What Judgment Feels Like

God struck me.

Image via Wikipedia

I committed a moral crime. One that many would excuse me for, but which I believe is serious. I have felt sorrow, and shame, and my guilt. But then I was struck in a very specific, very appropriate way. It seems unmistakeable. I didn’t expect it. But it happened.

First, it felt heavy. Like being hit once, heavily. Then it felt light, lenient that is, and with love. Then it felt just, and that it was necessary.

Do you know what it’s like to be punished by God? To be chastened? To be granted the sorrow of your crime in full measure? It is not something to try to avoid. Judgment is not to be avoided in itself. The evil that prompted it – that is the thing to avoid.

But to be scourged – it’s not cathartic in the way people want to suggest – in a sordid way.  People suggest that one is looking for a crime to be mitigated and erased. It isn’t. The crime is still there. We Orthodox hold to not forgetting our sins, to remembering them, in order to know what we are, and what we are not. My crime is not erased, and I don’t feel free of it. I feel… that I was taken measure of, that I have been loved enough to be taught, not by my own mind, but by the hand of God what is wrong. I don’t feel cast out, or destroyed. I feel rebuked, but with gentleness, yet powerfully.

I am brought low by it. I am brought to my knees. It is God. I am in his hands, and he is not pleased with me. Mercy. But more. Mercy. But more. i find the mind does not know what to say at such times. Do not let me go – chasten me. Do not destroy me with wrath – but do not let me off, do not excuse me, do not free me from the correction I need. That’s what it feels like.

The Lord is merciful in his anger. His judgment is his own radiant energy, his own grace sustaining and upholding a life, so that it does not fall away and be destroyed by death – by its crimes – by becoming entirely made of evil. One doesn’t presume to ask to be judged, I think, or so it feels, but one doesn’t turn away from it, or wish to escape it. So great a mystery is judgment.

You might think this is the manufacture of my own mind. I am not infallible, and I wouldn’t be guilty of prelest. But I recognize how direct, how surgically precise, and how effective it is. I am not a naturalist who thinks there is always an explanation that omits the economy of God. There is no cause to presume it is anything else. Struck, as though in all the world, for this thing, I was singled out and made to know  – I won’t say commensurate (“neither according to our sins hath he dealt with us”), but appropriate judgment.

Thanks are due. God deals mercifully with the sinner. God saves by chastening, rather than condemns by ignoring, the sins of his children. That’s it. No profound ideas here. Just, this is what has happened.

Grasping at Nothing

I’ve never felt so profoundly and helplessly Orthodox as when I’ve thrown religion over my shoulder. For the pain of it, for the weakness in it, for the inexorable totality of it. When I’ve neglected the liturgy, and failed at prayer, and broken inside, and hid, and sentenced myself to despair, and tried to live without moving at all – in those moments of life, there’s something that happens. In letting go, I’ve felt myself adrift in something larger than myself, and so my Faith sustains me where I have failed it.

Perhaps it’s hanging onto the Fast, that tangible connection to the rhythm of Faith that holds me when all other forms of confession fail. I will not eat when my Lord is in betrayed, is crucified, when I have done this thing, and brought this upon the world. If there is nothing else, I will starve if need be, before I let go of the sense that meaning exists in the world. I will welcome the desert and the sand into my mouth. That’s what fasting is. And we begin a new fast tomorrow.

Drown me in it, Lord. Take from me this knowledge of fat and richness. Make me lean. Make me know suffering. Thank Thee for not condemning me to constant joy, where there is no meaning, where I am condemned to the silent prison of my mind, to solipsism, to narcissism.

If nothing else, I can hunger. I can know Thy reflection in loss and emptiness. Fill me with loss, and come to me in the void. Grant me the oblivion that, emptied of all else, is full of Thy love and Thee. Crush me with it. Amen. Take from my mind all false images, all pretense of holiness. Let me live in the dark of my tomb.

Apart from this, none of it makes any sense. It’s all a noise-filled room, a crowd of emotions, a maze for the mind. Absence is the chapel of the soul.

I am Not Alone

Have you ever realized that you have received miraculous wealth? An amazingly complex chain of seemingly impossible events has begun to give you your heart’s desire, has saved you, had continually protected, guided, and enlightened you, the way you would do for your own family? And that this is incontrovertably due to Christ’s mercy, to the prayers of his most pure Mother, and the prayers of the Saints on your behalf – and that they have heard you, witnessed you, watched you, and answered you? There is no other possible reaction than to bow low, to kneel, to press down your head in aching gratitude. It is to finally realize that you are loved, that you are not alone, that you have a family, and that, while the world really is out to destroy you, you have a strong defender and protector, just as your own family has in you. And the rest, the rest that can be said, is in private, for the ears of Christ and the Saints. So I have nothing more to say about this right now.

