We were meditating this morning on the mystery of creation, the origin of paradise, and what sort of end it would like to be. And now I'd like to take this evening with the emotion of sin, the disorder which is in this life. and which prevents our realizing that meaning and purpose of God in our creation. Perhaps I may be allowed to say that in recent years and perhaps very much through the influence of the Syrian liturgy I've come to have a much deeper realization of the reality of sin It's one of the great themes of the Assyrian liturgy, it's repentance. I didn't mention it this morning, but both Monday and Tuesday are, in the Assyrian liturgy, days of repentance.

[01:05]

Each day of the week has its own theme. Tomorrow, as in all the Eastern churches, we celebrated the Mother of God. the apostles riding the cross, Saturday, they departed with a very strong sense of the Second Coming. Then of course on Sunday we come back to the theme of the Resurrection. So Monday and Tuesday are always devoted to reclentance and the same theme occurs in different offices on the other days. It's one of the major themes of the liturgy. Perhaps it was an accident that the prayer which Father Fry read to you just now is actually one taken from the Syrian liturgy. It's a glomph of that kind of prayer. spirit which is so strong, the two aspects, I think, go so closely together, the sense of the holiness of God and the sinfulness of man, that actually the whole Syrian liturgy is dominated by the theme of the vision of Isaiah in the temple in Jerusalem, that great vision when he sees the

[02:20]

the majesty of God, and the angels crying, holy, holy, holy. Every office we have begins, holy, holy, holy, Lord God of strength. And then we have that invocation, which you had at the Covana this morning, holy are you O God, Kali Shad, Aloho, Kali Shad, Han Solo, Kali Shad, Lomo Yusum, holy are you our God, holy are you the strong, holy are you the deathless who were crucified for us, have mercy on us. There this theme of the holiness of God dominates the liturgy and I may also add that at each time we say, Holy are you of God, we prostrate on both knees. We don't have a genuflection, but at the beginning and end of each office at the Qadishat, we prostrate on both knees with the forehead touching the ground. The same way the Muslims do if you've ever been into a mosque.

[03:23]

Actually I think the Muslims took it from the Scyllian Christians, it's an ancient custom, but it has a wonderful sense of adoration, of complete surrender to God, this prostration. And you may be interested to know that in India, these kind of prostrations come very naturally, and when our novices make satisfaction inquire, they don't just kneel down, they prostrate full length. on the ground, and that is quite, it doesn't feel at all embarrassing to them. I've often seen Hindus in a temple before an image laid out straight on the ground, a tremendous act of complete self-surrender, as it were. And so this gesture of prostration comes very naturally, and often I've seen brethren in the choir, where they go in to pray alone. Instead of just kneeling, they'll prostrate in that way.

[04:25]

It seems to come naturally to them. So, each office begins with this prostration, this adoration of the holiness of God. And with this holiness of God is associated the sinfulness of man. Isaiah sees this vision and he immediately cries out, I am a man of unclean lips, and you remember when our Lord performed the miracle of the fishiest, and Peter fell at his feet and said, Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, Lord. The holiness of God makes us realize our sinfulness, and equally The realization of our sinfulness makes us realize the holiness of God. I think these themes of holiness and sin are very, very important for our life at prayer. And I must say that I myself have experienced this very deeply. Before, I think I regarded sin too lightly.

[05:29]

I mean, I tried, I suppose, to take it seriously, but yet I didn't realize how profound it is and how intimately it's related to our awareness of God. And I think we'll all agree it's a matter which perhaps we all find a little difficult in the modern world. the sense of sin, as people often say, has been very largely lost. To the pagan, it is largely missing. And we have this sense that human nature is good, and fundamentally, and that life is good, and sin is rather banished to the background. And I think that affects us all, those of us who come from paganism in any form, and even those who have been brought up from childhood in the church, they are affected, particularly perhaps there in America, by this current way of looking at things. So I think it probably may be helpful for us all to meditate on this mystery of sin.

