Categories: mental-health, feast-days, spiritual-journey, holy-week, great-lent
Date: 07 April 2010 07:06:01
Christ is Risen! After pondering a bit more, I think my current mental state may've also led to a deeper appreciation of my movement through Great Lent to Holy Week and ultimately Pascha, the Feast of Feasts. It is clear to me my life is broken, in the way I think and the way I act. This is not punishing myself, so do not read it that way, but merely an acknowledgement that past experiences have led to a me that is not completely whole. And the ultimate, the only, source of wholeness is through the Church, the hospital for those unwell, to a deep and constant relationship with God. In a sense admitting this brokenness, and helplessness, is a release and a relief, for it is not all down to me; God, in His Time, according to His Will [for he did not remove the thorn from St Paul], will act, and my faith, feeble as it often is, reminds me that all happens for Good. Even when, especially when, I cannot see it: and furthermore feel as though I'm headed towards doom and despair. Journeying through the services, where we state through prayer and action [veneration, prostrations, processions, etc.] our wandering away from what we were called to as well as where we enter from Great and Holy Friday to Pascha particularly into God's ultimate sacrifice and triumph through the Cross, the Grave and the Resurrection, gave to me a sense of peace in that all my brokenness, all my foolish and unhelpful thoughts, all my strange and inconsistent behaviours, all that reflects my broken life in a broken and fallen world, can be handed over to God. Of course, such a belief is not new to me, and many of you, dear readers and commentators, have said similar. But while I only intellectually saw it previously, I feel as though it has seeped a little further in now. Of course, I will try to wrestle control back and try and solve my issues entirely by myself at times, but recalling this Lenten journey will, I pray, remind me of the fact the ever-blessed and ever-praised God indeed seeks to transform, through my submission and my acknowledgement of helplessness, my broken life into a whole. And the blessed realisation, a deep realisation, that God works with me in this is a source of great comfort and inner peace. For which thanks and praise be to God.