November 2020 – Allaxis Partners

In the school of adversity,ª you sometimes get your knuckles rapped. Sometimes it’s your fault. Sometimes it’s another person’s fault. And sometimes, it’s no one’s fault; it’s just life.

In any case, the pain is real. And sometimes those knuckles can throb for quite a while. The big question is: how will we deal with our affliction?

In his commentary on the psalms,º Elder Aimilianos of Simonopetra writes:

It is natural to consider [the feeling of affliction] as something negative, as something to be avoided, or to pretend that we are the kind of people who are not affected by such things. However, the experience of affliction is at the center of the life of every soul…

The truth is that afflictions are not the signs of God’s absence or abandonment but rather of His presence. Afflictions are like the kneading of the dough in the making of the bread…without them the soul is left unformed, cold, and alone. It is affliction alone that can tear us away from our isolated, individual existence and transform us into something much more whole and open…

From my affliction, I called upon the Lord, and He heard me and brought me into a broad place (Psalm 117.5). It was while I was in the midst of my afflictions that I remembered the Lord, and so I cried out to Him, and in response He transformed the narrowness of my heart into a broad place…He opened my heart and enlarged my soul and so enabled me to accept suffering…

He taught me how to live in this broad place, with an open heart that is able to contain all things. My heart has become like a vast reservoir: no matter how much water you pour into it, you’ll never be able to fill it, and no amount of troubles or afflictions can overcome me, since God alone can fill my heart. I called out to God in my affliction, and what did He do? He opened my heart, He made it so large, so wide, that now it can contain God Himself. Before, the littlest thing was enough to drown me, but no longer, for my afflictions proved to be but a preparation to receive God.

While this commentary may be more meaningful to people of faith, it contains a principle that applies to everyone, regardless of belief in God: the most effective response to affliction is to express it in a safe conversation, to a person with empathetic care for you.

What the wise monastic wrote won’t always happen to you, but sometimes it will. Sometimes it will happen when you hear yourself express aloud what you’ve never before expressed. And sometimes it will happen when the person who is listening—whether divine or human—responds in a way that transforms the pain into a soul-expanding force.

ª https://allaxispartners.com/the-school-of-adversity/

º https://www.indiktos.gr/ασκητικα/576-psalms-and-the-life-of-faith.html

It’s human nature to take the easy way, to watch a movie rather than go for a run. To avoid that difficult conversation rather than to initiate it. To present the set of numbers that makes us look best rather than the metrics that are actually most important. Deep down, we know it doesn’t do us any good, but we’d rather feel comfortable than the opposite.

In his classic Book of Pastoral Rule, Gregory the Dialogist encourages his readers

to love adversity for the sake of truth, to shrink in fear from prosperity, for it often defiles the heart by vainglory, but adversity cleanses it by sorrow. In prosperity, the mind becomes conceited; in adversity, even if on occasion it becomes conceited, it abases itself. In prosperity, man forgets who he is; in adversity, he is recalled, even unwillingly and by force, to the recollection of what he is. In prosperity, even his past good works are often brought to nothing; in adversity, faults, even long-standing, are wiped away. It is a common experience that in the school of adversity the heart is forced to discipline itself; but when a man has achieved supreme rule, it is at once changed and puffed up by the experience of his high estate.

There will be times when adversity finds us, when we won’t need to go looking for it. But in those other times, what will we do? Will we choose comfort or the school of adversity?

The Most Effective Response to Pain

The School of Adversity