A Letter from the Edge of Disappearance

“The heart that is truly illumined by grace is content to be unknown.”

— St. Isaac the Syrian

Introduction

There are seasons when the life one built through decades of devotion, work, and obedience begins to dissolve: not through failure, but through a slow mercy that strips away every illusion of permanence. In such moments, one learns that stability of soul is not founded upon community or calling, but upon the hidden life of the heart in God.

The following reflection was written in that liminal place, between vocation and silence, between the world that was and the one still unseen.

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Essay

I have reached sixty years of age, and something within me is quietly dissolving. Not in despair or bitterness, though both have brushed close, but in a kind of reluctant surrender. A self I have known for most of my life, shaped by vows, work, and the pursuit of a stable life with God, is fading. It might even be liberating, were it not for the recurring pattern of instability that circles back like an old, familiar storm. Communities built with love have fractured; hopes once radiant have dimmed. Each time I have tried to rebuild, believing that the next form might endure, it has slipped again through my fingers. I have watched others reinvent themselves after each collapse; I cannot. I cannot keep fashioning new versions of a life meant to rest in something unchanging.

I think often of my youth, when the call of God first struck me with fire and clarity. I longed for permanence, a home for the soul, a place where prayer and brotherhood would anchor what felt so transient in me. I entered a community that seemed to promise exactly that: a shared life consecrated by prayer, ordered toward God, bound by love and by stability. I believed that if I labored faithfully, through study, discipline, fear, and fatigue, something lasting would take root both within and around me. I gave myself to the rhythm of the hours, to the care of souls, to the shaping of younger hearts, hoping that through such constancy God would grant constancy in return.

But the ground was never still. Beneath the beauty and zeal, old wounds and hidden fractures ran deep. I tried to mend what was broken, to make of the ruins something holy. For years I told myself that this was obedience, perseverance, fidelity to grace. Perhaps it was. But perhaps, too, it was the long unmasking of another truth: that the stability I sought outwardly was never meant to be found there, that the only permanence offered to us is the stillness born of surrender.

Now I stand on the far side of those years, a priest who has built much and seen most of it fall. I have tried to remain faithful, and I think I have, but fidelity itself has changed. It no longer clings to structures or outcomes. It feels more like a stripping, a gradual relinquishing of everything once thought essential. My life has become smaller, quieter: caring for my mother, praying alone, teaching in hidden ways, waiting at a threshold that may never open. The silence stretches, and some days it feels like exile; other days, like home.

There are moments when it seems absurd, to have labored so long, to see so little remain. The world calls that futility. Even in the Church, silence is often mistaken for absence. Yet the older I grow, the more I see that this unmaking follows the pattern of the Gospel. The Word did not descend to confirm divine stability but to reveal divine self-emptying. The Son entered our instability and made it the place of communion. What is dissolving in me, then, may not be loss but the slow mercy of grace doing its work: stripping away the illusion of control so that God might dwell where I no longer can.

Still, it feels like madness. The heart wants to see fruit, to gather evidence that it has not lived in vain. But St. Isaac the Syrian reminds us: “The heart that is truly illumined by grace is content to be unknown.” I am not yet content, but I am being taught. The silence that once frightened me now feels almost like His breath.

So I will not rebuild. I will not craft a new version of the life that once was. I will let it fall away and see if the emptiness can become a dwelling place. Psalm 132 has taken on new meaning: I will give no sleep to my eyes until I find a place for the Lord. That place is no longer a community house or a visible ministry, but the heart itself: purified by loss, hollowed by silence, waiting for love.

If this disappearance is His will, then let it be a disappearance into Him. Perhaps this is what I sought all along: the unshakable permanence not of institution or identity, but of love itself, hidden with Christ in God, where nothing remains but mercy and flame.