On Worldly Advises & Hypocrisy

1. In the working world, we are advised to make sure that for whatever good we do, we have to make sure that our bosses know about it and that we get due recognition for it. Why we need to do this ? The world explains: "it is not because we want to boast of our achievements, but rather that we have make sure that we are being fairly compensated." We are told that in the workplace, things are quite complex and thus it is actually our responsibility for our bosses to know the good which we do so that they can then more effectively use us. 

2. As with most of the common worldly advises that we hear, the above one appears to be reasonable, practical and not wrong (if not outright good). And so we adopt the advice, try to act it out, see if it fits with our constitution, our conscience. 

3. But somehow, try as we might, we see that we can't do it with full gusto, for there is a nagging sensation. Perhaps our skin needs to be thicken up a bit, the world tell us. But maybe perhaps a certain part of our self (the better part ?) restraints us out of a sense of shame/modesty. 

4. But what exactly is wrong ? when we look within ourselves, we aren't able to entangle the conundrum, something is wrong, but what... We spend a few minutes pondering about it, but get nowhere, and soon the ten thousand distractions of the world, it's blinding lights and deafening sound it siren calls beacons to us and soon we are swept along the broad and wide road of worldly affairs and intrigues... 

5. We consigned the advice into the back of our minds, never able to be fully comfortable with it, yet not being able to challenge it. And so, along with a multitude of other half processed thoughts and ideas, the advice joined the litters of our inner world.    

6. But then, now and then, an Elder comes along and helps us clarify our doubts. So today was that day for me, for this question about making sure we market ourselves well. Should we do this ? By what degrees ? 

7. Saint Theophan gives us a resounding answer. No, by no means act in this way. In fact, act entirely the opposite way. Leave as much of the good you do unseen, but if you can't help it, then let it be seen. 

8. Why? The answer is simple, because we are to will and do good for God sake. For the sake of the goodness itself. If we do good in this way, we reap blessed spiritual fruits: peace, love, joy, the gamut of spiritual consolation. And ultimately the good that we do unrecognized, it gets publish anyway. The presence of grace is unmistakable. The goodness, it is undeniable.  

9. To do otherwise than this is hypocrisy. What is hypocrisy, to make an appearance of doing good. This is the strict form of hypocrisy, to want to show we are good, whether we actually do good is besides the point, once we want to show that we are doing good, we corrupt everything, everything now is rendered null and void. If we want to show our goodness, we can't actually do any good.

10. Thus, with the advice of the Saints, I find yet another resolution to one of the nagging doubts in my life. This is an immense gift and has lifted up much guilt I experience at the workplace. 

11. I now know how to labor properly, the best sort of labor perhaps is just to pray for others, entirely invisible, entirely oriented to their spiritual good, entirely an act of faith. How beautiful and meaningful is this activity. 

12. May God grant me more strength, more fervor and more attention to pray for others in my life. Amen.        

Two Mites, Nothing More...

Lately, I have been reflecting through my own actions past and present as to how limited we are as human beings to bring about any good in the world. It is as if we are all the widow in the bible with only two mites to give, a bit of good but nothing more. 

Yet, this is not really a problem, for in the Holy Scriptures and writings of the Fathers, it is recurringly emphasized that it is not a problem to be someone bereft of things to give. To be the widow is fine, for she is entirely justified as a human being because she offered all that she has, the two mites in her possession, to God. If you could only offer a cold cup of water and that is all you can do, that is fine too, God will recompense us. Our God is merciful, the Kingdom of God, it can be bought with two mites or a cup of cold water. What matters is not that we have little to give, but whether we give the little we have.  

Yet.. we somehow forget this most obvious fact and in our desperation to appear justified as worthy lovable human beings, we insist to ourselves and others that we have much more to give. We dream big and fashion for ourselves a story of our salvation and redemption in the sweeping scale and grandiosity of a Hollywood epic. We daringly proclaim to ourselves in the hymns and mantras of our age, that we can unlock 'greatness' within ourselves, that we can 'think' and 'grow' rich, that we can 'awaken' the giant within us. 

Yet, what does this do except breeds in us worries, doubts and anxieties within the secret recesses of our heart, when reality confront us that we actually aren't great. When we find out that our thinking apparatus, it is a most faulty and error prone machine, that the Giant we hope to awaken inside of us, it is but a whimpering child frozen in the corridors of the past, still looking to receive the love that was denied it. 

What do we do then, in fear and shame, we start to lie to ourselves. And instead of humbly putting our two mites in the collection jar and thanking God for his abundant mercies, we start to pour in a bunch of wood chips as counterfeit coins. We hope that the mound of wood chips will somehow fool God into thinking we are worthy instead of rendering our poverty even more conspicuous. A most foolish of human delusion I suppose... one which of course, I have been under the spell of innumerable times. 

I remember about, how some 11 years ago I started a data science consulting business, with a head full of idealistic notions of how I would change the corporate world for the better. I believed back then that it was my destiny to fix a corrupt corporate culture and build a whole generation of new data scientist through a hybrid consulting/education business model. I fashioned in my mind a personal ambition how I would be able to grow a multitude of skills and capabilities and then give them away selflessly. In the secret chambers of my heart, I nurse a fantasy of how when I retire, all my 'students' would throw me a celebratory party and honor my efforts and sacrifices. Looking back, the reality was that I was trying to regain my humanity by becoming a "somebody" in the eyes of others. I had a very empty inner core and very little to give actually... In fact if anything, I was a major taker, demanding from the world attention, high monetary compensation and praise/adulation. And when I didn't get it, I become petulant then despondent. I quit the business after 3 years haughtily believing that I held to personal values that were too high for my then business partner. 

So was that entire enterprise a futile one ? Maybe yes, maybe no... about a couple of years ago, an ex colleague told me that he met up with some of the old ex-colleague, and they all remembered me rather fondly. Of all the wood chips I deposited in the offering jar, I suppose that I also accidentally drop 2 mites into it as well, maybe something like being just a bit more kind and truthful than what is normally expected.

Perhaps that is all we can and should do anyway...     

 

Thoughts on Humility

Today, I have gathered together here some musings on humility, a most important of Christian virtues. May this be useful for you the reader.

1. Paradox of Humility

True humility to me is a sort of impossibility, a paradox if you will. Why ? It has something to do with the idea of wanting to see yourself as inadequate because ultimately it's a good thing to do so. In this way of thinking, one runs into a trap of sort, for if one see's himself as inadequate, and realizes it's a good thing, he will automatically, whether he consciously wants to or not, feel that he is now adequate and thus lose the true feeling of inadequacy.

In this way, one can keep chasing after the idea of trying to be humble, only to see himself grasping it at one moment only to immediately lose it the next. It was as if he was pursuing a mirage, a phantom. Psychologically speaking, the humility that one acquire or display, upon a self conscious realization of its goodness, creates a sense of self satisfaction, a subtle elevation of oneself. The humility even if it started out as genuine now becomes corrupted, it becomes false humility.

Perhaps humility, like happiness is something that ensues, and not something which can be acquired directly. Perhaps it follows from one truly understanding the magnitude of the task he has in order to work out his salvation that he becomes humble... Perhaps its from the reckoning of the the harm he has caused to others, the harm which would have been irreparable if not for something like God's grace.

This probably goes without saying, but the world today is replete in false humility. The spirit of the world, it goes on relentlessly under the banner of enlightened 21st century catch-phrases such as 'leaders eat last' to sow within the people a corrupted form of humility. An easy virtue-signalling form, one whose true face is an elevated and sophistry filled form of pride. One which is focused on making an ostentatious display of accepting personal shortcomings or showing off indifference towards rank and prestige. God knows I have succumb to such false humility many times in my life. I remember how I pretended to myself that I was beyond rank and invited junior staff in my company to be friendly with me, only to later be offended when they actually started acting familiar.

It behooves ones not to get lead astray by the spirits of the world as they try to fan the prideful passions within us to be 'humble' in this false sense. 

2. Seeing That You Have No True Humility in Yourself

Perhaps, the first thing one has to do in grappling with the problem of humility is to come to realize that he has no real humility at all, that all his supposed humility, it is but a sham and a show.

It is not exactly easy to understand this simple fact truly and experiential, and recently I was reminded of this difficulty when I fell into the grips of the spirit of false humility at my first Brazilian Jujitsu class in my son's dojo. His coach had invited me to join a new parent's class which he has started, believing that my presence would help motivate my son, who has become a bit dejected from the sports. The reason why ? It's because he had been constantly defeated by his friends at class. My son while intellectually gifted, is physically inept, and so had to bear the ignominy of being the bottom-of-the-barrel feeder of his class. He couldn't really process his defeats, and I intended to go to this parent's class to model how one can comport himself well even in the midst of defeat, believing that there is a higher moral victory to be attained in this sport.

