Wednesday, October 22, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Passion
Do not present the parts of your bodies to sin
as weapons for wickedness,
but present yourselves to God as raised from the dead to life
and the parts of your bodies to God
as weapons for righteousness.
I cherish my solitude. But in the AARP article that I re-read yesterday, a comment about dementia caught me off guard, which was that “isolation is one of the most frightening and unsettling symptoms of this kind of memory loss. It separates a person from their very self.”
Often I choose to be alone, even while I continue to test as an extravert on the Myers-Briggs scale. But I can imagine going deeper into my cave and becoming at least a little nervous about coming out. And I think of my friends or clients or family who find themselves alone because of choices they make. Relationships are wrecked by emotional explosions that mark the edges of an invisible minefield of unforgiveness.
When men rose up against us,
When their fury was inflamed against us,
Then would they have swallowed us alive.
When I’m that ENRAGED man, when my whole body feels inflamed against you, my self-righteousness shields me from reasonable argument. I feel justified by my “passion.” But what the psalmist says about my victim is just as true of me:
The waters have overwhelmed me;
The torrent has swept over me;
over me sweep the raging waters.
Fire and ice destroy relationship, and I descend into self-imposed isolation, the deeper the cave the better, until I can nurse my supposed wounds and return to my … marriage, my children, my friends, my boss, my church …if they are still there to return to.
Cynthia Bourgeault, one of my favorite ferreters-out of ancient wisdom, found something about this in the writings of Evagrius.
In ancient texts “passio” is the first-person singular passive of the word which means “I suffer. I am acted upon.” What passion always refers to in the ancient texts is this peculiar, compulsive nature of stuck emotion. The passions are really stuck emotions, revolving around themselves to generate drama.  
There’s a great teaching from the 4th-century spiritual teacher, Evagrius the Solitary, the first real spiritual psychologist of the Christian West. He did an interesting analysis of how when you’re in a deep field of gathered stillness, something will rise up as a thought and quickly become a thought chain. At first it doesn’t have any energy in it but as soon as it hooks onto a sense of myself, as soon as it becomes an “I-story,” it becomes a passion. It’s usually at this point, if you’re not terribly self-aware, that it comes to the surface in the form of rage, anger, hurt or fear, or all of those.  
Evagrius was a monk writing for monks, and they cultivated as their main occupation that “deep field of gathered stillness.” This sounds sweet to me, this deep field, but I see how rather than being receptive to God, it receives instead my niggling memory which then grows into a minor resentment until at last, holding my breath until I can no longer, I explode.
Once it becomes a passion and it’s stuck to your story, it can do nothing else but churn up more emotion, which then goes down into your physical body and steals your energy of being. Evagrius’ advice is that you have to learn to nip the thought in the bud before it becomes a passion. His prescription is a kind of wonderful combination of developing the capacity to see within, combined with kenosis – the willingness to let go of the satisfaction you get from your drama. That is what clears the radar screen.  
The real heart of working with emotion is the willingness to let go, to sacrifice your personal drama – letting go at that level so that you can begin to see with a pure heart.   Â
Paul insists that I do this work in Romans 6.
But sin is not to have any power over you,
since you are not under the law but under grace.
I am not in a monastery, under my own or my abbot’s microscope. But after an explosion I do have available the review and repentance of the Examen along with the practice we call the Twelve Steps. My unthrottled anger proves my powerlessness to manage, as called for in Step #1.
1) I can’t do this!
2)Â God can!
3) I think I’ll let him!
From there on, it’s just a matter of doing the work, which is substantial and often embarrassing, but oh, so, fruitful. Here are the official 12 steps from AA:
- We admitted we were powerless over alcohol (etc) —that our lives had become unmanageable.
- Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
- Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, as we understood Him
- Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
- Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
- Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
- Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
- Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
- Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
- Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.
- Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
- Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
We were rescued like a bird
from the fowlers’ snare;
Broken was the snare,
and we were freed.
Our help is in the name of the LORD,
who made heaven and earth.
 (Romans 6, Psalm 124, Matthew 24, Luke 12)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
#
