Preface to Part III

Christ is Risen! Truly, He is risen.

“It is not freedom when we say to people that everything is permitted. That is slavery.” – St. Paisios

I’ve been working on this piece for the better part of September, trying to figure out exactly what to say and apply some experience to my understanding and words, trying to convey some sense that I know what I am talking about when it comes to obedience.

To tell you the truth, I don’t have any experience with obedience. I don’t know what it means to be obedient. I don’t know what it looks like to be obedient. I grew up thinking “meekness” meant subservience, and it sort of is, but it’s more than that. And I thought that that was a bad thing growing up, but it isn’t. What was a bad thing growing up was doing whatever it was that popped into my head. That was being malleable; frankly, this type of submissiveness constitutes as regarding the self as secondary to the fleeting pleasures of this world that work in conjunction with the forces of darkness to keep us in darkness.

I don’t know what obedience means…

I always thought it was some authoritarian word used to scare kids into fitting in lest they become “cool.” A vague concept to keep people in line, especially kids. I grew up and didn’t want to conform, which was what obedience implies. I didn’t want to be like everybody else, whatever that means. When you’re a teenager not being like everyone else means about as much as the people you know, who are generally other people’s parents along with your own, and to break the monotonous cycle of “conformity” I started smoking cigarettes, drinking, and snorting whatever crushed up substance made into my line of sight on the way to gigs. And you know, it would be easy to say that this was—plainly—conforming to the world around me, but it would be missing the point that this behavior is boring.

Booze and short-haired girls, what kind of life are you living when you categorize people alongside substances?

Not the best? Sure. Boring? Definitely.

A side effect of following the passions, it would seem, is disregarding the value of the persons around us.

This perception is one of projection, because when we follow the passions, it is devaluing ourselves, regarding the self as secondary to the more important lusts of the flesh and the things of this world. It is not enough to hate ourselves or to hate what we do, but we also have to put that hate on others–the old man Toast is a viral infection.

Viruses are interesting in that they mimic the behavior of living things in order to replicate, having no ability to do so themselves lacking nuclei, organelles, or cytoplasm requiring hosts to “reproduce.” They steal the use of living cells in order to do this, they are dead. And we are, too, when we act against our own nature, act against the will of God, and follow the wants of the old man Toast.

The self, under the guidance of the old man, can only consume—it eats itself and the world around it.

It’s dead.

Recently, I was talking about prayer with the priest at my parish, asking him how to avoid vainglory at the altar and the pride that comes with saying our daily prayers, sometimes, as if to do so means that we are any better than those who do not missing the point that we are all nothing without Christ. What he said was interesting: he said this is why we have a community and a spiritual father, The Church and the Body of Christ which is that church. We cannot know ourselves unless someone tells us what that is, we need another to help guide us and tell us when we’re getting off track–be it falling into pride, vainglory, or another spiritual issue.

We cannot know ourselves in a vacuum. We cannot know ourselves set apart from the community.

This is how we fall into prelest, pride, and…

It is depression.

I only realized this later, but what they were talking about, how the Church understands sin. The passions making us less, the old man Toast getting whatever he wants right now, right now, right now! The virus is not alive!

Sin is like depression.

I was diagnosed with major depression (mercifully no longer medically called “Uber depression” at the time I was diagnosed) in my late teens and we can talk ad nauseum as to what causes this nebulous arrangement of neurons, but what matters is it leads to one being led by the passions down a field of inauthentic warmth, mimicking the warmth of prayer and the Sacraments of the Church, the community in Christ, and Christ Himself. We reach out for the easiest salvation we can get our hands on: sex, drugs, and vodka on the rocks. In this state we need people to tell us where we are, to help us get out of ourselves, because depression is turning inward—it is living in a vacuum of our creation.

And we aren’t us.

We aren’t who we are when we’re depressed (have a Sn*ckers). We may not be physically dead, but we aren’t real. We’re like an echo that gets shorter the more someone shouts, a light that dims with every passing day. This disease eats the body and in turn our thoughts eat the world around us, projecting what is within: Nothing.

It is no wonder the Fathers of the Church referred to the body of Christ as a hospital. The most difficult part of depression is listening to the world tell you what you see is not true. It’s so hard to see reality for what it is, because everything is so bleak. It feels like climbing Everest to conjure some purpose to putting on clothes, feeding yourself, or going outside.

Depression is like earplugs and a visor, obfuscating reality to continue living in this dead world that neither exists nor is alive, slowly contorting you to its image. It is demonic, full stop. Depression will take every one of your thoughts and twist it to conclude with a reason why you should not be alive. The secular world lost something when we decided that diseases weren’t caused by demons, because how do you describe something like that as an evolutionary whoopsie-daisy? *

I can only speak for myself from experience, but if someone were to have found me on my worst day with depression holding out a magic pill that would have alleviated every measure of my misery, that would have cured me completely and turned the sky into a different shade of blue from its sickening pale, somehow healed the carcinogenic smoke exhaling from my every pore as if a fighting dog was set ablaze inside the cells of my skin, cannibalizing itself in dreadful, vainglorious martyrdom.