When There Is No Place to Stand

Fidelity in the Place of Uncertainty

“I have already forgiven all, and pray for those who sinned against me.”

— St. Nektarios of Aegina

There are seasons when God seems to take away the ground beneath our feet.

The familiar place disappears. What once gave shape to our life no longer seems able to hold it. The future remains hidden, and every attempt to secure it only increases the unrest of the heart.

St. Nektarios knew such a place.

He knew what it was to lose position, reputation, security, and belonging. He knew what it was to leave behind an ecclesiastical world in which he had expected to spend his life and to enter another without knowing what awaited him.

Yet what is striking about Nektarios is not that he eventually found another place.

It is what happened before he did.

He remained faithful.

He did not make his innocence the condition of his peace. He did not require others to understand him before he could forgive them. He did not spend his remaining strength trying to compel history to give him back what had been taken away.

He entrusted himself to God.

This is perhaps one of the hardest forms of poverty.

We are willing to surrender many things to God provided that He tells us what will replace them. We can endure the closing of one door if another is already visible. We can accept exile if we know where our new home will be.

But sometimes there is only the road.

And Christ.

The Fathers understood this as xeniteia—the life of the stranger, the one who possesses no permanent dwelling here. It is not merely leaving a place. It is allowing the heart to relinquish its demand for a place from which it can say: Now I am secure. Now I know who I am. Now everything is settled.

There may come a time when none of those things can be said.

Perhaps something simpler can be said:

I am the Lord’s.

That is enough.

There is no need to turn the past into an accusation. There is no need to make the future into a defense of the choices we have made. There is no need to persuade anyone that the road beneath our feet is the right one.

There is only the necessity of walking truthfully before God.

Conscience must remain clear.

The heart must remain free of bitterness.

Those who have wounded us must be forgiven.

Those whom we have wounded must be carried in repentance.

And what has not yet been disclosed must be left undisclosed.

This was the hidden freedom of Nektarios.

Alexandria could be taken from him.

His office could be taken from him.

His reputation could be wounded.

His future could become uncertain.

But Christ could not be taken from him.

And perhaps this is what exile finally teaches us.

We thought we needed a place.

We needed God.

We thought we needed certainty.

We needed fidelity.

We thought we needed to know where the road was leading.

We needed only enough light for the next step.

There is great peace in ceasing to ask life to explain itself.

God knows.

God sees.

God will judge all things with mercy and truth.

My task is smaller.

To remain before Him.

To keep watch over my heart.

To refuse bitterness.

To obey conscience.

To pray.

To love.

And when there is no place to stand, to discover that Christ Himself has become the ground beneath my feet.

Perhaps exile is not always something from which we must escape.

Sometimes it is the place where everything unnecessary falls away until there remains only the one thing that cannot be taken from us.

Christ is here.

And if Christ is here, I am not lost.