DEALING WITH ADVERSITY: THE ORTHODOX APPROACH
😥 This is one of those serendipitous posts that seem to be passing by as regular as clockwork. Three memes crossed my screen today as if on queue. The theme is, dealing with hardship, adversary and grief. It emphasizes the difference between the Eastern and the Western approach. The first is a video uploaded by the much appreciated translator of 'Metropolitan Neophytos of Morphou Homilies', a segment from His Eminence's sermon on talks he had about Saint Anthimos of Chios, Saint Nikephoros the Leper and Elder Eumenios Saridakis. Available in Greek here.
Dec. 13, 2025 Metropolitan Neophytos of Morphou Homilies: The Era of the Great Saints | Saint Eumenios Saridakis. English translation in the subtitles.
If you are not familiar with Orthodox metaphysics and ethics, this way of thinking and view of reality will seem extraordinary. Yet, this is how Christians are supposed to see the world. Every event in life, particularly those of adversary and grief, are an opportunity to repent and to bring us closer to God. We'll see it in action in the third example.
Next I chanced on a music video, described as "a man sits alone in a cathedral, holding the photo of the woman he loved… and lost. The pain he feels is breaking him apart. He visits her grave with flowers, breaking under the weight of goodbye—until something impossible happens".
The 'impossible' is a butterfly fluttering over his beloved's photo, supposedly her soul (or a symbol, or an allegory thereof). This sort of infantile fantasy is what you get when you have no articulated theology, and when 'spirituality' takes the place of 'organized religion'.
Dec. 14, 2025 FactRushMusic: Don’t Despair | Sad Cinematic Vocal — The Divine Sign.
Good grief! This is the flimsy, almost cartoonish spiritual baggage most liberal, secular Westerners go through life with. Nothing more than some vague passing notion of God and the destination of the soul to carry them through life and its hardships. Is it any wonder people can't cope anymore?
The beginning of an answer is coming from Dr Zac Porcu in his midweek post on Substack titled, "Thank You God for the Mold" (link). It may not be available to non subscribers, so I am giving you a broad outline. If you have not signed up yet, you can check out the public playlist of his YouTube lectures here.
Dr Zac, his wife and toddler daughter recently were exiled from their home as it was being treated for mold. The family moved into the living room of his father for a number of weeks, living out of a suitcase.
He is pointing out that American culture is so oriented on happiness and prosperity that there hardly seems to be any place for dealing with stress and adversity. Going to confession, his Confessor told him to thank God in his prayers for the mold and the hardship.
Dr Zac is remarking that we tend to fall into two extremes, from the unchristian, materialistic 'prosperity gospel' to the equally unchristian, gnostic rejection of the physical world as an evil creation of a malevolent God.
We veer from one extreme to the opposite, the 'royal road' being lost. We should appreciate and be thankful for our existence and the good of the physical world, without mistaking it for the supreme good, which is the Kingdom of God
Confronted with the choice whether to fix up the house as a whole in a thorough way as a professional builder might like it, or to accept a lesser quality that would put the house sooner at the disposal of the family and the people they love, the doc chose the latter.
He suggests you could apply this sort of reasoning to many situations in life. Obviously stuff is here to serve us. We should not go about this as if we are here to serve matter. To Christians the physical life is a mere a prologue to the life to come.
In the West we lost every sense of the royal road. An entire timeline can be crafted how we got here (link). Personally I blame Plato's dualism and Hegel's dialectic for most of it. It makes us go from one extreme to the next.
It also goes to our inability to prioritize. The notion of the hierarchy of things has been lost in the West since the Scholastic period. But applying hierarchy, a scale of most important to the contingent, requires discernment and judgement. Wisdom, in fact.
There is an entire complex of issues why people in the West are having problems in dealing with adversity and grief. The roots go deep and are complex. One thing is certain: infantile cartoon fantasies are not going to help the situation. But thanking God for whatever we have, goes a long way!
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