The Peace That Comes When We Cease to Arrange the World

Purity of heart is not having found the way forward, but having ceased to need any way except the will of God.

“Those who love your law shall enjoy abundant peace; for them it is no stumbling block.”

— Saint Leo the Great

There is a peace that comes because circumstances have settled themselves, and there is another peace that comes because the heart has ceased demanding that they be settled.

We often confuse the two.

We imagine that peace will arrive when the uncertainty is resolved, when relationships are restored, when the future becomes intelligible, when the path opens before us, when others finally understand, when justice is done, when the questions that have tormented us receive their answers.

Yet Saint Leo speaks of another peace altogether.

It belongs to the pure of heart.

And purity of heart, in the language of the fathers, is not principally moral tidiness. It is simplicity. It is the gathering together of the fragmented powers of the soul until the human person desires one thing.

God.

The impure heart is divided among many objects of desire. It wants God, but it also wants assurance. It wants God, but also vindication. It wants God, but also a comprehensible future. It wants obedience, but also some knowledge of where obedience will lead. It wants surrender, but quietly reserves the right to determine what the fruits of surrender should look like.

This division exhausts us.

Perhaps this is why the desert fathers were so fierce about simplicity. They understood that much of what we call disturbance does not arise from the complexity of circumstances themselves, but from the multiplication of desires within us.

We want too many things.

And some of them are very good things.

That is what makes their relinquishment so difficult.

We may desire to serve God. We may desire to preserve something beautiful that has been entrusted to us. We may desire fruitful ministry, meaningful work, reconciliation, belonging, clarity of vocation, ecclesial stability, friendship, understanding, or the continuation of something into which we have poured decades of our lives.

None of these things is necessarily wrong.

But eventually God may ask whether we desire them with Him or whether we desire Him alone.

There comes a stripping in which even holy desires must pass through fire.

Not because God despises them, but because He desires the heart from which they arose.

The fathers knew this terrible mercy.

A monk enters the desert believing that he has renounced the world, only to discover that he has carried another world within himself. There are still expectations, judgments, imagined futures, conversations rehearsed in the mind, old injuries awaiting vindication, identities requiring preservation.

The desert then begins its deeper work.

It takes these things away one by one.

Not always externally.

Sometimes they simply cease to nourish us.

Books that once awakened desire lie unopened. Words that once came easily become burdensome. Projects lose their urgency. The imagination grows strangely quiet. Things that once seemed essential begin to fall away.

And the frightened heart asks:

What is happening to me?

Perhaps something is dying.

But perhaps what is dying is not the life of the soul.

Perhaps it is multiplicity.

Saint Leo tells us that the eye must be cleansed if it is to behold the true Light. The fathers would say that the nous must descend into the heart and become simple again. The clouded eye sees a thousand things and cannot see God. The purified eye sees God everywhere because it no longer requires anything else to reveal Him.

Then prayer itself becomes simpler.

There may come a time when many words become impossible.

Even spiritual words.

One prayer remains.

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

Again.

And again.

And again.

Not because nothing else is true, but because everything true has somehow become contained within the Name.

The Name becomes the place where the scattered heart gathers itself.

And slowly one discovers something astonishing.

The circumstances may not have changed.

The unanswered questions remain unanswered.

The future remains hidden.

Loss remains loss.

The dead are still dead.

What has ended has not magically been restored.

What others have failed to understand may never be understood.

There may still be unresolved questions, human misunderstandings, unfinished work, uncertain paths, responsibilities that cannot be abandoned, and roads that cannot yet be walked.

And yet beneath all of this another life begins to appear.

God is here.

That is enough.

Saint Leo therefore passes naturally from purity of heart to peacemaking. For the peacemaker is not merely someone who avoids conflict. Nor is Christian peace the result of everyone agreeing.

Sometimes agreement itself is false.

Saint Leo says so plainly. There are harmonies that have nothing to do with God. There are forms of peace purchased by compromise, fear, self-betrayal, or the suppression of conscience.

The peace of Christ is something deeper.

It is agreement with God.

“Thy will be done.”