[06:34]

And I emphasize mystery, because I think it's very important, not just stop, as I'm afraid we're often accustomed to do, simply at the enumeration of our sins. It's one thing to go to confession and to acknowledge the sins of which we are conscious, but it's quite another thing, really, to have a deep awareness and conviction of sin. And I'm afraid one can go to confession many, many times without any really deep sense of sin. In fact, the habit of confession, if one's not careful, may even tend to obliterate it. One tends to think sins are simply breaches of commandments, and we can number them, and we can find out their genus and their species, and we have them all taped out, and then we confess them, and they're disposed of. But we have the unfortunate fact that after people have gone to confession again and again, they still remain deeply sinful, and very often, I would believe, people go on going to confession, confessing the sins of their conscience, and remaining completely unaware of hidden depths of sin in their nature.

[07:50]

I mean, this fundamental pride and and self-centeredness, which are quite apparent to others, which remain hidden from ourselves. And now that is what we have really to tackle in our lives. It's not enough to confess our sins. We have, as monks, to grow day by day in the sense of sin, which, as I say, can never be separated from the sense of God's holiness. The two, simply, are different aspects of the same thing. because the sense of sin is essentially supernatural, because it, by any natural means, arises from the awareness of the holiness of God. Well now, this I think links up very much with what we were considering this morning, this fact that we as human beings are so deeply immersed in nature, because what has happened through original sin is that instead of our whole nature, rising through these different levels of being which we are considering towards God by this dynamic movement of a sense to God which should be natural to us, we have lost that.

[09:04]

movement, that curve of the movement in God, and we're thrown back on ourselves, and consequently we are now deeply involved and immersed in this whole world of nature from which we come. And this happens long before we have any personal consciousness. I think we have to realize how deeply we are involved in sin before we become conscious and before we commit any personal sins. And in this respect, I think the discoveries of modern depth psychology are really very relevant to us all. You know, people used to say how shocking it was that Christians would say that a dear little child as innocent as an angel was really sinful and had the wrath of God on it. It sounded really dreadful, but now you get the meaning. a psychologist who knows anything about human nature will tell you a far more terrible thing about that little child than what children used to do.

[10:10]

And I think it really is something we must face, not about other little children, but about ourselves when we were children. Because it really is a simple, plain and definite fact that in our childhood, before we were born, even when we were in our mother's womb, these fundamental tendencies towards sin, and when we think of sin we should think primarily of self-centeredness, that these tendencies were in our nature from the beginning, they were growing up in us when we were one and two years old, and by the time we reached four or five and were beginning to speak and think a little for ourselves, we were already simply held in the grip of these forces. That, I think, is really one of the rather terrible things which modern psychologists reveal. As you know, a man may go on for twenty, thirty, forty years, and suddenly he has a complete breakdown, to his own surprise and everybody else, and then he goes to a psychoanalyst and he finds that the roots of that breakdown started when he was a baby, or even today.

[11:24]

before he was born or at the very time of his birth. You know, the whole fact that some children never separate from their mothers. We have a very, very deep tendency to want to go back to the womb, to the security, when we were just living on another being and we had no responsibilities at all. And there is undoubtedly in human nature a desire to get back to that state of complete irresponsibility when we're just fed and warmed and looked after and everybody is attending on us and we are perfectly happy there in the center of things with this belonging to that in the womb and mind you this has a very much deeper sense there is a very wonderful sense in which we can be reformed as Nicodemus said to our lord how can we be wrong can we a man go back to his mother's womb and be born again? Well, of course he can't literally, but in a profound sense, spiritually, he can go back to the womb, he can be reborn.

[12:27]

But still, this other reality is very, very true for us all. We have this innate self-centeredness coming from this original experience in the womb, and then we develop, in this very, very early stage of childhood, the two fundamental impulses of our nature, what the Fathers of the Gnossian race called Confucianism, the very difficult term to define, but it's very nearly what Freud and others call the VEDA. It is this not simply lust, not simply sexual desire, but a sort of fundamental desire of our nature. One might rarely call it in a very, very wide sense simply love, that there is this root love in our nature, and through original sin, instead of our love moving spontaneously through different creatures towards God, where it finds fulfillment, it turns back from God and becomes centered on ourselves.

