Sit with Yourself and Hold Yourself Accountable

If you want to repent, or to be faithful in your relationship with God, then you must, from time to time, sit with yourself. Why?

Either you do not feel the danger you are in. You do not know your exact condition, nor do you realize your sins, nor their depth and ugliness… because the whirlpool of busyness and concerns constantly pulls you to it, and you are completely immersed in it… You have no time to think about yourself and your spiritual life. Perhaps this subject does not even cross your mind! Therefore, you need to sit with yourself, examine it, and observe it, so that you may understand the level you are at spiritually, or how far you are from it.

Or perhaps you know your sins, or at least the prominent ones. But you have no time or opportunity to think about how to abandon those thoughts and how to treat them. And before your mind turns to treating a certain sin, you have fallen into another one or something worse… Sins surround you from every direction, and there is no chance to get rid of them. Therefore, you also need to sit with yourself to treat what needs treatment in it.

Just as a sick person needs X-rays and laboratory tests to know exactly what is happening inside him and the type and danger of his diseases, he also needs to know the treatment and to practice it in order to be healed, and to follow this treatment with a wise doctor experienced in illnesses and their remedies… This cannot happen for the patient unless he pulls himself away from his concerns and goes for an examination… Such is the session with oneself.

This spiritual session with the self aims at its purification, by discovering one’s sins and weaknesses, blaming oneself for them, then also knowing the reasons for one’s falls—whether they are external pressures upon him, or internal reasons in which he himself seeks sin, or certain temperaments, habits, or influences from others… And he tries in all of this to avoid what distances him from a life of repentance and purity, and resolves firmly in his heart to abandon his sins with full willingness and internal conviction.

And the spiritual person does not limit his session with himself to examining the past, regretting it, and reproaching himself for his sins… Rather, he must also think of his spiritual future, and set a wise plan based on his condition and experiences… And he must decide in his depths to walk in that path with great accuracy, seriousness, and commitment… And in all of this, he asks God for grace and strength so that he may walk well from then on.

And I advise on this occasion that the person who intends to live a righteous life in the future will not benefit from seizing this feeling to offer God vows and promises that he will do such and such! As though he has confidence or pride in his personal ability, to the point that some say in such a session: “Do to me, O Lord, whatever calamities You wish if I return to this sin again!”… How many have promised God promises and did not fulfill them, then returned and said in sorrow:
How many times I gave God a broken promise
Would that out of fear of my weakness I had not promised at all

Rather, the matter should be no more than holy desires in which you present your will and determination to God, that He may give you strength to carry them out, because without His help you can do nothing. And thus your session with yourself merges into a session of prayer in which you ask for strength.

There is no doubt that the devil resists with all his might your sitting with yourself, because he fears that you may escape his control through it. Either he fears that in your session with yourself you may realize the badness of your spiritual condition and seriously think of repentance, thus escaping from his hand… Or he fears that in your session with yourself you may ask help from God and receive from Him a spiritual power the devil cannot resist… The devil has tried how many sat with themselves and repented… For example, Saint Augustine, who could not repent while in the whirlpool of busyness, of friends, of philosophy and thought… But when he sat with himself in that deep spiritual session, he was able to reach faith and repentance, and to return to God and escape forever from the grasp of the devil. It was not an ordinary session, but a decisive one.

Therefore, the devil resists a person’s sitting with himself in two ways: either by preventing the person from sitting with himself, by presenting him with dozens of tasks and hundreds of thoughts, and reminding him of matters that seem to him extremely important and must be attended to. All this so that he returns again to his whirlpool. For example, if you seize the opportunity of the beginning of a new year in your life to sit with yourself, the devil may work to occupy this occasion with parties and social obligations so that you become busy with them and do not find time to think of yourself.

**But if you insist on sitting with yourself and examining your behavior and life, and find an opportunity for that, and stay away from busyness even for a while, then the devil’s plan will be to sit with you during your sitting with yourself. He never despairs. And in his participation in your spiritual session, he presents to you thoughts and feelings from himself to prevent you from reproaching yourself for its sins… He lightens your feelings of remorse; and if you remember any sin, instead of your heart being crushed because of it and reproaching yourself, the devil offers you excuses and justifications for it, trying to pamper the self and flatter it, or lessen its responsibility by blaming, for example, the external environment or others… All this does not benefit you spiritually, nor does it lead you to repentance. Blaming others does not justify you, even if the other is truly blameworthy. So you must focus on what you yourself did, because you are accountable for it. And you do not receive forgiveness through justifications, but through repentance and condemning the self.
Perhaps among the devil’s tricks also is to reduce for you the seriousness of your sins and not make them appear in their true ugliness, as if they were something simple not worthy of sorrow or regret. And how easy it is for him to rename sins with names other than their own! Or to philosophize sin and attempt to hide it behind good intentions and purity of motive! In all this he leads you to carelessness and lack of concern and does not help you toward repentance; he may even push you to continue in what you are in. But you, when you sit with yourself, hold it accountable with firmness, examine it with precision, and constantly make sure of its purity.

1. An article by His Holiness Pope Shenouda III published in Al-Ahram Newspaper on 21-2-2010.

For better translation support, please contact the center.