July 3, 2025
Last week Friday, I dreamed thousands of books had to be moved “yesterday” because my time at school was done. Their spines were all kinds of colors, some bright some dull. I had furniture to move too with no room in the car, and no time left. My parents hovered in the background. I don’t get warm feelings when they show up in dreams.
I woke utterly exhausted. I woke utterly exhausted. My hip ached. My walk with Omalola was more hobble than walk. Tears seeped out during prayers. The losses of the last months have piled up. Mr. Peterson’s dying. Making the decision to say goodbye to Little Dog. Little Dog’s absence. Bruce’s surgery. My upcoming procedure that I refuse to fret about, though it still nags.
I sat in the profane thoughts of deep discouragement. I tried to nap but could only repeat the Lord be merciful to me a sinner prayer and scraps of prayers for friends. Bruce and I went out for Subway, Diet Pepsi and a picnic at the local park. The fast food lifted me. Sometimes that’s the best you can do to push against being so tapped out. At home I texted a friend and listened to her exalt in the joy of writing a good book, and the joy of a healer easing pain locked in her body for years. She spoke joy in text. She spoke the eternal return right to my ears.
In his essay, The Myth of the Eternal Return Martin Shaw said time was on his mind:
“One of the areas these midnight rambles have been leading me towards is thoughts about time. Historical time, poetical time, wretched time, delightful time, under a time, above a time, out of time, in time, all the times. I exist in a reality where all sorts of centuries are crashing into each other, and myth time is my foreground most of whatever-kind-of-time this moment is.”
What he means by myth of eternal return, is not that the eternal return is false, but that it is truer than true. Shaw says, “it’s often defined as stories which illuminate the very beginning of things.”
By eternal return he means those things that ground us:
“This is the eternal-return into a dimension of ritual, story, chant, repetition, prayer, solitude, community that anchors both religious experience and soulful significance into the daily cycle of our lives.”
Shaw differentiates between sacred and profane time. Me not so much. (He asked what we thought) I say this because the temptation to go looking for spiritual experiences is too great for me. Already I’m greeting the red wing blackbirds and grackles in the morning, hoping they’ll fly down to my shoulder. More likely they would poop on my head. For a bit, I took their flying over my head as some kind of holy greeting, when in reality, they were protecting their nests.
Already I gauge my walks as to how well I stepped into silence and I gauge my reading of morning prayer as to how well I focus on the words. I have had luminous experiences that have been gifts, but the temptation to seek them like a lost grail when the world itself is full of God’s glory and love seems like a temptation to look for luminous happenings and not stop looking for Jesus. I want Jesus.
What Shaw says, “But we defeat the demons by loving Christ says Saint Porphyrios, which is good enough for me. Focusing on them day and night isn’t at all wise” strikes me as truth and a rebuke to the temptation to obsess about the powers of darkness. Some charismatics have spooked me because that’s all they see—frightening, pesky figures crouched behind every action—theirs or others. I’ve spooked myself after reading Rod Dreher’s account of Tucker Carlson’s being mauled by demons and his saying a Christian woman was possessed because an ancestor fooled around with the occult. I’ve spooked myself, when filled with deep, silencing discouragement that sounds like it’s lying its way to truth, but is just a lie.
Jennifer Anna Rich in her essay Don’t Fight the Darkness recalls what St. Pophyrios’ goddaughter reported about the saint’s presence:
“God’s divine grace was so intense on him that there was no person who did not feel it. You usually felt a flutter in your heart, you felt like you were flying, an immense joy, an immense love. And when you looked into his eyes, you got lost in their blue color that was an immense sky, an immense sea, a calm.”
(This is how I want to be for our neighbors and friends. St. Peter says: “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (I Peter 2: 9, ESV). So why not?)
Rich cites Elissa Bjeletich:
“Do not fight to expel the darkness from the chamber of your soul. Instead open a tiny aperture for light to enter and the darkness will disappear.”
Rich urges us to:
“Focus on the LIGHT. Speak of the LIGHT. Pray for the LIGHT. Read the Theologians of LIGHT. Dwell in the LIGHT.”
