Before the Foundation of the World

The Love That Precedes Our Search and the Gathering of All Things in Christ

“He chose us in him before the foundation of the world.”

— Ephesians 1:4

There are words in Scripture that we have heard so often that we no longer tremble before them.

We recognize them.

We assent to them.

We move on.

The desert teaches us to do something else.

Remain.

Take a single word into the cell of the heart and refuse to leave until it has disclosed the wound within us—or the mercy of God hidden beneath our fear.

He chose us in him before the foundation of the world.

Before.

The whole mystery may be hidden in that one word.

Before you prayed.

Before you repented.

Before you understood.

Before you failed.

Before the first wound was received and before you learned the strange ways by which the heart attempts to protect itself from being wounded again.

Before your virtue.

Before your sin.

Before you knew the Name of Christ.

You were already held within a desire older than the world.

This is where St. Isaac the Syrian continually leads us. He does not begin with the restless search of man for God. He begins, again and again, with the incomprehensible movement of divine love toward creation.

We imagine that the spiritual life begins when we become serious.

Isaac smiles at us from the desert.

It began before the foundation of the world.

We imagine that prayer is our movement toward God.

The elders teach us to become still enough to discover the One who has already drawn near.

We imagine repentance as the desperate attempt to cross the distance created by our sin.

But the Father is already on the road.

The Shepherd is already in the wilderness.

Christ has already descended.

Grace is always before.

This is extraordinarily difficult for the religious mind to receive.

We are more comfortable with achievement. Even our asceticism can become a subtle attempt to establish a claim upon God. We fast. We keep vigil. We say the Prayer. We struggle against the thoughts. We confess. We rise after falling.

And quietly, almost imperceptibly, the heart begins to believe that these things are carrying us toward God.

The Fathers reverse our vision.

What if the desire to fast was already His gift?

What if the pain of repentance was the warmth of His mercy beginning to thaw the frozen heart?

What if the Name of Jesus arose within you because the Beloved had already entered the hidden chamber and was calling you from within?

What if your longing for God is not evidence that you have finally learned to seek Him?

What if it is evidence that you are beginning to feel yourself being sought?

The elder does not teach the disciple to manufacture desire.

He teaches him to pay attention.

This is why the desert is so concerned with watchfulness.

Nepsis.

Be awake.

Not because God is far away and must be found.

Be awake because the heart is surrounded by grace and has become almost incapable of noticing.

The tragedy of the passions is not simply that they lead us toward sinful things. Their deeper tragedy is that they scatter attention. They fragment desire. They teach the heart to rush from one object to another, one fear to another, one pleasure to another, one thought to another.

The heart becomes dispersed.

And the dispersed heart cannot perceive what has always been present.

St. Isaac understands asceticism as the healing of this fragmentation. Silence gathers what noise has scattered. Fasting gathers desire. Vigil gathers attention. Tears wash the eyes. The remembrance of God draws the mind downward into the heart.

And slowly the human person becomes capable of receiving a truth that was true before he began:

He chose us in Him.

There is something almost unbearable in this.

We spend years constructing identities.

Successful.

Failed.

Holy.

Wounded.

Rejected.

Faithful.

Unworthy.

We gather memories as evidence. We rehearse old conversations. We return to our sins. We imagine the judgments of others. We stand before the tribunal of our own thoughts and allow them to tell us who we are.

Then St. Paul speaks.

Before the foundation of the world.

Your deepest identity does not begin in your history.

It begins in His desire.

This does not make our history unreal. Isaac never asks us to pretend that the wounds of the heart do not exist. The desert is far too sober for such sentimentality. The Fathers know the violence of the passions. They know how deeply fear can enter the soul. They know the long labor required for the heart to become simple again.

But the wound is not first.

Sin is not first.

Failure is not first.

Love is first.

And because Love is first, healing remains possible.

Perhaps this is why the modern elders so often draw us away from obsessive examination of ourselves and toward the remembrance of Christ. The mind curved endlessly inward becomes suffocating. We measure our progress. We inspect our prayer. We evaluate our repentance. We ask whether we are advancing.

The elder says:

Remember God.

Say the Name.

Stand before Christ.

Remain beneath His gaze.

The Jesus Prayer itself becomes an act of surrender to what precedes us.

Lord Jesus Christ.

Before I called Your Name, You knew mine.

Son of God.

Before I turned toward You, I existed within Your providence.

Have mercy on me.

Let me awaken to the mercy in which I have always been held.

Perhaps this is why the Prayer can become so deep that words themselves seem to disappear. At first we say the Name.

Then the Name gathers us.

Then, by grace, there are moments when the heart seems to discover that Christ was already there.

Waiting beneath the noise.

Beneath the fear.

Beneath the compulsive movement of the thoughts.

Beneath even our religious striving.

The Beloved.

Paul tells us that this divine purpose is not limited to the salvation of isolated souls.

God has revealed His desire:

“to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.”

All things.

Here the heart of Isaac begins to burn.

For if the eternal purpose of God is gathering, how can the heart that participates in God remain committed to division?

If Christ is drawing all things into Himself, how can I make a spiritual home of contempt?

If the movement of divine love is toward communion, how can judgment become the resting place of my heart?

The merciful heart described by Isaac is not an eccentric achievement of unusually tender saints. It is the human heart beginning to move in harmony with the eternal purpose of God.

God gathers.

And the heart touched by God begins to gather.

It gathers the suffering.

The forgotten.

The sinner.

The enemy.

The animals.

The whole creation.

Even those before whom the heart trembles.

Even those it does not understand.

The enlarged heart refuses to create a world outside the reach of its compassion because it has begun to glimpse the terrible vastness of the desire of God.

This is not sentimental mercy.

It is cruciform.

To gather what is divided is costly.

Christ gathers heaven and earth with His arms stretched upon the Cross.

The saints enter this mystery.

They allow the divisions within their own hearts to be healed until they can stand before the divisions of the world without adding hatred to them.

This may be one of the deepest asceticisms.

To refuse to add another division.

To refuse to make another enemy.

To refuse to allow fear to tell us who may be loved.

The desert father enters his cell.

The world imagines that he has withdrawn from humanity.

Years pass.

He weeps.

He prays.

He struggles with demons.

He learns the poverty of his own heart.

And one day he emerges carrying the whole world within him.

How did this happen?

He remained beneath the gaze of the One who chose him before the foundation of the world.

Love gathered him.

And having been gathered, he became capable of gathering others within his heart.

Perhaps holiness is something like this.

Not becoming impressive.

Not becoming invulnerable.

Not becoming certain.

Becoming spacious.

The heart slowly widening beneath the pressure of divine love until it can no longer find a creature for whom it refuses to pray.

All of this began before us.

Before the desert.

Before the Cross stood upon Golgotha—though the mystery of the Lamb was already hidden in the eternal counsel of God.

Before Adam drew breath.

Before the stars burned.

Before the foundation of the world.

You were desired in Christ.

The spiritual life is the long awakening to this mystery.

And perhaps eternity will be nothing other than the endless wonder of discovering how deeply we have always been loved.