The Sin of Discontentment

Andrew posted a comment on "Work and Priesthood" that was particularly pointed:
"Out of curiosity, do all the positive responses to your blog also swell your ego? Not to be an arse or anything but it seems disingenuous to post a confession that you know will result in praise. To me, this "confession" has the aura of bragging about it." 

I don't know if Andrew is new to the blog (coming up on six years and over 600 posts old) but one of the things that I think is clear to my long time readers is that I'm no stranger to my own ego and the manifold and subtle ways pride and vainglory can be passed off as humility and piety. If it can be done, I've done it (he proudly claimed...). But his question is a legitimate one that gets to the heart of the human condition: rarely is something pure or a motive is without a tinge of hypocrisy or self-serving. But we live in the condition unaware that our existence is being rotted away at its core by such a tiny cancer.

One of the things that was integral to my struggle with ordination was the realization that I've spent most of my life being discontent with one thing or another regarding my life's circumstances. One of the things that kept me from Orthodoxy was the prospect of being a "talented layman" in the context of a clerical structure where a robe (or collar) gave instant "cred" to some (in my estimation) pretty sketchy people. At that time my perception was that, as a layman with little prospect for ordination, I would have to give up teaching and writing and sit in the back pew and shut up for the rest of my life.  I knew I had a gift for teaching, but I knew (at least my perception was) that if you didn't have a robe no one would regard you as a "real" teacher. I converted anyway with a mixed bag of humility and false expectations (like most of us do I've come to realize).  I was partly ready to sit quietly, but ordination was still a remote possibility though not a promise. In the back of my mind I would be the one that would get the "economia", the bending of the canons because... well, because I was special, of course. Over the years I got plenty of recommendations, attempts, Synodical votes, and when those didn't pan out I got lots of advice from clergy, laity and monastics about where to go and who to schmooze to get ordained. I've been enough of an "screw authority anarchist" throughout my life that I refused to play the "schmooze or lose game" even with the Church, so I never followed up on any of the advice. But that's not the point.

In the first year of my Orthodox life I began my stint as an "Orthodox radio show personality". The short story is, I and my friend Allan were invited as "new convert guests" on a local live Orthodox radio program.  Fr. Andrew (Barakos) essentially turned it over to us the next week. For the next ten years I did a weekly radio show that eventually became "Our Life in Christ" with Bill Gould and was for a season the most popular Orthodox internet radio broadcast on earth via Ancient Faith Radio. Bill and I ran out of things to say about a year and a half ago, and I started the solo podcast "Steve the Builder".  In the meantime I blogged, I started Mission parishes and I built monasteries. Yeah, I know this looks a lot like more vainglorious self promotion in the guise of confessional literature. But its just a rehash of stuff already on the blog.

But the point is I came into the Church with an ego and an agenda based on my ego. Ego and vainglory are what Mp. Jonah calls "the false self". Ego constructs a facade, a mask, a projection, it creates an idol within yourself, a false god of "you" that you bow down to and serve. Part of the problem is that the false self is partly constructed of the real self's attributes.  One's true talents and even God given gifts are aspects of the idol, just as most idols are partly human, partly God and partly something other than human or God.

And therein lies the ultimate sin of ego: it is discontent. The ego can know no contentment in the life in the fullness of the one true God.  I look back on all the stuff I've done and Andrew's question would be the obvious one:  Doesn't your ego get inflated when you get praise for doing all that stuff?  Well, no. My ego was already inflated.  I was already serving my self constructed idol "Fr. Wannabesoon". While I know I was legitimately using my talents for good purposes and objectively I did a lot of good things for a lot of people, I was not content.  I was not what I desired to be. I could only pay lip service to being grateful and humbled by what had been given to me to do... as a layman.  I was a layman, and thus could not "find contentment in whatever state I was in" (Phil. 4:11). Everything was subservient to the desire for the priesthood.  I could not enjoy the "present moment" in God. I lived in the past, my sins (ahem, "impediments"), the future, my illusions, my delusions, my dreams, my image, my orchestrations and manipulations, anywhere else but the present moment in God.  And so, I was discontent. Like the Israelites in the wilderness with manna to spare, I wanted the Egypt of my past, I wanted more than what I found in the morning, I wanted what was not given... yet, or perhaps ever.

What I didn't realize was I had imported my "I Corinthians 10 self" into the Orthodox Church.  As a Protestant, I was an egotistical self-worshipper, an idolater. Not far behind the narcissism of self-idolatry is immorality. I tried the Lord, I grumbled because I was only given bland manna, not the meat I desired. I thought I was standing and I fell.  When I entered the Orthodox Church, I renounced my former delusions, but I was so deluded I didn't know reality from illusion. Or more precisely, I knew it (perhaps not its true depths), but was not willing to crucify it. My idol was still my self-perception.  I was still ruled by my passions even though I could fast and pray in public quite admirably.  I continued to test God, to make deals, to look for signs, to throw out the fleece and check it in the morning.  I was in the wilderness between the Egypt of the surety of ordination in a former Church and the hope of a Promised Land. My grumbling was against His mercies and provisions and providences in my wilderness.  Rather than seeing the radio programs and building and teaching opportunities as true blessings (and yes, I truly had a sense of gratitude for them all... I'm not totally depraved, and did them with a mixed bag of ego, zeal and humility, and yes Andrew, I delighted in the praises), I still regarded them as scraps from the Master's table... I was being thrown a bone by God, given a consolation prize for finishing last in the "priest race".

So, I was not content. In the final analysis, I was ungrateful.  And this was the same sin that led me to my former downfall.  And as St. Paul says in the Corinthian verses regarding idolatrous, ungrateful, immoral Israel, "With most of them God was not well pleased..."  This is probably why I am a blogger, a cartoonist, and a podcaster and not a priest.  But, just as God continued to feed Israel, and even gave them the quail they grumbled for "until it came out their noses"... God continues to feed me and even give me some of the things I grumbled for before I came to the Church and since, because He is merciful to the idolater, the immoral, the grumbler, the proud.

So I've learned the hard way, even though the Scriptures told me clearly, discontentment is a flashing red light, a warning sign that something deep within the soul is in desperate need of fixing.  There is a fine line between having an aspiration and being discontented with the present moment in God, even if we think it is a wilderness. If we are not content where we are, as the Fathers say, "Look to yourself" rather than at your circumstances. It is when we can delight in the ordinariness of life, of mysterious manna given only day by day, and follow God closely only as far as He moves and no further is when we find our true self and the Promised Land He is leading us to.  In the end, this is the will of God for your life.