The Companionship That Remains

There are depths of stripping into which no one can follow us completely, yet we discover there that we have never been alone.

“A brother helped by a brother is like a strong city.”

— Proverbs 18:19

There are seasons of the spiritual life when what God permits is so severe that even those who love us may tremble before it.

They cannot stop it.

They cannot explain it.

They cannot descend entirely into the place where we have been led.

They can only remain near.

And perhaps this is one of the purest forms of love.

We often imagine companionship as the ability to relieve another’s suffering. We want to find words, open a door, restore what has been lost, make intelligible what has become bewildering. Yet there are sufferings before which love becomes almost powerless.

Almost.

For one thing remains possible.

Presence.

The fathers understood this. They rarely attempted to explain suffering away. They knew that there are places where explanations become another form of noise. What the suffering person needs there is not someone standing outside the mystery interpreting it, but someone willing to stand at its edge in prayer.

Someone who does not flee.

Someone who does not try to make the darkness smaller than it is.

Someone willing simply to say by his presence:

I see where you are being led. I cannot go there in your place. But I will not turn my face away.

There is something profoundly Christlike in this.

At Gethsemane the Lord asked His disciples simply to remain with Him.

“Stay here and watch with me.”

He did not ask them to remove the cup.

They could not.

He did not ask them to understand what was unfolding.

They could not.

He asked them to remain.

Perhaps we underestimate the holiness of remaining.

There are moments when a human being cannot carry another person’s cross. But he can stand near enough that the one carrying it knows that love has not disappeared.

And sometimes that is everything.

Yet even the deepest human companionship eventually reaches a boundary.

There is a place into which no friend can enter.

No spiritual father.

No brother.

No community.

No one who has loved us throughout our lives.

There is an innermost chamber of suffering where the soul stands alone before God.

At first this can feel terrifying.

Everything by which we once knew ourselves may begin to disappear.

Our work.

Our usefulness.

Our place among others.

Our imagined future.

Even desires that once seemed inseparable from our vocation.

The stripping can become so deep that we no longer know precisely what is being stripped away.

We know only that less and less remains.

The fathers would not necessarily tell us to escape this place.

They might tell us to become very still.

Because something else is being revealed.

There is a solitude that is isolation.

But there is another solitude that is union.

The first says:

No one is here.

The second discovers:

God is here.

And between those two sentences lies much of the spiritual life.

We spend years surrounding ourselves with things that reassure us of our existence. Roles. Relationships. Accomplishments. Plans. Responsibilities. Recognition. Even spiritual identities.

They tell us who we are.

Then Providence sometimes allows them to loosen one by one.

And the heart experiences this as death.

Perhaps it is death.

But the strange mystery of Christian death is that it is never merely subtraction.

Something is being uncovered.

Beneath everything we have accumulated there remains the primordial truth of our existence:

God is.

And I am before Him.

He knows me.

He loves me.

Nothing more is required for communion.

This may be the freest place a human being can ever inhabit.

Not because there is no suffering there.

There may be terrible suffering.

Not because there is no grief.

There may be grief beyond words.

It is free because nothing external is required to sustain it.

No institution can bestow it.

No circumstance can guarantee it.

No human judgment can confirm it.

And no loss can finally take it away.

Union with God is the one place from which we cannot be exiled.

Perhaps this is why the deepest stripping and the deepest freedom sometimes appear together.

We would never choose the stripping.

Indeed, if we could see beforehand what surrender would cost, we might recoil from it.

Even those who accompany us may look upon it with dread.

Yet God sees something we do not.

He knows that beneath everything that can be lost there is something that cannot be lost.

Himself.

And perhaps the spiritual life finally brings us there.

Not triumphantly.

Not heroically.

Often exhausted.

Sometimes bewildered.

Sometimes with nothing left but the Jesus Prayer moving quietly through the heart:

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

And then we begin to understand why the Name becomes so precious.

When everything else becomes uncertain, the Name remains.

When thought becomes exhausting, the Name remains.

When reading becomes impossible, the Name remains.

When words disappear, the Name remains.

When we cannot imagine tomorrow, the Name remains.

Jesus.

And perhaps this is what the stripping has been seeking all along—not emptiness for its own sake, but enough emptiness that the heart finally discovers what cannot be removed.

Yet God, in His tenderness, does not ordinarily leave us without signs of His presence along the way.

He gives companions.

Not necessarily many.

Sometimes only one or two.

People who do not interrupt the work God is doing by trying to rescue us from it.

People who pray.

People who remain.

People who are willing to stand close enough to the fire to feel its heat.

Their presence does not eliminate solitude.

It makes solitude bearable.

And perhaps more than bearable.

It reveals something of the communion toward which all solitude is secretly moving.

For Christian solitude is never absolute.

The hermit enters the desert not because communion has failed, but because communion has become immeasurably larger.

The cell becomes a meeting place.

The silence becomes inhabited.

The person who appears alone before the world discovers himself surrounded by a communion deeper than anything visible.

Christ.

The saints.

The living.

The dead.

Those who pray for us.

Those for whom we pray.

All gathered within the mystery of God.

Then companionship itself becomes purified.

We no longer possess one another.

We no longer require another person to save us from solitude.

We receive each other as gifts within a communion whose center lies elsewhere.

And therefore we can love more freely.

Perhaps this is one of the hidden gifts within severe stripping.

We discover what companionship truly is.

It is not preventing another from entering the darkness God permits.

It is carrying a lamp as far as we are permitted to go.

Then stopping at the threshold.

And praying.

The other must enter alone.

But not alone.

For beyond the threshold waits the One who has been there from the beginning.

The stripping may continue.

Perhaps much remains to be surrendered.

We cannot know.

But neither do we need to know.

It is enough that God sometimes gives us another human being who stands nearby and does not look away.

And deeper still, it is enough to discover that beneath every companionship, beneath every loss, beneath every identity and every future we thought necessary, there remains the place of absolute freedom:

union with Him.

There the soul cannot be displaced.

There nothing essential can be taken.

There the heart finally understands that even when everything else passes away, it has not fallen into emptiness.

It has fallen into God.