Desire and Wonder: A New Three-Volume Series Is Published

St. Isaac the Syrian, the Longing for God, and a Path Forty Years in the Making

“What unfolds across these pages is one movement of desire—the heart awakening to wonder, being drawn beyond itself, and discovering that its deepest longing has always been for God.”

There are books we write, and there are books that seem to have been writing themselves within us for years before we finally recognize them.

Desire and Wonder belongs to the latter.

I am very grateful to announce the publication of Desire and Wonder: St. Isaac the Syrian and Living in the Embrace of Divine Eros, a new three-volume series devoted to the spiritual vision of one of the great Fathers of the Christian East.

It was conceived and written as a single, continuous work—a sustained meditation on the vision of St. Isaac the Syrian and the mystery of the human heart drawn into the inexhaustible love of God. It was never intended to become three books. In fact, I resisted the thought of dividing it because what I wanted to express seemed to me to be one movement, one longing, one gaze.

But the work continued to grow.

Eventually it reached approximately fifteen hundred pages, making publication as a single physical volume impossible. And so it is being presented in three volumes.

The division is practical rather than conceptual. These are not three independent books, nor a trilogy in the ordinary sense. The volumes belong to one another and are intended to be received as parts of a single whole.

Perhaps there is something fitting about that.

For how does one come to the end of Isaac?

A Man Who Changed the Way I See God

There are saints whom we admire from a distance. There are others who become companions. And there are a very few who enter so deeply into the interior landscape of our lives that, after many years, we discover that they have helped teach us how to see.

St. Isaac has been such a presence for me.

I do not mean simply that I have studied his writings or taught his homilies. Isaac has slowly altered the grammar of my spiritual life.

He taught me to distrust every image of God smaller than mercy.

He taught me that repentance is not primarily terror before judgment but the breaking open of the heart before a Love it can scarcely comprehend.

He taught me that prayer eventually exceeds words.

He taught me that asceticism, stripped of love, can become another form of self-preoccupation, while true renunciation creates within us the poverty capable of receiving everything as gift.

He taught me that mercy cannot be confined to those whom we believe deserve it.

And perhaps above all, Isaac taught me to wonder.

Wonder is different from explanation.

Explanation stands before reality and asks how it works. Wonder stands before reality and becomes silent.

The older I become, the more precious that silence seems.

So much of life is spent naming, acquiring, defending, arranging, calculating, explaining. We construct identities and institutions and plans. We imagine that if only we understand enough, secure enough, accomplish enough, perhaps the ground beneath us will finally become firm.

Then life begins taking things away.

And strangely, beneath what is taken, something remains.

God.

Not an idea about God.

God.

Isaac has accompanied me into that place.

Desire

This is why the title Desire and Wonder became inevitable.

I have come to believe that beneath so many of our desires lies a deeper desire that we often fail to recognize.

We want security. We want belonging. We want to be understood. We want our lives to have meaning. We want wounds repaired, questions answered, futures made certain. Even many of our religious desires can become attempts to secure ourselves against the terrifying vulnerability of existence.

But beneath all of them there is an abyss.

And nothing created can fill it.

The heart desires God.

Not merely answers about God.

Not religious accomplishment.

Not spiritual experiences.

Not even certainty.

God Himself.

This is the great beauty of Isaac’s vision. He continually leads us beyond calculation into astonishment. At the depths of existence we discover not an accounting ledger but a Love whose measure is its measurelessness.

The ascetic life then begins to look different.

We relinquish things not because creation is evil, but because we are discovering something infinitely more beautiful. Prayer becomes less an attempt to obtain something from God and more the desire simply to remain before Him. Silence ceases to be emptiness and becomes a language. Repentance becomes the grief of having lived beneath the dignity of being loved so completely.

And gradually desire itself is purified.

The heart begins to say:

You.

Only You.

One Work in Three Volumes

What unfolds across these three volumes is therefore one movement of desire—the heart awakening to wonder, being drawn beyond itself, being stripped of its illusions of self-sufficiency, and discovering that the longing it has carried all along is ultimately a longing for God.

Perhaps there is something appropriate about the work having exceeded the boundaries I originally imagined for it.

