Arabic original here.
Even if you don't know how...
You are bound for salvation.
There are people who surprise you! They have not known, or rather, had never practiced Orthodoxy until recently, but despite that you find that they have remarkable awareness, seriousness and composure, while many others who were considered to be inside the Church you find to have shocking flippancy, disdain and indifference to the faith. Do you think it's an issue of knowledge and information? It doesn't seem to be! There are those who profoundly feel God's presence and there are those who do not feel it. This has no connection to whether you have been Orthodox for generations, but rather to whether you have an upright conscience, even if you grew up outside the Orthodox Church!
Your Lord works in ways you do not know, whether in what you value, inside the Church or outside of it. Your Lord does not treat titles like people do. Everyone, without knowing it, is from Him, in Him and to Him! His categories are not your categories. His calculations are not your calculations. In your own eyes, perhaps, it is as though you are coming from the unknown and setting off into the unknown, even if you are accustomed to shielding yourself with the name of your Lord. In reality, you might be acting according to your natural disposition, as though you have no power with God. In a world where your Lord is sidelined as though He had no connection to the details of your life, and you just grew up like that, you find yourself as though you were free to take account of Him or disregard Him, without a care. It all depends on your temperament.
But for your Lord, your situation is different.
There is an inevitability that you revolve around Him, even without knowing it. Every hair on your head is counted! Every thought, every impulse, every movement, every heartbeat, every endeavor would not have been possible without you being at the center of your Lord's plan for your salvation! How do you explain what happens to you? This does not mean that you are right in what you are doing. No, but your Lord is truth. He is the path to truth. There is nothing easier than following a path when you don't know what it is. You think it is one thing, and it turns out to be something else. You think you have reached a certain place and you strive for it diligently, then it becomes clear to you that you are in another sphere. In any case, do not forget that you are in your Lord's care.
Everything that has happened and is happening is in the service of salvation. I am not saying your own salvation alone, but the salvation of all humankind! However, this does not mean each of us individually, because so long as we do not work for each other, we gain no benefit. In other words, each is charged with his brothers, with all people. The dynamism of the salvation of each of us is activated through zeal for others' salvation. The issue does not stop at the limits of each being for himself. For you to fast, to pray and to remain in inner contact with your Lord is of course important, but you are not on fire in the Spirit unless it is through love! The warmth of a loving heart depends on compassion for your brothers! The more you genuinely embrace what belongs to others, the more you grow and the Spirit of God intensifies within you.
In this context, the return of the enemy, the stranger, the poor, the distant, the oppressor, the one immersed in his sin will be even greater for you if you embrace him with visceral zeal! "My brother is my life," in the words of St Silouan the Athonite. Love is poured out all the more upon the sinner, the stranger, the sick, the straying... and this benefits all the more the one who pours it out without keeping count.
Before you is one astray. Do not judge or condemn him! You do not know what hell he is coming from. There is the heart-- who knows what is in it apart from its Creator? Most people are sons of pain. I seek mercy and not sacrifice! Unless your righteousness surpasses that of the wicked and unjust, you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven!
The man of sin is characterized by lying and deception. Man, in this context, is the great prosecutor. He invents images of himself to protect himself, to defend himself. For him, truthfulness and dishonesty are both equally permitted. He chooses what suits him. There is nothing easier for him than to be truthful in the service of dishonesty. Exaggeration is something natural for him. There is nothing to prevent him from lying when passing on truthful statements that suit him. His motto, easily, is fabrication.
As for deception, in the words of Fr Elias Morcos, may God have mercy on him, "Man is a deceptive animal." Deception is related to desire, to trickery, to ambiguity, to one's self-image. And of course, to imagination, to fantasy, to dreams. Thus, in general, fantasy comes from darkness in the soul. The world of fantasy is the world of sin par excellence. If Adam had not gone wild with his fantasy, it would not have occurred to him that he was a god and so he would not have strayed from obedience to his God! The impulse to fantasy that the snake breathed cast him into the pit of falsehood! Accepting an image of himself other than what God told him in the commandment made him into a liar.
There are, nevertheless, people who have acquired qualities not devoid of goodness and integrity even though they are not of the Church. Who has passed through whose life, and what has he left behind? This remains a mystery with many. There are things in the soul found dormant, amidst events that influence their owners' direction. On this level, along people's path they are swallowed up by noise that they can only escape though a shock. At that point, they wake up to secrets that they never imagined existed, here and there, in the corridors of their conscience. What is revealed might result not only in something surprising, but something that might radically alter their direction.
A sinner is not generally at ease with his situation and is not pleased with staying in place. If we were to describe his internal existential state in one word, we would say that he is someone mired in anxiety. Of course, he tries to normalize a certain peace within himself, but he does this especially at times of crisis, with fabrications that only lead to more anxiety and confusion, no matter how much he relies on things that calm his nerves. In the final analysis, a sinner suffers from loss, and time and again his reaction cannot overcome the limits of escapism that always ends in tragedy. In general, he is inclined to go from failure to failure. In the long run, a sinner will inevitably awaken to a great emptiness. After a frivolous life, a frivolous death looms before him on the horizon. "Every vessel overflows with what it contains."
The secret remains in pain and at its center is an existential emptiness. In the end, a person cannot bear meaninglessness. What stirs within him, after everything that he has gone through in his life, pushes him to wonder existentially: "Where to?" There is something that is not within anyone's capability and there is no power, whatever it may be, apart from the Spirit of your Lord, that can provide someone with an answer at an existential level about the meaning of a son of Adam's life. They come from east and west and sit with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but the children of the kingdom are cast outside!
How and when can a soul change? Your Lord alone is the Knower of Hearts. What remains constant, however, is that the Most High wishes for all to be saved and to come to knowledge of the truth. As St Silouan the Athonite says: "Keep your mind in hell and despair not!" The important thing is to not despair.
Archimandrite Touma (Bitar)
Abbot of the Monastery of St Silouan the Athonite-- Douma, Lebanon
February 1, 2026
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