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jennifer anna rich's avatar

wow, that's amazing, timothy. so funny how God (and saint gavrilia) make things happen sometimes. thanks for telling me!

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Steve Herrmann's avatar

The saint spoke of light through a tiny aperture, and I thought of all the cracks in my own life, the places where grace had slipped in unannounced, like a thief who leaves behind a gift instead of taking.

Jennifer, you write of darkness not as an enemy to be vanquished but as a space waiting for illumination. It’s a truth the mystics know too well… the ones who have pressed their foreheads against the cold floor of their own failures and found, in the surrender, a warmth they could not explain. Saint Porphyrios understood this. He did not rage against the night, he lit a candle. And isn’t that the harder thing? To trust that the light, however small, is enough?

The thought of Maria speaking of his eyes, blue like an endless sky, like a sea that doesn’t drown but carries. That is the paradox of the saints. They do not remove us from the world but teach us how to bear it. They do not fight the darkness, they make room for the light. And in doing so, they remind us that the weight of the world was never meant to be carried in a handbag.

Cohen was right, of course. The crack is where the light enters. But the mystics would add that the crack is also where we exit, where we slip out of ourselves and into something greater. Perhaps that is what it means to be wounded by love. Not to be spared the breaking, but to find, in the broken places, the presence of the divine.

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