The Hem Of Christ's Garment

A hemorrhaging man prays at the Divine Liturgy this morning

Icon of the Healing Of the Woman With An Issue Of Blood

What a great thing church was today. I have been sick since the ARC conference in London three weeks ago. I caught a monster cold on Day Two, and though the cold symptoms eventually departed, I have continued to feel completely wiped out. I wondered for a while if I might have had Covid, but these symptoms are all too familiar to me. It feels like the return of Epstein-Barr, which is to say, mononucleosis. As longtime readers know, I had E-B for four straight years. Most people aren’t aware that by the time they reach their thirties, they have the virus in their blood. It never goes away, but after the first bout of mono — which might never have been diagnosed — it doesn’t go active, except with a very few of us lucky folks. There is no effective treatment for it; you just have to rest, stay hydrated, and wait it out.

In my case, the rheumatologist said it was triggered by intense and abiding stress. Well, yes: it came on me during my sister’s struggle with terminal cancer, and intensified after I returned with my wife and kids to Louisiana to live near my family there. Their rejection of us as “city people” sent me spiraling emotionally, psychologically, and physically. My book How Dante Can Save Your Life is about how reading the God-sent Commedia gave me the tools to climb out of the pit.

If I do have mono again, I know why: stress, even despair, over my divorce. I intentionally don’t write anymore about it all, but the whole thing is truly crushing. Yesterday I received an e-mail from a Christian man I don’t know (a mutual friend put us in touch), who is going through the same thing I am, though he is only now at the beginning of this sorrowful journey. We are now corresponding; it is a kind of blessing to be able to share tales of the road with him, and to help him through prayer and counsel to be strong. Because my profile is public, and my divorce was too, I hear from people a lot — especially men, whose suffering is often ignored or mocked in this rotten culture of ours.

We men have a habit of wanting to keep it all in, of telling ourselves to suck it up and get on with life. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but man, I tell you, it can be such a beatdown. As you might recall from my past writing, my ex-wife and I went through ten years of a failed marriage before she finally, without warning, pulled the plug. I feel as if I am having to learn how to walk again. It hurts, and it’s hard to ask for help, and even harder to receive it. I used to be very social, but now, most of the time, I just want to stay at home and read. Is it always going to be like this? I don’t know.

(A Jewish friend of mine said recently to me, “You’re just like a Jew: covering up your sadness by constantly joking.” Yeah, kind of.)

I have missed some church lately because I’ve felt too sick on Sunday morning to go. When I have gone, I haven’t presented myself for communion, because it has been too long since my last confession, and I know that in my sadness and darkness, I have surrendered to sins. It is difficult for me of late to resist resentment and even hatred over all this. This is normal, I know, and this too shall pass. But I’ve got to bring myself to go to confession. The physical debilitation I’ve been dealing with has a spiritual analogue. I can be so down that I don’t want to take the spiritual medicine that will heal me: restoration to God, and holy communion.

This morning I went out in the freezing weather to the 8 a.m. service at the Russian church. It’s in Old Church Slavonic, which of course I don’t speak. I recently found in my things an Orthodox prayer book which contains the Divine Liturgy. Though I know the shape of the liturgy from years of practicing Orthodoxy, I really miss hearing it in English. I thought it might be good to take the prayer book and follow along in English as best as I could, praying along with the Russian and Ukrainian congregation.

It turns out that this was really helpful. At one point, I found in the prayerbook some long prayers for the sick. I decided to offer them for myself, and for the others in my family affected by this terrible divorce. God did not make my ex-wife and me to divorce. Because of so much travail and trauma in our world, and because the world was too much with us, we arrived at this breach, at this wretched place of brokenness. So I prayed for my ex-wife, my kids, and me, as if we were all ill, which, in fact, we are.

Formal Orthodox prayers can be quite long, but vivid and poetic. The ones I prayed this morning draw heavily on stories from both the Old and New Testament, of God’s movements of healing in the lives of His people. Somehow, uniting our pain and suffering, through prayer, to that of the great men and women of the Bible, was surprisingly uplifting. You are thinking: Of course, fool, what did you expect? Prayer is always the answer! True, but you know how it is. You can get so lost in thought, in unhappiness, in physical exhaustion, and the temptation to despair, that you forget.

