How to heal a crippled soul

Healing the crippled woman's soul. Fresco. Photo: zlatoust-kharkov.church.ua

The Gospel reading about the healing of the woman with a bent back, who had been unable to straighten for eighteen years, prompted thoughts about my own crippled soul.

Millions of such crippled souls live around me, walking in a similarly сrooked state, heads bowed to the ground, unable to look at the beauty of the azure sky. For Christ to straighten us, we must change our attitude towards God and the world – to understand that the human spirit, from birth until physical death, lives beyond the world. We are so frightened by the enslaving dependence on external circumstances that, clinging to the world with both hands, we cannot wholly trust our fate to God.

Alone and despondent, we prefer to carry the endless worries and cares of our lives on our own. God looks at us with meekness and love, yet we, with our deceitful minds, view His ability to help us with distrust. Of the millions of souls, scarcely one can fully trust God without even the slightest doubt.

There is nothing in the world that does not depend on God.

But even as we hope in God, we try "not to fail ourselves", seeking, due to our lack of faith, another alternative support on earth, in case God "does not work". Offering God crumbs of "prayer rules", a person immerses themselves in the bustle of life, trading eternity for the trivialities of daily concerns. Thus, the soul becomes more and more crippled with the passing years until time finally bends it completely to the earth, grinding to dust all the "wealth" built up throughout life. The Lord extends His hand of silence and peace to us, while the devil relentlessly drives us to the pastures of many concerns, without giving me a second's respite.

Youth calls us boldly to run away from God in order to climb the "paradise" trees of sweet sensations. Maturity begins to taste the bitterness of life, while old age, sniffing at the fallen, rotten fruits of these trees, understands how deceitfully it was misled. Only childhood, with its jubilant joy of a bright existence, opens before us the endless horizons of infantile simplicity and holiness. Life is given to us for one thing only – to overcome death, just as the Son of God overcame it. Having achieved this, a person departs not into the dark shifting grave, but into eternal life, discovering in it new, previously unknown recognitions and understandings.

Satan, like a cook, chops the size of our soul into a salad of small pieces of the everyday hustle and bustle. With each generation, people shrink in size, turning from the universal, angelic greatness into gnomes and dwarfs of the consumerist civilisation.

The only reality is God, and Christianity is the only way to attain salvation in union with Him.

Everything else is a lie! Divine love is the absolute Truth towards which our soul strives. The devil, however, lures us with petty love, which is truly worth no more than a broken penny. Love builds the person, while infatuation only destroys it, driving one mad and making them believe that this is true happiness. The passion of human love can easily lead a person to despair and ruin, while love for Christ has no limits in its life-affirming grace. The worth and dignity of every person lies in the freedom of the transformed spirit, which is more precious than the entire Universe.

Orthodoxy is always light and heavenward. Religion is the fallen sky, frozen, immovable. It fears Orthodoxy, afraid to grasp its essence, because for this one must renounce oneself. Christ lives in every soul, but for every soul, there are hundreds of preachers who drown out its childlike intuition and spiritual sense.

The fate of outwardly religious people is self-isolation, unlike the openness of a true Christian heart that seeks salvation. Religion is like a shadow cast by the Sun of Truth – Christ. If there were no Sun, there would be no shadow. But the one who looks at the shadow will never see the Sun, because for that, one must turn their face in the opposite direction.

The grace of the Holy Spirit cannot be confined within a religious consciousness, slavishly dependent on quotations. The more we come to know Christ, the more we want to love Him, and the less we want to be separated from Him, even for a short time. But the soul that loves to dissect the writings of the Fathers, cutting out quotations to justify its own sluggishness, will never bloom and will never become eternally youthful and beautiful, like the angels.

In the end, such a soul will die without ever meeting God.

Orthodoxy leads a person to union with Christ, but not to religion with its quarrels, disputes over primacy, power, and other earthly contentions. To not find in Orthodoxy the God Who waits for you in the depths of your spirit, to not attain unity with Him in the Holy Spirit – this is the tragedy of fruitless religiosity. One can believe correctly and live in accordance with Orthodoxy their entire life, but if this faith does not bear fruit, such a person will be more miserable than a non-believer, who at least had some earthly sinful joys.

The earth has never been and will never be our Homeland. No matter how loudly patriots cry, their throats will eventually be covered by the earth. Our homeland lies in the inexhaustible Light of the Holy Trinity, "where there is neither sickness, nor sorrow, nor sighing, but eternal life".

The peace of our Homeland is found even here on earth, by the soul that has attained grace and experientially known Christ living in its heart. Earthly life passes through a wide amplitude of highs and lows, from the soaring impulses of carefree youth to the deep sighs of withering old age. But the most beautiful state of the soul is the serenity of the spirit living in the gentle breath of Heavenly Light. Our crippled life is given only one day.

Between carefree infancy and creaking old age, there is no room for even a tiny hair to pass.

All the events of our life, no matter how long it may be, are compressed into a single indivisible moment. Yet even this moment is enough to hate our very life along with its desires, to awaken from the intoxication of passions into the freedom of the Sons of God. Then the sinful hump will disappear, and God will place a ring on our hand (Luke 15:11-32) and give us a New Name written on a white stone (Rev. 2:17), and we will become heirs of eternal wealth that no one will ever take from us. But if, instead of Orthodoxy, we live by religious ritualism, we will build not the abode of the Kingdom of God but a miserable philistine niche.

God quietly and unobtrusively knocks at our heart. He has come to straighten our crippled soul and awaken our slumbering spirit. A pitiful sight is the crippled person who has never seen the blue sky or the starry scatter of the night sky.

But an even more pitiful sight is the person who lives and moves constantly amidst the bliss of Divine Love and Grace, unaware of its joy because of the crippled state of their own soul.

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