Dear Friend,
I have touched briefly on the topic of spiritual growth before, but since I believe this topic is one of the most important in Christianity and not so often discussed, I see the need to devote a separate entry to it in my blog.
Perhaps, not all of you, having heard the words "growth of the soul", will be able to understand what is meant by it. "What growth? What soul?" Of course, before you even begin to think about the growth of the soul, you need to believe that every person has a soul, just as they have a body. The human soul is the greatest creation of the Lord, which is given the power to control its body, according to individual capabilities. The body helps to executive what the soul has conceived and to realize its actions. With our souls we love, endure, worry, suffer, get angry, sin, hate… "But what about our brain?" Undeniably, the brain signals our body to perform the desired physical actions. But from a Christian point of view, we can imagine the brain as a computer that performs programmed functions that God has placed in us. We eat, sleep, talk, walk, swim, solve arithmetic problems, etc. By the end of the day, our brain battery is depleted and we need sleep to charge it, after which we can again get up in the morning and continue to perform basic functions. But if you ask the computer "Why?" when it comes to feelings, it cannot answer you. For example, when a computer solves a complex equation, it clearly knows what the equation is, it knows how to solve it, and the source the equation was derived from, but it does not know why a person needed to solve it. The truth is that behind the question "Why" there lies a long-range of human emotions, which is not limited to the answer "Because I was asked to solve it in school." Yes, of course, if we look at all questions so primitively, such an answer may be sufficient, but if we go deeper, we will immediately think about why we were presented with this particular equation and not another, why it was invented in the first place, why we need to know how to solve it, and so on. These questions are directly related to our mental reflections, our emotions, and the perception of a particular situation. Our brain is the strongest computer that has not been fully researched by men to this day. Our brain is part of our flesh that will die one day, but the soul will continue to live and think forever. The computer does not know how to love, be angry, rejoice, thank, grieve, complain. In addition, the brain tends to think for a long time, to reflect. You can imagine a computer program or a website that takes a long time to load with a "loading" sign. Yet if we listen to our soul, if we have grown to a state where we can clearly hear its desires and when we are not knocked down by extraneous, sly thoughts, we do not need to wait for a response from the brain. At this stage of soul growth, the soul does not have the concept of "loading", it knows here and now what it wants and why; it can give a straight "yes" or "no" answer. If we describe the soul and body in the simplest terms, the soul is our personality, and the body is an instrument for expressing that personality.
It is also worth noting that our heart is often used as a direct synonym for the word "soul". This is not entirely true. I would describe our heart as the inner repository of the most beautiful nature that the Lord has put in us. This beauty is the missing piece of our soul that we need to find in order to purify the soul (our personality) and learn to love our neighbour.
In the Gospel of Matthew, the Savior Himself gives us the first and greatest commandment:
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” (Matt. 22:37-39).
Soul and heart are connected according to God's law of nature. If our soul is evil, our heart gets colder over time until it is frozen, and it becomes more and more difficult to melt it. The closer we come to the Lord and the more we pray, thereby nourishing our soul with spiritual meat, the easier it becomes for us to get the key to the lock in the heart that can open it and let in the spiritual beauty hidden within it. Unfortunately, not every person strives to become kind, and the meanest and most arrogant people don’t allow their inherent beauty (that is, the ability to love and do good deeds) to unfold throughout their lives.
God tells us about this through the prophet Ezekiel, noting that through prayer to the Lord and the willingness to change, He can turn our stony hearts into human hearts:
“I will give them an undivided heart and put a new spirit in them; I will remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh.” (Ez. 11:19).
Let's think with the soul
The power of the thoughts of a free soul is incomparable with the power of the thoughts of the brain. The free soul is eternal, the brain is not; the soul is certain, the brain is not; the soul is loving, the brain is not; the soul is calm, the brain is not; the soul is hungry for love and truth, the brain is hungry for material food.
I want to emphasize that the word free is the key in this context. What is a free soul? Free does not imply a temporary excess of money, traveling the world, owning expensive property by the sea, or the right to enter into a same-sex marriage. Firstly, from the point of view of a Christian, freedom is the ability to think freely and purely without bewilderment and confusion that comes from the ideas that the devil sends us. This is an opportunity to make the right decisions in any, even the most difficult situation, and a clear vision of what you want; an understanding of what is good and what is bad. Without the Lord, this freedom cannot be obtained, and if somebody tells you that they already possess this freedom, they will lie (unless they have become a Saint and hence have grown to the step of free-thinking). An ordinary person, on the other hand, will always be confused and mistaken in their thoughts and actions, either because of their own spiritual deficiency or because of false prompts from the devil.
Secondly, spiritual freedom also entails complete freedom from the misfortunes that fate throws at us. However, this interesting topic requires separate reflection, so I will return to it in my next posts. For now, I want to note that a free soul is the highest stage of spiritual growth. In order to think more freely and livelier, we need to think with the soul, but for that, we need to grow up spiritually. In my post 'Why Do We Need to Pray to the Lord?', I mentioned that spiritual growth is a gradual process that comes with prayer. The more we pray and wish to change, the wiser and more mature we become in our spiritual age. Yet the very first step is turning to the Lord with the willingness to start changing for the better. The time of Great Lent is a wonderful opportunity to ascend to this level and continue to grow. That mustard seed of spiritual beauty that the Lord has sown in our hearts, called the Kingdom of Heaven, will begin to grow until it turns into a beautiful tree. And the Kingdom of Heaven, which includes the freedom of the soul and life with the Lord, can already be found here on Earth.
“What shall we say the kingdom of God is like, or what parable shall we use to describe it? It is like a mustard seed, which is the smallest of all seeds on earth. Yet when planted, it grows and becomes the largest of all garden plants, with such big branches that the birds can perch in its shade.” Mk. 4:30-32.
May the Grace of the Lord and Love be with you all.
A follower
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