What Does a Blind Beggar See?

A Personal Reflection on Silence and the Fear of Teaching

There is a part of me that longs for silence with a kind of desperation, as if only silence can keep me from unraveling. Not silence as escape or convenience, but the silence that strips everything away, the silence that teaches me who I am without role or title or task. A silence where I no longer speak with authority about anything because I know so little. A silence where the only voice worth heeding is the voice of God Himself.

For years I have taught, preached, guided, offered words to others who sought the way of the heart. And yet now I feel the deep tremor of fear at the thought of speaking again. Not because teaching is wrong, but because I know how far I am from the measure of those who embody what they teach. I feel more like a man crawling in the dust, searching for crumbs of wisdom that fall from the hands of the true elders. And perhaps I am only beginning to understand that I am the one who must be taught. I am not the one who should teach.

Age means nothing in the desert. Being sixty does not make me a father or an elder or a guide. Grace alone makes a man an elder and if grace has touched me at all, it has uncovered my wounds rather than elevated me. It has shown me my poverty, not my maturity. The more I have prayed the Jesus Prayer, the more I have read the Fathers, the more I have tasted solitude, the more I have realized how immature my soul remains.

And the circumstances of these past years sharpen this truth. The inability to be received into the Eastern Catholic Churches, the canonical liminality, the priesthood that feels suspended in the air without a place to land. These things do not simply wound me. They interrogate me. They expose my illusions of importance. They reveal that I am not an elder seeking disciples. I am a disciple begging for a teacher. I am a man clutching at God for direction in the dark, not one who stands on a mountaintop pointing out the path to others.

It is strange to stand at this age feeling as if I am just beginning, as if I know nothing, as if I have no right to instruct anyone. And yet God continues to place before me people who hunger for the wisdom of the Fathers, who seek companionship on the narrow road. I have nothing to offer them but my own poverty, my own wounds, my own desire for God. But maybe that is all I have ever had.

If there is any teaching left in me, it cannot be the teaching of someone who has arrived. It must be the teaching of someone who is still seeking, someone who kneels before the mystery, someone who speaks from the ground where he has fallen and been lifted again. Teaching that bows before silence and rises only when silence permits it. Teaching that confesses more than it instructs. Teaching that knows its own limits and trembles at the thought of misleading even one soul.

Perhaps this tension between silence and teaching is not something to resolve. Perhaps it is the truth of my vocation now: to remain a disciple for the rest of my days. To sit at the feet of the Fathers. To let the wounds and the failures and the losses be my instructors. To seek elders, even if I never find them in the flesh. To understand that any word I speak must first have been burned in the furnace of silence and emptiness.

I do not want to speak from authority. I want to speak from hunger. I want to speak from the ache that has driven me deeper into the heart of God. If a word rises in me, let it be a word born of silence, a word that has wrestled with God, a word softened by tears and shaped by bewilderment.

In the end, I want nothing more than to be a disciple who sometimes speaks, a learner who shares the bread he begged for, a man who lives in silence and lets silence teach him how to love. If God desires me to speak, He will make the words His own. And if He desires me to be silent, He will be the one to fill that silence with His presence.

Either way, let it be His doing, not mine.