Christ is Risen!
Many readers have noticed that after over a decade we have removed the Asser translation of the Septuagint (‘the Orthodox King James Old Testament’, including the Asser translation of the Psalter) from this website.
This is because it has just become available on Lulu.com in paperback. Within days it will be available in hardcover and epub. CTOS should soon be publishing the Pentateuch.
There is a Russian-American saying about converts, based on the fact that the Russian word ‘konvert’ means an envelope. The saying is: The trouble with ‘konverty’ (envelopes) is that they are often empty and often come unstuck’.
If this sounds unfair and racist we should remember first of all that today’s Russian Church is a Church of converts, about 150 million (including those now departed this life), who were all baptised there over the last 30 years.
I would also like to recall how a certain person, trying to justify the imbecilities of a certain priest said to me recently: ‘Yes, but he’s ‘a cradle Orthodox’ (an awful expression – there is no such thing). To which I replied: ‘So was Stalin’.
It is noticeable that nowhere do the apostles refer to themselves as converts, nor were they seen as converts. And yet they were. So what is the difference between a convert and an Orthodox?
Converts, in the sense that the word is used here, are neophytes, that is, they are new to the faith. The question is then, how do we stop being new to the faith and make the faith into an instinctive part of our nature, how do we become ‘old to the faith’?
It is sometimes said that ‘converts have zeal, but Orthodox have knowledge’. This is incorrect. If it were true, it would mean that you could simply become Orthodox by reading many, many books. It is just the opposite (1). In fact, converts have zeal, but Orthodox have experience. So, in order to stop being a convert, you have simply to obtain experience. This means mixing with Orthodox, senior to ourselves, who have experience, and following them in practice, not in theory.
A very simple example is how some converts think that they can ‘become Orthodox’ by copying the externals of monastics. I remember 40 years ago how, for some reason I could not understand then, male converts seemed to believe that they had to have a beard and long hair and female converts had to dress in dreary long black skirts and put huge cloths over their heads. Both sexes had to wrap prayer-knots around their wrists and wear some sort of strange boots. This was the uniform of the convert and you could spot them a mile away. It was anything but elegant and seemed to owe more to hippydom than anything else.
The strange thing was that none of the Orthodox did any of this: Orthodox men (apart from clergy) were always clean-shaven and Orthodox women dressed in brightly-coloured, just-below-the-knee-length skirts and dresses and wore small and modest head-coverings. All the converts had to do was look around themselves and copy, rather than shut themselves away into convert ghettoes and hothouses, guru clubs and cliques.
The apostle Paul says that men should cut their hair (1 Cor, 11, 14). He writes this in a context where he rebukes effeminacy. This is right, we agree with him. St Paisios of the Holy Mountain would take a pair of scissors to laymen who came to him with long hair and a long beard.
At this point some Protestants, of the Methodist or Baptist sort especially, may ask the question, why then do Orthodox monks (and also some monastic-minded priests) have long hair and long beards? The simple answer is because they are under obedience. They are not doing it out of some delusion that they are holy, they are doing it out of obedience, to their Abbot. In this sense, male monastics are not ‘men’, for they belong to a different order, outside the world.
Orthodoxy is not some weird sect, where people dress strangely. It is a way of life. It is in fact quite simply the Christian way of life, where people’s actions are the only thing that counts. It is as simple as that.
Note:
A British man, who was forced into joining the Patriarchate of Constantinople as he was not allowed by his government employer to join the Russian Orthodox Church (so much for freedom in the UK), asked me about patriotism and nationalism and how we can be British but also ‘support Russia’.
Nationalism is an artificial, manmade construct of the State and entails racist dislike and even hatred for everyone who is not of your own ‘nationality’. It is therefore not Christian. Though there are examples everywhere, Nazism and Zionism are prominent examples of racism. The United Nations agrees.
Conversely, patriotism entails a love for the positive sides of the country where, by God’s will, you have been born. It is, in other words, a love for God’s creation and inspiration. It also implies the innate ability to love the positive sides of other countries where others have been born.
As Christian patriots, we ‘seek the kingdom of heaven first’. This means that we obey our governments only inasmuch as they obey the Gospel. In other words, we are first of all patriots of God. We do not put any Establishment/Deep State, those artificial constructs, first. However, in obedience to the Apostle Paul, we do pray for Non-Orthodox secular authorities. Moreover, if they are Orthodox Christian, we pray for them by name.
