Through a Monk’s Eyes

Join Fr. Seraphim and the Monasteries of Mull and Iona on a pilgrimage to St Brendan's Island: Eileach an Naoimh—'The Rock of the Saint'.

St. Morwenna is commemorated on July 18.

"Truly I say to you, I do not know you."

What has light to do with darkness?

The sign of a true Christian

It is easy to ask for God's Word, but it is difficult to listen and accept His answer. That is because His answer reveals His Divine will and once we know that, we need to silence our own will and follow Him.

The story of a miracle: how God healed me and then poured a mountain of grace over us was recorded by Fr Seraphim (Aldea) at Mull Monastery (The Orthodox Monastery of All Celtic Saints), on the Isle of Mull.

We live in an age of new paganism. The distance we allowed between ourselves and Christ has created a spiritual void in the world, which is rapidly being filled with spiritual experiences and rituals that mirror those of the ancient pagan world.

This video is part of a Lenten Retreat at St Seraphim's Cathedral in Santa Rosa, California. As we prepare to enter Great Lent, we might ponder on the impossible height to which we are being called—to be perfect with the Father’s perfection—an impossibility that becomes possible in Christ, as we open up to His presence. This paradox and the tension it creates in us keep our spiritual life safe from being reduced to empty piety and religiosity.

We are broken and our prayer reflects that brokenness. But we are called to be one, to be simple with God's simplicity. As our prayer grows, we grow as well. As we spiritually heal and let go of our complexities and divisivenesses (which are results of our fallen nature), our prayer slowly lets go of its brokenness and becomes what it is supposed to be: a prayer beyond words, a silent prayer that is an act of being.

Fr. Seraphim Aldea reminds us to keep ourselves grounded in humility, so we may fight pride and hypocrisy, and prevent them from staining our spiritual struggle before the Lord. When you are at the beginning of your spiritual life, you need to prioritize your ascetical works, because they will eventually help you open up to receive God's Grace.

Fr. Seraphim Aldea reminds us that these are unforgivable sins against God's Love and Mercy. Feeling entitled to God's forgiveness, reducing God's Love to an automatic, impersonal tool of forgiveness—this is spiritual abuse of God's Love, this is the unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit. The other is to lose hope, to think that God's Love is not strong enough to cover our sins, to sink so low in our despair that we believe our sin has defeated God's Love.

'All is well, but I feel dry. Where there was life, I now have only the memory of it.' We tend to formalise our spiritual life, but Life is not in formalities: Life is in the Spirit—We need to reset our spiritual life to factory settings, jumping out of our comfort zones into a new, living faith.

Fr. Seraphim Aldea reminds us that prayer is 'the art of arts and the highest science'. Prayer is hard, it is exhausting and it will slowly burn the sinful parts of your being. This is why prayer is naturally painful and extremely difficult. In its perfect form, prayer is impossible for our fallen selves, but it becomes possible by grace (for the Saints) and in Christ's Kingdom, when we shall finally experience the full potential of our human nature.

Fr. Seraphim Aldea answers the question "If God is perfect, why did He create imperfection?", by reminding us of His love for His creation.

Would you tell the demoniacs whom Christ healed that they are 'perfect as they are'? Would you tell Mary Magdalene that the seven demons who fought her made her 'who she was'? Would you stop Christ from forgiving sinners because there is no need for them to be forgiven? If we are 'perfect as we are', then what need do we have of Christ? THIS is why the idea that we do not need to change, that we have to embrace ourselves just as we are and that sin is somehow part of our true selves — this is why this heresy is the door through which the collapse of our entire faith enters. If I am perfect as I am, then I don't need Christ for anything. Even more, this Christ Who tells me that I DO need to change becomes an antiquated and outdated 'invention', without Whom I can very well live my life.

The devil wants us to forget him. His ultimate success would be to make us believe that he is not even real, that he is just the product of our imagination. Once that happens, the flood-gates of sin are wide open in us and our salvation is in great danger.

Why can't I stop sinning when I want to stop with all my being? Why is it that I cannot pray with the strength with which I want to pray? Why can't I be the person I want to be for the love of Christ? And is there a way to actually move forward from all this sin and to grow in our spiritual life?

Fr. Seraphim shares a message of forgiveness at Christmas.

The opinion of others can destroy one's self-esteem. We need to found our life on Christ's values, regardless of the response that generates in those around us. We may be unpopular, but we are truly ourselves, and that is worth carrying this Cross for.

No good can come from constantly re-assessing our decision to enter a marriage or monastic life. The time for assessing is before we enter the Sacrament; after that, we should allow Christ to freely use the 'tool' of the Sacrament to shape us into the Saints He created us to be.

There is no fall too deep for Christ's love for us. Never lose hope, my brothers and my sisters.

