Before It Becomes Dor, We Ask God for Signs While Standing Inside Thousands of Them

We are always asking God to become more obvious.

Give me a sign.

Show me that You are listening.
Show me that I am where I am supposed to be.
Show me that I am loved.
Show me that You have not abandoned me.

And all the while:

breath enters the lungs.

Bread waits on the table.

Someone knows our name.

A mother still answers the telephone.

A father still grows older somewhere beneath the same sun.

Rain touches the window.

Music enters a room and, for reasons science can describe but never exhaust, something inside us trembles.

Someone waits for us to come home.

Perhaps the great tragedy of modern man is not that God has become silent.

Perhaps we have become accustomed to His voice.

Familiarity has made miracles look ordinary.

And this Sunday, the nineteenth after Pentecost, the Church gives us one of the most difficult passages in the entire Gospel: Christ's command to love our enemies.

Not merely to tolerate them.

Not merely to refrain from revenge.

Not merely to speak politely about them once we have safely removed them from our lives.

Love them.

“Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.” Luke 6:36.

And suddenly the question of signs becomes much more uncomfortable.

Because perhaps God's signs are not only sunsets and answered prayers.

Perhaps sometimes the person we least want to look at is also standing before us bearing the image of God.

Not because what they did was good.

Christianity never requires us to rename cruelty as kindness, to remain in danger, or to abolish necessary boundaries.

But the Gospel does refuse us one terrible luxury:

the right to decide that another human being has become less than human because they wounded us.

That may be one of Christianity's hardest revelations.

We search for God in the extraordinary while overlooking Him in the unbearable.

Nicolae Steinhardt understood something extraordinary about this.

In Dăruind vei dobândi, he arrives at what sounds almost like madness:

“Hristos… ne cere imposibilul: să dăm ce nu avem.”

Christ asks us to give what we do not have.

If you have no hope, give hope.

If you have no courage, strengthen someone.

If you feel no light, carry a candle for another.

And perhaps, this Sunday:

if you feel that you have no mercy left, give mercy.

Steinhardt's paradox is that in giving another what we ourselves lack, we may discover that grace has supplied it along the way.

Maybe that is how one begins to love an enemy.

Not by manufacturing warm feelings.

Not by denying the wound.

But by refusing to let the wound decide what kind of person we will become.

For Romanians, there is another word for discovering the value of something after distance has entered between us and it:

dor.

Constantin Noica understood that dor is almost impossible to dissect because it contains opposites within itself. In his meditation on the word, pain and sweetness somehow coexist; it carries both longing and absence, seeking and not finding.

Those of us who have lived far from Romania understand this without needing philosophy to explain it.

Dor is not simply missing a country.

It is hearing Romanian unexpectedly in a grocery store three thousand miles from home.

It is smelling food you have not eaten since childhood.

It is an old woman saying Doamne ajută exactly as your grandmother did.

It is hearing the Tatăl nostru sung in a church in America and realizing that, for several minutes, geography has somehow collapsed.

The strange thing about dor, however, is that it usually comes after.

After the house has been sold.

After the grandparents have died.

After the childhood street has changed.

After we have moved across an ocean.

After someone's voice exists only in an old recording.

Presence becomes precious once it becomes absence.

And perhaps this is why one of the great spiritual disciplines of Christianity is simply learning to see something before it becomes dor.

Petre Țuțea once said something magnificent:

“Ce pustiu ar fi spațiul dacă n-ar fi punctat de biserici!”

What a desert space would be if it were not punctuated by churches.

Elsewhere, even more simply:

“În biserică afli că exiști.”

In church, you discover that you exist.

Think about what that means for the Romanian diaspora.

In Anaheim, California, Saint Mary Romanian Orthodox Church gathers a community that includes second- and third-generation Romanian-Americans alongside people newly arrived from Romania, worshipping in both Romanian and English.

That is more than an ethnic institution.

It is not simply a museum for the country we left behind.

It is a place where memory is offered back to God.

Where Romanian words spoken by grandparents survive in the mouths of American-born children.

Where Doamne miluiește refuses to become an artifact.

Where someone who has spent all week speaking English may enter on Sunday morning and hear the language in which his grandmother prayed.

Țuțea was right.

A church punctuates space.

And for the immigrant, perhaps it does something more:

it punctuates exile.

It says:

You came very far.

You built another life.

Your children may pronounce certain Romanian words differently from you.

The world around you changed.

You changed.

But Christ was already here when you arrived.

And then there is New York.

A city where one can spend an entire day surrounded by human beings and scarcely encounter one.

We move underground together.

We stand inches apart.

Headphones in.

Eyes down.

Late for something.

Thinking about the next train, the next class, the next paycheck, the next audition, the next rent payment, the next achievement that will finally allow us to feel that life has begun.

California gives us miles between people.

New York sometimes gives us inches.

And somehow both can produce loneliness.

Our age has developed extraordinary technologies for communication while remaining strangely poor at attention.

We can see Bucharest instantly through a screen.

We can FaceTime across an ocean.

We can know what hundreds of acquaintances ate, wore, purchased, believed, celebrated and condemned before breakfast.

And still fail to notice the person beside us.

The modern world does not suffer from a shortage of images.

It suffers from a shortage of seeing.

We have become extraordinarily skilled at noticing what enrages us and astonishingly poor at noticing what has been given to us.

Which returns us to Sunday's Gospel.

Because there may be no greater test of attention than the enemy.

When someone hurts us, the wound becomes enormous.

It fills the horizon.

We remember the sentence.

The betrayal.

The humiliation.

The thing they should never have done.

And eventually we can know the worst thing about a person so well that we can no longer see anything else about them.

The image of God disappears behind the image of what they did to us.

That is precisely where Christ interrupts us.

Love your enemies.

Not because evil does not matter.

Because evil must not be permitted to teach us how to see.

Perhaps that is the connection between wonder and forgiveness.

Both require the recovery of sight.

Gratitude says:

I refuse to let familiarity make this gift invisible.

Mercy says:

I refuse to let injury make this person invisible.

And Christianity demands both.

Look again at the bread.

Look again at your parents.

Look again at your spouse.

Look again at your children.

Look again at the church you pass every week.

Look again at the stranger.

Look again, even if from a necessary distance, at the person who hurt you.

Not everything must be restored.

Not every relationship should resume.

But hatred need not become the final custodian of the heart.

Perhaps we have misunderstood God's silence.

We keep looking upward and saying:

“Lord, give me a sign.”

And perhaps heaven answers:

I gave you this morning.

I gave you lungs that filled again.

I gave you someone who remembers your childhood.

I gave you a language your ancestors prayed in.

I gave you a church thousands of miles from the graves of your forefathers.

I gave you music.

I gave you bread.

I gave you rain against the glass.

I gave you someone waiting at home.

I even placed before you difficult people through whom you might discover whether your love resembles Mine only when love is easy.

How many more signs would be enough?

One day, the voices around our table will become memories.

One day, somebody will pronounce our name for the final time.

One day, the church where generations prayed will contain faces different from the ones we remember.

One day, the ordinary Tuesday we barely noticed will become the kind of day for which we would give anything to return.

And then we will understand dor.

But perhaps wisdom is learning the lesson of dor before absence has to teach it to us.

So call while the voice can still answer.

Forgive while there is still time to become free.

Give thanks before the gift becomes a memory.

Stay a little longer at the table.

Listen when someone speaks.

Look at the faces around you.

Cross yourself when the bells ring.

And when you ask God for another sign,

perhaps first look carefully at the thousands He has already given.

The world may not be empty of God.

We may simply have stopped being astonished.