Bulgaria, Tsarino (en)

The Moment of Giving In

On my way to Bulgaria, I paused at the Abbey of the Brothers of the Holy Johannes.
The road stretched ahead, uncertain, but I found myself in a stillness that stretched deeper than any horizon.

They called it "adoration" — an hour of silent presence before the figure of Christ.
To me, it felt like meditation: the low benches, the hush, the quiet company of breath and wood and stone.
I sat and looked.

The figure of Christ held my attention.
Not just the suffering — we know suffering —
but the posture of it.
He slumped, head forward, not collapsed, not defeated… but given in.
There was still tension in the twisted limbs,
but the neck had let go.
And in that gentle drop of the head, I saw surrender.
Not giving up — but giving in.
The body still bound, but the “I” released.

And in that posture, something moved in me.

I wondered: Does the soul suffer?
It seemed to me — no.
Suffering belongs to the body, to the mind, to the constructed self that can tense and protest and resist.
But the soul?
The soul — that quiet presence that remains after thinking stops —
it notices, perhaps,
but it does not cling.

I asked Father Clemens.
He said, yes — the soul can suffer.
When a friend dies, when there’s loss.
And I knew what he meant.
Because the ego, when struck deeply, trembles all the way to the foundations.
It feels like soul-suffering.
And perhaps that is why people believe the soul can bleed.

But for me, the soul is not the self that grieves.
It is the space that notices grief.
Like a sky that holds the storm, but is not torn by it.

And then I thought:
If the soul cannot suffer, what of hell?
What point is there in torturing a presence that simply observes?
And maybe that’s the heart of it:
Hell is not fire or demons — but the clinging to identity,
the refusal to give in, to surrender,
the torment of a self that cannot stop being someone.
That cannot fall, like Christ’s head, into release.

In a playful moment, I had asked Father Clemens:
What is truth?
And he smiled: Whatever I say.

We laughed. But I kept thinking —
he’s not wrong.
Truth, for most of us, is whatever harmonizes with the echo chamber of our ego.
It feels right when it fits the pattern of our history.

So perhaps, in the end,
truth is not something we can own,
but something we must keep meeting anew.
We must realise a single viewpoint is naturally limited. And whatever insight is gleaned in tenporarily not thinking, it is always translated back into resonating with a singular viewpoint when we 'understand'. Understanding is stopping questioning,

Like Christ, not frozen in one final pose,
but showing us, again and again,
that the way through suffering
is not resistance,
but surrender.
The way through life is not understanding, but humility, thankful acceptance of any experience. If it be suffering, than that is what it will be. And we can observe the tides of suffering.Read more