The Broken Cisterns

How We Lose God While Still Believing We Are Seeking Him

“My people have committed two evils:

they have forsaken me,

the fountain of living waters,

and hewed out cisterns for themselves,

broken cisterns,

that can hold no water.”

— Jeremiah 2:13

There is something terrifying about the second chapter of Jeremiah because it is addressed not to those who never knew God, but to those who did.

“I remember the devotion of your youth, your love as a bride, how you followed me in the wilderness.”

They had followed Him.

They had entered the wilderness with Him. They had known His deliverance. They had been fed by His hand. They had experienced His protection when there was nothing around them upon which they could depend. Israel had once belonged to God with the simplicity of first love.

And yet they wandered.

This is precisely what makes Jeremiah’s words so close to the spirit of the Desert Fathers. The great danger of the spiritual life is not simply that we will refuse God. It is that, having begun to follow Him, we will gradually begin to desire something else alongside Him.

And eventually that something else may become more important to us than God Himself.

The Fathers understood this with a severity that can make us uncomfortable. They knew that a person may leave the world physically while carrying the world entirely within himself. One may enter the desert and then spend years reconstructing Egypt inside the cell.

We may abandon possessions and become possessive about our spiritual life.

We may relinquish status and begin seeking spiritual status.

We may leave worldly ambitions only to develop ecclesiastical ambitions.

We may renounce ordinary pleasures and become intoxicated by being considered holy, learned, discerning, traditional, contemplative, orthodox, important, needed.

We may even turn prayer, theology, ministry, asceticism, liturgy, community, obedience, priesthood, monasticism, or the defense of truth into broken cisterns.

None of these things is evil in itself.

That is precisely why the danger is so subtle.

When the Gifts Replace the Giver

Jeremiah asks a devastating question:

“What wrong did your fathers find in me that they went far from me?”

There is almost a wounded tenderness in the words.

What did you find lacking in Me?

What did the idols promise you that I did not?

Why did the fountain cease to be enough?

The Desert Fathers would recognize the question immediately because the whole purpose of the desert was to expose the innumerable ways the human heart answers it.

We want God—but we also want consolation.

God—but also recognition.

God—but also security.

God—but also certainty about our future.

God—but also vindication.

God—but also influence.

God—but also the affection of particular people.

God—but also the assurance that our sacrifices will be noticed and our lives will unfold according to some intelligible pattern.

And when these things are withheld, something hidden within us becomes visible.

We discover whether we loved God—or loved what being near God gave us.

This is why the desert strips.

Not because creation is evil. Not because affection is evil. Not because ministry, friendship, beauty, learning, community, or ecclesial belonging are evil. They are gifts.

But a gift received without vigilance can quietly become a substitute for the Giver.

Israel’s tragedy began precisely after blessing:

“I brought you into a plentiful land to enjoy its fruits and its good things.”

The wilderness was dangerous, but abundance proved more dangerous still.

In the wilderness Israel knew that water came from God.

In the plentiful land, they could forget the source.

“Where Is the Lord?”

Perhaps the most frightening sentence in the passage concerns the religious leaders:

“The priests did not say, ‘Where is the LORD?’

Those who handle the law did not know me.”

They handled holy things.

They possessed religious knowledge.

They spoke about God.

And they did not know Him.

There could hardly be a more searching word for the Church—or for any of us who spend our lives around sacred things.

The Desert Fathers fled precisely this possibility.

They knew that familiarity with holy things can become one of the greatest obstacles to holiness. A man can speak beautifully about prayer without praying. He can teach repentance without repenting. He can celebrate mysteries while his heart grows cold. He can defend orthodoxy while losing mercy. He can read the Fathers while avoiding the very conversion the Fathers demand.

He can spend his entire life speaking about the fountain while dying of thirst beside it.

This is why the desert tradition continually returns us to the heart.

Abba Anthony’s warfare was there.

Evagrius located the struggle there.

St. Isaac the Syrian relentlessly leads us there.

St. Silouan, St. Sophrony, St. Porphyrios, and the great elders of our own age speak the same language.

Do not imagine that proximity to sacred things is the same as communion with God.

There is only one question finally worth asking:

Where is the Lord?

Not: Where is my place?

Not: What will become of me?

Not: Am I understood?

Not: Is my work succeeding?

Not: Do others recognize what God has given me?

Not even: What great thing should I do for God?

Where is the Lord?

And am I with Him?

The Cisterns We Build

Jeremiah’s image is extraordinarily precise.

We do not merely leave the fountain.

We begin digging.

We work tremendously hard constructing substitutes for the water we once received freely.

This may describe much of modern spiritual life.

We construct programs, strategies, platforms, identities, movements, institutions, networks, methods and plans. We measure success. We cultivate visibility. We speak endlessly about renewal.

Yet the desert asks a terribly simple question:

Is there water in the cistern?

Does it produce repentance?

Does it produce purity of heart?

Does it make us merciful?

Does it deepen prayer?

Does it free us from the need to be praised?

