Why Not Be Changed Into Fire?

by Sister Mary Elizabeth

Abba Lot came to Abba Joseph and said: Father, according as I am able, I keep my little rule, and my little fast, my prayer, meditation and contemplative silence; and, according as I am able, I strive to cleanse my heart of thoughts: now what more should I do? The elder rose up in reply and stretched out his hands to heaven, and his fingers became like ten lamps of fire. He said: Why not be changed into fire? ¹

Fifteen years ago I caught a vision of holiness of life imbued by the certainty that holiness would only come through embracing the joys and the discomforts of living a sacramental life of praise and prayer shared with other souls broken in much the same ways I am broken. My vision presumed that wholeness would come when the dross of self-will was burned away in community by choosing love over anger, annoyance and hurt feelings. Within this context I became that first holy Abba — keeping my rule, my little fasts, my prayer and meditation on God’s Word, waiting in silence on God’s infusing grace in contemplative prayer, seeking His healing in Eucharist and Confession and daily life. I grew and matured, but have I become holy? Have I become fire?

This summer I had the privilege of attending a Healing Conference at the Spiritual Life Center led by Francis and Judith MacNutt. In the early days of his ministry Francis MacNutt was charged by a vision of ordinary Christians becoming channels of the super-ordinary grace of God, ministering with power in much the same way that the first century Church mediated grace through gifts or manifestations of the Holy Spirit. Francis related how in his early years in the Charismatic movement, he had asked his mentors, “What is my gift?”, hoping their answer would be some sign of power showing God’s answer to his prayer. He was told by one, “Your gift is love,” by another, “Your gift is faith.” I can hear him now, irony and disbelief still humbly written on his face and in his voice after all these decades: “Well. Just what was I supposed to do with that?” He desired to see signs wielded through his hands, power given as grace by God to heal in the same way the Church had once healed. But all that his Charismatic friends could tell him was that God had given him faith and love.

Francis MacNutt, at eighty, is a very holy man. Like the second holy Abba, his hands are hands of fire, aflame with gifts of love and faith. In my experience that week, this fire was not unique to him. Everyone in his party seemed to possess this fire — the capacity to touch and convey healing power. Dr. MacNutt’s dream had become reality: ordinary Christians were channels of super-ordinary grace. Why not then be like that? Why not become fire?

The answer is, I hold back because of fear. At first I thought, perhaps I fear Holy Spirit power lest I become like the epithet one clergy friend flung at Charismatic zealots — a “holy flame thrower,” a loose cannon in the Church. Or, what if I did carry within me God’s healing touch — I’m not sure I would know what to do with it! What if I possessed power but used it badly? What if I hurt rather than healed?

My real fear is not this unselfish, though. Scripture says, “Our God is a consuming fire.” My reluctance to embrace the Holy Spirit lies in a fear of getting too close to God’s kind of power. I keep my little rule, I offer daily sacrifices in prayer and communal life, but I hold back just shy of coming too close to the consuming fire of the Spirit of the Living God. What if the bush of my life were to burn — truly burn? I seek holiness; yet it is true: I fear holiness. What if I asked God to heal me, make me more like Him, to transform my life at ever deeper levels — what if I asked this and I become someone new, someone different, someone I didn’t even know? What if I were healed? One of my mentors long ago told me, “Bibba, you don’t want to be healed, you just want the pain to go away.”

The Desert Fathers saw holiness as just this — apatheia — being without pain. Unlike me, though, they sought, not so much an avoidance of suffering as the rooting out of distortion at the deepest levels of the soul. The word used by St. Paul in phrases like “Do not be conformed to the world and its passions” or “the flesh and its passions” has its grounding in the Greek verb pascho from which we get nouns implying pain: “compassion,” “pathos,” “pathology.” The early Greek-speaking Church used “passion” to describe a movement within the soul away from the true self created good by God into a state of suffering.² Passions were places of pain clung to as haven or solace. Traditionally associated with disordered appetites — modern terms would include alcoholism and addiction, eating disorders, sexual perversion, gross materialism, abuse of power, depression — the passions were always understood as chosen, though perhaps the choice was locked deep in the psyche.

The West has lost this original meaning of passion. We often say we want to live our lives before God with passion, meaning with emotional vigor. The early church would have been puzzled by this, as if we had said we wanted to live our lives in God with deep, integral, spiritual pathology. The ancient church sought not to celebrate passion, but to be healed of passions.

Lord, heal me of spiritual passions.

What do I mean when I say I want to be healed of passions? When I first began praying this, I am not sure I even knew, but the answer to my petition came like fire. One example from my life: I was fifteen when my mother died after a lingering illness, and I swore then that I would call no other woman “Mother,” thinking that this brought too much complexity into relationships. God has a great sense of humor and much patience, and what I meant by that resolve has changed over the years under much circumstantial pressure. (How many “mothers” did He need to send into my life before I got the point?) Only in this last year have I let go of that inner vow, exposing the deeper pain it protected — the deeper passions of unresolved guilt and protest against trauma and loss.

I was certain when I was fifteen that, had I loved my mother — really loved her — she would not have died. If I had been more fully good in that great ideal of “good” that childhood comprehends in the statement “God is good,” then she would have lived. But I was not good like God is good: I quarreled with my mother in the way of teenagers, hid from her escalating sickness, and ultimately grew numb and sick with guilt. A month after her death I heard the Gospel of salvation — that Jesus died on the cross to bear the burden of my sin. I understood fully the need for this kind of sacrifice, and, in the seminal event of my life, I gave my life to Jesus as Lord, accepting His redeeming work of forgiveness and reconciliation with God.

