Do Not Name What God Is Doing Yet

On the Holy Poverty of a Life That Has Not Taken Shape

“By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place which he was to receive as an inheritance; and he went out, not knowing where he was to go.”

— Hebrews 11:8

There is a peculiar temptation that comes when a life begins to fall apart.

We immediately begin trying to understand what God is building from the ruins.

Something has ended, and almost before we have allowed ourselves to grieve it, we ask what is beginning. A door closes and we search for another. An identity becomes uncertain and we begin constructing a new one. A vocation no longer holds us as it once did, and we immediately ask what vocation will replace it.

We cannot bear formlessness.

We cannot bear a life without a name.

And so we begin to speak.

Perhaps God is calling me here.

Perhaps this loss happened so that I could become that.

Perhaps these years were preparation for something else.

Perhaps now I finally understand.

Perhaps.

But perhaps not.

The Fathers were suspicious of the mind’s need to explain what God was doing.

They knew how easily fear disguises itself as discernment.

The religious mind is particularly skilled at baptizing its anxiety. We call our need to know discernment. We call our plans vocation. We call the future we have constructed God’s will. We arrange the pieces carefully and then ask God to confirm the pattern we have already made.

But God is not obligated to explain Himself.

Sometimes, in His mercy, He allows every explanation to fail.

Then the soul finds itself somewhere it never expected to be.

There is no clear path behind.

There is no visible path ahead.

There is only the small patch of earth beneath one’s feet.

And God.

This is a frightening place.

It is also holy.

The Violence of Naming Too Soon

We often think naming something gives us understanding.

Sometimes it only gives us control.

If I can name what is happening to me, perhaps I can contain it. If I can call it a transition, a new vocation, a purification, a preparation, a passage into something greater, then perhaps the terrible openness of the moment will become bearable.

But what if God has not named it?

What if He has deliberately left it without a name?

There are seasons of the spiritual life in which every attempt to interpret the future becomes another way of fleeing the present.

We want resurrection before we have entered the tomb.

We want Pentecost while Christ is still silent in the grave.

We want the Promised Land while manna is still appearing each morning in the wilderness.

We want to know what the seed will become while God is still burying it.

The seed does not know the name of the tree.

It simply consents to disappear.

This is one of the hardest forms of obedience.

Not doing.

Not deciding.

Not understanding.

Not becoming.

Remaining beneath the earth long enough for God to do something that cannot be accomplished by our own hands.

Christ Himself gives us the image:

“Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

We usually rush toward the fruit.

Christ speaks first of burial.

There is a time when the spiritual task is not to become fruitful.

It is to fall into the earth.

The Desert Does Not Explain Itself

The desert fathers understood this.

A man came to the desert wanting to become holy.

The elder gave him a cell.

The man wanted wisdom.

The elder gave him silence.

The man wanted to know God’s will.

The elder told him to remain.

Again and again the answer was intolerably small.

Stay in your cell.

Watch your thoughts.

Pray.

Repent.

Do not judge.

Remember God.

Why such poverty?

Because the heart wants continually to escape into abstraction.

We would rather contemplate our vocation than wash the bowl before us.

We would rather discern the shape of our future than endure the emptiness of today.

We would rather understand God’s Providence than trust it.

The elder keeps bringing the disciple back.

Here.

Now.

This cell.

This prayer.

This brother.

This sorrow.

This obedience.

This God.

Nothing else has been given.

St. Arsenius fled the court carrying with him the habits of a man accustomed to importance. The desert slowly taught him another language:

Flee.

Be silent.

Be still.

Not:

Understand.

Construct.

Secure.

Explain.

The desert does not tell us what we are becoming.

It strips away everything we have used to avoid becoming nothing.

And there, in that nothingness, something terrible becomes visible:

how much of what we called identity was something we needed in order not to stand naked before God.

When God Removes the Name

There may come a time when the names by which we have understood ourselves begin to loosen.

Teacher.

Priest.

Monk.

Mother.

Father.

Scholar.

Pastor.

Caregiver.

Writer.

Leader.

Disciple.

Even good names can become places of concealment.

We begin to believe that because God once called us to something, He must preserve forever the form in which that calling was first given.

But God is not the guardian of our self-concept.

He is our salvation.

And salvation sometimes requires that even sacred identities pass through death.

This does not mean that what came before was false.

A thing can be true and still come to an end.

A vocation can have been real.

A friendship can have been real.

A community can have been home.

A ministry can have borne fruit.

A season can have been filled with grace.

And still God may say:

Leave.

Not because it was meaningless.

Because it has been completed.

Abraham was not told that Ur had never been his home.

He was told to go.

The apostles were not told that their nets were evil.

They were told to leave them.

Israel was not told that Egypt had never fed them.

They were told not to return.

There comes a point when gratitude for what has been cannot become an argument against what God may now be doing.

But neither does leaving tell us where we will arrive.

This is the part we resist.

We want God to say:

Leave this for that.

Lose this so that you may receive this.

Surrender this because I am giving you something better.

Sometimes He does.

Sometimes He simply says:

Come.

And nothing more.

The Idolatry of the Next Thing

We are very capable of surrendering one identity while secretly constructing another.