We sometimes pray very hard for Christ to release us from our sin, but it feels as if He just looks away and doesn't want to help. Almost always, this betrays a much more serious sin in us, hiding underneath the one that troubles us. Pride, judgement, and condemnation of others can prevent Christ from releasing us from our sin.

Hope and repentance are the two wings of spiritual life.

What has happened in the last year and a half at the Orthodox Monastery of All Saints?

Fr. Seraphim Aldea explains the hiatus from recording the podcast for 18 months.

This battle is now way above our heads. We need to humbly wait in the loving palm of Christ.

Why can't we just focus on the spiritual side of life and live as spiritual beings? Why is the Church so keen that we should learn to control our bodies and their passions? Does God even care what we do with our bodies?

We often gather our forces to fight our spiritual enemies at the wrong 'gate' of our being. Most frequently, evil enters our life through the gates of our mind and heart, not that of the body. We need to pay attention and learn the behaviour of the evil one, so we may guard well the fortress of our being. Once we learn to decode his behaviour, we can finally begin to plan a strategy to fight back.

The world attaches no value to our bodies and it often feels as if the Church shares the same vision: the body is evil, worthless, a sort of dark gate through which demons, passions and sins enter our being. But is this the revealed truth and is this really what the Church confesses? We need to escape this confusion, we need to rediscover the worth of our bodies before we start preparing our fight against the passions which control them. If we do not know the value of our bodies, how are we expected to fight for them?

Why is God so interested in what we do in the bedroom? Why is the Church so keen that we should learn to control our bodies and their passions? Why can't we just focus on the spiritual side of life and live as spiritual beings?

Some things are to be discerned with one's mind, but others - the most important ones - should be approached based on faith and love alone. One cannot 'discern' one's vocation for married or monastic life; this is not a choice to be made based on logical assessment, but on the love one feels in one's heart.

My will or God's will? The will of the world and that of our families have become components of our own will. To discern and follow the will of God, we must free ourselves from the dominion of these three: the will of the world, the will of our immediate circle of family and friends, and our personal will. The best teacher for this is the wonderful St John of the Ladder (of Sinai).

Back in March 2020, when I promised that I'd be recording these videos to keep each other company through the pandemic, I definitely had no idea I would still be doing this a whole year later. One year of the pandemic, one year with the virus, and we are still here, helping each other on our way. I have learnt enormously from you during this past year and I want to thank you all, on behalf of the Monastery, for the love and encouragement you have offered us. May God, Who brought all of us together, continue to bless us every day, every hour of our portion in this world, my dear ones.

If your aim is to be 100% happy, 100% of the time, you can be 100% certain that you will fail into utter misery. We are constantly being fed ready-made recipes for happiness, impersonal visions of what happiness looks like, false idols of who we should be in order to be happy. We can grow from the darkness in our lives, as much as we grown from its light. Happiness comes from unexpected places and we should always be ready to embrace it. If we are blinded by these unreal visions of happiness, we might just let true happiness pass by unnoticed.

What is the Orthodox practice of total fasting? How do you keep it and why would you? What are the spiritual benefits of fasting for a period from all food and water for the love of Christ?

As we begin our Lenten journey, Fr. Seraphim Aldea reminds us of the importance of repentance for our salvation.

Some people thrive and others collapse fought by the same temptations, in the same context, surrounded by the same people. St Paisius the Agiorite (St Paisius of the Holy Mountain) and St John of the Ladder teach us that a joyful disposition of the heart and the determination to see goodness in everyone can make the difference between spiritual life and death. We need to train our thoughts to always 'translate' the situations we face into good examples, into sources of strength, virtue and beauty. Depending on whether we decode this world through a lens of love or one of condemnation, the same temptations can feed the Divine Image in us or the nothingness in us.

When we judge our brother we become anti-Christs, because we rob the True Judge - Jesus Christ - of the authority given to Him Alone by the Father. We envy His place on His Throne of Judgement and we sit on His Throne in our mind, making ourselves to be judges, although God did not give us this authority. We are not the Judge, but the ones who will be judged, with the rest of humanity. We must always remember that the Same One Who said: 'do not kill' also said: 'do not Judge'.

The is NO LIFE in despondency and abandonment. We must learn to fight for love, fight for joy, and this LOVE will teach us about God.

A lot of people around us suffer from the physiological pressures of this pandemic. Some were suffering before it all started, others have only now found themselves facing this struggle. The point is that there are SO MANY among us who suffer quietly and unknown by anyone. We MUST open our eyes to see them. St Silouan tells us that a loving, prayerful heart naturally feels the pain of the world and willingly crucifies itself in prayer for the world. We must close the judgemental eyes of our minds and open the loving eyes of our hearts, so we may perceive the silent pain in our brothers and sisters. Once we see it, we must do what Christ teaches us to do: lift their cross on our shoulders and carry it for them. At least for an hour. At least for a day. It may not be much, but it will allow them a respite from the lonely hell of a mind in pain.

