The Master's Ladder, Step Two

The Master's Ladder – Step by Step.

Step Two

Blessed are they the mourn: for they shall be comforted.

For many decades of my life, I could see nothing of value in this sentence. I always thought it was a truly silly saying. Firstly as grief does attract comforters, it is a normal part of the Human Condition.  Secondly on a deeper level I didn't believe it was true. I knew that it wasn't always true in a literal sense because I had witnessed people mourning in egoist isolation, wrapped in a bubble of their own pain, unreachable, untouchable, inconsolable, eyes looking and brain registering nothing but numbing pain, in the shock of loss. I was also familiar with the bitterness of grief, the mourning that can color ones life, grinding grief that lasted decades.2Co 7:10  For godly sorrow produces repentance leading to salvation, without regret; but worldly sorrow produces death. 

2Co 7:11  For behold this very thing, that you sorrowed in a godly manner, how much diligence it produced in you, even an eagerness to defend, even indignation, even fear, even longing, even zeal, even vengeance! In all things you demonstrated yourselves to be pure in this matter. 

But, I have learned something about mourning which I would like to share.  Please forgive me because it is in the context of my own life and I can't for the life of me understand why anyone would find it interesting. However I'm hoping some will find it "instructive." I received a letter of comfort following a personal loss. It shows an expert "comforter" at work and it is his work that is instructive.  I have to share my part or his instruction would not have context. The exchange of letters, teach much about the blessedness of mourning and the reality of God's comfort.

From: Bishop (-----)

To: Father Symeon Elias

November 4th, 1997

Early morning on the Hill. Milky white mist permeates the sky. The silence of yellow leaves in cold autumn light. "Mole's End" is cold but I cannot make a fire because my books are stacked in front of the fireplace rather than logs. So I drink cups of hot tea instead and warm myself.

The Indian summer of my life has passed by. It is time to take stock of things as I start my week-long holiday at 8 pm tonight. An old grief aches now like a soldier's scar in windy weather. It is a great mercy of God that out of love for us, the searing pain of grief will end in the stillness of memory. And we always have then this choice. We must decide where to take this grief, how to let God transform it, use it, shape it, and ultimately transfigure our souls. Sometimes people grasp on to their old griefs and die slow deaths. In Orthodoxy we speak of synergy which is the transforming action resulting from Man's will connected to God's grace. And so we must take our grief, we must bring our sorrow to God and say, "Lord, here am I, wretched sinner! Have mercy upon me Sweet Lord! Here is my broken heart. Take it and restore me for I have no where to go but You."

I have friends who suffer very deeply at this time. Throughout this world that God so loved that He gave His only Son to redeem it, men and women suffer, grieve, weep, despair. And I have friends who stand now at the Cross. How to help them? How to comfort them? Everything begins with us. With our own hearts. With the transfiguration of our own souls. With the death of our own selfish passions.

Have we lost someone we love as dearly as life? Have we lost a cherished dream or ambition? Has some doctor grimly told us that we have only a brief time to live? Are we being crushed by the burdens of life, of debts, of hardships? Do we live day to day with a feeling of hopelessness, of anguish, of profound loneliness?  I know people, people who are my friends, my neighbours, my colleagues, who are experiencing these earthly sorrows. And I have known them myself.

I look at my beloved Father Seraphim of Sarov. And I see the years he lived in the wilderness devoting himself to the podvigs of prayer, work, and the emptying of passions. And when his heart had been transfigured by God, when he had arrived at that special place when God revealed to him who he was and why he was born and what he was called to be. When Father Seraphim had learned to be centered in his heart and stored up great spiritual treasures within his soul, then the Holy Mother of God told the Staretz that he must open the doors of his hermitage and share the love of Christ with all who seek a way out of pain, misery, and confusion.

You see, Father, “We cannot give what we do not ourselves possess. We cannot bear the unbearable unless our hearts are filled with grace. We cannot weep tears with the sorrowing and comfort them in their pain unless we have suffered brokenness ourselves and have turned to God in our darkness and asked Him for help like a small child full of trust.” You remember these words, you wrote them to me.

Father Symeon, for you, your hermitage is your own heart, your own life and your own home. Who among us turns his home into a haven for those needing God's comfort, and those choosing to serve the least? Yet this is what your home is and what you have done. And each day you do not hurry, whether it is your prison work and other ministries, your piano work , your art work, or your music and recording. I have learned all these are also ministry and without regard to monetary necessity you move slowly through your days never hurrying for anyone, and in your "paced day" you open your heart and your home to people of all walks of life. So now you stand among your books, feeling the reality of your Indian Summer, and you look at the fireplace which is too often like mine, without a fire, and you warm yourself with cups of coffee and grieve. But in the grieving you continue to bless and you do not curse and the reality of your heart is exposed for all to see. Remember there is genuine witness in your tears.

