The Grammar of the Heart — Reflection X

Until Christ Be Formed in Us

“My little children, for whom I labor in birth again until Christ is formed in you.”

— Galatians 4:19

Perhaps we have been speaking about one thing all along.

Not primarily about East and West.

Not about spiritual traditions.

Not even about phronema.

We have been speaking about the formation of Christ within the human heart.

Everything else matters because of this.

The Fathers matter because they show us what a human being can become in Christ.

Prayer matters because it turns the heart toward Christ.

Repentance matters because it removes what keeps us from receiving Christ.

Asceticism matters because our desires must be healed if they are to desire Christ freely.

Suffering can become holy because Christ enters it.

The Church matters because we do not become Christ’s Body alone.

The Eucharist matters because Christ does not merely give us ideas about Himself.

He gives us Himself.

Perhaps the entire Christian life is contained in those words of St. Paul:

Until Christ is formed in you.

Not merely believed.

Not merely understood.

Not merely admired.

Formed.

This is a much more demanding vision of Christianity.

It is possible to believe many things without being changed by them.

We can possess an elaborate theology of mercy and remain unforgiving.

We can defend the doctrine of providence and live as though everything depends upon us.

We can speak about humility and be consumed by how others perceive us.

We can preach the Cross and spend enormous energy arranging our lives so that nothing crucifies the ego.

We can know the Fathers and remain strangers to repentance.

We can pray the Jesus Prayer and still refuse the person standing before us.

The heart can remain astonishingly untouched by truths the mind has possessed for years.

This is why the distance between knowing and becoming matters so much.

There are truths we can understand as propositions and truths that seize the imagination, conscience, and whole person.

But the ascetical tradition presses the question further.

What happens after assent?

What happens when the truth we have come to believe begins demanding embodiment?

I believe God is merciful.

Then one day mercy must become the way I see the person who wounded me.

I believe Christ emptied Himself.

Then one day I am asked to relinquish the need to defend myself.

I believe in providence.

Then one day the future disappears from view and I must live without knowing what comes next.

I believe that the person before me bears the image of God.

Then one day that person becomes difficult, repetitive, dependent, inconvenient, or unable to give anything back.

I believe in the Cross.

Then the Cross comes.

This is where theology becomes life.

And perhaps this is where the grammar of the heart is truly learned.

Grammar is not the purpose of language.

We learn grammar so that eventually we can stop thinking about grammar.

A child does not speak because he has mastered syntax.

He speaks because language has entered him.

Eventually the rules become invisible.

Something similar happens in the spiritual life.

At first we must remember.

Do not judge.

Forgive.

Pray.

Remain.

Trust.

Repent.

Begin again.

These can feel like commands imposed upon a resistant heart.

And often they are.

We struggle.

We fail.

We notice ourselves judging after we have already judged.

We discover resentment while saying prayers about forgiveness.

We tell God that we surrender and then spend the next hour arranging the future.

We invoke mercy while withholding it from someone else.

So we begin again.

And again.

And again.

There is no shame in this.

This is how language is learned.

We stumble over the words until the words begin to live within us.

The Fathers understood this patience.

The desert is filled with beginnings.

A brother falls.

He rises.

He falls again.

He rises again.

“How long?”

Until death.

There is something immensely consoling about this.

God does not seem nearly as scandalized by our weakness as we are.

We imagine holiness as the moment when weakness disappears.

The saints seem to discover something else.

Holiness begins when weakness no longer prevents us from turning toward God.

This is repentance.

Not spiritual perfection.

Return.

Again.

Again.

Again.

Until returning becomes the instinct of the heart.

And perhaps one day we discover that other things have become instinctive too.

Mercy comes before judgment.

Prayer arises before panic.

Silence comes before self-defense.

Compassion comes before explanation.

Gratitude interrupts complaint.

The person before us matters more than the interruption he represents.

We did not decide all of this in a single heroic moment.

The heart was formed.

Prayer formed it.

Suffering formed it.

Repentance formed it.

Other people formed it.

The Church formed it—not as an institution standing outside the spiritual life, but as the Body within which we learned to pray, repent, forgive, receive, and belong.

Grace formed it through everything.

Christ was being formed in us.

This is why the spiritual life is finally so much more mysterious than self-improvement.

Self-improvement keeps the self at the center.

Christian transformation does something more radical.

The old center begins to disappear.

“I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me.”

These words are almost frightening if we hear them fully.

Christianity does not promise merely a better version of ourselves.

It promises communion so profound that St. Paul can speak of Christ living within us.

The Fathers dared to call this theosis.

Not the destruction of the human person.

Its fulfillment.

We become most truly ourselves precisely as we become transparent to the life of God.

And this explains something about the saints.

The closer they draw to Christ, the more distinctly human they become.

Not less.

More.

More tender.

More free.

More capable of tears.

More capable of laughter.

More attentive to creation.

More aware of suffering.

More compassionate toward weakness.

Less interested in protecting an image of themselves.

Less frightened of death.

They have not escaped humanity.

Humanity has become luminous.

Perhaps this is what I have loved most in St. Isaac.

Not merely his teaching about mercy.

The kind of human being his vision of God makes possible.