Don't look for the easy way out of pain. Do not deny the reality of your doubts, your struggles and your sins. Be who-you-are before Christ, so that He may save the truth of who-you-are.

Every Lent is an opportunity to START ANEW, to shine in Christ, to do the things we only think about doing the rest of the year. We can go deeper in our faith, we can create secret 'signs of love and faith' with Christ, we can re-shape the courses of our thoughts and emotions so they once again flow in the direction God intended them to flow when He created us.

Why do we forget all the beautiful things God teaches us in our life? How come we cannot hold on and remember all the advice God speaks to our hearts, either in prayer or through the people and circumstances of our lives?

Fr. Seraphim Aldea reminds us that who we are in Christ is the best version of ourselves.

Fr. Seraphim Aldea helps answer the question "Will we ever reach the holiness of the Saints?".

After we sin, our hearts freeze. For a while, we stay away from God on purpose. We need time to heal, we need some sort of ritual of cleansing, some manner in which to make ourselves (in our own eyes) acceptable again to God. But the way back to prayer must begin as soon as possible, if possible even during the act of sin itself. The sooner we turn ourselves back to face Christ's Light, the sooner we shall drag ourselves out of the depth of our fall. Remind yourself of those who were waiting in the darkness of hell for Christ's Descent - ask for their desperate desire to be forgiven, pray for their unceasing hope that Light WILL one day find them and bring them back to Life out of the death of their hell. For those who put their trust in Christ, there is always Hope, there is always Love, there is always a way back to repentance and Life.

Prayer is a new creation - St Sophrony says somewhere. By that, he means that prayer will change the one who prays into a new person, a true person, the saints whom God created us to be. If we are afraid of change, we should be terrified of prayer, because prayer is deeply transformative or nothing at all. Prayer kills the evil seeds in us and it feeds the good seeds in us. Like a series of small deaths and resurrections, prayer slowly reshapes our being, until it re-creates us according to the Image of God in us.

Not the virus, not the vaccines, not ecumenism, not any other enemy of choice: the greatest danger to our salvation and the trigger of the destruction of this world is our SIN We are the ones who can destroy ourselves and our world, but we are also the ones through whom the world can be saved. Christ has already opened that door for us. A world without love can have no future, but one drop of Love can redeem ALL.

Two summers ago (when people still travelled) I met a lady on the ferry who had come to the Isles all the way from North America because 'God told me to visit Scotland'. Apparently, God had told her to visit many places in the world and she was looking forward to wherever He would send her on her next holiday. This lesson is based on a very different story about St Macarius the Great who one day received the thought of leaving his cell to go and pray in the desert. After he waited for FIVE YEARS, fighting in prayer to discern if this is the will of God, he then went into the desert.

This is not about religious regimentation, nor about brainwashing ourselves into believe doctrines that are foreign to our nature, nor about abandoning our will to become the puppets of a master, nor about denying oneself and losing one's identity. Being a Christian is about following the God of Love onto our own cross, mirroring His Cross, so we may discover who-we-are-in-Love and what this world looks like when saved by Love.

To die to the world has nothing to do with self-destruction or the destruction of the world. Quite the opposite, when we die to the world, we begin the process of being born in Christ, which is then reflected back unto the world as a new blessing, a new input of grace, a new change for salvation. To be dead to the world means not to engage with the world in its fallen state, but to engage with its full spiritual potential, with the hidden image of God imprinted on everyone.

What would happen if we were all martyred for the Truth of Christ?

On Violence and Power.

The Feast of Theophany, when God the Trinity reveals Himself to us.

At times, we are reduced to the empty shell of our being. How do we survive when there is no life in us? Working under obedience can carry us through this desert; it can empty the mind, so that the mind can be filled once again with Life by the Giver of Life.

'It was through whispering that the serpent drove Adam and Eve out of Paradise, so he who speaks against his neighbor will be like the serpent, for he corrupts the soul of him who listens to him and he does not save his own soul' - Abba Hyperechius of the Desert Fathers. Slander and gossip are the fruits of evil and hatred, and their own fruits are division, brokenness and pain. He who slanders goes against Him Who asked us to be One. He who listens to the one who slanders opens himself to the other one's poison, and both of them are condemned as the spiritual murderers of the neighbor whom they slander.

When your heart and your mind are suspended, when there is no life in you, how do you find your way back to Christ, back to Life? How do you pray when you feel dead inside?