I told my son from the cushy perch of my martial artist arm chair, "There is a winning and losing beyond the normal winning and losing whenever you step on the mat, and that is the winning over oneself, to submit the unworthy parts in you such as pride and laziness and to attain for yourself the true fruits of the art, the martial spirit".  

Unbeknownst to me, I was already filled with pride which I told my son he had to submit, I thought I had already attained the humility of the warrior who been through a hundred battle and stared through death to see his own true face. I went into the dojo donning on the robe of the humble spiritual warrior, hamming up the role by being extra silent, extra somber, extra deferential. I bowed a bit deeper... If I had not this tentative exterior personality, I guess I would have been rather insufferable to be around.

But thank God, all this pretense was shattered the moment I was asked to roll with a young girl of about 15 years of age. I was submitted in like under minute or something. It was not that I didn't understand that in BJJ, skills are able to equalize against weight and strength difference, but my ego was wounded nevertheless. 

"How can I lose to a girl like this", the ego expressed its indignant. The next round, I lost again, and then again... I tried harder, trying to brute force through the girl's defense, but then lost again. By the end of the class, I could see my ego wounded, writhing and crawling on the floor, not wanting to go to class the following week. I found that I was exactly like my son I couldn't process losing, and I also understand clearly now that I had no humility.

3. Acquiring Humility From Seeing That You Have an Impossible Task in Life

To do God's work, it is in a sense impossible by worldly standards. We are asked to turn our right cheeks... We are asked to sell all our possessions and give to the poor, to lay down our lives for our neighbor. Yet as Christian, we try our best to do all this because we want believe that this works towards our salvation. We want to believe that the present life, it is but a staging ground for the next stage. An impermanent stage where after a short time passes away to reveal the permanent kingdom. A stage where as actors in a play, we put on our mask, robes and outfit only to shed them at the end.

Yet.. this is of course all very hard to believe, we see and feel our present life very much, and the after life, not very much. It but appears to us but in shadows and fleeting glimpses here and there, always slightly beyond the pale of our normal senses. A vague intuition, a nagging suspicion, but nothing more... And thus our task is rendered somewhat impossible. We face this dilemma that we feel the impossibility of the Christian promise and thus the impossibility of the self-denying task we have to undertake. It is difficult for we have little faith, and because of the little faith we start to despair... that maybe this all a lie, a self induced delusion, perhaps in such despair is the seed of humility.

"Lord, save me...", Peter cried out as his faith faltered when he walked on the water towards our Lord Jesus. Perhaps in that cry is true humility. And perhaps in emulating Peter can we truly can get a taste of humility... To jump into the tumultuous seas like Peter, despite our reservation if the Christian promise is true, despite our real lack of faith. To make a leap not of faith but of faithlessness and a sense of desperation knowing that to stay on the boat is to sink to the bottom eventually, to surrender to death...

4. Humility from the Fear of Damnation

The other day a Buddhist friend of mine asked me the following question, "what is your understanding of the nature of the afterlife in Christianity, are you worried for your love ones about their afterlife ?"

"In Orthodox Christianity, we are supposed to believe in eternal damnation, but that the process of being condemn or justified, it's not straightforward in Orthodox Christianity. So I don't know if my love ones will be damned or saved. Maybe I will be damned too", I responded to him something to that effect.

Afterwards, I thought more about our exchange and realized that I don't really have a good understanding of this idea eternal damnation nor do I really believed it. It was like an inconvenient fact about Christianity that I have shoved into the back of my mind. It was rather incompatible with modern ideas of compassion and forgiveness and I have chosen to ignore it sub-conscious. This conversation with my friend however surfaced the inconvenient fact back to the forefront and cause me to ask, what if eternal damnation was real though ? What does it say about our present life ? I went online to read a bit more about what others thought about this problem and came across something which struck me. Maybe eternal damnation is real because our sins, they are much more severe than we think. I reflected further, this made sense to me even from the standpoint of a secular worldview. All our actions today, they would somehow reverberate through the process of cause and effect through all of eternity (or at least till the death of the universe). One negligent action today, maybe it would cause the death of my son 30 years from now ?  I thought to myself further, if every single action have the weight of infinity in them, how then is it possible for me a finite being to manage all of this infinite action, all the time. As it is, I was barely conscious of most of my actions and lived out most of my life in a semi-conscious autopilot mode. I felt outmatched, and knew that God had to be the answer... 

Gradually this idea that I may be condemn has seeped into my consciousness more and more. It has given me pause in many things I do, for e.g. I couldn't just simply go along with one of the bosses secular ideas about life just so as to not rock the boat, it was no longer an option for me. What if in agreeing with this secular idea of his about parenting, would damn his children, and his children's children. Then wouldn't I also be condemned also... ? The weight, it makes one buckle and makes me want to cry to our Good Lord. "Save me" Perhaps in this, the seed of humility is starting to sprout

5. Humility is Possible Because of God

A couple of months back, I was watching on Youtube a discussion between the Orthodox icon carver Jonathan Pageau and the Canadian cognitive psychologist Professor John Vervaeke. The content of the discussion revolved around whether advances in cognitive sciences now allow us to recreate a new religion which teaches age old wisdom of humanity but without the baggage of superstition. John Vervaeke was of the opinion that we have reach the necessary self awareness as a species to pursue such an endeavor. Johnathan Pageau who was an Orthodox Christian, was able to provide comments and contrast to John Vervaeke's position from the tradition of the Orthodox faith.

In one section of the discussion, they touched on the topic of humility and John Vervaeke commented that he believes that one should be humble but only up to a limit, for he believed that without such limits, one cannot really bring himself to act in any manner

"How does one protect himself from paralyzing self doubt if he thinks absolutely nothing of himself", he asked something to that effect. I could hear from the tone of voice, that he was genuinely perplex at why Orthodox Christian would think having zero confidence in ourselves is a good idea. It is an understandable position if you are viewing life through a secular lens.

I can't really remember how Johnathan Pageau answered, but it was something around how the Saints had no problem to be extremely humble because they could turn this humility into all sort of good things. Perhaps my answer to the Professor would have been to share with him a passage from Met. Anthony Bloom's book "On Prayer", which I've copied here below. It has within it a definition of humility which really help clarify things for me:

"Twenty-five years ago a friend of mine who had two children was killed during the liberation of Paris. His children had always hated me because they were jealous that their father hade a friend, but when the father died they turned to me because I had been their father's friend. One of this children was a girl of fifteen who came to see me one day in my surgery (I was a doctor before I became a priest), and she saw that, apart from my medical paraphernalia, I had a book of the Gospels ony my desk. So with all the certainty of youth she said 'I can't understand how a man who is supposed to be educated can believe in such stupid things.' I said 'Have you read it?' She said 'No'. Then I said 'Remember it is only the most stupid people who pass judgments on things they don't know.' After that she read the Gospels and she was so interested that her whole life changed because she started to pray and God gave her an experience of His presence and she lived by it for a while. Then she fell ill with an incurable disease and she wrote me a letter when I had already become a priest and was in England, and said 'Since my body has begun to grow weak and to die out, my spirit has become livelier than ever and I perceive the divine presence so easily and so joyfully.' I wrote to her again: 'Don't expect it will last. When you have lost a little bit more of your strength, you will no longer be able to turn and cast yourself Godwards and then you will feel that you have no access to God.' After a while she wrote again and said 'Yes, I have become so weak now that I can't make the effort of moving Godwards or even longing actively and God has gone', but I said 'Now do something else. Try to learn humility in the real, deep sense of this word.'

The word 'humility' comes from the Latin word 'humus' which means fertile ground. To me, humility is not what we often make of it: the sheepish way of trying to imagine that we are the worst of all and trying to convince others that our artificial ways of behaving show that we are aware of that. Humility is the situation of the earth. The earth is always there, always taken for granted, never remembered, always trodden on by everyone, somewhere we cast and pour out all the refuse, all we don't need. It's there, silent and accepting everything and in a miraculous way making out all the refuse new richness in spite of corruption, transforming corruption itself into a power of life and a new possibility of creativeness, open to the sunshine, open to the rain, ready to receive any seed we sow and capable of bringing thrity-fold, sixty-fold, a hundredfold out of every seed. I said to this woman 'Learn to be like this before God: abandoned, surrendered, ready to receive anything from people and anything from God.' Indeed she got a great deal from people; within six months her husband got tired of having a dying wife and abandoned her, so refuse was poured generously, but God also shone His light and gave His rain, because after a little while she wrote to me and said 'I am completely finished. I can't move Godwards, but it is God who steps down to me.'

