Main news for 28 January 2020

The Savior's words about responsibility for what is one's own and what is another's may at first glance seem strange: everyone knows that a person always treats what is his own more responsibly than what belongs to another, whether property or anything else is in question. But this is how it seems only at first glance, if one does not think about what a responsible attitude toward anything at all is, whether it is one's own or another's.

What, indeed, is responsibility? Where does it come from? Real responsibility is impossible without a freely and consciously made choice, when a person spiritually determines himself with respect to his own life. Responsibility is the reverse side of the freedom of choice realized by a person.

But for a choice in a concrete situation to be truly free, a person's whole life must be conscious. For this a person must be aware of every desire and striving of his, every intention directed toward someone or something. If there is nothing of the kind, then there will be no conscious desire in a person's life. But, it would seem, everyone desires something, and most people desire quite strongly, while very few, alas, are aware of themselves and their life. What then should one think about the desires of the majority? As is clear, it is hardly possible to call them conscious.

But such desires can hardly be considered desires in the proper sense of the word: a real desire is always spiritual; it is an act of will in which a person gives account to himself fully and to the end. An unconscious desire, however, is only a passion, an emotion, an affect, a force that has seized the person and that he can neither recognize nor control. And when it seizes a person, that toward which he passionately strives seems to him unconditionally his own, absolutely necessary, and even absolutely inseparable from himself.

A person cannot imagine himself without "his own" - not because he has understood and recognized what place in his life the object of his desires should occupy, but because he has merged with it almost to complete indistinguishability and certainly to complete inseparability. To take such "his own" away from a person is the same as cutting off his arm or leg, or even worse, a part of his soul. In such a case people most often say, "he tore it from his heart."

Yet of course there can be no question of responsibility in such a case: what responsibility can there be where a person seized by the desire to obtain or hold on to "his own" does not even possess himself? But with what belongs to another, with what is "not one's own," nothing of this kind can exist by definition. In order to treat responsibly what is not the object of one's own passion, what is indifferent to you, true responsibility is needed precisely.

And if it exists, a person will be able, first, to distinguish what is his own from what only seems so to him, and second, to treat what is his own as consciously and responsibly as everything entrusted to him. This is not surprising: a person who lives consciously cannot fail to understand that even what is his own is only entrusted to him by God, that it has been given to him for use, not for undivided and unconditional possession. And he treats it accordingly, in the same way as everything given to him and entrusted to him.