The Earthquake of Divine Love

The world calls it madness. The monk knows it as sobriety. The Fathers call it “sober drunkenness,” for the one who has tasted the love of God is seized by a paradox that overturns all human categories. What reason calls irrational, grace reveals as wisdom. What the world fears as loss, the monk discovers as gain.

When the monk enters his cell, he steps into the holy winepress. It appears to the eyes of flesh to be nothing more than a small and hidden room, yet within it the heart is crushed like grapes and made to pour forth the new wine of contrition and divine love. The door closes behind him, and the earthquake begins. Tears strike like waves against the rock of the heart, loosening its hardness. In that tragic weeping he finds himself drunk, yet with the only sobriety that matters: the vision of God’s mercy.

Zacharou shows us that this “madness unto wisdom” is born not of sentiment but of repentance. Love is no abstraction. It is fire. It seizes the monk until he can no longer live as before, until every breath is consumed in the invocation of the Name. In his cell he laments his poverty, confesses his ingratitude, weeps over his unworthiness, and yet in the same moment sings hymns of thanksgiving that he has been given even this small space where Christ becomes his companion and servant. The contradictions of this life—lament and gratitude, weeping and joy, hell and uncreated Light—are reconciled only in the crucible of divine love.

Saint Sophrony lived this mystery with terrifying intensity, his towels wet with tears, his nights consumed in lamentation. For him, repentance was no passing emotion but a prophetic earthquake that shook the whole of his being. Yet from that hell of compunction came visitations of the uncreated Light, the sober intoxication of divine love that left him ravished and consumed. So too with Saint Silouan, Saint Symeon, and all those who let their hearts be pierced by the arrow of Christ’s love.

For the monk, the cell is not isolation but communion. It is the most beautiful place in the world because it is here that heaven bends low. Here the soul is both wounded and healed, both stripped bare and clothed in light. Here the madness of love for Christ blossoms into a wisdom not of this world.

And what of us, who are not monks? This mystery is not foreign. Every Christian who turns to prayer with compunction tastes something of this sober drunkenness. The same Spirit that made the Apostles appear drunk on Pentecost is poured out upon us. We too are called to the paradox: to be both broken and made whole, to grieve our sins and yet to rejoice, to suffer the fire of love that consumes self-love so that the heart may burn with God’s own longing.

Even a whisper of this Spirit, as Saint Sophrony says, is “glory beyond compare to all the content of life lived apart from God.” To seek that whisper is to live always on the edge of an earthquake, ready to be shaken into the madness of love, and to discover in the still small voice of Christ the only sobriety that endures unto eternity.

Personal reflection based on the writing of Archimandrite Zacharias Zacharou 

“The Otherness of Love” pp. 294-301