Some people who claim to be Orthodox, but in fact are still pagans, are shocked that we pray for Non-Christian authorities, for example, for enemies of Russia, Greece, Romania etc. These people have not yet understood that the very definition of Christian is someone who not only loves his friends, but also loves (and so prays for) his enemies – so that they may stop doing evil.
Therefore, the old words of the German national anthem ‘Deutschland ueber alles’ (Germany above all) are a piece of pagan blasphemy. (The French national anthem is even worse – it is full of a barbaric desire for bloodshed). As for the 18th-century invented British imperialist national anthem ‘God save our gracious Queen/King’, it seems a good wish, but when the anthem goes on to proclaim ‘Scatter her/his enemies, And make them fall; Confound their politics, Frustrate their knavish tricks’, we begin to sense nationalism.
As for ‘supporting Russia’ (or Romania or Greece or any other ‘Orthodox country’), this is only possible if that country is actually Christian. (Obviously, I use the word ‘Christian’ as a synonym for ‘Orthodox’). Thus, I have no time for today’s corrupt oligarch Russia, created by the consumerist West, just as I had no time for Soviet atheist Russia, nor for the pre-Revolutionary aristocratic traitors who carried out the anti-Christian palace coup (‘Russian Revolution’) of February 1917. Inasmuch as the ‘Reds’ were atheists, Orthodox could not support them. However, according to St John of Shanghai and a host of others in the emigration (and I can confirm this from my own experience), 90% of the ‘Whites’ also had no time for the Church.
In other words, we are patriots of God, patriots of the Church, patriots of Orthodoxy. Our patriotism for countries is strictly limited to their Christian content. Thus, I am a patriot of Christian (= Orthodox) England, but also of Orthodox Scotland, Wales and Ireland, as also of Orthodox Russia, Orthodox Lithuania, Orthodox Greece, Orthodox Argentina or Orthodox anywhere else. But I have no time for anti-Orthodox Britain or for anti-Orthodox Russia.
Q: Who will be saved?
A: This question is dangerous as it may contain the pride of the pharisee. Really we should not even be asking it. It may imply that somehow we want to take on God’s role as Judge of the Universe. The only valid question we may ask is: Will I be saved? Salvation is personal. And our own salvation is the only thing that we can do anything about.
The fact is that no external label can save us: Orthodox, Catholic, Evangelical or whatever. God is the only Knower of hearts, for only He knows what truly is in our heart and He judges by that.
Some people will tell you, for example, that cradle Orthodox (an absurd term invented by converts with an inferiority complex) will be saved. This is also absurd. Stalin was a ‘cradle Orthodox’ (and also an expelled seminarian). Arius and Nestorius were ‘cradle Orthodox’ (and also had clerical rank). The fact we are baptised as babies makes no difference. What is important is that we were brought up as Orthodox and then, above all, remain Orthodox. (Quite a few priest’s children were brought up as Orthodox but do not remain in the Church, including many priest’s children who became infamous Bolsheviks and persecuted the Church in Soviet Russia).
Moreover, the Mother of God and the apostles were not ‘cradle’ Orthodox! They were ‘converts! But they are saints. And here we come to the key point. When you are depressed by various clerical scandals, always remember what is vital: Follow the saints! We know that the saints have been are saved. This has been revealed to us. The rest is speculation. Forget it.
Q: I recently received a link from someone about the controversy in the USA within the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese (now close to bankruptcy), relating to the 21 monasteries close to Elder Ephraim. A discussion about the toll-houses then ensued. Personally I don’t have any clear idea about what the correct teaching is on toll-houses. To me the idea often presented sounds a bit legalistic and more like a Roman Catholic or Calvinist approach to salvation. I mean, if almost everyone goes to hell then what’s the point of even trying? Could you please comment on the whole toll-house “issue”?
A: The Church teaching on the twenty Aerial Toll-Houses concerns life after death, what happens to the soul after it leaves the body. After death the demons attempt to take the soul towards hell, while the angels attempt to take it towards heaven. After an examination of the soul, lasting the equivalent of forty earthly days, comes the Particular Judgement, when the soul is appointed a place of rest. This place of rest can ‘improve’, ‘floating’ upwards, depending on the prayers of the living for the soul, i. e. depending on how much that soul is loved on earth. In this place of rest it awaits the Last Judgement.