[13:36]

There you have the whole tragedy of original sin, this love which should go out towards others, towards God behind its fulfillment there, is turned back from its actual course, and is feeding on itself. And this terrible feeling of love feeding on itself, which frustrates all our desire for right relationship with others, that is something in which we are all involved, simply through original sin. And then the other great impulse of our nature is what you normally call pride, which you can also call the lust for power. As Freud based everything on libido, so Adler, traced everything to this lust for power. Those are the two basic forces in human nature. And this lust for power, this desire to dominate, to be master of our circumstances and of other people, to use people and things for our purposes, is tremendously deep in our nature.

[14:50]

So we have to face the reality of this sin in our nature, and I do honestly recommend this as a daily meditation. We have times, or at least in other religious congregations, I don't think that addictions tend to divide things up so much, we have this examining of conscience. But really, for a monk, I think it's not so much a question of any particular time when we examine our conscience and we calculate what we've done wrong. It's trying to acquire this habitual sense of sin, which goes with a habitual sense of dependence on God. Because ultimately, of course, self-love means independence from God. The original sin of man was But instead of being surrendered to God, receiving everything from God, and giving it back to Him, He will preserve, bless Himself, and other things, in independence, to be the master of Himself.

[15:59]

And that is the basis of pride, and of separation from God. So this is surely something which each one of us has to face in his nature. It is no good allowing ourselves to go on, as one can do for a very long time, just noticing our particular faults as they arise. and not trying to go deeper into this original sin. And when we really reach the depth of original sin, we realize that there is no sin of which we're not capable. We realize that we are a share of solidarity and sin with all mankind. And I think that is tremendously important. You know, the Fathers again and again say that until you're incapable of judging your neighbor, you've not begun to have real challenges. And I think that is the basis of it. As long as you think that there's anybody in this world who is really worthy of your help, that there are certain things that you could not do.

[17:03]

I mean, you can read about Kepscher or Stalin or anybody you like, and you can say to yourself, well, surely I could never do that. But you really cannot say that. Kepscher is simply a human being in whom these forces which are in us all were, through circumstances, through we don't know how much his own consent to it, were actually brought into power. And of course, no kind of calling a power of of other people, but they are simply forces in our own nature, and really, you know, those of you who were alive at the time, or who were growing up at the time, will know that this outbreak of Nazism in Germany was a terrible revelation for modern man, because English people, and Americans, I think, particularly, had really come to think that they'd outgrown that sort of thing. that human nature had gone beyond it, and we were past that, that was the sort of bestial level from which we'd risen, and now we were civilized people and we'd done self-control and so on.

[18:12]

And this really broke through that illusion, it made people realize what human nature really is. And so, as I say, I think we must face that in ourselves. You can live quietly in a monastery for years and years, and you'll never commit a murder, or to any really serious outbreak of crime, but you're still cherishing in yourself forces which could make you into a murderer, or an adulterer, or into a man who will betray his friend. These forces are deep in our nature, and in everyone's. And therefore, as I say, I think we have to try to realize the presence of these forces in our And it is really a deliberate attempt to know ourselves, you know, Socrates. or rather the Delphic oracle, which St.

[19:15]

Augustine took up and really made the base of his philosophy, to know ourselves as we are. That should be surely the part of a novice. It's a part which every monk has to be continually renewing, and of knowledge it's humility. Humility is simply this awareness of our true nature and that surely helps us to understand the degree of the humility of St. Benedict. One may be at first rather find it difficult to take in what St. Benedict says that the monk always with eyes closed down, remember of the burden of your sins, say, Lord have mercy on me, a sinner. It may seem a little exaggerated, well surely we're not quite as bad as that, we needn't take it quite so seriously, but really when you've come to know yourself and to realize what is in human nature, then these things are not exaggerated, really the saints understood this depth of sin.

