A Terrible Mercy

On the love of God that dismantles the religious ego

“For whom the Lord loves He chastens.”

— Epistle to the Hebrews 12:6

A brother said to an Elder, “Why does God take away the things by which I believed I was serving Him?”

The Elder replied, “Because you had begun to possess them.”

There is a mercy of God that comforts the heart.

But there is another mercy that terrifies it.

For a long time a man may believe that he loves God. He fasts. He prays. He studies the Scriptures. He serves in the Church. His life is filled with good things. Yet hidden within these good things a subtle illusion grows.

He begins to think that the spiritual life belongs to him.

Virtue becomes a possession.

Prayer becomes an achievement.

Service becomes an identity.

Without noticing it, he begins to live from these things instead of from God.

This is the birth of the religious ego.

It speaks the language of holiness.

It quotes the Fathers.

It performs the works of devotion.

But its secret foundation is the self.

God sees what we cannot see.

And because He loves the soul He sometimes does something terrible.

He removes the structure that sustains the illusion.

The prayer becomes dry.

The certainty disappears.

The role that once defined the man collapses.

The soul feels abandoned.

But it is not abandonment.

It is surgery.

The false self cannot be healed.

It must die.

No man willingly dismantles the identity that protects him. No man easily surrenders the image he has built of himself before God and before others.

Therefore God sometimes accomplishes in love what we cannot accomplish in obedience.

He takes away what we have begun to worship.

This is why the Fathers say that true repentance often begins in loss.

The man who once believed he possessed the spiritual life suddenly finds himself empty. His knowledge cannot help him. His past achievements cannot sustain him. His identity offers no shelter.

He stands before God as he truly is.

Poor.

Powerless.

Dependent.

And in that terrible poverty something new begins.

The soul no longer tries to hold God.

It begins to receive Him.

The man who has lost the illusion of holiness may finally begin to live in communion.

For God does not give Himself to the self that possesses.

He gives Himself to the heart that has been stripped bare.

This is the terrible mercy.

God destroys the false life so that the true life may begin.