Soul. "My leader!" My eye! My supreme spiritual power! My mind! You are driving me into hopelessness. If thou, being my light, acknowledge thyself to be darkness, then what shall I expect from my other powers, which are common to me with dumb animals? What can I expect from my will or power of desire, from jealousy or natural anger, which can only then act differently than they do in cattle, beasts, and demons, when they are under your guidance? You have told me that, with all your weakness, with all your darkness, with all your deadness, the Word of God is still working on you, and has given you at least a sign of distinguishing good from evil, which is the greatest difficulty. And I became a partaker of this knowledge! I, too, when I begin to feel embarrassment and frustration, at the same time feel the wrongness of my condition, I feel distrust and hatred towards this state, I try to throw off a state that is unnatural and hostile to me. On the contrary, when you stop, even for a short time, as if in your own embrace, in thoughts drawn from the Word of God, what consolation I feel! What a praise to God begins from the depths of my heart, from the most heartfelt treasures! What reverence I have for the majesty of God, Who then reveals Himself to me! What an insignificant speck of dust I seem to myself in the midst of a vast and varied universe! What a grace-filled silence, as if brought by the breath of the heavenly wind, begins to blow in me and cool me, exhausted by the heat and lack of rain! What a sweet and healing tear, born in the heart, ascends to the head and flows out of the humble and meek eye that looks at everyone and everything so peacefully, so lovingly! Then I feel the healing of my nature! Then the inner struggle is destroyed! Then my powers, dissected and fragmented by sin, are united into one. Having become one with you and with my other powers, having attracted the body itself to this unity, I feel the mercy of the Creator to His fallen creation, I come to know actively the significance and power of the Redeemer, Who heals me by His all-powerful and life-giving commandment. I confess Him! I see the action of the worshipped All-Holy Spirit, proceeding from the Father and sent by the Son! I see the action of God the Spirit, introduced by God the Word, manifesting His Divinity by His creative power, by means of which the broken vessel appears as if it had never been broken, in primeval wholeness and beauty. My mind! turn to the Word of God, from which we have already borrowed innumerable blessings, but have lost through our negligence, our coldness to the gifts of God. We exchanged priceless spiritual gifts for the deceptive phantom of gifts, under the guise of which sin and the world offered us their poison. My mind! turn to the Word of God! Seek there consolation for me: at the present moment my sorrow is unbearable, and I fear lest I fall into final destruction, into despair.

{p. 110}

Intellect. The Word of God, the soul, solves our perplexity with the most satisfactory definition. But many of the people, having heard the Word of the Spirit and interpreted it to themselves with their carnal understanding, said of the life-giving Word of God: "This Word is cruel, and who can hear it!" [255] Hear, O soul, what the Lord has said: He who has found his life will destroy it: and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it [256]. He who loves his soul will destroy it, and he who hates his soul in this world will preserve it into eternal life [257].

Soul. "I am ready to die if God commands. But how can I, an immortal, die? I don't know the weapon that could take my life.

Intellect. "Do not think, soul, that the commandment of Christ commands you to die alone, that I am excluded from the sentence. No! I must share the cup of death with you and be the first to drink it, as the main culprit of our common fall, rejection, calamity, temporal and eternal death. Death and destruction, which God demands of us, do not consist in the destruction of our existence: they consist in the destruction of self-love, which has become, as it were, our life. Self-love is the distorted love of fallen man for himself. Self-love idolizes its fallen, falsely named mind, tries in everything and constantly to satisfy its fallen, falsely directed will. Self-love is expressed in relation to one's neighbors either through hatred, or through man-pleasing, that is, by pleasing human passions, and towards the objects of the world, which it always abuses, through partiality. Just as holy Love is the bond of perfection and is composed of the fullness of all the virtues, so self-love is that sinful passion which is composed of the fullness of all the other various sinful passions. In order to destroy self-love in us, I must reject all my understandings, even though I be very rich in the understandings provided by the teaching of the world and according to the elements of the world. I must sink into poverty of spirit, and, stripped naked by this poverty, washed by weeping, stained, softened by meekness, purity, and mercy, receive the mind which the right hand of my Redeemer deigns to inscribe upon me. That right hand is the Gospel. And you, the soul, must renounce your will, no matter how painful it may be for the heart, even though the feelings and inclinations of your heart seem to you the most righteous and the most elegant. Instead of your own will, you must fulfill the will of Christ our God and Savior, no matter how disgusting and cruel it may be for a self-loving heart. This is the death that God requires of us, so that by voluntary death we may destroy the death that lives in us violently, and receive as a gift the resurrection and life that flow from the Lord Jesus.