What a wonderful day it is on the Hill. I thank my Lord for the cold because how can I appreciate the warmth of the tea or the comfort of my beloved "Mole's End"? Soon I must put on my shoes and wear my coat and prepare for the day's work. I must go and say words. I pray for this one thing. That God opens my heart to whomever will need me today. I ask Him to help me be a friend to somebody who needs a friend. In giving we receive. In loving, we are fulfilled in our existence. In praying for others, we will be blessed. In being merciful, we will be forgiven. And we will know something of God's love in all suffering humanity and the created world.

Christ is amoung us!

Bishop (_____)

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In the first step we talked about the idea of coming to recognize that our own answers are inadequate. That our methods and philosophy are so much "vanity" and dusty rags. We may discover this wisdom only in old age as King Solomon did and at that point be able to write books on grief and the vanity of it all.  No matter when this awakening happens, when we realize the "natural futility of life," that is the burden of mortality, we go through a process of mourning. And in that state everything we see and say is only half-true. I know it will come as a great shock, since it is "scripture" and of course "inspired" . . . still most everything Solomon said in Ecclesiastes is only half true.  He certainly painted clearly the futility of the human condition without experience of Christ and the constant presence of HIS Holy Spirit. 

You see, we spend time stuffing our hearts with the hurts and disappointments of life, real and imagined, the pride, the greed, the lust, the anger, the envy, the entropy, the hurtful advice we have given, the horrible things to which we have given our consent through the false idols we have worshiped, the provocations we have given and followed, the praise and flattery we have extended to evil, the cowardly silence we chose when others were abused, treated unjustly, mock and even killed and that greatest fault of all the myriad times we have gone to the mat defending our transgressions, justifying our actions, psychologizing our wickedness away. When we first reach to that deepest part of ourselves . . . when we become brave enough to truly take the mind and walk it down to our heart's door and enter our own heart, in the company of Jesus Christ who has been standing their incessantly knocking, it is a painful journey, we dare not take without his company, because if you have lived any time at all, you have to know, it is ugly down there. 

Jer_17:9 The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?

Rev_3:20  Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.

You see, that is just IT, what Jeremiah did not know, is that the incarnation of Jesus Christ, clearing the way for the indwelling of the Holy Spirit gives us the tool to do just that, to with much pain and much effort, much repentance, and more repentance, and more repentance, come to layer by layer, object by object view the garbage stored in our hearts and clean house. If it isn't a painful journey into the heart, it is NOT real, if what we discover is not shocking, tormenting and painful, we are playing a spiritual fantasy game. However, with the recognition of our own weakness and taking on the spiritual eyes of the "rule of God" (entering the Kingdom) we grieve deeply and do not hide from it, looking at not only the state of ourselves, our own lives but the lives of those around us and how we effect them, color them, inspire or vampirize them; we also become alive to the seemingly intractable problems of mankind. Every baby aborted, every child raped or abused, every victim of the murderer's weapons, every fraud of business, the inane circus of politics, the arrogant ignorance of irrational behaviorist education, the abysmal ignorance of the so-called sciences, the folly of the deconstructionist and rational theologians and philosophers, the pride of the cultist and denominationalists, the sad carnival of the rich; these things and many more become a huge grief to us.

If we are bound by the "happiness seeking sickness of religion" the “fake it till you make it movement” “the hold on repent nothing, Jesus has saved me movement” we can NEVER reach to our hearts and what is more we never TRULY let Christ in. 

Without the knowledge how and why, reaching deep into our souls and finding this grief, this ugliness, we balk, and are likely to rationalize that we have accepted something false, some error of dogma, some heresy because of the pain it causes us. Aren't we are told again and again that we are to experience "joy" and "happiness" in Christ. Who can justify purposely opening old wounds and purging them of their content!

A famous mystic said, "Before the soul can stand in the presence of the Master, its feet must be washed in the blood of the heart." She was a Theosophists, but as a Pagan reaching to God constructed a flawed but graphic imagery of first steps of The Way. It is true that we begin our walk on The Way, not just with the "tears of remorse" for our own sins, but in shock and grief at the "state of life" at the damage Satan has done, at the scars on our heart and the scars we have placed on others, at the waste of our lives and others, at the state of the suffering world. A beautiful Galatian liturgy says,

"As we draw near to the peace of atonement, may we see the wonder of God's presence, may we see the wasting of God's people, and may we see the wounding of God's Son." 