This is not only a story to illustrate what i said, but something to the point; this is the weakness in which God can manifest His power and this is the situation in which the absence of God can become the presence of God. We cannot capture God. But whenever we stand, either like the Publican or like this girl, outside the realm of 'right', only in the realm of mercy, can we meet God. "

Perhaps true humility is possible after all because of God, because of His love for us.

A Reflection on Great Lent

Over the last 7 weeks, I went through Great Lent as an Orthodox Christian neophyte. It was my first year celebrating Lent, and all in all, I found it to be a very fruitful one, having discovered much about myself and the salvific powers of Christ and His Church. In this post, I would like to capture in writing a general sketch of how the spiritual journey of Lent unfolded for me over the 7 week period. May God guide me to write truthfully and unpretentiously as I record my accounts of the events here.

Great Lent: A Preamble 

From a secular standpoint, Lent is a quaint and unassuming Christian celebrations, almost trivial by the standards of modern sensibilities. Unlike Christmas, it has not been subjected to as much infiltration and modern influence and is thus the lesser known of the two Christian celebration. In the Orthodox tradition, Lent is a time where we believers submit ourselves to more stringent ascetic practices. Generally, these practices fall into the following 4 categories of fast, prayers, reading of spiritual books and alms giving. On Easter day itself, Orthodox Christians celebrate Christ's resurrection with a long service that last through the entire night (9 PM - 3 AM). After which they take a break and return to church at 9:30 AM to attend the mornings service and the final celebratory feast which brings the season to an end. 

As a whole, nothing about Lent and the celebration of Easter marks it out to be anything special, especially when contrasted with the spectacles of other modern festivals such as the Olympics or World Cup, where extravagant fireworks and glitzy parades abound. To secular sensibilities, it is also bland when compared with Christmas, which nowadays is celebrated with modern exuberance, with people reveling in the delights of rich food, Christmas movies and shiny presents.  

In Malaysia, where festive holidays abound, the unassuming Lent trailed quietly behind the dusty heels of a series of more fashionable public holidays, Christmas, New Year & Chinese New Year, receiving little attention for itself from the general public. Thus, without the usual environmental cue which marks out a particular season to be important, I somehow carried in my heart a feeling mostly of secular indifference mixed with a dash of hope and trepidation as the start of Lent finally arrived. 

The hope, it came from the fact that I had started to experience a little of God's grace in my life. Leading up to Lent, I had started to receive deeper personal revelations about the condition of my soul through the Sacraments of Confession. On the last week of February, right before my Chengdu trip, I found myself breaking down at the confession table, feeling a deep sorrow at my inability to love my son properly, for wishing him death in the dark hateful recesses of my heart. Why do I wish him death ? Because while I love him, and see him as my spiritual brethren, he is still immature in many aspects and we get into fights which leaves me in a lot of anguish. After the confession, I felt an inexplicably relief, as if to be lifted from the mire, that I can be forgiven for everything. I started to feel that I too can have a meaningful existence in spite of myself.   

The trepidation, it came from having to give up all the good food during this upcoming fast. In my last Orthodox fast (the Nativity fast), I experienced quite a bit of lethargy and found that giving up meat to be more difficult than I expected it to be. The Sunday before Lent, I had a 'last meal' of some pancakes at Hoshino at Midvalley with my wife and kid, as a 'mourning' for my upcoming fast. I also decided around that time to also give up the internet except for work and spiritual matters. The Church Father's, they say that at Lent we are to give up 'eating' our brothers and sisters (i.e. consuming on their shame, misfortune and distress), without stopping the use of Internet, this would not be possible.  

And so, after having tucked away my last meal, I stepped tentatively into first week of Lent...

The first 3 weeks of Lent: Discovering my humanity.  

The first week of Lent is called the Clean Week, a week whereby those who are able to would fast from food for the entire Monday and only start re-eating slowly on Tuesday onward. I decided to give the full Monday fast a try and felt surprisingly energize this time around. Perhaps God's grace is in stronger me than it was during the Nativity fast. During Clean Week, there were also daily services at the church, both in the mornings and the evenings. The evening services were especially good for me, for it involved the reading of the Canon of St Andrew of Crete which had a lot of petitions/prostration to God about granting us more humility (something I struggle with). 

During the first evening service, I had a spiritual breakthrough which left me weeping silently in the darken church. What was I weeping about ? It was the sight of a fellow lady parishioner cuddling with her small child under the faint glows of the warm church candle lights. Why would I weep at such a sight ? Previously I had noticed that I harbored an irrational racist sentiment towards her and had confessed about it generally at the confession table. However, it wasn't till my sin was reflected through the light of this precious and yet so fragile loving moment that the extent of my dehumanization of her only finally strike home. The revelation reduced me to a puddle of tears, I wept over my depravity.. (but also vaingloriously praise myself for my 'saintly' tears).     

During the subsequent 3 weeks of Lent, I had a few other experiences likes this, where my more awaken heart would be able to perceive the true worth of things clearer. Things that would normally appear mundane and pass me by unnoticed. For example one night after service, I found the sight of my wife driving my son up the porch in our banged-up Myvi to be both achingly and hauntingly beautiful. At the time, she was wearing a Pikachu party hat and was looking slightly worn down, most likely from having given her motherly love to my son unreservingly. Something about the Pikachu hat and me not being able to be by her side that night made the image of her tiredness a tragically lonely but heroic one. I felt the windows of my heart open to the sorrows and plight of single mothers the world over, who had to break their backs to provide for their children without the support of a spouse. I don't know why I would feel like that. The way I perceived it, it was totally out of context, yet at the same time, it made a lot of sense and most importantly made me feel the need to love my family reverentially. 

I also experienced these out-of-context feelings faintly at work when I saw an office couple sharing a private moment with each other. This sight, it created an emotional surge in me, it was as if my heart was telling me to pay attention to how their love stand as a testament against the brutal norms of the capitalistic workplace. 

"Pay attention, you are a human being, not human capital nor a mindless consumer...", my heart was perhaps suggesting    

Concurrently, during the evenings, I found myself waking up at 3 AM in the mornings with tingling sensations coursing through my body. I wonder if this is the operation of God's grace in me, the movements of the Holy Spirit. Sometimes, the tingling sensation is accompanied by spiritual reflections, mostly regarding my own sins as a human being. I found myself crying silently some of the nights and falling back to sleep peacefully after. Perhaps this is the process of healing.        

All these experiences, they reached a sort of a climatic resolution on the Friday of the 3rd week. On that day there was a service, and I attended it. It was also my birthday. As I entered church, a surge of emotions welled up in the bosom of my heart. Tears began to flow inexplicably, it was as if something was on the verge of bursting out, but I didn't know what it was or how to say it. I finally found the words at the confession table, I confessed in a flood of tears.

"I have lived 40 years as an animal, this year onward, I want to live as a human being", I said in a choking and sobbing voice.  

The 3 weeks of sporadic spiritual experience, they culminated as the singular insight that I am not an animal, but a human being. An insight which in the dark times of modernity, is in fact quite revelatory (for myself at least). After the service, Father texted me links to the audio-book, "Our Thoughts Determine Our Lives" by Elder Thaddeus. I thank him and made a commitment to listen to it. 

The 4th Week: Intermission 

The 4th week passed by in a similar manner as in the 1st three weeks, but perhaps with less intensity for I couldn't recall anything specifically from the week now. I vaguely recall putting some of Elder Thaddeus' advice into use with my family and found it to be extremely helpful. 

"Even if you so much think of your child as bad and in need of correction, you are giving him an unknown blow", Elder Thaddeus advice us. One has to be much less judgmental with his child and try to influence him with a much more loving internal disposition. I put this idea to practice and found being able to influence my son much better.  

Another thing which I remembered from that week was a phrase from the sermon my Father gave on the Sunday of Saint John of the Ladder. In the sermon, he mentioned that "The Ladder of Divine Ascent" which St John wrote was not meant to be read by beginners and lay people as it was written for monks and those who are advanced in the spiritual journey. Personally, "The Ladder of Divine Ascent" was a special book for me, along with "The Way of the Pilgrim", "The Philokalia" and "Dairy of a Writer by Dostoevsky". I came across these book in the later part of 2022 and read a substantial portion of all of them. It was in these book that I found the conviction that the Orthodox Christians have within their possession the Truth of life. Within "The Ladder of Divine Ascent" , I found the idea that we are to learn to love 'dishonor' to be comforting and an antidote for my own obsessive vainglory and pride filled disposition. I had since found many other Orthodox books which were more suitable for my level (books written by more contemporary saints such as St Theophan, St Paisius etc..), but these 4 books, they have a special place in my heart, for without them, I would most likely have not find my way into the Orthodox church.  

