From Gollum to Grace: Seeing Ourselves in the Light of the Saints

Reading the Evergetinos as a Mirror of Who We Are and Who We Are Meant to Be

There are moments when reading the Evergetinos that feel like holding a pure and burning coal in the hand. The stories of the saints shine with such goodness and mercy that they seem almost impossible for us. Not because they are irrational or exaggerated but because they reveal a way of being that exposes the poverty of our own hearts. We glimpse in them what the human person becomes when grace has done its full work. And suddenly, in the brightness of that vision, we see ourselves with unsettling clarity.

In the saints there is no calculation. There is no self-protection. There is no holding back a corner of the heart for private use. They receive insults without anger and give their last possessions without fear. They see an enemy and feel only compassion. They look upon injustice and do not cry out for vengeance but entrust themselves to God. Their goodness is not the result of a careful ethical system. It is the fruit of a heart that has been purified to the point that Christ Himself lives within it.

And then we turn inward and we see something else. Something small. Something twisted. Something clinging.

We see Gollum.

We see how fiercely we guard the smallest thing, how we cradle in our hands some tiny scrap of desire or grievance or entitlement and whisper, “my precious.” It may be as small as the need to defend ourselves against a slight word or as large as a deep-seated resentment we refuse to relinquish. Yet the dynamic is the same. We hold the smallest things with deadly grip and imagine that losing them would unravel us. We would rather hide in the dark than release them. Sometimes we would murder for them. Sometimes we simply withhold love, which is its own kind of murder of the heart.

And more disturbing still is this: when we encounter another person whose heart is twisted by the same fear and clinging, someone who mirrors our own darkness, something in us recoils. Instead of mercy we feel irritation. Instead of compassion we feel disgust. Instead of tenderness we feel the impulse to be rid of them. We want them gone because they reveal something of ourselves that we prefer to keep hidden.

The Evergetinos holds up the saints as a mirror, but it also holds up our neighbors. In the saints we see what grace can make of us. In the people who irritate or offend us we see the brokenness we still carry. And this is the hidden mercy of these texts: they do not let us live in fantasy. They force us to see the truth about the human heart. They show us that the greatest barrier to holiness is not the weight of the world or the cruelty of others but the tiny, hardened corner of our own will that refuses to yield.

The monk who offers his cheek to be struck has no such corner. The elder who lights a lamp for thieves has no such clinging. The one who guards his mind with purity has no inward twist of envy or fear. They have allowed grace to hollow them out until nothing remains but love. They have become what they were made to be.

And we, seeing them, are humbled. Their lives are a call to become what we are in Christ, to become truly human. But before that call can take root, it exposes the parts of our soul that still resemble Gollum crouched in the dark with his treasure. This exposure is not meant to crush us. It is meant to save us. It shows us what we cling to so that we might finally open our hands.

If we let this knowledge do its work, something remarkable happens. We begin to look upon the Gollum in others with tenderness rather than contempt. We see their clinging not as malice but as fear. We recognize in their grasping our own struggle. And instead of wishing them gone, a small and trembling compassion awakens.

This is the beginning of mercy.

And perhaps this is how the saints began too. Not from heroism or extraordinary virtue but from the honest confession that they were no different from those who provoked them. They simply chose to let grace unravel their clinging, to let the light enter the cave of their heart, to let their “precious” fall from their hands so that Christ could take its place.

The Evergetinos shows us what we could become. But first it shows us who we are. And in that truth there is both humility and hope.