Restore Us to Yourself

When every other way of being restored has been taken from our hands

“Restore us to thyself, O LORD, that we may be restored.”

— Lamentations 5:21

There are sorrows that still contain within them the hope of repair.

We suffer, but somewhere in the heart we are already imagining how things might be put right. A door might open. Someone might understand. An explanation might finally be accepted. What has been confused might become clear. What has been lost might somehow be returned.

And then there is another kind of sorrow.

It comes when even the possibility of repair begins to disappear.

Jeremiah stands in such a place.

The city is ruined. The inheritance has passed into other hands. The elders have left the gate. The young have ceased their music. The crown has fallen. Everything by which the people once recognized themselves has been stripped away.

There is something almost unbearable in the simplicity of the words:

The joy of our hearts has ceased.

Nothing is defended. Nothing is explained. Nothing is disguised.

This is the terrible honesty of biblical lament. It does not rush toward consolation. It allows the wound to speak before God.

The Desert Fathers understood this place.

They knew that there comes a moment in the spiritual life when we can no longer sustain ourselves by imagining what God will do next. Even holy possibilities must sometimes be surrendered. We must relinquish not only our sins and attachments, but our explanations, our expectations, and finally our preferred form of deliverance.

We come before God without a plan for our own resurrection.

Perhaps this is among the deepest forms of poverty.

I have discovered how instinctively the heart reaches for reassurance. Tell me that this will be resolved. Tell me where I belong. Tell me what remains possible. Tell me what I must do and what will come afterward.

Yet sometimes no such reassurance is given.

One seeks wisdom and receives uncertainty.

One searches for a path and discovers that the path itself is disappearing.

One asks how life might be restored and slowly begins to understand that God may be asking something far more radical:

Will you allow Me to be your restoration?

This is where Lamentations suddenly becomes prayer.

After recounting devastation almost beyond endurance, Jeremiah turns his gaze away from everything that has fallen:

But thou, O LORD, dost reign for ever.

The city does not suddenly rise again.

The dead do not return.

The questions remain unanswered.

But God remains.

And perhaps this is why the final plea is not, “Give us back everything we have lost.”

It is:

Restore us to thyself.

There is an entire spiritual life hidden within those words.

Restore me not first to certainty.

Not to usefulness.

Not to recognition.

Not to the identity by which I once knew myself.

Not even necessarily to the future I have begun to imagine.

Restore me to Yourself.

For if I am restored to You, then I am restored indeed.

The elders of our own age speak repeatedly of this stripping. St. Silouan learned to remain before God when consolation vanished. St. Sophrony understood that the soul may be brought to the edge of an abyss where nothing remains except the naked act of entrusting oneself to Christ. The saints do not teach us how to escape this poverty. They teach us how to remain there without despair.

And sometimes God gives another mercy within it: another person keeping vigil nearby.

Not someone who can solve the mystery.

Not someone who can promise how the story will end.

Simply someone who knows.

Someone who remembers us before God.

Someone who enters the silence and prays with us there.

The fathers knew the holiness of such companionship. The desert was filled with men and women seeking solitude, yet it was also filled with the words, tears, and intercessions of those who carried one another before Christ. Communion did not distract them from God. At its purest, it drew them more deeply into Him.

There are moments when knowing that another person is awake before God, praying somewhere in the night, becomes an almost sacramental consolation.

Nothing outward has changed.

And yet one is no longer entirely alone beneath the weight.

Perhaps this too is part of the stripping: learning that love need not rescue in order to be love.

It can simply remain.

And so can we.

I do not know what must remain and what must disappear.

I do not know which doors will open or which will quietly close.

I do not know how much more will be taken from my hands before they are finally empty.

But perhaps empty hands are precisely what prayer has been trying to give me all along.

The old men have left the gate.

The music has ceased.

The crown has fallen.

And still, beyond everything that changes:

Thou, O LORD, dost reign for ever.

Therefore I need not manufacture a future.

I need not save what God does not ask me to save.

I need not force open a door because I fear there will be no other.

I need only remain before Him.

And when I cannot even do that well, I can allow myself to be carried by the prayer of another who remains before Him with me.

This is enough for today.

Perhaps it is enough forever.

Restore us to Yourself, O Lord.

Strip away whatever keeps us from that one desire.

And if every other restoration must fail so that we may finally discover You as our inheritance, then give us the courage not to flee the poverty through which You are drawing us home.