Elder Aimilianos on Life as a Spider's Web

 

Jesus Christ Deisis with the Theotokos and the Precious Forerunner   

"When all our days are past, and passed in your wrath, our years will be seen like a spider. Day and night [the spider] works. She rises in the morning, and cleans her corner. She works until the night, and again, the next morning, she is in her same corner. Her web was destroyed. In the morning, she must weave it again. Days and nights of agony, and she sweats and suffers, without, ultimately, her work being completed.

"Whatever I might do, no matter how good it is, is like the work of a spider.

"A work has essential meaning, and is not like a spider's web, but is eternal, only when it is a search for You, when we turn to You, when it occurs for You, when it brings me, not to a desert place, not into a foreign land, not to this temporary earth, but to the true Chanaan, where You are, in Heaven.

"Thus, O Lord, was my life. I should have come to work for You. But I separated myself from You. For me, You no longer did exist, You Who exist from the ages and unto the ages. I thought, would my life be like this? A spider's corner, which would be gone tomorrow. Was I born for this, therefore?

"We have created something which has no worth before You, O Lord, it is nothing. I worked, thought, lived, thinking that I was progressing, that I was going towards the Promised Land. Because, however, I sinned, in reality, my life had no meaning to You. All things which have worth to You are those things that objectively have importance and meaning. Therefore, that which I thought was my success, that which I saw as my joy, that which for me was an object of enthusiasm and shouting for joy, this was something away from which You wished to turn away.