Trenches

The spiritual battlefield is right smack in the midst of everyday life, making a mess of everything, thank God. There are no neat compartments of emotional life and spiritual life anymore.

To be engaged in the spiritual struggle now means that my emotional life, which was always this undercurrent of feelings that seemed to function as a safeguard of my primal safety, is being dismantled. The life of emotions used to seem protective in terms of providing feedback that told me whether my needs were being met or not. “How do I feel” about everything is always the question. But what if how I feel about things is the wrong question for this call to spiritual battle?

What seemed supportive of the personal life, every move in service of propping up this false idol of the individual, actually turns out to be a dead end, destabilizing and weakening the spiritual life.

Is the reality of every little thing subject to how I feel about it? Do I want to be driven by my feelings telling me I’m okay or not?

Emotions fluctuate and have no sustaining power. No wonder a life built on that foundation is like building on sand.

It occurs to me that there is no secular discipline that can ever solve this problem, nor modern spiritual practices that have no grounding in real spiritual authority (begs a longer discussion, not for now).

I say that I’m in recovery from modern psychology. The best that any of the multitude of forms of that can do is to polish the boots and clean up the worldly warrior for worldly battle, with no power to participate in the real spiritual battle going on.

In all that personal work over the many years, I became slightly more adept at taking care of the false idol of the self, as that’s as far as that could go. And that self is always in a precarious position. It can never overcome fear and suffering, because fear and suffering are its inherent qualities.

When it becomes clear that real safety and security are in the spiritual domain, then priorities change. All the micromanaging of needs of the self begin to feel draining. All the emotionally driven awareness of what to do and what to think, to make sure that I’m ok – it all begins to feel hollow.

Even my puny understanding of the vast glory of the spiritual world is enough to remind me that my emotionally driven little self-manufactured world of “staying safe” has no real power in the face of this bigger picture, the immensity of spiritual reality.

God’s providence is where the focus needs to be, to direct all the practicalities and discernments I need to make at every moment to take care of things. Only in that context and on the spiritual battlefield is the real fight for healing taking place. And it’s a fight, reclaiming the real grit of it that modern attitudes have such aversion to.

The kingdom of heaven is attained by violent struggle, as Scripture says. It’s of course an inner struggle, but we don’t shy away from the ferocity of it. It’s not an escape into a new-age ideal of love and light. We’re in the trenches.

Sometimes it feels like the whole rug of familiar support is being pulled out from under me and I’m alone in this impossible situation, with God. How could being held by God, no matter how bereft I might be in worldly terms, be anything less than cause for rejoicing?

That’s the crux of it. In God, all things are possible, so the key is to get with God as the habitual way of life that takes over for the old primal way. Only the power of God can overcome those primal forces, and that’s the power that I have been blessed by holy baptism to embody and cultivate. So I move through my life in this new way of unseen warfare.

“Godly sorrow is joy because before you, you see God, for whom your heart lives, and thus the Lord Jesus Christ reigns within you. This is true, God-pleasing sorrow!”-Elder Aimilianos of Simonopetra