The wonder of God's presence is an "awesome" sight -fearful in the archaic sense of the word. The wasting of God's people is a grief engendering sight which by God's Grace is held from us and we are only allowed to view it as we come to see the Wonder of God's Presence or seeing it would cause such psychic weight it would kill us. Today many live in deep bitterness looking around at the Luciferian Damage to this planet, the slaughter, the genocide, the chaos, the cynical enslavement.  Such pursuits without the proper heart conditioning is a fool's errand. 

You see, the only way such wounding of God's people may be viewed in perspective is through, the wounding of God's Son.  Standing, kneeling, prostrated at the Holy Cross, is so necessary. The sight of it cannot be by-passed with glib dismissing words like, “Well, I like to think of Jesus' Resurrection.” Most people see the resurrection as the miracle, but it is not so.

It was only natural that the Life and Love of the Lord of All Life -LIVES; - that's a no-brainer.

The miracle was the crucifixion of the Lord of Glory; who could have predicted it? Who can truly understand it? Who can reach to the ends of the POWERS it generates for US? It was against the backdrop of the wasting of God's people that this miracle of the Cross occurred, the condescension, beyond human conceptual language. When someone thinks they can explain it to you in “religious slogans” they have never gained a vision of the Cross, which is absolutely necessary to healing/salvation. It wasn't a legal action, it was not in response to theft.  It was an organic process, the birth of the First Born of All Creation. 

What can we know of mourning and comfort when we are bound by the "happiness seeking sickness of religion" of our culture? A culture that makes a manikin of a corpse, sprays it with perfume, chemically retards its decay so that everyone can say, “Doesn't he look good. Just as if he has fallen asleep.”
I have such a wicked wit I have to bite my tongue at such times to keep from saying, "Yea and ready to take a dirt nap, too."

The people speaking are the ones asleep. They know nothing of the repentance that says, “My soul, do not trust in health of body and quickly-passing beauty, for you see that the strong and the young die. How can I keep from weeping when I think of death, for I have seen my brother in his coffin without glory or beauty? What, then, am I to expect? And for what do I hope? Lord, only grant me repentance before the end.” What can we know when we fear the grief that is an absolute part of true purification and illumination? 

You see, if we truly reject the grief, it is because we lack faith to believe Jesus' words, that there is Comfort quickly coming, unexpected, REAL. No ACTING involved. 

Please let me share how I answered the Bishop's letter, using it as an opportunity for “katharsis” to after many decades pull up deep long held griefs, look at them graphically and at least confess them, even if I could not yet send them away. Those pages that were tear soaked are not part of me now, except in deep love that filled the empty spots, which letting them go caused in my heart.

To: Bishop (____)

Father Symeon Elias

Saturday December the 6th, 1997

Your Grace, Greetings in Christ.

I want to express deep gratitude for the beautiful words of comfort you expressed in a note of lovely prose about the loss of (__________). In my prison chaplaincy work especially, and even with close friends, in fact for most my life, I found it difficult to share my own grief.

(Digression: you see I know the egoist isolation, wrapped in a bubble of ones own pain, unreachable, untouchable, inconsolable, eyes looking and brain registering nothing but numbing pain, in the shock of traumatic loss. - many people do.) 

Though I did share the "fact" of my grief, I could not share the depth of the grief, it being too deep, too painful and too soon – even decades later. Having been shocked by loss very early in life, although I was very close to my father, not a tear at 13 when he reposed. It was seventeen years later before I found myself alone one day tears streaming down my cheeks. In their broken, though loving ways, friends tried to express comfort. What a burden it is to try to comfort a "comforter!" We know all the words, all the pat phrases -and in our own loss it is difficult to find meaning in our "stock" words. 

Part of the Christianity which is real is being open to the Holy Spirit of all Life. This makes us open to The Truth, and in truth we should not and cannot hide from our grief. In Truth we should not act contrary to ourselves, we must know grief's suffering significance in the healing of our psyche. One reality of truth is that if love is real, it is without repentance and though the body goes to the grave, and the soul to the comfort of the Almighty, the love remains with us, to comfort us and break us. The love of those who have reposed, is a bitter-sweetness of great riches, a price of gold paid for our benefit. It is the reality of the blood warmly flowing from our broken hearts which is the life blood of The Way. Without it, all entertaining of ideas of faith are mere speculations and suppositions, maybe even prideful fraud.  We run the risk of turning our system of belief into superstition and phantasy. 