Perhaps those four words contain the whole ascetical life.

Not:

Let me understand Thy will.

Not:

Show me where this is leading.

Not:

Assure me that what I have offered will bear the fruit I hoped for.

Not even:

Preserve the good things I have tried to build for Thee.

Only:

Thy will be done.

The soul that begins to say this truthfully becomes strangely free.

It no longer has to be Providence.

It does not have to force open doors.

It does not have to preserve identities whose time may have passed.

It does not have to construct a future from the ruins of the past.

It does not have to make something happen in order to prove that the years already given were worthwhile.

Nothing offered to God disappears.

And therefore nothing has to be rescued from Him.

This is perhaps one of the hardest lessons of the spiritual life.

We think surrender means placing something into God’s hands so that He may bless and return it to us.

Sometimes He does.

But deeper surrender means placing something into His hands without requiring its return.

Our work.

Our reputation.

Our place.

Our friendships.

Our plans.

Even our understanding of ourselves.

The desert fathers called this death.

The modern elders speak of it as self-emptying.

But beneath both lies the mystery of the Gospel:

Whoever loses his life will find it.

There is an immense difference between having one’s life taken away and offering it.

Externally they may look identical.

Interiorly they are worlds apart.

The first produces bitterness.

The second, eventually, produces peace.

Perhaps this is why some of the deepest seasons of the spiritual life appear so unimpressive from the outside.

A person may simply be sitting beside an aging parent.

Preparing food.

Cleaning a room.

Helping someone stand.

Repeating something that has already been said ten times.

Keeping vigil while the rest of the world sleeps.

Holding a prayer rope.

Whispering the Name.

Waiting.

Nothing appears to be happening.

And yet an entire world may be passing away.

The old compulsion to accomplish something may be dying. The need to explain oneself may be weakening. The desire to control what comes next may be loosening its grip.

The heart is becoming poor.

And therefore capable of peace.

The elders repeatedly tell us that God is found where we actually are, not where imagination tells us our spiritual life ought to be occurring.

This is terribly difficult to accept.

We would rather believe that somewhere beyond the present obstruction lies our true obedience.

When circumstances change.

When responsibilities lessen.

When the path becomes clear, stable, and fruitful.

Then we will give ourselves wholly to God.

But what if the obstruction is the obedience?

What if the hidden room is the cell?

What if caregiving is the vigil?

What if uncertainty is the poverty?

What if having nowhere to go is precisely how God teaches the soul to remain?

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

The cell finally is not a geographical place.

It is the place from which we stop fleeing the will of God.

And perhaps this is why Saint Leo can say that those who love God’s law possess “abundant peace” and that for them there is “no stumbling block.”

This cannot mean that nothing painful happens to them.

The saints suffered too much for such an interpretation.

It means something more radical.

Eventually everything can become a road to God.

Honor and dishonor.

Fruitfulness and apparent failure.

Belonging and exile.

Speech and silence.

Ministry and obscurity.

Possession and loss.

Life and death.

Nothing becomes meaningless because everything can be received within the providence of God.

Then the stumbling block disappears.

Not necessarily because the stone has been removed.

The heart has stopped demanding that it be removed.

It bows before what God permits and discovers Christ there.

Perhaps this is the peace Saint Leo is describing.

Not tranquility.

Not resolution.

Not the absence of grief.

But the end of interior argument with Providence.

There may still be tears.

There may still be longing.

There may even be dread before the stripping through which God leads us.

But beneath everything there begins to emerge a single consent:

Thy will be done.

And when the heart can remain there, something becomes possible that once seemed impossible.

We no longer need to know who we will become.

We no longer need to know what will remain.

We no longer need to know whether the road continues in the form we imagined.

God is.

I am before Him.

He knows me.

That is enough.

Perhaps purity of heart is finally nothing more complicated than this.

The disappearance of every rival necessity until only the One Thing Necessary remains.

And when only One remains, the heart is no longer divided.

When the heart is no longer divided, the eye becomes clear.

When the eye becomes clear, God is seen.

And when God is seen, even dimly, peace no longer depends upon what happens next.

The soul has already found its home.