The Grammar of the Heart — Reflection V

What the Heart Knows by Suffering

“The knowledge of the Cross is concealed in the sufferings of the Cross.”

— St. Isaac the Syrian

There are things we know only after they have happened to us.

Before suffering, we may possess the words.

After suffering, we begin to know what they mean.

This distinction has become increasingly important to me.

For much of our lives we assume that understanding precedes experience. We learn something, comprehend it, and then perhaps apply it. This is how much of ordinary education works, and understandably we bring the same expectation into the spiritual life.

We learn that God is faithful.

We learn that suffering can become redemptive.

We learn that we must surrender ourselves to providence.

We learn that prayer continues when consolation disappears.

We learn that death is not the final word.

All of these things may be true.

We may believe them sincerely.

We may even teach them to others.

And still not know them.

Not yet.

There is a knowledge that comes only when the thing we believe is asked of us.

The Fathers understood this.

They were never suspicious of theology. Some of the greatest theologians of the Church were themselves ascetics of extraordinary depth. But they understood that there is a kind of knowledge of God that cannot be acquired at a distance.

The desert exists precisely because certain truths have to become flesh.

Patience cannot finally be learned by studying patience.

Forgiveness cannot be learned without someone to forgive.

Trust cannot mature where there is no uncertainty.

Poverty of spirit remains an idea until something we depended upon is taken from us.

And surrender becomes real only when there is something we desperately want to keep.

This is why suffering possesses a terrible capacity to teach.

Not because suffering is good in itself.

Not because God delights in our pain.

Not because every wound arrives carrying an explanation from heaven.

But because suffering removes abstractions.

It brings us to the place where the words we have spoken about God must either become life or fall silent.

I have discovered this increasingly in recent years.

There are sentences I once spoke easily that I now approach with greater caution.

“Trust God.”

“Offer it up.”

“Everything happens for a reason.”

“God has a plan.”

Even when something true may be hidden within such expressions, suffering teaches us how cruelly true things can be spoken when they have not yet passed through compassion.

The person in pain rarely needs an explanation of providence.

He needs someone willing to remain.

Perhaps God does too.

Perhaps one of the deepest movements in the spiritual life is the passage from explaining God to remaining before Him.

Job’s friends spoke much.

Some of what they said was theologically respectable.

But they could not bear the mystery of the suffering man before them. They needed his suffering to make sense.

Job needed God.

There is a difference.

We discover it only slowly.

When suffering enters our lives, the first instinct is often to ask why.

Why this?

Why now?

Why this person?

Why after so many prayers?

Why when I was trying to do what was right?

There is nothing shameful about these questions. Scripture is filled with them. The Psalms cry them aloud. Christ Himself prayed in Gethsemane and cried from the Cross.

But suffering eventually brings us to the edge of the question.

There comes a place where why cannot carry us any further.

Then another prayer becomes possible.

Stay with me.

Or perhaps even more simply:

Jesus.

This is where the knowledge of the heart begins.

St. Isaac knew that there are mysteries revealed only through participation. The Cross cannot finally be comprehended from outside the Cross.

We may contemplate it.

Venerate it.

Preach it.

Write about it.

But there are dimensions of the Cross that remain concealed until some small splinter of it enters our own flesh.

Then Scripture changes.

Gethsemane changes.

The Psalms change.

The tears of the saints change.

Even silence changes.

Words that once seemed dark become recognizable.

Not because we have solved them.

Because we have been there.

This may be one of suffering’s strangest gifts: it gives us a new capacity for recognition.

We recognize the exhausted.

We recognize the frightened.

We recognize the person whose prayer has been reduced to a thread.

We recognize the caregiver performing the same small act for the hundredth time.

We recognize the person watching someone he loves slowly disappear while still sitting beside him.

We recognize the one whose future has become uncertain.

We recognize the person who can no longer imagine how his life will take the shape he once expected.

And if suffering has done its work gently within us, we become less eager to instruct them.

We sit down.

There is an asceticism in this.

The ego wants to repair.

To explain.

To rescue.

To make meaning.

Sometimes love can do none of these things.

It can only remain.

This kind of remaining is not passive.

It may be among the most demanding forms of prayer.

To remain beside what we cannot fix.

To remain before God when He does not explain Himself.

To remain faithful to another person when there is no visible progress.

To remain within the limits of the life actually given to us rather than continually escaping into the life we imagined.

The desert Fathers called this staying in the cell.

The cell was a physical place, but it was also something more.

It was the refusal to flee the place where God had permitted the monk to encounter himself.

“Stay in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.”

The saying can sound romantic until the cell becomes real.

Sometimes the cell is an illness.

Sometimes it is an unanswered question.

Sometimes it is an obligation we did not choose.

Sometimes it is the bedside of someone we love.

Sometimes it is a future that has disappeared.

Sometimes it is simply today.

And the temptation is always to leave.

If not physically, then inwardly.

We imagine another life.

Another vocation.

Another family.

Another community.

Another past.

Another future.

Anything except the place where our feet are standing.

But grace is stubbornly present here.

Not in the imaginary life.

Here.

The heart learns this only slowly.

For years we may think surrender means reaching a state in which we no longer care what happens.

That is not surrender.

Indifference is easy compared with love.

Christian surrender means loving deeply and still consenting to receive reality from the hands of God.

Christ does not enter Gethsemane without desire.

“Let this cup pass from me.”

The desire is real.

The anguish is real.

And then:

“Nevertheless.”

Perhaps there is no more complete grammar of surrender than that word.

Nevertheless.

I desire this.

Nevertheless.

I do not understand.

Nevertheless.

I am afraid.

Nevertheless.

I would have chosen differently.

Nevertheless.

Not my will, but Yours.

This is not resignation.

It is love remaining open when it can no longer control the outcome.

And something happens to the heart when it lives this way long enough.

It becomes softer.

Or it can.

Suffering does not automatically make us holy. It can make us bitter, frightened, controlling, resentful. Pain by itself sanctifies no one.

But suffering received before God can hollow out a space within us.

The Fathers sometimes speak of the enlargement of the heart.

Perhaps this is one way it happens.

Our explanations become smaller.

Our compassion becomes larger.

We become less certain about the judgments we make concerning other people’s lives.

We learn how little we know about the hidden burdens another person carries.

We become slower to speak.

Quicker to forgive.

More willing to remain.

And perhaps, strangely, more capable of joy.

Not the joy of having escaped suffering.

A quieter joy.

The joy of discovering that God can be present in a life we would never have chosen.

This is an unsettling discovery because it means that our peace no longer depends entirely upon circumstances becoming what we hoped.

The broken thing may remain broken.

The unanswered question may remain unanswered.

The future may remain unclear.

And still there can be prayer.

Still tenderness.

Still beauty.

Still the name of Jesus.

Still God.

This is knowledge the intellect alone cannot give us.

It must be learned with the whole person.

And once learned, it becomes difficult to explain.

Perhaps that is why the deepest people often speak so simply.

After enough suffering, the elaborate sentences disappear.

An elder says:

God is here.

Have mercy.

Do not judge.

Remain.

Pray.

Begin again.

These sentences are small enough to carry into the darkness.

And perhaps that is the final mercy of suffering.

It does not necessarily give us answers.

It may give us something better.

It strips away everything we thought we needed in order to find God until, sometimes with tears, sometimes with resistance, sometimes only after many years, we discover what the saints had been trying to tell us from the beginning:

God was not waiting at the end of the explanation.

He was here.

In the cell.

In the wound.

In the person before us.

In the prayer we could barely say.

In the life we did not choose.

And the heart knew Him there.