How to Eradicate Ill-Feeling
Do you maintain that you are keeping the commandment of love towards your neighbour? If so, why is there so much bitter ill-feeling in you against this or that person? Is that not perhaps a sign that you are preferring transient goods to loving, and that just to possess them you are struggling even to the point of hostility to your brothers and sisters?
Sadness and ill-feeling go hand in hand. So if you are sad when you see your brother or sister’s face, that probably means that you are harbouring ill-feeling.
If it does, then pray for that brother or sister and you will weaken the drive of your passion, because prayer will purge of all bitterness the memory of the evil the other has done to you. After that, by acquiring love for your neighbour, you will eradicate any trace of that passion from your soul.
If someone else is harbouring ill-feeling against you, show yourself friendly towards him and also humble. Treat him well and you will set him free from his passion.
It is essential to eradicate envy, anger and ill-feeling against people who have offended us. But this in itself does not mean you are loving them. One can avoid returning evil for evil simply because the Law commands it, without experiencing a scrap of love. In this way you will make no progress to repaying evil with good.
Yet readiness to do good to someone who hates us is a characteristic of perfect love alone.
Maximus the Confessor
Centuries on Charity, 3, 15ff. (SC9, pp.127ff.)
If Someone Causes You Trouble
‘Love is patient and kind.’ [1 Car. 13:4] Consequently, to be discouraged by the misfortunes that happen, to fly into a rage with those who are the cause of them, to stop loving them, isn’t that perhaps dodging the will of a wise God?
Watch yourself, for fear lest the evil that is setting you at odds with your neighbour derives, not from your neighbour but from your own heart. Hurry to be reconciled with him in case you are breaking the commandment of brotherly love.
Be on your guard against neglecting this commandment. It can make you a child of God. But if you break it, you become a child of hell.
To envy or to be envied, to cause hurt or to receive it, to offend or to be offended, to persist in a suspicion – all this is an obstacle to love between friends. A neighbour of yours perhaps has been a trial to you and you have been so cross about it as to begin to hate him. Don’t let yourself be overcome with hatred, but overcome hatred with love.
In practical terms, pray sincerely for him, accept his apologies, make yourself his champion, take on yourself the responsibility for your trials, and bear the situation with courage until the clouds disperse.
Maximus the Confessor
Centuries on Charity, 4, 18 (SC9, pp.156ff.)
~ Thomas Spidlik, Drinking from the Hidden Fountain, A Patristic Breviary: Ancient Wisdom for Today’s World
