A Little Change-Lenten Reflections: Some Thoughts, part I "The Madness"

I think I will take some time away from posting Orthodox News. I will post anything of great interest that may come my way, but by and large I will discontinue this.

This Lent I went deeper than I ever have into fasting and the Fast's results are showing up to the point where others are noticing things that I thought were not there but they, my friends, are urging me to let up some.

I have been blessed to have a friend come live with me for a time and the relationship has been beneficial to us both. He is new to the Church and I have alot of comfortablility disclosing myself to him and he had witnessed tonight, in my home, the manifestation of much of the true ME, the ME of the Ego, being the ego and not observing the ego as something distinct to be discussed in a scholarly way, safe and detached from it, but as it, when the thinking about it blend and become one with it.

I can only begin to venture that the Fast, in performing its strictly biological function, breaking the body away from nutrients that are used to sustain it, is now bringing the body into an area where the stores of its nutrients have been depleted and a sort of dementia is being experienced.
Tonight I was overtaken with delusion but with the blessing of voicing it and exposing it in the presence of my friend who helped keep me from entering into madness proper.

To be fair, we talked a good honest talk about a good honest many things and without this talk, I may not have been brought to this place of madness. But once having come to its edge, I felt safe to enter into the madness to explore it in a way I have never allowed myself to before. I pray and fight myself out of such states long before they have approached the place of enveloping the entire ME.

Now, I would like to add that I suspect this is the true state, in some sense, of every one of us.

If the reader has never experienced the Canon of Saint Andrew of Crete, in his words placing himself as even below the worst of sinners and every vile act that a man may do, this little piece I have written will not make sense. More importantly, its not just hearing the words of the Canon, but believing yourself to be that man, only then will this little essay into the science of the spirit begin to make any sense.

I will explore a bit in my next piece, The Comfort of Food.