in love with the events that are dragging them downward

Without Your eye I wander hopelessly

through my soul like a wayfarer in the night,

in the night’s indistinguishable gloom. 

And the wayfarer in the night falls and picks himself up, 

and what he encounters along the way he calls “events.”

You are the only event of my life, O lamp of my soul.
When a child scurries to the arms of his mother, 

events do not exist for him.
When a bride races to meet her bridegroom,

she does not see the flowers in the meadow, 

nor does she hear the rumbling of the storm, 

nor does she smell the fragrance of the cypresses

or sense the mood of the wild animals–

she sees only the face of her bridegroom; 

she hears only the music from his lips; 

she smells only his soul. 

When love goes to meet love, no events befall it.

Time and space make way for love.

Aimless wanderers and loveless people have events and have history. 

Love has no history, and history has no love.

When someone makes their way down a mountain

or climbs up a mountain without knowing where he is going, 

events are imposed upon him as though they were the aim of his journey. 

Truly, events are the aim of the aimless and the history of the pathless.

Therefore the aimless and the pathless are blocked 

by events and squabble with events. 

But I tranquilly hasten to You, 

both up the mountain and down the mountain, 

and despicable events angrily move out of the way of my footsteps.

If I were a stone and were rolling down a mountain, 

I would not think about the stones against which I was banging, 

but about the abyss at the bottom of the steep slope.

If I were a mountain stream, 

I would not be thinking about my uneven course, 

but about the lake that awaited me.

Truly terrifying is the abyss of those who are in love

with the events that are dragging them downward..."

[from Nikolaj Velimirović's Prayers by the Lake]