Judgment Hastens

A few years ago, in a nearby college town, I saw police hassling a homeless person who was also probably a little emotionally sick. He’d been sitting on a bench with his gear outside some businesses in the campus area. Apparently someone had decided he was talking to himself too loudly and called 911.”I didn’t do anything,” he said. One of the officers replied, “Do you want us to find something to arrest you for?” Yes, they offered to just make something up – to falsely accuse the man, something I’ve seen more than once.
Tonight on our local city channel is a piece about a new ordinance aimed at panhandlers. The police spokesman said it’s only aimed at “aggressive panhandling” not at the free speech protections accorded panhandlers. It became clear quickly that the opposite was true, when he described twelve definitions of “aggressive pandhandling”. These include asking for charity too close to a phone booth, or too close to sundown, or to anyone waiting in line for a show or any other kind of line, or asking more than once, or ‘following’ a person so you can ask them for charity. Between the twelve ways to mess it up, there’s really no place to stand and no way to ask. What’s worse, it’s designed so the accuser is presumed truthful. We’re told, we “have the right to write out a citation, and have the individual arrested.” In short, they’ve made it impossible for the poor (and these are the poor among us) to survive.

Looking on these things, I am reminded that the only people who will not go into everlasting fire – not Hell, mind you, but the eternal torment – are those who care for the poor:

“Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels: For I was hungry, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.”

The rod of iron cometh. “Do we not now reck his rod?” Each knee begins to bow, and each tongue confess. Despite the pride. Despite the greed and self-worship. Can you feel the Judgment coming soon? And the answer that must be given?

“And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations: and he shall rule them with a rod of iron: and he treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God.”

Lord have mercy. And beyond this, it is difficult to say anything. We each know what we have done or have not done. We know where our treasure is, or where it has not been. Who can really answer for anyone but himself? I only know this; the Judgment is coming. It hastens. It is closer now, and closer, every day. And I am an unrighteous man.

At the Dazzling Stone Orphanage in India, little children send up their prayers for people who bring them soap or toothpaste, or rice, or nutrient drinks. Can you imagine this? Those little voices, going forth to God… “Have mercy on Mr. Smith, who gave us a meal. On Mrs. Jones, who gave us some clean towels. On … ” Who will cry out for me, I wonder? Will any voice be heard?

How much I crave now the prayers of those ones, those few small voices, so very few, for whom I have given so much less than a tithe, so much less than alms, less even than I spend on cups of coffee. How I want the riches of their prayers for my salvation, so that someone will bear witness on my behalf in the Judgment. And I can barely imagine the voices of those who will cry out that I could have helped them and did not. I haven’t learned their voices, and I haven’t asked their prayers. They are unknown to me, and cry from the ground.

Click photos for source. Fair use.

Confessions

I stand in the light of Saints as the sole shadow. I stand in the shadow of Saints as having no shadow at all. In either case, I stand when I should be prostrate. Have mercy on me the sinner.

My guilt is that I write prayers rather than pray them, that I read the prayers of Saints and am struck to the heart, and still do not pray.

I am my own enemy. How can I add anything to another?

If you have received anything good from my hand, it is because God makes the same rain of His Grace to fall on the just and on myself the unjust.

I am covered in the blood of all that have died. Every man, every animal, every forest, each worm, each flower. It was I who killed Our Lord. As He came to bestow life on all, I bestowed upon Him what he knew not. Death. And from that first day of history it spreads from me and infects all creatures, all that is. It is the very air, the ground underfoot, the heat, the light, the darkness, the cold, the wind. I have done this. And my remorse is but a mockery, the shallowest of answers for my crimes. When a whole crop is plowed under, dying to yield its fruit, I have done this. When in the plowing birds, mice, rabbits, worms, beetles, moths, butterflies, snakes, and toads lose their lives, I have done this. When deer and small animals that would have eaten what I left starve and thirst in Summer and Winter, are forced onto highways, where I drive over them in my hastening toward death, I have done it. Whenever anyone or anything anywhere is injured or suffers or falls ill or dies, I have inflicted it. I am the bringer of death, the curse of the world. I am the cause of all wrongs, the succour of demons, the nemesis of angels, the torment of Christ. For all this I have no answer except “Lord greater than death – have mercy and slay me. Overcome me. Melt down and remake me.

If I appear to be giving to the poor or needy, if I an seen laying aside anything for the Saints, I have no such virtue. At best, I am merely fulfilling my absolute obligation to one greater than me. It is the Master’s money, and he bids me deliver it to his true children — those in whom I am supposed to recognize His face. He allows me a living from the funds, and I am the unworthy servant that skims too much off the top and lives in luxury, perishing in soul, while others perish in body and are saved. When I open my palm, what you see is the hand of the thief. I contribute nothing, and I take all. I am Judas clutching thirty pieces of silver and letting Heaven slip from my grasp. God have mercy.

Every breath I take is the death of something. Every good act I have done is an evil. Every true statement I have made is a lie. Every word a presumption. Every charity a self-interest. And no word will change or atone.

My tears are not worthy to annoint Thy feet O Lord. They are not yet tears of true repentance.