A heart that cannot bear the suffering of any creature.

A heart that prays even for those who appear farthest from God.

A heart whose repentance does not narrow into self-absorption but expands into compassion for the whole creation.

Isaac’s theology becomes tears.

That is the test.

Not whether we can explain mercy.

Whether mercy has made us merciful.

The same is true of St. Silouan.

His knowledge of hell does not make him harsh.

It makes him pray for the whole world.

His repentance enlarges him.

His encounter with Christ does not produce spiritual superiority.

It produces love for enemies.

And St. Sophrony carries the same mystery further: the human heart becomes catholic in the deepest sense when it learns to bear Adam within itself, when the suffering of humanity ceases to be somebody else’s suffering.

This is phronema at its deepest.

Not possessing the correct religious mentality.

Having the mind of Christ.

And the mind of Christ is revealed in descent.

“He emptied Himself.”

This remains the pattern.

Downward.

Into humility.

Into service.

Into the suffering of another.

Into the relinquishment of self-importance.

Into the hidden life.

Into obedience.

Into the place where there may be no recognition at all.

The world tells us to become visible.

Christ disappears into Nazareth.

The world tells us to establish ourselves.

Christ takes the form of a servant.

The world tells us to preserve ourselves.

Christ gives Himself as food.

Perhaps the grammar of Christ is always cruciform.

And this means that some of the most important formation of our lives may happen where almost no one sees it.

In the kitchen.

At the bedside.

During the sleepless night.

In the conversation we have heard many times before.

In the forgiveness no one knows was difficult.

In the prayer said without consolation.

In the future surrendered for the sake of the person who needs us now.

In the decision not to answer the accusation.

In the silence that refuses to become bitterness.

In beginning again after failure.

There Christ is being formed.

Quietly.

This changes how we understand vocation.

We spend enormous energy asking what God wants us to do.

What is my calling?

Where should I go?

What work should I accomplish?

What will become of my life?

These questions matter.

Sometimes they must be answered.

But beneath all of them lies a more fundamental vocation.

Become Christ’s.

Let Christ be formed in you.

Then circumstances that appear to interrupt our vocation may turn out to be the place where our deepest vocation is being fulfilled.

The life we did not choose may become the place where the heart is finally taught to love.

The hidden years may be the fruitful years.

The silence may not be absence.

The narrowing of possibilities may be an enlargement of the heart.

We may discover that God was less concerned with preserving the life we imagined than with making us capable of receiving the life He was giving.

I have begun to believe this more deeply.

There are questions about the future that remain unanswered.

There are forms of belonging that require discernment.

There are things I recognize in my heart that I must continue to test before God and within the life of the Church.

But beneath these questions something has become simpler.

I do not need to know the whole path in order to belong to Christ today.

I do not need to solve tomorrow in order to love the person before me.

I do not need certainty about the future in order to say the Name.

I do not need to understand everything God is doing in order to consent to this moment.

This is enough.

Perhaps the grammar of the heart eventually becomes very small.

Jesus.

Mercy.

Remain.

Love.

The elaborate explanations fall away.

The arguments become quieter.

Even the questions lose some of their urgency.

Not because truth ceases to matter.

Because Truth has a face.

There is Christ.

There has always been Christ.

Behind every Father who taught us.

Within every true word.

At the center of every sacrament.

Hidden within every act of mercy.

Waiting in the person before us.

Descending into every place of suffering.

Standing within every grave.

Calling us through every repentance.

Present within every genuine desire for God.

Christ.

Perhaps this is why the Jesus Prayer can accompany an entire life.

It contains so little.

And everything.

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

At the beginning we say it because we are trying to pray.

Later we say it because we have discovered our poverty.

Later still because we have discovered His mercy.

And perhaps eventually there is no reason left except love.

The Name itself becomes enough.

This is where I would like The Grammar of the Heart to end.

Not with an argument.

Not with a conclusion about one tradition against another.

Not with a claim that I have understood my own path.

Not even with the word phronema.

With the Name.

Because every true grammar of the Christian heart must finally become simple enough to say one thing.

Jesus Christ.

The heart has not learned another language merely so that it may speak differently.

It has learned another language so that it may love differently.

To see with mercy.

To repent without despair.

To suffer without abandoning God.

To receive another person without judgment.

To remain when we would rather flee.

To surrender what cannot be kept.

To recognize communion as more fundamental than autonomy.

To become small enough to receive everything as gift.

And perhaps, after all the books have been read, all the arguments considered, all the prayers repeated, all the tears shed, and all the roads traveled, the heart discovers that its grammar has become extraordinarily simple.

There is the person before me.

Love him.

There is the wound within me.

Bring it to Christ.

There is the brother who has fallen.

Do not condemn him.

There is the future I cannot see.

Entrust it to God.

There is the present moment.

Receive it.

There is Christ.

Follow Him.

Nothing more complicated may finally be necessary.

The heart has not been trying to master a language.

It has been learning to become a word.

A word of mercy.

A word of repentance.

A word of communion.

A word of love.

Until even that word disappears into the Word from whom it came.

Perhaps, in the end, there is only one Word the heart has been learning all along.

Christ.