Poison by trifles

  • I’ve been mulling over a quote I read by Fr. Alexan­der Yelchaninov:

    The effort expended in secur­ing con­trol over our­selves and our anar­chic, autonomous ner­vous sys­tems, is greatly facil­i­tated, made quite easy, by the cor­rect poise of atten­tion and imag­i­na­tion. We shall inevitably stum­ble over every tri­fling obsta­cle until that which is not a tri­fle becomes sharply defined and con­vinc­ing in our mind; until we strive with all our spir­i­tual, emo­tional, and intel­lec­tual pow­ers towards the Essen­tial, and thus remove to their proper place the tri­fles that poi­son our every­day life.

    The tri­fles that poi­son our every­day life. What a phrase.

    This is the prob­lem with being a 21st cen­tury Ortho­dox believer. The like­li­hood that I’ll be taken into the arena and asked to deny Christ are fairly slim. The like­li­hood that I’ll wait in long lines that don’t move, get honked at in bad traf­fic (and honk at oth­ers myself), get in some mas­sive crush of peo­ple all going to the same place at the same time — air­port, county fair or what­not — and feel a strong temp­ta­tion to dis­like all of them … the like­li­hood that all that will hap­pen? Well, 100%, right? Those things hap­pen every day. And every day I feel like it would be too silly to pray over how much my nerves are fray­ing and my tem­per slip­ping over these insignif­i­cant nothings.

    Only this is what life is like now. These noth­ings are the things that steal our human­ity away by inches.

    I remem­ber read­ing a story about peo­ple that were made to stay on a plane that was at the gate at the end of a long flight for ten hours, because of some weather irreg­u­lar­ity and a bureau­cratic snafu. The food and bev­er­ages ran out, the bath­rooms were over­loaded and unus­able and they were all sit­ting in the cramped tiny air­plane seats that they had already flown in for many hours.

    Ever since I read that story, I’ve used that as a sort of mea­sur­ing stick for myself. Am I ready to stand some­thing like that and still behave in a Chris­t­ian way? Would I be able to act as if I had any shred of dig­nity, san­ity, human­ity or faith? I’m not sure, but then I know God gives you strength for what you need when you need it.

    As Fr. Yelchani­nov says, it does take a lot of atten­tion and focus for Chris­tians to get con­trol of this aspect of mod­ern life, but unless you do, you’ll always live in fear not of real things — the dread Judg­ment Seat, our own sin­ful­ness or even the unclean spir­its — but of nothings.

    And so it seems with peo­ple in the world: they live in con­stant fear of tiny things that make them tinier still.


    Related posts:

    1. The per­va­sive­ness of the Chris­t­ian idea

    June 17th, 2005 | Grace | No Comments |

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