Priest Ioan Istrati
A devastating text from the Poem of repentance of Saint Andrew of Crete says as follows: `Making an image of the ugliness of my passions with my pleasure loving cravings I spoiled the beauty of my mind.`
It is fascinatingly depicted the perverse work of the mind to make idols through imagination, whom the fallen man worships as God. Image in Greek is eikon, icon. The wretched and debauched man makes himself icons from the imagined or seen bodies whom he worships like an animal to the food from earth. It is an usurpation of the glory due to God. But what is even more terrible is the fact that the mind becomes the pigsty of the pigs, incapable to feel God anymore, full of the dirtiness of the cravings.
The mind is an altar of light, full of the beauty of God`s love, a Holy Table where Christ, the Crucified and Resurrected One rests, a spring of heavenly ideas and values. But when the mind spoils its initial beauty it becomes a brother of filthiness. It is symptomatic for the sexual obsession which is born from debauchery or pornography.
We can see this beauty of the mind at children.
They forgive. smile, light up the world, are full of enthusiasm, of purity, of peace, of the pure truth of a serene love. They play and in their game God smiles longingly.
