I wish I could find words for the way you sing. But I only have tears. Silent cascades squeezed from my heart, turned into a sponge and tossed back and forth by your voices.The mercy of peace, the sacrifice of praise…
Maybe I shouldn't talk about this, I've heard it's not necessarily good, but I only like to speak the truth, so take it as a confession and nothing more: when I listened to you, I listened from my knees and with tears. Your music passed through me (a little “a sword will pierce your own soul” (Luke 2:35), so that the many thoughts in my heart might be revealed to me...), and it cleared the rust from my being, thread by thread, invading without permission the deepest and most cobwebbed corners of my inner self. I didn't get up from there until after at least half an hour of rivers pouring down my cheeks in a continuous torrent, trying to hide my eyes, pickled by the prolonged soul-shower, under my shawl.
Should the world see that I cried, should they know what effect you have on people? Or better to hide, so that they don't form the false impression that I'm some great prayer warrior? Whatever the case, what is certain is that in those hours I surrendered my heart to you as an instrument, and you tacitly accepted my unspoken challenge, and you tuned its strings with unsettling precision, attuning it to His tone with such patient delicacy, without even suspecting the good you do me. Thank you…
Your voices holding my hand as I slipped through the cold, damp stone mouth, descending towards the cave in my heart. Your song winding, stretching and taking the shape of safety ropes – with carabiners, harnesses and all – holding me tight so I wouldn't fall. My torch for navigating through myself. Without fear. Looking my wickedness and black pride straight in the eye, with the fingers of my hand raked through the palm of your cherub, made into a walnut shell over the trembling core of my emotions.
I am not a good person. Far from my home, from my Lord's home, I am actually a terribly bad person – I know what I know, no one knows me better than Him, I'm a glass-cutter with my tongue… And, strangely enough, bathed in the sweet waters of your music, I am not afraid to acknowledge my ugliness, to recognize the darkness nestled in my inner seams. And to calmly invite it to a warm tea. Not hot, so it doesn't burn its tongue, already carbonized by so many evils spewed out automatically, because "they deserved it," "but why should I be the one to shut up?!".
For even the devil was first an angel of light. And evil does not exist in itself, but only as a perversion, as a distortion, as a denaturation of good – the true nature of being. Evil is the rejection of Love, just as darkness is merely the withdrawal of light (I don't say absence, because I don't believe that Good can ever be absent – “If I ascend to heaven, You are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, behold, You are there.” (Psalm 138:8)). Can you imagine how much pain – to reject the source of your own existence? So gentle and loving is the Light, that, bowing its head in silence, it allows itself to be rejected and driven away in the most violent and vulgar ways...I hurt with blood flowing from the nail wounds, I hurt with death trampling on death, I pray for you with inexpressible groans... But if you don't want Me, I won't force you to stay by My side. Go, if that's what you want, if that's what you feel. Go...
“I feel so sorry for demons,” a good friend once told me, with baths of tears instead of eyes. “You know, they too were His children, His creation...”. But they fell. Falling presupposes that you have from where to fall, the abyss only exists if its slope is traced by a great peak. That's why the mountain moves into the sea and completely swallows the abyss – that is, sin – all through a crucifixion, a death and a Resurrection. "3 in 1," like instant coffee (don't laugh! In everything, the highest theology has been slyly hidden, “God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong” (I Corinthians 1:27), and when it comes to strong or weak coffee, don't get me started, because I'll go on again about the Banat motif of coffee in an ibrik...). “Hell no longer exists since He resurrected, only we insist on taking ourselves there.” – the words of a father whom I love from my depths, even if they are the depths of my malice!
Do you know why the devil envies us the most? For our limitations. Because, thanks to them and only through them, we always have the chance to return Home. After every wandering. Like the prodigal son. Once, at a seminar, during our discussions on seemingly exclusively moral-socio-politico-economic topics, but implicitly and firmly anchored to the shore of the Gospel, the professor told us: “Christianity is a change of mind”. Christianity is a change of mind.
As long as we are in the flesh, we permanently have this blessed chance to question our decisions – hey, wait a minute, it seems I didn't get it right, it seems this good isn't really good... To pull the steering wheel and take another path. We can do this because we have limits. We are bordered by the fences called time, space, and body. We have constraints – at first glance, the connotation sounds negative, doesn't it?
Well, it is precisely for these constraints that we are most envied by the fallen angels. This is the secret of the most precious treasure that only we, humans, have received – in the form of clay vessels. In the unseen part of the world, things are different; angels, fallen or not, are eternally so from the start and that's it. Do you see how it sounds as if they are more constrained than us? Now that I say it, I realize that it is so. Because once they chose, they stuck with their choice. We, humans, however, can choose so many times here on earth, and, although most of the time we choose wrongly, He forgives us everything. “Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow” (Psalm 50:8). How many times? “Seventy times seven” (Matthew 18:22).
In eternity, however, the steering wheel is locked. That's why the Risen One tells us, almost imploring us, to keep watch, because we do not know on what day our Lord will come (cf. Matthew 25:42), so that we may have everything as much as we can in order when the trumpet sounds and it's time to leave the body, to have at least one wheel out of four on the edge of the good path, for Christ to have a corner of a hair tip to grab us and pull us to Him, even through the eye of a needle.
Believe me, in all these restrictions of His commandments that I have scoffed at for years – considering them outdated, absurd, and oh, come on, Lord, with these principles from minus V century, it doesn't work anymore in our times, don't You understand that it no longer catches on?! Don't you see it's not cool, it's not politically correct, it's not fashionable at all!? −, in His words, to which I almost always turned my back at the first opportunity, hurrying back to the sweet downy couch of comfortable lies that I snorted, only in all the “one shall not pass here”-s drawn by Him and accepted, finally, by me, I found my true freedom. “My soul clings to Your testimonies, O Lord, do not put me to shame. I ran on the path of Your commandments when You enlarged my heart. Teach me, O Lord, the way of Your statutes, and I will keep it forever. Give me understanding, and I will seek Your law and keep it with all my heart. Lead me on the path of Your commandments, for this is what I desired.” (Psalm 118:31-35).
And I still don't know how to fly properly. But the wind of the Kingdom begins to tickle whispers of love among the flakes of my wings, and I shiver with a smile. Each time, a lightning bolt shoots through me from head to heel, like a kiss on the soul, and mischievously whispers into the ear of my sternum: Come on, shall we go?
I'm learning to fly. But a plane without passengers doesn't take off.
So I'm waiting for you. Gate 8 return, destination I won't tell you! You have to guess! (It might even be hard...)
“You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:31). But how can you love others when you don't know yourself? Through Him, in you, for others…
Thank you for teaching me to know myself. And you also hold my hand (the left one, because the right one is tightly wrapped in His). Thank you to you and your music – my flight instructor through sub-muscular, meaning underground, caverns, “for dust you are and to dust you will return” (Genesis 3:19).
But still, thanks to you, I hope I will return a little bit to Heaven too…
“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another” (John 13:34),
just as He loves me
through you.
P.S. I can't wait to hear Cabin crew, boarding completed!
Ana Bănică