The Fear of Harming a Heart

Seeing All Men as One

“For twenty years I have been continuously struggling over a single thought, beseeching God that I might be able to see all men as one.”

— The Gerontikon

The Fathers place before us a vision of the human person that is almost unbearable in its simplicity and demands. We do not live with others because we have learned techniques of communication or conflict resolution. We can live with others only to the degree that we fear God and have begun to see all men as one.

This is why the Elder says that if we remembered how Lot was saved because he condemned no one, we could live even among wild beasts. The greatest beasts are often not around us but within us: our judgments, our suspicions, our secret comparisons, our readiness to define another by his weaknesses. We imagine that our difficulties with others arise from their faults. The Fathers suggest something far more painful—that we cannot live with others because we have not yet learned to love them.

Judgment begins in the mind long before it reaches the lips. St. Ephraim is remarkably precise: “Do not disparage a layman in your mind.” We may preserve an outward courtesy while inwardly diminishing another. We may smile while secretly placing ourselves above them. Yet the Lord alone knows the secrets of the heart. Every judgment is, in some measure, an attempt to occupy God’s place.

The Elder who struggled for twenty years to see all men as one reveals something essential about holiness. The spiritual life is not an effort to become extraordinary. It is the gradual dismantling of every illusion of separateness. The one before me is not an interruption of my life, nor an obstacle to my peace, nor an object for my evaluation. He is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. His wound is my wound. His weakness is my weakness. His salvation and mine are mysteriously intertwined.

From such a vision arises great care regarding scandal. The Fathers are astonishingly sensitive about harming another’s heart. They ask not merely, “Is this permissible?” but, “Will this burden my brother? Will this put troubling thoughts in his mind? Will this diminish his peace?” Love willingly limits itself for the sake of another’s weakness.

At the same time, the Fathers teach us not to become scandalized ourselves. The Egyptian monks judged the brethren of Sketis because they saw them eating hungrily. They knew nothing of their ascetic labors. How often we do the same. We glimpse one action and construct an entire narrative around it. We see a person’s fatigue and call it laziness. We witness their weakness and imagine mediocrity. We know almost nothing, yet judge as though we know everything.

Discernment requires humility. We do not excuse sin, but neither do we presume to know the secrets of another’s struggle. Love leaves room for mystery. It says quietly, “Perhaps there is a story here that I do not know.”

The Fathers also insist that when we have harmed another, even unintentionally, we should hasten to bring peace to their heart. If our words or actions have troubled our brother, our concern is not our reputation, nor our fear of humiliation, but the healing of communion. We make a prostration because the wound of another cannot be regarded as someone else’s problem. We are one body.

To see all men as one is to become incapable of contempt. It is to walk through life gently. It is to guard the minds of others from unnecessary burdens and to guard our own minds from suspicion and judgment. It is to honor every person for the Lord’s sake and to remember that each human being stands before God bearing hidden wounds, secret battles, and unspoken grief.

Perhaps the struggle of twenty years described by the Elder is the work of an entire lifetime. Yet this is the path of the Kingdom: to become so united to Christ that we begin to look upon every human face and say, “This one, too, is my own.”