When I finished the prayers for the sick, I then ran across the Akathist to the Theotokos. An akathist is a long hymn in the Eastern Christian tradition; it is usually chanted using particular melodies. I stood before an icon of the Christ Child in his Mother’s lap, and prayed this one silently. When I started, I did so with in the frame of mind of knowing that the events recounted in this prayerful telling of the story of the events of Jesus’s incarnation, birth, and early life are also, mysteriously, the events that led, and do lead, to our salvation. In other words, I tried to join in some way the mystery of our present suffering to the events about which I was praying. In this akathist, we honor Mary as the exemplary follower of the Lord.

Here is an example from the akathist:

Protestants and others may mistakenly think we are praying to Mary as a goddess. No, that’s not true. What we honor in her is her fidelity to God, and the way the Most High used her, and her willingness to surrender entirely to His will, as the conduit for His entry into the world of mortality, through which the salvation of all mankind was accomplished. She is the most important sign directing us to Him. She is the “cornland yielding a rich crop of mercies” because she said to God, through the Archangel Gabriel, “Be it done to me according to Thy word,” and received the divine seed. God, in His great love for mankind, will not force us to obey Him. He offers us miracle, but we must be prepared to receive it. This is why we look up to the Holy Virgin. She is our leader in showing us what we must do to receive Him, and to thereby glorify God. Her womb is the “table bearing a wealth of forgiveness,” the Savior of the world.

These lines in honor of St. Joseph spoke to me in particular this morning:

Yes, I get that. My heart has in this past month, after receiving more deeply troubling news from home, been a tempest of doubting thoughts. This morning I asked the Lord, through the prayers of St. Joseph, to clarify within me the knowledge that however dark and hopeless things appear now, that God’s will is somehow present in the storm. And having prayed that, I felt calmed.

Then this prayer followed:

I asked the Lord if he would help me, as he guided the Magi, to see signs of redemption in the sky of seemingly unending night. Help me to see those signs, and to follow them to You, I prayed.

And then this, in honor of the blind prophet Simeon, who recognized the presence of the Messiah, come to the temple for his presentation:

I prayed: “Lord, I am so blind now, in my despair. Help me to see, as Simeon did, with eyes of faith, and to know that You are present.”

It went on like this while the congregation received Holy Communion. In our church, the tradition is for the celebrant to give the sermon after Communion. Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev preached today. His English-speaking assistant, Philip, rushed out of the altar to stand by me and translate the Metropolitan’s words. Vladyka preached on this Gospel reading:

The Metropolitan said in his homily that God will heal us, will send us miracles, but they depend on our ability to receive them, in faith. He spoke at length about the importance of our willingness, through faith, to believe in God’s power, and goodness.

After the sermon, reflecting on his words, I thought about how our God is not a god of transaction: you do this thing, and are guaranteed that result. That’s not how it is with Him. He works through faith — and this faith of ours, He tests.

It could be that in His permissive will, He allows us to suffer for a time for some greater good. After all, the incomparable blessing of bearing the Messiah of Israel, the Savior of the world, Mary had to endure watching her beloved son mocked, tortured, and crucified. I don’t know if this is true, but I think Mary looks so sad in icons of herself with her little Son because she knows what is coming. As the Prophet Simeon said to her at her infant’s presentation in the temple: “'Look, he is destined for the fall and for the rise of many in Israel, destined to be a sign that is opposed, and a sword will pierce your own soul too — so that the secret thoughts of many may be laid bare” (Luke 2:34-35).

The point is that the will of God typically works itself out in part through suffering and sacrifice. Not even God’s only Son was spared. Nor was His mother. Mary knew from virtually the beginning that the blessing that began with the Incarnation, and her willingness to receive the Lord of Hosts into her womb, and that began to blossom there at the altar of the temple, would be mixed with tragedy.

And I was thinking, walking home from church: the blessing that blossomed when my ex-wife and I stood before the altar on our wedding day, and that bore fruit in three beautiful and beloved children, has now arrived at this moment of great pain and suffering for us all. God did not will this, but we, for reasons both out of our control and within our responsibilities, failed the gift.

