By Fr. Michael Psaromatis
Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Australia
The heart is rarely taken from God all at once. More often it is drawn away quietly, and in our time this often happens through the eyes.
Before prayer has gathered the soul, the phone has already opened the door to a thousand concerns. News, messages, opinions, advertisements, comparisons, scandals and images press upon the mind. At the dinner table the body may be beside the family while the mind is carried into work emails, financial pressure, headlines, or the lives of strangers online. A young person can lie awake at night looking at carefully arranged images of other people’s lives and quietly conclude that their own life is somehow less beautiful, less successful, less loved. A parent can begin the day already weary, not because the day has been lived, but because the mind has already travelled through a hundred fears.
Into this life Christ says, “The eye is the lamp of the body. If therefore your eye is good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is evil, your whole body will be full of darkness” (Matthew 6:22–23).
The eye is more than eyesight. In the life of the Church, it also points to the inner attention of the heart, the nous, the faculty by which the human person turns toward God or away from Him. When this inner eye is clear, life is seen more truthfully. When it is clouded, even blessings can become idols, and ordinary cares can begin to rule us. Saint John Chrysostom says that the eye guides the body, and in a similar way the mind and heart guide the whole life. If the guide is darkened, the whole person suffers confusion (St John Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew, Homily 20). Saint Maximus the Confessor writes that the nous becomes dark through attachment to the passions and is illumined when it turns again to God in love (St Maximus the Confessor, Four Hundred Texts on Love).
Saint Bede, commenting on the same image in the Gospel of Luke, says that Christ has set the lamp on the lampstand, that is, in the Church, so that those who enter with true faith may see the light of truth. He also says that the Lord calls us to cleanse not only our works, but also our thoughts and the intentions of the heart (St Bede the Venerable, Commentary on Luke 11:33–36). The eye of the soul is not healed by appearances. It is healed as the heart is brought into Christ, into His Church, and into repentance.
The Fathers also speak of the logismoi, the thoughts that enter the heart and begin to argue, accuse, tempt, frighten or flatter. A thought may come uninvited, but it does not need to be given a throne. Much of anxiety begins when a thought is received as though it were prophecy. Watchfulness teaches the heart to notice what has entered, to reject what darkens it, and to return again to Christ.
We become, little by little, what we give ourselves to. What we repeatedly look upon, admire, fear, envy, desire and consume begins to shape us. The eye is a doorway. Through it, light enters. Through it, darkness can also enter.
Christ says, “You cannot serve God and mammon” (Matthew 6:24).
Mammon is not simply money. Money can become bread for a family, help for the poor, support for the Church, education for children, medicine for the sick and love offered in practical form. Mammon is wealth when it takes the place of God. It is security without God. It is the belief that peace will finally come once we have enough, control enough, own enough, achieve enough, or are admired enough.
But the heart that has forgotten God never finds enough. It may gain possessions and remain afraid. It may gain status and remain empty. It may gain comfort and still have no rest. Saint Basil the Great warned that wealth becomes spiritually dangerous when it is held tightly against the needs of others, because what was given for stewardship can become an accusation against the soul (St Basil the Great, Homily on “I Will Pull Down My Barns”). Saint John Chrysostom speaks just as sharply, reminding us that the goods of this life are entrusted to us for mercy and salvation, rather than for the hardening of the heart (St John Chrysostom, Homilies on Lazarus and the Rich Man).
Almsgiving helps heal our relationship with money. We give not because God needs our possessions, but because the heart needs to be freed from possessing them wrongly. When money is offered in mercy, it returns to its proper place. It becomes a servant of love, not a master over the soul.
The Lord says, “Do not be anxious about your life” (Matthew 6:25).
These words can sound difficult when life is full of pressure. People worry about children, health, employment, debt, housing, ageing parents, loneliness, sickness, the state of the world and the uncertainty of the future. Many carry real responsibilities, but they also carry fears that have not happened, conversations that have not occurred, griefs that have not arrived and burdens God never asked them to carry alone.
Christ is not praising carelessness. He is not telling parents to neglect their children, workers to abandon their duties, or families to stop planning wisely. He is putting the heart back in order. Anxiety, in the Gospel sense, is what happens when tomorrow becomes larger than God. It is the soul trying to bear the future while forgetting the Father.
Recently, after the Liturgy, a mother stayed behind in the church. Her son had been caught for some time in drugs and dangerous company. He had been badly hurt. He was moving among people who were pulling him further into darkness, and she was carrying what only a mother can carry.
