Spiritual Watchfulness
In this section we will continue with you publishing the Friday lectures at the Cathedral which are delivered by His Holiness Pope Shenouda, and we will publish them as they are, as much as we can, so that the reader may feel as if he is hearing the lecture himself, in the same manner. And today we will begin with a lecture about:
Spiritual Watchfulness¹
The person who lives in sin, far from God, is a person asleep, a person anesthetized who does not feel what he is in. He needs to wake up, and therefore our teacher the Apostle Paul says, “Now it is high time to awake…” Enough of the time we spent in sleep… And thus the Church places for us the Midnight Praise, calling to us in it saying, “Arise, O you children of the light, let us praise the Lord of hosts, for He has granted us the salvation of our souls.” And the psalmist says in the Psalm, “Awake, my glory; awake, lute and harp.” Arise. Arise, O sleeper. And the Apostle Paul also used this expression in his epistle to the Ephesians saying: “Awake, you who sleep, arise from the dead, and Christ will give you light.”
It is a call to wakefulness. This sinful person was a sleeping person, needing to wake up, and to become alert to himself, to recover, to recover from his slumber. The sinful person lives as though he were asleep, not feeling himself, “his peace has been stolen,” not knowing what he is in; his spiritual sense is disabled. A person who has forgotten himself, and forgotten his relationship with God. Perhaps he thinks he is in full wakefulness, filling the world with activity and movement, while the angels cry out, “This person is asleep, he does not know where his spirit is nor what his destiny is,” and the angels try to awaken him…
When the devil wants to make a person fall into sin, he first numbs his conscience so that he does not feel, nor pay attention, nor know what he is doing… Do you know what this sinful person resembles? Like a ball thrown by someone from the top of a mountain at a certain angle, and the ball keeps rolling and rolling from top to bottom, not feeling, not having control of itself to say, “Where am I? And where am I heading?”… And a roll keeps pushing it to another roll, as it descends without thought, without awareness, without feeling… not knowing where it is going… All it senses is that it is rolling, and perhaps it does not sense even this also. Until a stone strikes it on the way and stops it, saying to it, “Stop. Enough rolling. Where are you going? And to what end…” Thus is the sinner. This sinner needs to wake up. And if he cannot, someone else must awaken him. Listen to what the Psalm says… “I lay down and slept; I awoke, for the Lord is with me.”… I lay down. I did not know what I was in… then I awoke… Blessed is the person whose sleep does not last long. As the Psalm says, “I awake early”…
What then are the causes of this sleep or slumber? And how does a person awake from sleep? These causes are many, among them we mention:
- Preoccupations: The sinful person is a busy person, not free for God, not having time to think about himself or his eternity, nor time to spend with God or to think during it about changing his state. The devil, who is wise in evil, if he wants to make a person fall into sin must first make him busy, not giving him a chance to sit with himself so that he does not think of anything spiritual, and so that he does not listen to the voice of God within him… Therefore the devil says: I must make this person constantly busy… It does not matter that the busyness be in sin; rather, any busyness regardless of its kind. A student, for example: he keeps him busy with studying, with knowledge until he graduates, then keeps him busy with a job, with higher studies, with a wife, with family matters, with problems, with activities, with sports, with anything… What matters is that he does not leave him time to think about himself or about God. Our world in this technological age, the mechanical age, is a busy world, a world that turns like a machine, like an engine, turning at an amazing speed… Every person runs, and is busy, as if in a whirlpool. A world that has lost calm and stillness and lived in constant preoccupations… Even if a person takes a holiday from his work and sits in his home, the enemy does not leave him calm in his home but sends him a preoccupation… a visit where he becomes busy with endless and unprofitable conversations… And if there is no visit, he becomes busy with conversation with family members… or sits with the radio or the television, busy with sight or sound or both… What matters is that he does not sit with himself nor sit with God, lest he awake… and think about his life. And if the person insists on escaping his busyness and sitting with himself, the devil says to him: “If you insist on this, no problem, but on condition that I sit with you, think with you, and offer you the proper advice.” Thus he disturbs him even in his solitude and retreat, muddles his thoughts, and lets them wander in various fields far from concentration. And thus the person enters another busyness which is “wandering of thought and its preoccupation”… Strange that people remain so busy—not only throughout life. But truly, even if death came to them, it would find them also busy… And when Christ comes in His second coming to take us to eternity— is it not possible also that He finds the world busy?! A busy world—when will it find time to free itself from this busyness and give even a portion of its time to God? When? When will it cut off a portion of its time to spend it with God? When will it obtain a period of calm or stillness, a period spent in meditation for its psychological and spiritual rest? A period during which the tongue rests from speaking, the feet rest from walking and running, and the hands rest from work…! God says to us that He wants to give us rest, but we do not want to give ourselves rest, because we are always busy. So what shall He do for us? He will give us a day of rest, one day each week in which you rest and be quiet for yourselves. And on this day you sit with Me… Like a fiancé saying to his fiancée: I will free myself one day a week which we spend together, go out together, walk together, talk together. Then this fiancé comes and finds his fiancée always busy, not paying attention to him— she has sweeping, wiping, washing, and arranging; she says to him, “Not now; I am busy with work in the house; I find no time for you.” We ask people about their relationship with God and they say they are busy. If they are truly busy all week, what about the holiday, the Lord’s Day… It is not theirs; it is dedicated to God. If they become busy in it, then God has no importance in their hearts… We do not find time for God because we are busy; the ball is still rolling down the mountain and has not found a stone to stop it to say to it: Where are you? Martha was busy. And she did not feel at all that she ought to leave her busyness and sit with the Lord. Rather, more than this, she kept blaming Mary who sat quietly at the feet of Christ…! Why does she sit in quietness? Why does she not become busy like me and with me? What is the benefit of her sitting with God… like those who blame monks and want to bring them down with them into their disturbances and preoccupations outside the quiet. We must, my brothers, organize our time and give the Lord His share in it, and we must not give up the Lord’s portion for any other preoccupation, whatever the reasons… Reduce your preoccupations. And if you consider the utmost importance of your sitting with God, and the necessity of this for your life and your eternity, then surely you will find time… surely you will arrange your time. You are not in the same busyness as David the prophet and king. He was a king, leader of the army, judge of all the people, and father and husband of a large family… And with all these tasks he found time for God— long, rich time for the lute and harp, and for praising and chanting. The amazing thing is that even among those consecrated to God, devoted to Him, there is a large number who do not find time for God to sit with Him amid the burdens of service… We say to him: Where are your prayers, your Psalms, your meditations, your quietness? He says to you: “I do not find time… the service, the visitation, preparing lessons, the meetings, the sittings with those served… all that left me no time…!!” Truly the writer who said: “You spent your life serving the house of the Lord, so when will you serve the Lord of the house?!”
¹Article by His Holiness Pope Shenouda III – Al-Keraza Magazine, Fifth Year – Issue One, 05–10–1974
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