When you feel your breath snatched away and you can no longer breathe. All the pains of people, passed into you, as if through a black conduit, straight into your most intimate depths, flooding everything with a roar of the end of the world, and you, with your soul in your teeth, desperately scrambling towards the top of your chest, clinging to a fragile sliver of light. Those many people, God's kingdoms, with their pains, with those bleeding cuts through which the bone of their heart is visible, alive, beating heavily. The despair with which they place in your palm and eyes unbearable, unimaginable rendings. The sufferings and writhing of children, the cancers, father, just pray that I don't fall from faith, that I don't get to slap God, only that much pray, that I don't spit in His face for my child and that I don't curse His mother, pray. And all the divestments of love, the departures and abandonments where you wake up in the morning realizing half your heart is missing, that guy took it and left, and in its place, reeking of a scream of terror, some blood-stained rags with a knife plunged in, gleaming like steel.
And you manage it again and again. You unclench your jaws, frozen by the tremor, and words come from you, like white bandages they come, to soothe. And, when you can no longer and are empty of words, you whisper Christ has risen, Christ has risen. And when you can't even say that anymore, you get up and take the wretched one into your cross-formed arms and cry with him.
I would no longer become a priest with such serenity, now that I have become a Sahara of pain for everyone. But if I haven't gone mad from so many soul-shards stuck in my soles, if I haven't gone mad it's only because I see the prints of His sandals before me, through the desert, towards the light beyond the horizon. For one day all things will end and we will pass through our death as through a narrow door, beyond which pain has ceased.
In the meantime, let us love each other and soothe one another's hearts. Let us pass through this life drunk with love as if with a liquid and cool God, thanking Him for the gift. For life is a gift, a gift with the taste of ice cream.
Fr. Crin-Triandafil Theodorescu