told me what he told me, then I understood what life means. It’s a blessing.” So God is the one who will bring these things about for us. Do you have another one? Do you have any good ones? Time? Time is something you control. There were a few on this subject, so I think I’ll consolidate them into one. What is the church’s stance on secular teachings, on thoughts, self-development, etc.? Can they work in tandem? And I’ll add that there were a couple in terms of the practice of physical meditation, yoga, etc.

When I first heard the question, I thought it was about psychology. And I think that principal psychology is a very vast and variegated field. We refer to it with one word, but there are so many schools of psychological thought that it’s really inexact to speak of psychology in general. But having said that, I’ll do it anyway. I think that the best that psychology has to offer is actually good, and that many people have been helped by counselors and psychologists and psychiatrists. Just as the body can get sick with disease, the brain is part of the body, and the brain can. I mean, there’s obviously a certain percentage of people who have organic brain disorders or chemical imbalances. It’s just part of the way we get sick. It’s part of the way things go wrong and those people can be helped by counseling and even medication. I think at least in the US we’ve gone way too far with this and we’re over diagnosing people with the smallest kinds of neuroses and problems and the answer to everything now is to get everybody on drugs. Because the pharmaceutical companies make a lot of money and it’s all like that. But if you look at the positive achievements of psychology and psychiatry, we should welcome them because they can really help people that can’t otherwise be helped. But having said that, we also have to recognize that psychology and psychiatry have their limitations. They’re dealing with the emotional and the psychological aspect of the person. And often, this is the problem with medicine today, they’re usually just treating symptoms. They’re not getting at the deeper. Often there’s a spiritual cause or there’s something. So I think there needs to be a combination of the spiritual together with. Just like if a person has a physical problem, the priest wouldn’t say, “No, just go pray about it.” He would say, “No, you go to the doctor.” It’s very simple; we overcomplicate it, I think.

As far as the other things go, meditation and yoga, and I have a question about all of those things, and I question the appropriateness of those things for Orthodox Christians or for any Christian. They present themselves as exercise, they present themselves as stress relief, and everyone’s stressed out, but they are really the vestiges, anyway, of the spiritual practices of another religion. And there are many yoga teachers who are attracted to yoga and they’re attracted to eastern religions and they’ll teach their yoga class, they’ll give people mantras. It’s not everybody does this, but some do. But I think if you want to exercise, that’s great. I would encourage you to exercise. I see no reason why we have to be going to other religious traditions to relieve stress. And I know that yoga is popular and that many people go to yoga classes and what I’m saying might be looked at as narrow-minded or obscurantist or negative, but I genuinely feel that way. I just don’t think that I could do that. I couldn’t go to a yoga class. And how would you feel if I did that? What would you think about me? I couldn’t go to yoga and do what? And place my body and spirit in submission to Someone who’s going to tell me do this and do that. And what do they do? My body is not my own. My body belongs to the church. My body belongs to the body of Christ. That’s not my body to go now to deposit at the feet of a spiritual teacher from India or Southeast Asia or… All world religions have things of value in them. But I think to do this is to cross a line. And it’s not necessary. And actually, I read a book a while ago, I forget the title of it, I’m sorry.

But it’s about the history of modern yoga. And the yoga that we’re familiar with in the Western world is actually a fairly recent phenomenon. It was invented in India in the late 19th, early 20th century by a group of Hindu religious leaders who were upset and concerned about the presence of British Protestant missionaries in India. You had lots of Indians converting to Christianity under the British, and these Indian religious leaders were naturally concerned about this. So what did they do? They created this whole system of modern yoga as a way to combat actually Christianity. Obviously yoga has roots in much older Indian traditions, but the form of modern yoga that is practiced today goes back to Vivekananda. There’s a whole history here; we’re not here to talk about that. But the very idea that it was created to combat Christianity is enough, I think, to make any Christian question becoming an adept, let’s say, at that practice. So anyway, it’s a whole other worldview. It’s a whole other worldview. I know I lost a few people with that one, but I was going to ask one final question. But because of that, after Father’s answer, maybe we’ll ask two, and His Grace will say a few words and we’ll all go downstairs. How important is teaching Hesychasm to young children? What could it look like in the household?

