Begin to recognize yourself, to love and possess yourself, to be kind to yourself, and you will be happy. If you desire to know yourself and to possess yourself, go into yourself, and do not search for yourself outside. Distinguish between what is around you, what belongs to you, and your self. The world surrounds you, your body belongs to you, and you yourself are within, made to the image and likeness of God. Return then, transgressor, to your heart, within, where you are truly yourself Outwardly you are an animal, fashioned as the world is fashioned, and that is why man is called a miniature world. But inwardly you are made in the image of God and so are capable of being deified.
Now when a person comes to himself as did that young prodigal son, where does he find himself? Is it not in a far country, in the Land of Unlikeness, and in a strange land, where he sits down and weeps as he remembers his father and his home. And does he not find cause for sorrow in himself, feeding pigs while he himself is starving? If the many hired men in his father’s house have bread enough and to spare, while he, the son, in exile and dire poverty, cannot find even husks with which to fill his stomach, will not his tears flow readily enough?
O Adam, where are you? Still in the shadows perhaps, so that you cannot see yourself? Sewing silly fig leaves
together to cover your shame? Your eyes are only too open to what is around you and what belongs to you. But look within, see yourself; there you will find things which are much more shameful than those external things of which you are so ashamed. ‘Turn inward, sinner, to your soul. Look at it dominated by vanity and ill-will, so fettered that it cannot break loose; and mourn for it.
We may say that one has only to probe the depths of his own wretchedness, ignorance, neediness and unbridled passions and make an honest reckoning with his conscience, and he will mourn, weep and lament more deeply for himself than at the funeral of anyone else, however dear. His own plight is so much the closer to him as it is within him. Why have sympathy for others, but none for yourself?
Isaac of Stella’2