Isaac himself continually does this to me.

Just when I believe I understand what he means by mercy, he opens it further.

Just when I think I understand repentance, he takes me deeper.

Just when I think I understand love, he reveals that I have hardly begun.

And when language finally reaches its limit, he points toward silence.

That is why the three volumes should really be understood as one book. The divisions are simply places where the physical book must stop. The meditation itself continues.

There is one path running through them.

Desire.

Wonder.

Repentance.

Mercy.

Prayer.

Silence.

Love.

And ultimately God Himself.

Forty Years

There is another reason this publication is deeply personal.

Desire and Wonder is dedicated to the memory of Fr. Drew Morgan (1960–2026)—my friend, mentor, and brother.

Forty years ago, Fr. Drew placed the Philokalia in my hands.

At the time, neither of us could have known where that gift would lead.

How could we?

A book is sometimes only a book. But occasionally someone places a book into our hands and, without knowing it, places us upon a road.

The Philokalia opened before me a world I am still discovering: the desert, watchfulness, purity of heart, the Jesus Prayer, the remembrance of God, the healing of the passions, the mystery of stillness, and the possibility that a human life might gradually become prayer.

That road eventually led me more deeply into the Fathers of the Christian East.

And somewhere along it, I encountered Isaac.

Or perhaps Isaac encountered me.

Decades passed.

Life became far more complicated than either of us could have imagined when we were young. There were joys and wounds, beginnings and endings, friendships and losses, accomplishments that once seemed important and eventually faded, and those strange providential passages through which God slowly teaches us that very little of what we clutch can finally be kept.

And now Fr. Drew is gone.

Yet the path remains.

I find myself holding the Philokalia again, so to speak, four decades later.

Only now the hands are older.

And emptier.

Perhaps that is grace.

Memory Eternal

The dedication at the beginning of Desire and Wonder reads:

Fr. Drew Morgan

1960–2026

In grateful memory of Fr. Drew Morgan,

friend, mentor, and brother,

who first placed the Philokalia in my hands

forty years ago

and opened before me a path

whose depths I am still discovering.

Memory Eternal.

I cannot imagine a more fitting dedication.

Because Desire and Wonder is ultimately about that path.

It is about what happens when Christianity ceases to be something we merely think about and begins descending into the heart.

It is about discovering that prayer is deeper than words.

That mercy is deeper than judgment.

That surrender is deeper than control.

That silence may say what language cannot.

That loss can uncover what possession concealed.

That the stripping away of what we thought we needed may reveal the One without whom we cannot live.

And that beneath everything—the searching, wandering, suffering, praying, loving, failing, beginning again—there has always been a desire we did not create.

A desire placed within us by God because we were first desired by Him.

The Path I Am Still Discovering

Perhaps that is why I could not make this a small book.

I have spent much of my life trying to understand what Isaac saw.

Increasingly, however, I am less interested in understanding it than in entering it.

I want to know that mercy.

I want to learn that poverty.

I want the heart that weeps for all creation.

I want the prayer that no longer needs to speak.

I want the wonder that appears when our explanations finally fall silent.

And when everything unnecessary has fallen away, I want what Isaac wanted:

God.

There is less and less that I know how to say beyond this.

Perhaps there is less that needs to be said.

The path that opened forty years ago remains before me. Its depths are still undiscovered. And after all these years, Isaac seems to stand somewhere ahead, pointing beyond himself toward the One for whom every human heart has always been longing.

It is with gratitude, then, that I offer Desire and Wonder in these three volumes.

I offer them in memory of the friend who first placed me upon this path.

I offer them in gratitude for St. Isaac, who has accompanied me so far along it.

And I offer them to anyone who has discovered within himself that strange and inexhaustible ache that nothing in this world seems capable of satisfying.

Perhaps that ache is not a problem to be solved.

Perhaps it is an invitation.

Perhaps our deepest longing is already a kind of remembrance of the One for whom we were made.

May these volumes be received in that spirit.

Not simply as something to be read.

But as an invitation to desire.

An invitation to wonder.

And perhaps, when desire and wonder have carried us as far as words can go, an invitation to become silent before the inexhaustible Love of God.