The Grammar of the Heart - Reflection II

Before Theology Becomes Words

How the Christian Life Teaches Us to See

“Taste and see that the Lord is good.”

— Psalm 33:9 LXX

There is a knowledge of God that comes before explanation.

Not before revelation. Not before truth. Not before the Church gives us the words by which we confess what has been revealed. But before those words become our own—before theology passes from the lips into the heart—there is often something quieter taking place.

We are learning God by living before Him.

A child knows the face of his mother long before he can speak her name. He knows the sound of her voice, the safety of her arms, the meaning of her absence and return. None of this knowledge is unreal because it cannot yet be expressed. In some ways, it is more immediate than anything that will later be said.

Something similar happens in the life of faith.

Long before we can explain prayer, we kneel.

Long before we understand repentance, we weep.

Long before we can speak adequately about providence, something we love is taken from us and we discover whether we can remain before God when we no longer understand Him.

Long before we have a theology of mercy, we sin, fall, return, and discover that the door is still open.

The Christian life begins teaching us before we realize that we are being taught.

The Body Learns First

This is one reason the Fathers never separated theology from the manner of life.

For them, theology was not principally the arrangement of correct ideas about God. It was knowledge born of purification, prayer, repentance, obedience, and communion with God. Evagrius could therefore bind prayer and theology together with startling directness: “If you are a theologian, you will pray truly; and if you pray truly, you are a theologian.”

This does not diminish doctrine. It reveals how seriously doctrine must be taken.

The truth is not merely to be defended.

It is to become flesh in us.

We fast before we understand everything that fasting will reveal.

We keep vigil before we know what the night will teach us.

We forgive while resentment is still alive within us.

We remain silent when every part of us wants to justify itself.

We make the sign of the Cross over a body that will die.

We kiss icons.

We light lamps.

We stand for the Gospel.

We receive the Holy Mysteries as a gift beyond our comprehension.

The body is being instructed.

And gradually the heart begins to understand what the body has been doing.

Christianity has always known this. We are not disembodied minds receiving religious information. We are creatures whose loves, instincts, fears, memories, desires, and perceptions must all be healed.

So the faith enters through the whole person.

The knees learn something about God when they bend.

The stomach learns something when it hungers voluntarily.

The tongue learns something when it refuses the cruel word.

The eyes learn something when they turn away from what inflames the passions.

The hands learn something when they give away what they would rather keep.

And the heart learns something when, after every failure, it hears again:

Return.

The Desert Knew This

The men and women who fled into the deserts of Egypt and Syria did not go there because they lacked theology.

They went because they understood that truth must become life.

The desert stripped away the illusion that knowing about God was the same thing as knowing God.

A brother could possess Scripture in his memory and still be ruled by anger.

He could speak eloquently about humility and be unable to endure a slight.

He could understand the commandments and still secretly despise the brother beside him.

The desert exposed this division mercilessly.

The question was not simply:

What do you believe?

The question was:

What has what you believe made of you?

This is why the sayings of the Desert Fathers can seem almost unnervingly simple. A monk asks for a word of salvation and receives no elaborate theological system.

Remain in your cell.

Guard your tongue.

Remember death.

Do not judge your brother.

Pray.

Begin again.

The elder understands that the brother does not merely need another idea.

He needs another heart.

And hearts are not changed by information alone.

They are changed through grace received in a life of repentance.

When Truth Becomes Instinct

There comes a point in the spiritual life when certain truths begin to move beneath conscious thought.

A person who has spent years praying the Jesus Prayer may discover that the Name rises within him before he deliberately calls upon it.

A person who has repeatedly fallen and encountered mercy may become slower to condemn another.

Someone who has stood beside the suffering may cease offering easy explanations for suffering.

Someone who has cared for another through weakness, repetition, dependence, and decline may begin to understand love less as a feeling and more as remaining.

Someone who has lost what once seemed essential may discover, almost with surprise, that God remains.

This is theology becoming instinct.

Not irrational instinct.

Not sentiment.

Not private revelation.

Rather, truth has been lived long enough that it begins to shape perception itself.

We no longer merely remember that we should be merciful.

We begin to see the other person through mercy.

We no longer merely affirm that God is present in suffering.

We instinctively turn toward Him when suffering comes.

We no longer merely believe that humility is a virtue.

The need to be seen, defended, vindicated, and understood begins—slowly, painfully—to loosen its hold.

Something has changed beneath the level of argument.

The grammar is entering the heart.

Suffering Teaches a Severe Theology

Some of the deepest theological formation comes through experiences we would never have chosen.

Illness.

Failure.

Caregiving.

Bereavement.

The collapse of plans.

