Not Knowing Up from Down

“I have sunk into the mud of the deep and there is no foothold.”

There are seasons when the inner world loses its compass and the outer world turns to mist. Days when nothing holds still long enough to be named and every direction seems equally unreliable. The Fathers knew these seasons well. Cassian once wrote that the soul can enter a place where “all things seem confused within,” where discernment wavers like a flame in the wind. St Isaac tells us that God sometimes allows precisely this kind of obscurity so that a person may learn the “knowledge born of helplessness,” the wisdom that blossoms only when one’s own resources are exhausted.

In such times the Psalms become more than prayers. They become a path under the feet. They become a handrail on a narrow trail cut into the side of the cliff. “My steps falter,” the psalmist cries in Psalm 38, “and my sorrow is before me all the day long.” In Psalm 69 we hear the raw disorientation of a soul overwhelmed: “I have sunk into the mud of the deep and there is no foothold.” In Psalm 73 the psalmist confesses, “My feet came close to stumbling,” yet in the same breath he discovers that God “holds my right hand.”

This is the strange mercy. When one does not know up from down, the heart is forced to cling to what is not of one’s own making. Prayer, fasting, and vigils become not spiritual achievements but survival. Psalm 62 becomes a place to stand: “In God alone is my soul at rest,” because every other place is shifting ground. Psalm 130 becomes breath: “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord,” because the depths are where one finds oneself without choosing.

The desert fathers speak with a hard clarity about this state. Abba Moses once told a monk who was paralyzed by confusion, “Sit in your cell and your cell will teach you everything.” The cell is not merely the physical place. It is the still point of fidelity. It is the simple obedience to remain at the foot of the Cross when every impulse is to run. St Sophrony says that the whole spiritual life rests on a single movement: remaining before God with the mind in the heart, even when everything in one’s inner world feels ungoverned. Even when the heart feels like a storm-torn sea.

And so the Cross becomes the fixed point, the immovable horizon. When up and down disappear, when the mind loses the sense of where to turn, the Crucified Christ stands as the one direction that remains true. Psalm 27 whispers, “You, Lord, are my light and my salvation. Whom shall I fear?” And Psalm 22, prayed on the lips of the Crucified Himself, gives voice to the desolation that is not absence of God but the way into His deepest nearness.

Prayer, fasting, and vigils are not heroic in such times. They are the thin threads that keep the heart from unraveling. They are the way one remains turned toward Christ when nothing else in the landscape is stable. “In your light we see light,” Psalm 36 says, and in the moments when one cannot see anything at all, that light becomes less a vision and more a promise. A whisper. A presence.

There is a hidden grace in not knowing up from down. It dismantles the illusion that we navigate the spiritual life by sight. It reduces the heart to its simplest posture: a poor man begging for mercy. A creature turning toward its Creator. A sinner calling out from the depths, trusting that the One who descended into those same depths will not fail to meet him there.

The saints tell us not to fear this disorientation. They say the desert often begins in confusion. They say the ladder to God is built not from clarity but from the willingness to stay before Him in the dark. They say that humility is born precisely where one’s ability to manage the journey collapses.

You do not need to know up from down. You need only to know Him.

And He is already nearer than the confusion, nearer than the ache, nearer than your own breath.

“Though my flesh and my heart fail,” Psalm 73 declares, “God is the strength of my heart.”

This is the whole truth.

And it is enough to keep a man standing when the world inside and out has turned to fog.