How can I deal with my sinful condition?

In the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.

So  often we ask ourselves and one another a very tormenting question:
How can I deal with my sinful condition? What can I do? I cannot avoid
committing  sins,  Christ  alone  is  sinless.  I  cannot, for lack of
determination,  or courage, or ability truly repent when I do commit a
sin,  or  in general, of my sinful condition. What is left to me? I am
tormented, I fight like one drowning, and I see no solution.

And there is a word which was spoken once by a Russian staretz, one of
the  last  elders  of  Optina. He said to a visitor of his: No one can
live without sin, few know how to repent in such a way that their sins
are washed as white as fleece. But there is one thing which we all can
do:  when we can neither avoid sin, nor repent truly, we can then bear
the  burden  of  sin,  bear  it  patiently, bear it with pain, bear it
without  doing anything to avoid the pain and the agony of it, bear it
as one would bear a cross, ≈ not Christ's cross, not the cross of true
discipleship,  but  the  cross  of the thief who was crucified next to
Him.  Didn't  the  thief  say to his companion who was blaspheming the
Lord:  We  are  enduring  because we have committed crimes; He endures
sinlessly... And it is to him, because he had accepted the punishment,
the pain, the agony, the consequences indeed of evil he had committed,
of  being  the  man  he  was, that Christ said, ▒Thou shalt be with Me
today in Paradise.▓

I  remember  the  life of one of the divines, the story of one who had
come to him and have said that he had led all his life a life that was
evil,  impure,  unworthy  both  of God and of himself; and then he had
repented, he has rejected all evil he had done; and yet, he was in the
power  of  the same evil. And the divine said to him: There was a time
when you lapped up all this filth with delight; now you perceive it as
filth  and  you  feel  that  you  are drowning in it with horror, with
disgust. Take this to be your reward for your past, and endure.

This  is something which all of us can do: to endure the consequences,
to  endure  the  enslavement  which  is  our patiently, humbly, with a
broken  heart;  not with indifference, not with a sense that as we are
abandoned  to it by God, then, why not sin? But taking it as a healing
perception of what sin is, of what it does to us, of the horror of it.
And  if  we patiently endure, a day will come when our inner rejection
of sin will bear fruit, and when freedom will be given us.

So,  if  we  can,  in all the ways we can, let us avoid sin in all its
forms,  even  those  sins which seem to be so unimportant, because the
slightest  crack in a dam sooner or later leads to its bursting. If we
can  ≈  let  us  truly  repent,  that  is turn away from our past in a
heroic,  determined  act;  but  if  we can do neither of them ≈ let us
carry  humbly and patiently all the pain and all the consequences. And
this  will  also  be  accounted one day by the Lord Who in a folkloric
life  of  Moses, in response to His angels saying, ▒How long shall you
endure their sins▓ ≈ the sins of the Jews in the wilderness, answered:
▒I  will  reject  them  when the measure of their sins will exceed the
measure of their suffering▓.

Let  us  therefore  accept  the  pain  as a redeeming pain, even if we
cannot offer it as pain pure of stain. Amen.



 * All texts are copyright: Estate of Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh

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