Lecture by metropolitan Elpidophoros of Bursa

St. Paul exhorts his disciple Timothy: “You should be watchful in all things …”(20). In so doing, he is motivating Timothy to be constantly vigilant in spirit so that he may overcome the passions and become secure, in the best possible sense, in his spiritual nature. Here, I believe, lies the essence of Orthodox spirituality: namely in watchfulness, purity, and vigilance that extend everywhere, always and over all things. Only in this way can contemporary humanity find peace. Man must see himself clearly; he must confront his internal conflicts; and he must fill his emptiness. Christ has established this truth in a powerful manner: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God”(21). Only the pure, then, will behold the face of God in the heavenly kingdom. Not the externally clean, the selectively pure, those who are merely or pretentiously or externally clean, but rather those who are altogether pure in heart, in thought, imagination, activity and intention. The fundamental presupposition to acquire the vision of God, according to St. Maximus the Confessor, is purity. St. Basil the Great says that the impure person is unable to accept the divine energy. St. Gregory Palamas emphasizes the following point: “If we can say that God has a weakness, we must say that he, as the pure one, will not dwell among unclean things.” And for St. Gregory of Nyssa abstention from every evil and an attitude of passionless are tantamount to purity.

The Orthodox spiritual life renders the heart of the believer merciful, satisfied, serene, graceful and peaceful. The authentic practitioner of Orthodox spirituality is Christianized; that is to say, he makes the life of Christ his own life, as the blessed Elder Sophronios Zacharoff says. It is then that the believer can truly become theophoros, christophoros and pneumatophoros – God-bearer, Christ-bearer, and Spirit-bearer.

At this point, I believe that it is important to clarify the meaning of Orthodox spirituality, inasmuch as many foreign elements have infiltrated from time to time to create serious misinterpretations. Spirituality is the grace of life in the Holy Spirit. It is a life purged by the Holy Spirit after a struggle for purity. By purity, we do not mean some sterile ethic with defined external criteria. A truly spiritual person is one who is adorned by the gifts of the Holy Spirit. In the spiritual life, what matters is not so much what one thinks or imagines, what one wants to be or what one believes one is, but rather what in fact a person truly is. It is dangerous and dubious to use as a criterion how we feel psychologically or sentimentally; this is by no means a precise indicator of a person’s actual spiritual condition. The spiritual life is not what is pleasing to a person, what one finds comfort in or what one delights in. Such an individualistic spirituality is self-centered and selfish inasmuch as it seeks to please the self, to create its own leisure, which results in spiritual indolence and indifference.