Is it natural for a man to go against his own nature?!
…but why depart from God's law “like them”? …our shells burst one after another… man answers for everything, and very strictly
“Nevertheless I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first love” (Rev. 2:4)
A small sin, such as smoking, for example, has become so firm a habit of human society that society provides every condition for committing it. Where will you not come across a cigarette! There is an ashtray everywhere; at every step there are special rooms, carriages and compartments for smokers. It would be no exaggeration to say that the world itself is one enormous smoking room, or rather one enormous carriage in interstellar space: everyone “smokes” — calmly commits the small sin: great and small, sick and healthy, learned and simple… A criminal is allowed a cigarette before his execution. As if there were too little air in the earth's atmosphere, or it were too insipid, we want to create for ourselves some smoky, poisonous air and breathe, breathe this poison, stupefy ourselves with this smoke. And indeed, everyone is stupefied… so that a person who does not smoke is as rare as a person who has never told a lie, or a person to whom the feeling of pride is entirely foreign… The tobacco market is one of the largest in world trade. Every year millions of people labour to give the other millions the chance to inhale acrid smoke and stupefy their heads and whole bodies with its narcotic.
Is it really natural for a person to commit this small narcotic sin — to smoke? The very question is strange. Is it really natural for a person to go against his own nature? To poison himself with a narcotic? Governments forbid the enjoyment of cocaine but encourage the enjoyment of tobacco; small sins are permitted by human law, they do not bring the offender to prison, everyone is guilty of such sins and no one wants to give them up. Tobacco, as a “little cocaine,” is permitted, just like a little untruth, an insignificant lie, the murder of a person in the heart or in the womb. But divine Revelation — the will of the living God — does not tell us this. To the Lord one little untruth is loathsome too, and a single word that wounds the heart to death, and a single lustful glance. A little stalk of lawlessness is as accursed before the Lord as a great tree of crime. A multitude of falls into small sins is undoubtedly much heavier for the human soul than a few great sins that always stand before one's eyes and can always be wiped away by repentance. And a saint, of course, is not one who does great deeds, but one who refrains even from the smallest offence.
It is much easier to fight a great sin and keep away from it. Once two women came to the righteous Anthony of Murom. One was weeping over her great sin, while the other asserted complacently that she had not committed a single great sin. (Out of foolishness people often repeat this at confession, for they do not understand that they have come there not to justify themselves but to judge themselves.) The saint met them on the road; he told the first to go and bring one large stone, and the second to gather as many small stones as she could. In a few minutes the women came back. Anthony said to them: “Now go and put the stones back exactly where you took them from.” The woman who had brought the large stone easily found its place, while the other went about in vain, looking for where she had taken her small stones from, and finally came back to the holy father with the stones still in her hands. Anthony, who was endowed with the gift of spiritual vision, explained to them what these stones meant… For the second woman they stood for the many sins she had grown used to, counted as nothing and did not repent of. She did not remember her small offences and stirrings of passion, whereas they pointed to the comfortless state of her soul — a soul that no longer had even the capacity to repent. The first woman, however, remembered her sin, suffered over it and freed her soul from it.
Many small, unworthy habits are like a swamp for the human soul, if a person establishes them in himself or accepts them as an “unavoidable” evil against which it is “not worth” and “impossible” to fight. It is here that the soul falls into the snare of God's enemy. “I'm not a saint,” “I live in the world,” “I have to live like all mortals”… — so the troubled conscience of a believer soothes itself. Man, of course “you are not a saint,” of course “you live in the world” and “must live like all mortals”; that is why you were born like all mortals; you will die like them; you see, hear and speak like them — but why must you depart from God's law “like them”? Why must you defile yourself with their ways, “like them”? Think about this, man!
How hard it is for the soul to give up a wrong but familiar idea. The psychology of the godless world has taken such firm root in the mental world of modern man that almost everyone behaves in the same way towards sin and the breaking of God's laws. And the saddest thing of all is that evil has taught people to call the demands of sin “the demands of nature.” The demands of nature are to breathe, to eat in moderation, to keep warm, to give part of the twenty-four hours to sleep — and not to poison one's own body with a narcotic out of a senseless love for smoke and mirage.
It is enough to think this question over attentively, and conscience will bring the evil to the surface. But the trouble is that modern man thinks a great deal about his brief earthly existence of 60–70 years and has no time to think about eternity, about his immortality. Carried away by an utterly misunderstood “practicality” and sunk in practical earthly life, modern man thinks he really is “practical.” A bitter mistake! At the unavoidable moment of so-called death, which may come any second, he will see plainly how unpractical he was, reducing the question of practicality to satisfying the demands of the stomach and forgetting altogether his eternal lot.
