Create in Me a Clean Heart O God: the Battle Against Pride

O Lord, humble my heart, that I may be ever pleasing in Thy sight.

My heart loved Thee, O Lord, and therefore I yearn for Thee, and seek Thee in tears.

O Lord, by Thy Holy Spirit, enlighten Thy people that all may know Thy love.

It was in this manner that Saint Silouan the Athonite prayed while he was on earth. 

As a young monk, Saint Silouan was given much grace from the Lord and was granted to see a vision of the living Christ Himself. However, he lost this grace because he fell into pride. For fifteen long years, he battled against this pride and the demons that were allowed to afflict him because of it, as the Lord Himself testified:

It was fifteen years after the Lord had appeared to him, and Silouan was engaged in one of these nocturnal struggles with devils which so tormented him. No matter how he tried, he could not pray with a pure mind. At last he rose from his stool, intending to bow down and worship, when he saw a gigantic devil standing in front of the ikon, waiting to be worshiped. Meanwhile, the cell filled with other evil spirits. Father Silouan sat down again, and with bowed head and aching heart he prayed.

“Lord, Thou seest that I desire to pray to Thee with a pure mind but the devils will not let me. Instruct me, what must I do to stop them hindering me?”

And in his soul he heard,

“The proud always suffer from devils.”

“Lord,” said Silouan, “Teach me what I must do that my soul may become humble.”

Once more, his heart heard God’s answer,

“Keep thy mind in hell, and despair not.” 

St. Silouan the Athonite p. 42

Saint Silouan’s disciple, Saint Sophrony, offers this commentary on Saint Silouan’s experience: 

Silouan came to know experimentally, from the experience of his own life, that the field of man’s spiritual battle with evil – cosmic evil – is his own heart. He saw in spirit that sin’s deepest root is pride, that scourge of humanity which has torn men away from God and plunged the world in miseries and sufferings innumerable; pride, the seed of death, which has muffled mankind in the darkness of despair. Henceforth, Silouan was to concentrate his whole effort on acquiring the humility of Christ which had been made known to him at the time of his first vision but which he had lost. 

Ibid. p. 45

St. Silouan is so important for us to know because he understood the mystery of humility: that God can only be known in the Holy Spirit, Who comes only to the humble of heart. St. Silouan knew from experience that there is no worse suffering than being separated from God, and nothing separates us from God so completely as does pride. 

Pride. It is no accident that “pride” is the slogan for the LGBT movement. Many others more qualified than I have spoken about how this movement is a work of the devil. What is not spoken about as much is the suffering and despair experienced by LGBT people themselves. This suffering is not due to oppression or bigotry, as they would say, but because they have separated themselves from God.

The sexual perversion of the LGBT movement is just a symptom of the larger issue: the passion of pride, which (together with envy) caused Satan to fall from heaven, is promoted and celebrated as a virtue in our society. 

What is pride? In Step 1 of his chapter on the subject in The Ladder of Divine Ascent, St. John Climacus states: 

Pride is denial of God, an invention of the devil, the despising of men, the mother of condemnation, the offspring of praise, a sign of sterility, flight from divine assistance, the precursor of madness, the cause of falls, a foothold for satanic possession, a source of anger, a door of hypocrisy, the support of demons, the guardian of sins, the patron of pitilessness, the rejection of compassion, a bitter inquisitor, an inhuman judge, an opponent of God, a root of blasphemy. 

p. 170

In Step 9 he writes, “God resisteth the proud. Who then can have mercy on them? Every proud-hearted man is unclean before God. Who then can cleanse such a person?” (p. 171) 

Thus, what is so dangerous about the LGBT movement is not the sin itself, for we are all sinners. As Christ says in Luke 5:32, He came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. The danger lies in the fact that a proud person believes that they have no sin, and is therefore incapable of repentance. 

Our spiritual father teaches that homosexuality is the ultimate expression of pride, in that a person becomes attracted to members of the same sex because they want to please a reflection of themselves. 

Pride is so tragic because not only does it separate a person from God, but it blinds us to the fact that we need God in the first place and can even lead us to deny His existence. 

I have heard statements made by LGBT people such as, “I just can’t believe in a God who doesn’t accept everyone the way they are. I deserve to be loved by God, too.” In other words, “I am perfect the way I am, and if God tells me to change, He is wrong. I’m going to deny His existence completely because the idea that I would have to change anything about myself is so absurd, I can’t even entertain it.” 

This is the disposition of everyone suffering from pride, not just LGBT people. And the problem is that God does indeed love everyone, but we don’t know what love is. We conflate love with comfort, pleasant feelings, and being nice. 

Our God is love (1 John 4:8); our God is a consuming fire (Hebrews 12:29); our God is light and in Him is no darkness at all (1 John 1:5). His love requires us all to repent and be purified because nothing impure can withstand the fire of His love. 

Monastics are also tempted with thoughts from the devil, but we strive to turn to Christ rather than accepting these thoughts and integrating them into our identity. 

