Do Not Reach Beyond Your Measure

St. Isaac the Syrian on humility, costly prayer, and the wisdom that refuses both pride and idleness

“There is an order for every work, and for every discipline there is a fixed time.”

— St. Isaac the Syrian, Homily XXI

Synopsis of Tonight’s Group on the Ascetical Homilies of St. Isaac the Syrian Homily 21 paragraphs 7-13

There is something extraordinarily beautiful in the way the aged elders speak to Isaac.

They do not flatter him. Neither do they crush his zeal. They recognize that his desire is good, but they also recognize something Isaac himself cannot yet see: even the desire for humility can become a hiding place for pride.

Isaac proposes something apparently severe. He will sit publicly outside the church eating in the morning so that people will see him, judge him, and think less of him. He has read of the great ascetics deliberately courting dishonor in order to escape human praise. Why should he not do the same?

The elder sees through it immediately.

Not because Isaac’s intention is wicked, but because it is premature.

The great fathers who behaved strangely before men were not experimenting with humility. They had already passed through long years of obedience, watchfulness, restraint, tears, and purification. Some had become famous through miracles and holiness, and therefore deliberately accepted disgrace in order to escape the poison of human glory.

Isaac does not need to manufacture dishonor.

Providence will provide enough of it.

This is the elder’s remarkable counsel: if you desire humility, do not create theatrical opportunities to be humbled. Receive peacefully the humiliations God permits to come without your choosing. Do not become angry with the person who misunderstands you. Do not defend yourself unnecessarily. Do not despise the one who dishonors you.

There is a profound distinction here between seeking the appearance of humility and consenting to be humbled.

The first can still contain a hidden movement of the ego.

The second crucifies it.

We can secretly become proud even of our attempts to destroy pride. We can admire our renunciations, our fasting, our silence, our willingness to be misunderstood. The ego is extraordinarily capable of surviving beneath religious clothing.

The elder therefore returns Isaac to measure.

There is a time for everything.

There are practices appropriate to beginners, others to those who have acquired some stability, and still others that belong only to those purified by long struggle. To seize prematurely what belongs to another stage of the spiritual life is not zeal. It is a failure of discernment.

The inexperienced merchant, the elder says, can lose everything by attempting a great venture. He learns first through smaller transactions.

So too the soul.

We want the extraordinary when God is asking for fidelity to the ordinary.

We want some heroic humiliation when God has already placed beside us someone who irritates us.

We want great silence while neglecting the silence required not to answer back.

We want mystical prayer while resisting the prayer rule before us.

We want to imitate the freedom of the saints without first accepting the discipline by which they became free.

And then the elder gives Isaac one of the most severe sayings in the entire passage:

“Reckon every prayer, wherein the body does not toil and the heart is not afflicted, to be a miscarriage, for this prayer has no soul.”

This is not contempt for quiet prayer. Nor does it mean that prayer must always be emotionally painful or physically exhausting.

It means that prayer cannot remain exterior to the person praying.

Something must enter the fire.

The body must learn fidelity. The mind must be gathered. The heart must stand naked before God. Prayer must eventually touch that place within us where repentance becomes more than an idea.

The fathers speak so fiercely because they know how easily prayer itself can become slothful. The lips continue. The rule is completed. The appointed words are said. Yet the heart has never appeared before God.

We can pray without surrendering anything.

We can even cultivate stillness while carefully protecting ourselves from repentance.

The elder will not allow Isaac that illusion.

Prayer has a soul when the human person is actually present within it.

This is why toil and affliction of heart belong together. The toil is not payment offered to God. Grace cannot be purchased by exhaustion. Rather, toil reveals desire. I remain here because I seek You. I gather the wandering mind again because I seek You. I rise when I would rather remain asleep because I seek You. I endure the poverty of prayer because I seek You.

And the afflicted heart says something even simpler:

Have mercy on me.

The same wisdom appears when Isaac asks another elder what to do with visitors who continually interrupt his prayer and seem interested only in idle conversation.

The answer is magnificent because there is no anger in it.

The elder does not tell Isaac to condemn them.

He does not tell him to lecture them about wasting time.

He does not even tell him to refuse them hospitality.

Let them come.

Let them sit awhile.

Receive them.

And then pray.

“Brother, let us pray.”

There is tremendous spiritual intelligence here.

The elder teaches Isaac to establish a boundary without hostility. He does not have to surrender his rule in order to appear loving, nor does he have to become harsh in order to preserve it.

He simply remains what he is before them.

When the hour of prayer comes, he prays.

And wonderfully, he invites the idle brother into the very thing the brother has been avoiding.

Not accusation.

Invitation.

“Make but one prayer with me.”

That may be one of the gentlest forms of ascetic correction imaginable.

The elder does not say, You are idle.

He says, Come and pray with me.

He does not argue against the man’s way of life. He reveals another way of life by living it peacefully in his presence.

And Isaac is told to make the prayer longer than usual.

There is almost a holy humor in this.

Eventually those who truly desire nothing but idle conversation will stop coming. But perhaps another possibility remains: one of them may stay.

One may bow.

One may pray.

One may discover that beneath all his restlessness and conversation there was a hunger he did not know how to name.

This is how the elders correct.

They do not manipulate. They do not shame. They do not anxiously attempt to change everyone who enters their cell.

They simply refuse to abandon the center.

This entire passage is really about that center.

Do not manufacture humility.

Do not imitate spiritual states beyond your measure.

Do not confuse religious eccentricity with freedom.

Do not call prayer alive when your heart remains untouched by repentance.

Do not allow another person’s idleness to make you idle.

But neither condemn him.

Receive him.

Love him.

And when the hour comes, stand before God.

“Brother, let us pray.”

There is an entire theology of spiritual fatherhood contained in those four words.

The aged elders possess authority precisely because they no longer seem interested in exercising authority. They have nothing to prove. Their wisdom has been purchased through decades of remaining in the cell, guarding the heart, falling, rising, repenting, and discovering their own weakness.

They know that pride can disguise itself as humility.

They know that zeal can disguise self-will.

They know that prayer can disguise sloth.

And they know that correction without love can become another expression of the very pride we imagine ourselves to be correcting.

Therefore they continually bring Isaac back to what is small, concrete, and true.

Remain within your measure.

Accept the humiliations you did not choose.

Let prayer cost you something.

Guard the heart you have struggled to purify.

Do not despise the weak.

Do not surrender your rule to accommodate their weakness.

Invite them instead into your prayer.

And then leave the rest to God.

Perhaps this is why the words of these old men still possess such weight. They are not theories about the spiritual life. They are words spoken by men who, as Isaac says, had tasted the tree of life “through the sweat of the soul” from youth until old age.

Their wisdom has become simple because it has become lived.

We do not need to invent a cross.

We do not need to manufacture humility.

We do not need to seek extraordinary struggles.

The day itself will give us everything necessary.

Receive what comes.

Keep the heart.

Say the prayer.

Repent.

And when another wanders into the cell looking for distraction, make room for him without abandoning the One for whose sake you entered the cell in the first place.

Then bow gently and say:

Brother, let us pray.