Becoming Desert: A Journal of Hesychastic Struggle in the West - Part V: The First Light of Grace Entry 28

Introduction

I did not go into the wilderness. I was not tonsured on a holy mountain. I live in the West, where noise seeps into the bones and the air is thick with restlessness. Yet something in me aches for the desert, for that place where men and women once wrestled with God and were broken open until mercy filled them.

This is not a manual, not a polished theology, not a record of visions. It is simply a journal of one who seeks hesychasm in hiddenness. I am not a monk in the desert but a struggler in a room. Yet the Fathers said: “Go to your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.” So I go.

What follows are fragments from that cell: noise, failure, temptation, tears, glimpses of grace. The desert is not far away. The desert is within.

Part V: The First Light of Grace

Entry 28: Light on the Face of Christ

In the quiet, just once, I saw Him, not with my eyes, but in my heart. A face, full of mercy, radiant but gentle. It passed like a shadow of light, here then gone. My mind says I imagined it. My soul knows otherwise. Even a glimpse changes everything.