There must be something going around! Macarius and Rus, my sympathies and prayers are with you gentlemen. I have been, for a few weeks, going through my own spiritual funk...burnout, call it what you will. I'm not proud about it or happy about it one bit either. My priest was wonderful at confession the other day, as always. Reassuring and inspiring. I'm praying hard about it. I have heard that, after you get chrismated, not long after Satan attacks you like a dang ton of bricks. My priest told me to think of St. John Climacus and the ladder and the value Satan attaches to me, that I'm worth plucking from the ladder. In some ways that is frightening, in other ways I see it as hopeful and a compliment that Satan sees me as worth destroying and God sees me as so deeply valuable and salvagable. Nobody is harder on me than ME!
Mac and Rus, prayers for you and I ask you to do the same for me. The Christian Walk, particularly the Orthodox one, is harrrrrd. I think the people who have zero problems with Orthodoxy or Christianity, who never have any questions or concerns or spiritual blahs and funks, either they're saints or their spirituality might not be as deep as they think it is. Christianity is a Cross we embrace and walk with, carry, and it weighs a ton sometimes.
Some days I think the country I live in, heck, the world I live in, is so fundamentally screwed up that it's almost intolerable. My job shows me the dark underbelly of society and how 9 out of 10 parents I meet could care less about their kids. Their "love" for their kids is a superficial one. And I look at the political structures of our country, both the absurdities of conservatism and how it seeks to brainwash people into thinking that corporate fat cats and de facto rich oligarchs who are trying to rid the middle class of any rights or powers while baiting them into voting for them dangling the abortion issue in front of them, it's unsettling. Then I look at the liberals and how they turn a blind eye to abortion and see it as getting a wart burned off. I see them force agendas on us culturally and a wing of the Left loathing religion. Seeing them both, in an almost Chestertonian sigh, I want to throw my hands up. I get tired of sports even sometimes with the silly cheating and dramas. Likewise most television is either lame reality shows or sexually-charged tripe. Music is shallow and uninteresting, never impactful anymore. It seems we're always losing freedoms from the Left and Right also....
People nowdays are obsessed with gadets and tech more than what is going on around them.
I constantly have to stave off the urge to "Go St. Augustine" on life. I tend to be a touch cynical and raise and eyebrow easily.
Spiritually I told my wife the other day, as I was going through an Orthodox Funk, "my goodness, we can't even have Christmas, Easter, or anything on a normal holiday Gregorian style! We have to drive an hour, our entire Sunday is pretty much spent at church with roundtrip driving and the coffee hour and the length of the DL, I don't even get a full weekend!" crying the blues....only to feel guilty later.
The way "high-stakes" testing is right now, I see my job as almost the guy in Pink Floyd's "The Wall," something a lot of these twenty-somethings in here wouldn't know about. It's like we are so test-driven with kids nowdays that we see them as a statistic, an automoton, a brick in the wall....and that makes me sad. I hate that. I'm praying the pendulum swings and the new "common core" standards in California shift the paradigm.
I think the fact that my wife is so embroiled in nursing right now, with 12-hour shifts, that doesn't help my funks.
Right now I'm doing ok. The Sacrament of the Eucharist and Confession last weekend was a shot in the arm.
I feel your pain, Mac and Rus. Hang in there boys....
He's a deacon, and awaiting the birth of his first child sometime in the next month or so. But our archbishop doesn't tend to leave deacons in that state for long, so we'll see!