So I choose not to lose the loving memory of my childhood friend Leslie, killed by a homosexual rapist. I remember the sun drenched days of playing "civil war" with our plastic soldiers in the sand, and on rainy days on the front porch. The loser of course had to be the Yankees, next game. We would walk to the Old  Soldier's Home and actually talk with Civil War Veterans, three of them, whose age was a century or more, but still amazingly full of stories. What a wealthy childhood it was! I remember the taste of Coca-Cola on ice his mother would serve us on a tray in the back yard in the shade. I remember every day the mile walk to kindergarten and how we felt brave, and knew that together we could face any foe. And of almost drowning deep in the storm culvert when a Summer rain storm caught us unaware. I still do not hide from the sight of Leslie in the coffin, at peace following a horrible death. I have not lost the sense of guilt wondering why it was him and not me who was kidnapped and killed.

I choose to love and remember my very own angel who graced my young days, my raven-haired cousin,  she and her sister, who doted on me as if I were their own child, then gone at seventeen, still the prettiest female this earth has known; such an exaggeration I'm sure, but that's my mind's eye. It was the same Summer of Leslie's murder, and following Barbara Ann's death my Father had the first in a series of heart attacks that seven years later would take him. I sat dazed that Autumn and Winter, seeing my robust father's complexion, pale and his face sometimes ashen.  Confronted with a new world I did not much want to know, I knew at six my childhood was over.  

Something magic happened, and though it never was again a normal childhood, (if there really is such a thing in this challenged world) the Lord used the pain to open the heart of a mystic in a young boy. Suddenly I was very aware of the beauty of this place, the dance of the trees, the symphony of light and color, the movement of the wind, the song of the birds, the gardens like paintings, the underlying harmony and dissonance, the beauty of movement and sound captured me, the aura of Life clung to the landscape and the clouds preformed just for me. In no uncertain terms, in the pain of that year the Lord opened to me the beauty of creation, and gave me a hint of the complete beauty which is to come. In the fog of that grief, I found the incongruity of living. He comforted me with the certain knowledge I have never been and will never be alone. I still see radiant beauty out of the corner of my eye often in my deep thoughts. My guardian angel, I think the constant reminder of the energy inside the samsara. 

I choose to love and remember my fiancee', killed in an auto accident the Summer of my eighteenth year. Her face has not faded, because I will not let it. Her strong Choctaw features, the tint of her skin, the sound of her speech pattern and voice, the fear and humility I felt when someone so beautiful and full of life gave herself to me. The five years of our friendship and the two years of our deep love are a pivot point, when I balance the meaning of my life, it seems even at this age it is viewed as everything before and after her. I choose to love her still, and always will. I will never let her memory grow dull.

And in that promise I choose to remember my buddies killed in Vietnam, our crazy teenage tricks, our dangerous high speed races and reckless driving, our drinking and hiring a lady of the evening to (censored for propriety sake). I choose to love and remember my best friend, Doug, killed via chain-saw. I remember the night we met, the cursing, drinking, pool games and gambling, the arm wrestling con that got us thrown out of many bars. I remember his tears and conversion and the love of Jesus Christ in his eyes, witness and sincerity, how he became a real father to his sons, and a loving husband to the wife he had regularly abused. And all the others I choose to continue to love and to remember with immediacy, my Father, Mother, Brother, Aunts, Uncles and Cousins, the babies lost. The bitter-sweetness of their memory purposely kept alive, purposely experienced, with a smile on my face and glint in my eyes, purposely spoken and brought to the eternal moment of my prayer everyday.

My best memories of (-----) are of her as young child of eight-years, as she was recovering from years of abuse at the hands of her step-father who is still in Prison for his crimes against her and her sister. I loved her, counseled her, taught her how *not* to approach everyone in a sexual manner, it was

all she knew! In God's Grace I helped her to heal.  So cut to the core was I and insulted, when I learned she suffered the further indignity of a violent death and horror of horrors a severed head. So in it all, the reality of my mal-formed-ness and lack of sanctity was all too evident in this loss. It stirred murderous rage, I choke back, because there is no place and reason to express it. For though I loved her with my core, with whom could I share the loss, too full of pride I was to openly weep the anger and bitterness of my heart. Evidenced, in that the expressions of comfort from friends were sadly very uncomfortable for me and made it even more difficult to carry on. I felt like saying, “Can't you just let this go and we get back to normal.” That had been my trick, bury my Dad the next day go to school as if nothing had happened. Bury my Mother in the early afternoon and at five o'clock I'm at symphony hall tuning for that night's performance.  "The Show Must Go On."  I know the damage I've done to myself by these procrastinations, "Sure, I will deal with it later."