Salvation means not only rescue but also healing. Inner healing involves elements of forgiveness and consent. As I have prayed that God would heal me of passions — of inner pain and distortion — He has shown me that in all these years of leaning on His redemption, forgiven through His blood shed at Calvary, I have secretly held back the right to condemn myself. I was reconciled to God, I accepted His forgiveness, but I never really forgave myself. And I never renounced the naive concept of good and love with which I denounced myself as a teenager. Much of who I am today was formed by this paradox of accepting God’s forgiving grace even as I secretly clung to my right to self-judgment. How many of my deepest habits of compulsion and inner numbness, manifested as obesity and occasional depression — at their core the ancient passions of gluttony and acedia — arise from this clinging to self-condemnation? Like nesting cups, habits of sin are imbedded in distortions within the heart, holding me back from total acceptance of God’s healing grace. It is not enough to simply identify this. As I acknowledge both the habits of sin and the false means of protecting my heart, I must also give them up, turning them over to Jesus. God rescued me when I said yes to His forgiveness at the age of fifteen. The Holy Spirit’s healing grace resumed the transformation of deep scar-covered wounds when, at almost 50, I said, “Yes, Lord. I accept Your forgiving love. And, yes, I forgive me.”

Why not give the Holy Spirit free rein to direct and rule my life? Why not become fire? Because fire burns, fire hurts, and long ago I vowed never to be hurt again. Yet choosing self-condemnation, unforgiveness, or even the kind of passion bound up in a vow never to feel pain again — building my life on these things rather than on being led and healed by the Holy Spirit — means choosing to live in a different, ultimately more destructive, place of suffering. The familiar pain I have built my life around may seem safe, but, if it is a lie, its end is destruction. Sometimes in order to choose life we must follow the Holy Spirit’s prompting to walk through old wounds, pray for healing, and then leave the pain behind, not only taking up and carrying crosses we would prefer to avoid, but also putting them down when Jesus, our yoke-mate and Healer, tells us that He has now taken on the bulk of this particular burden.

I have taken the risk this past year of opening my soul as much as I can to the Holy Spirit’s work — both for inner healing and for ministry. No, I don’t completely understand what that means, only that I have chosen to be open to it. The end has been a deepening self knowledge, but even more, a letting go, a giving to Jesus new Lordship over places in my heart I had not known existed.

With this risk taking has come the transformation of the work to which God has called me. The pursuit of monastic rule and sacrifice, of interior prayer, meditation and contemplative silence, of intercession and corporate worship — all the craft of being a Religious — is not set ablaze by the Spirit. Lectio divina has come alive with God’s words of love to me; plainchant has seemed at times as vibrant as the gift of tongues; silence and stillness burst with my awareness of Christ’s immediacy and presence — I could go on. I have also intercedced alongside others in the Healing Ministry, and through our hearts and hands have seen healings take place. This last — I confess it — this ability of God to work miracles through direct intercession, has been more unsettling to my complacency in a steady religious vocation than any confrontation I have felt in seeking inner healing. I have dedicated my life to prayer, and I had no idea prayer could be like this!

It is a fearsome and awe-filled thing to give your life into the hands of the Living God. When the bush of our life encounters Holy Spirit power, parts of it will burn, but the pain of that burning transforms the whole into a tree of great beauty and power. It is the promise of transformation that makes overcoming our fears worth the effort. This is paradox: that passions are overcome by passion. Indeed our passions have already been healed by the Passion of Christ at Calvary. Jesus wept and sweated blood when asked to embrace suffering for the sake of wholeness, but He said to His Father, “Not My will, but Yours be done.” Through His obedience all humankind, indeed all Creation, is brought within the reach of holiness.

What I want is to be happy. Holiness is nothing less than radical happiness reigning at the deepest levels of our lives. Pain protected at these deepest levels is not radical happiness. The Abbas and Ammas of the Desert saw apatheia — “passionlessness” — as the end of their struggle to reach the radical happiness of complete healing in Christ. Saints like the elder Abba in our story are nothing less than men and women who have risked permitting the Holy Spirit’s fire to burn the dross of interior distortion rising from protected places of inner pain — burning until only the image and likeness of God which they were created to reflect remains.

As I struggle with these mysteries, my heart keeps returning to Dr. MacNutt’s bemused acceptance that his charismatic gifts of power were the simple spiritual fruits of faith and love. With Holy Spirit-driven, passionate love for God, the Christian community and the larger hurting world and with faith in Christ’s power to transform, Francis MacNutt became as fire. Faith and love also carried the second holy Abba beyond the constraints of his little rule, his little fast, his prayers, his silence — into prayer that lit his hands like lamps. Only faith and love can give us the courage to submit our deepest passions to the Holy Spirit, breaking down our protected strongholds of fear and pain, drawing us to accept and pass on the salvific healing which is our promise in Christ Jesus. From this healing will come new ministry — true works of mercy exercised as light and power in the world around us.

Lord, may we be changed into fire! Come Holy Spirit. Come now, and come with more power!

Notes:

1 The Wisdom of the Desert: Sayings from the Desert Fathers of the Fourth Century, Thomas Merton, New Directions Books, Norfolk, CT, 1960, p. 50.

2 For the link between the passions and suffering, see Orthodox Psychotherapy (The Science of the Fathers), Hierotheos, Bishop of Nafpaktos, Birth of the Theotokos Monastery, Levadia, Greece, 1994.