This teaching is found in virtually every Church Father and dates back as such to the fourth century, though there are references to it in the Apostle Paul (Ephesians 6, 1-13). The most detailed account of the twenty toll-houses occurs in the Life of St Gregory of Thrace, dating from the 10th century, which describes how at each toll-house the soul is tested for each type of sin. This is the teaching and that is that. It is all so simple really. However, in our sad human reality, this teaching has been distorted, pulled in different directions by impure souls. The first problems arose in the USA among converts to ROCOR 1970s. Today, they have come back, for exactly the same reasons, again in the USA, but now in the highly Americanized Greek Orthodox Archdiocese.
I think you put your finger on the problem with your words: ‘To me the idea often presented sounds a bit legalistic and more like a Roman Catholic or Calvinist approach to salvation’. And that is exactly it: converts from strict Catholicism (Augustinianism) and strict Protestantism (Calvinism) do present the teaching as legalistic, frighteningly so. There is no surprise at all that the same problem has come up twice within forty years, each time in the USA. The USA was founded on intolerant, witch-hunting Calvinists who refused to live in Protestant England because it was not strict enough for them! Ever since the USA has been the land of extreme and aggressive intolerance, of Creationism, fundamentalism, phariseeism and racism and also of virulent liberalism and intolerant atheism (political correctness), where you can be sacked for saying that you believe that the practice of homosexuality is a sin.
Of course, the teaching on the toll-houses can be presented by the contemporary scribes and pharisees (literalists and ritualists in modern English – and woe unto them) as a cause for despair. Why bother when we are all doomed anyway? (As the Calvinists say). This is because they see everything literally, without God’s Mercy. Such fundamentalists, always aggressive, create depression and despair because they have no love.
On the other hand, there are also today’s liberals and ecumenists, the modern saducees (like the very Protestant and very aggressive anti-monastic lay activists in the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese in the USA), who will tell you that this teaching does not exist! These are the sort of people who have painted a fresco (as there exists in one Greek ‘Orthodox’ monastery in England), where they show the Last Judgement without showing hell, only heaven. When I asked one of the monks why this was, I was told that it was because we shall probably all be saved! Here again, why bother? Origen triumphs in the Paris School.
The teaching on the toll-houses is clear and balanced. After death our souls will be tested and we shall find out whether we are closer to angels or closer to demons. But even this is not our last chance. If people on earth loved us and so still remember us and pray for us, we can been drawn far away from hell and brought to the gates of heaven by their prayers.
(A question from Vyacheslav, aged 10).
First of all, dinosaurs were only discovered 200 years ago, long after the Bible was written down. On the other hand, since the Bible, right at the beginning, very, very briefly mentions the period when there were dinosaurs, you may ask why it does not mention them. That is simply because when dinosaurs existed, people had not yet been created, so there was no-one to see dinosaurs and describe them.
However, there is a much more important reason why the Bible does not mention dinosaurs. You see, the Bible does not mention giraffe, zebra or kangaroos and lots of other things. But they all existed at the time when the stories in the Bible were written down. This is because the Bible is not interested in them. The Bible is not a handbook on fossils, animals, insects, astronomy, engineering, geography, medicine, laws, business, history, French, maths and all sorts of other things. For example, if I want to know about dinosaur fossils, I will read a book on dinosaur fossils, but I will not expect that book to tell me about God, or what I can do to become a better person and save myself from bad things (salvation), like the Bible.
So, if I want to know how to fix my car, I get a handbook on my car. But if I want to know how I can fix my life, then I read the Bible.
In fact, we can say that there are two types of book. The first type will tell me about all sorts of things that we might see in the world today or might have seen in the world in the past or even what we might see in the future. These books are called fiction and non-fiction. They can be compared to a microscope, which is used for looking in detail at people and the world around us.
Then there are ‘The Books’, what we call in English the Bible, which means precisely ‘The Books’. Now the Bible only mentions people and the world around us in passing. This is because it is not a microscope, but a telescope. And it is a telescope which we use to see beyond the universe, beyond creation, to God. In this way we can understand how our whole life changes because God is here and so we can make sense of our past, present and future and how we can save ourselves from bad and become better.
So, the Bible is a book that is very different from all other books: it is not a microscope to look at life around us, at Creation, but a telescope to look at the source of life, the Creator, so then we can make sense of our life.
Introduction
After the revolution of the last generation, the generation since the end of the Cold War, what is the situation of the two parts of the Russian Orthodox Church today, of the Russian Patriarchate and of the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR)? Once they were bitterly divided. And now?
