Join Mother Silouana (Vlad) as she delves into the profound journey of finding true joy amidst life’s challenges. In this enlightening discourse, Mother Silouana explores the root causes of sadness and discontentment in today’s world, Join Mother Silouana (Vlad) as she delves into the profound journey of finding true joy amidst life’s challenges. In this enlightening discourse, Mother Silouana explores the root causes of sadness and discontentment in today’s world, offering spiritual insights on redirecting our desires and seeking fulfillment in God. Through poignant anecdotes and thought-provoking reflections, she guides us to embrace moments of perceived absence from God as opportunities for growth and self-discovery. Discover the transformative power of surrendering to God’s will and allowing Him to shape us into our true selves. Experience the joy that transcends circumstances and find solace in the loving embrace of divine grace. Join us on this spiritual journey towards inner peace and fulfillment.
Video source: ASCOR Cluj, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, May 10th, 2019
Watch the full lecture here: https://youtu.be/YbCMX1dPZfk (in Romanian)
I’ve met young people, I’ve heard talk about young people who have everything, a car I can’t even get into, a good job, good salary, an apartment, their parents helped them, and still they’re sad… they don’t enjoy anything and they don’t know what to do. Why? Because other desires always appear, a happiness that is like a chimera, we always look for it elsewhere and we don’t know how to find it.
We are sad when our desires are misdirected, when our minds are darkened and captured by false good. The moment I feel sad, then let me cry to God: ‘Lord, take me out of here’. Let’s think, what are you doing if you fell into, oh… you don’t know what that is; in the country side, there were wooden outdoor toilets and sometimes the floor was rotted and it happened that someone would fell into it. It wasn’t very deep, but it wasn’t pleasant anyway. Well, what was supposed that person to do there? Was he saying: ‘Help, please give me something to eat too, give me a cigarette’? No! He was trying to get out of there. Well, today sometimes people stay there. So they fall into the mess, fall into the mud and sit there and watch TV where they are told:
“In case you fell there, take advantage of the fact that it’s warm, it’s soft, that we have deodorants, we have body sprays.” And there people rebel against God who is “so unjust”. Well, I don’t know what God did… Is He guilty for building a toilet in the yard?”. Now we have it inside the apartment buildings and you flush it and you don’t fit there anymore, but you fall into other things, symbolic things. As we enter a state like this we must say to Him: ‘I am not staying here, Lord, save me! Lord, Lord have mercy on me!’
The Savior says: “A little while, and you will not see Me; and again a little while, and you will see Me…but your sorrow will be turned into joy” [John 16:16-20]
In order to turn sadness into joy, we need to live that little interval of time of God’s absence, when we don’t feel His presence. Let’s say I was injured, I failed my exams, I lost something, my soul became sad: “Lord, have mercy on me! Lord, save me!”… But He is silent… This is that little time frame when we do not see Him, we do not feel Him, but without living with Him this little time, we will not see Him again and we will not get to know what joy is. So this is the secret of turning sadness into joy, living this faith, this state of not feeling the grace. He is there, He works deep within us, but we are not aware of Him. Why does God do this? For me to become a god. Otherwise I would be a flea. What is a flea? A parasite that feeds on… God gives us His Blood, His Body, but not as for fleas… But we eat it like that and become bedbugs or ticks… we are not ticks, we are persons, people, and it is given to us as food, for us to become ourselves. He wants me to become myself. And when we love each other, you marry ‘Basil’ so that Basil can be more and more Basil, you don’t make him a kind of ‘second-hand’ Basil… he is God’s project and you serve him to become what God wants, and you serve her to become what God wants, not according to your image and likeness… So this is what God wants from us. This little experience in which God withdraws the feeling of grace from me is the laboratory, the place where I transform my negative feelings, pains, into sources of joy, and I give myself into God’s hands.