OBEDIENCE AND PURITY
Many years ago, a youth came to me seeming to be religious, quiet, and decent. Bitterly, he complained about adultery of the heart. He said, “I fast for long periods and cry during my prayers for the Lord to release me from the war of evil desire, but all is in vain. I always read the Bible and refrain from reading any cheap attractive books. I have no bad friends and do not see any bad attractions. What else can I do?”
I asked him, “What is your relationship with your parents?” He said that he always complains and argues with them. I had put my finger on the problem; he disobeys his parents, so his body does not obey the soul. He who does not have a good relationship with his family cannot control his inner feelings. This is the holy law: “‘Honor your father and mother, which is the first commandment with promise ‚that it may be well with you and you may live long on the earth.” (Eph. 6:2-3). Since the meeting with this youth, I concluded that he who complains from evil desires must review his dealings and relationship with his parents, brothers, relatives, colleagues, and employers. He who plants violence and disobedience will not reap anything but inner war and temptations.Obedience and Sound Personality
Fr. Tadros Y. Malaty
Category: TEMPTATION & LUST & VIRGINITY
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Whoever is chaste before marriage is the same after marriage. Those who learned adultery before marriage, do the same afterwards. It is written in the Divine Scriptures “All bread is sweet to the adulterer” (Sirach 23:17). For this reason, a crown is placed on the head (in the altar), as a sign of victory. They are entering the wedding not conquered or oppressed by lust. There is no reason to put a crown on the head of whoever gets into the love of pleasures and surrenders his soul to adultery, because he has been defeated.Instill this in them, teach and pressure them by all means.
—St. John Chrysostom
via Family Love by Fr. Tadros Y. Malaty -
The desire for a woman, or another sordid pleasure, we shall not merely control—rather, we shall turn from it as something transitory, forever doing battle and looking toward the day of judgment. For the larger fear and dread of the torments always destroys pleasure’s smooth allure, and rouses the declining soul.
—Athanasius, The Life of Antony
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“You can’t prevent malicious thoughts from coming, but it’s up to you to resist them.”
—Abba Pimen -
Struggle with your flesh until it is humbled. Once it is used to this modest and rough environment, it will become your mute slave. Humility of the flesh will be granted at last. You should always keep this in sight and strive for it as a reward for your labors. Physical podvigs [spiritual struggles] foster physical virtues: solitude, silence, endurance, vigilance, labor, patience in deprivations, purity, and virginity.
You should remember that this friend of yours will end up in the grave. They say: Do not trust the flesh—it is deceitful. When you come to believe it is humbled, you relax, and it immediately grabs you and conquers you. This war with it continues to the grave, but it is much harder at first. Later it gets easier and easier until finally there remains only attention to its behavior with occasional light sensations of fleshly upsurge.
—St. Theophan the Recluse, The Path to Salvation: A Manual of Spiritual Transformation
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Even if a thought does not represent anything bad in and of itself or in its consequences, do not immediately incline towards it, but be patient for a time, so as not to do anything rash. Some have waited five years before carrying out a thought.
—St. Theophan the Recluse, The Path to Salvation: A Manual of Spiritual Transformation
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“For nine years a brother was assailed by the temptation to leave his community. Every day he got ready to go and picked up the cloak in which he used to wrap himself at night. At evening he would say, ‘I will go away tomorrow.’ At dawn he would think, ‘I ought to stay here and bear this temptation just today for the Lord’s sake.’ He did this every day for nine years, until the Lord took the temptation away.”
The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks
by Benedicta Ward -
From The Screwtape Letters—a fictional work written from a senior demon’s perspective, advising a junior tempter.
You will find, if you look carefully into any human’s heart, that he is haunted by at least two imaginary women a terrestrial and an infernal Venus, and that his desire differs qualitatively according to its object. There is one type for which his desire is such as to be naturally amenable to the Enemy readily mixed with charity, readily obedient to marriage, coloured all through with that golden light of reverence and naturalness which we detest; there is another type which he desires brutally, and desires to desire brutally, a type best used to draw him away from marriage altogether but which, even within marriage, he would tend to treat as a slave, an idol, or an accomplice. His love for the first might involve what the Enemy calls evil, but only accidentally; the man would wish that she was not someone else’s wife and be sorry that he could not love her lawfully. But in the second type, the felt evil is what he wants; it is that ‘tang’ in the flavour which he is after. In the face, it is the visible animality, or sulkiness, or craft, or cruelty which he likes, and in the body, something quite different from what he ordinarily calls Beauty, something he may even, in a sane hour, describe as ugliness, but which, by our art, can be made to play on the raw nerve of his private obsession.
The Screwtape Letters
C. S. Lewis
