Povozhaev

The dying breath of summer moved pink flowers. As I strode under old trees absorbing a palpable shadow of change, feelings and thoughts cascaded through me. I was numb. I had graduated eight years earlier from the college where I was an adjunct instructor of composition. From the blue office of my favorite professor on medical leave fighting breast cancer, to open dorm windows offering the exact sweet smells of the younger girl I’d been, time was heavy in me as I walked through campus recalling the hope I’d had in making life good and whole on earth. The past dwelt in the hollow of my chest, reconcilable to the present in a silent, wordless whisper. There, near my heart, but deeper still, was the quiet of memory: Cherie’s deep laugh and strong bones; her careful pause and generous study. I had graduated, married, and become pregnant, even still clinging to the tethers of Cherie’s mothering. Past my college days and into adulthood, she had offered possibility, happiness one summer afternoon in her backyard: cut grass, the rattle of her daughter’s hoola-hoop, baked bruschetta bread and homemade salsa.

Truth is obvious and follows nature. We study, we learn. We work the body, we grow stronger. We seek, we find. We are loved, we love. Mystery is just as obvious, for how and why probed deeply enough leads to the unanswerable. Life and death are ultimate mysteries. There is no easy or complex response that satisfies the human heart when it comes to suffering through life and death. In our pain we are beckoned past knowing, past individualism, past this world all together. In our suffering we are one.

Recently, I heard that every heartfelt confession is a plea to God for the entire human race. Self analysis breaks clichéd notions about the human condition. As others before me have argued, one’s self is always the subject at hand.¹ As a writing teacher, I’ve urged students to construct personal narratives with deliberate, controlled purpose, conscious always of extending beyond the self. Yet, what if I prescribed far less, entertaining the notion that each heartfelt confession is a plea to God for the entire human race? Is not “real” (published) writing often expressed in such a powerfully real way?

Students and I read a published essay in which the writer is crippled from war. He and friends are in New York when a beautiful woman pauses and sees him, not merely as another person but as a fellow human being in all the depths that suffering reminds us we share in. He writes of compassion we often withhold, despite the powerful connection that offers respite and even joy to another: “For there is a universality to a wounded person,” he says.² Students engaged with their own stories of sorrow: a divorce, a failed career, single parent homes—countless silent confessions burning through the lesser realities in which we hold ourselves.

For most of my life I believed that Jesus Christ died for my sins. Though I hadn’t thought this implied God required His Son to suffer as ransom, considering salvation in such a way does not suggest a God of Love and Justice. Orthodox Christianity teaches Christ died to conquer death, to be the Victor over all suffering, including the ultimate—death. “His loving, self-sacrificing work is to rescue us for Himself from the power of sin, Satan, and death, not from His own displeasure with us. What the Son of God truly wants as a result is achieved: the just reconciliation of His creation to Himself.”³ During Pascha, or Easter in the Eastern Christian tradition, the Church sings “Christ trampled death by death”. I understand this mystery as far as my own small sufferings permit me to.

Eight years earlier I married and shortly after graduated college. I taught high school English, living with my husband and his host family, saving money for our first home. There were problems, to be sure. Living as a married couple under the roof of “parents” is a challenge unique but common in its issues. Asserting independence while totally dependent is awkward at best. Since this time, things have grown harder, things have not become more perfect—however, I pray my soul has matured through the sufferings of life. My priest once said life doesn’t get easier; the harvest field continues to grow, but so do the “tools” in the shed. Suffering is purposeful. Infertility, financial stress, Russian in-laws moving to the States—my marriage testing faith as I’d never dreamed possible. It has been through the thin and cold times that determination to stay has increased my faith, and my love.

Suffering prepares us to receive one another with open and caring hearts. Recently, during the hardest time in my own life, others have shared their pain with me in candid honesty and mystifying intensity. Why? How?—It seems irreconcilable that a young mom would have cancer. Church Fathers teach there is a connection between body and soul, sin and sickness: “[P]ain tells us that something has gone wrong with the soul, that not only is the body diseased, but the soul as well. And this is precisely how the soul communicates its ills to the body, awakening a man to self-knowledge and a wish to turn to God.” St. Nicodemos of the Holy Mountain says the true self is not the visible body but the invisible soul.⁴ In a world that denies the soul and lives for the perfection of the body, suffering defeats us, explodes us into smithereens, as Meredith Hall writes in her personal narrative on losing her husband due to his infidelity.

She compares her loss to killing chickens. She writes, “Holding her neck hard against the floor of the coop, I took a breath, set something deep and hard inside my heart, and twisted her head. I heard her neck break with a crackle. Still she fought me, struggling to be free of my weight, my gloved hands, my need to kill her.”⁵ For my students and me, Hall’s writing resonates. We know her pain—for it is our own, held in our individual bodies, carried deep into the silently screaming soul. We unite in each specific suffering, not merely the general idea that pain is common. No, each instance is real, is mystical and holy in its effects on us and those with whom we share.

Meredith ends with the reality of a new tomorrow when she will turn over her garden, call a lawyer, tell her children she and their father are divorcing. She concludes with healing in the choice she’s made to keep on, despite her pain. In another brutally honest and chillingly real personal narrative, Cheryl Strayed writes of losing her mother and sacrificing her marriage as a result of pining for her loss. She becomes a slut—ultimately betraying the essence of true love, loyalty and self-sacrifice. Strayed writes, “Healing is a small and ordinary and very burnt thing. And it’s one thing and one thing only: it’s doing what you have to do.”⁶

Often, we are not strong enough to heal. Nature shows us the truth: self-reliance has limits which are icy and more painful than suffering in and of itself. To look no further than one’s self is to deny the offering of a humble and contrite heart that God promises will move Him to mercy. Like a sacrifice on the alter before God, healing is a “burnt” thing, silently asking that we humble ourselves and know God. For burnt offerings are nothing to Him without a heart of praise that joins together with others in an outward gaze, accepting illumination of intricacies within the human heart. May we determine to take responsibility for our stories, allowing the intellectual cost and heartily believing in the power to understand with the mind of the heart—and so to heal.

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Lea Povozhaev

A nonfiction writer and 2007 alum of the NEOMFA, Lea Povozhaev teaches creative writing and composition at Walsh University. Her work appears in Ohio Teachers Write, Fringe Magazine, Akros Review, America and is forthcoming in the anthology Growing Up Transnational and the magazines Spiritual Life and Word.

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