Until then a person really has “no time” to think about the elementary moral laws of his life. And the unhappy man suffers boundlessly from this himself. Like a child who keeps touching the fire and crying, mankind keeps touching the fire of sin and lust, and cries and suffers, yet touches it again and again… It does not understand that this state of its is spiritual infancy, which the Gospel calls “blindness”; it is a true blindness of heart, even though a person has bodily eyes.
Mankind will kill itself by means of sin, and each individual does the same. Possessed and maddened by evil, mankind, with unbridled enjoyment of the basest instincts, is preparing a cruel lot for itself, as is every person who walks this way. They that sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind. And it is precisely this one important question that they “have no time” to think about… “Live for the moment,” “what will be, will be” — so the soul evades the truth itself, which tells it inwardly that it must turn its gaze on itself, gather its attention, examine the inclinations of the heart and think about its eternal lot. The Creator of the world commanded man to take care only for the day; the world commands him to take care only for “this moment,” and drowns him in a sea of worldly cares!
What is morally of little importance is not at all little. In it is expressed God's apocalyptic reproach to the Christian world that it “has left its first love.” How much holier and morally higher than man today is the very nature from which his body was made. How holy is the stone, ready to cry out against people who do not give glory to the Lord; how holy are the flowers and trees, caught up in the wondrous cycle of life; how majestically the animals obey the Creator's law in their purity. Nature does not smoke, does not drug itself, does not commit adultery, does not destroy the fruit given by God. Dumb nature teaches man how to carry the cross of obedience to God amid the turmoil and torments of this passing world. Man, think about this!
Some think that nothing will come of all that happens here on earth. A person with an unclean conscience naturally prefers to think so. But why deceive ourselves? Sooner or later we shall see the dazzling mystery of the holiness of the world.
We feel that we are alive. But do we really value ourselves so little, and understand the Creator of the world so superficially, as to identify this earthly, everyday vanity with human existence? We are far greater and higher than what we picture here on earth not only as life, but even as an ideal. We are a seed thrown into the ground. That is why we do not yet see the world above, that true picture of nature which will open before us at the moment of so-called death — that is, very soon.
What is death? Death is not at all a coffin, or a canopy, or a black armband, or a grave. Death is life's sprouting up to the surface of the earth, existence under the rays of the divine Sun. The seed of life must die and sprout while still here on earth. The Gospel calls this being “born of the Spirit,” being “born again.” The death of the body is the sprout's leaving the earth, its coming out of the earth. A person who has received into himself even the smallest spiritual leaven, even the most insignificant Gospel pearl, truly has no death awaiting him. But for those dead in spirit, of course, coffins, graves and black armbands truly are death. Their soul will not be able to come out onto the surface of true life, because on earth they did not die to themselves, to their own sins.
Like an egg, we are separated from the other world by the thin shell of the body. Our shells burst one after another… Blessed is the person who turns out to be a living organism, formed for the life to come. Worthy of mourning is the state of one who turns out to be a formless liquid… and perhaps morally stinking as well.
Here on earth we truly are in the darkness of the soul, in its “womb.” And is it not a crime, being in this state, not to prepare for our real birth, and to consider our darkness either a place of ideal blessed life (as optimistic atheism holds) or an inscrutable place of meaningless torments (as pessimistic atheism holds)?
To the bodily eye the meaning is, of course, hidden; but it is very easy to believe in it if you reflect on yourself and on the Gospel. All nature cries out about this meaning; every awakened human soul begins to cry out about it.
How tenderly all of us “unsprouted” people should treat one another… How we should guard in one another this seed of life, this way out into boundless space under the divine Sun!
…the same is felt by the fornicator, and the lover of money, and… the smoker… what are we to call that person… but are not we ourselves the temple of God?! …and only in order to have a smoke…
It is hard to picture in theory the misfortune of a person who, having lived godlessly on earth, “as if nothing existed,” suddenly finds himself face to face with a reality that is not only more evident than this earth of ours, but a reality that surpasses all our notions… Was it not for these souls too that the Lord suffered in the garden of Gethsemane? Was it not for them too that He accepted His Passion on the Cross?!