Does it make us capable of remaining quietly before God when everything else is taken away?

If not, the cistern may be beautifully constructed.

It may even be religious.

But it cannot hold water.

The modern elders repeatedly warn against precisely this exteriorization of Christianity. St. Porphyrios continually redirected people toward Christ Himself rather than obsessive preoccupation with darkness. St. Silouan discovered that the whole spiritual life becomes distorted when humility and love disappear. St. Sophrony saw that Christianity is not primarily an ideology, moral system, or civilization but life in the living God.

And St. Isaac goes still further.

For Isaac, the heart must become so simplified by desire that God becomes increasingly the one thing necessary. Stillness is not emptiness. Renunciation is not contempt for creation. Withdrawal is not misanthropy.

They are the gathering together of a scattered love.

The heart has been drinking from too many wells.

The Most Dangerous Moment

Perhaps the most dangerous moment in the spiritual life is not the beginning.

It may be much later.

After grace.

After conversion.

After years of prayer.

After sacrifices have been made.

After we have received spiritual gifts.

After others begin looking to us.

After we have learned the language of the spiritual life so well that we can explain almost everything happening within us.

Then comes the danger of believing that because we once followed God into the wilderness, we must still be following Him now.

Jeremiah destroys that presumption.

“I remember the devotion of your youth.”

God remembers.

But memory is not communion.

Yesterday’s fidelity cannot substitute for today’s surrender.

The manna of yesterday cannot feed us today.

The question is always present tense:

Where is the Lord?

The Fathers therefore speak so relentlessly about vigilance. Nepsis is not spiritual anxiety. It is love refusing to fall asleep.

The heart must be watched because desire moves quietly.

No one awakens one morning and decides to exchange the fountain of living water for a cracked container.

It happens by degrees.

A small attachment.

A small compromise.

A resentment cherished.

Praise enjoyed a little too much.

Comfort defended.

Prayer shortened.

Silence avoided.

A wound continually rehearsed.

A fantasy of another life entertained.

A need to be recognized.

An insistence that something other than God must change before we can have peace.

The heart begins wandering long before the feet do.

“I Have Loved Strangers”

Jeremiah finally gives Israel’s terrible confession:

“I have loved strangers,

and after them I will go.”

There is a terrible honesty here.

The problem is finally love.

We go where our desire goes.

This is why the Fathers did not understand asceticism primarily as punishment. Asceticism is the healing of desire. Fasting, vigil, silence, solitude, tears, obedience, custody of the thoughts—all of these are ways of discovering what the heart has begun to love more than God.

The desert removes the hiding places.

And eventually we discover the stranger.

Perhaps it is approval.

Perhaps comfort.

Perhaps control.

Perhaps reputation.

Perhaps being needed.

Perhaps anger.

Perhaps our plans for the future.

Perhaps even our cherished image of ourselves as faithful servants of God.

Then grace asks something painful:

Will you surrender this too?

Not because God wishes to impoverish us.

Because He wishes to give us water.

The Fountain Remains

Yet Jeremiah’s prophecy is not fundamentally a story about human infidelity.

It is a revelation of divine fidelity.

Israel wandered.

The fountain remained.

Israel forgot.

God remembered.

Israel loved strangers.

God still called her His bride.

This is the mystery that prevents the severity of the desert from becoming despair.

The Fathers could speak ruthlessly about the passions because they believed even more radically in the mercy of God.

The purpose of seeing the broken cistern is not to sit beside it lamenting our foolishness forever.

It is to return to the fountain.

St. Silouan’s entire life bears witness to this. Descend into the truth about yourself, yes—but do not despair. St. Porphyrios tells us not to spend our lives wrestling endlessly with darkness but to turn toward Christ. St. Sophrony shows us that repentance is not morbid self-absorption but the movement of the whole person back toward divine life.

And Isaac never ceases to tell us that beneath everything stands the incomprehensible mercy of God.

The fountain has not dried up.

Perhaps this is the word we most need.

We live in an age of endless cistern-building. We are offered techniques, identities, movements, causes, entertainments, ideologies, spiritualities, programs and platforms. Even the Church can succumb to the temptation to believe that if only we construct the right thing, organize the right initiative, recover the right form, or communicate the right message, life will return.

The desert says otherwise.

Return to the Fountain.

Return before you build anything.

Return before you speak.

Return before you teach.

Return before you reform the Church.

Return before you discern your future.

Return before you decide what your life must become.

And perhaps, after returning, we will discover that many things we thought indispensable are unnecessary.

The desert steadily brings us toward this terrible and beautiful simplicity.

God alone.

Not God as an idea.

Not God as the justification of our vocation.

Not God as the guarantor of our plans.

Not God as the explanation for our suffering.

God.

The living Fountain.

And perhaps the deepest repentance is simply to recognize how many times, even after tasting that Water, we have wandered away carrying our little shovel, convinced that somewhere else we might dig a better well.

The Fathers would tell us:

Put it down.

Stop digging.

The Fountain is beside you.

Drink.

And remain.