By Another Way

The soul does not need to understand the whole road. It needs only to seek the Lord faithfully upon the ground given to it.

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,

my ways not your ways - it is the Lord who speaks.”

— Isaiah 55:8

There are paths we would never have chosen because we could never have imagined them.

We look back over the years and want to make them intelligible. We search for a straight line. We want to know why God permitted this, why one door closed, why another remained open, why something that seemed settled for decades should suddenly - or perhaps not suddenly at all - give way beneath our feet.

But God does not give us the map.

He gives us Himself.

“Seek the Lord while he is still to be found.”

That is enough.

The desert fathers understood this. They were suspicious of the need to interpret everything. They knew how easily the mind turns Providence into a story that confirms its own desires. Better to bow the head. Better to pray. Better to say, Lord, You know.

There is a poverty in this that becomes freedom.

I do not need to explain the whole of my life in order to obey God today.

Nor must I condemn yesterday in order to walk faithfully tomorrow.

Perhaps this is one of the hardest lessons of the spiritual life. We imagine fidelity means remaining where we once found God. Yet fidelity is always fidelity to God Himself. The place where He met us is holy. The people through whom He loved us are holy gifts. The years of prayer and sacrifice are not discarded because the road continues beyond them.

Nothing given to God is wasted.

The elders teach us not to despise the road by which we have been brought to repentance. Even our bewilderment can become part of our purification. Certainties are stripped away. Explanations fail. The soul discovers that it has been leaning upon its understanding of God rather than upon God.

Then Isaiah becomes frighteningly beautiful:

“My thoughts are not your thoughts.”

We do not know the mind of God.

We know Christ.

And sometimes that must be enough.

The years can seem to demand an explanation. How can a road traveled for so long lead somewhere one never expected?

But perhaps this question assumes that we understand what the road was for.

Perhaps those years were not a road away from one thing and toward another. Perhaps they were simply the place where God taught the heart to desire Him.

Prayer deepened.

The Fathers became companions.

Silence became necessary.

The Jesus Prayer descended from the lips toward the heart.

The ascetical life ceased to be a subject of study and became a language.

And gradually the soul discovered that it had learned a grammar it had not deliberately set out to acquire.

What are we to say about such things?

Very little.

The desert counsels restraint.

Do not announce that you understand Providence.

Do not claim that God has revealed the meaning of your life.

Do not make yourself the interpreter of His hidden counsels.

Simply stand before Him and say:

Lord, if this is from You, preserve it.

If anything in it is mine, burn it away.

Do not allow me to follow myself while imagining that I follow You.

There is peace in such a prayer because nothing needs to be defended.

The modern elders repeatedly returned to this abandonment. God does not ask the soul to foresee the end. He asks for trust within the obscurity of the present moment. The person who places himself in God’s hands does not possess certainty about what tomorrow will bring. He possesses something deeper: the willingness to be led.

And sometimes being led means discovering that the road continues beyond the boundaries we had assumed would contain our entire life.

This need not make the earlier road false.

Grace is not so fragile.

A life offered to God does not become meaningless because its outward form changes.

Perhaps the greater danger is insisting that because God met me somewhere yesterday, I must remain there forever - even when conscience has become restless before Him.

There comes a moment when explanations must cease.

The soul stands before God alone.

Not rebellious.

Not triumphant.

Not accusing anyone.

Not declaring that it has finally understood everything.

Simply listening.

And perhaps trembling a little.

The Magi came to Christ by one road.

They returned by another.

Scripture says almost nothing more.

There are moments when this is the whole spiritual life.

We come seeking Christ.

We encounter Him.

And then, by ways we could never have foreseen, we find ourselves being asked to return by another way.

The road may bewilder others.

It may bewilder us.

But the final question is not whether the road can be explained.

The question is whether we are still seeking Him.

“Seek the Lord while he is still to be found.”

Seek Him when the road is clear.

Seek Him when everything familiar disappears.

Seek Him when others understand.

Seek Him when they cannot.

Seek Him when forty years stand behind you and the future contains almost nothing you can name.

For His thoughts are not our thoughts.

His ways are not our ways.

And perhaps holiness begins precisely here:

when the soul stops demanding to know where the road leads,

and asks only for the grace

to recognize Christ

and follow Him

wherever He is found.