This is the prayer of one who is still in the world, but no longer of the world. When despair and anxiety bite they feel like a little death. When your tiredness, your sin or your despondency collapse over you, you need to pray with the prayer of the dead, the prayer of our nothingness silently hoping against hope, silently crying out for Christ, silently waiting for the Resurrected One to be risen from our own tomb: our body and our soul. This is not abandonment, but the exact opposite: this is the prayer which is proper to our fallen nature, the desperate cry for Life of one who is made of nothing, but does not belong to nothing. This is the prayer of one who is still in the world, but no longer of the world - instead, they now belong to Christ

Fr. Seraphim Aldea discusses the current blessing of silence and solitude.

Fr. Seraphim Aldea shares practical insights about developing a relationship with a spiritual father.

Fr. Seraphim Aldea exhorts his listeners to fight for faith in the living God during this challenging time.

Fr. Seraphim speaks about losing hope and temptation and how it is not a sin until we act upon it. He goes into detail about our salvation and the difference between falling into sin and being tempted.

Fr. Seraphim apologizes for his time away and gives an update on the monastery. He also talks about his struggles with faith and what we must remember in those hard times.

Fr. Seraphim Aldea answers the question of whether or not couples should abstain from sexual relations after the years of procreation.

Marriage is a sacrament—as important, as able to save you, as monasticism.

From the States, Fr. Seraphim discusses the Orthodox perspective on the value of death.

Fr. Seraphim Aldea delivers a talk in Atlanta, GA, about the power of our demons in those we meet, including the unborn.

Fr. Seraphim Aldea delivers a talk in Atlanta, Georgia, about the importance of humility in extending our view of the world.

Fr. Seraphim shares about the life of St. Brendan.

Fr. Seraphim Aldea talks about his reasons for taking a break from the podcast.

Fr. Seraphim Aldea shares reflections at the conclusion of his recent visit to Mt. Athos.

Fr. Seraphim Aldea narrates the importance of struggle in the relationship with a spiritual father, through his own physical journey from his monastery to the Holy Mountain.

Fr. Seraphim Aldea speaks on the importance of welcoming Christ into our lives.

Fr. Seraphim Aldea continues his series on fasting.

Fr. Seraphim Aldea concludes his series on fasting.

Fr. Seraphim begins a discussion on fasting and the importance of discernment in the spiritual life.

Fr. Seraphim Aldea continues his series on fasting with a discussion on how experience follows action. The fruit of fasting can take years to develop.

Fr. Seraphim reads the final section of the booklet On Prayer. The full text can be found at mullmonastery.com.

The idea of sacredness and the way it is manifested in space, The whole world is sacred, not because of our memories and experiences but because of God.

Fr. Seraphim reads the introduction and the ending of the booklet On Prayer. "True prayer is a state of being. It is the oneness between God and humanity." The full text can be found at mullmonastery.com.

Fr. Seraphim reads a section, Killer Prayer, from the booklet On Prayer. "The basic thing people seem not to understand is that the point of prayer is not happiness." The text can be found at mullmonastery.com.

Fr. Seraphim reads a section, Sin and Prayer, from the booklet On Prayer. "To define myself through my sinfulness is to decide that I am my own creator. I replace God with myself and I become my own creation, not His." The text can be found at mullmonastery.com.

Fr. Seraphim reads a section, To Pray is to Follow, from the booklet On Prayer. The text can be found at mullmonastery.com.

Fr. Seraphim was in Paris shortly after the November 13 attacks. He reflects on what our response as Christians should be. How do we hold on to our Christianity? What is our role as peacemakers? He reminds us that we fight for is not of this world.

Father Seraphim reflects on some of the content from his past podcasts, and asks for forgiveness because of the brief hiatus he took in posting new material.

Fr. Seraphim continues his discussion from last week on how to get more out of each confession, by recommending three more exercises to help grow closer to both the spiritual father and Christ.

Fr. Seraphim reflects on his experiences confessing, the role of a spiritual father, and he gives three recommendations to help get the most out of each confession.

The worries of American Christians, as important and contemporary as they may be, are in reality secular concerns.

Father Seraphim reflects on the life of Saint Columba, and talks about spiritual fathers.

Father Seraphim reflects on why he refrains from going into detail about Celtic saints during the podcast. He also begins to share about the life of Saint Oran.

If you go into a pilgrimage with humility and the belief that you understand very little—if anything—then by the end of it, something may be revealed to you beyond your own limitations.

Fr. Seraphim shares some of the ways in which laypeople can imitate the life and prayer of monastics.

Fr. Seraphim explains what it really means to be free to become who you are.

Is one better than the other? Fr. Seraphim begins tackling some listener questions.

Fr. Seraphim describes monasticism as a battle against the world—an act of violence and true rebellion.

To be a monk is to be alone and to define oneself according to Christ alone.

Fr. Seraphim introduces his new podcast and explains why he decided to become a monk.