“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” (Jer. 29:11)

“Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something moulded.” (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)

“There is not one big cosmic meaning for all; there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.” (Anais Nin)

“Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone we find it with another.” (Thomas Merton)

“This is the urgency: Live! and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind.” (Gwendolyn Brooks)

“Nobody can teach me who I am. You can describe parts of me, but who I am - and what I need - is something I have to find out myself.” (Chinua Achebe)

“The purpose of life is to discover your gift. The work of life is to develop it. The meaning of life is to give your gift away.” (David Viscott)

They wait for the mysterious Godot who never arrives

The endearing Didi and Gogo meet near a “leafless tree” [already such a marvellous irony] to engage in a series of discussions. They wait for the mysterious Godot who never arrives. It all appears meaningless. They consider suicide. Perhaps they had read Camus! Whether they are to be taken seriously or not is beside the point. But the problem is neither of these characters actually articulates what they want; or what they are looking for; or who Godot actually is. Or even if he ultimately exists. Ennui is at them. Entropy. Apathy. In existential terms, it is not even knowing what you want. It is, as some critics have said, the most successful literature ever written about “nothing”. Nothingness leads to ‘nothing.’ And to the deepest of despair.

“Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It's awful.” (Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot)

“The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” (Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus)

How many great symphonies have not been written

There are times when we are scared to approach that which we believe to be beyond us, like a great challenge which will push us to our limits, or when we are terrified of speaking our truth for fear of ‘cancellation’, or of declaring our love lest we be rejected. It has been asked how many great symphonies have not been written because composers were reluctant to compose their own Ninth, the ‘curse of the Ninth’ they call it, for the fear of comparison with Beethoven’s ‘Choral’ masterpiece. And yet, is this not the most agreeable of things? To keep climbing the stairs, to follow Jacob onto the “stairway” until we have reached our limits and to have exhausted the depths of our capacity [that which can ‘contain, take or hold’]:

“Jacob left Beersheba and set out for Harran. When he reached a certain place, he stopped for the night because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones there, he put it under his head and lay down to sleep. He had a dream in which he saw a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.” (Gen. 28:10-12)

“The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.” (Rainer Maria Rilke, Poem)

It was only when I allowed for my heart (extract from a letter) [1]

It was only when I allowed for my heart to become vulnerable again, that is, to love without any fear of reprisal, to not set limits on the geometry of my embrace, that I was permitted some few insights such as these which I am now sharing with you. Similarly to the human eye which is amazingly adaptable and works to correct light deficiencies, the heart also as our ‘spiritual organ’ functions in an analogous way as it filters ‘darkness’ and ‘light’. A contemplative has somewhere said: “In fact, one question is enough. In everything that happens to me, do I remain free enough to love?” In recent times I have been pondering, that sadly, we do not rightly reflect on the actual love of the malefactor crucified next to the Christ, the one who asked to be remembered by Jesus when he came into his “kingdom” (Lk. 23:42f.). This love which he quite literally expressed through his ‘confession’ and ‘compassion’ as he himself was dying, opened up to him the gates of paradise. Father Seraphim Rose has articulated well the question behind this fearsome mystery:

“Why is the truth, it would seem, revealed to some and not to others? Is there a special organ for receiving revelation from God? Yes, though usually we close it and do not let it open up: God’s revelation is given to something called a loving heart.”

“The heart governs the entire bodily organism and reigns over it, and when grace possesses the heart, it governs all the members and all thoughts, for it is in the heart that the intellect is found and all the thoughts of the soul as well as its desires; through its intermediary, grace equally penetrates into all the bodily members.” (Saint Macarius of Egypt)

I would take away its trustworthy lessons (extract from a letter)

During the darkest hours of an interminable sense of hopelessness which plagued my spirit and bruised my bones, I thought that all being, all striving, all life was for nothing. It was the temptation to an extreme pessimism; the seduction of nihilism. That it was all animalistic chance, a throw of the dice. Still, even here, in this deathlike existence, when by the grace of God some little shards of light dropped down on me, I would take away its trustworthy lessons. From this place of mournfulness which separates darkness from the light itself, anarchy from order, death from life, and hell from heaven, good things can still pour through. Salvation, however we might understand it, is not to be trifled with. Sometimes outside a good discernment, these polarities may not always be clearly identifiable one from the other. So, we might continue to confuse what is evil for good, and what is unrighteous for righteous, like a hesitant tincture caught between two colours. Yet, like a constantly recurring musical phrase, a leitmotif, which you can’t quite place, the stirring of the Holy Spirit is asking for us to give Him a name. I was on a train in London on my way to the monastery in Tolleshunt Knights,[2] when I first read these overwhelming words from the English writer and lay theologian G. K. Chesterton which I will share with you below. I straightaway copied them into my little notebook which I would carry most anywhere I went. They struck an inherent chord within me. I was comforted in a way I could not explain, other than that an unassailable truth had been disclosed to me:

“Every man has forgotten who he is. One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God; but thou shalt not know thyself. We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten our names. We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful moment we remember that we forget.”

“Hear my cry, O God; listen to my prayer. From the ends of the earth I call to you, I call as my heart grows faint; lead me to the rock that is higher than I. For you have been my refuge, a strong tower against the foe.” (Ps. 61:1-3)

It is temperature shock which hardens steel (extract from a letter)

Transformation, sometimes used for the metamorphosis of the life cycle of an animal, will not happen overnight. It will be a long journey and it will demand much spiritual labour and large amounts of patience. It is good to remember when things get difficult, as they undoubtedly do, that it is temperature shock which hardens steel and that it is intense heat which changes molecular structure. Change can hurt, and it will often hurt a lot, but it will make all the difference. Franz Kafka who was fascinated with ‘transformation’ considered “patience” very high on the list of virtues. Conversion is only the beginning. It took Christ an eternity to reveal his blinding glory to his creation, “where his face shone like the sun” at his Transfiguration (Matt. 17:1f.). Allow for the grace of God to fall on you and to make the necessary changes, similarly to new colours which are created with the passing of the years on natural landscapes. I know, too well, sometimes it can be like breaking your knuckles on steel or smoothing your heart on a piece of pumice stone. Yet how wonderful it is when with every little step forwards, there is an additional revelation.

“Then Peter answered and said to Jesus, “Lord, it is good for us to be here…” (Matt. 17:4)

“What you are you do not see, what you see is your shadow.” (Rabindranath Tagore)

The mindful thing is to admit to our ‘longing’

We leave a place never to return, but we spend the rest of our life reflecting over it and going back, often without even realizing it. For me this location is ‘Redfern’, it is both a physical and spiritual place. It is the priesthood and where I was given my new name. We never can wholly escape. It is like Joyce who was desperate to leave Dublin but never could, and Faulkner who thought he could escape Lafayette County, or 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 mindful 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. It is bringing back beautiful scents [lavender, vanilla] and sounds [the clickety-clack of trains], and dreams which can still rouse the adrenalin.

“When I die, Dublin will be written on my heart.” (James Joyce to Sheehy Skeffington)

“How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.” (William Faulkner, Faulkner’s county: tales of Yoknapatawpha county)

[1] These three letter extracts from a recent correspondence with friends have been here modified for their readability.

[2] It was late in 1990 during the First Gulf War when I returned to Europe. My primary intention was to visit the Patriarchal Stavropegic Monastery of Saint John the Baptist in Essex, England, to spend time with its monastic community especially celebrated for its practise of the Jesus Prayer and for its beloved abbot Elder Sophrony. hhttps://www.thyateira.org.uk/archdiocese/monasteries/monastery-of-st-john-the-baptist/

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