Beginning of a path.

Today I sat with the teachings of Abba Moses and found myself nodding along in the quiet — yes, purity of heart, yes, love above fear, yes, the Kingdom as the only true end. I understood it all in the stillness. The archer and the target, the means set aside when they obstruct the goal, the three motives ascending toward love. I believed every word of it while the room was silent and no one was watching me. And then I stepped back into my life, and the understanding scattered like birds from a branch.

Because the truth is, I can hold the thought of hell with a kind of strange peace — God, if you need me there for your sake, so be it — and yet a sideways glance, a cooled tone, a moment of imagined disapproval from someone standing right in front of me sends me spiraling in ways that hell apparently cannot. The fear is not of punishment in the next life but of indifference in this one. Of being unseen, unwanted, dismissed. And when that fear wakes up, the stories begin, and the body follows the stories, and suddenly I am very far from purity of heart and very deep inside a loop I did not consciously choose to enter. Lord, how did I get here? When did the opinions of those who can only touch the body come to weigh more than the love of the One who holds the soul?

I do not know the full answer yet, and I think that is actually the point of today. This has been a day of questions more than conclusions, and I am beginning to accept that questions may be their own form of fidelity. How do you come to me today, Lord? Do you come in the joyous pain that breaks something open, or do you stand just beyond reach so that I learn to move through the water on my own? Do you come to sit with me in the silent places, or to press on the wound so it finally heals? I do not know, and I am trying to stay inside the not-knowing without fleeing into easy answers or anxious stories.

What I do know is that you have called me to questions — for others, and it seems, for myself. To refrain the statement, to open the hand instead of closing it into a declaration. Perhaps the releasing I am asking for does not come through understanding the fear first but through returning, again and again, to love — not love as an emotion I generate but love as the ground I keep coming back to. Purity of heart is this: to love you above all things and all things in you. I am not there. But I am here, and I am asking, and maybe that is where the path begins.