The Seeker

It is common in religious circles to talk about a certain type of person known as a “spiritual seeker”. For many the term “seeker” conjures up all kinds of mystical and adventurous images oftentimes romanticized in popular culture. I was always attracted to these types of characters in books and movies: the lone determined hero on his quest for knowledge and the mystic experience. I was a shy and introverted kid, often spending hours absorbed in imaginary adventures, pretending I was one of these heroes from the popular sci-fi and adventure movies and books I often watched and loved to read. I believe this imaginary world I was often living in gave root to my later attraction to the idea of “the seeker”.

As a teenager I began to explore world religions and spirituality. I felt the exhilaration of an adventurer in discovering the exotic and mystical paths trodden by seekers in religious texts and myths. In my imagination I began to form a caricature of the archetypical “seeker,” like the wondering mendicants of Chinese and Indian Hindu and Buddhist mythologies, or the solitary hermit in a cloister or cave, or the homeless monk who has taken the vow of poverty, fearlessly wandering the earth and plumbing the depths of his own soul to confront his own fears in the darkness within, only to emerge victorious, the conqueror of evil, radiating enlightenment, peace and bliss. This image of the seeker began to replace my childhood heroes, and I would find myself fantasizing about being a wandering seeker myself.

Admittedly, I have had a genuine desire to seek God for as long as I can remember. But coming from a divorced household, with no strong role model to guide me through the transition from childish fantasy to “the real world,” I simply retained my tendency to transform the impressions of my life into my imaginary fantasy world that I was so accustomed to taking shelter in. I naively thought that the caricatures I had created of these heroes - religious or otherwise - were, in fact, reality. I thought that all I had to do was pretend and mimic them to have the genuine experiences I imagined they were having. Perhaps it is common for children to have that kind of imagination, to be able to fantasize about things so deeply that they almost feel like they are their favorite heroes. However, it also seems that it is natural to “grow up” or mature and - with the help of parental figures - to become more acquainted with reality. Somehow, it was not so for me, until I was much older.


These past few weeks leading up to this new Lenten season, I have been trying to be honest with myself in coming to terms with my lingering immaturity, especially in regards to spiritual life. Much of my adult life until now - almost 20 years - I have simply been pretending, and indulging in the same old familiar fantasy pretend realms, and thinking that to mimic the caricature is a real spiritual life. I am trying now to learn - thanks be to God that He has been showing me - that it is now time to give up my fantasy play-time, and stop pretending I am someone I am not, to finally be myself, and to start anew.

This process of “growing up” in my relationship with God is painful at times. My ego would rather remain in the fantasy. But I am beginning to see that it is not enough to simply go through all the motions, as I imagine this imaginary “seeker” would, and to expect this to substitute for a genuine relationship with God and my neighbors.

This Lent I am trying hard to follow the fast, and to fast especially from those fantasy images I have created about God and myself. I am trying to follow this fast simply out of obedience and faith, with no expectation of some enlightenment experience like “the seeker” character I have created supposedly has. I’m trying to take off the costume and remove the props and toys I have held onto in my internal fantasy-drama of a “spiritual life”. In fact I have been learning that it is better for me to stand before God naked, as it were, and simply say “I don’t know who I am. I don’t know what I should do. All my imaginings and fantastic expectations have been illusions and nothing more than a child’s escape from reality. Have mercy on me! Please help me! Guide me and teach me who and what I should be and do.” I am realizing now that it is not enough to read about God and pretend or fantasize about what it might be like to be a saint. I want to be me for real and to know God for real.

The Lot of Normal People

Tonight after my children were put down I asked my wife how close to the brink she felt she was. I told her that I thought that we did a pretty good job of giving it our best - "it" being "life" - and continuing to live it, though despair tends to linger especially now as the winter drags on. I think that we moderns live dangerously close to this margin, that behind the doors of our homes and our minds all of the very real pressures, fears and anxieties of modern life are manifested - while out in the world, at our jobs, our schools, our public lives, we dedicate more energy than we admit to glossing over this glaring reality. I know I do.

I remember walking home late one night almost a decade ago when I was living in Kansas City. I had just read "Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee" by Dee Brown, an extensive account of the Native American Holocaust perpetrated by the encroaching ex-European population, and as I walked I felt, in a very acute way, that there was something profoundly wrong with things, with "the world." At the time I was a Christian, and yet I couldn't see the obvious, that the historical narrative of my own religion had at it's root the most sophisticated, and - more importantly - truth-filled explanation for this inherent gaping in the human heart.

When I finally converted to Orthodox Christianity I learned that the most important aspect of the faith wasn't my intellectual grasp on any ontological or cosmological falleness, but that I was given the "tools," so to speak, that would allow me to confront the darkness in my heart and in my world, and to live in this paradoxical reality.

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Today was the first day of Great Lent, where we do all of those things we do throughout the rest of the year as Orthodox Christians, only more so, and with greater intensity. Yesterday, the Sunday of Forgiveness, is also the Sunday of Adam's expulsion from paradise. I remember being in a class two summers ago and wincing at the instructor and my fellow students derogatory statements concerning Masaccio's famous rendering of the expulsion, as if the idea it attempted to communicate was somehow archaic or primitive. I couldn't help but think that some of my classmates knew all-to-well the horrors of the fall - of emptiness, instability, the crushing prospect of a meaningless existence.

The purpose of this blog is to communicate the life of the spiritual struggler, through the entries of a number of Orthodox laypeople.

Language often works to defeat us in the modern world: when we say "The Spiritual Life," we construct the boundaries between it and an assumed "Real" life. When an Orthodox Christian hears the term "Spiritual Life," he or she hears the words "Real life," and we don't arbitrarily divorce it from "material" life (eating, drinking, driving, burping, etc). When we hear the words "the life of the spiritual struggler" we think to type-cast the image of the some saints of old. We would do good to remember that the spiritual struggle is the lot of normal people. People who fight depression, anger, temptations and bad habits of all sorts, who have the inability to understand themselves or their own actions, who can't help but harbor hatred towards some people or things, who are crippled by shame. This isn't the picture of a psychiatric ward patient - this is the picture of everyone of us.

The spiritual life, the life of the Church, is the life that pulls together what the dynamic forces of sin seek to shatter. Therefore let's look to the life of the Church, her saints and teachings, her services and sacraments, and lift each other up in every way that we have the faculty to do so.

Forgive me if I have sinned against you in anyway,

-J.S.