To the Bone

“Thou hast deceived me, O Lord, and I have been deceived.” (Jeremiah 20:7)

The Latin is more wiley, seduxisti me, “Thou has seduced me.” Jeremiah, of course, is complaining that the Lord’s call on his life is a bitter one and full of sorrows. His prophesying in the name of God is not turning, and will not turn, Judah from the coming exile. Indeed, he himself suffers, and yet is inwardly compelled to testify: “If I say, ‘I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name,’ there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot” (Jeremiah 20:9).

I suppose that most Christians feel this way at one point or another. The Lord draws us to himself in “sweetness and light,” with consolations in prayer, with the heart-warming of the Sacraments, with the revelation of thoughts through the Scriptures. We long for nothing more than to remain in this state of perceived union and joy.

But we must be stripped of our sins and impurities, for without holiness no one will see the Lord (Hebrews 12:14). And that divestiture of soul is painful. And we feel deceived, seduced. Led by way of consolation, but brought through the surgery of soul necessary for the removal of cancerous growths.

These growths are all, in some sense illusions, and none are more painful to release than those illusions of the self fed and fattened by ourselves, our circumstances and those who love us. Even when those illusions of self are themselves painful (but somehow, at least initially, less painful than the reality they are designed to mask), we cling to them with a sense of security, they stupefy the signals of pain meant to grab our attention so that we may attend to the needed surgery.

In these last few days my family and I have experienced pervasive physical illness (bronchitis, the common cold, sinus infections, the flu). There is nothing like illness to disabuse one of the notion of one’s immense and Job-like patience. There is nothing like having everyone in one’s household ill, when service to one another is not done from a sense of strength but out of weakness, to disabuse one of the notion of one’s mature stature in Christ (somehow whininess just doesn’t comport to grand statements of the faith).

And there is likely to be even more strippings of my soul to come in the next several months. I do not know why this is the case, but when the living Word, our Lord Jesus Christ, works his surgery, his division of joints and marrow, he goes to the quick, down to the bone. I met this, as probably many of us do, with some anger and indignation. After all, hadn’t I done thus and so, suffered this and that, and done my best, etc., ad nauseam? But I was mindful of what counsel my priest or an Athonite father might give me, and it seemed clear that I would be told to quit my sniveling, that this was nothing so heroic as what Job went through (or any of the saints of blessed memory), and in any case it was for my salvation.

Didn’t I believe what Fr Seraphim had said? “We are told by the Holy Fathers that we are supposed to see in everything something for our salvation. If you can do this, you can be saved.”

Seduced, maybe, but not really. The longing is ultimately satisfied. This is just the current means by which it is accomplished.