"Feelings"

“Feelings” is much more than the title of a really bad song from the 80’s (“Fee-lings…whoa, whoa, whoa…feee-lings”); they also strongly influence the way that most of us live our lives. Feelings in and of themselves are fine, though like the rest of our humanity are fallen, and thus serve as unreliable guides in life. When undiscerning folks depend strictly upon how they feel to determine such things as truth, love, commitment, even spirituality, then we begin to have real problems.

Let us take love as an example. Although there are often feelings associated with human love, love itself is not fundamentally an emotion. Love is action. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son…” Thank heavens that God’s love is not measured by warm and fuzzy feelings toward us, but by genuine compassion and self-sacrifice for our sakes, leading to our redemption and glorification. In a marriage, feelings come and go, and many marriages end tragically because one partner or the other decides that they no longer feel in love. In such a case, feelings become more important than the action of love and commitment. Those who succeed in marriage do so by consistently putting the right actions and commitment ahead of changing feelings. Over time, such couples are often rewarded with a depth of feeling far greater and more enduring than any they knew in their youth.

For Orthodox Christians seeking communion with God, there is much to learn from this.

A very large segment of contemporary Christendom routinely mistakes feelings for “spirituality”. The services that many Christians attend deliberately include lively music and animated preaching designed to produce an emotional high for the audience as an alleged “sign” of the presence of the Holy Spirit. Folks leave the service in a temporarily elevated emotional state and claim that they “feel” the Spirit within them. If any of these people practice a “quiet time” at home, the success of that is often measured by the same emotional standard. A person might tell his fellow believers at work that he had “a really good time with the Lord” that morning, because during his prayers or scripture readings he felt himself emotionally stirred up.

The problem of course is that emotions really have nothing at all to do with spirituality. A believer can utilize all manner of gimmicks to keep himself emotionally charged up, and at the very same time remain utterly oblivious to the many serious sins in his life that keep him from true communion with God.

Conversely, the Eastern Orthodox experience caters very little to feelings, but unrelentingly addresses our need for repentance and restoration to God. This is of course what Christianity should address. But in a society in which people are absolutely addicted to their feelings, this fact is often overlooked and Christian spirituality is reduced to a mere emotional state.

Orthodoxy is really good at what it does; namely, shedding the light of God’s truth upon our darkened souls and revealing the many sins that lurk therein. Emotionally speaking, this can be very stressful and often produces a reaction quite the opposite of “feel-good” Christianity. But Orthodoxy also provides us with the proven spiritual therapies to expunge these sins and heal our souls, and thus it is necessary that our sins not remain hidden and unknown to us, even if their uncovering should cause us a certain measure of distress.

Sometimes however, Orthodox Christians forget this important fact and get caught in the web of their feelings when their sins begin to be revealed. As a priest, the number one confession that I hear from people is that they allow themselves to lose heart because they feel so unloving toward God, so unspiritual, so sinful. My dear brothers and sisters, we are unloving, unspiritual, and sinful; just how else are we supposed to feel about this? In this rare instance our feelings are actually revealing what is true about us, thanks to the divine light which guides them.

The issue for us comes down to whether we will allow this emotional experience to bring us closer to God or to drive us further away from Him.

If we are completely given over to feeling good about ourselves, we will tend to flee from everything that reveals the painful truth about us. Thus we will participate nominally in the life of the Church; we will not pray, not fast, not be watchful over ourselves, not come to confession, because all these things make us feel bad—at least at first. In short, we will hold God and His Church at arms length and will regard the Orthodox pursuit as “too depressing”. By such action, we remain in our sins and fail to make the progress in our life that we otherwise could.

I’ve even heard the occasional convert lament their conversion to Orthodoxy, claiming that they “used to really love the Lord” and now all they seem to experience is compunction and tears. What they don’t realize is that such things are a wonderful gift from God meant to lead them to repentance, renewal, and ultimately, to joy. “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted”. With the proper spiritual guidance, such experiences can help us move beyond the superficial “honeymoon” stage with God into the depths of a true and enduring love of the Lord.

Orthodox believers who come to understand this, enter into that wonderful life of “bright sorrow”. On the one hand, we do gain the sorrow that comes from finally seeing a few of our own sins so clearly, and from recognizing our own willful participation in the dissolution of our souls. We come to lament that we have truthfully loved the darkness more than the light, and our sins more than God. But on the other hand, we also gain a brightness in our lives from knowing that these things were never hidden from God, only from us, and that God has always loved us, and loves us still.

It is necessary that we see our sins, at least to the degree that God will allow, in order to begin to enter into a mature relationship with Him based upon repentance. If you were to interview any older married couple, you would find that they possess both wonderful and painful memories of their life together. You would discover that they faced times of failure and sorrow, perhaps even betrayal—and times of growth and forgiveness, of restoration and deepening communion. Through it all they remained committed to the action of love, and were not led astray for long by emotion. Any relationship based primarily on “feelings, nothing more than feelings” will always remain shallow or will fail in time.

Our Christian life must be based on the action of love, which will one day lead even to the healing of our fallen feelings which now only seem to get in our way. We must learn to accept the bitter with the sweet in our Orthodox Christian life, and to always follow genuine love as our guide through the turbulence of our present emotions.

Do this, and you will succeed with God’s help.