On a May afternoon, I watched a ­nondescript young man enter the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Sofia, Bulgaria—a show church, Eastern Orthodox by denomination, and used less for worship than for tourism—reach into the pocket of his rain jacket and hurl a stone at the face of Christ on a larger-than-life-icon behind the altar. It was protected by a sheet of glass, which cracked open but did not shatter when the rock hit it. The young man’s aim was slightly off, so after the glass broke the stone damaged the plaster near the edge of Christ’s halo.

By the time that stone landed, the vandal already had turned around and was sprinting out of the cathedral. Though I gladly would have tackled him, I didn’t even get close. Nor did the other people milling about, tourists like me who walked to the altar to assess the damage. We saw the glass on the floor, the nick on the icon. “Schade,” said one, who must have been German. A priest came through, bellowing in Bulgarian and looking, too late, for a perpetrator.

He looked at all of us, and I tried to tell him with my disappointed eyes and my sagging shoulders that I hadn’t caught the vandal, that I wouldn’t even be able to pick him out of a police lineup. I wandered around by the altar a while longer, wishing I had been younger and quicker and more perceptive and had been able to stop the young man—an iconoclast, in the truest sense of the word—from escaping the place he had profaned, or even from throwing that stone at all. Who was he? A failed divinity school student with a grudge? A too-young father having a bad day? An atheist who wants to eradicate all signs of faith in the public sphere?

Whatever he was, I felt sure that he hated those who believed, those who prayed. I didn’t expect to see such violence in Bulgaria. In America, our cultural debate often runs along religious lines: we argue about ­abortion, gay marriage, and religion’s place in an increasingly secular public sphere. In many former Iron Curtain countries like Bulgaria, where religion was rendered subservient to the official atheistic ideology during the long Communist reign, it plays almost no role in public life. In Western Europe, too, it has been at times drowned out by secular voices and might never recover its influence over the people. So while I could imagine why a young man would throw a rock at Christ in America, I couldn’t guess why this would happen in a place where religion is in danger of becoming merely a quaint reminder of cultural history.

Yet it happened. A stone flew, glass broke, and I fell into a listless daze. I left Nevsky Cathedral without an icon, without even a postcard, and shuffled dazed over to nearby St. Sofia Church, originally dating from the sixth century and currently being excavated by archaeologists. The friend who had given me a tour of Sofia had first taken me there instead of to the showier Nevsky for good reason: St. Sofia is a working church and simply feels more sanctified. He pointed out the crypt that we could glimpse through ­glass-covered holes in the floor, and also an early Christian image—a bird in the Tree of Wisdom—that I will never forget. I vowed during this tour to visit St. Sofia alone and light some candles for those I loved, and after the incident with the stone it seemed like a good time. I needed to be in a place where religion was practiced, not merely displayed as cultural adornment.

Two women walked past me with a priest, then folded their hands together in prayer as he sang. Chairs sat near the altar, awaiting worshippers. Near the entrance stood a glass-walled booth where candles, icons, and crosses were for sale. Close by were several metal candle holders at shoulder level, as well as two sand-filled basins at shin level. My Bulgarian friend had told me the high candles were for the living and the low ones for the dead.

The woman behind the sales window was not of the generation that learned English in elementary school. As I pondered how to buy candles from her without my Bulgarian phrasebook, I called upon the smattering of Polish—like Bulgarian, a Slavic language—that I had learned as a child from my maternal grandfather. I could still count to ten, and that would probably get my point across. But when I counted the people I wanted to light candles for, I quickly ran out of fingers. Among the dead: my father, my father-in-law, and two children who never made it into this world—jeden, dwa, trzy, cztery. Among the living: me, my wife, our two sons, our two mothers—pięć, sześć, siedem, osiem, dziewięć, dziesięć.

And that was it for fingers. What about my brothers, my brother-in-law, my children’s godparents? What about the priest I met on the Black Sea coast who drank to the point of stumbling and, though married, refused to stop harassing a young American woman? What about the Catholic priests who caused all the sex abuse scandals and all those who suffered from them?

On top of those, breaking the camel’s back, was the young man who had thrown the rock at Christ’s face. He needed prayers as much as anyone, though he might be enraged at the thought of it. I couldn’t separate him from anyone else on the planet who had engaged in this thing called sin, which means all of us, living and dead.

No one is immune from the emotions that made the young man throw his rock. By the time the cock crows to end our lives, we will all have betrayed Christ not three times, not three thousand times, but more: when we pretend that we have managed to escape God’s sight, when we grow ungrateful for the life we have been invited to live, when we spill our own shame and anger onto fellow creatures of the world. As I stood before the candles that burned for the living and the dead, the distance between me and the young stone-thrower collapsed. We humans are in this thing called sin together: What have we done? I kept asking myself. Not he or they but we, the species Homo sapiens. I had too many of the dead to pray for and too many of the living. In my mind, they had become two masses from which I could not separate myself. I was part of one now and would be part of the other for the rest of ­eternity.

When I made my way back to the window, I knew what to say.

“Dwa, molya,” I asked the woman behind the glass, and when she asked what size, I pointed at the ones that looked right. I paid my seven leva, picked wax off the ends of the candles to expose their wicks, and lit one for the living from a candle that someone else had paid for. I didn’t try to single out any one of the living for special mention, nor did I try to with the dead when I knelt down to do the same with their candle. The dead were the same, and the living were the same. One candle for each.

I knelt on the hard tile and the priest who had just been singing walked past me, staring at this obvious tourist. I got self-conscious and my face reddened, and as I stood up I wondered how my next step would go. Not where it would lead me, because I knew it would take me out the door and back onto the streets of Sofia, but with what spirit would I be led forward now that the gap had closed—just for one moment, long enough for me to light those candles and offer a silent prayer—between me and everyone who had ever lived.

How would I walk forward? Would I have the grace to heal my wounds, our wounds? Would I have the grace to even try?

Steven Wingate is Assistant Professor of English at South Dakota State University.