Hello, my dear ones! You know how sometimes it feels like there is no breath of life left in
you and all that's left is the nothingness and the dust that has no hope and no strength to carry on?
I suppose we all go through this because it's part of the human experience of being in this world,
it's part of not belonging to this world, and as horrible as the experience is, it is in
fact a very valuable time and it can teach us an immensely valuable lesson: that we do not belong
here. You can eat everything you want to eat until you cannot see it any more, you can---I don't
know---whatever you want to do, watch whatever you want to watch, you can go wherever you want to go,
be with whoever, whomever you want to be in whatever way you want to be, you can do anything
for as long as you want, but there is a void underneath it all and when that void bites you
that's like a little death that has taken over our soul, and again as dreadful as that experience is,
it hides in itself an immensely valuable truth, as I said, the truth that we do not belong here,
that this is not us, that this is just part of the journey that takes us from nothingness,
from dust into the fullness of our being in the image of Christ. There are moments for
all of us when you simply cannot pray because how can you pray when there is no prayer?
how can you pray when there are no words? how can you pray when there is no will to pray?
when there is no desire? when there are no words? You have to somehow find the words
to keep you going when there is no heart in you to hope; you have to somehow hope against hope;
you have to reduce your life to an instinct of God, to an instinct of salvation, to an
instinct of reorienting yourself towards life, towards light, towards hope; and
the deeper the bite of this thing, of this experience, the more difficult
survival really becomes, because in these cases it's all about survival,
a determination to not abandon even as you lie down on the floor, metaphorically or physically,
with hardly any strength, to just keep on breathing as you lie down on that floor
like a corpse in a grave, you have to hold on to waiting, you have to hold on to the faith that
some miracle will happen and that life will be returned into this course which you have become,
you have to be stubborn, you have to have a sense of holy, sacred stubbornness in you; you have to
be like a weed in relation to Christ; you have to be like a virus, like a seagull, like these
birds that are never defeated, that will feed on anything and everything in order to survive:
be a weed, be a virus, never let go, be stubborn in your determination not to let go of Christ
and pray with the prayer of the dead, because there is such a thing. Don't forget
that Christ descended into hell on Holy Great Saturday in order to bring the good news to
those who had been long dead into hell, and those among them who had been there holding on
to hope against hope, holding on to an instinct of salvation, holding on to an instinct that despite
every evidence, despite every proof to the contrary, light will overcome darkness;
those among them who held onto this instinct were able to recognize Christ for who He is and
to receive the good news and to be saved; as you lie down dead, dead because of your sinfulness;
when your sin has suffocated you and you feel that there is no way forward, no way out;
when you lie down dead because of how tired you've become of everything and
everyone, of trying everything for everyone including yourself and always
failing, always failing to find a way; when you feel that there's no way forward and you lie
down dead because of just the overwhelming sadness and paralysis of the world, this
spirit of despondency which has grabbed the world and which will unavoidably bite you
if you are a true Christian praying for the world, because if you are a soldier of Christ
fighting for the world you are going to be fought by everything, every spirit that fights the world;
as you lie down dead for any reason, remember in your silent soul, in your silent heart,
remember those words of the Resurrection: Christ is risen from the dead. You are the dead
and Christ---we're not saying will be resurrected from the dead---He is risen from the dead;
as I lie down dead in my tiredness or my despondency or my sinfulness, Christ is already
risen from this dead, He was reason, He is risen, He will forever be risen from this dead, and the
dead that you can become and the dead of this world, when there are no words, when your heart is
cold like a stone, when your brain is a void, when your body doesn't serve you, quite the contrary;
when everything that you are and everything that you know is fighting against you for any reason:
hold on to a sense of sacred stubbornness and belief that where you fail, Christ
will succeed; that where you've collapsed into death, Christ will be resurrected and in His
resurrection you already are a partaker; when everything in you and around you is called dead