I remember a certain fiction writing workshop in which I took part in graduate school. One of my fellow students had written a narrative from the perspective of a gay man who is haunted by fragments of his religious upbringing which remain alive in his subconscious. 

In one scene, if I remember correctly, this character is taking a shower in preparation for a sexual encounter. As he washes himself and looks forward to what he is about to do, verses of Psalm 50 ring through his head against his will: 

Thou shalt sprinkle me with hyssop and I shall be made clean. 

There is a graphic description of the character’s lustful anticipation, and then another verse: 

Thou shalt wash me and I shall be made whiter than snow.

More descriptions, interspersed with:

Thou shalt make me to hear joy and gladness; the bones that be humbled, they shall rejoice. Turn Thy face away from my sins, and blot out all mine iniquities. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from Thy presence, and take not Thy Holy Spirit from me. Restore unto me the joy of Thy salvation, and with Thy governing Spirit establish me. I shall teach transgressors Thy ways, and the ungodly shall turn back unto Thee.

The story was supposed to make the point that the shame the character was feeling was wrong and that Christianity is oppressive and unjust. 

I remember the professor and some of the students being uncomfortable and questioning the presence of the Psalm. There were comments such as, “I like the idea, but something about it isn’t working,” and, “Is there a way to communicate his sense of false shame without including the actual Bible verses?” 

Although the writer did not intend this, the juxtaposition of his sin with the words of Scripture revealed the truth of the sin. He himself could not quite explain why the Scripture had to be present in the narrative. 

There was so much pain, both in the story and in the person of the writer himself. Amid all the suffering and confusion, his spirit continued to pray; to cry out to His Creator for healing, cleansing, and forgiveness. Yet, he suppressed the cries of his spirit and continued in his state of sin, and that is pride. 

Pride makes us blame other people and external circumstances for our pain. We are constantly angry and irritable and will change the whole world before looking at ourselves. People will go so far as to undergo surgery and mutilate themselves rather than address what is going on in their hearts. 

Maybe if I go to the thrift store and buy a whole new wardrobe of clothes in a style I don’t even particularly like, I’ll feel different. 

My misery must be the fault of the person I am dating, so I will find someone else.

Maybe if I dye my hair red, spend an hour doing my makeup, post a selfie on Instagram, and get 100 likes, I won’t be in complete despair. 

Maybe if I yell at this person, get angry at this organization, or participate in this protest… 

This is how I was in the world. 

In the Church in general and monasticism in particular, all the distractions are stripped away and we can no longer escape from ourselves. 

Slowly, as I shift from pursuing sin to seeking Christ, I find that there are walls between Him and myself. I go through a cycle of repentance, confession, and Holy Communion; receive grace; and feel Him with me. Then inevitably, whether it be after a few hours, days, or weeks, the wall is there again. Life, and especially prayer, is unbearable. I know God is there but the moments of grace are like a fantasy, something from another lifetime or experienced by someone else. 

O merciful Lord, Thou seest my fall and my distress. Humbly I entreat Thy mercy. Pour upon my sinful self the grace of Thy Holy Spirit. Recollection of Thy grace draws my spirit to seek out Thy compassion anew. 

The wall between God and myself is pride. Every time I go another layer deep in my repentance, there is another wall of pride. 

Our spiritual father describes the spiritual life as a spiral. We fight a passion and might believe we have conquered it, only to deal with the same passion again after some time. It may feel that we are going in circles, but with each revolution around the spiral, we are facing the passion on a deeper level and coming closer to Christ. 

O Lord, grant me Thy spirit of humility that I lose not Thy grace again, and weep for it as Adam wept for paradise and for God. 

Repenting of pride is indescribably difficult and painful but I am so grateful that I have the chance to try. Other than the Church, I don’t know where it would be possible to even begin the process, since, as was stated above, our whole culture celebrates pride and seeks to infect children with it from infancy.

Many LGBT people are repenting and coming to the Church because of the prayers of St. Silouan and others who have prayed and are praying as he did. It is only possible through prayer – no amount of words will reach a person lost in the hell of pride if God does not open their heart.

We who are blessed to be in the ark of the Church must channel whatever horror we feel at witnessing pride parades, propaganda in schools, children claiming to be transgender, etc. into prayer – not just for those souls but for our own; for the uprooting of the deadly disease of pride which has infected each of us to varying degrees, for, as St. Sophrony and many of the Fathers say, “The field of man’s spiritual battle with evil – cosmic evil – is his own heart.” As we fight this evil within ourselves, that healing and repentance ripples out to the rest of the world.

O God of mercy, Thou knowest our infirmity. I beseech Thee, grant me a humble spirit, for in Thy mercy Thou dost enable the humble soul to live according to Thy will. Thou dost reveal Thy mysteries to her. Thou givest her to know Thee, and the infinity of Thy love for us. 

O God, enlighten us by Thy Holy Spirit, that we may all apprehend Thy love. 

St. Silouan, pray to God for us! 

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