January 1, 2022

Dear everyone,

Today, I experienced an even greater stillness in the welcoming of this New Year. Exactly 15 minutes after the clock tolled 12:00 a.m., all the lights in my neighbors' houses were turned off, no sound emanated from any child's trumpet, and no firecracker exploded. For the second year in a row, we celebrated  New Year's Day in my village with no one being injured. And this New Year's day was even more silent than the previous one.

When we went into lockdown in 2020, I started again in my rediscovery of the Sufis and the Desert Fathers (Abbas) and Mothers (Ammas). My mother and me were fortunate to have gone to Jordan, Israel, Palestine, and Egypt in 2018 and one of the things that struck me most in the places where we went is the evidence of loss and destruction. Abandoned cars, abandoned houses, abandoned mines and signs of dangers littered the barren lands we visited. The broad and unforgiving expanse of the desert struck me most when we were in Mt. Sinai and visited St. Catherine's Monastery. This is the same Biblical place where God appeared to Moses in the Burning Bush, beneath the Mount of the Decalogue. There is a wooden cross far above the mountain which indicated where the body of the beheaded Aikaterina Dorothea, or known as St. Catherine was found. The mountains in this range and the stony arid magnificence of the desert left a lasting impression on me. I personally felt and saw why ordinary people, learned people, healers, widows, prostitutes, who turned away from their previous lives to became the holy Ammas and the Abbas, sought refuge in places like these to discover and be one with the Stillness, the Silence from which All came and to which All would return.

The lockdown made me realize that the desert is not simply a place, or a hilly country that one can visit. It is also a wilderness in the Spirit, that is trying to make sense of all the apparent turmoil this global crisis had evidently engendered.

In times like this, the holy Amma Syncletica would probably preach what she practiced: that is, living and directing the soul with discernment. Since "Our God is a consuming fire", she taught that we must all "start the divine fire within ourselves with tears and toil", for it is not certainly easy. And the way, as pointed out by the holy Abba Symeon, the New Theologian, is through Love:

"Love came down, as is its way…ardently I searched after it;

and suddenly, completely,

I was conscious of it present in my heart,

like a heavenly body.

I saw it like the disk of the sun…

It closed me off from the visible

and joined me to the invisible things.

It gave me the grace to see the Uncreated."

In the meditative hum of the minutes passing by to another day, I remember what the Sufi Prophet said which link Fire/Light, Toil and Love together:

"And I say that life is indeed darkness save when there is urge,

And all urge is blind save when there is knowledge,

And all knowledge is vain save when there is work,

And all work is empty save when there is love;

And when you work with love you bind yourself to yourself, and to one another, and to God."

So in all the days of this New Year 2022, and in the incoming Christmas of 2022, and beyond, my family and I wish that all of you are blessed with the Work, the Fire/Light, the Love and the Grace to bind yourself to your God, and be graced "to see the Uncreated": the Manifestation of every Good Best Thing and Thought you have never even entertained as Possible!

Deo Gratias!

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