I found sim­i­lar thoughts in a col­lec­tion of Met. Jonah’s edi­to­r­ial pieces in Divine Ascent:

“…we stayed up all night talk­ing about the book Saint Silouan the Athonite, and through that dis­cov­ered how much of one mind and vision we are. It was the pas­sage about the young archi­man­drite, a mis­sion­ary to some­where, who was zeal­ously try­ing to tell the peo­ple that their non-Orthodox faith was in vain and they were going to hell. St. Silouan said, If you tear down their faith, they will not believe you. Rather, the way is to affirm what is right, and build on it.”

…

“[The Abbot of Valaam Monastery in Rus­sia] had to return to the main monastery, leav­ing us with Father Isaakiy [of Valaam’s Skete of the Fore­run­ner]. We began to talk about spir­i­tual war­fare; Father Isaakiy was known among the broth­ers for the inten­sity and tan­gi­bil­ity of his bat­tles. We expe­ri­enced first hand an exam­ple of that war­fare, which brought us to greater sobriety.

Then the ques­tion was posed about how we grow to spir­i­tual matu­rity. This began a won­der­ful con­ver­sa­tion that lasted for sev­eral hours. In this con­ver­sa­tion, I dis­cov­ered Father Isaakiy to be not only a man of pro­found spir­i­tual life, but an intel­lec­tual of the first class, well edu­cated and very well read. The focus of the dis­cus­sion was about the works of Archi­man­drite Sophrony (Sakharov), the founder of the Monastery of St. John the Bap­tist in Essex, Eng­land, and dis­ci­ple of Saint Silouan.

How do we grow from a psy­cho­log­i­cal reli­gious life to true spir­i­tu­al­ity, s dushevnosti do dux­ovnosti? How do we attain authen­tic per­son­hood? What is the mean­ing of noetic vision in this quest?

In the begin­ning of our spir­i­tual jour­ney, when we are spir­i­tu­ally imma­ture, our entire reli­gious out­look is ego-centered, emo­tional, and ratio­nal. The deeper level of aware­ness, the noetic con­scious­ness, has not yet been fully opened. We don’t know our true self, and we live in func­tion of rules and exter­nal obser­vance. Our prayer is words in the mind, and not yet descended to the heart. We love God from duty, and our neigh­bor from obe­di­ence. Yet, it all remains self-centered, ego-centered. We want to be “right,” and we zeal­ously defend our posi­tions, whether doc­tri­nal, rit­ual, or oth­er­wise. In short, we are our egos, defined by our pas­sions. We are far from being authen­tic per­sons, caught up in our iso­lated individualism.

As we grow, and gain more and more con­trol over our pas­sions, and our soul is puri­fied, grace illu­mines our spir­i­tual (noetic) con­scious­ness. We become more aware of God’s pres­ence, more aware of the other. We move away from our self-centeredness, to the restora­tion of the focus of our atten­tion on God. As this hap­pens, as Father Isaakiy put it, our own per­sonal “I” expands, and encom­passes oth­ers, so that we can­not con­ceive of our­selves in iso­la­tion from God and our broth­ers; they are who “I” am, and “I” includes them. It is the bond of authen­tic spir­i­tual love, pow­ered by grace. The more we grow in this noetic con­scious­ness, the more our love embraces all those around us. We pray from the heart for them, and for the whole world. We are puri­fied by grace, so that we can authen­ti­cally love in a purely unselfish way. This is the essence of what it means to be a Chris­t­ian: to authen­ti­cally love.

By truly lov­ing God and our neigh­bor – for our love for our neigh­bor is the cri­te­rion of our love of God (cf. 1 John) – we are puri­fied, illu­mined, dei­fied. We are healed from our fal­l­en­ness, from our ego or self-centeredness, from the tyranny of our ratio­nal and emo­tional con­scious­ness. The pas­sions come under our con­trol, sub­or­di­nated to the love of the Other. We become puri­fied of all that focuses us in our­self, and becomes a bar­rier to love.

“Our brother is our life” as St. Silouan said. This is what authen­tic monas­ti­cism is: the love of our neigh­bor. The more puri­fied our love is, the more we actu­al­ize our own per­son­hood, and the more our per­sonal “I” expands, to include the whole monas­tic broth­er­hood, the town, the region, the coun­try, the Church, the whole world. The saints are those whose “I” includes the whole Church, and their prayer is for all as their true self. Hav­ing attained to true per­son­hood, to authen­tic spir­i­tual matu­rity, the Chris­t­ian real­izes in his life what Father Sophrony calls “the hypo­sta­tic prin­ci­ple,” exis­tence like that of Christ, in Christ, for Christ, as Christ. Our deifi­ca­tion is real­ized in becom­ing per­fected in love, embrac­ing the whole cre­ation, as Christ did, and being grounded in His divine Per­son. It is a state of true syn­ergy with God: our love in coop­er­a­tion with His love, which is His energy, His grace, His life.” (empha­sis mine).

- From “A Vision of Con­tem­po­rary Monas­ti­cism: Valaam and Elder Sophrony” by Met­ro­pol­i­tan Jonah (Paffhausen), Divine Ascent, No. 9 (2003)

Wow. What an amaz­ing pas­sage that is (and MANY thanks for tak­ing the time to input the entire thing!)

‘…we are our egos, defined by our pas­sions…’ There’s some­thing to chew on.

Many years to Met. Jonah!

Ooooh, how true that is, Grace. Thank you.

Nice post. Did you see this NPR piece: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?stor…