Beyond our Sin

The father of a young man who was (and still is, unfortunately) addicted to drug use once told me that the only way he could deal with his son’s situation was to look beyond the self-destructive human being in front of him. I know the young man personally. He lived with us for about a year in our monastery in Moldavia, trying to stay far away from the environment that had kept him paralysed in this addiction. Then, one day, without telling anyone, he left the monastery and went back to the city. He felt strong enough to face his old demons.

He wasn’t, and he ended up injecting again. After that, it all went downhill very fast. To hide the signs of his drug use from his family, he started to inject in his legs. Because he didn’t do that properly, his right leg got infected and he didn’t tell anyone until he ended up in hospital. They had to amputate his leg to save his life. He was then in his twenties.

I saw him in hospital a few days after the amputation, and I felt helpless and useless. It was after that meeting that his father told me that the only way he could hold on to his love and faith in his son was to look beyond his present self, to the boy he had once held in his arms. He had to learn to look through this self-destructive young man and focus on the beautiful being his son could have been, had he not been lost to drugs. This helped him carry on, it gave him the strength to care for this grown son as if he were a five-year old. This preserved his sanity, and kept his love burning.

If we are open, we can learn a lot from the people God sends our way. They may come radiating love or they may approach us in hatred. Regardless of that, if we keep ourselves open to them, we may lead each other to Christ. This family taught me how to look through the fallen person before me. They taught me not to focus on the anger of the world, on its bitterness and demonic need for violence. There is good in everyone. There is good in the world, no matter how deep it has fallen. Our calling as Christians is to look beyond the evil, to see through the darkness, to let go and not deposit this poison in our hearts, and to keep asking God to send us love for everyone.

Father Sophrony Sakharov writes somewhere that one cannot hope to live a Christian life; one can only learn how to die a Christian death. As I grow old, this idea, once foreign and strange to me, becomes self-evident, because one only becomes a Christian as one approaches the Cross. Each step, one is tempted with the choice to turn away and ‘live’. Each step we take forward, each step that takes us closer to the Cross is a step further from this life, but a step closer to Christ. Once we are finally on the Cross, we have lost our lives, but we have finally become Christians. A Christian knows only how to die, because to die for the life and salvation of the world is the Life of Christ, offered to us all in eternity.

I pray we may look beyond the fallenness of the world. I pray we may look beyond the fallenness of our neighbour. I pray we may also look beyond our own fallenness, so we may approach everyone – ourselves included – with hope, forgiveness and love. We are all one. We are lost or we are saved through one another.