She did not come with theories or many explanations. She had already said what she could say to him. She had warned, pleaded, prayed, cried, blamed herself, hoped again, feared the next phone call, and then woken the next morning to carry the same weight again.
She lit a candle and stood before the icon of Christ. After a while she said, “Father, please pray for him.” So we prayed his name before the Lord. We asked Christ to protect him, to open a way for repentance, to break the hold of the people and habits destroying him, and to give his mother strength, wisdom and patience.
When she left the church, the problem had not vanished. Her son still had his battle. She still had to go home and continue loving him without being swallowed by fear, helping him without being destroyed, setting boundaries without closing her heart. But for a moment the burden was no longer locked inside her chest. It had been placed before Christ.
A mother can love her child, warn him, wait for him, pray for him and weep for him, but she cannot be God for him. There are places in a person’s life where only Christ can enter. “Your heavenly Father knows.” He knows the child. He knows the mother. He knows the fear. He knows the road back.
His Eminence Archbishop Makarios of Australia, speaking to Orthodox youth in Perth, warned of the false promise of drugs and alcohol, and said that “only Christ can penetrate the depths of our being” (Archbishop Makarios of Australia, Address to the Orthodox Youth of Perth, 13 July 2024). This belongs closely to the Gospel. The heart has depths that no argument, pressure, pleasure, or fear can heal. Christ enters those depths without destroying the person.
Many faithful people also carry wounds that cannot be healed by being told simply to worry less. Trauma, panic, depression, clinical anxiety and illness of the nervous system are not signs of weak faith. Christ does not shame human frailty. The Church knows that the human person is soul and body together, and healing may involve prayer, confession, spiritual fatherhood, medical care, wise counsel, patient support and the slow rebuilding of trust. The Gospel does not humiliate the wounded. It calls them home.
Christ points to the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, not to make life sound easy, but to teach us how to see again. The birds are fed. The flowers are clothed. The Father is present in His world. He is not blind to His creation, and He is not blind to us. “Are you not of more value than they?” (Matthew 6:26).
Many people need to hear this because the world has taught them to measure life by usefulness, appearance, income, productivity, diagnosis, failure, profile or public opinion. Christ returns us to the truth. A human being is made in the image of God. A human life has value because God Himself has placed value upon it.
In a message on appearance and the opinion of others, Archbishop Makarios said that “it is not a failure to go unnoticed” and urged the faithful not to allow anyone’s opinion and judgment to define their life (Archbishop Makarios of Australia, “Do what will give real meaning to your life, regardless of the opinion of others”). The eye becomes sick when it constantly looks outward for worth. Christ heals the person by turning the heart back to God, where human value is not performed, advertised, or negotiated, but received.
Saint Paul sets the measure of that value before us: “God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).
Christ did not wait for us to become worthy. He did not wait for us to repair everything. He did not wait for us to become spiritually impressive. While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
Saint Paul says, “Having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Romans 5:1). In the Orthodox life, this is not reduced to a legal declaration alone. It is reconciliation, healing, and entrance into the grace in which we stand. Faith is not mere agreement with an idea. It is living trust in Christ, a faithful turning of the whole person toward Him. Peace is reconciliation with God in Christ, even while life remains difficult. The separation caused by sin has been healed in Him. His Blood has spoken louder than our fear, failure and shame.
The words of Christ, “Do not be anxious,” would be too heavy if they were placed upon us without grace. Saint Paul shows us that Christ does not command from a distance. He comes near. He reconciles. He heals. He gives grace. He pours the love of God into the heart through the Holy Spirit (Romans 5:5). What the Gospel commands becomes possible because Christ has already acted for us.
Grace does not remove our freedom. It heals it. God acts first, yet He does not save us without our response. We turn, repent, pray, struggle, fall and rise again because His grace is already calling, strengthening and healing us. The Christian life is not self rescue. It is cooperation with the mercy of God.
Saint John Chrysostom sees in Romans 5 the proof of divine love. If Christ died for us when we were weak and estranged, then His love does not depend on our emotional state, our strength, or our latest success (St John Chrysostom, Homilies on Romans, Homily 9). If He loved us when we were far from Him, will He abandon us now? If He gave His Blood for us, will He forget our daily bread? If He reconciled us to the Father, will He leave us alone in the struggle?