The 5th & 6th Week: Crossing an Ocean & Falling from Grace

The 5th week of Lent was a rather eventful one for me and I have summarize the experience in one of the blog post below. "Crossing an Ocean". It was essential a week where I came to terms with my own sins, made a public account of it and crucified myself on my own Golgotha, my own Cross. 

In the 6th week of Lent, I started to feel a loss of grace. I believe that this happened because I found myself starting to become obsessed about my blogging. I had set out initially to write an honest apology/confession to my friends ("My struggle with the passions"), but as the praises come in, it began to infect my soul and started inflating my ego and robbing me of my peace. Soon, I found myself writing the "Crossing an Ocean" blog post, this time about my spiritual experience on the weekend of the 5th week. My heart, it felt inflamed by this blogging activity, and I lost the ability to perceive those transcendent truths nor write flowingly, semi-consciously. I became worried if my sentences were coming together well enough, if it will hit the high of the previous post. This loss of grace, it saddened me, but I wasn't fully conscious of it at the time, except that I knew I felt restless. At the end of the 6th week of Lent, things came to a head, and the spiritual dearth I felt throughout the week, it culminated with me blowing up at my son at the Church for creating a ruckus and causing inconvenience to other parishioners. I left Church service mid-way in an angry huff and felt embarrassed for myself and sad for my son. Later that afternoon however, through the infinite grace of God, things improved and my son had a spiritual breakthrough himself while we were eating deserts at the IPC mall. 

He told me that he had experienced very little peace within himself and that he would like God's peace to be with him more. I asked him how was he going to acquire this peace and he found the answer for himself. He said that this required him to be one with God (theosis ?), to do His commandments. Later that evening I told him that since he made being one with God his life goal, I felt my usual parental rules and boundaries would no longer be adequate to guide him, and that I would withdraw them and instead only advice him as a 'brethren' on what he should do to acquire Godly peace which he himself wanted. Here I borrow a bit of St Paul's writing about how one has no need of the Law of Circumcision now if he has Christ. (Later on, I wonder whether I was too idealistic here, and have dialed back this a bit)

The 7th and Final Week: Coming Face to Face with My Original Sin 

At the start of the final week of Lent, I was still very much in a state of spiritual angst from my obsession with the blog. Yet I decided not to stop it, I felt (delusionally ?) that maybe I have a gift here, and that I should try to continue and learn to write without obsessive attachment. I also felt that what I write will be useful to my son one day and also to the reader who is looking for spiritual answers to his own life too. These thoughts, they galvanized me and gave me fuel to retype the blog post "A window into a parents life" that I deleted out of disgust for all the vainglorious thoughts it was generating in me. I was at that time very close to abandoning this entire blogging project. I also took 2 days off to attend the Great Thursday and Great Friday services and hoped to recover myself during then. 

By now, I had felt that while Great Lent started out well, it has now gone a bit down hill. I wasn't entirely discouraged by this fact because I had read from one of Met. Anthony Bloom's book that one shouldn't expect to be able to hold on to the Grace of God. That it will be taken away from us to teach us humility. I thus had little expectations for the final week except perhaps that I would try to get a grip on my vainglory and try to practice the virtue humility in the midst of this difficulty. Little did I know that my biggest spiritual breakthrough of the entire Lent was still lying ahead for me. As they say in Mandarin, "human plans are inferior to the plans of heaven" Indeed God had His plans for me, for without me realizing it He was about to reveal my 'original' sin to me. The sin which is so close to oneself that one cannot see it, the cardinal sin that engenders/catalyzed all the other sins. This insight, I now take away as a gift from God, for it was revealed to me in a manner which felt divinely guided. It is my most prized possession now, a final crowing treasure which I have gotten out of Lent. 

The way I was led to this insight by divine providence happened like this... 

On Thursday night, at the evening service, I found myself confronted with a horrible truth. As I was listening to the reading of the events of the Crucifixion, it dawned on me that I am one with the Pharisee, that I was enjoying their mocking of our Lord as He hanged silently on the cross. 

"If you are God, please come down from the cross now", my heart snickered along with the Pharisee. I knew a part of me hated God, but I didn't know why. At this point now however, I have been doing confession seriously for around 5 months, and was practiced enough to be able to face this horribleness within me without sugar coating it, without flinching and looking away but instead to stare it in its face and acknowledge it as something I needed to repent of. And to have faith that it is not beyond the Lord to forgive me of something like this. And to have hope that he will reveal to me what I need to do. 

After the service, I felt bad but not entirely disturbed, not as disturbed as much as being plagued by the slings and arrows of vainglorious impulses. The next day, Great Friday itself, I went to church in the morning and after service, Father reminded us to attend the evening services for there will be a presentation and procession of the burial shroud of our Lord. It was going to be an evening funeral service, probably the most special and solemn day of the entire year. I was determine to be there on time today. But things didn't turn out as expected, God's other plan was in motion and by a confluence and string of minor events that occurred in succession, I found myself late, despite my best human attempt not to be. 

So what happened ? What was the gentle gust of wind that the flutters of the butterfly wing produced to cause a subsequent hurricane. Well... it was something small and seemingly innocuous, I had forgotten to do the laundry before going to morning service, a household work which my wife had asked me to help with the previous night, somehow it just completely slipped my mind. After I got back home, I was reminded by my wife of this unfulfilled promise. Feeling guilty, I immediately leap from my seat and went to get it done. After the laundry was done, I proceeded to hang the clothes on the rack outside for it to dry, thinking I had put away this accident behind me. However, disaster struck, I fell asleep while reading some spiritual books on my phone and it started to rain outside, wetting the laundry. My wife had reminded to bring the clothes in case it rained as she couldn't do it, having to attend to some business call.  When she came down after her call to find the clothes wet, something in her broke, she lost her cool and scolded me for this particular negligence but also other things which I tend to slip up on. Normally she would have not be so frustrated, but today she couldn't keep her cool due to the fact that her project was giving her quite a bit of stress and she was also physically unwell.  She told me that somehow I didn't not care about the house, that I cared about our son and her, but not the house. While I nodded my head, inside I was resistant, and chalked it up to her being emotional.  

"I've cared and sacrificed my self plenty", the hard parts in me was saying.    

In general, me and my wife fight very little, so every argument rends and tears the heart. Though I didn't really agree I did something wrong (after all I am just a bit forgetful mah...) I still felt the need to make up to her. I decided to redo the laundry and also fetch her to my in-laws house so that she did not need to drive herself. She had been working hard on her project all week long, and I felt that it was the least I could do to not make her feel neglected.  At this time, I also thought maybe I should skip the night service if my wife finished work late, because by the time I fetch her to the in-law house, perhaps three quarter of the service would have been over. It would be a great loss, but maybe it's better to miss the service after all.. 

"Didn't I enjoy seeing Christ being nailed at the cross, maybe if I go to the burial service, I would be blaspheming Christ in my heart ", I wondered. 

I also remembered that one of the Saints did say that before church, we have to take care of our spouse. Just at the time I was toying with these ideas, a Christian friend of mind texted me to wish me Happy Great Friday. I confided with him my problems, and he basically helped me feel OK with my decision to stay at home with my wife. 

"God will understand", he told me something to that effect.  

However, I got to go to the church after all as my wife managed to finish her work at 6:00 PM that night and so I had a chance to attend the service before it was too late. I thought I could potentially keep to my original promise of attending the service on time. But by the time I was done fetching her, it was already 6:30 PM and I found that I had only 30 mins to get to the Church if I wanted to make it before service start. The afternoon rain which caused me to redo my laundry, it didn't help me in this situation either, for it created a heavy traffic jam leading into downtown KL where the church was located. Somehow, I became very anxious and frustrated as I tried to weave and cut my way through the jam. For some reason, I felt a great loss about something which not that long ago I was thinking wasn't that important. I felt a pain in me that I was going to miss the burial of my Lord, to miss His last earthly moment. It produced anguish within me.  

It was during being stuck in this jam and being in this despair, that my epiphany came to me. Suddenly, I realized.. this seemingly little thing, this "accidentally" forgetting the laundry and "accidentally" falling asleep which had caused me to miss my Lord's burial, it is not something small at all, it is my original sin. The sin I grew up with, the sin which has hid in the shadows of my unresolved childhood memories of how I was a victim in a world which was unfair to me. Suddenly, a whole series of past experience got re-arranged within my minds eye into a new picture. I experienced a gestalt shift in my perspective, like how one experiences in those visual illusions where you can see an image to be both either a young lady or an old lady depending on how your subconscious frames it.  

