The City of the Lord Within

Let my heart be a holy temple of the living God and my hermitage the city of the Lord. May God Himself protect it by His holy angels and put within me only the desire to walk the way of perfection.

There are mornings when I rise and the silence presses against my chest like a living thing. The walls of this hermitage are close and familiar, yet within them there is an expanse larger than any city. When my heart begins to awaken to prayer, I sense it: how easily the boundaries of this small space dissolve, how the heart itself becomes the dwelling place of the Infinite.

The psalmist’s words echo softly in the stillness: “I will walk with a blameless heart within my house.”  I whisper it as a vow and a cry. To walk blamelessly is not to live without fault but to live with nothing hidden from God, to let the light reach the most secret corners.  I want my heart to be such a house, open to the sun of His presence, swept clean of vanity, resentment, and noise.

I know how easily I set before my eyes what is base.  Thoughts come unbidden, voices clamor for attention, memories haunt like ghosts.  I have no strength to banish them, only the faint cry: “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.”  In this cry, the walls begin to breathe again. The demons lose their hold, and something deep within begins to burn: quietly, steadily, like an altar flame.

St. Isaac says that when the heart has found stillness, the angels draw near to minister to the one who prays. I believe this. I have felt it in moments when all within me is stripped bare, when prayer no longer feels like words but like being held.  The Fathers call such stillness the city of God, because in that moment all disorder is cast out, and peace reigns where once there was confusion.

Yet I fall again and again. Pride rises like smoke, and I chase after shadows. I am not yet the citizen of that holy city, only a beggar at its gate. But I know the sound of its silence. I have heard its music in the tears that fall during prayer, in the aching beauty of repentance, in the strange joy that follows surrender.

Perhaps that is the way of perfection, not achievement, but longing purified by fire. The Lord knows what He is doing. He lets the walls crumble, only to rebuild them stronger. He strips away even the good I cling to, until all that remains is the raw desire for Him alone.

So tonight I sit beneath the lamp, my heart still restless, my body tired from the day’s labor. The psalm stirs again within me: “Morning by morning I will silence all the wicked in the land.”  I take this to mean the land within—the wild, untamed country of my thoughts.  And so I beg: “Silence them, Lord. Drive out everything unworthy of You. Let nothing dwell in this heart but Your mercy.”

Then maybe this hermitage, these four walls, this frail body, this poor and wandering soul, will become, by grace, the city of the Lord.  Not through worthiness, but through love.  Not through strength, but through surrender.  And in that surrender, perhaps the angels will keep watch, and God Himself will make His dwelling there.