The Grammar of the Heart - Reflection I

When Mercy Becomes the Way We See

The heart is changed when mercy ceases to be something we believe about God and becomes the light by which we see everything.

“As a grain of sand cannot counterbalance a great quantity of gold, so in comparison God’s use of justice cannot counterbalance His mercy.”

— St. Isaac the Syrian

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The Grammar of the Heart is a nine-part series exploring how prayer, repentance, suffering, and the ascetical tradition gradually form not only what we believe about God, but the way the heart learns to see Him. This is Reflection I.

There are truths we believe long before we understand what they mean.

Perhaps mercy is one of them.

We are taught from the beginning that God is merciful. We hear it in the Scriptures. We sing it in the Psalms. We ask for it continually in prayer.

Lord, have mercy.

Kyrie eleison.

Again and again the Church places these words upon our lips until they become almost as natural as breathing.

Yet it is possible to ask for mercy for years while still imagining God primarily through fear.

We may confess His love while inwardly expecting condemnation. We may speak of forgiveness while secretly believing that our failures have exhausted His patience. We may repent, but our repentance can remain haunted by the suspicion that God receives us reluctantly.

The words are Orthodox.

The imagination of God may not yet be.

This is precisely why the heart requires formation.

Sitting at the Feet of Isaac

Few Fathers have altered my understanding of God as profoundly as St. Isaac the Syrian.

I have sat at his feet for many years.

At first, I suspect, I read him as I read many of the Fathers: searching for wisdom, marking passages, trying to understand his teaching about prayer, tears, stillness, the passions, and the purification of the heart.

But Isaac does something dangerous to anyone who remains with him long enough.

He takes away our excuses for withholding mercy.

Not by making sin insignificant.

Isaac understands the devastation of sin far too deeply for that.

He does something much more radical.

He refuses to allow sin to become greater than God.

Again and again he returns us to the abyss of divine compassion. The Creator does not cease loving His creature when the creature falls. God’s mercy is not a temporary suspension of His justice. Mercy reveals something about who God eternally is.

This changes repentance completely.

If God is primarily imagined as the offended judge from whom I must extract forgiveness, repentance easily becomes negotiation.

I confess.

I promise.

I punish myself.

I try harder.

Perhaps then God will receive me.

But if mercy precedes my repentance—if the Father’s face is already turned toward me before I begin the journey home—then repentance becomes something altogether different.

It becomes awakening.

I discover that I have been living far from the One who never ceased loving me.

And I turn.

The Fear Beneath Our Religion

Much religious anxiety grows from an image of God we rarely examine.

We say that God is love, but somewhere beneath the words another god may be hiding.

A god easily angered.

A god keeping account.

A god whose patience is nearly exhausted.

A god from whom we must protect ourselves by being sufficiently devout.

We can build an entire spiritual life around appeasing this god.

Prayer becomes payment.

Fasting becomes payment.

Confession becomes payment.

Good works become payment.

Even repentance becomes payment.

And because we can never know whether we have paid enough, peace remains impossible.

The tragedy is not merely psychological.

It distorts the spiritual life at its root.

The ascetical Fathers call us to fierce repentance, but genuine repentance does not arise from despair before an implacable God. It arises when the heart begins to perceive the terrible beauty of the love it has resisted.

The prodigal returns because he remembers his father’s house.

The publican can cry, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner,” because somewhere within that cry is already the hope that mercy exists.

Peter weeps because the eyes that meet his after the denial are the eyes of Christ.

Mercy does not abolish repentance.

Mercy makes repentance possible.

Lord Jesus Christ, Have Mercy on Me

Perhaps this is why the Jesus Prayer can gradually reshape our understanding of God.

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

At first we may hear the prayer almost juridically.

I am guilty.

Christ is Judge.

I ask Him not to condemn me.

But if we remain with the prayer—if the Name accompanies us through years of sin and repentance, consolation and abandonment, strength and weakness—the words begin to open.

“Have mercy on me” begins to mean something larger than “Do not punish me.”

Heal me.

Find me.

Gather what has become scattered.

Enter the places within me that I am afraid to see.

Free me from the passions that have made me a stranger to myself.

Restore Your image in me.

Teach me to love.

Bring me home.

And eventually mercy becomes inseparable from the Name itself.

Jesus.

The One whose Name we invoke is mercy.

The Harder Conversion

But there is a test of whether this grammar has actually entered the heart.

It is relatively easy to believe in God’s mercy toward ourselves when we desperately need it.

The harder conversion begins when we are asked to see another person through the same mercy.

Especially the person who has wounded us.

Especially the person who misunderstood us.

Especially the person who judged us unfairly.

Especially the person whose weakness has become burdensome.

Especially the person whose failure seems obvious to us.

