This book is as a wonderful companion to the much-loved God, Where Is the Wound? Once again, Mother Siluana speaks directly to the people of our time: confused and wounded, yet created in God’s image and “born for joy.”

Her profound understanding does not come from theory, but from her own struggle, from within the struggle itself, in which so many of us recognize ourselves. Haven’t we been waiting for someone like her all along, for someone to embrace our wounds and tell us that indeed, God loves us no matter where we are?

In the first conference, “The Theology of Small Things,” Mother Siluana tells us that our individual problems have common roots. We forgot who we are. We identify with our wounds, and not with the image of our Creator. “Our mind is ill and filled with confusion, wrong opinions, and beliefs”. Our attention is scattered. We are seduced by psychological and spiritual trends that encourage positivity and emotional bliss, yet remain detached from the true spiritual life. God, once known as a Person who never leaves our side, is insidiously reshaped according to the precepts of society and our ever-changing desires. Thus, our soul becomes fragmented. We pretend to be who we are not. We run away from our own lives. We fall into depression and despair. Some even contemplate suicide, while others seek oblivion in pleasures of all sorts.

And yet, beneath this turmoil, the thirst for God remains. Mother Siluana knows this thirst. She shows us the way to rediscover our identity, meaning, and zest for life. She invites us to quench our thirst with the living water of her words.

She reminds us that God does not abandon us, that He is always present and interested in the smallest things of our lives. However, she tells us that we need to choose to be healthy. To collect all our attention and redirect it towards Him in everything we do. “Now, in what I am doing at this moment, I can meet God if I remember Him and show myself to Him, and I can feel the joy that He gave to me, and that is in me, regardless of what I can sense with my senses and what I can feel with my feelings.” 

The conference titled “Who Am I?” becomes an invitation for the sophisticated philosopher, the learned psychologist, the cradle Orthodox, and the seeker as well. We are defined by God, created by His own hand in His Image. We are created, therefore always dependent on our Creator. “God is; we become.” We become by interacting with Him and others; we grow and heal only in relationships. Joy becomes available to us.

So, how do we start to become? Again, it is our choice to desire change - to become by growing up into what God meant us to be.  To learn to “die to the unrealistic expectation that the world should automatically satisfy our needs and desires.” To stop being afraid of suffering. To name the lie and evil in us. To leave the defenses that separate us from God. To allow ourselves to die to the false image we create for ourselves. To dare to become what our hearts truly desire. To remember that we each are cells of the Body of Christ. To grow up in relationships. To engage without demanding love. To cling to God and stay in His Body. This is what Mother Siluana so boldly tells us. There is no other way. Because when we stop pretending, we start becoming...

However, many of us do not feel joy. We feel empty or half-alive; we are depressed. The last conference, “The Source of Depression in Modern Man,” addresses this pervasive reality. Here, Mother Siluana speaks of her identity crisis, when she, a smart and well-educated young woman, was “convinced that God does not exist, and if He exists, He does not deserve our love because He allows so much suffering in the world.” At that time, she was hospitalized twice in a famous psychiatric hospital in Bucharest. Alongside the standard treatments of the time, her doctor prescribed something unexpected: that she stop trying to be like everyone else, to dare be who she truly was. This is the advice she never tires of offering us. We have heard this before, but here it takes on a deeper meaning: the healing of an illness that keeps us stuck in emptiness and half living. “Depression is often a rebellion against a meaningless life”, “the cry of a soul that can no longer live without God.”

Many fall into depression because they have not yet found God; others because of wounds they have not yet been able to heal, or because they believe they deserve everything. In truth, we are often depressed because we do not know how to approach life correctly. We deny that we are wounded. We lack the courage to look inside and take responsibility for the lies we are afraid to discover in us. Instead, we blame others. We attempt to free ourselves by projecting our troubles onto them. And so, we remain caught in suffering, sadness, and depression.

Yet there is a way out, the very path Mother Siluana herself took.

It begins with understanding the words Jesus spoke to the rich young man in search of life: that life cannot be bought, because Life is God’s gift to us, offered for free. If we want to be truly alive, we must keep the commandments and learn to love ourselves and one another through the power they provide. “This is the door! This is the truth!” We must also cleanse and nourish ourselves with the Sacraments of the Church.

The path continues with learning to differentiate the events of life from life itself. “When I differentiate between me and my deeds, between my life and the circumstances of my life, I take the first step toward freedom.”

 However, the secret remedy for healing is forgiveness. She tells us that when we forgive everything that wounded us, depression lifts. The subject of forgiveness is Mother Siluana’s essential work, which integrates all her teachings and life experience. It gives us a clear step-by-step process, a radical way of healing, in which we learn to pray, uncover our wounds and to offer them to the Lord. As we bring bread and wine to the altar for the Eucharistic Liturgy, so we bring everything we experience to the Lord: thoughts and feelings, impulses and actions, sorrows and joys. Our lives become an incessant prayer—the inner liturgy.