Guard What Has Been Given

St. Isaac on stillness, love, and the fidelity that keeps Christ before the heart

“Reckon his company in the place of your longest prayers.”

— St. Isaac the Syrian

Synopsis of Tonight’s Group on The Ascetical Homilies of St. Isaac the Syrian Homily 21 paragraphs 14-17a

There is something almost frightening in the severity of St. Isaac’s counsel.

A brother asks what appears to be a question about charity. He possesses something necessary for his life of stillness. Another person needs it. Moved by compassion, he gives it away. Yet afterward the loss of what he needs forces him into anxiety, activity, searching, conversation, and distraction. His stillness is broken. His prayer is disturbed. His mind, once gathered before God, becomes scattered among many things.

What should he do?

Should he not give?

Should mercy have limits?

St. Isaac’s answer is deliberately shocking:

“May that righteousness perish, and every form of mercy, love, compassion, or whatever is thought to be for God’s sake, which hinders you from the practice of stillness.”

We should not hurry past the violence of those words. Nor should we make them harmless by turning them immediately into metaphor.

Isaac means what he says.

The solitary has been entrusted with something exceedingly fragile and exceedingly precious: a heart gathered into the remembrance of God. His cell is not simply a place where he happens to live. His silence is not a preference. His withdrawal is not an eccentric arrangement of circumstances. These things belong to the particular form his obedience has taken.

He has left the world in order to stand before God.

Therefore, what might be virtue in another form of life can become infidelity in his.

This is one of the difficult truths of the spiritual life: not everything that appears good is ours to do.

There are acts of generosity that can arise from vanity. There are forms of service that conceal an inability to remain still. There is a compassion that allows us to become necessary to others because we are afraid of becoming nothing. There are good works that slowly carry us away from the one thing God has actually asked of us.

The question is not merely:

Is this good?

The deeper question is:

Does this preserve me in the obedience God has given me?

For the solitary, Isaac’s answer is uncompromising.

Guard the cell.

Guard silence.

Guard prayer.

Guard the senses.

Guard the remembrance of God.

Guard what has been entrusted to you as though guarding a flame in a great wind.

The extraordinary saying of the elder makes this almost painfully clear. He says that even leaving his place briefly “to pass water” shakes him from his habitual recollection and disturbs the order of his spiritual work.

We may find such sensitivity incomprehensible.

But perhaps that is because we have grown accustomed to dispersion.

We move continually from one thing to another. We receive messages, conversations, images, obligations, opinions, news, anxieties. We scarcely notice the violence done to attention because fragmentation has become our ordinary state.

The elder notices because he has discovered another way of being.

He knows what it is for the heart to become still.

And once a man has discovered such stillness, even a small movement can be felt like a stone dropped into clear water.

This is the uniqueness of the solitary vocation. We should not pretend that everyone is called to live in this way. Isaac himself distinguishes the solitary from “men who live in the world.” The solitary has been entrusted with an almost terrible simplicity: to relinquish many good things in order to preserve the one thing for which he entered solitude.

Yet hidden within Isaac’s severe counsel is a word for every Christian.

Because everyone has something entrusted to him that must not be sacrificed even in the name of apparently good things.

For the solitary, it may be the silence of the cell.

For another, it may be the person sitting across the table.

This is where Isaac’s teaching becomes uncomfortable in another direction.

We can lose Christ through distraction even while doing things “for Christ.”

A husband can become consumed with apostolic work and cease to see his wife.

A mother can become so anxious about everything that must be accomplished that she no longer beholds the child before her.

A priest can become absorbed in ministry and cease to recognize the human beings entrusted to him.

A Christian can spend hours discussing theology, defending truth, following ecclesiastical controversies, reading spiritual books, or performing works of service while becoming increasingly impatient with the person who interrupts him.

We may even call this sacrifice.

But sometimes what we are sacrificing is precisely what God gave us to love.

There is a strange inversion here.

The solitary must sometimes say no to another person in order to remain faithful to God.

