I was an atheist for over thirty years. Not a quiet one — the evangelical kind. I grew up in a home with a fair amount of what a therapist would call childhood relational trauma, and I carried a deep hostility and skepticism toward any male authority figure, divine or otherwise.
In high school I discovered Buddhism and started meditating like a drowning man grabs a life preserver. I had crippling social anxiety. That was the surface problem. Underneath it was an ocean of anger and grief that would take decades to fully surface. But over time the practice helped. It gave me my first glimpses of stillness and relief from a nervous system that didn’t know how to be at peace.
I held onto that for years. And for years it wasn’t enough, and I couldn’t figure out why. I’d sit, I’d note, I’d label. The inner unease would calm down on the cushion and come right back when I stood up. By the time I had my own family, all the wounds I hadn’t healed reared up. I was trying and failing to have a meaningful practice and I didn’t understand what was missing.
Then my wife, who is Romanian Orthodox, introduced me to Orthodoxy and specifically the Philokalia. For someone who grew up with right-wing evangelism as the main lens through which I experienced Christianity, I was shocked to discover how much of what the Desert Fathers described overlapped with what I’d been doing on the cushion. The watchfulness. The stillness. The discipline of not following every thought that shows up. The mechanics were almost identical. But the orientation was different. The Orthodox practice wasn’t solitary. It was relational. You had a părinte, a spiritual father, someone who sat across from you and heard what you carried. And for someone with as much father hunger in me as I had, having an older man be there for me, really be there, was something I needed more than I knew.
That’s where this story comes from. Not the plot — the plot is Radu’s, not mine. But the thing underneath it. The discovery that certain wounds, the ones people made in us, need people to help heal them. You can sit with your pain alone. You can watch it, note it, label it with skill and let part of the patterns dissolve with practice. But solitary practice can also be a way of the wound trying to heal itself within the aloneness it’s always known. Connection, love, the real healing — that has to be done with people and, for me, perhaps with a God I can be in relationship to. Though I’m still working out that last part.
I want to be clear: this is not a story about Buddhism failing and Orthodoxy succeeding. It’s not a competition. Father Mihail’s offer at the end — the stole, the prayer — is not about Radu coming back to the church. He says so himself. It’s about a man finally letting someone be in the room with him when everything breaks. The practice, the tradition, the theology — those are the frame. What matters is the hand on the back of his neck.
The scene where Radu breaks down was written a week after something similar happened to me. I won’t say more than that except that trauma can freeze our bodies in ways that last decades, like a cramp we hold so long it just becomes part of us. And when it finally releases, often in the witness of another person, it is not pretty and it is not quiet. The body is shaking. It feels like something is leaving you, finally. I wanted to get that down while it was close. I wrote it partly so I’d remember.
This was the hardest piece I’ve written for Vesper. The first half had to be a real intellectual conversation — not a lecture, not a podcast, but two specific men with real ideas in a real kitchen. And then it all had to pivot from the mind to the body, from theology to trauma, without the reader feeling the gears turn. I’ve learned a lot from writing these pieces over the years, what works and what doesn’t work, and I hope enough of those lessons paid off to make this piece land in the way Radu’s story deserves.
There’s a Romanian word in the story: liniște (lee-NEESH-teh). English can’t touch it. “Silence” is too empty. “Peace” is too broad. “Stillness” is too physical. Liniște is all of those at once — a settledness, inside and out, where nothing needs to happen and nothing needs to be fixed. Father Mihail tries to explain it to Radu and Radu understands instantly, because he’s been looking for it his whole life. So have I.
I cry with all of these stories. They pour out of something specific — a wound, a moment of healing, an experience I don’t fully understand yet — and the writing is how the grief gets out. I usually don’t understand what a piece is really about until it’s done and I have some space. This one helped me see that the two practices living inside me, the Buddhist and the Orthodox, aren’t in competition. They never were. One taught me to sit still. The other taught me I don’t have to sit alone.
Liniște. A settled place.
– Derek Ellerman