Intuitively, I realized now, it was this "accidentally not paying attention" at primary school that my relationship with my parents soured. It was this "accidentally not paying attention" that led me to accept all things indiscriminately (pornography included). I realize what my problem was, I was fundamentally a slothful and lazy person, and more particularly, I was lazy with the way I manage my attention. I realized it was entirely my choice me to be like that, that I could have addressed it at any time in my life, but which I instead chose to ignore, to paper over my laziness with a prideful excuse that I was too spiritual to care about worldly matters. I was in short an ignorant person, an pompous ignoramus... And this was my downfall... 

Upon arriving at church, I knew I had an epiphany that I had to digest (perhaps for the rest of my life), but at the time, I was too restless to process properly. I was more concerned with not being able to join my Lord's funeral and was simultaneously thankful to Him for revealing to me that I in fact care deeply about Him, and that my hate, it was probably mingled up with this blindness I had over my original sin.  

After the service, I went to fetch my wife and son home. I could feel she was still upset with me (for I made another couple of "accidental" mistakes that send a signal to her that I didn't care enough). Within my heart, the rip seemed to widen a bit more and I felt disturbed and unable to feel or think about anything except wondering how to patch things up. (Is this how everyone feels when they fight with their spouses?). I felt that the Lord was reinforcing the message to me as if to show me how a "bit of carelessness" can lead to the destruction of the world.         

On Saturday morning, I attended services and felt relieve to be given a piece of Holy Bread by Matushka. I had the intuition that this Bread will help sustain me throughout the weekend before communion. I felt as if the demons were prowling at the gates, waiting for the chance to rob the final day of Easter from me. Besides getting into trouble with wife, I was also dealing with another spiritual battle, but ones that are not meant to be shared here... 

When I got home, I found that things has lighten up between me and my wife, and I was determine to on guard for the day, trying to hold the Jesus prayer within me and also trying to be vigilant and not to be 'careless' around my family, not to take them for granted. I started seeing more of what needed to be done at home and felt I had made some progress immediately already. 

But again at night my "carelessness" struck again. I forgot to check with Father if I needed to fast before the midnight communion. I went to church and asked, and was crestfallen to be told that indeed that I needed to, and that I couldn't commune with my Lord as I ate my dinner to close to communion time. This was the second time I was blocked from my Lord due to my own carelessness. The message got driven home even further. I felt like I was one of the foolish virgins banging at the closed gates. The oil that I didn't have in my lamp ? It was vigilance, it was the respect for the sanctity of my God given power of attention. 

Father told that I can still go for communion on the Easter Sunday morning services, but I was properly paranoid now. And indeed, the paranoia was warranted. On Sunday, due to other mishaps (but this time not because of my "laziness"), I almost missed the Holy Communion with my son, but was glad to finally succeed in doing so.  The rest of the Sunday, it went as it should. After Easter, there was a celebration at the Trapeze, and I was finally able to eat meat again. During the night, I went to dinner with the in-laws, I was quite strung up now from events of the past few days and was low on spiritual fuel by now. I was able to treat everyone cordially and nicely but not anything more. 

The Week After: To be a Good Servant

All in, the entire Easter had been a very eventful one for myself, a journey that somehow parallels Christ own final journey through his earthly life. I felt my own version of the triumphal entry, reclaiming my humanity, felt my own crucifixion in exposing my own shame, descend into a Hades of vainglorious suffering and experience a resurrection as man who has reconciled with his childhood unhappiness. As I step out of Great Lent, I find myself looking forward to working with our Good Lord to root out the slothful disposition within myself and to become a more faithful servant to do His work. To bring more like me (fallen publicans, thief and harlots) to the shores of salvation. With our Lord, who has trampled down death by death, all is possible.    

 Christ is Risen ! Христос воскрес !

  

           

 

A Window into a Parent's Life and The Problem With Gratitude

This blog post consists of two parts: The first part is a window and snippet into the life of a parent . The second part is a philosophical contemplation on the idea of gratitude. 

This morning, as I was driving my son to school, I managed to have a discussion with him about a question of spiritual matter. In such moments, I feel my life finding its zenith in terms of significance. It is as if, all my accumulated experiences in life, many of which difficult and painful, takes on a different shine under the light of parental love. Some sort of a transmutation occurs, and one’s own life experience, now food for the youthful soul, changes into spiritual treasures of immense worth. One feels his soul elevate and his purpose in life coming into clearer focus…

This morning, the spiritual discussion went as follows. My son told me that he had a mix feelings of love and hate for his teacher, and he did not know what to do about it. I asked him why, and he told me it was because his teacher punishes him physically. I told him, it was not wrong for him to think that his teacher was doing something wrong, but that perhaps he has to find way to free himself from the hate. He asked me how, and I told him that he could take aim and vanquish the spirit of hate with the positron cannon gun of forgiveness, a reference to his favorite Japanese anime, Neon Genesis Evangelion. Taking the metaphor further, I told him that he had to charge the cannon first with the spirit of humility. That he first has to see that he was in desperate need of forgiveness himself. He asked me how was it possible for him to see that he needed forgiveness, and I told him to pray to God to reveal his sins to him. I also told him that in life, most of wait for others to ask for forgiveness before firing the gun of forgiveness, but there was no need for that, one can squeeze the trigger long before that.

As we were finishing up the discussion, an insight occurred to me… I told my son, just as we were pulling up to the school that besides the positron cannon gun of forgiveness, there was another super weapon he has at his disposal, that he can use in his spiritual battles at school. He got intrigued and ask what was it? I told him that it was a most super powerful ‘quark gluon’ rifle, but that I could only reveal the details tomorrow, teasing him a bit to bait his interest.

“What is this rifle dad?”, he took the bait, he needed to have the answer now.

“It’s the quark-gluon rifle of gratitude, or in simpler words, the rifle of saying thank you, we’ll talk more about it tomorrow”, I replied in a tone which suggest that I am someone with special insights into the mysteries and secrets of spiritual life adding a bit of dramatic effect to end the conversation in a cliffhanger.

However, after my son alighted and waved goodbye to me, doubt started to pop into my mind. I started to feel vaguely uneasy and felt a certain lack of clarity with myself, a spiritual impotence if you will. Why is this simple phrase ‘thank you’ a spiritual weapon of immense power? Can I clarify it for myself further? I felt that I may have mentioned the word to my son because I have encountered it many times in my reading of the Church Father and also in the past within self-help literatures, but have little Christian experience with the word. At office, I decided that I would write something about gratitude, in order to gain clarity for myself.   

So here’s the second part of blog, an investigation into gratitude. Gratitude, why did the idea rings hollow and sounded banal in in my soul today? Unable to generate any stirrings in the heart nor bring calm or joy to it. Perhaps today, the grace of God is lacking in me and that I am stuck in a worldly way seeing things. A way of seeing that belongs to the past, a past without God or hope.

So what is this past way of seeing gratitude? Let us investigate…

In the past, I was steeped in all things self-help, and used to practice something called gratitude journaling whereby everyday I would write down things for which I am grateful for. This practice while able to generate some positivity within myself initially, ultimately withered into nothingness within a few short months. Like the barren fig in the Gospel, the practice looked good from afar but was unable to bear true fruits. So what was the gist of what I wrote down in the past? Why did it petered out? In reviewing my past journal, I see that there are things which I wrote down that are perhaps things that I’ll still write down today

• Being blessed with a family

 There were also things which I perhaps won’t write down today that are worldly in nature:

•  Silicon Valley: For the abundance of technological innovation that made the world what it is today

So given that there are things which I should be grateful for even now, why did my practice stopped? As I reviewed the things I wrote, an answer came to my mind. It was because I didn’t know to whom was I ultimately being grateful to and what exactly was it that I am grateful about. The whole exercise, I recall now, felt rather muddled up in my soul, and if I tried to force clarity upon myself, it starts to become contrived and dead.

For example, was I being grateful to the random manifestations of an uncaring universe when I wrote down that I was grateful to have a family? Was I being grateful to my own self (what a spiritual burden that is). Was I being grateful to my wife who did me a turn of favor by marrying me? (I could insist myself to say so, it would faintly be true, but would also ring hollow somehow…) Besides, am I really grateful to have a family? All things in the world seemed to be a mix of good and bad, everything seemed to be corrupted by the touch and stench of death. Sure, a family gives us joy, but it also gives us sorrow and even if we have the best family we could ever hope for, wouldn’t they die one day? Can I unequivocally say I am grateful. No, not really at the time, my soul knew it was dealing with something counterfeit. So what was it I was being grateful for, I guess I didn’t really know at the time, or knew it dimly.

