A NEW WAY OF SEEING - A NEW WAY OF BEING

"Aloysha is now capable of abandoning himself to divine providence - not in the passive sense of taking whatever life gives him, but in the prophetic sense of accepting life's difficulties and imperfections as the very stuff of his destiny. Nothing must be rejected but everything accepted as from God's hand. That is what Zossima meant when he told him that in his sorrows he was to find his happiness."

Robert Inchausti, Subversive Orthodoxy p. 58
writing about Dostoyevsky's Bothers Karamazov

Subversive Orthodoxy was one of the books I began reading after I had arrived on "The Coast" and was staying with the New Camaldoli in a hermitage named "Kyros" - a Greek word that means for me "the fullness of the present moment." It has the connotation of "God's time," or a "moment of significance," "a moment pregnant with meaning." It is the eternal moment as opposed to simply a moment in time (chronos - as in chronology).

The quote from Inchausti's reflections on The Bothers Karamazov expresses something of this new way of seeing that came out of my experience at The Beaches, Toronto and the whole fiasco over the car. It is not passive resignation to a situation - just accepting what can't be changed - but rather seeing the gift within the situation. Providence is ultimately benign and leads us in the path we are meant to walk, the road we are meant travel - not in a fatalistic sense (which is blind) but but "in the prophetic sense of accepting life's difficulties and imperfections as the very stuff of his destiny" - which is about seeing clearly the true essence of things. As Kerouac says, "Believe in the holy contour of life."