[20:16]

And I've also sometimes thought, you know, that, well, I sometimes think in my own experience that when one starts the religious life, one is very little aware of sin, and one's very much aware of the goodness and the love of God. One is often in a state of, one almost might say, the unitive way. And then, that one attracts in the religious life, one enters into the unitive way, and one gets to make many lights about the scriptures and about the fate of mankind and so on. And I think the real culmination of our lives is when we begin to enter the third age. And I really think it's very, very important for us all to, to, to face this, this really desegregation which has to be done.

[21:22]

Actually, you know, if you look across all these dark nights, this final dark time for spirits, are a great undating of these hidden depths in our nature which we don't realize before. So, I would say that we must, as monks and as Christians really, make it our task to know ourselves and to know the inner depth of sin in human nature. As I say, making us aware of our solidarity with all men, so that we're never shocked, we're never surprised, when we read about outbreaks of crime, you have all these adolescent criminals and so on, which are in America and in many other parts of the world. We shouldn't greet these things with what is often a surprise, we should simply realize that this is human nature, this is what I am like, and in similar circumstances, I have no reason to think that I would behave differently. It gives us a really profoundly charitable attitude.

[22:26]

And probably many of you know that division of spiritual life in Berlin, which I find extremely helpful. You remember, he says we begin There is self-knowledge, which is humility, and humility leads to compassion. When you realize what you are like in your sin, then you realize that your brother is in the same state. And instead of, when you don't realize your sin, you hide it, it becomes a shadow which you don't recognize, then you're extremely sensitive to the sins of other people, and you're always up against them, and you're always ready to condemn them. But when you realize it in yourself, then you realize that we're simply sharing in the same burden of sin, then you have compassion for your neighbor, and from that compassion, as Bernard said, purity of heart arises. So, with the knowledge of our own sin, we have a deep sense of the sinfulness of human nature, and therefore our solidarity with all mankind in this sin.

[23:32]

Now the next thing is that exactly as we realize our own sinfulness, we realize the love of God. As I said, the holiness of God is known to us through our awareness of sin, and so it is for the mercy or the love of God. In actual fact, you see, rarely our very awareness of sin is itself an effect of this love and mercy of God coming into our souls. I don't know if you've read St. Gregory the Great, Fr. Leclerc often quotes him, this beautiful thing that he had about his compunctio, compunctio cordis, which is of course such a very monastic virtue, in a sense, that it is the touch of God, you see, which awakens this compunction of sin in us. It isn't that we first realize we sin and then turn to God, it's actually that God himself has moved us, made us aware of our sin,

[24:45]

in order that the same moment we may become aware of his mercy. Now to stand continually in awareness of our sin and in awareness of God's mercy. That is really to get on the way to sanctity I think. You see what we normally do is we have a certain consciousness of sin and we We go to confession, and then we tend to go into the background, and we recover our self-confidence. We're always really trying to recover our self-confidence. And the more we do so, of course, the more God removes from us. But every time we lose that self-confidence, we realize our own fundamental sinfulness, our weakness, our incapacity, then we simply draw God into us, and we become aware then of our complete dependence on Him, and we're able to receive that grace into ourselves which we need at every moment. That is a great difficulty, to realize how much we need God at every moment.

[25:49]

So an awareness of sin brings with it and is in itself an effect of this merciful love of God coming into our souls. Well, now, that is really the meaning of repentance. Repentance in the true biblical sense, et al noia, this change of mind, this change of heart, is simply becoming aware of our real state, of our state of sinfulness, and at the same time of this merciful love of God which comes to our rescue. And therefore we should always keep this spirit of repentance. As I said, in our liturgy we renew it every Monday and Tuesday, so that every week begins, and we take for our Gospel reading always, repent for the Kingdom of God is at hand. You see, it's your each week you begin again with the message of the Gospel. And this So the liturgy helps to keep us in this habit of repentance and with this repentance for sin comes this deeper and deeper experience of God's grace and God's mercy.

[27:07]

Well now, that is the first aspect when we really try to become aware of sin. When this sense of sin has brought us to the knowledge of God's mercy, then we begin to recover our original baptismal state. And really all our life as monks is trying to get back to baptism, isn't it? You know, other fathers regard monastic professions as a new baptism. It's simply a renewal of our baptism. In our baptism, in the mysterious and wonderful way, we did die for sin, and this new life from God came into our heart. We were renewed in the likeness of God. But these forces of spin remain in our nature, and for those of us, I suppose, saved, forces gradually take possession of us.

