The Holy Turnabout of the Soul.

 

The Holy Turnabout of the Soul.

There’s a quare story told among the old desert lads, and there’s more truth in it than in a yard of newspapers. Abba John the Dwarf goes to Abba Poemen, all soft-eyed and settled, and says to him he’s after reachin’ such a grand peace of soul that there’s no temptations left knockin’ at his door. Not a whisper, not a tug, not a bother. And Poemen, the old fox, looks at him and says, near gentle but sharp as a scythe: “Pray to God, brother, that the battle comes back to you, the broken heart, the lowliness you had before. ’Tis only in the fight the soul puts on flesh.”

And there you have it, the great riddle of the spiritual life, turned upside-down like a creel on the strand. What the world curses as misery and shame, the soul that’s half-awake knows as blessing. What the world runs from, the saints lean into, slow and steady, like a man walkin’ into a headwind he knows will make him strong.

The world has its own crooked wisdom, God help us. It says: “I must break you, or I’ll be broken. I must stand taller than you, or I’ll be nothin’.” And so we harden ourselves, stone upon stone, wallin’ the heart, guardin’ the self, ever watchin’ the other as a threat. But the word of Christ, ah now, ’tis a wild, dangerous word altogether. It pulls the rug from under our feet and says: “Lose yourself. Fall. Die, and live.”

In the life of the spirit, strength isn’t taken, it’s given away. Victory comes not by swingin’ the fist, but by openin’ the hand. “Better I be less,” says the soul that’s learnin’, “if it means you may live.” This is the great turn, the metanoia, the holy twist of the mind and heart, where a man stops clingin’ to himself and lets himself be broken open for love’s sake.

Sufferin’, then, isn’t some curse sent to torment us. No, ’tis the chisel God uses to shape the stone. The wound becomes the doorway. The pain, if taken humbly, turns into bread for another man’s hunger. What weighs us down, offered back to God, becomes the very thing that lifts another soul on its feet.

We win, so, when we throw down the weapons. We stand tall when we knock our own walls. We come alive when we stop fightin’ to survive and start dyin’ to love. For in the end, and this is the quiet secret of it all, the only strength worth havin’ is the discoverin’ of God stirrin’ deep inside us, closer than breath, older than fear, and fierce with a love that conquers by surrender alone.