Agnes Sanford, in The Healing Light says:
“God is both within us and without us. He is the source of all life; the creator of the universe behind universe; and of the unimaginable depths of inter-stellar space and of light years without end. But He is also the indwelling life of our own little selves. Just as the whole world full of electricity will not light a house unless the house itself is prepared to receive that electricity, so the infinite and eternal life of God cannot help us unless we are prepared to receive that life in ourselves. Only the amount of God that we can get in us will work for us.
“‘The kingdom of God is within you,’ said Jesus. And it is the indwelling light, the secret place of the consciousness of the Most High that is the kingdom of Heaven in its present manifestation on this earth. Learning to live in the kingdom of Heaven is learning to turn on the light of God within” (4).
Sanford lists four steps to make these connections:
“The first step in seeking help from God is to contact God.’Be still and know that I am God…’ Let us then put aside our worries and cares and quiet our minds and concentrate on the reality of God…The second step is to connect with this life with some such prayer as this: ‘Heavenly Father, please increase in me at this time your life-giving power.’ The third step is to believe that this power is coming into use and accept it by faith…And the fourth step is to observe the operations of light and life” (7).
Throughout the book she gives examples of people who were healed by simply leaning into the power freely given us by the Lord.
Seems to me this is what the saints do to the nth degree by prayer and fasting and living self-deprived lives as a way of emptying themselves and making space for God. I just finished reading the Little Russian Philokalia of St. Seraphim of Sarov where his interlocutor, A.N. Molotvilov describes how they were bathed in uncreated light:
“Imagine in the center of the sun, in the dazzling light of its midday rays, the face of a man talking to you. You see the movement of his lips and the changing expression of his eyes, you hear his voice, you feel someone holding your shoulders; you do not even see yourself or his figure, but only the blinding light spreading far around for several yards and illumining with its glaring sheen both the snow blanket which covered the forest glade…”(100).
Molotvilov reports feeling warm and at peace–“extraordinarily well.”
What if this is our natural state, right here right now, but we just don’t perceive it? Maybe it would be too frightening, just like Jesus’ presence terrified the people whose pigs drowned when the demons entered them. With mercy Jesus left that town after he commissioned the healed man to share the great things Jesus had done. Maybe that’s why we are clothed in flesh and blood and brokenness, with bits of light shining through. Maybe we should set our eyes on Jesus, the light of the world who calls us to walk in the light.
The Daily Office has taken us to reading about Stephen’s face glowing like an angel’s while he was preaching to the elders who had seized him because Jesus said he’d destroy the temple and change all the customs. “And gazing at him all who sat in the council saw that his face was the face of an angel” (Acts 6:15). Imagine what it would have been like to look at that face during Stephen’s long sermon about God’s history with Isreal and a final rebuke that they’d killed the prophets, they’d killed Jesus, God’s son. The heavens opened for him and Stephen saw Jesus at God’s right hand before he died. What if those heavens are right close, right now but we don’t see them?
When Jesus showed up while Paul was on his way to Damascus to find more Christians to throw in prison, Jesus blinds him and asks why are you persecuting me? The one who is bathed in light so powerful it knocks Paul off his horse, claims us has his body. Does that mean we too are bathed in light, walking in the light as he is in the light, but just don’t perceive it?
Back to the spooked by demons bit. A charismatic preacher, Christopher Blackeby has said:
“Christians you are the most frightening thing in the room. You are seated with Jesus in the heavenlies right now.”
Imagine our eyes are glowing with fire. Our legs are burnished bronze. Our clothes are whiter than snow caught in sunlight. We are lit up like the sun. (I can’t hardly look when I turn toward the sun on my walks.) What if what the Bible says is true that as Christ is, so are we in this world? (I John 4:17). What if the power that raised Christ from the dead lives in us? What if he means it when Jude says he is able to keep us from stumbling and to present us blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy? What if this faith is our shield protecting us from those spooky darts?
The fireflies have been lovely this week despite the cut hay field. I walked the dog through their blinking on and off, felt the joy I feel when I see Christmas lights. I watched one. He’d go dark like a blank space in a poem. Then flash light. He’d go dark, then light. The first night Bruce and I spent here on the farm, a firefly blinked on, blinked off in our bedroom.
Incidentally, Paul Kingsnorth published an essay imagining St Seraphim of Sarov and Molotvilov in Be Still and Know if you’d like to read more about this saint.
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