when there is no hope in you, remember that there is a prayer of the dead and everything that we
treat as a secondary prayer, everything that we treat as merely empty tools like scaffolding for
prayer but not real prayer, things like fasting, things like prostrations, even extreme things that
can only be used in extreme situations like I remember the examples of many Saints who
simply stood through the night with their hands lifted up towards Christ, saying nothing,
praying nothing, barely breathing but holding on, lifting up their hands; I remember Saints who
covered themselves with chains or carried rocks through the night: my own beloved Saint Seraphim,
whom we call the Saint of joy, in his late years just before his death was seen by
the novices in the monastery after he had returned to the monastery from the desert,
he was seen carrying rocks, carrying wood from one part of the monastery to the other, he would
just carry, an old man who could barely walk any more because of what he had endured in the desert
of the Russian forest, he would carry these heavy logs from one side of the monastery to the other,
and once all the logs were in that side of the monastery he would start carrying them
back in their initial place; and they did all of this because this is the scaffolding of prayer,
and when there is no prayer alive in you, hold on to the scaffolding, hold on to what
you have even if it feels like nothing; that nothing, my dear brother and my dear sister,
that nothing is more valuable than all the tears that you can shed when you feel that grace is
upon you, because when you shed those rivers of tears, you shed them not because of who you are or
because of something you have done for Christ but because Christ Himself is blessing you and because
Christ Himself is dwelling in you with the Father and the Holy Spirit as He told us that He would,
and those tears and those rivers of prayer that just flow out of your heart, they are not yours,
they are Christ praying in you as Saint Isaac the Syrian and all the tradition of the Church is
teaching us; but this nothingness, this prayer of the dead, this scaffolding of prayer rather than
prayer itself truly is you and truly is yours; these are the two coins that truly belong to you:
if you offer Christ these coins when everything in you, when everything around you---your experience,
your feelings, your heart---tells you this is not worthy of Christ, but if you look at yourself
and say: These two coins is all I am, this dead man is all I am and this is what I offer You;
from the depth of your death, from the depth of your sinfulness, from the depth of your despair,
then those two coins, this corpse which we are is a greater gift and will bring
more joy to Christ than all the tears in the world, because those tears do not come out of us
but out of His grace. Remember all the saints who have gone through what you are going now; remember
their tiredness, remember their collapse under their own despair and sinfulness and feeling of
accomplishing nothing and failing at everything, of being reduced to just matter, just matter.
Think of Saint Seraphim, think of, think of Saint Anthony the Great, the amazing Saint of
Egypt who lived in a tomb for so long: he did not go in a tomb just by accident,
he went in the tomb because he was dead, dead to the world, dead to himself and in that depth,
in the tomb, he has experienced death to Christ as well because this is who we are,
and as we grow into our humanity we experience everything that humanity is, and humanity
is large enough to contain within itself God Himself and the Kingdom as we have seen in
Christ's incarnation, but also the depth of hell, which is why---remind
yourself again and again---which is why Christ descends into hell on Holy Great Saturday:
in order to bring salvation to those among the dead who despite everything hold on to
this sacred stubbornness and like a weed they do not die and like a virus they refuse to let go.
Be what you need to be in order for death not to completely swallow you and remind
yourself---may this be your mantra, may this be your breathing in and your breathing out---that
Christ is risen from the dead, He is already risen from this dead that I am and the dead that you
are and the dead that anyone who partakes of human nature will be sooner or later in their lives.
We are not alone in this:
Every human being has experienced death, every human being has experienced despair, even
the perfect humanity of Christ: Why have you abandoned me? He said on the cross.
Christ is risen from the dead, my dear ones,
and as we approach Christmas, as we approach His incarnation in the flesh and the blood of
the Holy Mother of God, never let go of this purpose of His: He became incarnate so that in
our death He may act as the burst of life, the act of life, the One who is
in the depth of our death. Be blessed, my dear one, be blessed. Amen, amen, amen.