Saint Paul does not pretend that life will be free of suffering. He says that suffering can produce endurance, endurance character, and character hope (Romans 5:3–4). Pain remains pain, but in Christ it is not empty. Christ has carried human pain into His Cross, and by His Resurrection He has changed what suffering can become. Saint Isaac the Syrian often speaks of trials as places where the heart, if it remains humble, can be purified and enlarged by grace (St Isaac the Syrian, Ascetical Homilies). Saint Maximus teaches that the very wounds which expose the passions can become, through repentance and grace, the place of healing (St Maximus the Confessor, Questions to Thalassius).
When the heart is anxious, the Church places it again before Christ through repentance, watchfulness and communion with God. Even the practices of the Church can be misunderstood if they are treated as techniques. Prayer, fasting, almsgiving and watchfulness do train the person, but they are not techniques of self salvation. They are ways the heart cooperates with grace and learns again to live before God.
The Jesus Prayer gathers the scattered eye of the soul: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.” It brings the heart back from the many things to the one thing needful. Saint Hesychios the Priest writes that watchfulness joined to the prayer of Jesus guards the heart and brings light into the inner person (St Hesychios the Priest, On Watchfulness and Holiness, Philokalia). Saint Gregory Palamas teaches that the purification and illumination of the heart is the work of divine grace in those who turn toward God through repentance, prayer and the sacramental life (St Gregory Palamas, Triads).
Saint Porphyrios gave this counsel: “Pray without anxiety, calmly with trust in God’s love and providence.” He speaks of a heart that works, prays, and entrusts itself to God without panic. He also taught that God cares for the smallest details of our life. The anxious soul begins to think everything depends on itself. Prayer slowly teaches the heart that God has not abandoned it.
Saint Paisios warned that excessive work and excessive worry make the soul worldly, strained and spiritually breathless. He often urged people toward simplicity because a crowded life easily becomes an anxious life (St Paisios the Athonite, With Pain and Love for Contemporary Man). Saint Iakovos of Evia lived the same truth through prayer. “Prayer always supports us. Let us not be afraid,” he taught. He had suffered enough to know that fear loses its rule when the soul stands before God.
C.S. Lewis, although not writing from within the Orthodox Church, touched the same Christian order when he wrote, “Aim at Heaven and you will get earth thrown in: aim at earth and you will get neither” (C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity). When the Kingdom is first, earthly life is received properly. When earthly life becomes first, both earth and heaven are distorted. In “Learning in War-Time,” Lewis also writes that the present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received (C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory). Christ gives today’s grace for today’s obedience. He teaches us to ask for daily bread, not to carry every fear of every possible tomorrow.
In the sacramental life of the Church, the eye of the soul learns to see the world truthfully. In Baptism, the old life is buried and the person is clothed in Christ. In Chrismation, the gift of the Holy Spirit is sealed upon the newly illumined. In Confession, the darkness of the heart is brought into the mercy of God. In the Eucharist, we receive Christ Himself, the medicine of immortality and the life of the Kingdom (St Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Ephesians; St Nicholas Cabasilas, The Life in Christ).
The Lord gives us the order of life: “Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you” (Matthew 6:33).
To seek the Kingdom first does not mean that earthly responsibilities are despised. It means they are placed under God. The Kingdom first does not make earthly life worthless. It restores earthly life to God. Food, work, family, beauty, friendship and rest are not rejected. They are purified from idolatry and received with thanksgiving. Family becomes an offering. Work becomes service. Money becomes stewardship. The future is no longer surrendered to fear, because it belongs to the Father.
We often wait for peace until everything is finally under control. Yet control becomes its own prison. Comfort is too weak to save us. Approval changes with every opinion. Wealth cannot forgive sins, quiet the soul, conquer death or give eternal life. Christ alone reconciles us to the Father. Christ alone fills the eye of the soul with light.
The Father knows what we need. The Son has shed His Blood for us. The Holy Spirit pours the love of God into the heart. We are not orphans trying to survive outside the house. We are children being called back to the table.
The struggle is not to make tomorrow disappear. It is to refuse to let tomorrow become lord.
Christ does not ask us to see every step ahead. He asks that the heart begin where true life begins, with the Father, in the Son, by the Holy Spirit. The eye that turns toward the Kingdom begins even now to be lit by it.
So we return to what the Church has always placed before us: prayer, repentance, mercy, the Holy Chalice, and the small obedience of today. The fears of tomorrow may still speak, but they do not need to govern the soul.
Everything placed above God will pass from our hands. What is placed in God is not lost. It is gathered into His Kingdom, and this is what Christ tells us to seek first.
