“As Though the Roots Remembered”

I stood today in the quiet movement of a tradition older than memory,

where nothing was hurried and nothing was forced.

The Liturgy did not seem performed, it breathed.

It unfolded like something that had always been,

as though the air itself were familiar with the prayers

and the walls had already heard them a thousand years over.

There was a seamlessness in how the priest lifted his hands,

not dramatic, not austere,

but with the ease of one who knows

that God has always been near,

and that these gestures carry the weight

of saints and sinners who used the same signs

beneath starlit skies and candle smoke

long before I took my place among them.

The music rose like a river,

not to entertain, not to draw attention to itself,

but to remind the soul it once knew the sound of Eden.

And the icons, still and silent,

seemed to carry within them

both history and eternity,

shaping the space with a beauty

that did not demand to be noticed

because it simply belonged.

I found myself wondering

if this same rootedness lives in the monastic heart:

not as a program of formation,

nor an identity one must labor to fit,

but a way of being that shapes a man

because it has shaped a thousand before him.

A clarity not argued but inherited,

a psychology born of prayer,

an anthropology breathed in the rhythm of psalms,

where silence is not escape

but the native land of the soul.

Could there be a life

where one does not craft belonging,

but discovers that belonging has already been gifted:

where one does not strain to become,

but is slowly revealed

like a face emerging from stone

under the patient chisel of grace,

where the monastic is not fashioned

but remembered,

as though the roots knew,

long before the branch did,

what fruit it was made to bear?

Today’s Liturgy did not ask me to imagine God.

It simply made space for Him to be.

And in that space, a whisper:

What if the life you long for

is not something you must achieve,

but something ancient and living

that has already been waiting

for you to come and breathe its air?