It has been a time also when some who while observing my Orthodox witness, have wished to "prove" or maybe "dis-prove" the validity of my faith. I know that this is from their own questions and needs and is no part of my reality. Yet in witness it IS, so this grief has been a chance to see me at my worst, to see if I would "fake it" or fall into dissimulation and play the hypocrite. For their spiritual health and healing I would not and could not hide my grief as a fundamentalist Christian does, as so many have learned to do, at the funeral home, saying "What is there to grieve about? He's in a better place!" and the like. In my deep grief all I could say was what I know to my core, "God is in control. The Evil One is vanquished. All things come to me in the synergism of the Holy Spirit for my good. The Lord Gives and the The Lord Takes Away, Blessed Be the Name of The Lord." And I think, Your Grace, for the first time in my life I meant it, actually meant it without admixture of question, Why? Why her? Why so young? etc. 

I began from the first day to teach that one must be real, and not hide from their loss. Via the reality of the synergism of the Lord of all Life, I know that the Lord placed me in a position to live out this grief in front of people from whom I could not hide. I guess I could have really. I could have taken a leave of absence but knowing the tragedies of some of our members, that for me was not a choice. But here in the chaplaincy there was no work in which to hide.  There was no choice, I had to stand and say words. 

Although each week following the loss, I have called her name at Liturgy, those who love me, and those who observe me, needed more. I knew that I needed to share with them more. But I truly did not know how to, or where to find the strength or the vehicle to do this. However, the week of Thanksgiving your letter served as a beautiful method of sharing that grief with them, and also teaching them that the Apostolic Ministry is not static, not a cold thing passed down from generation to generation, not a thing of dusty books and rules, but alive and individually expressed via the Holy Spirit in power. I explained how in comforting at the worst times, we must remind others of the beauty and dignity of life and the commonality of grief and death, and give ourselves and others permission to continue in the Love and the Life that is Real. Your letter was the perfect vehicle for that. I saw smiles and tears in the eyes of twice convicted murderers and rapists, some of them men who will never see the outside again, and at the women's prison, broken women, mothers whose babies were born crack addicted and with AIDS, weeping sweet tears, and loving you for your words of comfort to me, and loving me for sharing them, and entertaining the possibility that there is still something about them worth loving. If I could love them and respect them enough to go through this pain of sharing my grief with them, I saw in their eyes that it truly meant something.

Your letter gave me the vehicle to extend a blessing via the Holy Spirit, which was beyond my capacity in my grief. I cannot express the true significance of the blessing your sharing has wrought. Not just to them, but to me. Well, Your Grace, I love you for the comfort you have given me and the beauty of the blessing and the hope I was able to see on the faces of these least of the least.
May God bless you with the comfort you share and fill your life with beauty and joy.

IHS

Father Symeon Elias

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We all have our griefs to face, in Him is the only comfort and it is His Joy in our core that sustains at the most grievous and bitter times. But, The Way, is IN the suffering of Human Life and NOT removed from it in some nebulous mystical fog of religiousness and frosty spirituality.

From: Bishop (____)

To: Father Symeon Elias

December 7th, 1997

Dear Symeon, Sunday afternoon is my favorite time of the week. It often takes all of Saturday to recover from the battering we can receive during the work week. And so today is a good time on the Hill. Silence reigns in Mole's End and I have deliberately not played any music choosing to allow the sounds of this morning's Divine Liturgy to linger in my head and to enjoy the silence and allow it to sink deeply into the soil of my heart. How do hyper-active Americans survive I wonder if they are constantly on the go, constantly driven by radical materialism, needing to drive out to the malls, constantly shopping for what they do not need, and did not know they wanted until they were told by the continual hypnosis of the culture, constantly running away from themselves and the emptiness within? In my ideal society people would work three days a week acquiring all the necessities they need to live comfortably and modestly. And then they would have two days to take care of errands and other domestic chores. The remaining two days would be for spiritual, artistic, and intellectual survival which include time for prayer, solitude and silence.

