In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I want to take a break from the topic we have been discussing for the last few podcasts, because we are getting very close to Pascha, and we are also getting deeper into this lockdown situation that we are finding ourselves into. And it feels unnatural, somehow, not to address this in a more direct way. So for a week or two, or three, or for how long God allows me to, let us talk about what is happening to our real lives in a more practical and direct way.

I want to do this because I do not want all of us to look back on this time in lockdown and to discover too late the great treasure that we have just before our eyes right now. This does not have to be a wasted Lent. This does not have to be a spiritually sterile period in our lives. Quite the opposite: this borderline anxiety and fear we are feeling, they hide a unique opportunity, a unique opportunity in our frantic lives to be, all of a sudden, to be entirely alone, entirely in peace and quiet with God. We often wonder about the lives of hermits. We like to imagine ourselves in their place.

Well, this is the chance, perhaps the only one we shall ever have: a chance to see from the inside what their spiritual lives feel like. The boredom and anxiety we feel hide the fear of being truly alone, being truly silent with ourselves and with God. The desperate need we feel to come up with things to do, that comes from the deeper need, which is fed, in fact, by fear, to find things to distract us, to turn our focus from the one thing we dread, which is to face the living God, to face him in silence and in solitude. We fear this meeting because, deep down, we know that facing God will lead to facing our own true selves, and that is painful.

That can be dangerous, because it might require us to act, to change, to move from the place of spiritual comfort to which we have become so accustomed to a place of real love, real self-sacrifice, real cross. And we might just have to acknowledge, between God and before our own conscience, that we are not willing to make that change. To face God is to be given a vision, a very clear vision of oneself, because only in God we see the image according to which we were created. And to see one’s true self can be the most horrendous experience, because it exposes our complete, naked unwillingness to change, to believe in a real way, to truly follow Christ.

All this boredom, all this anxiety we fight, have much deeper roots in our spiritual lives. And yet, painful as it may be, it is always better to look truth in the face. At the very least, if nothing else, it will nourish our humility, and that humility can, by the grace of God, be the start of a real transformation. What a strange, intensive Lent this is! We are facing this forced togetherness with one another, and even more difficult is this togetherness all alone with ourselves, without distraction, without projects, without deadlines, [with] nothing to look forward to.

Being with oneself can feel just like hell, and that is why we fear being alone, and that is why we fear boredom: because underneath this very fine, transparent layer of boredom, our true selves are waiting to look us in the eye. We fear this, because the cracks in our foundation are immediately showing. And our thoughts return to the surface of our polished, civilized selves. Temptations return to us; sins return to us. Violence very quickly follows, violence usually directed against our own neighbor, but really fed on the hatred we feel deep down for ourselves.

Be very careful with anger at this time. Try to not even open—don’t even crack the doors of your heart to anger, let alone act upon it. And remember in your prayers those unknown or known to you who are horribly abused at this time, by the violence of others or by their own violence manifested in horrible things. Think, think and pray, for all the women, all the men, all the children, all those who are stuck of necessity in the same place, the same household, sometimes the same room, with their abusers. Domestic violence—physical, emotional—even in Christian families, will traumatize many these weeks, these months. Spiritual warfare will make the lives of many a horrible nightmare. Many, very many of us will fall. Many who fight addictions of any kind will see the ghosts of their pasts, the ghosts of their temptations, return with renewed forces. Many of us will see our faith tested at this time, and many of us will fall.

Without distraction, without our usual empty daily frantic business, silence will take over, and true silence is heavy. Silence is heavy, because without the firecrackers and all the noise, all the distraction, all that is left is me alone with myself, just me, just us, exactly as we are, exactly as we shall stand before Christ in judgment, in all our naked ugliness, in all our failed humanity. There is a good reason why hermit life is so rare. There is a very good and painful reason why monastic life and hermit life in particular have always been valued so highly by the Church.

