Daily Talks and Other Writings About Herbert Schwartz Yoga and Me Current Updates

 

Writings of Herbert Thomas Schwartz, T.O.P.

Our Lady of Guadalupe
The Maternity of Mary

The Little Flower's Theologian

On Living Therese's Little Way

Daily Talks of an American Staretz

The Meaning of the Cross:
To Overcome the Misgiving about God's Love for us
Which is the Effect of
The Sin of our First Parents

The Message of Lazarus:
Only as Dead and Stinking in our Sins Are we Able to Rise with Jesus

Dead to Our Sins in Christ,
We Can Rise in Him to New Life

 
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This pastel drawing was sketched by Herbert at a time when a well known psychiatrist was visiting us. He called it "The Suffering Psychiatrist", and I believe it will be evident from the following introduction that his view of a genuinely Christian psychiatrist corresponds to the traditional Orthodox image of the staretz. In the words of one of Herbert's disciples:

As he explained it to us, the face is the face of a psychiatrist and the surrealist profusion of forms around him represents the fantasies and obsessions and disordered emotions which he explores in and with the patient. His own posture and expression, however, which dominate the picture, reveal the wisdom and fortitude of the doctor but above all his suffering, as he takes on the whole burden of the sins and sufferings of the patient and makes that burden his own. (Filioque, Vol. II, no. 2, Feb. 1982, ed. Cecilia M. Mellet, cover page.)
This explanation of the picture describes very well Herbert's own role in the community that grew up around him, as well as the role of the staretz in Orthodox tradition. The angel hovering over the right shoulder of the spiritual doctor especially places the drawing squarely in the Orthodox ikonographical tradition. It is a true ikon of the staretz.