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When praying with people, we sometimes have to pierce through with our prayer as if it were the hardest wall — human souls, hardened and petrified by earthly passions — to penetrate the Egyptian darkness, the darkness of passions and worldly attachments. This is why it is sometimes difficult to pray. The simpler the people one prays with, the easier it is.

– St. John of Kronstadt, “My Life in Christ”

I couldn’t help wondering as I thought about this honest reflection of a godly man, how would it be for him if he was praying with me? Sensing innately my soul’s condition (as I imagine all priests begin to do in time), would he feel as if he were trying to break down a wall? And what are the things that fight and fester in my own “Egyptian darkness”?Lent is coming again. Am I ready to wade in, ready for the stench and all the rest of what comes when you take on your passions, however weakly?

And besides all those questions — for which I may never have satisfactory answers (if I could even stand to know them) — there’s the matter of how to respond to the darkness. The secular world’s answer is to disbelieve in it, learn to idolize yourself and eat, drink and be merry. Most of the American Christian world seems to think the answer is to deny it, slap on a smiley face and sing some praise songs so that no one will think you’re a bad Christian.

Only from Orthodoxy, I think, do we get something like Mpn. Philip’s answer in “Out of the Depths Have I Cried**” (emphasis mine):

… we want merely to relate to and make contact with our depths, so that we may see disclosed through them the emerging Divine Light. … The task is difficult, to be sure. More than that, it is fearful; “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” (Heb. 10:31)

And yet we must! Saint John Chrysostom meant this when he said, “Find the door to the inner chamber of your soul, and you will discover the door to the Kingdom of Heaven.” And again, Saint Ephraim the Syrian knew that God placed in man at creation “all the Kingdom” for which he must dig deeply. Such men know this simple truth; the way “upward” is the way “inward.”

We explore, then, the part that we can play in discovering just what it is that flows from these depths, revealing to us God’s presence in whose image we are formed. It is, after all, from this deepest level of our self, that we can also exclaim, “Out of the depths have I cried.”

A lot to think about. Many questions, and few answers. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to see the value in that, if it’s all I’m capable of. The right questions are worth a lot more than the wrong answers. Make sense? Maybe not. Still feels like the truth, though.