So what is the remedy here? 

How do we activate this quark gluon gun of gratitude that everyone says is important, and which I told my son will help him in his battles with the demons ? From a conceptual standpoint, it is perhaps not difficult to state the 'right' Christian answer. We are to be grateful to God, and for the following things He has done for us:

• The fact He created us high above all created thing
• His love for us as his children and His sacrifice on the cross for our salvation
• The spiritual gifts that He showers to those who are willing to receive them in faith and humility 

Yet, this conceptual scheme, while easy to state and comprehend, is hard to experience as a lived Truth and thus hard to believe in the reality of our being.  But believe we must, for the alternative is to have an empty life which is bereft of meaning, hope, which we can't be thankful for, not in the least. 

So what to do ?

Do we commit intellectual suicide here so this reality can become accessible to us ? How do we respond to Nietzsche's Super Atheist, the Ubermensch, which criticizes us, 'Stop with your delusions... Accept the harshness that life is arbitrary,  forge your meaning for yourself henceforth'  Do we defend ourselves by parading a host of logical arguments which prove the inconvertible fact that Christ in fact existed, was crucified and has risen? Some type of first principle arguments which we can link up proposition by proposition, into some sort of an intellectual chainmail that could withstand the heavy blows from the Spirit of Rationality. Somehow, the soul, when it can be honest to itself, quavers at the thought of such a defense, 

"This is a fools work, hopeless... A house of card, which shatters our belief and our peace at the first contact", it seem to say.

So what is the answer ? 

Our Good Lord and the Church Fathers, they teach us another way, a way rooted in the direct perception of Truth via the heart and not through the mind. “Blessed art those who are pure in heart, for they can see God”, says our Savior. Maybe we can only really possess this truth, this un-counterfeited gratitude if we are able to see God. To see Him after we have successfully purified and conquered the unruly impulses of the heart to chase after the empty things of this life, the vainglories, the fleeting and momentary sensual pleasure, the notion that we are our own true Gods. 

Personally, in the briefest of moments, when the concerns of worldly life recede a bit into the background a bit, I am able to see faintly that what the Holy Scriptures say is in fact true. These moments of clarity, they occur to me in the small mundane everyday happenings. For example, on Wednesday, I found myself experiencing a small measure of joy when I was able to look past my own impatience when queuing at the Auntie Anne’s stall at KLCC to become dimly aware of the humanity of the girl who was serving me behind the counter. It was as if my heart could ‘see’ faintly that the being standing in front of me was a creation of immense worth, worth more than perhaps the sum total of all things non-human in the entire universe, the stars, the supernovas etc..  It occur to me that being able to thank this being, it was not something trivial, but an act, if done properly, imbued with divine significance. 

If only now, my heart could put aside its sinful, prodigal ways, to see this fact clearer, more often, perhaps it would be able to peer beyond the veil of the vain pursuits of life, and see into the wonder and abundance of True Life, the one which God intended for us to experience. If we can see it, then we can be grateful, we can have non-counterfeit gratitude. 

Will stop now as I've been spending a bit too much time writing and editing this, may God bless you the reader.

 

P/S: I wrote the above post on Wednesday, and it prepared me for my follow-up conversation with my son on the following day. That morning, I shared with him an instructive version of the musings above. I told him that he needed to go through a 3-step activation process to use the full power of the quark gluon gun. I told him that most of us are given this gun, but without an instruction manual, and as a result, normally all we can muster is a weak spluttering of plasma. 

So, how to activate the gun ?

The first step, I told him, was to ‘see’ that his teacher was a significant creation of God, in fact the most significant creation of God besides other human beings. More worthwhile than all the stars, and the supernovas are like cosmic firecrackers going off to celebrate our existence, that we are in fact centers of the universe (borrowing from Solzhenitsyn). His response here was to tell me that he got a tingling sensation when he hears this and that he believe the worst thing one can do to another human is to not call him a human. (He struck upon the evils of de-humanization)

As for the second step, I started by telling him that human beings are significant because we can do something not of the universe, something beyond it, the creation of goodness. I told him that the second step consist of paying attention and trying to ‘see’ the goodness in others. A goodness that is not easy to see for it has been shattered by the fall and exist as fragmentary pieces mixed in with a slurry of bad things. To this, his responded that he get’s it and added that goodness (love) is not of the world because while there is a finite energy budget in the universe, there is no finite budget in the unive3rse when it comes to love. I felt this insights of his to be non-trivial, the way he juxtaposed physics and metaphysics, it strikes through to the heart of the matter. I told him that I would not have been able to think up such a succinct metaphor in all my life and thanked him for it.

Finally, as the last step, I told him that he needed to ‘see’ the sacrifice his teacher has to make in order to bring him this fragmentary goodness to him. He concurred with this and added his own final summary on the matter.

“These guns, while it appears we are firing at others, in fact we are firing at the demons inside of ourselves. Others are like a reflector for us”, he said.

Afterwards, an idea for a next discussion emerged between us. How can we help others to remove the slurry of badness and glue back again their fragmented goodness. We decided to pursue in another day. Before he alighted from the car, he said to me in a soft voice, “thank you dad..” Firing his gun of gratitude at me. It gave me a glimmer of hope that life is indeed something to be infinitely grateful for.

A Not Very Typical Weekend or Crossing an Ocean

Last weekend, a series of significant experiences happened to me, one of which led to the writing of the blog post below this one. It was as if I crossed the equivalent of a spiritual ocean and now find myself aground in another continent. Funny how one can travel a long distance and not actually move at all physically..  A new life awaits on this side of the ocean perhaps.. one a bit brighter and more hopeful, one shimmering with the gentle lights of divine love/grace (Or perhaps I will be swept back to the other side of the shore)

The account of a not so typical weekend:

On Friday, something bad by worldly standards happened to me. I botched up a piece of work at the office, got humiliated by the subsequent repercussions, and went home that late afternoon with a bad feeling in my heart and a sense of loss in my soul. 

 

That late night, the wound in my soul stirred and I awoke with some spiritual sentiments forming within me. These sentiments, they have become more regular in recent weeks and often provide comfort and healing to my soul. Perhaps this is only possible because I have started to learn how to turn to God for solace when bad things happen. That night, as I lie on my bed with my wife beside me, my heart revealed to me that I had a lot of pride bottled up within me, and it was this pride in me that caused me to botch up the work. I finally understood experientially what pride is, and how it is different from vainglory. Pride is when you want to see yourself as better and more elevated than others and vainglory (desperate glory) is the desperate attempt to find evidence in the world that this is the case. I understood, in a non intellectual way, how I was desperately currying for evidence that I was good/better than others, and because of this, I had no room left in my heart for others, I couldn't love and thus I couldn't do the work properly. The past experiences of the week of struggling desparately/vainly and fruitlessly now came into clear view within my mind's eye, and my sins laid clearly before me. Tears flowed (I think)..  

 

On Saturday mornings, I went to Church as there was a service and because I needed to go there to heal my wounded soul. Initially, I only planned to stay a short while, owing to the fact I promised my wife to be back by 9:30 am. But as I was about to leave, I felt something like a twitch in my heart, followed by a small searing sensation coursing through a nerve within it. It made me stop. It was as if my heart was telling me to wait. I didn’t know for what, but later something significant happened, I was asked by Noah, the priest assistant to help with administering the Eucharist. To hold the red cloth over which a communicant rests his/her chin to open his/her mouth to receive the Blood and Body of Christ.

 

In that position I had a clear side view of the communicant face coming near to the Golden Chalice. Something about this image, along with the fact that I could see a hidden icon tucked away in the side wall, struck an emotional chord in my heart. The sight of a slightly worn out and weathered human face opening it's mouth to receive the perfectly glistening golden spoon, it sent tears streaming down my cheeks. “This is the magnificence of Christ love for human being. See how He deigns to enters the manger of our broken soul and body”, my heart seems to tell me. Vain thoughts however immediately followed as to whether others are noticing that I'm having a spiritual experience. I try to fight them off but failed and lost my peace of heart in a cloud of self conscious thoughts.

 

After the Eucharist was performed, Father gave a sermon which spoke to me again. He said that we are to read the Akathist of the Most Holy Theotokos Mary whenever we needed help against spiritual attack. This was the thing I needed to ward off the magpies of self seeking thoughts which constantly picked away at the spiritual fruits that were growing within the garden of my soul. I resolved to read the Akathist regularly the following week and soon I was feeling quite well again. I felt comforted by God, and at some point during the day I gained a glimpse of what it meant when Christ said “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”. All that trouble on Friday, it has resulted in me gaining so much more in return. I felt that life, here on earth now, it has this perfection already in it, everything is perfect, be it the bad things, the persecution, they are in fact the best thing, and you can know the reality of this perfection, the kingdom, if only you endured your experience with faith and humility..