If the visible heaven did not separate us from the invisible one, we would be horrified to see the spiritual contrast between the triumphant Church of the angels and our earthly Church, full of slack human souls that have all but given up the struggle. We would be horrified, and the truth we do not understand today would become clear to us: what the Lord Jesus Christ has done for us and what He does for each one of us. We picture the salvation He has granted almost theoretically, in the abstract. But if we saw, on the one hand, the snow-white, radiant hosts of holy spirits, burning like fire with an indescribable love for God and striving to save everyone; and on the other, saw the earth with its hundreds of millions of half-people, half-insects, whose hearts are chained to the earth alone — saw people devouring one another, the self-loving, the sensual, the money-loving, the stubborn, those possessed by the dark powers — we would be horrified and tremble. Then it would become clearer than clear that the salvation of man by “natural” ways is utterly impossible. The occultists' talk of an ascending evolutionary movement of a reincarnating humanity would seem to us foolish, to say the least. We would see that the darkness hanging over mankind is not only not lifting but growing heavier… And we would understand what the Creator, incarnate on their earth, has done for people. We would see how the heavenly reapers lift up to heaven even an ear that holds a single grain; we would see that the smallest grain of Christ in a person — like the only grain in the ear — already saves that person. Everything dark will be wiped away and cut off; only the spark will be taken up, and it will become the person's eternal life. Glory to the salvation granted by Christ! Truly, we have nothing but a human dignity trampled into the dust. And from this dust we shall rise by the grace of Christ and be caught up to heaven as a spark. But we shall be caught up only if this spark of the love of God has been kindled in us, if we are able in spirit to tear ourselves away from everything deadly in this world, if we are able to notice even this deadly smallest sin and cut it off too. Watchfulness, attention even to the smallest sin, will be the measure of our spiritual health.
The talk of the need to reject even the smallest sin brings us to the most important question of human life — life after death.
According to the Church's teaching, a soul that has not been freed from this or that passion will carry its passion over into that world too, where, lacking a body (until the resurrection), it will not be able to satisfy it; because of this, its own passion will burn it, and a constant thirst for sin and lust will choke it.
The gourmet who all his life thought only about food will certainly suffer after death, for he will be deprived of bodily food yet will keep the soul's thirst and craving for it. The drunkard too will suffer beyond measure without a body that could be satisfied with a dose of alcohol, and so, for a while, the tormented soul be soothed. The same is felt by the fornicator, and the lover of money… and the smoker.
Let us make an experiment: let a smoker not smoke for two or three days. What feeling will take hold of him? A feeling of torment, eased by everyday dealings and amusements. But take away life with its amusements… and the torment will grow sharper. It is not the body that suffers, but the soul living in it, which has grown used to satisfying its lust, its passion, through the body. Deprived of satisfaction, the soul suffers; and of course the soul of a rich sinner who has suddenly lost his wealth suffers in the same way, and the soul of a pleasure-lover deprived of pleasures, and the soul of a self-loving person whose self-love has been wounded… How many suicides have happened on this ground! All this is experience, the bare experience of our earthly life! Already here on earth we can test our soul. Every person must be prudent; he must guard his house and let no one break into it (Matt. 24:43).
Feeling this, can we calmly submit to the passions, or divide them into serious ones and harmless ones? Fire is fire all the same, whether of a furnace or of a lit match?! Both are painful to the person who touches them, and both may turn out to be deadly. We must believe this indisputable truth: every passion, every evil, every lust is fire.
God's law has set limits to the instincts of the human body; and to the volitional and emotional energies of the soul… it has given the true direction, so that a person may go easily and without hindrance towards spiritualisation. What are we to call a person who understands all this and still gives himself up carelessly and unconcernedly to his passions, justifies them, and lulls to sleep in his soul every sign of saving watchfulness?!
First of all we must stop justifying our own sin, our own lust — even the very smallest; we must condemn it before God and before ourselves. We must ask for salvation, for deliverance. The Lord is called Deliverer and Saviour really, not abstractly. The Deliverer delivers from every infirmity and passion; He will save, He will heal quite visibly and tangibly; in healing He will forgive. Healing is given only to those who thirst for it. To one whose desire for it barely flickers, it will not be given. But to one who is aflame, who burns, who begs and strives with his heart, it will be given. For only such as these can value the healing granted by God, not trample it underfoot, give thanks for it and, in the Saviour's name, watchfully guard themselves from fresh temptations of the evil one.
Of course smoking is a very small sin, just as a match is a small fire. But this sin too is an enemy of the soul, and it is impossible even to imagine that any of the Lord's closest disciples was a smoker.
“Destroy the small sin,” say the saints. There is no acorn that does not contain an oak. So it is with sins. A small weed you can easily pull up. But uprooting a big one needs special tools.
The cause of smoking and of all the small lawless acts that a person justifies lies in the slackness of soul and body. It is a make-believe calming of oneself (of one's “nerves,” as people sometimes say, without realising that the nerves are the bodily mirror of the soul); this “calming” takes us ever further from true peace, from the true consolation given by the Holy Spirit. This calming is a mirage. Today, while we are in the body, it has to be constantly renewed. In the future this narcotic calming will be the source of the soul's tormenting captivity.
We must understand that, for example, when a person “vents” his anger, he also “calms down.” But of course only until the anger rises in his throat again. You cannot calm yourself by satisfying a passion. You can calm yourself only by resisting a passion, by abstaining from it. You can calm yourself only by carrying the cross of struggle against every passion, even the smallest — the cross of uprooting it from your heart. This is the true, firm, certain way and, above all, the way of eternal happiness. One who has risen above the fog sees the sun and the ever-azure sky. One who has risen above the passions enters the peace of Christ, into inexpressible blessedness, a sphere that begins here on earth and is within reach of every person.