Here the heart reveals its true theology.

We may quote Isaac beautifully and still keep careful accounts of another person’s sins.

We may pray the Jesus Prayer thousands of times and still rehearse the case against our brother.

We may believe that God’s mercy toward us is inexhaustible while quietly deciding that someone else has exhausted ours.

Then mercy remains an idea.

The Fathers will not allow this division.

If I have begun to know myself as one who exists only by mercy, then the distinction between myself and the sinner before me begins to collapse.

I may still need to speak truth.

I may need boundaries.

I may need to leave situations that are destructive.

Mercy is not sentimentality, and forgiveness does not require pretending that evil is good.

But something changes in the heart.

I no longer need the other person to be condemned in order for my suffering to be acknowledged.

I no longer need to win the interior trial I have been conducting against him.

I begin to desire his healing as well as my own.

That is much harder than being right.

When Life Becomes the Commentary

There was a time when I thought the Fathers were texts I was studying.

Increasingly, I have come to understand that life itself becomes their commentary.

Aging.

Loss.

Disappointment.

Ecclesial wounds.

The failure of carefully constructed futures.

The diminishing of people we love.

The daily demands of caring for another human being when neither strength nor patience feels sufficient.

These things expose what we actually believe.

It is easy to write about Providence when life is unfolding according to expectation.

It is easy to speak about mercy when no one is testing its limits.

It is easy to praise surrender while there remains something we can still control.

But when the structures begin to fall away, the heart speaks its native language.

And sometimes we discover that it is not yet the language we thought we had learned.

This is not failure.

It is revelation.

God allows us to see what remains unhealed so that it too may enter His mercy.

Mercy Toward Our Own Life

There is another person whom we often refuse to see mercifully.

Ourselves.

We look backward and imagine all the lives we might have lived.

The decisions we would change.

The words we would withdraw.

The opportunities we missed.

The years we spent pursuing things that eventually disappeared.

We can become merciless toward our own history.

But repentance is not the hatred of the person we once were.

Repentance is bringing that person home.

The young man who did not understand.

The priest who tried too hard.

The person who sought security where none could finally be found.

The one who was wounded.

The one who wounded others.

The one who prayed badly.

The one who mistook activity for fidelity.

The one who could not yet surrender.

All of them must be brought beneath the same mercy.

Otherwise even repentance becomes another form of self-rejection.

God does not ask us to rewrite our history.

He asks us to give it to Him.

Nothing is healed by pretending it did not happen.

But everything can become material for grace.

The Eyes of Mercy

Perhaps this is one meaning of purity of heart.

Not moral perfection.

Not spiritual invulnerability.

Not reaching some state in which weakness disappears.

Purity is the gradual simplification of vision.

The divided heart sees everything through competing fears and desires.

The purified heart begins to see through God.

And if God is merciful, then the heart that comes to know Him must itself become merciful.

This is why Isaac can speak so extravagantly about compassion. The merciful heart cannot bear the suffering of creation. It burns for human beings, animals, enemies, even those who have wandered far from God.

This is not ethical heroism.

It is likeness.

The heart has spent so long before the Merciful One that it has begun, however faintly, to resemble what it beholds.

This is the movement from belief toward phronema.

At first:

God is merciful.

Then:

God has been merciful to me.

Then:

I entrust myself to His mercy.

Then:

I cannot withhold from another what has become the ground of my own existence.

And finally, perhaps, there are moments when we no longer consciously make these distinctions.

We simply see differently.

The sinner evokes compassion before judgment.

Weakness evokes tenderness before irritation.

Our own failure sends us toward God rather than away from Him.

The wound no longer automatically demands vengeance.

The uncertain future no longer proves abandonment.

Mercy has become grammatical.

Lord, Teach My Heart Your Mercy

I increasingly believe that this is what years of prayer are meant to accomplish.

Not that we become impressive religious people.

Not that we accumulate spiritual knowledge.

Not even that we become particularly conscious of our progress.

Quite the opposite.

The closer we draw to God, the more astonishing His mercy appears and the less interested we become in distinguishing ourselves from those who need it.

Perhaps at the end there is only the publican’s prayer.

Have mercy on me.

Have mercy on him.

Have mercy on her.

Have mercy on those who wounded me.

Have mercy on those whom I wounded.

Have mercy on the Church.

Have mercy on the world.

Have mercy on the living.

Have mercy on the dead.

Have mercy on all that You have made.

And slowly the distinction between prayer and vision begins to disappear.

We ask for mercy.

We receive mercy.

We become merciful.

We begin to see through mercy.

Until one day, by grace, the truth we once held as a proposition has become something closer to sight.

God is merciful.

We always believed it.

Now, perhaps, the heart is beginning to understand.