A. The Russian Patriarchate of the Past
1. Attitudes to the Outer World
In the bad old days, a few prominent bishops of the Patriarchate were forced to sit in front of cameras and tell blatant lies, for example, that there was no persecution of the Church inside Russia. Why? Simply because if they did not, their priests and parishes would suffer. As hostages, they took the political sin of lieing onto themselves. Personally, such blatant lies never really bothered me. I knew why they were doing it. Frankly, I thought the sin was more with those who asked them such compromising questions. However, something else did bother me.
2. Attitudes to the Inner World
What bothered me was hypocrisy. There were certain bishops and others of the paralysed Patriarchate who were utterly corrupt, whether sexually or financially. And that corruption rotted all of Church life. Those people were not Christians. As a victim of them at that time, I know what I am talking about.
B. ROCOR of the Past
1. Attitudes to the Outer World
In the bad old days, ROCOR in the USA sometimes took CIA money. That bothered me. At that time, quite a few in ROCOR worked for various anti-Soviet (in fact, anti-Russian) Western spy agencies. These people have today almost all left the Church or else died of old age. Today, for example, I know of people who have joined the Paris Exarchate because they are not allowed to join either part of the Russian Church as they work as spies at GCHQ or spy agencies in Paris. Loyalty to the Western Establishment comes first for them, Christ second. That is clearly wrong.
2. Attitudes to the Inner World
Hypocrisy in the old ROCOR also bothered me. Some considered that as long as you were anti-Communist, you were fine, you could be as anti-missionary and racist as you wanted, as well as practise abortion. I could quote names. Fortunately, such outrageous phariseeism was the domain of a minority.
C. The Russian Patriarchate Today
1. Attitudes to the Outer World
Today, the Patriarchate is a Church of 150 million converts and various neophyte deformations can be found on the fringes. For example, we can find secularizing, pro-Soviet attitudes, the arrogance and racism of the old ‘Soviet tank’ mentality that simply wants to barge in and take over everything. This type of imperialism, with an undiscriminating admiration for the present State, pays no attention to pastoral matters and building up parish life, has little understanding of families and children. It is ritualistic, careerist and money-orientated, its representatives never having suffered.
However, we can also find pro-Western (ecumenist, liberal, ‘diplomatic’) attitudes among those from a bourgeois background. They vilify the Soviet past, dismissing its positive preservation of re-Revolutionary cultural values, detest President Putin and adore the Atlanticist Prime Minister Medvedev.
2. Attitudes to the Inner World
We can also find a conservative, pietist movement. Piety is good, but pietism generally means ritualism, sentimentalism, zeal without understanding, words without meaning. How many churches have we visited where services are read and sung in such a way that not a single word can be understood. This is what drives away men, meaning that services are attended by 80%-90% women. This may have been normal in abnormal Soviet times, when men would lose their jobs for attending church, but today it is abnormal. A huge work of catechism is under way. There is far to go.
We can also find a pro-social movement. Many of its representatives are very liberal, but they are at least beginning to deal with the huge social problems of post-Soviet society: massive and endemic corruption, alcoholism, abortion, drug-taking, environmental degradation, the handicapped…
D. ROCOR Today
1. Attitudes to the Outer World
Today, there is a danger of ROCOR becoming an Americanized Church, which simply refuses to understand the unpaid clergy and the plight of the mass of poor people who have come to us out of Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe. It does not want to know our sufferings. Here too there is a certain arrogance and spirit of takeover. ‘We are right, you are wrong’. Just as in today’s Russia, there can sometimes be a spirit of show, a concentration on externals. There can also be a spirit of mafia, a concentration of power among the first and wealthy, so that others are excluded as second-class citizens.
This lack of love is also fostering a liberalism, unheard of before in ROCOR, which comes from outside the Church. If unchallenged, this American-style cultural infiltration of ecumenist, liberal and ‘diplomatic’ attitudes from a bourgeois background will hamper our uncompromised witness.
2. Attitudes to the Inner World
Exactly as in the Patriarchate, we can also find a conservative, pietist movement. Piety is good, but pietism generally means ritualism, sentimentalism, zeal without understanding, words without meaning. How many churches have we visited where services are read and sung in such a way that not a single word can be understood. This can be accompanied by a self-righteous denial of the ROCOR past. ‘Everything was perfect’. This nostalgia of course is totally unjustified. Many ROCOR parishes are real and model communities, examples for the Patriarchate, but not all.
