The Grammar of the Heart — Reflection III

Sitting at the Feet of the Ascetics

The heart does not learn the language of God by mastering ideas, but by dwelling among those who have learned to speak it with their lives.

There comes a point when reading the Fathers changes.

At first we read them because we want to know what they thought. We underline sentences. We compare translations. We follow arguments. We collect sayings from the desert and passages from the Philokalia. We learn the vocabulary of nous, nepsis, apatheia, compunction, remembrance of God, purity of heart.

All of this has its place.

But if we remain with the Fathers long enough, something quieter begins to happen.

We cease merely reading them.

We begin sitting at their feet.

And these are not the same thing.

To read someone is to ask what he knows. To sit at his feet is to allow ourselves to be taught how to see.

This is one of the great differences between acquiring religious knowledge and receiving a spiritual tradition. Knowledge can be accumulated while the heart remains largely untouched. A tradition, in the deepest sense, must be inhabited. It has to enter the gestures of the soul: the way we repent, the way we suffer, the way we judge another person, the way we endure uncertainty, the way we pray when prayer has become dry, the way we stand before God when every explanation has failed.

The ascetics teach us precisely here.

They do not merely tell us things about God. They show us what happens to a human being who has remained before God for a very long time.

Their words bear the marks of that encounter.

This is why the sayings of the desert can sometimes appear almost offensively simple. A brother asks for a word concerning salvation, and the elder does not give him a theological system. He tells him to remain in his cell. To guard his tongue. To remember death. To forgive his brother. To accuse himself. To pray. To begin again.

We may initially find such answers insufficient.

We want explanations.

The elder gives us an obedience.

We want clarity.

The elder gives us repentance.

We want to understand the path.

The elder tells us to remain where we are and call upon the name of God.

Only slowly do we discover that this simplicity is not the absence of theology. It is theology after it has passed through fire.

The desert stripped away everything that could remain merely theoretical.

Abba Arsenius did not simply formulate a theology of silence. He fled into silence.

St. Isaac the Syrian did not merely develop an account of divine mercy. He wept until mercy became the world through which he saw every creature.

St. Silouan did not offer an abstract solution to despair. He descended into the darkness of his own soul and there received the terrible and liberating word: Keep thy mind in hell and despair not.

These words cannot finally be understood from outside the lives that bore them.

They are the speech of transformed hearts.

And this is why years spent with the ascetics can alter us in ways we do not immediately recognize.

Their words begin to become interior companions.

A situation arises, and before we have consciously reasoned through it, something from the desert is already present. Someone wounds us, and we remember the elder who refused to condemn. Anxiety rises, and somewhere within us comes the command to remain in the cell. We become frightened about the future, and the heart remembers that it has been told a thousand times not to abandon the present moment in search of an imagined tomorrow.

Eventually we discover that the Fathers have been teaching us a grammar.

Not simply what to say about God, but how a life before God is formed.

Yet even here there is a danger.

We can imagine that this formation takes place privately: one person, alone with his books, selecting spiritual wisdom from the centuries and constructing an interior world for himself.

That is not how the Fathers themselves understood the spiritual life.

No one enters the desert alone.

Even the hermit carries a people within him.

The sayings of the desert are filled with relationships: elder and disciple, brother and brother, stranger and guest. The monk receives a word from another. He brings his thoughts into the light. He learns obedience beside imperfect human beings. He discovers whether his imagined love of God is real by encountering the brother who irritates him.

The tradition passes from heart to heart.

And so we do not really sit at the feet of the ascetics alone.

We encounter them through those who have received something of their spirit: through spiritual fathers and mothers, through teachers, monks, priests, friendships, communities, and sometimes through the unexpected person whose quiet faithfulness reveals more than many books.

We hear them in worship.

We encounter their theology in hymns before we can explain it in propositions. We discover their understanding of the human person in fasting and feasting, prostration and forgiveness, vigil and Eucharist. Their world becomes tangible in the rhythm of a people who have prayed within it for generations.

This matters.

Because the grammar of the heart is not a private language.

It is received.

There have been people in my own life whose words mattered precisely because their lives stood behind them. Sometimes what they taught was very little. A sentence. A gesture. A refusal to become anxious. A way of remaining silent when everyone else felt compelled to speak. A gentleness toward weakness. A willingness to wait upon God without forcing an answer.

Years later, these things remain.

Perhaps this is how tradition most deeply enters us.

Not as information handed down, but as a way of being transmitted from one life to another.

This also explains why certain spiritual writers begin to feel less like authors and more like elders.

For me, St. Isaac has long been such a presence.

One can study Isaac. One can analyze his anthropology, his ascetical teaching, his understanding of judgment and mercy. But after enough years another relationship becomes possible.

One begins simply to listen.

And listening long enough changes the listener.

Isaac’s astonishing confidence in the mercy of God begins to expose the cramped images of God we carry within ourselves. His tenderness toward creation makes our harshness increasingly difficult to defend. His insistence that repentance is not terror before an offended deity but the awakening of the heart to divine love begins slowly to alter the meaning of repentance itself.

Eventually one realizes that something more than agreement has occurred.

The heart has begun to acquire an accent.

The same is true of the modern elders who have carried the desert into our own age. In St. Silouan and St. Sophrony, in the elders formed within that same stream of prayer, one encounters again this peculiar combination of severity and tenderness. Nothing sentimental. Nothing evasive about sin or suffering. Yet beneath everything there remains an almost unbearable confidence in the love of God.

The deeper the repentance, the greater the compassion.

The deeper the descent, the less desire to condemn.

The more clearly one sees one’s own poverty, the more spacious the heart becomes toward the weakness of another.

This is not an idea.

It is a way of seeing.

And perhaps this is one of the surest signs that we have actually begun to learn from the ascetics.

Not that we can speak more fluently about them.

Not that we can defend their theology.

Not even that we admire their holiness.

But that something of their vision has begun to judge our own.

We notice our harshness more quickly.

We become suspicious of our need to be right.

We find condemnation increasingly unbearable.

We become less interested in explaining suffering and more willing to remain beside the person who suffers.

Prayer becomes simpler.

Mercy becomes larger.

God becomes less manageable.

And slowly we understand why the Fathers insisted so relentlessly upon repentance.

Repentance is how the heart remains teachable.

Without it, even the Fathers become material for the ego. We quote them to establish our position. We use them against others. We turn the desert into an ideology and the Philokalia into an arsenal.

Then we may possess the words of the ascetics while remaining strangers to their spirit.

The desert asks something far more costly.

Become a disciple.

Sit down.

Listen.

Do not hurry to speak.

Allow yourself to be corrected.

Remain long enough for the words to descend from the mind into the heart.

And remain among a people in whom those words can be tested, embodied, forgiven, contradicted, purified, and lived.

Perhaps only then do we begin to understand what it means to receive a tradition.

The Fathers are not relics of an ancient Christian world.

They are witnesses to what a human heart can become when it consents, over a lifetime, to the work of grace.

We sit at their feet because we want to learn that life.

And after many years, if grace permits, we may discover that their language no longer sounds entirely foreign.

Something within us recognizes it.

Not because we have mastered the desert.

But because, patiently and almost without our noticing, the desert has begun to teach us how to speak.