The Mercy of an Unfinished Life

When God does not give us a path forward, but only enough light to remain faithful where we are

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

— Abba Moses

There are seasons in life when God seems to make His will known by opening a door.

There are others when He seems to make it known by closing every door through which we imagined ourselves passing.

We prefer the first.

A path appears. A decision becomes clear. Something that had been uncertain suddenly acquires shape. We know what must be done, and even when obedience is costly, there is consolation in knowing where we are going.

But there is another kind of providence.

Nothing resolves.

One waits for an answer that does not come. One seeks a path and discovers complications. Possibilities appear and then recede. Responsibilities arise that cannot simply be set aside. The future that once seemed imaginable becomes increasingly inaccessible.

And gradually we discover something unsettling.

We may have been willing to surrender many things to God while still retaining one final possession:

the right to know what our life is becoming.

This is perhaps one of the last forms of poverty.

The Desert Fathers understood it well.

Their flight into the desert was not primarily a search for an alternative life that could be mastered more successfully. The desert was precisely the place where the ordinary supports of identity disappeared. Reputation, usefulness, position, accomplishment, even the consoling knowledge of one’s own progress—all of these could become impediments to the naked encounter with God.

The cell stripped a man of explanations.

There was simply the day before him.

The psalms.

The work of his hands.

The brother who knocked at the door.

The thoughts that arose within him.

The remembrance of death.

And God.

This is why the saying of the Fathers concerning the cell is so severe and so beautiful. The cell teaches because the cell prevents escape. It removes the fantasy that salvation lies somewhere else.

We imagine that peace will come when the circumstances are finally arranged correctly.

When the answer arrives.

When the ecclesial situation is resolved.

When the responsibility has passed.

When we know where we will live.

When we know what form our vocation will take.

When we can finally say, This is what my life is now.

But perhaps God sometimes withholds precisely this knowledge because He desires something deeper from us.

Not certainty.

Trust.

Not a map.

Abandonment.

Not a resolved identity.

Communion.

There is a subtle violence in our desire to finish the story before God has finished writing it.

We take the fragments of providence and attempt to assemble them into a future. We imagine what will happen when this obligation ends, when that permission is granted, when another door opens. None of this is necessarily sinful. Prudence requires us to think about the future.

But the heart can quietly cross a boundary.

Planning becomes possession.

Discernment becomes prediction.

Hope becomes attachment to a particular outcome.

And suddenly we are no longer receiving our life from God. We are negotiating with Him over its shape.

The modern elders speak repeatedly of another way.

St. Silouan learned to stand before God in an interior place where every human support seemed to have disappeared. St. Sophrony speaks of the terrible freedom of remaining before God without possessing Him, without possessing ourselves, without possessing even the assurance that we understand what He is doing.

St. Porphyrios continually drew souls away from anxious self-observation and toward Christ Himself.

Do not become fascinated with the darkness.

Turn toward Christ.

Love Christ.

Let Him be everything.

This is not passivity.

It may require tremendous activity. There may be letters to write, responsibilities to fulfill, people to care for, decisions to make, counsel to seek, injustices to endure, practical matters to arrange.

But beneath all of it there can be another movement:

the refusal to demand that today’s obedience reveal tomorrow’s life.

That is extraordinarily difficult.

Especially after many years in which one’s identity seemed clear.

We accumulate names for ourselves.

Priest.

Monk.

Teacher.

Writer.

Father.

Founder.

Member of this community.

Servant of that work.

These names may all express something true. They may even describe genuine gifts given by God.

But eventually the Lord may permit circumstances in which none of them can bear the full weight of our identity.

Then the question becomes frighteningly simple:

Who am I if I cannot tell myself what comes next?

The desert answers:

You are the one standing before God.

Nothing more is required.

And nothing less will suffice.

Perhaps this is why the final years of life can possess an ascetical intensity that youth cannot understand.

