Wait for the Lord; / be strong and take heart / and wait for the Lord. (Ps. 27:14)

Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. (Matt. 11:28-30)

There are places of experience in life that unless we have entered ourselves, we can only theorise and paraphrase what we have read. As a much younger theologian on my pastoral calls, though with the best of intentions in my heart, I still could not rightly grasp the depths of the suffering when comforting a parent who had lost their child, or of a distressed soul that was in a battle with a terminal disease. It is precisely the same when it comes to those interior and invisible battles that we fight in the mind. One can see a broken arm in a cast, for example, and offer empathy, but a mind that is hurting could be dismissed, for the "cast" cannot be seen. The true understanding will invariably come only from those kindred souls who have themselves entered into these deeper places of Gethsemane, where they, too, have agonised in their own pain and asked of their Creator to lift the cup of sorrows from their heart.

Being an Eastern Orthodox theologian I had the most wonderful literature in my hands, most of it meaningful and impactful, and if it helped when I was ministering, and indeed it did, but only for a while. How were those suffering souls to get through the night, when the momentary comfort offered to them as a sweet balm, was to wear off after we had all gone home. Who could in truth understand the depths of their anguish? As Henri Nouwen had said from his own experience, only “wounded healers” are able to bring healing to others. Is this not once and for all demonstrated by our Lord’s sacrifice on the Cross? Later we will find this divine charity expressed in the early church’s first Christological hymn that pointed to the God-Man’s kenosis, Phil. 2:5:11: “And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross!” (v. 8). Of course, this cannot mean that we do not reach out to others whose pain we might not fully comprehend. As Christians, as human beings, we are called to minister to all peoples, but as we are told by our great teachers of pastoral wisdom, there are times when our presence alone could oftentimes be enough. They refer to this ‘being there’ as a “compassionate presence.” A tender-hearted embrace could mean much more than some well-intentioned parroted words. To console someone who is on the precipice of despair requires love in practise, and large amounts of intercessory prayer.

Being weak in health as you yourself are, I cannot fail to feel much sympathy for your plight. But kind Providence is not only more wise than we are; It is also wise in a different way. It is this thought which must sustain us in all our trials, for it is consoling, as no other thought is. (Elder Macarius of Optina)

Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true. (Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning)

What then of suicidal ideation that originally prompted this small reflection. To begin with some fundamentalist communities might have us believe this is unacceptable for a practising Christian. But for those who are familiar with the Word of God, and with the hagiographical tradition of our Church, they would know that melancholia, for this is the correct word and not the commonly expressed depression, and which William Styron did very well to point out in recent times, is not unfamiliar to those who have loved our Lord. And not ironically, to those who have been the more passionately desirous of His presence in their lives, often the hurt could be more— for His absence at certain hours could seem unbearable. This condition is particularly evident in the lives of the Old Testament prophets who were tasked with some outwardly impossible missions by an “invisible” God that was not yet manifested in the Incarnation. Do recall those persevering prophets, Job, Elijah, King David, Heman son of Korah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and the others.

If the only home I hope for is the grave, if I spread out my bed in the realm of darkness, if I say to corruption, ‘You are my father,’ and to the worm, ‘My mother’ or ‘My sister,’ where then is my hope—who can see any hope for me? (Job 17:13-15)

Elijah was afraid and ran for his life. When he came to Beersheba in Judah, he left his servant there, while he himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness. He came to a broom bush, sat down under it and prayed that he might die. “I have had enough, Lord,” he said. “Take my life; I am no better than my ancestors.” Then he lay down under the bush and fell asleep. (1 Kgs 19:3:5)

All of these souls, mortal and subject to the uncertainties of the human condition, like you and me, entered into the deepest depths of melancholia. After that tribulation to emerge giants of our faith. To become first-hand witnesses not only to the power of prayer and the attainable knowledge of our Creator, but also testifying to the extraordinary resilience of the human spirit, as Christ Himself did reveal in Gethsemane in facing that most momentous crisis of his earthly life, to ultimately place everything before the Father: “If you are willing, remove this cup for me; nevertheless, not my will, but yours be done” (Lk. 22:42). Ministering to those brothers and sisters experiencing this compressing trial, what has helped in my prayer time with them, is to confess that this test has also not been absent from me; that not a few of our saints have themselves been tempted by this dread and have been delivered from their mental ordeal; importantly, they [we] are not to feel guilty, for these responses to life are not absent from the universal human experience. Moreover, to reflect daily on the covenantal promises of our God:

No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to mankind. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it. (1 Cor. 10:13)

We have an additional advantage, while secular psychotherapy aims to treat the mind or psyche, in the Church our pastoral counselling also seeks the healing of the nous, the “eye of the soul” or spiritual centre, and through participation, too, in the life-affirming and medicinal Sacraments. We have been blessed with many spiritual tools to heal and to comfort the deeply distressed, to remind them as often as might be needed, they are not alone—and that one keeps living because they are precious and unique in the divine providence of their Maker, that He has wonderful plans for them from even before they were born: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born, I set you apart” (Jer. 1:5). Be an active listener and remind the broken brother or sister, their story matters and that their best days are still ahead. Celebrate their achievements and inspire them to keep moving forward with endurance and perseverance. This dreadful sadness that is at this very hour compressing their spirit, making it seem that all is lost, is not their final destination. We are not broken. We are healing. They are us and we are them. There is still work to do before we finish the race—and new opportunities to love and to be loved, to create and to inspire creation in others. Day by day, all will be well. Keep busy with meaningful things and surround yourself with sympathetic, gentle souls. A new day dawns tomorrow. Wait for it.

The nose bleeds increased in frequency, this started to scare me because there were times when I could ‘hear’ little slingshot ‘explosions’ inside my head. It was the beginning of my lifelong battle with high blood pressure. Like the experienced painter, I knew that I would have to keep stretching the canvas. I remember, too, when sleep would finally approach to bow before the icon of the weeping prophet, Jeremiah, and to entreat him for his intercessions for he knew better than most that place of the lamentations. I would then cross my body with holy oils from Mother’s collection to be ‘prepared’ for I could not be sure that I would live to see the next day. The thought of suicide had begun to again infiltrate my mind and would gradually become one of my most unforgiving demons. The more I wanted to put an end to my life, the more I wanted to live. It was this that made it all the more unbearable and excruciating. The unregenerate and the regenerate life-forces within me were fighting for control. They would oftentimes spill into each other, like unconscious memory which streams into the present.

This is close as I would come to some intellectual comprehension of the harmony and dichotomy of that heartbreakingly iconic pericope where most in Christendom have drawn their sense of faith and divine providence from, “Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.” (Matt. 26:39)

Organizations to a large extent help shape identity which makes individuals definable and recognizable. How much more faith-based institutions with their overwhelming references to community and fidelity. I had lost my identity or at least very large pieces of it. My identification with the Church was ‘total commitment’. It was everything for Christ. I felt abandoned and whatever gifts I might have once possessed I now considered wasted. Already in the grip of that horrible feeling of having the life sucked out of you, left with nothing: an empty shell. There is a marvellous title to one of Philip Roth’s books that describes this condition perfectly, The Humbling, even the first line: “He had lost his magic”.

There were more pieces to the puzzle which would catch me by surprise and often enough shock me, this troubling restlessness within me and my inability to compromise were together friend and enemy. I had this overriding sense of a ‘constant homesickness’. It was nostalgia for something I had lost, or perhaps had never even possessed. Maybe, I had somewhere scribbled in a book of notes, it was something like the ‘youzi’: “the wandering man” of the great Chinese poetic canon of the Six Dynasties gripped by the need for spiritual fulfilment he would go on journeys both real and imaginary. But I knew, somehow I knew though I could never quite explain it to myself or to others, that while I had great appreciation for the drama and lessons of Sisyphus I did not too often, even during the most difficult of days feel myself to be condemned to a senseless cycle of repetitions. I could ‘see’ or ‘sense’ sometimes clearly and other times more dimly the light at the end of this long and dark tunnel.

