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The soul prefers a velvet cross to a wooden one, yet only the latter saves.

Bertrand de Nullepart

In the shadowed chambers of my soul, where the light of vigor once danced with unyielding grace, I find myself now tethered to a bed of thorns.

A frail prisoner of flesh and bone.

The air grows heavy with the weight of hours, each moment a mirror reflecting not the deeds I once wrought in the sunlit fields of health, but the silence that cloaks me now—a silence that speaks louder than the hymns I used to raise. There is a season for all things, a rhythm to the turning of the world’s great wheel, and yet how ill-prepared I am to yield to its austere decree when it bids me lie still. To suffer, it seems, is an art I have not mastered, a craft that demands a tempering of the spirit I scarcely know how to forge.

What is this restlessness that gnaws at me, this quiet rebellion against the stillness imposed upon my limbs? I lament not the ache that threads through my sinews, nor the fever that paints my brow with beads of dew, but the absence of motion, the muting of my hands that once lifted offerings to the divine. In days past, I walked the paths of service, my steps a cadence of purpose, my voice a thread woven into the tapestry of prayer. Now, stretched upon this rack of infirmity, I mourn the loss of those acts, as though their absence were a theft of my very soul. And yet, is there not a deeper truth lurking beneath this discontent, a whisper that bids me pause and listen? For in this hour of surrender, when the body falters and the will bends like a reed in the storm, there lies a potency I had not foreseen—a potency born not of striving, but of yielding.

The mind, ever eager to assert its dominion, recoils at such a thought. We are creatures of will, are we not? Beings who measure our worth by the works we heap upon the altar of existence. To act is to live; to suffer is to diminish, or so I once believed. But what if the hand that shapes the clay of our days intends a different form when the fires of affliction blaze? What if, in stripping me of my accustomed labors, it seeks to carve a vessel of another kind. A kind tempered not by the sweat of exertion, but by the quiet flame of endurance? A single hour, borne with love, may outweigh a thousand days of bustling devotion, just as a single star, steadfast in the night, outshines the flickering lanterns of a city.

And yet, how loath I am to embrace this truth. I confess it with a tremor of shame: I would rather stand upon the mount of radiance, basking in the glow of my own offerings, than kneel upon the hill of shadows, where the air is thick with the scent of myrrh and the echo of nails. The soul delights in sweetness, in the tender caress of favor, and turns its face from the bitter draught of trial. I have loved the divine when it mirrored my desires, when its voice sang in harmony with my own. But when the melody shifts, when it calls me to a tune of dissonance and strain, how swiftly my affection wavers. I am a fickle lover, drawn to the bloom of spring and repelled by the frost of winter, as though the hand that tends the seasons could be persuaded by my whims.

This is the crux of my folly, the knot that binds my heart in restless coils: I seek to serve not as I am called, but as I prefer. When the summons is to patience, I yearn for zeal; when it is to stillness, I pine for motion. I would have the world bend to my design, the divine will shaped to fit the contours of my own. And in this, I am not alone—you, too, have felt this tug, have you not? The urge to dictate the terms of your surrender, to choose the cross you bear rather than bear the one laid upon you? We are architects of our own tabernacles, dreaming of edifices bathed in light, yet shrinking from the rough-hewn beams of sacrifice. We crave virtue draped in velvet, not clad in sackcloth; we sip gladly from the cup of consolation, but recoil when it brims with gall.

Pause here with me, in the dim glow of this reflection, and consider the shape of our longing. We love the love we feel, the warmth that soothes our fragile frames, rather than the source from which it flows. The divine remains unchanging, a fixed star in the firmament of being, its essence unaltered by the tides of our fortunes. Yet how we shift and sway, our devotion a fickle tide that rises in prosperity and ebbs in want. In health, I have sung its praises with a fervor that felt eternal; in sickness, I falter, my tongue stilled by the weight of my own frailty. Is this love, then, or merely the shadow of it—a fleeting affection tethered to the fleeting pleasures of the flesh?

The question cuts deep, a blade honed by the whetstone of doubt. If I loved truly, would not my heart beat with the same rhythm in every season? Would not the hand that strikes me be as dear as the hand that lifts me up? The one who loves the eternal does not falter when the temporal fades; the one who cherishes the root does not mourn the shedding of the leaves. And yet I mourn, I falter, I cling to the husks of what was, as though they could shield me from what is. The fault lies not in the divine, whose constancy is a mirror too clear for my clouded eyes, but in me—in the something out of it that warps my gaze and bends my will.

What, then, is this something? A phantom born of pride, perhaps, or the echo of a self that fears to dissolve in the crucible of surrender. It is the voice that whispers of loss when the body weakens, that measures worth by the tally of deeds rather than the depth of being. It is the illusion that I am diminished when I cannot pray as once I did, when my lips cannot form the words nor my knees bend in homage. But what if prayer is not the sound I make, but the silence I keep? What if it is not the offering I bring, but the offering I become? In the stillness of this bed, in the slow pulse of breath that marks my hours, there is a liturgy unfolding—a hymn not of words, but of presence, a supplication woven from the threads of my own brokenness.

The thought unfurls like a flower in the dusk, fragile yet insistent. To suffer well is to act in a manner beyond action, to render a service that transcends the labor of hands. It is to stand—or lie—before the infinite, not as a doer, but as a witness, a participant in a mystery that does not demand my strength, but my assent. The iron flesh I once sought, the unyielding frame that could bear all burdens, is a dream of youth; the truer metal is forged in yielding, in the quiet alloy of trust and resignation. For in this yielding, I am not less, but more—not a shadow of my former self, but a soul distilled to its essence.

And so I turn my gaze inward, past the clamor of my discontent, to the still point where all seasons meet. The spring of my vigor and the winter of my weakness are but moments in a greater dance, threads in a tapestry whose pattern I cannot yet discern. I would have chosen the mountain of light, the peak where the air is sweet and the view unclouded; yet it is upon the mount of shadows that I am called to dwell, and there, perhaps, to find a truer sight. For the divine does not shift with my fortunes, nor bend to my caprice—it is I who must bend, I who must learn to see the caress in the strike, the bloom in the thorn.

You who read this, you who wrestle with your own seasons of want and plenty, know that this struggle is ours together. We are pilgrims on a road that winds through valleys of ache and peaks of joy, each step a question, each breath an answer. Do you, too, feel the pull of your own will against the tide of what must be? Do you, too, yearn for the ease of health when the weight of sickness presses down? Let us not despise the vinegar and gall, nor flee the shadow of the cross, for in their bitter embrace lies a sweetness we cannot yet name—a sweetness that lingers beyond the reach of our choosing.

Here, then, I rest—not in peace, perhaps, but in a kind of truce. The body trembles, the spirit bends, and yet within this fragile frame a spark endures, a flame that flickers but does not fail. The hours stretch before me, a canvas of light and shadow, and I am learning, slowly, to paint upon it not with the bold strokes of action, but with the soft hues of surrender. The sick who cannot pray, it seems, may yet offer something greater: a heart laid bare, a will unmade, a love that seeks not its own. And in this offering, frail though it be, there is a music that rises—a cadence of resilience, a melody of trust, a hymn that echoes in the silence of the stars.