And sometimes we isolate ourselves from others, whom we have characterized as evil, or we isolate (ourselves] from church. Or perhaps a person may isolate himself from his job, when he is doing a work he does not like, and so he submits his resignation and looks for another job, and so he moves from work to work, and everywhere he goes he finds flaws only. Therefore, he keeps on saying that he has not found people who love him, and there is no fairness in this work, etc. And this person continues to search for perfection, and will not find it, for there is no absolute perfection on earth.
—H.E. Metropolitan Youssef, How to Develop Your Personality
Category: LONELINESS & SOLITUDE
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The person who has not learned how to bond with others, will find it very difficult to say to someone that he is in need of others’ help. In contrast to that is the person who has bonded with another. It is very easy for him to say that he needs your support, because he is going through a tough time.
—H.E. Metropolitan Youssef, How to Develop Your Personality
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What happens when a person, because of upbringing, fails in bonding with others, and is not able to form successful relationships? The person feels lonely, isolated, and estranged.
This isolation and estrangement passes through three stages:
The first stage [consists of] grumbling and distress, in which the person feels pain because he is alone, and feels that he is a stranger and has nobody to ask about him, and that nobody loves him. But he may [even] grumble against God, and say that the Lord does not love him, and may grumble against society wherein he lives. This person complains, because he has failed in making sound relationships. For this person to overcome this matter, he has to deal with this pain in a positive way, and from it, as an impetus, set out to form relationships and friendships with others, and then he can heal himself and grow in a sound way. If he does not do this, he will enter into the next stage.
The second stage is what we call, the building up of the feelings of grumbling against everything around him, because the feeling of the pain of loneliness persists for a long time. So you find him grumbling against God and others, and against home, church, and school.
As for the third stage, it is the most dangerous, in which the person feels that he does not deserve to live, and then he ends his life and reaches the point of [committing] suicide.
From the aforementioned, the importance of forming relationships is made clear, and [also] bonding with God and entering into a relationship with God, so he will bask in the warmth of His love, and will attain success in his life, as Joseph bonded with God, and therefore, Scripture says, “The LORD was with Joseph, and he was a successful man.”
—H.E. Metropolitan Youssef, How to Develop Your Personality
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Pain and suffering went into man’s life because a relationship was no longer present.
—H.E. Metropolitan Youssef, How to Develop Your Personality
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“Everything bad I’ve ever done – everything dysfunctional I ever did – I did because I needed love, and I was lonely.”
Anna Runkle, Crappy Childhood Fairy -
Most psychological problems, including the difficult ones like addiction, may be eliminated through relationships.
—H.E. Metropolitan Youssef, How to Develop Your Personality
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This [same] description may be applied to departments and organizations. Someone might go to a [new] church, and after frequenting it for several months, he would say, “This church is bad and I will not go to it again. Its service is bad, there is no orderliness in it, but even everything in it is bad.” Then he looks for another church, and classifies it as bad too. In the end, he separates himself from every church, because he will not find a perfect church on earth. Every church has flaws and weaknesses.
I read once a saying of an author, which included the following: “There is no perfect church, devoid of weaknesses and deficiencies, in this world. And if it so happened that we find a perfect church with no flaws in it, I advise that you should not go to it, because you are an imperfect person, and none of us is perfect; therefore, as soon as you enter it, this church will be imperfect, because of the presence of an imperfect person in it—that is, you.”
And we sometimes isolate ourselves from others, whom we have characterized as evil, or we isolate [ourselves] from church. Or perhaps a person may isolate himself from his job, when he is doing a work he does not like, and so he submits his resignation and looks for another job, and so he moves from work to work, and everywhere he goes he finds flaws only. Therefore, he keeps on saying that he has not found people who love him, and there is no fairness in this work, etc. And this person continues to search for perfection, and will not find it, for there is no absolute perfection on earth.
—H.E. Metropolitan Youssef, How to Develop Your Personality
Many of us come to Orthodoxy having read good books about great spiritual athletes and it is easy to form romanticised expectations about what the clergy should be like. If we come to church with unrealistic ideas the devil may use them to disappoint us and convince us that things aren’t good enough and that we should look elsewhere. We must remember that the demons will do everything in their power to prevent us from becoming part of Christ’s Church and our own lack of discernment can be a dangerous pitfall. The grace of the priesthood is a real and wonderful blessing, but it is given to men of flesh and blood. The devil will delight in telling us how unworthy the priest is: but rest assured, the priest is only too aware of his own unworthiness.
A certain monk lived in a monastery, and he was always angry. He decided, “I will leave this place and dwell by myself as a hermit, and then I will no relations with anyone, and the passion of anger will leave me.” Leaving the monastery, he settled in a cave. One day, having taken up a pitcher of water, the monk set it one the ground, and it tipped over. Again he drew the water, and the pitcher tipped a second time. The he drew it again, and it fell a third time. The brother got angry, picked it up and broke it. When he had come to himself, he understood that the devil had triumphed over him and said, “Behold, I have gone away into seclusion, and I am conquered! I will go back to the monastery, for patience and the help of God are necessary everywhere!” And he returned to his previous place.
—Ancient Patericon -
But to extrapolate that reality into the idea that we shouldn’t want to tend to our loved ones, to receive them as flawed and imperfect people and care for them anyway, is a grave miscorrection. We all exist to save each other. There is barely anything else worth living for.
no good alone, RAYNE FISHER-QUANN -
It is a cruel and fundamentally inhuman tragedy that the culture has convinced so many of us that we must be healed in isolation, because being surrounded by people — people who love us, or care for us, or are willing to sit in the same room with us while we clean up our messes — is about the only way that I, for one, have ever been able to get better.
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It’s driven me to isolate myself, convinced that ritualistic self-punishment and pathetic martyrdom were the only ways I could ever make myself worthy of other people. I realized, though, that I was being a coward. Being alone is hard, to be sure, but it’s also deceptively easy — it requires nothing of us.
no good alone, RAYNE FISHER-QUANN -
When relationships are made difficult by traumas, anxieties, and neuroses — and when those issues are triggered as you navigate complicated relationships — being alone really can feel a lot like being cured. Relationships with other complex, flawed people are beautiful and transformative and fulfilling, but they’re also inherently maddening, infuriating, hurtful, stressful, and yes, triggering. It is ideal, of course, for us to work to understand those conflicts and thereby make them less destructive to ourselves and others, but we can’t make those feelings disappear; nothing real can have contact without friction. If you’ve been encouraged to define a healthy life as a frictionless one, I think it may be inevitable that a life devoid of contact starts to feel like healing.
no good alone, RAYNE FISHER-QUANN
SO GOOD QUOTES 