But this is not the end of the story! I don’t know what God will do next. I don’t know what kind of healing He is offering to me, or to any of us in my family. It could be that I have to bear this particular suffering till the end of my days, like so many men whose names I’m now learning are doing. If so, I can only pray that I can learn to do it with strength, and even joy, so that I can console others who have been so badly bruised. Or maybe the pain will be lifted by some means I cannot foresee. Who knows? All I can know now is that I have the responsibility to trust in Him, and to work to repent of my sins, including the sin of bitterness and anger, and to do what I can to open my soul up to receive the miracle of healing. And, through my prayers, help open the hearts of others in my suffering family to heal from their wounds — especially the children, who do not deserve any of this.

I’m not going to lie: this is hard. This is so very hard. But this morning in church, I was thinking about the poor man who wrote me yesterday from America, and how his suffering is more intense than mine. I thought about a dear friend back home whose suffering is even worse than the first man’s and mine. This is the world into which we have been thrown. But God Himself condescended to live as one of us, to suffer what we suffer — even to the point of crying on the Cross, in the words of the Psalmist, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?” It feels like that sometimes, that God has forgotten me, has forgotten us men who wanted to be good husbands and good fathers. Flannery O’Connor has a character who says she thinks she might be able to be a martyr if they kill her quick. Yeah, me too. But the very slow martyrdom of the woman who bled out for twelve years, and for men and women who suffer the pains of marriages gone bad, and divorce — that’s harder, I think. If you have had to walk this road, as so many have, you will be no stranger to the ugly thought that death would be a mercy rather than having to live like this.

There is a great mystery here. The Christian faith does not promise that we won’t suffer. It promises only that we will not suffer alone, and that come what may, the God who suffered will not abandon us, and that if we stay faithful, the day will come when He will wipe away every tear. We can know through faith that though chaos, disorder, and hatred may triumph in this broken world, it does not have to triumph through us, or within us.

That’s not nothing. It’s a truth I had let slip within me until church this morning. Now I need to go to confession and get back on the straight path.

One more thing: we talked earlier this week about Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s conversion to Christianity, and how it strikes many people as purely instrumental. She had said that she was first drawn to Christianity because she saw that the things she had come to love about Western civilization were mostly down to its ancestral Christian faith. Plus, she could not bear the pain of nihilism that is inescapable from atheism. To these critics, this sounded like she became a Christian because it “works,” somehow.

As I wrote in her defense, nearly all of us who came to Jesus as adults did so through a messy way. Few if any of us had pure conversions, like St. Paul being struck on the road to Damascus. It is not surprising that Ayaan would approach the truth of Christ through looking at the civilizational fruits of Christian belief, and through her desolation at the stones of atheism, versus the bread of Christian faith. These are but signs pointing her onward, to a deep spiritual encounter with the living God.

Similarly, a man or a woman who has been shattered by divorce can know that Jesus Christ, in his Church (meaning, in the community of believers, whose number includes great saints of the Bible), offers consolation through a brotherhood of the broken, the strength to carry on in this valley of shadows, and the hope of healing. I’m living out this mystery now. If someone who lacks faith sees this from the outside, and is weary from years of blood flowing out of them without end, then let him, or her, come to touch the hem of Christ’s garment, seeking healing. Christ’s garment is Holy Scripture. Christ’s garment is the prayer life of the Church. Christ’s garment is the icons, is the liturgy, is the priest who teaches and who prepares the Sacrament. Christ’s garment is each and every soul, tattered and careworn though we may be, who shows up seeking mercy and communion.

Standing there before an icon of Mary and the Baby Jesus praying that akathist today, the remembrance of the Virgin, of St. Joseph, of the Magi — all of these were part of Christ’s garment, through which the healing power of Christ flows to those with hearts able to receive it. They were flesh and blood people who walked the earth as we do, and who knew the Lord, and who say to us, even today, “See, He makes all things new” (Rev. 21:5)

Lord knows that I hope I don’t have to bleed like this for twelve more years! But if I do, then I know by faith alone He will give me the strength to endure it, and turn it to His glory. That is a precious gift. I’m sorry that I forget about it from time to time.