There is a reason why those who take up the cross of this solitude and this silence, this cross of always living one’s life facing oneself in complete, utter, naked, painful honesty, willingly, and who bear it for their entire earthly lives. There’s a reason why these people turn into these extraordinary, other-worldly beings, strange and wonderful even among the saints. Think only of St. Mary of Egypt as an example, simply because we have just celebrated her feast day and we have just celebrated the Sunday dedicated to her. We do tend to reduce somehow her life to the experience of a human being who was fought by lustful temptations and who threw herself willingly for so many years into this sort of scene and who then, by the grace of God and under the protection of the Mother of God, found her way out and offered her repentance to Christ. As beautiful, as exemplary as that life it, it is but a reduction; it is a simplification of her life.

The one thing that has always struck me when I read her life or when I heard her life being read in church during Lent is that one line, where she says that after she finished eating the three loaves of bread she had, there was nothing left to eat or to do for—if I remember correctly—47 years. This is not about food. This is not what I want to point out. I want to point out, I want to bring before your imagination the life of someone who is entirely alone in the desert with nothing to do, no object to take her mind away for a moment, no activity to occupy her mind for a moment, not one other human being for almost half a century with whom to speak, with whom to share a thought, with whom to quarrel and make peace, whom one can love or hate, not even one wild animal. She very significantly underlines that for half a century she has not seen one other human being or one wild animal.

What does that do to a human being? Half a century of the life we are struggling with now, after only two or three weeks, and we live in our homes, and we live surrounded by thousands of objects, from books to dishes to clothes to objects of furniture. We are surrounded by people: by family, by immediate family, our friends with whom we can keep in touch by so many means: social media and telephones and video; so many ways with which we can keep in touch with the people whom we love. And two or three weeks into this, we collapse. Our surface cracks, and all the ugliness underneath scares us. What about half a century of willingly, having nothing to look at, no one to interact with, no object to occupy one’s time, one’s mind with? What about half a century of nothing else in one’s life except facing God, and, in facing God, facing one’s own nothingness?

This is the stuff that makes saints, and this is the stuff that scares the life out of us. And there is something profoundly troubling in this. Silence and solitude always reveal to our conscience our own failed humanity in all its ugliness, in all its lack of worth. And as horrible and as crushing as that experience is, there is, in fact, something even more horrible, even more crushing than that. The truly horrible thing, the truly unbearable thing is that Christ, the one who is love, the one who dies for me, the only one who is perfect man, Christ commands me to love this wretch that I discover myself to be, commands me, expects of me to love this nothing that I discover myself to be.

And the pain and the humility, the depth of repentance that flood one’s soul under the devastating weight of this unbearable commandment, to love this unlovable being—those are the things our souls instinctively know await just underneath this layer of silence. These are things that are souls are not ready, not willing to acknowledge and to follow. And to understand this and to accept this horrible truth about ourselves, who call ourselves Christians, this brings us back either to a state of deep, crushing despair and anxiety, as most of us feel these days, or, by the grace of God, it may refuel, renourish our humility and our complete, utter, absolute dependency on Christ’s mercy alone.

If we approach this Lent with care, my most beloved and beautiful brothers and sisters in Christ, if we approach this Lent with care, this can be the Lent of our lives, the Lent when we had a sparkle of the knowledge concerning ourselves, the Lent when we were given just the tiniest understanding, the tiniest vision about who we truly are. And from that seed of knowledge, our salvation can flower. We never see so much of us as we do right now. We never see ourselves more clearly that we do right now, during this Lent which we try to convince ourselves is not real, is not worthy to be called Lent, is “wasted.” But this is just our minds trying to convince themselves that this is a wasted and failed Lent. The reality, the deep reality, is that perhaps this is the only Lent that counts, because we get to face God, and, in God, we get to face ourselves in this silence and this solitude that crush us. But you know what? If a seed doesn’t fall to the ground and doesn’t rot and doesn’t grow roots, it dies alone. But if it does, it brings forth fruit, and in that fruit we find our salvation.

Forgive me for daring to be so abrupt in my honesty. I have shared with you nothing else but my thoughts. I’ve shared with you nothing else but the way in which I relate to this Lent and to myself and to God through this Lent. And I do this because I try to force myself to love you as much as I try to force myself to love myself. Keep me in your prayers and keep our monastery in your prayers. We pray for you, and in this oneness, in this togetherness, we shall find our salvation. Amen.