A cigarette is an illusory happiness. The same as being angry with someone, putting oneself above someone, painting one's cheeks and lips to please people, stealing a piece of something sweet… Let us not look for happiness of this kind. Its direct, logical continuation is cocaine, striking a man in the face, forging something valuable. Blessed is the person who rejects such happiness with righteous anger. This demonic happiness that reigns in the world is a harlot who has wedged herself between the human soul and Christ.
Every consolation, if it does not come from the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, is a temptation full of rage, on which the builders of a human paradise build their dreams.
It is impossible to pray in spirit and smoke a cigarette. It is impossible to preach and smoke a cigarette. Before going into the temple of God people throw away their cigarettes… but are not we ourselves the temple of God?!
Whoever wants to be a temple of God every minute will throw away the cigarette, and with it cast out every wrong thought and unclean feeling. One's attitude to a small movement of the soul within oneself is the thermometer of the fervour of a person's faith and of his love for God.
We can picture an example from everyday life: in tobacco as a plant there is no evil at all (just as there is none in gold dust, or in the cotton from which banknotes are made). The apricot is a plant. Alcohol is very beneficial to the human body at certain moments and in a certain dose, and it does no harm at all, like tea or coffee in moderation. Wood is the material furniture is made from; everything is from God… But now let us arrange these components as follows: a man sprawls in a soft armchair, puffing a Havana cigar and every now and then sipping apricot liqueur from a glass standing by… Can this man in such a state speak about the living God or pray to the living God? Physically, yes; spiritually, no. Why? Because this man is now slack; his soul has sunk into the armchair, into the Havana cigar, into the full glass. At this moment he has almost no soul. Like the prodigal son of the Gospel, he is wandering in “a far country.” In this way a person can lose his soul. A person loses it constantly. It is good if he constantly finds it again, fights not to lose it, trembles over his soul as over a beloved infant. The soul is an infant of immortality, helpless and pitiable in the conditions of the world around us. Oh, how we should hold it to our breast, how we should press it to our heart, how we should love it, born for eternal life! Oh, how purely we should keep it, removing even the smallest stain!
We have seen an example of how the soul can be ruined if it is passionately parcelled out among the objects around it: the armchair, the cigar, the liqueur. The example given is vivid enough, though in life there are even more vivid ones. But even if we showed the same slack soul through a colourless example rather than a vivid one, the same atmosphere would remain, in which it is better to be silent about Christ than to speak of Him. Here is the explanation of why the world is silent about Christ, why neither in the streets, nor in drawing rooms, nor in friendly conversation is the Saviour of the world mentioned. The world instinctively senses that, in the conditions in which it constantly finds itself, it is less of a sin to be silent about Christ than to speak of Him. And so people are silent about God. A terrible symptom. The world is borne along by legions of words; the human tongue is possessed by these empty legions — and not one word, not one word about God, about the beginning, end and essence of all things.
For to speak a word about God means at that very moment to convict oneself and the whole world. And if a word about God is spoken after all, it is hard to finish it — before oneself and before the world.
If a person does not hate his small sins, he is spiritually sick. If he hates them but “has not the strength” to overcome his infirmity, then this infirmity stays with him until he shows his faith in a struggle with something more dangerous for him than this infirmity, which has been left him for the sake of humility. For there are many, at first sight blameless, who neither smoke nor drink, but who, in the words of John of the Ladder, are like “a rotten apple” — that is, they are full of open or hidden pride. And their pride cannot be broken unless they fall into some sin. But outside the Kingdom of God and its laws will remain the one who himself, for this or that reason, “allows himself” to commit small sins. Such a person, who “lulls” his own conscience to sleep, loses the ability to step into the blessed eternity of the spirit. He always remains like that young man who comes to Christ and at once goes away from Him in sorrow — and sometimes even without sorrow — and only in order to “have a smoke”!
Rigorism and puritanism are foreign to the spirit of the Gospel. Pharisaic righteousness without love is darker in God's eyes than any sin. But the lukewarmness of Christians in keeping the commandments is just as dark. Like the Pharisees, the traders and the smokers in the temple of God — they are driven out of the temple alike.
For the will of God is “your sanctification” (1 Thess. 4:3). A watchful conscience will itself learn to see the foreign dust that lies on the wounds of the soul.
The Son of God and Son of Man has given us one commandment for our thirst: “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” In it the Lord seems to say: people, I do not give you a limit — set it yourselves. Set yourselves the limit of your love for My holiness, and of your obedience to that love.
Archbishop John (Shakhovskoy). Translated (into Georgian) by Irakli Kamkamidze
