We are admittedly in a difficult time. A time when economic hardship is leading us to internal turmoil because we are moving away from the prosperity to which we have become accustomed, and with a general sense of insecurity about our future. We had become accustomed in recent years to living in financial comfort, having earnings more than corresponded to the work we did. We had made ourselves comfortable. We were doing well. And unfortunately many of us have forgotten that man has not only material substance, when he gets stuck in material things he will balance, and when for some reason he is not comfortable with material things, he will find it difficult to redefine his existence in this world we live in.
Indulgence thickens the mind and we think of nothing but indulging. But here it is, now that the good times are over.
Many people talked about hunger. I don’t know if we can still say that word today, but personally being of a certain age, like some of you older people who lived in difficult circumstances, we would find it difficult to use that word “hunger” for today at least.
A wise Greek painter said the following “the Greek has lost a great motive he had in life hunger. Now he eats and everyone has a belly and stomach. So we cannot have the activities we had as hungry people. Whatever great things Greece did, either by philosophers or by ordinary people, it was done by hunger. The Greek eaten becomes a dehumanized animal. Hunger must today become a diet. That was in the 80s.
And today, along with the economic material difficulties, we are being bombarded with pessimistic information about the general situation of the planet and our country in particular.
A few months ago I found myself in an Athonite monastery and we gathered in the monastery’s monastery to celebrate the Abbot’s feast. Among other things, the internet was dominated by information from the internet, about events in the world, about the evil plans of the Freemasons, the politicians, the economists, the Pope, the….,the….,the…, a blackness. Next to me sat an old monk who listened attentively without being disturbed, while in the faces of those present there was a gloom, and he whispered three times “and where is God”, “our soul is blackened and we have no hope in God’s providence”.
It is not for us here to analyse these dark, for many, negative powers and forces that say they have brought us to this present impasse.
Our point is that we can escape if we want to. To escape from material difficulty but find the real mental strength to stand on our own two feet. And the Light and the Life is Christ. To call ourselves Christians is to actually live a Christian life. Christ made a breakthrough in history not by his moral teachings but by the two truths he showed us in his life and preaching: The Resurrection and love.
With His resurrection He gave a solution to the greatest enigma and problem of man.
Today our culture is spiritually bankrupt. It wants to drive the thought of death out of our lives and make us avoid pain we’re talking mainly about physical pain. The use and abuse of drugs today is frightening and the more we get used to the drugs the more they don’t work for us and we increase the doses and so on We are all used to living on our pills. Heart pills, cholesterol pills, blood sugar pills, pills…, pills…, pills…, pills… most of the time we take pills to avoid dieting, abstinence, deprivation. We live more years today. But we live with pharmaceutical support, either for our physical health or our psychological health. Depression takes and gives.
We all know that we will die and that we will surely be in pain in this world no matter how much we want to push these two realities away in our minds.
We hear them say “new one man was the new one, not even 80. In the old days, with all the hardships and wars, men could hardly make it past 60. Today, with the advances of science, we give false hope that it will be too late to die. But if we don’t die, we won’t rise again. Someone used to say about our country that Greece never dies and that is why it never rises. We live in a state of maintenance, in a misery. We learned to get by on the easy stuff without any pressure and now that the hard stuff has come, the grumbling born of our insecurity has become like an epidemic. One is sinking the other.
Some visitors come to the Mount of Saints and ask “has the economic crisis affected you here?” I answer “of course” they say “but how come you don’t get salaries, you don’t have pensions, how have you been affected?” and I reply “your complaining affects us” and fortunately many people understand and change the conversation.
And since we mentioned the visitors to Mount Athos because that’s basically where I draw my experiences from people, either by talking or confessing, I’ll make an assessment of their needs.
Some come consciously repenting of their lives so far, confessing their sins and trying to love our Christ and feel his love. These people fall down and get up, but they do not sin again in the same way. Bad habits do not go away easily, temptations are more intense today, but these people may outwardly do what they did before, but their hearts are not given to sin in the same way, so they have hope. They can rejoice because they gain a loving relationship with our Christ who bears all the sins of the world if we are willing to lay them on Him.
There are others who come to report their faults out of moral duty, and few of them have joy in them, despite the bearing of their sins. Many times they try in detail to expose their sins in order to be better cleansed, but joy is lacking, because there is no love for Christ. They don’t care about their relationship with Christ but about their religious, their psychological fit. That’s what they do in other religions. In Islam, for example, if you wash yourself after a sin you are cleansed, but a relationship with God is not established, only simple observance of the law. This is unfortunately the case with many of us Christians.
We do not live. Life exists only in relationships. Individual moral order without love for people leads nowhere.
The lack of real human relationships dries up the soul, leaves it meaningless and forces people to run to psychologists and psychiatrists today. Unfortunately, we have become the West. In the old days we didn’t need psychologists because we talked to each other and there were relationships. Of course, we didn’t have money for such luxuries.
And a bracket that hurts. Unfortunately today the role of the psychologist is tried to be played by some spiritualists, without the necessary knowledge and training, and the results are pathetic.
Archim. Makarios
Elder of the holy chilandari cell of the birth of the theotokos “Marouda” Mount Athos