Pastorally, many are positively moving parish life into the inevitable multinational and bilingual future and creating real communities. Here there is also a danger – that Church life becomes only social, emotional, all words, the ascetic foundation forgotten, as in the Exarchate and the OCA.
Conclusion
Thus, we can see remarkable parallels, indeed convergence, between the two parts of the Russian Church. Clearly, only the positive trends are needed, all that is negative is not needed. Above all, we need the central unity of the spiritual food to be found in the purity of our Tradition of Holy Rus.
Introduction: Pastoral Work
There is a common myth that there is a difference between parish work and missionary work. In fact, they are exactly the same thing. All parish work is missionary work and all missionary work is parish work, because both are pastoral work. There are two impediments to real parish/ missionary/pastoral work. The first is practical and involves the disastrous lack of Orthodox infrastructure in Western countries, the second is ideological and involves what may politely be called ‘mononationalism’ – making those of other nationalities into second-class citizens.
Lack of Infrastructure and Mononationalism
Today, the Orthodox Church is faced with the interrupting and disrupting consequences of a century of persecution, apostasy and so decadence. With few devoted to the Church and knowledgeable about the Tradition, we lack premises, priests, singers and finance – and so we lack infrastructure. The second problem is one of racist mononationalism, the refusal to accept those of other nationalities into the Church. And yet we are called on by St Matthew (Matt. 28, 19) to ‘go, teach and baptise all nations’, that is, to accept all people, regardless of nationality, background and class.
We are called on to have no ethnic prejudices (for example, the abuse of accepting only Anglicans, only Greeks, only Russians etc into our churches). We are called on, for instance, not to impose alien customs like the Roman Catholic calendar, obligatory communion without confession, chairs and pews and other anti-Orthodox practices. Such novel customs just put off real Orthodox and are just as phyletist and divisive as using only a single, non-local language in services. Either we are Christians and obey the commandments (Matt. 28, 20), or else we are not,
Negativity and Realism
Some find us negative. In fact, we are realistic. Like Russians, we of the people, tell the truth, however unpleasant it may be to naïve idealists and those in a state of illusion. Nothing is ever built on illusion. That is building on sand. Evil is real. Indeed, if I wrote down all that I have experienced, then you would be shocked. But I do not write it down. St Paisius the Athonite said that when walking on Mt Athos you should remove the excrement of wild animals from the paths, so that others do not tread in it. That is my task here in the world, to remove such unnecessary and distasteful realities.
The Orthodox Church will again be seen to be the only Christianity, as in the Beginning
Today Anglicanism, like all other forms of Protestantism, and like their source in Roman Catholicism, is dying and in some places already dead in the first (Western) world. (In the second world, Eastern Europe, as in the third world, they are still very much alive, though in traditional local forms: thus, in this country, Anglicanism survives thanks largely to Africans and Afro-Carribeans and Catholicism largely thanks to Poles. But this will only last for another generation. All who participate in the Western secularist and supremacist myth are corrupted and destroyed by it sooner or later.
Therefore, we are seeing the end of the old movement of Anglican/ Episcopalian Halfodoxy, called ‘Anglicanism with icons’ etc. Where it is not dead, it is dying, except in places where it has been taken over by Eastern Europeans, Romanians, Moldovans and Baltic Russians, but is therefore no longer Halfodox. Both wings of such ex-Anglican convert groups, the moralizing liberals (liberals are always moralizing because they have no spirituality) and the sectarian, ultra-conservative Anglo-Catholics, have painted themselves into corners. We are English Orthodox, not Anglican Orthodox.
Conclusion: Real Missionary Work
Real missionary work is not conducted by shouting on street corners or ramming the Gospels down people’s throats like Protestant sectarians. The results, if any, are superficial and never last. We do not have plans, we simply have hope, faith and love. We do the services together and pray. The rest will come. This was how 75 years of Western atheist tyranny ended in the Russian Lands and 400 years of Turkish occupation ended in Greece. We will do the same here and end the 1,000 years of occupation by anti-Christian and Russophobic (the two go hand in hand) Western Establishment elites.
Introduction: Missionary/Pastoral Experience since the 1970s
My experience has been in England (Cambridge and the Fens for 3 years), France (14 years) and Portugal (6 months). I have also served in Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, USA and Australia, lived for a year in Greece, and spent several months since the 1970s in Russia and the Ukraine. I have been in England again for 21 years since 1997. Here I now cover 25,000 miles a year doing pastoral work all over the East, in four prisons and in ten counties – Sussex, Kent, Essex, Hertfordshire, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire, Norfolk and Lincolnshire.
