What Judgment Feels Like

God struck me.

I committed a moral crime. One that many would excuse me for, but which I believe is serious. I have felt sorrow, and shame, and my guilt. But then I was struck in a very specific, very appropriate way. It seems unmistakeable. I didn’t expect it. But it happened.

First, it felt heavy. Like being hit once, heavily. Then it felt light, lenient that is, and with love. Then it felt just, and that it was necessary.

Do you know what it’s like to be punished by God? To be chastened? To be granted the sorrow of your crime in full measure? It is not something to try to avoid. Judgment is not to be avoided in itself. The evil that prompted it – that is the thing to avoid.

But to be scourged – it’s not cathartic in the way people want to suggest – in a sordid way.  People suggest that one is looking for a crime to be mitigated and erased. It isn’t. The crime is still there. We Orthodox hold to not forgetting our sins, to remembering them, in order to know what we are, and what we are not. My crime is not erased, and I don’t feel free of it. I feel… that I was taken measure of, that I have been loved enough to be taught, not by my own mind, but by the hand of God what is wrong. I don’t feel cast out, or destroyed. I feel rebuked, but with gentleness, yet powerfully.

I am brought low by it. I am brought to my knees. It is God. I am in his hands, and he is not pleased with me. Mercy. But more. Mercy. But more. i find the mind does not know what to say at such times. Do not let me go – chasten me. Do not destroy me with wrath – but do not let me off, do not excuse me, do not free me from the correction I need. That’s what it feels like.

The Lord is merciful in his anger. His judgment is his own radiant energy, his own grace sustaining and upholding a life, so that it does not fall away and be destroyed by death – by its crimes – by becoming entirely made of evil. One doesn’t presume to ask to be judged, I think, or so it feels, but one doesn’t turn away from it, or wish to escape it. So great a mystery is judgment.

You might think this is the manufacture of my own mind. I am not infallible, and I wouldn’t be guilty of prelest. But I recognize how direct, how surgically precise, and how effective it is. I am not a naturalist who thinks there is always an explanation that omits the economy of God. There is no cause to presume it is anything else. Struck, as though in all the world, for this thing, I was singled out and made to know  – I won’t say commensurate (“neither according to our sins hath he dealt with us”), but appropriate judgment.

Thanks are due. God deals mercifully with the sinner. God saves by chastening, rather than condemns by ignoring, the sins of his children. That’s it. No profound ideas here. Just, this is what has happened.