Children learn by example. We are our parents’ children. What our parents did, how they behaved in the home, how they related to each other—that’s what we learn. What they tell us, that sort of goes in one ear and out the other. How do they say? They say, “I’d rather see a sermon than hear one.” Have you heard that one before? And so, who the parents are and how they live, that’s what the children see. That’s what they pick up on. They’re already genetically predisposed anyway because they’re your children. So if the parents don’t have a spiritual life, if the parents aren’t people of prayer, if the parents aren’t people of faith, it doesn’t matter what you tell your kids. Are you going to tell your kid to go to…? I used to see this. Parents would drop their kids off to church for Sunday school. They would go and get pancakes and then pick them up. Whatever they learned in Sunday school, the real lesson was: church is not that important because my parents don’t go, or Daddy doesn’t go, or Mommy doesn’t go, and so on. And if you are that living example of faith and of belief, and if your heart is open to God, your children will see that. Even if you never say a word about it, your children will see that; they will experience that. God will take care of that; God will communicate to them. Of course, you want to teach them and take them to church, right? But children are very sensitive too. Children, especially younger people, teenagers, adolescents, are very, very sensitive to injustice and hypocrisy. You smoke. The father says, “You shouldn’t smoke.” “Well, you smoke, Dad.” They’re very sensitive to the hypocrisy that fills our world. So, raising children is probably the most important thing that any human… that’s greater than anything in the world: to bring another person into the world and to raise that person right. That’s got to be the greatest challenge. That’s another life that God has given you for you to raise. And if the example isn’t there, if the example of love and forgiveness and patience… and now we have kids telling their parents what to do. The whole world is upside down. So if the parents go to church and receive communion, the children will learn that and follow along. Now there might come a time—we have this thing in our culture where the kids feel they have to rebel—and okay, they might do that. They might say, “I don’t want to go to church anymore.” But you know, they’ll come back if you’ve given them that foundation, right? They will realize, “My mother was right, my father was right. All those years I didn’t understand it, but… because that’s the right thing to do.” So, you don’t want to be too heavy-handed either. You don’t want to be kind of imposing and forcing and, you know, sit down and say your Jesus prayers. It’s not supposed to be punishment, right? But at a particular point, our children should learn how to pray. They should know that they should experience the reality of God, and they should experience the grace of God, and the love of God, and the compassion of God, and the freedom and the joy that comes from knowing God. That’s what prayer is. We have this idea about a rule of prayer. Nobody likes rules. I don’t like rules, right? I’m an American. Americans don’t like rules. It’s coloring in the lines and all of that. To say it’s a prayer rule, that’s not necessarily the best way. Kanonas, it’s a little bit different. In English, “a rule”… you pray to God because you love God. Not because you have to, or somebody told you to, or it’s a rule. Okay, sometimes it’s good to have the discipline, but that’s not the motivation.

Elder Emiliano of Simanopada, I used to say all the time: if I walked into a crowded room, if I walked into a room and there were 500 people in that room, and if there was one person in that room, one person in that room that I loved, where do you think I’m going to go? I’m going to make a beeline for that person. I’m going to have to say hello to you and shake your hand. The whole time, my mind is on the one person in the room that I love, and that’s where I want to be. You want to be where love is. And that’s what prayer is. You go to your icons in your house not because someone told you to, or because that’s what’s right to do, or someone gave you a rule. You go there because you want to be where love is. That’s where love is. You go where God is. You go there so that your heart can rest in God, so that you can bask in God’s love and be in that place. That’s why you go. You can’t feel that way 24 hours a day, and that’s why a prayer rule is good. Because that’ll keep you going. Just like in a relationship, not every day of married life is a honeymoon. When the strong feelings of love aren’t there, I’m still here. We’re still together because we’re committed. I don’t just love you because I feel like loving you today. I love you because that’s what we’ve agreed to do. That’s who we are now. But we don’t want to ever forget the real reason we come to church is to be with the Lord, to be with God in that place of love. That’s another thing.

Vageli, you’re tiring the world out. No more questions? We’ll go with one more. I’m sorry. Forgive me. That was a great answer. It’s a great way to close the segment. But I already said to whoever this is, hopefully they appreciate the father’s answers. I’m sure they will.

Once we quiet our minds, which kind of relates to what you were saying just now, what questions can we ask ourselves to find out who we are? Think about the way that question is structured. The whole problem is the way I’m thinking. It’s all of these thoughts. If I create a space for myself and I bring those thoughts into that space, it’s still me. In other words, people say, “You have to think out of the box.” Have you heard that expression? “You have to think outside of the box.” The problem is what? The problem is that thinking is the box. In other words, it’s that same voice. It’s that same question. Who’s asking those questions? It’s that same sinful voice. It’s the clouds that are speaking. Take the clouds and bring the clouds down here. The idea is to be done with all of those things. In other words, when I stand in the presence of God, I don’t have my thoughts there, because if the thoughts are there, I’m not with God. I’m with the thoughts. They say the thoughts are all thieves, because they steal the idea of God from you. In other words, if I’m with someone that I love and all of a sudden I’m thinking about other things, it’s like I’m not there anymore. When we’re with God, what we strive for is not so much… I’m not saying don’t think about yourself and don’t ask questions about yourself. That’s unavoidable. We do that. But in these deeper moments of prayer, that’s not the place to think about myself now. No, because you’re with God. You’re in the middle of that relationship. Agapas totheo.

