on helping one's lamb to lay among the lions.

Your Ochlophobist, not a bastion of paternal competence, recited a stupid phrase to his elder daughter, aged two and a half, some weeks ago. She had returned from a morning at the zoo spent with grandmother, mother, sister, aunts, and cousins. She happened to show a very small paper cut on her finger to your Ochlophobist, and he proceeded to ask her if she had been bitten by one of the lions. My comment was met with a flash of horror across her face. It had never occurred to her that lions might be adversarial. Now it seems that she hardly thinks about anything else. She speaks frequently of the lions coming to get her, there are places in the house in which she is terrified, she shows her father the places where the lions are (these lions are too small for your Ochlophobist to see, but she points to their precise location for him) and asks him to stomp on them with his foot, she is afraid to be alone in any room, and looks over her shoulder as she walks down the hallway, closing doors behind her in order to have less space to worry about. Your Ochlophobist has tried to explain that there are no lions and when that explanation did not work he tried to explain that we have sufficient means in the house to dispatch an attacking lion should the need arise. But our little Celt shook her red head at her father's trust in chariots, with that wisdom that comes from having seen her father and her cousin frequently unable to knock over tin cans with the Daisy Red Rider in the backyard. So we turn to what has usually been the last resort in your Ochlophobist's life.

Our Fawder, who art, in heaven, hallow be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven [here she starts to say "hallow be thy name" again, and gets prodded to "give us"]... give us this day our dail lee bread, and forgive us our tressesspasses [here she often tries to skip to "against us" and is proded to go back], as we forgive those to tressesspasses ginst us, and lead us not in tentation, but deliver [often just 'liver] us from the evil one. Frew the prayers of our holy fawders [here she usually wants to go back to "who art in heaven"], O Lord, Jesus Christ, [usually here a prod] our God, have mercy on us and save us, amen. This last part while your Ochlophobist takes his flux weary hands and attempts to form three little fingers to a point, with two to rest against a palm the size of a walnut, and sign God's word on the matter of lions, and all other matters, over her and her troubled heart.

This, like all other aspects of our faith, is not magic. Praying the prayer does not make the lions disappear. I have not found an explanation fit for a two year old to explain why it is we must pray this prayer as the lions are about when it does not cause them to go away. So now it remains as simple as, "well then, this is what we do." She will learn soon enough that to pray that God's Kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven is to pray for the presence of Him who took the violence of every man's lion upon Himself. Fr. Hopko says that to pray "Lord, have mercy" is to pray "Lord, be who you are to us." If who God is to us is most revealed in God hung dead on a tree then it seems we had best get used to the company of lions, for the time being.

There is a great deal that one might find to fear in this life. For some years my wife and I had only one conception that we knew of, an early second trimester miscarriage. While pregnant with our red headed one my wife became seriously ill, delirious and hallucinating from high fever, unable to lift herself out of bed, with infectious disease specialists who knew nothing of the cause or what to do (though thanks be to God a night shift nurse who intuited something), and I assumed the worst, first for our child in her womb, then even for her own life. Once, by God's goodness, Winifred was born I feared those long moments between every of her breaths. With two very little ones in my home as I am fast approaching middle age I sometimes wish that we had born children sooner, but it seems that those bitter years have brought about the intense gratitude I have for every little breath felt against my skin. Walking infant Brighid to sleep tonight I find in the cadence of her breaths my own, "thank you, thank you, thank you." I was an obscenely arrogant young man, I probably remain such, and God's giving in his time has been eucharist to me, as His giving always is. For whatever reasons, I needed to wait to become a father, my moments with these little ones are set aflame, my failures as a father, plenty of them, weightedly apparent, the blessedness of the presence of two little lives manifest in ways I would not have realized in years past. Mercy.

God's gifts sometimes seem the most fragile of things, too weak to last or survive on their own. The violence of Satan's rebellion and man's embrace of it are, it seems, everywhere upon us, and ever winning. The Kingdom of God counters this ubiquitous violence with the breath of an Infant, a breath which would cease on the rood, only to later breathe the authority of the Father through the presence of the Holy Spirit upon those the Father had given Him, those not, in the worldly sense, a promising lot. Here is the one paradigm with no anomaly. It is God's weak, and His poor, and His lowly who will overcome the world.

