November 8, 1998
Starting
Over: What to Do After Sinning
Today’s thought concerns repentance and relinquishing
sin. All of us, from time to time, fall into sin and seemingly lose all the progress we
have made in living the spiritual life. The Desert Fathers give us many examples in their
teachings, though, of how a person can regain their spiritual progress after repentance:
BEGIN: A certain brother fell into temptation, and through tribulation relinquished the
garb of monkhood; and he wished to begin to renew his ascetic life, but he saw the great
difficulty of the matter, and he drew back, and said, "When shall I ever find myself
in the same condition as I was formerly?" And through fear he did not begin his work,
and he went and made the matter known to an old man, and the old man said, "The
matter is thus: There was a certain man who possessed an estate, and he held it to be of
no account and did not cultivate it, and it became full of tangled undergrowth and thorns.
Now one day he remembered it, and he sent his son, and said unto him, ‘Go, clean the
estate.’ And when he had gone and seen the abundance of the undergrowth he was
afraid, and said to himself, ‘When shall I be able to clean away all this
undergrowth?’ And he threw himself upon a bed, and lay down, and went to sleep, and
thus he did every day. The his father went forth and found that he was asleep, and that he
had done nothing; and he said unto him, ‘How is it, my son, that no work whatsoever
hath been done by thee?’ And he said to his father, ‘When I came to work and saw
the abundance of the undergrowth, I was afraid and said, "When shall I be able to
clean all this away?"’ And his father said unto him, ‘My son, work
according to the measure of thy sleep each day, and it shall be sufficient for thee’;
and when he heard this the young man plucked up courage, and did thus, and in a short time
he cleansed the estate. Thus also thou shalt not be afraid but begin the work of thy
rules, and God, by His Grace, will establish thee among those in the first rank." Now
when the brother had done thus he was helped. END
from E. A. Wallis Budge, "The Paradise of the Holy Fathers," (Seattle,
Washington: St. Nectarios Press, 1984), p. 137
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