Sitting at the Feet of Mercy

Rereading St. Isaac and discovering how quietly a vision of God can become the language of the heart

“As a grain of sand cannot counterbalance a great quantity of gold, so in comparison God’s use of justice cannot counterbalance His mercy.”

— St. Isaac the Syrian

I have been rereading Desire and Wonder, and something has surprised me.

It is not primarily the arguments that remain with me, nor even the passages I remember laboring over. What I notice now is the tenderness.

There is a gentleness running through the work that I do not think I fully recognized while writing it. And I know where it came from.

I had been sitting at the feet of St. Isaac for a very long time.

Perhaps this is what happens when we remain with one of the saints long enough. At first we read his words. Then we begin to understand something of his thought. Eventually, if we are patient and God is merciful, we discover that he has been teaching us how to see.

Isaac taught me to see God differently.

Or perhaps more accurately: he helped strip away the things I had placed upon God that were never His.

Fear. Calculation. Retribution. The terrible human instinct to measure mercy, to decide who deserves it, to imagine that God’s patience must eventually become exhausted because ours does.

Isaac will have none of this.

Again and again he leads us toward the almost unbearable possibility that God is better than we have dared to believe.

His asceticism is fierce. He knows the passions. He knows repentance and tears and warfare of the heart. There is nothing sentimental in him. Yet beneath everything is an ocean of mercy.

And the ocean is always greater than the wound.

That is what I find so moving as I reread these pages.

Repentance, in Isaac, is not principally the frightened return of the condemned. It is the awakening of the beloved.

We repent because suddenly, perhaps only for an instant, we see.

We see what love has been offered to us.

We see how little we have understood it.

We see how desperately we have tried to hide from the One who has never ceased seeking us.

And then the tears come.

Not because God has finally become merciful, but because we have finally begun to understand that He always was.

There is an immense freedom in this.

The spiritual life ceases to be an attempt to persuade God to love us. Asceticism ceases to be a payment. Prayer ceases to be an achievement. Even repentance ceases to be a negotiation.

Everything becomes response.

God has loved first.

God has desired first.

God has descended first.

And our desire for Him is already evidence that something of His desire has awakened within us.

Perhaps this is why the title Desire and Wonder means more to me now than when I first began the work.

Desire leads eventually to wonder.

We begin by seeking God.

And somewhere along the way we discover that He has been seeking us.

We begin by wondering whether we can reach Him.

And eventually we find ourselves astonished that He has already crossed every distance.

Then something in the heart becomes quiet.

There is less to prove.

Less to defend.

Less need to divide the world into those who deserve mercy and those who do not.

For if Isaac is right, the person who has truly tasted the mercy of God begins to acquire a merciful heart—a heart that burns for the whole creation. The boundaries of the heart begin to widen because it has encountered something of the boundlessness of God.

I find myself deeply grateful that I have been allowed to sit at the feet of this man for so many years.

I did not know where that sitting would lead.

Perhaps we seldom do.

We think we are studying a saint.

We collect texts. We trace themes. We examine words and historical contexts. We underline passages and fill margins with notes.

Meanwhile the saint is quietly dismantling us.

A sentence enters the heart.

Years pass.

Another sentence joins it.

Slowly an entire way of seeing God begins to change.

And one day we discover that what began as study has become companionship.

What began as theology has become prayer.

What began as admiration has become gratitude.

But as I reread these pages now, I realize that Isaac has done something still deeper in me.

He has altered the interior grammar of my heart.

There are many Fathers whom I love and to whom I owe more than I can say. Yet Isaac, perhaps more than any other, and with him the modern elders formed in the spiritual tradition associated with Essex, has given me a language in which my heart now instinctively tries to speak to God.

It is the language of poverty and mercy.

Of tears without despair.

Of repentance without terror.

Of silence that is full rather than empty.

Of a God whose love does not diminish when we fail to comprehend Him.

This interior grammar has opened so much for me—not simply in theology or prayer, but in the way I understand life itself.

Suffering looks different within it.

Loss looks different.

Failure looks different.

Other human beings look different.

Even the unanswered questions of one’s own life can be carried differently when mercy rather than explanation becomes the ground beneath one’s feet.

The elders of Essex have deepened this for me in their own way: the descent of the mind into the heart, the willingness to stand before God without self-protection, the strange coexistence of profound repentance and invincible hope, the prayer that gradually expands until it begins to carry others within itself.

But beneath all of this there is something even simpler that I hope never to lose.

Desire.

And wonder.

If there is anything I want to hold onto fiercely, it is this.

Not certainty.

Not achievement.

Not even understanding.

But the astonishment that comes when the heart glimpses something of the mercy and love of God—and then discovers that the glimpse has made it thirsty.

I do not want that thirst extinguished.

I want my desire for God to become unquenchable.

I want every encounter with His mercy to make me desire Him more. Every experience of His tenderness to deepen the wound of longing. Every glimpse of His beauty to make everything that is not Him seem smaller.

Perhaps this is the great paradox Isaac has taught me.

The closer one comes to the inexhaustible love of God, the less satisfied one becomes with anything less than God.

Wonder does not extinguish desire.

Wonder sets desire on fire.

And perhaps that is what I recognize most clearly now as I reread Desire and Wonder.

I thought I was writing about a spiritual tradition.

I see now that, slowly and almost imperceptibly, that tradition was teaching my heart how to pray.

And so my gratitude is very simple.

Thank you, Father Isaac.

Thank you for teaching me to expect mercy.

Thank you for teaching me that repentance can be filled with tenderness.

Thank you for teaching me that the heart can break open rather than merely break.

Thank you for teaching me to wonder.

And if God grants me anything for whatever years remain, I pray it will be this:

that desire for Him will not grow smaller with age, disappointment, suffering, or loss;

that it will become simpler;

that it will become purer;

that it will become fiercer;

until nothing remains in the heart but the longing for God—

and wonder that He has loved us so.