Again, Elder Milianos had a great image. He said, let’s say I’m walking down the road, going to my friend’s house. I’m thinking, “How nice it will be at my friend’s house. He’s made a nice meal, we’ll listen to some nice music, maybe we’ll watch a movie.” My mind is wandering and I’m imagining all of the nice things that are going to… All of a sudden I look up and a few paces in front of me on the road there’s a lion. He says at that moment I’m not thinking about the dinner and the music. All I’m thinking about is the fact that there’s a lion on the road. It’s staring at me, and now it starts to walk toward me. The next thing I know, his face is right up to my face. Am I thinking about anything else? Even myself? What am I? Because then he says, “What if… What if the lion swallows me whole?” The lion is God. When you’re in the presence of God. Let me ask you something. You’re a skeptic. I’m describing an intense situation, but that’s the ideal. To answer the question, I think that when we put ourselves on a spiritual path, when we move in the direction of God, and when we do the right things in our life, those questions will be answered spontaneously. In other words, I don’t know who I am apart from God. I can’t answer the question of who I am independently of God. It’s only in relationship to God that I can discover who I am. What do we say? We say that the human person is the image of God. In other words, like a copy; the original is God and we are the ikones. There is an icon; there is the prototype.

So how can you know the truth of the image if you don’t know the archetype, if you don’t know the source of the image? If I have a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, I can’t read it; I have to get the original. So that’s how I figure out who I am. That’s how I come to know who I am, when I enter more deeply, not into myself, but into the reality of God.

Is that it? You’re going to close it? Thank you so much, Father Maximus, for that really deep, spiritual, enlightening homily and questions and answers to the questions from the parishioners gathered here this evening. I think we’ve all been very much edified during this important Lent period, and we thank you very much for coming here from Boston, for making the time, and for enlightening us with your words and your examples, and, of course, strengthening our relationship with Christ above all. I want to give the last word, and we’re almost there. I want to give the last word to His Grace, Bishop Christoforos, who is also blessing us with his presence here today, so he can also thank Father Maximus and say a few short words. Your Grace.

On behalf of His Eminence Metropolitan Sotirios, I would like to welcome Father Maximus to our metropolis and to thank him personally for his lovely speech about Logism. I don’t know, Father Maximus, if you have searched this area: the ancient philosopher Plato, who spoke about the world of ideas, if they have something related with the world of ideas which are eternal. And also, I know that on Mount Athos, when the monks go for confession, they don’t say, “I am going to confess,” but they say, “I want to say my Logismos,” which is very important in the spiritual life. Also, I thank very much Father Fanourios, the pious priest who organized, under the blessing of our metropolis, this spiritual opportunity in the midst of the Great Lent, which is so necessary to help us to grow our spiritual life in this holy period. When I was in Essex sometime, I heard Fr. Sofroni who spoke about Logismi. And what I remember from that speech is, if a priest is in the middle before the Holy Altar and he accepts an attack by adaptation, what does he have to do? He says, in this crucial moment, he has to pray to God and to say to Him, “My Father, look at him, and You? Discuss with God.” So, to avoid and to pass the temptation there. By this, he will be released from this temptation and he continues his service. Again, I thank Fr. Maximus who came to this Holy Church, which is connected with me personally, as he says that his former name was Nicholas. But also, I am connected with this church because I have been ordained here as a bishop 16, 17 years ago, a long time. Thank you, all of you who came here, and I wish this holy speech to have roots in our spiritual life, especially in this holy land we pass through. Thank you.

One more minute, promise. Thank you so much, Your Grace. Everyone is invited downstairs in the church hall for some charisma that the community is offering, and I want to thank the community council. I want to thank our Philoptochos, who always work so tirelessly, as all Philoptochos do across our holy metropolis. You’re all invited downstairs. For those interested, Father Maximus will be celebrating the Divine Liturgy with Father Hadidimos tomorrow at All Saints at Bayview, south of Finch. So he’ll be there for the Divine Liturgy. Also, for those interested, this homily will be available through the Metropolis’ Facebook and YouTube channel. So if you’re not already there, you can visit it. And, of course, you can visit our Metropolis’ website, and there’s a special section there, not only for this talk, but also for Great Lent, with a lot of spiritual nourishment for the entire Lenten and Holy Week period. Once again, I want to thank everyone for making the time in this distracted world to spend some time here with us. Hopefully, you were mentally here along with physically. I want to thank, of course, above all, His Eminence Metropolitan Sotirios, His Grace here, and, of course, Father Maximus, for once again coming and giving us such spiritual recharging for our spiritual batteries. Thank you, and Kali Anastasi.