[28:16]

Unless the baptismal race is revised continuously, the forces of original spin are there always to accentuate, stimulate, and give us this control. And therefore, a great part of our life is trying to get back to that original, that faith baptism, and to recover this image of God in us. Now, this I think is very important. We mustn't allow the depths of sin, or misery, or false, to hide from us this other aspect, that in the inner depths of our nature we never lose this image of God. It is there, implanted, and it can always be renewed by grace. And that is the source of our real dignity. There shouldn't be any opposition. In fact, there never can be a true opposition between a real deep sense of sin and a deep sense of the dignity of the human person.

[29:24]

In fact, it's just as we realize our sinfulness, we realize the beauty of that nature in which God created us, before which created us, as you remember that passage I read from the liturgies this morning, it spoke of this beauty of my nature which was lost and which God is keeping for me. It's when we realize that, then, unless we realize what our true nature is, and how this This other nature, which we all bear with us, is a kind of mask which we impose over our true self. That, I think, is the difference. Psychologists recognize that from a very early age we all develop a kind of mask, a persona in the literal sense. It's a way of dealing with external affairs. We can't face the world with this inner nature, so mysterious and difficult, we have to have some sort of defense against the world, and so we create a kind of moth by which we conduct our life without too much

[30:36]

Not even though we can go from person to person, from thing to thing, in a more or less even way. And that is less to a large extent. But we must become aware of what we're doing. We must realize what this mark is and what the hidden truth beneath it is. And then, as we become aware of the mask of the sinful nature, then we become aware of this true self which underlies it. And this, of course, is the falsehood doctrine of the old man and the new man. The old man is this human nature which was fallen, which got involved in sin, in self-will, in pride, in self-love, and is separated from God. And the new man is this new life which came to us in baptism, this image of God which we all bear, which is within us. from an awareness of sin we come to an awareness of our true self, our true nature.

[31:46]

And you know the Hindus have this doctrine of the self, the Atman, the true self. Actually it's a little confusing. I think really the Hindu fails to understand the depth of it, but he does have a very deep sense that this ego which we ordinary have, our ordinary human personality itself, is a false swaft, it belongs to Maya, it is illusion, it's an illusory self, And he's always trying to find this real self, the Atman, which lies hidden beneath this. And I think that it's one of the most genuine and fundamental movements in all Hindu life and spirituality, that it is this constant seeking of the true self, which they know is to be found in God. They know quite well that this ego which we have is not our true being, and that we should only find our true being in God.

[32:46]

Where they make a mistake is, they tend to say that when you reach the true self, you reach an identity with God. They say the ultimate is the Brahman. When you realize your true self, you realize that there is no real difference between you and God. And that, for a Christian of course, is a very difficult saying and in fact I think that is one of the points in which we really have to face the Hindu doctrine and to show its inadequacy. But if we say that we discover our true self not as an identity but as a relation to God, then surely we are on the right line. When we know our true self, we know ourselves in this true relation to God which we had in the beginning and which we lost through sin. And so to recover the image of God in us is to recover this awareness of our living constant relationship to God as a father, this continual dependence on his providence.

[33:48]

And I don't know anything more important for our daily life than this awareness of God's providence that As we realize our own incapacity, our dependence on Him, so we realize that in reality God is looking after us in the most marvelous way from day to day. And I think we often don't realize that. And if we can, it's really a wonderful grace in one's life, because there is no illusion about this. All our Lord's teachings of the Heavenly Father, it's most wonderfully true as one becomes aware of it. If one is not aware of it, if one simply goes on independently, then the fatherhood of God gradually becomes quite meaningless. And I think that's what happens to the majority of people. They lose their faith in God, or it becomes so vague, they depend on themselves, and so the whole idea of God's providence and His fatherhood just fades away. You know, a very interesting fact, again, which Mercy Eliade has brought out,