The loss of reputation.

The discovery that a vocation or future we once imagined may not unfold as we expected.

These things do not automatically make anyone holy. Suffering can just as easily make us bitter, frightened, or closed.

But when suffering is received before God, it can strip theology of abstraction.

Providence means something different when we can no longer see where our life is going.

Hope means something different beside a grave.

Mercy means something different after we have discovered the extent of our own weakness.

Prayer means something different when words disappear.

And surrender means something different when there is actually something to surrender.

Perhaps this is why so many of the elders speak with such simplicity.

Their words have passed through fire.

They no longer need to say everything.

Sometimes a sentence is enough.

Remain.

Repent.

Do not judge.

Call upon the Name.

Trust God.

Begin again.

Such words can appear almost embarrassingly small beside the complexity of human suffering.

Until one tries to live them.

Then they become immense.

The Difference Between Knowing and Seeing

We can believe something for many years before we begin to see through it.

I can believe that God is merciful.

I can defend that proposition.

I can locate it within Scripture and the Fathers.

I can preach it.

And yet when I fail, I may still instinctively hide.

That instinct reveals something.

My lips confess mercy, but some deeper part of me still expects condemnation.

The spiritual life begins to heal this division.

Through repentance, confession, prayer, worship, suffering, forgiveness, and repeated return, the truth gradually descends.

God is merciful.

At first I know it.

Then I dare to trust it.

Then I begin to live from it.

And eventually, by grace, I may begin to see everything through it.

The sinner before me.

The wound within me.

The person who has hurt me.

The failure I cannot undo.

The future I cannot control.

Even death.

This is something more than possessing a correct theological statement.

The statement has become a way of seeing.

And this is where the Christian life begins to reveal its extraordinary depth.

Theology is not complete when we can say what is true.

The truth seeks incarnation.

It seeks the body, the imagination, the memory, the desires, the instincts, the wounds.

It seeks the heart.

We Are Being Taught Even Now

Most of us imagine our spiritual formation as something deliberate.

We read a book.

We listen to a teacher.

We undertake a discipline.

We study Scripture.

We learn from the Fathers.

All of this matters enormously.

But another formation is happening simultaneously.

The ordinary circumstances of our lives are teaching us.

The person we did not choose is teaching us patience.

The unanswered prayer is teaching us poverty.

The humiliation is revealing how deeply we need approval.

The interruption is exposing our attachment to control.

The repetitive task is teaching fidelity.

The silence is revealing how frightened we are of emptiness.

The person who needs us today is asking whether love will remain when nothing dramatic or spiritually satisfying is happening.

This is not separate from theology.

It may be where theology becomes real.

The question is whether we are willing to be taught.

Yet none of this formation is meant to happen in isolation.

We did not invent the words with which we pray. We did not create the gestures by which the body worships. We did not discover the path of repentance for ourselves. They were given to us.

Others prayed these prayers before us.

Others fasted these fasts.

Others kept these feasts.

Others stood through the long vigils, confessed their sins, buried their dead, received the Mysteries, and called upon the Name of Jesus long before we were born.

We learn the Christian life within a people.

Even the solitary goes into the desert carrying a language he has received.

The Church has already taught his lips what to say.

The Scriptures have formed his imagination.

The Psalms have given words to his sorrow.

The liturgy has taught his body how to stand before God.

The saints have shown him what a human life can become when it is yielded entirely to grace.

No one teaches himself this grammar.

We receive it.

And then, slowly, we inhabit it.

The desert tradition insists that knowledge of God cannot finally be separated from conversion of life. We do not merely acquire Christian ideas and then carry them unchanged into the world.

We ourselves are meant to be changed.

Our perception is meant to be purified.

Our desires are meant to be reordered.

Our reflexes are meant to become evangelical.

Our heart is meant to acquire another grammar.

And perhaps this is why God sometimes allows our familiar words to fail us.

We have said them long enough.

Now He asks us to live them.

There comes a moment when mercy must cease being a word.

When providence must cease being a concept.

When repentance must cease being an obligation.

When surrender must cease being beautiful spiritual language.

When Christ must cease being merely the One about whom we speak.

We must encounter Him.

We must remain before Him.

We must allow His life to become the hidden measure of our own.

Only then do we begin to understand something the saints knew well:

The deepest theology is sometimes learned before we can explain it.

It is learned on our knees.

It is learned through tears.

It is learned by remaining.

It is learned by falling and returning.

It is learned in the prayer of the Church, among a people who have received this life before us and who hand it on.

And slowly, almost imperceptibly, what we once struggled to believe becomes the world in which the heart lives.

Theology has become more than words.

It has begun to become sight.