We leave a place never to return, but we spend the rest of our life reflecting over it and going back, often without realizing it. For me this location is ‘Redfern’, it is both a physical and spiritual place. It is the Greek Orthodox Cathedral and my religious name, Jeremiah. It is the priesthood and where I was tonsured into another existence. We never can wholly abandon these places. They become oracles to be written on the inside of our bones. It is like Joyce who was desperate to leave Dublin but never could, and Faulkner who thought he could escape Lafayette County, or more recently Armen Melikian in Journey to Virginland who cannot forget Armenia despite his exile from the homeland of his forefathers. These writers like many others, spend a great deal of their lives going back. The clever thing is to admit to our ‘longing’, to embrace it, to take what is good and to transform the rest. The nostalgia, this longing unto sickness to return, is not all bad and is the central refrain in one of our earliest ‘blockbusters’, the great Homeric epic, The Odyssey.[1]

As you set out for Ithaka

A number of Cavafy’s poems re-work the Homeric myths. Ithaka is the most famous and the last of these designated “Homeric poems”. The first time I heard this masterpiece read, in its original tongue, was when I was still an undergraduate studying Modern Greek at Sydney University in the early 1980s. It was either Michael Jeffreys or Alfred Vincent who recited it for us. Outside the poetry of the paschal canon it had struck me then as the most beautiful thing I had ever heard. I could not have imagined then, young and forward-looking, that there would come a time when hardly a few weeks would pass when I did not ‘return’ to Constantine Cavafy’s luminous Ithaka. “And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you. Wise as you will have become, so full of experience, you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.”[2]

Dwelling

“It’s both a noun and a verb. It holds both spatial and temporal meanings. It has taken on a negative connotation of immobility and paralysis, and at the same time it is a word, like home, that evokes powerful positive associations. What is this strange split in our psyche, this ambivalence about residence? The word itself embodies the tension between our awareness of perpetual change and our desire to have something solid and unchangeable to hold on to as we move through the world. It is a beautiful word in just this way, balancing yin and yang, reminding us that it is always possible to find movement within stillness, and stillness within movement.”[3]

Saint Sabbas Monastery

And so I moved on, to the cold and fiery desert. But not idealizing any place for earth is still earth. “There never was, and never will be a place on earth free from sorrows. The only sorrow-less place possible is the heart, when the Lord is present there.” (St Nikon of Optina)

Founded by Saint Sabbas in 483 [478?] CE and overlooking the Kidron valley in the Judean desert, The Holy Lavra of Saint Sabbas the Sanctified is reckoned the oldest ongoing inhabited monastery in the world.[4] In Arabic it is known as Mar Saba. To see this marvel of building ingenuity with its honeycomb architecture where one cell connects seamlessly to the next and a little chapel takes you through to another larger one; where hidden staircases and underground tunnels lead to secret antechambers and to escape routes; and deep blues and earthen reds and golden browns shimmer resplendently in the sun, is to imagine a mysterious jewel in the desert. On walls you will find the signed graffiti of young boy monks who grew-up to become old and venerated Patriarchs. I came to this legendary place once ‘heaven’ to hundreds if not thousands of monks (if you are to include the mountainous surrounds) now down to fewer than a dozen, after having resigned from my teaching post when I had not only discovered the name of my ‘benefactor’ but also found it increasingly difficult to settle into my ‘new’ layperson persona. This was no simple pilgrimage. I arrived seeking to make atonement in what is considered the harshest monastery in Christendom, to find a way with the help of Abbot Seraphim (who was one of the “three”) to make some small amends for taking my hand off “the plough”. I also wanted to discover if I could live here, in the desert where there are no games, as one of the monastic community.

And if Katina’s high school reunion was held a day earlier or a day later than on that fairy-tale February evening in 1994 where without any warning I asked her to marry me, I would have returned. My cell already decided [I had asked for the ‘luxury’ of a book rack and for the window to be repaired], there to spend the remainder of my natural life.

I’ve been through the desert

“I’ve been through the desert on a horse with no name, It felt good to be out of the rain. In the desert you can remember your name, ‘Cause there ain’t no one for to give you no pain.

La,la,la,la,la,la,la,la,la…”

— America

[1] Here is a very good little discussion on the relevance of Homer’s Odyssey which you can share with family and friends: http://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-homers-odyssey-82911

[2] http://www.cavafy.com/

[3] Andrew Peterson, The Next Ten Minutes, (Atria Books: New York, 2010), p. 251f.

[4] https://orthodoxwiki.org/Holy_Lavra_of_St._Savas_(Jerusalem)

Journal

This day is not your final destination

Fragments from a diary continued