When we are young, renunciation often means giving up things in order to undertake something greater. We leave one life for another. We surrender one possibility because we have discovered a vocation.

But later there can be a stranger renunciation.

We surrender without immediately receiving another identity in return.

There may be no great undertaking.

No new institution.

No dramatic beginning.

No visible resolution.

There may only be an elderly mother who needs help rising from a chair.

A meal to prepare.

A room to clean.

A prayer rope placed once again into hands that have forgotten where it was left.

An unanswered letter.

A candle burning before an icon.

The Jesus Prayer in the middle of the night.

And the temptation comes:

Surely my real life is somewhere beyond this.

But what if it is not?

What if the place where love presently binds us is precisely where Christ waits?

The Fathers would recognize this immediately.

The desert is not defined by sand.

The desert begins wherever escape becomes impossible and love becomes necessary.

There the heart is exposed.

There we discover how much of our spiritual life depended upon movement, usefulness, recognition, plans, even ecclesial identity.

And there Christ asks something almost unbearably intimate:

If I give you nothing except Myself here, will I be enough?

Not someday.

Here.

Not when everything has been settled.

Now.

This changes the meaning of waiting.

Waiting is no longer the empty interval before life resumes.

Waiting becomes the place of offering.

The unresolved life becomes an altar.

Every morning we place upon it the same things: our uncertainty, our desire, our fatigue, our plans, the people entrusted to us, the institutions that disappoint us, the doors we hope will open, the doors we fear will close.

And then we say:

You know.

Those may be among the purest words of prayer.

You know what I desire.

You know what I fear.

You know what I can bear.

You know those whom I love.

You know the obligations I cannot abandon.

You know whether this path will open.

You know whether another will close.

You know what remains of my life.

You know.

The heart no longer has to know everything because God knows.

Here something of childhood returns.

Not childishness. Not irresponsibility. Rather that evangelical poverty in which the soul ceases trying to secure itself against Providence.

This is close to what St. Isaac the Syrian means when he speaks of casting oneself upon God. Faith is not merely believing that God exists or that His promises are true. Faith ripens into a kind of existential surrender: entrusting oneself to the incomprehensible wisdom of His providence when events refuse to explain themselves.

Then even uncertainty can become mercy.

Because an unfinished life leaves room for God.

Perhaps we are sometimes desperate for resolution because resolution allows us to return to ourselves. We want to know who we are, where we belong, what we will do, how the remaining years will unfold.

God may desire something far greater.

He may desire that we belong to Him before we belong anywhere else.

This does not make ecclesial order unimportant. It does not abolish obedience, responsibility, discernment, or the need to seek what is right. Nor does it sanctify disorder simply because it is painful.

We should seek resolution where resolution is possible.

We should tell the truth.

We should act with integrity.

We should knock upon the appropriate doors.

But having knocked, we need not break them down.

Having spoken truthfully, we need not control the response.

Having done what conscience requires today, we need not manufacture tomorrow.

There is freedom in this.

A tremendous freedom.

The future ceases to be something we must constantly rehearse.

Perhaps this door will open.

Perhaps another.

Perhaps neither.

Perhaps the life we imagined will come.

Perhaps God will ask something altogether different.

The Christian heart finally learns to say:

I do not need to know in order to love.

This may be one of the deepest forms of hesychia.

Silence is not merely the absence of speech.

It is the cessation of the interior argument with reality.

It is the moment when the heart stops saying, This must become something else before I can give myself completely to God.

No.

This day is enough.

This obedience is enough.

This person before me is enough.

This prayer is enough.

This hiddenness is enough.

Because Christ is here.

Perhaps at the end of all our striving, the spiritual life becomes astonishingly small.

God is.

I am before Him.

He knows me.

That is enough.

And perhaps the unfinished life - the life whose final shape we cannot yet name - is not unfinished at all.

Perhaps beneath everything we can see, God is completing the one work that mattered from the beginning:

teaching the heart to desire nothing apart from Him.