Why Feeling Spiritually Mature Means You Have Grown Lazy

On the feast of St. Sisoes the Great, we remember one of the most beloved figures in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, a monk who dwelt in the desert for sixty years in the very place where Abba Anthony the Great once lived. One of the most famous images you will find in monasteries is the icon of Sisoes kneeling over the open tomb of Alexander the Great. On his travels Sisoes came across the burial place of the greatest military commander who ever lived, the man who amassed the largest army in the world and was appointed Pharaoh of Egypt, and he wept, asking where all the armies and the wealth and the kingdom were now. Alexander died at thirty two, and nothing he had acquired followed him into the grave. This is the futility of a life spent acquiring things that carry no eternal significance, because whatever you gather here that does not have eternal weight will not go with you when you die. The deeper lesson comes from the death of St. Sisoes himself. As the fathers sat beside him, his face began to shine like the sun, and he told them that Abba Anthony was coming, then the choir of the prophets, then the apostles, and his countenance grew brighter still. When the angels came to fetch him, he was heard begging them to let him have a little more time to do penance. The fathers told him he had no need to repent, and yet this man, in the very glory of God with the saints and angels surrounding him, said that he did not think he had even made a beginning. Everyone present knew that he was perfect, and still his only reflection on his own life was that he had not yet started to repent. That is the majesty of true humility, to stand in the light of God and see only how far you have to go. So often in the spiritual life you begin to think that you have made progress, that you are doing better, that you are more mature or more healed than you used to be because you no longer commit some sin you once did. These very thoughts are the beginning of laxity, because the moment you believe you have accomplished something you become negligent, lazy, and careless in prayer. The great irony is that the holy fathers who reached tremendous heights of virtue and asceticism, even as God shone His glory upon them, said they had not even made a start, while we grow comfortable and congratulate ourselves over the smallest imagined progress. If there is one attitude to carry from the life of Sisoes, it is to say continually that you have not yet begun to repent, because the sense that you have grown is itself the surest sign that you have not. True progress in the spiritual life is marked not by looking at yourself and seeing accomplishment but by looking at yourself and asking whether you have even begun.