Soul. "I make up my mind to deny myself: from the very words you uttered about self-denial, I have already begun to feel joy and hope. Let us abandon life, which gives birth to hopelessness, and let us accept death as the pledge of salvation. Lead me, my mind, following the commandments of God, and yourself abide unswervingly in that Word Which has proclaimed Himself: Whosoever shall be in Me, and I in him, the same shall bring forth much fruit, for without Me ye can do nothing." Amen.

Seeing Your Sin

That terrible time will come, that terrible hour will come, in which all my sins will appear naked before God the Judge, before His Angels, before all mankind. Sensing the state of my soul in this terrible hour, I am filled with horror. Under the influence of a vivid and strong premonition, with trembling I hasten to immerse myself in the examination of myself, I hasten to believe in the book of my conscience the sins noted by deed, word, and thought.

Books that have not been read for a long time, stagnant in the cabinets, are soaked in dust, moth-eaten. Whoever takes such a book encounters great difficulty in reading it. Such is my conscience. Not reviewed for a long time, it could hardly be opened. When I open it, I do not find the expected satisfaction. Only major sins are listed quite clearly; the small writings, of which there are many, have almost been erased, and now it is impossible to make out what was depicted by them. {p. 112} God, God alone, can restore brightness to pale writings and deliver man from an evil conscience [261]. God alone can grant man the sight of his sins and the sight of his sin, his fall, in which is the root, the seed, the germ, the sum total of all human sins.

Calling upon the mercy and power of God for help, calling upon them for help with the most fervent prayer, combined with prudent fasting, combined with weeping and sobbing of the heart, I again open the book of conscience, once again peer into the quantity and quality of my sins, I peer into what the sins I have committed have engendered for me.

I see that my iniquities have surpassed my head, for a heavy burden has weighed upon me. The hair of my head is multiplied more [262]. What is the consequence of such sinfulness? My iniquities have come upon me, and I am not able to see; my heart, forsake me [263]. The consequence of a sinful life is blindness of mind, hardening, and insensibility of the heart. The mind of an inveterate sinner sees neither good nor evil; his heart loses the ability to feel spiritually. If, having left a sinful life, this person turns to pious feats, then his heart, as if it were someone else's, does not sympathize with his striving for God.

When, through the action of Divine grace, a multitude of his sins is revealed to the ascetic, then it is impossible that he does not fall into extreme bewilderment, does not sink into deep sorrow. My heart is troubled at such a sight, leave me my strength, and the light of my eyes, and that is not with me: for my hands are filled with reproaches, that is, my activity is filled with stumbling from the habit to sin, which forcibly draws me to new sins; my wounds have stinked and rotted from the face of my folly, that is, sinful passions have grown old and terribly damaged me because of my inattentive life; there is no healing in my flesh, that is, there is no healing through my own efforts alone for my whole being, stricken and infected with sin. {p. 113} By the recognition of my sins, by repentance of them, by confessing them, by regret for them, I plunge all the innumerable multitudes of them into the abyss of God's mercy. In order to guard against sin in the future, I will take a closer look, secluded in myself, how sin acts against me, how it approaches me, what it says to me.

He approaches me like a thief: his face is covered; His words were softened more than oil[265]; He tells me lies, offers iniquity. Poison is in his mouth; his tongue is a deadly sting.

"Enjoy! He whispers softly and flatteringly, "why are you forbidden to enjoy? Enjoy! What sin is there?" — and proposes, the evildoer, a violation of the commandment of the All-Holy Lord.