The Life We Cannot Save

The Cross, the loss of the false self, and the Kingdom already breaking into the world

“Whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.”

— Mark 8:35

There comes a moment in the spiritual life when Christ no longer permits us merely to admire Him.

He says: Follow Me.

And the road upon which He walks is unmistakable. It is the road of relinquishment. “Let him deny himself and take up his cross.” These words can sound severe until we begin to understand what Christ desires to take from us. He does not ask us to surrender life because He despises life. He asks us to surrender the life we have constructed apart from Him so that we might receive the life that cannot be taken away.

The Fathers understood this with extraordinary clarity. The desert was not a rejection of creation. It was the place where a man went to discover what remained when everything unnecessary had fallen away. Reputation. Possessions. Position. The approval of others. The need to explain oneself. Even the image one has fashioned of who one is supposed to be.

One by one these things are placed upon the altar.

Eventually something more difficult appears: the self that has depended upon them.

This is why the Cross reaches so deeply.

We can surrender possessions while secretly preserving ourselves. We can surrender comfort while preserving our importance. We can even surrender a particular way of life while desperately trying to preserve an identity.

But Christ goes farther.

Lose your life.

Not destroy it.

Not despise it.

Not flee from it.

Give it to Me.

This is the strange arithmetic of the Gospel. Everything grasped eventually disappears. Everything surrendered to Christ becomes eternal.

“What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his life?”

The world Christ speaks of need not mean wealth or pleasure alone. There are subtler worlds we can spend our lives trying to gain: certainty, recognition, belonging, vindication, security, an unquestioned place among others. We may even desire to preserve the story we have told ourselves about our lives.

Yet there are seasons when God allows that story to become impossible to maintain.

Then faith takes on a different character.

We discover that following Christ may sometimes mean allowing ourselves to be led where we never imagined we would go. The Cross is not always the suffering we choose. More often it is the place where our own understanding fails and obedience must become more naked.

The modern elders repeatedly return to this poverty. St. Silouan speaks of descending into the abyss without despair. St. Sophrony teaches us to stand before God with the whole tragedy of human existence exposed, yet without withdrawing our trust. The saints do not offer us techniques for controlling life. They teach us how to remain before God when control has disappeared.

Perhaps this is what it means finally to deny oneself.

Not to become nothing in the nihilistic sense, but to cease insisting upon possessing oneself.

I am Yours.

My life is Yours.

My past is Yours.

My future is Yours.

Lead me where You will.

And then comes the final saying of this Gospel, which can easily seem disconnected from everything preceding it:

“There are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God come with power.”

But it is not disconnected.

Immediately afterward Mark leads Peter, James, and John up the mountain of the Transfiguration.

For a moment the veil is drawn aside.

The One who has just spoken about rejection, suffering, the Cross, and losing one’s life stands before them radiant with uncreated glory.

This is the secret hidden within the entire passage.

The Cross and the Kingdom are not two different roads.

The Cross is already opening upon the Kingdom.

The disciples are being told that beyond the surrender Christ asks of them lies something they cannot yet imagine. They think they know Jesus. On Tabor they discover that they have scarcely begun to see Him. The humanity they know becomes transparent to glory. Moses and Elijah appear. Heaven and earth touch. Eternity enters time.

And perhaps this is why the saints could surrender so much without becoming bitter.

They had begun to see.

The kingdom had already come with power within them.

This is the deepest meaning of asceticism. Prayer, fasting, silence, solitude, obedience, tears, renunciation—none of these are exercises in spiritual severity. They are ways of becoming transparent to another Life. The old self loosens its grip so that the life of Christ may become visible.

The Kingdom is not simply the reward waiting at the end of our dying.

It begins to reveal itself in the dying.

Something within us becomes quieter.

The need to defend ourselves weakens.

The need to know what comes next diminishes.

The hunger to be understood loses some of its power.

And beneath all of this another life begins to appear—a life that was there all along, hidden with Christ in God.

Perhaps there comes a point when the whole spiritual journey becomes very simple.

Christ stands before us.

Behind us lies everything we thought we had to preserve.

Before us lies a road we cannot see.

And He does not explain the road.

He says only:

Follow Me.

The Fathers went into the desert because they believed that word was enough. The elders endured exile, misunderstanding, illness, obscurity, displacement, and loss because they discovered that Christ Himself was enough.

And sooner or later every Christian must discover the same thing.

We cannot save our lives.

We can only give them away.

And when at last they have passed completely into His hands, we may discover that nothing essential has been lost.

The Cross has become a doorway.

The mountain is already shining.

And through the cracks of this passing world, the Kingdom has begun to appear.