The Bandage of Consolation

God does not promise that we will remain unbroken, but that He will not abandon us in the breaking.

“God rebukes but also encourages, he brings fear and he brings consolation, he strikes and he heals. Do not reject him.”

— St. Augustine, On Pastors

There is a kind of consolation that merely tries to make suffering disappear. It tells us that things will soon improve, that what has been lost will somehow be restored, that uncertainty will eventually give way to clarity. We offer such words because we love one another and cannot bear to see another person suffer.

But Augustine offers something more severe and more beautiful.

“Offer the bandage of consolation,” he tells the shepherd.

A bandage does not deny the wound.

It covers what has already been broken.

Perhaps this is one of the hardest truths of the Christian life to receive. God does not always console us by removing the thing that wounds us. Sometimes His consolation is given precisely there, in the place where our strength has failed, where familiar structures no longer sustain us, where explanations have ceased to satisfy us, and where we discover that faith must become something far more naked than certainty.

The desert understood this.

The fathers did not go into solitude because they believed themselves strong. They went because they wanted to discover what remained when the usual supports of life were taken away. Reputation, position, usefulness, plans, the approval of others, even cherished images of themselves, all could become subtle refuges from the poverty in which God alone is enough.

And so the desert stripped them.

Not because deprivation is holy in itself. Not because suffering should be sought. But because the human heart clings to almost anything rather than stand defenseless before God.

Abba Poemen said that to throw oneself before God, not to measure oneself, and to cast away one’s own will are the instruments of the soul.

There is an entire spirituality contained there.

To throw oneself before God.

There comes a moment when this is all that remains.

We spend much of life trying to understand the road ahead. We discern, seek counsel, examine possibilities, wait for doors to open, wonder whether we have misunderstood something, and try faithfully to place the pieces into some intelligible order. None of this is wrong. Prudence has its place.

But eventually God may permit us to reach the boundary of prudence.

There we discover that life with Him cannot finally be lived as a problem to be solved.

It must be received.

Augustine therefore refuses two false consolations.

The first says: You will not suffer.

The second says: You must be strong enough to bear everything.

Neither is the Gospel.

Instead he says:

Prepare your soul for temptation.

And then immediately:

God is faithful.

These truths must never be separated.

Without the first, Christianity becomes sentimentality. Without the second, it becomes terror.

The fathers knew both.

St. John Climacus speaks relentlessly about detachment, exile, obedience, tears, remembrance of death, and the purification of desire. Yet none of these exists for its own sake. They clear the heart so that the heart may become simple. The monk relinquishes many things not because creation is evil, but because he longs to discover the One Thing that cannot be taken away.

The modern elders speak with the same voice.

St. Silouan was brought to the edge of despair before he learned the terrible freedom of the word given to him: Keep thy mind in hell and despair not.

The second half is everything.

Despair not.

Remain.

Do not flee the place where God has permitted you to stand.

Do not demand that tomorrow explain today.

Do not require certainty before giving yourself to God.

Do not make peace dependent upon circumstances becoming intelligible.

This is the bandage Augustine places upon the wounded soul.

God is faithful.

Not: everything will remain as it was.

Not: every human relationship will survive unchanged.

Not: every institution will understand.

Not: every door will reopen.

Not even: you will recognize immediately what God is doing.

Only this:

God is faithful.

And perhaps faith becomes real precisely when this becomes enough.

There are seasons when the temptation is not primarily toward obvious sin but toward calculation. We begin constructing possible futures in the imagination. If this happens, then perhaps that will follow. If this door closes, perhaps another will open. If I make the correct decision, perhaps uncertainty will finally disappear.

Yet beneath all of this can lie a hidden demand: I will trust You, Lord, once I know where You are taking me.

The desert asks for something more radical.

I will trust You because You are God.

That changes everything.

Then even uncertainty can become ascetical.

Waiting becomes prayer.

Loss becomes poverty.

Silence becomes a dwelling place.

And what appears from the outside to be diminishment may become inwardly an immense enlargement of freedom.

One begins to understand why the fathers spoke so frequently about exile. The deepest exile is not geographical. It is the moment when the soul can no longer establish its identity in the things that once told it who it was.

Then a frightening question arises:

Who am I when these things are gone?

The Gospel answers:

You are His.

Perhaps this is why Augustine turns our gaze toward Christ Himself.

The Father did not spare the Son from suffering. Christianity therefore cannot mean constructing a life sufficiently prudent, faithful, or holy that suffering no longer reaches us. The Son entered completely into the vulnerability of human existence.

Gethsemane remains.

The Cross remains.

But so does the Father.

And this may be the deepest consolation Christianity can offer.

The Cross does not explain suffering.

It reveals where God is within it.

He is not standing at a distance.

He has entered the wound.

Therefore the Christian does not need to become invulnerable. We do not need to pretend that loss does not hurt, that uncertainty does not exhaust us, or that obedience to conscience costs nothing.

We may tremble.

Augustine explicitly imagines the weak person trembling.

And he does not rebuke him for it.

He binds him.

“Do not be afraid.”

This is pastoral love at its purest. Not the removal of every cross. Not the multiplication of explanations. Not telling another person what Providence intends.

Simply staying near the wound and reminding the wounded one:

God has not left you.

Perhaps this is also what our wounds eventually teach us to offer others.

The person who has never been broken is often tempted to explain suffering.

The person who has been broken and met Christ there learns instead how to sit beside it.

The desert father rarely gives the disciple a theory. He gives him a word.

Remain.

Pray.

Do not judge.

Remember death.

Call upon the Name.

Entrust yourself to God.

Begin again.

Such words seem small until everything else has become impossible.

Then they become bread.

There comes a point when the spiritual life grows astonishingly simple.

Christ.

His Name.

The next act of love.

The person entrusted to us.

The duty immediately before us.

A little prayer.

A little silence.

Repentance.

Mercy.

And the refusal to despair.

Perhaps we spend years learning many things only so that God may eventually lead us back to this poverty.

The Jesus Prayer itself becomes enough:

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.

Nothing is explained there.

Everything is entrusted.

And perhaps that is what Augustine finally means by consolation. Not that God assures us that nothing painful will happen, but that He gives Himself within what happens.

“You will give us tears to drink in measure.”

Even tears, then, have their measure.

The chalice is not infinite.

The trial is not God.

The darkness is not God.

The uncertainty is not God.

God is God.

And because He is God, none of these things possesses the final word.

So when the heart grows weary of discerning, calculating, defending, anticipating, or trying to understand the whole shape of its life, perhaps it may finally become still.

There is no need to know everything.

There is no need to preserve everything.

There is no need even to know what will remain.

One thing is needful.

To belong to Christ.

Alive or dead, understood or misunderstood, hidden or known, useful or forgotten, settled or still wandering:

I am the Lord’s.

Perhaps that is the bandage we place over every wound.

Not an explanation.

A Name.

Not certainty.

Presence.

Not the promise that we will never be broken.

The promise that even in our brokenness we cannot fall outside the mercy of God.

And so we remain.

Before Him.

With nothing left to prove.

With nothing left to demand.

God is.

I am before Him.

He knows me.

That is enough.