How does one teach a not yet three year old that the most fearful of all lions, these lions she sees, are within her? One of the things which has amazed me as a parent is how early in life an infant displays what is obviously fear. I suppose we should expect this from a person created to image God and born into the postlapsarian sickness. It seems from infancy through adulthood none of us can shake that sense that something has gone terribly wrong. No matter our devises of avoidance, we will have to face up to the fact that, as Perry says, the universe is an open wound, and we all intuit, to varying degrees, that some time or another the piper of our brokenness will have to be paid. Save the coming of the Last Day, we will get sick and die, as will those around us. Most of us will suffer some hardships prior to death. In many respects, the Orthodox faith handles this state of affairs in a manner which is completely different from American health and wealth Christianity in its various forms. Orthodoxy in unequivocal here - our sober, joyful awareness of our own suffering is a part of our recapitulation in Christ and essential to our salvation.

But how does one teach such a thing? Especially to a child? I am not sure that it is a didactic point which can be taught. I am increasingly inclined to think that it is a state of affairs that one must come to intuit. All of us want to see our loved ones, family and friends, safe from harm, well, and good. Most of us want the same for ourselves. I suppose that for many of us our greatest fears have to do with concerns about the well being of our children. We imagine our lions as those threats to body and soul which our children face at seemingly every turn. It would seem distorted if these were not our concerns. At the same time, we who have been baptized into the waters of Christ's death and have partaken of His Body and Blood really have no claim over our own lives or the life of anyone else. So what should one desire? It would seem that any concern which is possessive is wrong, but just as wrong would be disinterest in the welfare of another, especially those entrusted to our care. As Orthodox we are taught that there is one place, and one place only, where I am obliged to address to woundedness of the universe -- in my own heart. Indeed, we believe that as man is the microcosm of the universe which is paradoxically even greater than the macrocosm, we even believe that woundedness of the universe has been healed through the givenness of one Man to God, that the right order of one human heart, that of Christ, has led to the restoration of all things. Especially for those of us reared in one of the many forms of American Christianity, there is a tendency to assume that it is our obligation to fix whatever brokenness we see around us. Part of the danger of this wrong assumption lies with the fact that there is some truth in it. But the Church teaches, following the image of Christ, that the only way we will ever rightly draw beauty and grace over the ugliness and brutality around us is to give our own lives over to God. I can say and do all of the right things, but if my own life is not one of prayer I will be impotent. One sees this sort of thing all the time, persons whose influence in religious and spiritual matters ends up being nothing much more than commotion. But if one is fortunate enough to encounter a person who is genuinely and profoundly holy, one recognizes that when they simply walk in the room the context of every living narrative in that room has just changed. They permeate grace and new-createdness, first in themselves, and then in those around them. I am certainly not such a person, but it seems to me at the very least I must try to give to my children the awareness that they have a father who is trying to be such a person. How do you attempt to become such a person? Well, quite obviously, you pray, you repent. For salvation to come one must at least intuit that the lion I must quell is the lion within my own heart. It is that lion that I must finally learn to lay with. As I say, I cannot imagine a way in which this can be taught in a didactic fashion. One must suffer and pray one's way through it, upheld by the saving balm of the Mysteries. The only way that I can see to pass such intuition onto one's child is to see it realized in one's own life. It is so profoundly correct that the Church acknowledges as central in her betrothal rite the fact that marriage and childrearing are a call to the death of martyrdom. There is no state of life within Orthodoxy that gets to pursue "the good life" (especially not in the "American dream" variety) while other states of life must pursue cruciform work. To be Orthodox is to go under the waters which do not part.

There is one prayer commonly said among Orthodox that would seem to be among the best at helping one develop the intuition concerning how to encounter our lions. I came across this prayer when a friend gave me the text of it a decade or so ago, and my wife and I think of it very much in terms associated with our own conversions to Orthodoxy. Fr. Stephen Freeman includes it in the daily prayer rule of his parish, St. Anne's Orthodox Church in Oak Ridge.

O Lord, I know not what to ask of Thee. Thou alone knowest my true needs. Thou lovest me more than I myself know how to love. Help me to see my real needs which are concealed from me. I dare not ask either a cross or consolation. I can only wait on thee. My heart is open to Thee. Visit and help me, for thy great mercy's sake. Strike me and heal me. Cast me down and raise me up. I worship in silence Thy holy will and Thine inscrutable ways. I offer myself as a sacrifice to Thee. I put all my trust in Thee. I have no other desire than to fulfill Thy will. Teach me how to pray. Pray Thou Thyself in me. Amen.
- the prayer of St. Philaret of Moscow

Perhaps what I mean by intuition in this post is better expressed as God praying Himself in me. There, God within me, is the only place of peace. May my little ones find Him there.