The Love That Was There Before Us

Learning to see providence when love seems absent

“We love because He first loved us.”

— 1 John 4:19

There are moments when the heart aches not primarily because it has been wounded by others, but because it begins to see.

It sees how little love there is in the world.

And worse, it sees how little love there is within itself.

We imagine ourselves generous until generosity costs us something. We imagine ourselves merciful until someone wounds us deeply. We imagine ourselves patient until another becomes an obstacle to what we believe should happen. We imagine ourselves surrendered to God until providence begins to unfold in a way we would never have chosen.

Then something hidden is revealed.

How quickly the heart calculates.

How carefully it measures what has been given and what has been withheld.

How readily it remembers injuries.

How instinctively it seeks to defend itself.

How desperately it wants to control what comes next.

The Fathers did not flee into the desert because they believed themselves better than other men. They fled because they had begun to see the abyss within the human heart. The desert stripped away the circumstances by which a man could excuse himself. There, without distraction, he encountered the terrible poverty of his own love.

And yet this was not despair.

It was the beginning of mercy.

For the man who truly sees his own heart can no longer be astonished by the weakness of another.

He knows.

He has seen the same movements within himself.

The anger.

The vanity.

The fear.

The desire to be justified.

The refusal to forgive.

The subtle pleasure taken in another’s humiliation.

The hunger to be seen, understood, vindicated.

The old men knew that beneath our carefully constructed identities there remains a frightened creature desperately trying to preserve itself.

And so the desert teaches us something very different from moral superiority.

It teaches us to mourn.

To mourn the absence of love.

To mourn the hardness of our own hearts.

To mourn the ease with which human beings wound one another.

To mourn how even religious men can speak of God while behaving as though everything depended upon power, reputation, control, position, or victory.

But there is a sorrow deeper still.

Perhaps the greatest poverty revealed within us is not that we fail to love one another.

It is that we do not really believe that God loves us.

We say that He does.

We preach it.

We repeat the words of Scripture.

We speak of providence.

Yet when something painful enters our lives, another belief often reveals itself.

Where is God?

Why has He permitted this?

Why has He not defended me?

Why has He allowed others to misunderstand me?

Why has the path become obstructed?

Why has what seemed good been taken away?

Why has the future become uncertain?

Why has prayer not produced the answer I expected?

Without realizing it, we begin to measure the love of God by the shape of events.

If events console us, God is near.

If doors open, God is guiding.

If others understand us, God is blessing us.

If our plans succeed, providence has smiled upon us.

But when the opposite occurs, the heart trembles.

The great ascetics knew another way.

They sought to become so rooted in the love of God that circumstances could no longer define His goodness.

This is why St. Isaac can speak so astonishingly about dishonor, suffering, humiliation, abandonment and the contradictions that providentially enter a man’s life. He is not teaching passivity before evil. Nor does he ask us to call cruelty kindness or injustice righteousness.

He is teaching something far more radical.

Nothing reaches us before passing through the mystery of God’s providence.

Another man may intend harm.

God intends salvation.

Another may misunderstand.

God knows.

Another may withhold mercy.

God remains Mercy.

Another may close a door.

God has not ceased leading.

The human intention and the divine providence are not the same thing.

This distinction is everything.

Otherwise we will spend our lives attempting to arrange circumstances so that we can finally trust God.

The Fathers reverse this.

Trust God first.

Then receive what comes.

St. Silouan discovered this in the depths of spiritual abandonment. St. Sophrony learned to stand at the edge of the abyss without despair. The modern elders continually return us to the same evangelical poverty: do not demand that life explain itself before you consent to God.

Remain.

Endure.

Pray.

Give thanks.

Do not judge.

And above all, do not imagine yourself to be Providence.

There is immense freedom here.

I cannot make another person love.

I cannot force generosity into another heart.

I cannot make someone understand me.

I cannot compel an institution to act mercifully.

I cannot arrange the future so that everything unfolds according to what appears reasonable or good to me.

I cannot even make my own heart pure by force.

But I can remain before God.

And perhaps this is where the deeper conversion begins.

For gradually the heart discovers that beneath all the changing circumstances of life there is something that does not change.

Love has preceded us.

Before anyone welcomed us, God loved us.

Before anyone rejected us, God loved us.

Before we succeeded, God loved us.

Before we failed, God loved us.

Before we understood our vocation, God loved us.

Before we knew what our future would hold, God loved us.

Before we learned to pray, God loved us.

Before we repented, God loved us.

Before we learned to love Him, He loved us.

We are always arriving somewhere that Love has already been.

This changes everything.

Even the place we fear entering has already been entered by Him.

The loneliness.

The humiliation.

The uncertainty.

The waiting.

The loss of identity.

The closing of a door.

The silence after prayer.

The hidden life no one sees.

Christ has gone before us.

There is no Golgotha upon which He has not already stood.

There is no tomb into which He has not descended.

There is no darkness in which His presence cannot secretly be found.

The spiritual life therefore becomes less and less an attempt to understand Providence and more a surrender to it.

We cease asking endlessly:

What will become of me?

And begin asking:

Can I remain with God here?

That question is enough.

Because eventually the soul discovers something astonishing.

God does not need circumstances to become favorable in order to love us.

He does not need others to become generous.

He does not need institutions to become merciful.

He does not need the future to become clear.

He does not even wait for our hearts to become worthy.

His love is already there.

And perhaps this is why the saints could endure what seems unbearable to us.

They were not stronger men.

They had simply ceased requiring the world to prove that God loved them.

The proof had already been given.

Christ.

And Him crucified.

Everything else could therefore be received differently.

Even suffering.

Even dishonor.

Even waiting.

Even disappearance.

Even death.

The merciful heart of which St. Isaac speaks is born here. Not from forcing ourselves to feel affection toward everyone, but from discovering that we ourselves exist only because we have been carried by an incomprehensible mercy.

Then judgment begins to weaken.

How can I condemn another man for his poverty when I have seen my own?

How can I demand that another love perfectly when I know how imperfectly I love?

How can I refuse mercy when every breath I draw is mercy?

The heart softens.

Not sentimentally.

It becomes broken.

And through that brokenness another Love begins to appear.

Perhaps this is why seeing the poverty of love can hurt so much.

God may be enlarging the heart.

The pain itself becomes prayer.

Not:

Lord, make everyone love me.

Not even:

Lord, remove everything that wounds me.

But:

Lord, teach me to see Your love in all things.

Teach me to believe that You are present before I understand.

Teach me to trust You before the path becomes clear.

Teach me to recognize Your providence even when it comes clothed in something I would never have chosen.

Teach me not to demand from others what can finally be received only from You.

And when I discover hardness within myself, let even this become an occasion for humility rather than despair.

For You were there before my hardness.

You were there before my fear.

You were there before my wounds.

You were there before my sin.

Your mercy preceded everything.

Perhaps at the end there is very little left to say.

God is.

God loves.

God has gone before us.

I do not need to understand everything that comes.

I do not need to control what comes next.

I need only remain before Him and allow the heart, little by little, to become what it has always been called to be:

a place where the Love that was there before us may finally be received—

and given away.