A River Runs Through It

Forty Years of a Quiet Eastern Longing

Forty years is enough time for a current to shape the landscape of a life without ever showing itself on the surface.

I was formed in the West — and gratefully.

It gave me language for God, discipline of mind, structure for prayer, the strength to stand and the call to serve.

It became my schooling, my pasture, the architecture of belief I lived within.

My soul grew there as in a garden bounded by familiar walls.

And yet, even as I flourished in that soil, something deeper was moving silently beneath it.

Not in rebellion.

Not in dissatisfaction.

But in the quiet way a river runs beneath rock, shaping what will one day break open and bloom.

The signs were always there, though I could not name them as a young man.

My heart quickened at the scent of incense in half-lit chapels.

I was stirred by monks who prayed through the night as though dawn were their only necessity.

I felt something ancient wake within me whenever I read The Ladder of Divine Ascent, or heard the low hum of the Jesus Prayer spoken like breath instead of speech.

Not understanding, I let it remain underground:

a mystery, a tenderness, a homesickness without geography.

Years passed.

Responsibilities multiplied.

I walked faithfully where I was placed, and the river flowed on beneath in silence.

It never demanded, only waited.

It widened while I wasn’t looking.

It carved me from within — a hidden patience, an unconquered longing, an interior eastward pull.

There was joy along the way.

There was sorrow.

There were seasons of clarity like a star over deep water, and others where the horizon blurred and I stood with only the next breath of prayer.

Yet through every season this quiet ache remained — less a desire than an inheritance, less a question than a memory.

I began to realize that what I felt was not uncertainty,

but recognition.

This was not a new longing, but a long one ripening.

Not a departure, but an emergence.

Not movement away, but movement toward:

toward the place where my soul already belonged in secret.

And one day the realization came not like revelation, but like relief.

The river was not beneath me anymore.

It was in me.

What had flowed hidden for decades was rising to the surface,

not over-turning my life’s story, but completing its arc.

All the years, all the formation, all the prayer, they were not detours but preparation.

The West raised me.

But I have always breathed Eastern air.

The river has been working toward this moment for forty years.

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Forty years, and the current has never stopped.

Even when I did not speak of it.

Even when duty asked for stillness.

Even when I lived as though the river were only memory and not blood.

The water has been carving its way through my life,

slow, unrelenting, older than thought,

older than the questions I used to ask God in the dark.

It has shaped me through rock and winter.

It has carried silt from deserts I never walked

and yet have always known.

Some days the water was gentle,

a shimmering thread beneath ordinary time.

Other days it surged with the weight of longing

that could not be buried or reasoned with.

I have come to see that this river did not begin in me;

it began in God, before my breath,

before my name.

It runs beneath the structures of the West that formed me,

beneath the prayers I learned to speak,

beneath the certainties I once held like stones.

And under the stones are words,

ancient, burning, alive.

Words from monks who lit their nights with the Name.

Words carved into silence deeper than thought.

Words that feel like home.

Forty years, and the river has not dried.

It has widened.

It has deepened.

It has become the pulse beneath everything I am.

And now I know what this feeling is,

this ache, this pull, this holy unrest.

It is not confusion.

It is homesickness.

A river runs through me still,

cut by the floods of God,

fed by the rains of saints long dead,

clear enough now that I can finally face its source.

I do not know the end of its course,

only that I am carried.

And I too am haunted by waters.