The First Test of Abiding

The struggle to remain with the Lord is often fiercest precisely when we have resolved to seek nothing but Him.

“Abide in me, and I in you.”

— John 15:4

There are moments when the spiritual life seems suddenly to become very simple. Not easy, but simple. After years of trying to understand circumstances, discern paths, resolve questions, and discover where everything is leading, the heart hears again the one word that was there from the beginning:

Remain.

Abide in Me.

There comes a point when even good and necessary questions can become another way of living outside the present moment. We begin searching for the place where God will finally give us peace, the circumstances in which our vocation will finally become intelligible, the resolution that will allow the heart at last to rest.

And then grace reveals something both consoling and severe: the place of rest is not somewhere ahead of us.

It is Christ.

The counsel given to me was almost disarmingly simple: for a time, stop trying to solve anything. Do not write. Do not construct the next chapter of your life. Do not attempt to discern what cannot yet be known. Simply remain with the Lord and allow yourself to receive His love.

There was something immediately recognizable in this. It touched the very thing that had been emerging in prayer: the desire for an undivided heart.

Not a heart that has finally arranged all the circumstances of its life.

A heart that belongs to One.

And almost immediately came the test.

It is remarkable how quickly a resolution to abide in Christ reveals everything within us that does not yet know how to abide.

A question arrives. Then another. Something from the past reappears demanding explanation. Matters one believed had already been placed before others must seemingly be explained again. Words arrive carrying implications that awaken the instinct to defend oneself, correct the record, demonstrate what has actually happened, or establish that one has acted reasonably and in good faith.

None of these impulses is necessarily sinful. Some may even be justified.

That is precisely what makes the temptation subtle.

The temptation is not always to abandon God for something obviously evil. Often it is simply to allow something less than God to become the center of the heart.

Suddenly the mind begins composing answers. It rehearses arguments while walking through the house. It imagines conversations that have never taken place. It returns to old correspondence. It tries to anticipate what another person might do. It constructs possible futures and then attempts to defend itself against them.

And without ever consciously deciding to leave the presence of God, one discovers that one has traveled a very great distance from the simplicity of:

Abide in Me.

Perhaps this is why the test came so quickly.

I had thought the challenge would be learning how to remain quietly with Christ. Instead, almost immediately, circumstances touched precisely those places where remaining becomes difficult: uncertainty, misunderstanding, the desire to be rightly seen, questions about belonging, questions about the future, and the vulnerability of having important matters resting partly in the hands of others.

The old instinct says: Resolve this.

Christ says: Remain in Me.

The old instinct says: Make them understand.

Christ says: Remain in Me.

The old instinct says: You must know what happens next.

Christ says: Remain in Me.

And perhaps most difficult of all:

You must secure the place where you belong.

But Christ says:

You belong to Me.

This does not mean that practical matters cease to matter or that truth should never be spoken. Abiding is not passivity. There are times to answer, times to clarify, times to act, and times to wait.

But there is an enormous difference between acting from communion and acting because communion has been displaced by anxiety.

The first can be remarkably simple. The second becomes endless.

This may be one of the hidden meanings of the undivided heart. An undivided heart is not a heart from which every unresolved circumstance has disappeared. It is a heart in which unresolved circumstances are no longer permitted to become rival centers of gravity.

Everything remains—but everything remains around Christ.

The questions remain.

The uncertainty remains.

The limitations of other people remain.

My own limitations remain.

The future remains unknown.

But Christ remains also.

And He is enough.

Perhaps this is why the Fathers speak so relentlessly about guarding the heart. The decisive battles of the spiritual life are often almost invisible. A person may remain outwardly in his room while inwardly traveling hundreds of miles through imagined futures, remembered injuries, explanations, fears, and possibilities.

The body has remained in the cell.

The heart has left it.

To return is not to solve all those things. It is simply to notice that one has gone away and to come back:

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

Again.

And again.

And again.

There is something profoundly humbling about discovering how difficult this is. We may imagine that after many years of prayer the great challenge will be some extraordinary ascetical demand. Instead, the Lord may ask something much more radical:

Stay here with Me.

Do not run ahead.

Do not return to yesterday.

Do not build tomorrow.

Do not make your peace dependent upon being understood.

Do not demand that uncertainty disappear before you consent to love Me.

Stay.

Perhaps the fierceness of the struggle is itself a revelation. We discover how deeply we have relied upon understanding, resolution, recognition, plans, structures, and imagined futures to give us the security that can finally come only from God.

And then what appears to be disruption becomes purification.

The very circumstance that threatens to disturb our peace becomes the place where a deeper peace can be born.

Not the peace of having everything settled.

The peace of having One Thing Necessary.

This is where abiding begins to become something more than a consoling spiritual idea. It becomes asceticism. It becomes renunciation. It becomes a kind of poverty.

I relinquish the right to know what comes next.

I relinquish the need to be perfectly understood.

I relinquish the imaginary conversations by which I vindicate myself.

I relinquish the future I continually attempt to arrange.

I relinquish even the demand that my vocation become intelligible to me before I live it.

And I receive this moment.

This room.

This prayer.

This responsibility.

This hidden life.

This Christ.

Perhaps the Lord permits the test to follow the grace so quickly because otherwise we might mistake the grace for an insight rather than an invitation.

We say, I want an undivided heart.

And almost immediately life asks:

Do you?

We say, I want to abide in Christ.

And something arrives that offers us a thousand reasons to leave Him interiorly.

Then the real prayer begins.

Not the prayer in which nothing disturbs us, but the prayer in which every disturbance becomes an occasion for returning.

Again to Christ.

Again to the heart.

Again to the Name.

Again to the simple poverty of being loved by God without needing to know what He intends to do with our life.

Perhaps this is what I am being taught now.

The answer to the uncertainty is not certainty.

The answer to being misunderstood is not finally being understood.

The answer to instability is not necessarily finding some earthly structure that can never be shaken.

The answer is the One who said:

Abide in Me.

And perhaps, after a lifetime of searching for the place in which the heart could finally rest, one discovers that the place was never a place at all.

It was Him.

And every time something draws the heart away, the whole spiritual life begins again in one small act of freedom:

Return.