[34:52]

is that among most primitive people you'll find a very wonderful conception of God as a Father and Creator and of His Providence. But that this Father God almost invariably fades into the background. He's a little too remote. for the practical needs of life. They want to get their daily bread, and therefore they want a mother goddess, or the spirit of the corn, or the spirit of the thunder which brings the rain. So you worship some other god, which is really the father of nature, which are nearer to you, and which apparently produce the goods, you see, the rain produces the corn. But God, well, he's up in heaven somewhere, whether he is affecting the thorn or not, you begin to doubt, you see. And so he becomes, what Lercieliade calls, a deus ociosus. He uses that of all the African gods. He becomes a deus ociosus. He's just after heaven, but, well, perhaps he's forgotten about us, and so we have to deal with the spirits there on earth, just as the modern man says we've got to deal with the practical realities of life.

[35:59]

constant too much time with the Father in heaven. But when we begin to change our lives, when we begin to have repentance, when we begin to realize the fact of God's Fatherhood, of His Providence, then I'm sure you can experience it in your life, this extraordinary fact that we realize that day by day and hour by hour, we are under this watchful providence. And if we could really relive our lives fully in dependence of God, we should simply realize that from moment to moment, not only God's creative action, but His merciful providence, that preserving us from sin and leading us to Himself, is at work in our hearts. It's really a wonderful thing when one simply begins, even in a small way, to realize that reality of God's providence. Well now just to conclude we become aware of our sin and through that we become aware of God's mercy and love and as we cease to depend on ourselves and begin to depend on God so we experience this grace of his providence in our lives.

[37:14]

But just as I said there is a solidarity in sin. We are all of the same human stock which sinned and share the same nature. So as we recover the image of God in ourselves and realize our sonship of the Father, so we realize that this image of God is common to all mankind. You know St. Gregory of Nyssa has a beautiful phrase where he says that the image All mankind, from the first to the last man, is one image of Him who is. The beautiful phrase says that all mankind, from the first to the last, is one image of God, of Him who is. And of course, the one image of God is Christ. And we, in Christ, form this one image of God. And therefore, as we recover, our own personal life, our true person, we recover our true relationship with other men.

[38:21]

We discover this wonderful unity of human nature. As there is one human nature which fell in Adam, so there is one human nature which is restored in Christ. And I think for what we were thinking of yesterday, this conception of the the universality of the church, there is nothing more helpful than that, because after all it is a problem for us. that divine revelation came so late. There are so many hundreds of thousands of years in which people have lived apparently without any redeemer. But once we realize that the human race is one, and you know St. Augustine and St. Thomas have the most wonderful things to say about this unity of human nature. St. Thomas says, homines homines unus homo. All men are one man, in a very definite sense. so that there is this one man who fell in Adam.

[39:22]

then there is this one man who is restored in Christ. So that we can say quite definitely that no human being, as Gregory says, from the first to the last man, does not receive grace from Christ, and it's therefore truly related to the Church and to Christ, and therefore part of this divine economy of redemption. And so, as we recover the image of God in ourselves, we recover our relationship to our fellow men in Christ, and our true relationship to God as our Father. I hope that may help us to see that once the reality of sin is extraordinary depth, then how we must become more and more aware of it, and yet with that awareness of sin, the growing awareness of God's mercy, His providence, of the real unity of our own life with one another in Christ, who is of course the new Adam, the thin Adam.

[40:31]

As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive. And just one last thought, that always when we look back to the paradise, to the original creation, we at the same time look forward to the resurrection and the new creation. We never can actually go back in time. What Christ has done is to restore paradise to us and actually to raise us to a state which is higher than paradise, so that we're always looking forward to the resurrection. I hope we'll have time to consider more in detail the relation between the cross and the resurrection, between this state of sin and the new life. But let us take away this thought that as we become aware of sin and aware of God's mercy, are looking forward all the time to this fulfillment of our nature in Christ, this restoration of that image of God which was lost in sin, which will bring us into this true relationship with one another, this true relationship with Christ and with God, and so bring us back to that center from which we departed in our sin.

[41:54]

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