The person living in the world must sometimes say no to a hundred distractions in order to remain faithful to the person God has placed before him.

Both are guarding the same mystery.

Presence.

The refusal to abandon the place where God is waiting.

This is why another sentence in Isaac’s passage is so important.

If the visitor is “one of the fathers or a wearied stranger,” Isaac says:

“Reckon his company in the place of your longest prayers.”

Suddenly the fierce guardian of solitude opens the door.

And this tells us everything.

Stillness is not an idol.

Prayer is not an achievement to be protected against love.

The cell exists for communion with God, and therefore when God Himself arrives hidden beneath the weariness of another human being, receiving that person may become prayer.

Not an interruption of prayer.

Prayer.

This requires discernment of a very high order because the same encounter can be distraction in one moment and obedience in another.

The idle talker may need to be comforted briefly and dismissed in peace.

The weary stranger may need the door opened.

The solitary must know what protects the flame and what merely consumes its oil.

So must we.

We often imagine spiritual discernment to concern great decisions: vocation, ministry, monasteries, marriage, work, where we belong, what God wants us to accomplish.

But much of the spiritual life is quieter than this.

It concerns what we allow to occupy the heart.

What receives our attention.

Whose face we actually see.

Whether we are capable of remaining where love has placed us.

The tragedy is that we can spend our lives searching for the will of God while neglecting the form His will has already taken before us.

A face.

A voice.

A responsibility.

A suffering we did not choose.

A person who needs patience rather than correction.

Someone whose story we have heard a hundred times and whom we are asked to hear once more.

Someone whose slowness interrupts our efficiency.

Someone whose weakness rearranges our plans.

And perhaps here we discover the deeper meaning of the cell.

The cell is not merely four walls.

It is the place of fidelity.

For one person it may indeed be a hermitage.

For another it may be a kitchen table.

A hospital room.

A marriage.

A child’s bedside.

The care of an aging parent.

A community one has promised not to abandon.

The ordinary place where one’s life is being spent without spectacle.

The temptation is always elsewhere.

For the solitary, elsewhere may be activity, usefulness, conversation, even apparently charitable works.

For those living in the world, elsewhere may be the imagined spiritual life we think we would have if only the people around us stopped interrupting it.

But Christ is very often hidden inside the interruption.

And so the command is the same:

Remain.

Guard what has been given.

Do not allow what appears important to steal from you what is precious.

Do not confuse movement with obedience.

Do not confuse usefulness with love.

Do not imagine that because something is good it is therefore yours to do.

And above all, do not go searching for Christ so far away that you fail to recognize Him in the person He has already placed before you.

There is a stillness deeper than physical solitude.

It is the stillness of a heart that has ceased fleeing the life it has been given.

Such a heart can live in a desert or in a crowded house.

It can pray beneath a monastic cowl or while preparing another person’s meal.

Its essential movement is the same.

It remains before God in what God has given.

Perhaps this is why Isaac’s words remain so severe.

Love requires guarding.

Attention requires guarding.

Prayer requires guarding.

The person before us requires guarding.

Everything precious in this life is easily lost through dispersion.

And the enemy does not always need to tempt us with evil.

Sometimes it is enough to offer us another good thing.

Another responsibility.

Another conversation.

Another cause.

Another place where we might be useful.

Another life in which we imagine we could serve God better.

Until at last we have become strangers to the very place where He was waiting for us.

The solitary closes his door.

The mother puts down her phone.

The husband turns toward his wife.

The caregiver sits beside the one entrusted to him.

The monk returns to his prayer.

Different gestures.

The same renunciation.

The same love.

The same refusal to abandon Christ where He has chosen to be found.

And perhaps the whole wisdom of Isaac can finally be gathered into this:

Know what God has entrusted to you, and do not surrender it lightly—even for something that bears the appearance of holiness.

For sometimes the longest prayer we can offer is to remain.

And sometimes the person before us is the cell we must not leave.