A Stranger Before You

Learning to Live as an Exile Under the Gaze of God

“I am a stranger before You, Lord,

a sojourner like all my fathers.”

(Psalm 39:13, Grail)

To pray these words is to renounce possession of the world without needing to hate it. The psalm does not curse creation. It confesses distance. I am here, yet not at home. I walk among familiar things, yet nothing finally belongs to me. Even my own heart feels borrowed.

The desert fathers understood this not as an idea but as a condition of the soul. To be a stranger before God is to stand uncovered, without the small securities that make us feel permanent. Titles, roles, achievements, explanations: all of these assume that we are staying. The psalm whispers the opposite. You are passing through.

For St. Arsenius the Great, exile was not geographical alone. He fled the imperial court, but he also fled the court that forms inside the heart—the place where one rehearses one’s importance before invisible judges. To become a sojourner is to abandon that inner tribunal and consent to being unknown.

The psalm does not say, I feel like a stranger.

It says, I am a stranger.

This is truth, not mood.

When I accept this, prayer changes. I stop trying to settle myself by words. I stop demanding clarity. A stranger does not rearrange the house he is passing through. He keeps watch. He listens. He learns the sound of the footsteps that will one day call him onward.

Exile sharpens attention. When nothing is owned, everything is received. Bread tastes like mercy. Silence becomes shelter. Even sorrow loosens its grip, because it no longer needs to justify itself as permanent.

“I am a sojourner like all my fathers.” The psalm places me in a lineage of pilgrims who refused to confuse promise with possession. Abraham lived in tents. Moses died outside the land. The desert fathers chose cells that could be abandoned in an hour. They knew that God meets us most truthfully when we do not pretend to be settled.

To live this way is not to despise the world but to refuse to cling to it. Love becomes lighter. Obedience becomes simpler. Suffering loses some of its bitterness, because it no longer interrupts a fantasy of permanence.

Lord, let me live gently in what passes.

Let me carry nothing that cannot cross with me.

Teach me to stand before You as I truly am:

a stranger, held for a moment by Your mercy,

already on the way home.