Peter Bouteneff: Pitfalls and Consequences of understanding that you are a sinner

 We’ve been describing the healthy appropriation of “sinner” language and identity as a journey, and any of a number of pitfalls can crop up along the way. In fact, it’s best to expect that they will so you won’t be taken by surprise when it happens. These are some of the toxic tendencies to beware of when taking on a sinner identity.

• Reactivating old abuse / victim language about yourself.
• Exacerbating a genuine clinical depression.
• Descending into shame-spirals over things you can’t control.
• Obsessing over past sins that have already been forgiven.
• Thinking that you are your sin, your shame, your guilt.
• Becoming maudlin or self-pitying.
• Trying to “out-unworthy” other people.
• Allowing it to prevent you from living a fully realized life.

Be patient with yourself. Don’t forget to pray. As for the healing tendencies of the penitential mindset,

St. Paul identified “the fruits of the Spirit,” as “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” (Gal 5.22). Here’s What you might discover in yourself as symptoms or consequences of understanding yourself properly as a sinner:

• Living in truth.
• A right stance before God and your fellow humans.
• Freedom from enslavement to self-justification.
• Freedom from care about what others think of you.
• Freedom from taking offense.
• Freedom from judging others.
• Love and mercy for others.
• Love for your true, innermost self.
• Taking responsibility for wrongdoing.
• Addressing your attachments, compulsions, and passions.
• Experiencing forgiveness and love.
• Knowing the sweetness of unearned love.
• Inner peace.
• An appreciation of beauty and goodness in the world.
• Greater knowledge of Christ, who saves the world overcomes evil, and forgives sin.

+Peter Bouteneff, from How to be a Sinner, Chapter 7 Mercy, Forgiveness, and Divine Judgment, Summary

Archimandrite Seraphim (Aleksiev): On those who think they have no great sins

 Those who think that they do not have any great sins are actually blind. They must pray to God to enable them to perceive their sins and to save themselves from the extremely fatal spiritual delusion that they do not have any particular sins. Even if their sins are as small as specks of dust, if they are not cleaned with constant Confession, they pile up and dirty the room of the heart so that the high heavenly Guest cannot enter there.

The small sins are often more dangerous than the greatest crimes, because the latter weigh heavily on the conscience and insist on being atoned for, confessed, settled, erased, while the small sins do not weigh too much on the soul, but they have that perilous property of making it insensitive to the grace of God and indifferent to salvation. Fewer people have perished from ferocious wild beasts than have from small microbes, invisible to the naked eye. By being considered insignificant, the small sins are usually passed by without any attention. They are easily forgotten, but they create in man the most terrible habit - the habit of sinning, of dulling his moral consciousness.

+Archimandrite Seraphim (Aleksiev), from The Forgotten Medicine, The Mystery of Repentance, Chapter 4, Objections to Confession

St. Macarius of Optina: Seeing ourselves as bad or good

 You are distressed to find that whenever you now examine your conscience, you see yourself as bad; whereas formerly, when you were young, such examination showed you to be, on the whole, good rather than bad. What an extraordinary reason for distress!

It is infinitely better for us to see ourselves as bad than good. In the first case, we acquire humility, and find the door to forgiveness, the door to grace; in the second, we grow proud; and pride blocks the way to grace.

As to the real value of our deeds and actions, of that God alone is judge; He, who knows the most secret impulses of every human heart.

+St. Macarius of Optina, from Russian Letters of Direction, I Blessed are the Poor in Spirit; for Theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven, 2. Self-Knowledge

St. John of New Valamo: The mind should not be idle.

Imagination and memory are one inner sense. Sometimes the memory of former events [i.e. sinful acts] hits us on the head like a hammer. At such a time concentrated prayer is needed, and patience too. Our memory must be filled by reading the Holy Gospel and the writings of the Holy Fathers; in other words, the mind should not be idle. Former events must be replaced by other thoughts, and gradually the former recollections will be crowded out and the melancholy will pass. In one heart two masters cannot live together.
+St. John (Alekseyev) of New Valamo, from Christ is in Our Midst: Letters from a Russian Monk, letter #26, dated Dec 20, 1947.