When the Demons Speak at Dawn

The demons rush upon me again, night and day.

They whisper their poison as I rise, mocking the shape my life has taken: “What meaning has this priesthood now? What value is there in your hiddenness, in hands that labor rather than bless?” They sneer at my silence, at the stillness of my hermitage, at the long hours of manual toil. By evening they return, dark voices circling the edges of thought, murmuring of wasted days and lost identity. And I, like the psalmist, feel myself “fade like a shadow that lengthens, shaken off like a locust.” Yet I also take up his cry: “Help me, Lord my God; save me because of your love. Let them know that this is your hand, that you, O Lord, have done it.”

The Fathers teach that such assaults are not signs of abandonment but of proximity to grace. St. Anthony said that no one can enter the kingdom untested, and that where the demons rage most fiercely, there the soul draws near to God. The mockery that questions the worth of hidden obedience or of manual labor is the same ancient taunt that met Christ in the desert: “If you are the Son of God…” It is the voice that doubts identity, that sows confusion between what is divine gift and what is self-made. The demons despise humility because they cannot comprehend it. They rage when the soul refuses to define itself by anything but the mercy of God.

Abba Poemen once said, “Teach your mouth to say that which is in your heart.” When the heart knows its poverty and still gives thanks, the demons are undone. For thanksgiving is a flame that consumes their bitterness. To bless God in affliction, to see in the dust of one’s humiliation the fragrance of His presence, is to share already in the victory of the Cross. The psalmist cries, “I am poor and wretched, and my heart is pierced within me,” yet from that wound there flows a prayer that transfigures suffering into communion.

The elders of our own times echo the same wisdom. Elder Aimilianos wrote that when the soul is stripped of all outward dignity and stands alone before God, that moment becomes the liturgy of the heart. There, in the silent cell, one learns the true priesthood: not of altar or vestment, but of offering one’s own desolation as a sacrifice of praise. The sweat of labor, the ache of obscurity, the mockery of the unseen spirits, all become, through thanksgiving, the Eucharist of the solitary.

So I rise again to meet their voices, not with argument but with prayer. If they say, “You have no name,” I answer with the psalm: “I give thanks to the Lord with all my voice; he stands at the right hand of the poor man, to save him from those who would condemn his soul.” Let them rage; the heart will not. For the Lord Himself has taken up my cause, and in His mercy I shall not fade, but be hidden in the shadow of His wings, where no voice of mockery can reach.