Two Problems in the Diaspora Everywhere
The Need for New Missions
Every few months I am contacted by someone to open a ROCOR mission, this month in Wiltshire, three months ago it was Newcastle on Tyne. Two or three times a year we also have visits from people at church, asking for a new mission. We must also recall that we can and need start only on virgin territory, where there is no similar Russian Orthodox presence already, as there is for example in Oxford, Brighton, Portsmouth, Southampton, Nottingham and Derby. Also we recall that all missions must be in centres of population, where Orthodox already live and so provide a base and not be a project in the middle of nowhere.
Public Missions in the East to Date (apart from house chapels)
Twelve Other Possible Public Missions in Eastern England, God Willing, Remembering that We Orthodox Have no Plans, only Hopes, and We Depend on the Needs of the Grassroots, not on Theories and Pins in Maps
Conclusion: Sixteen Missions
With these sixteen missions we could cover Eastern England, providing access to Orthodoxy for 90% + of the 28 million population of the East within a 25 mile radius of each centre. If we achieved only half of this total, that would be a miracle. Give me the tools and I will finish the job, as I wrote 20 years ago.
Archpriest Andrew Phillips
Felixstowe, 1 February 2018
Here is a question that we sometimes hear. Immediately, it suggests jealousy. Why else would someone ask such a question, if they were not jealous of someone else? Jealousy is a terrible thing because it if you are jealous, it not only makes others feel bad, but it also makes you feel bad. But, if we think about it, what a strange question it is.
Whatever do we mean by success? Does it mean having a lot of money, a big house and a fancy car? If it does, I am not interested. After all, Christ did not have any of those things. As a matter of fact, he did not have any money, or a house or a car.
I think that a much more interesting question is: Why is he happier than me? I find this question interesting because it seems to me that happiness is much more important than success. Why?
Well, first of all, only a few people are ever going to be rich and have big houses and fancy cars. That is just a fact of life. Secondly, I have met such people and none of them seemed particularly happy to me. For example, I know a lady who is a millionaire. She is miserable. And I will tell you an English saying: she is so miserable that she is ‘as miserable as sin’. That’s a saying that we should think about. Oh, I’m sure that there are some people who are rich and ‘successful’ who are also happy. It is just that I have never met any of them.
On the other hand, I know a lot of people who are happy, but they are not rich and successful. They have very ordinary jobs, most of them rent a house or a flat, some of them don’t even have a car. So they are not really ‘successful’. So what makes them happy? It can’t be their age, because they are all ages, between 9 months and 90 years, it can’t be that they are men or women because they are both, it can’t be their nationality because they come from many different countries and it can’t be because they are married or single because they are both. So what is happiness?
Well, I’ve thought a lot about it and I have come to this conclusion. It seems to me that they are happy because they are content with what they have. They are content with it because they say to themselves: ‘This is what I have and I am going to make the best of it’.
For instance, I often visit people in prison. Now that is not a place where you want to be. I say this to the prisoners: ‘You are in a bad place. So how are you going to survive? You’re going to survive by making the best of it, by using prison as an opportunity to find good and do good. Prison’s your opportunity to prepare the rest of your life for after you get out. It’s a university of life’.
Life is what we make of it. We all know that there are good things and bad things in life. All we have to do to be happy is to look for the good things. We should not even make success into our aim. We should make being contented with what we have inside us and what we can do with it into our aim. Then we shall be happy. But if we spend our lives wanting more things, more money, bigger houses, fancier cars, bigger TVs, newer smartphones and tablets so that we can be happy, then all that will happen is that we will never be happy, because we will always be wanting more money, a bigger house, a fancier car, a bigger TV, a newer smartphone and tablet and so we shall never be satisfied, never content.
One of the worst things for this nowadays is the way that some people use Facebook. Because a lot of people use it to show off and bully others, to show how popular it seems that they are, how many likes they have, how many friends they have, how many holidays they have etc. For them, all of life is a competition and they are the winners. That makes others jealous or even depressed.
I will tell you something about Facebook:
Most, and probably all the people, who show off on Facebook are not happy. They are not ‘winners’, they are what is called ‘losers’. If you are happy, content, you do not need to show off or bully. You keep yourself to yourself, living your life (and not someone else’s) from day to day. And that for me is success.