The greatest sadness, accidents I saw at the men who had thought that they had authority over the others. It is important to understand that our purpose on earth is not to change the others but to bear them. I don’t know anyone who changed as a result of the tensions caused by someone else. Mad is the man who imagines that he can change the people around himself. I am a confessor and sometimes I feign madness thinking that maybe the man could change but in most cases it seems only like blowing in the wind. When you’ve got the impression that the man has changed a little, when you have the feeling that things entered a normal course of life, then everything breaks. The man is the greatest surprise that God left on earth and more than that it’s not meaning the other one, but us.
It’s important to understand the way things work. The man comes for confession and says, poor fellow: `I suffer only because of the other, he makes me mad, he upsets me` Everyone is guilty around you only you are right and good. Nobody can make you suffer unless you are deeply distempered in your soul! Those around you are not some pets who can draw away your boredom, don’t use the people for your interests.
There is no other more meaningful preoccupation on this earth than to seek God! All the others are only surrogates, sooner or later you reach to their end, you get bored of a man, of a situation, of a job. There is no other thing to give us a deeper meaning and concern us our whole life. That’s why I think that we need spirituality, faith because faith is the only one which can take us out of spiritual sickness.
Orthodoxy proposes marriage as a path to walk for melting the ego from within yourself, a daily exercise which helps you to give up on your vanity and ambitions since where it starts the melting of the ego, God descends. The man begins to sanctify his soul. In a man who fights permanently with himself and his addictions God has His place.
There are many people who unfortunately live together but in complete solitude. If you end up your life near a man you almost consider as a a stranger, you should know that there is a failure not a virtue. It is as if in your heart you had divorced long time ago even if you didn’t sign the divorce papers.
You didn’t assume the person who is beside you, you didn’t love him, you didn’t have mercy for him, you only accused him of your unhappiness. But when you see marriage as a way of accomplishment you know that the small rows, the minor conflicts are necessary, because in them you manifest the cut of your personal will. If you want to make the marriage be an attempt for justice you’re just heading towards disaster.
We’re experiencing terrible frustrations and failures, because we don’t start the journey with the homework done, because we are sold terrible illusions about love and marriage. I know couples who keep on having rows and offending each other from morning till night. I don’t think that this means to carry your cross, to assume a man, I don’t think that this means marriage. God didn’t do it so! He looked at all men with love and mercy. Can it be mended something that had been broken between two people? Yes, but the effort is huge and the husbands must understand they begin a healing process. Most of the people divorce because they don’t have a confessor. That’s the way I think. Salvation is an act of knowledge, of mutual share, the man becomes aware of eternal conscience.
We need faith. At the church you won’t find righteous sinless people, there go the people who understand the meaning of their life, who have the willingness to accomplish themselves spiritually and want to strive every day for that. Someone who believes in God, who set his life in God, even if he has falls is a man who gives peace to many other people around him, who brings peace at home and in his life. But a man who complains from morning till night about his pain, about his sad life, about his problems, who speaks only about himself is someone who bores and tires those who are around him.
Selfishness is of two kinds: a barbarian, primitive selfishness when you take the food of the other one to eat it yourself and a subtle selfishness when you consider yourself the navel of pain, of suffering, you don’t care about anyone and anything but your own pain. You complain all day long about your hard life and about the people who are bad and treat you badly and this is a demonic form of selfishness when you don’t help anyone, you don’t offer comfort to anyone, you don’t get out of yourself to welcome someone else.
The peace of God offers comfort and rest and it’s a great thing to be able to find peace near someone. Thus when you get married try to find someone near whom you can rest and to whom you can offer rest having PEACE as a starting point. You can’t control it in the other one but you can gain it in yourself for sure.
I’m sure that nobody runs away from a man of peace, from a man who is always merry, with a happy face, with a happy nature, I believe that the Savior was that way, very lively, with a merry and bright heart…
priest Visarion Alexa