 

During the rest of the morning after going home, I had to do some research work for an education related project that I have undertaken as a spiritual podvig. I has to also do the run-of-mill errands of fetching my son to swimming class and having breakfast and going shopping with my wife. In all these, I felt a descending of peace into my soul, I didn’t feel I am burdened by the world or that I was a burden to it. I was happy, and could treat everyone around me well, I had an excess of good will to give. At a lunch event with my parents, I felt a stirring in me. In my heart, a spirit of forgiveness manifest and extended out to my mom, and I could put my hand on her shoulder to send her a gesture of love. I sense that she feels it and I hope now I can love her in a different way now… different from the way I treated her my entire of life. 

 

Something is healing… I was given an experiential understanding of the power of forgiving, of to be forgiven by others and by God. To forgive others, it has the power to save and redeem souls. And if we forgive, God save our souls by forgiving us. 'Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespasses against us', say's the Lord's Prayer. How simple life is…  

 

In the afternoon however, I was tempted again, images of possible worldly humiliation (at work) troubled me, and in that state I lost temper at my son for causing me to be late to fetch him to his tuition class. After that I acknowledge the sin and wrote it down as something I needed to repent of. My mood improved markedly when I went to fetch my son later and apologize to him. After that I went to do some shopping with my wife, I had to purchase items for Holy Unction. Here I struggled and succeeded in giving up money for God. I bought the ‘impractically’ expensive wine, olive oil and rice. Later when I talked to my son about this 'feat', he said I shouldn't make too much out of it, as I cannot win God's favor by so cheaply a method. While he missed the point a bit of what the struggle was about, I find that he's the closest I have to a spiritual brethren. Age prove no barrier to us here and may God guide him to see clearly his faults just as much he can see mine.  

 

At the All Night Vigil service, nothing strange or significant struck me at first, I guess generally my soul was at peace, I was calm, God’s grace abide in me, but not intensely. But mid-way, something happened, I was called up to the alter to help Noah read. For some reason, I could read much faster than I normally could, something about my mind was awake in a way in hadn’t in a long time… After the reading, I was assailed and assaulted by the spirit of pride and vainglory again, Tempting thoughts suggest to me that I’m now a parishioner of a different stature at church, a proto-saint perhaps. When I saw Matushka talked to one of the parishioners, I feared that she was asking him instead of me to read, and thus stripping me of my extra special status. Disdain for others crept in, I try to fight these instinct and am reminded how much more in this life I will have to continue to fight for my salvation against the passions.

 

After service, things were calm in my soul, and I drove back in a very calm mood, even though I will be a bit late for dinner with my brother and parents. At dinner, my heart was in a state of openness and it allowed the conversation around the table to flowed in a way which rarely happens when my elder brother is not around. We talked about a number of things, and soon discussion became rather spiritual. My dad, a man of small stature and hunched over, mention to me and my younger brother that his understanding of life is that it is fundamentally an act of service to others. In the past, I tend to brush off whatever he says, but in the last 2 years, I have tried to be more patient in listening to him. His saying, they so happened coincide with what Elder Thaddeus mentioned in the book “Our Thoughts Determine Our Feelings” and resonated with me. My younger brother, he opened up too, and he talked about some of his challenges growing up. In the evening, I sent two Whatsapp message to my brother and father. I told my father that I would like to thank him for his and my mom’s service to us, that I am sorry for all the rebellion and offense I caused them and that I hope we had years still to love and serve each other. To my younger brother, I confessed that my own insecurities may have harmed him while we growing up. I told him that I was essentially a person who, while smart, had very low EQ and a big EGO. I told him that subconsciously I had an urge to prove that I'm smart because I couldn’t get along with others and had to justify it with the fact I’m too good for their friendship.  

 

All these speech from the heart, I wonder if they make me a burden to be around. But in my heart, I also feel I have crossed another milestone which I never thought I could. Even though it’s just on Whatsapp, I have told my parents that I love them, indirectly. I thought I could only express such sentiments at their eulogy. I finished my prayers that night (2 hours) and went to sleep around 1 AM.

 

On Sundays, I awoke early, around 5 AM and had some time till having to rouse my son for church. After my morning prayer, an inspiration took hold of me and I wrote out the confession (blog post below) which I had promised my high school friends was coming. I have severed my relationship with my high school friends for about 10 years, and we had reconciled like a month ago (?). I promised them that I will give them an account of why I did what I did and today was the day for that. I bared my soul about my shameful past and my spirit poured out of me into the keyboard and in a frenzied manner, I typed out the essence of my life’s struggle up till the present age. I finished by 8:50 am, and with tear stains streaked across my cheeks, I sent the link to my friends. Soon replies and messages started to come in. My friends, they thanked me for sharing with them and basically gave encouraging responses to me. The estrangement was hopefully brought to a close and properly buried. More importantly, I felt I have dealt with an unspeakable difficulty in my life and that my life can now begin, I can now finally step into the light of my life with my past burden no longer a hindrance, but now providing me both fuel and direction for life. 

At service, tears flowed continuously, there were 2 services this morning, and by the end of service at 2 PM, my eyes were slightly blood shot and I probably look rather haggard and puffy eyed. The tears, they flowed at services because I couldn’t help but think of what I wrote and getting triggered by them. I do note however that not all the tears are of a good sorts. Yes, a part of tears are of sincere gratitude and repentance, but a part of them also are of a self-congratulatory type, prideful tears that I have become a saint and am now better than anyone. I had to struggle here and by the time the service is over, I had only little peace left, the devil and his magpies had robbed me of my spiritual fruits, the prideful part was winning. I was indulging in sentimentality as a glorification of my own saintliness.

 

Right after the service we had lunch at one of my estranged friend’s house. I felt now pride and disturbance in my soul. It spreaded across my field of being as a tension akin to exerting oneself against a heavy, immovable object. I felt as if I was wrestling with my friends, to submit them in order to receive some type of respectful deference that are due to me now that I did something heroic. But then I prayed, and with some wine, the tension subsided and gave way to something like a yielding humility, which settled my soul into a state of calm. I had this insight formed within me: let me not hanker for anything more, no more for myself for God will provide, let me here be of a kind presence to others, I felt I finally understood the foolishness of Pride, and how it’s completely worthless in the face of Godly peace. Soon the conversation flowed well, and we shed real tears about the past trauma in our lives.

 

Finally, night came, I sent a message to my elder brother about my confession, he responded encouragingly, my soul feels warm now, and during dinner time with the in-laws, we had a good surprise, my brother in law’s girl-friend joined us. We haven’t seen her in months, and I was very happy to see her, in a genuine way. I felt that all along, since I knew her about 10 years ago, I never had welcomed her into my heart. Tonight, it was different, I sincerely wanted to and could show her hospitality. After dinner, as we drove home, I felt a sense that the true riches in life do not require money, a fleeting “moment of clarity” if you will, in a world of material intoxication.  

Soon the night came to an end, I had some bickering with my son about sleeping time, and lost the peace again within me. I was reminded after all the lofty hubbub within my soul through the weekend, that I had perhaps neglected my basic responsibility as a dad, to guide my son well spiritually. It reminded me that spiritual development happens in both the realm of ineffable, infinite and eternal but also in the tangible here and now, within the day-to-day task that God has given to us to dutifully execute without grumbling.

 

And so marked the end of this strange weekend journey of my soul across an oceanic expanse worth of spiritual experiences. I will end this writing now.

May God bless you the reader of this post...

P/S: Writing this blog post has been a painful experience for me, as it's produced a lot of vain glorious thoughts and feelings within me. Causing me to edit and overworking the sentences in desperate worry that the words are coming across as bland/convoluted/uninteresting etc. May God deliver me from this affliction..

My struggle with the passions

Today is end of the 5th week of Lent, and in the tradition of the Orthodox Church, we venerates Saint Mary of Egypt to mark off the occasion. To those unfamiliar and interested, Saint Mary of Egypt's personal story is one of the overcoming sexual passions. You can google her story on internet, there will be no short amount of material available.

In memory of the Venerable Mary, I thought that I too will write a personal reflection of my own struggles with sexual sins for the purpose of humbling myself and for the edification of whoever happens to read this. God knows that more men should speak up on such matter and may He strengthen me to write as honest and clear an account I can.   

My story... 