(Edit) Too personal to share, where he scolded me in very stern words for having held too much grief for too long. He told me I suffered the sin of melancholy and “wallowed in the sin of nostalgia.” He asked me this very pointed question, “All this grieving love you choose to hold as a museum piece of your heart, who in your present life, and in the Eternal Moment, are you robbing. Big hint . . . It is not just yourself, I dare say your wife, your children and grand children and your Lord.” Whew the words stung, but they were so true. And I knew I had been so very stupid, painting in my heart a great and beautiful mural of my personal mythology, of my favorite and sweetly bitter pain. How had its noise not block me from ever hearing God's voice, but of course it had to have! How could it not!  He gave me this one quote, which source do not know:

"It is the goal of the Hierophant to first still the heart and silence the mind. It cannot happen when a ragtime band beats discordant sounds in the heart and the mind sees a carnival stripper, or the strains of heavenly symphonic melody play and the beauty of the pines of Rome flow by in endless procession.  The person, who has thoughts – good or bad – inside his heart, is the person who from a Patristic point of view is a suffering soul. Regardless even if those thoughts are moral – even supremely moral – or whatever else they may be.  He is not living in the eternal moment, he is distracted by his own ego. In other words, according to the Fathers of the Church, whoever has not undergone catharsis of the soul and cleansed of his passions and has not reached the state of enlightenment by the Grace of the Holy Spirit, is a suffering soul."

Well, certainly that label fit.  I immediately though, "the slap of a righteous man is a kindness." 

I've also edited the friendly banter he added in beautiful prose to soften the blow of his very blunt reprimand. 

He continued:

Dear Symeon, he IS here and in your heart. It has to be, for you at this time of deep grief to be concerned with the effect your grief may have on others. This is a sure sign of your priestly heart and the humility to live out your vocation. In reality this is what we are called to do, to make our life a Sacrament of Living, in which others find The Way. Grieve On In Joy, my friend, so that all with eyes to see, may see Life in the ashes! This is my "sage" advice. Is it any wonder that St. Ignatius used the image of the phoenix to picture the Life of the Suffering Servant? Turning the gruesome into inspiration, and loss into riches, and suffering into gain, this is the reality of the Life engendered by the Lord of All Life and you are living it.

Christ is amoung us!

Bishop (____)

The comfort comes in the experience of loss, the lessons we gain. Tears of remorse are met with unexpected and sometimes tough words of mercy. How does a soul find real healing without a spiritual father and confessor?  The isolation of the human condition is MOST CERTAINLY NOT the Path of Christian Growth. The role of the arrogant "individual spiritualist" hold no place in Christianity for even those who choose a hermitage.  

Blessed are those who face death, for you shall have pure and good life.--Buddha
I faced a lot of death very early and it did not stop me from terrible sins or racking up a dumpster load of garbage and deep scars in my heart.

Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. -The Master
I know this to be very true, if we allow ourselves to be cracked open and not allow Satan to construct layers of scars, seducing us into nostalgic imagination, sucking the life force from THIS MOMENT.

The mind's journey into the human heart is so that we may create in ourselves a “heart-mind” holding wisdom and intelligence greater than what we hold in our brains, outside of the confines of the straight-jacket of rationalism, or the other side of the coin the fantasies of imagination. The "heart-mind" (what the ancient fathers and Saint Paul named the NOUS) is then where the innate knowledge by the Holy Spirit informs us of HIS WILL, of what is life engendering and what is death engendering; Where the Holy Spirit exposes to us our own attitudes and actions and the attitudes and actions others, and judges them by that same rule.  It is just silly but I hear the Star Trek voice over, saying, “Going where no man has ever gone before.” The analogy is not at all far fetched since the heart contains all the dangers of everything alien to life, killing toxins which have to be identified, named, examined, repented of, and expunged, so that what is worthy and virtuous, that is LIFE ENGENDERING, may fill the void. 

In the introduction to this series entitled: "Gnostic Creep into Protestant Thought" where I spoke of The Apostle Paul becoming so full of God's uncreated energy that the rags laden with his sweat became instruments of healing enlightenment and deliverance from evil;  Realize that state witnessed in him, did not come as some magic "gift of the Holy Spirit" but the rigorous ascetic work to which Paul was willing to not just "passively submit" but ACTIVELY practice, empower by the Holy Spirit to do so for purpose.  When you begin to grasp the "organic reality" of what I am describing to you here about very, very deep healing/salvation, the emptiness of the "self-help books" like "A Purpose Driven Life" become exposed. 

 Psa_84:4  Blessed are they that dwell in thy house: they will be still praising thee. Selah.