Brethren, Peace and Good to all of you, the Peace that surpasses every understanding.
I’ve been re-reading my favorite novel for Lent and Holy Week, Father Elijah: An Apocalypse (which I once reviewed here) and a stream of consciousness from the main character (Fr. Elijah) caught my attention:
Was there a missing component in all human beings? The rural masses seeking the metropolis; the urban young fleeing to the woods. Women pretending to be men; men becoming more like women; everyone aping the divinity in his desperation to escape creaturehood? Western youths seeking the Orient; orientals seeking capitalism? Monks abandoning their monasteries; married men pining for solitude. Liberals seeking to demythologize the Scriptures in an attempt to flee the exigencies of biblical faith; fundamentalism seeking to fill the empty places of their religion by a return to the Old Testament, fleeing the tasks of the baptized intellect. Was the promise always to be found elsewhere, always just beyond the horizon? Why this persistent need for signs, wonders, new pillars of fire, arks of covenant, tables of stone – anything other that the demands of raw, laborious, darkest faith?
Fr. Elijah then goes on to question himself if his own conversion from Judaism to Christianity was his own personal version of this “dynamic of escape, a flight from the pain of the Holocaust and the death of his wife and unborn child during a terror attack in Israel.
It might be argued that the rest of the book is dedicated to answer these questions. But I must come back to the paragraph’s basic idea, which is one of alienation. Modern man (which embraces “woman” unless otherwise indicated by the text) remains in a state of alienation, and all the philosophies and “spiritualities” that promise liberation from our acedia contribute instead to further alienation: from reality, from other people, and from oneself.
The root of man’s alienation is his original alienation from God, from the One Personal Source of Love.
Of course, the devil, the world, and the flesh will tell us we are wrong and in a renewed attempt to entice into their net. The first step of spiritual warfare is to recognize their stratagem for what it is, and resist it while praying that others may resist it too.