Welcome, traveler! Enter and take your rest...

A chaikhana is a teahouse along the legendary Silk Road pilgrimage and trading route linking China to the Middle East and Europe. It is a place of rest along the journey, a place to shake off the dust of the road, to sip tea, and to gather together to sing songs of the Divine...


We awaken in Christ's body

by Symeon the New Theologian
English version by Stephen Mitchell

We awaken in Christ's body
as Christ awakens our bodies,
and my poor hand is Christ, He enters
my foot, and is infinitely me.

I move my hand, and wonderfully
my hand becomes Christ, becomes all of Him
(for God is indivisibly
whole, seamless in His Godhood).

I move my foot, and at once
He appears like a flash of lightning.
Do my words seem blasphemous? -- Then
open your heart to Him

and let yourself receive the one
who is opening to you so deeply.
For if we genuinely love Him,
we wake up inside Christ's body

where all our body, all over,
every most hidden part of it,
is realized in joy as Him,
and He makes us, utterly, real,

and everything that is hurt, everything
that seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful,
maimed, ugly, irreparably
damaged, is in Him transformed

and recognized as whole, as lovely,
and radiant in His light
he awakens as the Beloved
in every last part of our body.

-- from The Enlightened Heart: An Anthology of Sacred Poetry, by Stephen Mitchell

/ Image by Mads Schmidt Rasmussen /

View All Poems by Symeon the New Theologian


I have been rereading John Anthony McGuckin's The Book of Mystical Chapters, which is a selection of short poems and insights, many of them from the desert fathers and other voices from the rich Eastern Orthodox tradition -- beautiful little meditations. And one of the visionaries highlighted repeatedly is Symeon the New Theologian. Despite my Russian name, I was not raised in Orthodox Christianity myself, but I have really come to appreciate many of these profound mystics, perhaps most especially Symeon the New Theologian. This is one of my favorite poems by Symeon the New Theologian.

Symeon doesn't urge us to merely honor or love the Beloved (Christ within the Christian tradition) from a distance. We melt into the Divine, become one with the Divine, share the same body.

I move my hand, and wonderfully
my hand becomes Christ, becomes all of Him

Some of these lines remind me of a poem often inaccurately attributed to Teresa of Avila, You Are Christ's Hands with it's lines-- "Christ has no body now on earth but yours, / no hands but yours..."

This poem by Symeon is one I just want to drink in -- it feels so deeply healing and generous to the soul.

and everything that is hurt, everything
that seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful,
maimed, ugly, irreparably
damaged, is in Him transformed

and recognized as whole, as lovely,
and radiant in His light
he awakens as the Beloved
in every last part of our body.

Have a beautiful day discovering the Beloved within.



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/ Photo by Maria Hossmar /

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