We leave one place and immediately imagine the next.

We relinquish one role and begin wondering what our new role will be.

We surrender one form of service and immediately ask how God intends to use us now.

Even our language betrays us.

Use me, Lord.

It sounds holy.

But perhaps there are times when God does not want to use us.

Perhaps He wants us.

There is a difference.

A tool has value because of what it accomplishes.

A beloved has value because he is loved.

Much of religious life can be spent confusing these two things.

We become accustomed to usefulness.

People seek us.

Work needs us.

Communities recognize us.

Our gifts have somewhere to go.

Our days have shape.

Then perhaps all of that begins to disappear.

And a terrible question rises:

Who am I if God does not need me to do anything?

The answer cannot be learned quickly.

It may require a long silence.

Perhaps this is why God sometimes permits a human life to become extraordinarily small.

A room.

A sickbed.

A kitchen.

A prayer rope.

A person who needs to be washed.

A meal that needs to be prepared.

A lamp burning before an icon.

The Name of Jesus whispered when there is nothing left to say.

The world may see diminishment.

Heaven may see a human being finally becoming available to God.

Do Not Turn the Wound Into a Vocation

There is another temptation.

When we suffer deeply, we want the suffering to mean something.

So we make a vocation from the wound.

We imagine that because we have passed through something painful, God must now require us to teach it, explain it, write about it, minister from it, build something around it.

Perhaps He will.

But not yet.

The wound deserves silence before it becomes speech.

Some things must be allowed to bleed before they are permitted to teach.

Otherwise we turn suffering into another form of usefulness.

We escape the poverty of being wounded by becoming an expert in wounds.

The Fathers would tell us to wait.

Let the wound descend into the heart.

Let prayer touch it.

Let tears wash it.

Let time remove from it the need to justify itself.

Let God decide whether it ever becomes a word for another person.

Not everything suffered must become ministry.

Some suffering is known only to God.

That may be enough.

Holy Saturday

There is a day in the Christian mystery that we rarely know how to inhabit.

Holy Saturday.

The Cross has happened.

The Resurrection has not yet appeared.

Nothing can be undone.

Nothing has yet been explained.

Christ lies in the tomb.

The disciples do not know that they are living between Good Friday and Easter.

Only we know that.

They experience it simply as devastation.

This matters.

Because when we are living our own Holy Saturday, we do not know that it is Holy Saturday.

We cannot see Easter from inside the tomb.

And therefore faith is not the ability to say, “Everything will work out.”

Faith is remaining near Christ when nothing has worked out.

The Mother of God remained.

The women waited.

The stone did not move.

Heaven offered no explanation.

And beneath the silence, God was doing what no human being could see.

Perhaps some seasons of life can only be lived this way.

Without interpretation.

Without resolution.

Without the reassurance of knowing what comes next.

We stand before the sealed tomb.

And remain.

The Life Without a Name

There may come a moment when we have to stop asking what our life is becoming.

Not forever.

But now.

Because the question itself has become a disturbance.

What will I be?

Where will I belong?

What will remain?

What will I do?

How will others understand me?

What will become of everything I have given my life to?

These are human questions.

They are not sinful.

But there are places where God does not answer them.

Instead He asks another:

Will you remain with Me without knowing?

This is where faith becomes very small.

There may be no great act of surrender.

Only getting out of bed.

Lighting the lamp.

Making breakfast.

Caring for the person God has placed before you.

Opening the Psalter.

Taking the prayer rope into your hand.

Breathing.

Saying the Name.

Jesus Christ.

Jesus Christ.

Jesus Christ.

And allowing tomorrow to remain unborn.

Perhaps that is enough.

Perhaps it is more than enough.

Do Not Name It Yet

We are always tempted to write the final chapter while God is still composing the middle.

Do not.

Do not call the stripping a new vocation yet.

Do not call the silence a failure.

Do not call the emptiness abandonment.

Do not call the closed door judgment.

Do not call the open door God’s will merely because it opened.

Do not turn every possibility into Providence.

Do not force meaning from what has not finished happening.

There are things God does in darkness that become distorted when brought too quickly into the light.

Let them remain hidden.

Let yourself remain hidden.

Something may indeed be dying.

Let it die.

Something may someday be born.

Let God give it birth.

You do not have to assist Him by imagining it into existence.

The spiritual life eventually brings us to a poverty deeper than having nothing.

It brings us to the poverty of being nothing that we can name.

No explanation.

No secure identity.

No map.

No guarantee that the life ahead will resemble the life behind.

Only God.

And perhaps, after all our searching, this is what we had been asking for from the beginning.

Not answers.

Not certainty.

Not even a vocation.

Him.

So if your life has become formless, do not be afraid to leave it that way for a while.

If God has not spoken, do not speak for Him.

If the road has disappeared, do not manufacture one.

If you have been buried, do not dig yourself out merely because the darkness frightens you.

Remain beneath the earth.

Pray.

Love the person before you.

Receive the day that has actually been given.

And let tomorrow belong to God.

Perhaps the life God is giving you has not yet taken shape.

Do not force it.

Do not name it.

Do not turn your wound into a vocation simply because emptiness frightens you.

Remain beneath the earth.

Let God decide what rises.