Something bad happened to me when I turned 13, I stumbled unto pornography. It happened the year I started going to high school, my best friend at the time invited me and a bunch of other friends over to watch a 'tape' that he had come into possession. We locked ourselves in his uncle's house, which was empty at the time, and together we watched a man and a woman have sex on screen and sinning against God and themselves. For many of us, it was the first time we watched something like that, I recalled feeling sick in my stomach and couldn't eat properly that night... Afterwards, in usual youthful bravado, we made a joke out of 'watching' event, but really what happened that day was bad, we wounded our souls, and our bodies and heart could feel it even if our minds were not aware of what has happened.    

This momentous event, it marked the beginning of my downfall and devolution from a human being into an animal. Very soon, pornography took possession of my soul and I started down a rabbit hole of pornographic indulgence. As a child of the 1980s, I turned into an adolescent around the middle 90s, the time when the internet started to become main-stream. This is not a good time to be a teenager who has the time and urge to consume pornographic materials. By the time I was 17, 4 short years after being introduced to pornography, I was totally enslaved to my sexual passions, yet at the time I didn't even realize this was the case. After all everyone was watching porn, after all it's just watching people having fun. Along with watching porn, I also developed a whole raft of sexual urges and fetishes, some of which, in their demand to be satiated, cause me to act lewdly around girls. I suspect that I would have continued to spiral and who knows, maybe even become a sex criminal if not for another momentous event which happened to me the year I turned 18, right after completing my final high school exam (SPM). In this time, when we should be enjoying the bloom of our youth and nursing good hope for future, my conscience instead awoke to the horror of what I become and started persecuting and crucifying me. 

It happened like this...

One day, me and my high school friends went to a coffee shop for breakfast. I was sitting opposite a girl, and she said in an off handed and joking way 'Why is your smile so yam jin (perverted)'. Somehow this innocent and off-handed comment turned out to be the last straw that allowed me conscience to broke through to me. For some reason I felt extremely disturbed by this comment, and the moment I went back home after breakfast, I went up to the mirror and flashed the most perverted smile I can to the mirror. Indeed, what stared back was not human, it was evil, it was animalistic, my soul quavered in horror, I have turned into an evil animal and I didn't know what to do about it. 

Quickly, I tried to forget this bad incident, but to no avail, my conscience had awoke and it would not go back to sleep until I have atoned for my sins. Slowly, under the weight of the persecution of my conscience, I slowly withered psychologically, socially then physically. Back then, up till age 17, I was a warm person, someone who was basically the class clown that could bring laughter and amusement to everyone I met. I remembered distinctly how at a late night tea session, I could put a slightly shy girl at ease with my presence, I felt at the time a warm glow in my heart, that I was a human soul knitted together with other human souls. 

The revelation however of my sins and of my fallen self, it changed all that and rewired my personality in a fundamental way... By the time I was 20+, abroad in UK pursuing a degree, I became hyper self conscious, I couldn't smile naturally as I felt it reveals to others the evil animal that I was. When I did have to smile, fear would shoot through my nervous system, and I would imagine that I was flashing up a half frozen grin. This cause me great anguish, and as my social relations started to fray and dwindle, my pornography consumption continued unabated. In fact, it became a solace for my loneliness in life. In my 20s, I contemplate running away to Brazil, living a frenzied life and then committing suicide there, such was the despair within me. Of course, things were not all bad, when I do return to my home country, sometimes things would lighten up for me more. My high school friends, they were a great solace to me during the time, and we hanged out and did silly stuff together. In fact one did even came to stay with me in UK for a couple of years (as he came to study at the same University), who knows if I would have committed suicide if not for him. 

So thus, I passed most of my 20s in some sort an anguish intermix with momentary respite either from friends or alcohol. This continued on until my late 20s when something momentous happened to me again... I met my wife, the human savior of my life whom God put into my life. Here I begin the slow process of re-learning and re-believing that I am a human being worthy of love and worthy to give love. We started a relationship, forged it through my PhD years away from my home country and eventually got married and had a son. My sexual bad habits stayed with me, and I was not entirely free of my sins before or while in my marriage, but as with age also comes more temperance and it became much less. Nevertheless, I still couldn't smile properly, I fear that it reveals my true nature. 

One thing to note. The night I got married, an instinct came over me, I needed to leave my past behind, completely. I need to be a new person. I didn't know how to do it at the time, and I thought the way to do this, was to leave all I know behind. I made a commitment, to no longer have any association with any of the things in the past that would remind me of my shameful history. I started cutting ties with my high school friends and felt like this was the only way I could move forward. Now I know this was not the solution. 

The solution, it started to come... the years I turned 35-36.

In these years, I started to encounter Christ in my life, in a way which touches the heart. Up till then, I was a scientific atheist, and considered God to be a human delusion, and that my salvation depends entirely on me to stop the thoughts that I am an evil animal, either through some self-help methods or through some of the Buddhist psycho-therapy. This started to change when I encountered the lectures of Jordan Peterson online. His earnest lectures on the Bible managed to reach into a deep part of my soul, and were able to convinced me that God is perhaps not unreal. Soon, this trickle of an awareness grew, and I started to search for answers to the problem of why I was an evil animal through the Christian route. At age 36, I had another powerful encounter with the Christian Triune God through the writings of Dostoyevsky, in particular his work "The Brother Karamazov". This work, it showed me a vision of the greatness and loftiness of Christian goodness through the character of Aloysha Karamazov, I wept when I finally completed the book. It made me subconsciously resolve to find my answers through Christ and I started attending the Methodist churches under the semi-true semi-false pre-text of having to find a safe harbor for my son.

Then another momentous event hit my life and the lives of others in general. Covid-19 happened, and we were all grounded in our houses. This disrupted my church going activity, and by the time the lockdowns were lifted, my son had refuse to go to Church, and I stopped with him, believing that I am in a semi-OK state of not sinning as much, so maybe don't need God anymore. Nevertheless, I still couldn't smile properly, but I had at this point made progress here, having already confessed this problem to my wife. In my worldly life, I continue to struggled at career, in loving and raising my son, in making sure my broader family were OK. Things were OK, passable, not like in my college years were I felt like dying, my wife's love was for me, it was a great unspeakable solace, she is God's true gift for me. But as much as I was granted this undeserving gifts, something persisted in me along with my broken smile. At the background, I am always doubting things, what is the point of life ? Is this a cruel joke ? Why am I given at this animal body and then told not to use it like an animal. Why I am semi anguished. Why don't I have any real friends beyond my wife?

All this question persisted in me until I turned 40, when another momentous thing occurred in my life. God brought me back to Church, but this time not the Methodist Church, but the Church which spoke deeply to me, the Church whose one of her sons, the writer Dostoevsky revealed to me the possibility of human dignity, the Orthodox Church. God brought me back by putting online reading materials and Christian friends in my life to prompt me about my understanding and commitment to the faith. Under this guidance, I found myself back at Church, attending the regular Sunday services. Slowly the Orthodox Church began to reform me as a person, first as a catechist then as a baptized convert. I stopped watching porn entirely when I started going Church service regularly as a catechist, but things really started to really come into place after my baptism, where I was now able to participate in the Sacred Communions offered by the Church. Through this, God's grace started to flow into me more rapidly, and revealed to me how I can through prayers and communion rid myself of other sins which has gathered around my mind/heart/soul. Soon, I could see others patterns of thought and behavior within me that were evil and animalistic, and I had the power of Communion and prayer to be rid of them and persecute them, to bring them under dominion instead of being dominated by them. I was am now healing, I am recovering my humanity... 

During this Great Lent season, I feel the pace of healing has picked up more rapidly, and my soul has more moments where it is at peace. My heart radiates a low indistinct warmth that somehow feels like the presence of the Holy Spirit. My mind, while it still veers and jumps, and is still used relentlessly by the Spirts of the Passion to entice me to sin, I am now much more able to fight this battle, to control and discipline it and persecute the bad thoughts through prayers. My relationships, they are mending, I can feel love for others more. I believe in Love, a word only approximately used to describing and trying to capture something ineffable and infinite. I can appreciate the manifestation of Love, when people show glimpses of it to each others, these make me wants to fall down and weep sometimes (but it also makes me want to show-off in search of vainglorious praises)...

I don't know where this Christian life will take me further, but I would not trade what I have now for anything in the world I suppose. Not the 27 years of living like an animal, not the suicidal periods of my life. Anyway, I need to bring this to an end as it is 8:50 and I will need to go met the Triune God at Church...  May this writing be of edification to those who read it.. And to my high school friends, I would like to apologies to you all. Mostly, I wrote this for you all.