Physician Heal Thyself

I read this today and it really struck me.

The American playwright Thornton Wilder wrote a magnificent short play, The Angel That Troubled the Waters. Do you know the story? It's poignant and powerful. It involves the pool at Bethesda, the famous pool in Jerusalem where the people believed that a movement of the surface of the water was caused by an angel. The pool was surrounded by the ill and disabled who, as soon as they saw the waters being stirred, would quickly enter the pool, as they believed that the first person to enter the moving water would be healed.

In Wilder's play, there was a physician who would go to the pool with some regularity, wishing to be healed of his afflictions of melancholy and remorse. One day as he sat at the edge of the pool waiting and the waters began to stir, the angel appeared and stopped him from getting in. "Healing is not for you," the angel told him.

The physician was very upset. Why could he not receive this precious gift?

The angel responded, "Your melancholy and remorse, and the timbre in your voice when you speak to the broken and wretched, speak volumes and have a healing effect on them. Healing is not for you."

Still, the physician was troubled. But then a man who had been healed and was rejoicing came over, and said, "Would you come home with me just for one hour? My son is thinking dark thoughts. I can't communicate with him. You are the only person who has ever been able to lift his spirits. And since her child died, my daughter sits in the shadow. She won't listen to us, but she does listen to you. Please come home with me."

The angel, standing nearby listening, said, "In love's service only the wounded soldier can serve. All the angels themselves do not have the power to heal as you do."

Link

Cheer

A Link

This entry on a blog I've begun reading by an orthodox convert layman titled "This is Life! Revolutions Around the Cruciform Axis" is spot on. I agree with his criticisms of "progressive" Christianity, and his writing happens to be hilarious too. Especially this bit:

What’s so funny is that these “progressives” are still stuck in that three-centuries old modernist paradigm of binary opposites: “belief-centered” versus “transformation-centered.” Haven’t any of them heard of this new thing called “Post-mo-der-nism”? It’s pretty slick. It attempts to deconstruct such binarism. So, I mean, how progressive can one be if one is still stuck in a centuries-old paradigm?

Purpose

I've resurrected this blog, yet I have yet to elucidate its mission, its purpose, and its raison d'etre. It will be different from it's previous incarnation, where I mostly used it as a venue to either brag or to bitch and moan about my life. There will be no more such bloviating. This blog will be a place for me to discuss my thoughts on religion and politics, and to post links and quotes from interesting things online. I will probably still give random updates on the state of my existence, yet I do not want that to be the focus of this blog. There are more than enough self-obsessed blogs out there as it is.

So, with that, dear reader, please enjoy what I may come up with. Also, if anyone out there can come up with a better title for my blog, please let me know in the comments.

Wisdom

I think I shall start this blog anew. To start, a passage by St. Theophan the Recluse:

If, when they [the self-reliant] grieve at their downfall, reproaching and abusing themselves for it, they think: ‘I shall do this and that, the consequences of my downfall will be effaced and all will be well once more,’ this is a sure sign that before the downfall they trusted themselves, instead of trusting God. . . . If a man does not rely on himself but puts his trust in God, when he falls he is not greatly surprised and is not overcome with excessive grief, for he knows that it is the result of his own impotence, and, above all, of the weakness of his trust in God. So his downfall increases his distrust of himself and makes him try all the harder to increase and deepen his humble trust in God. . . .

For by thinking that they [the self-reliant] are something important they undertake too much, hoping to deal with it by themselves. When the experience of their downfall shows them how weak they are, they are astounded, like people, who meet with something unexpected, and they are cast into turmoil and grow faint-hearted. For they see, fallen and prone on the ground, that graven image which is themselves, upon which they put all their hopes and expectations. This does not happen to a humble man who trusts in God alone, expecting nothing good from himself. Therefore, when he falls into some transgression, he also feels the weight of it and grieves, but is not cast into turmoil and is not perplexed, for he knows that it happened through his own impotence, to experience which in downfalls is nothing unexpected or new to him. [Unseen Warfare, pp. 87, 88]