The World After You Have Died to It

Phronema and the Recovery of Wonder

“What is a merciful heart? It is a heart on fire for the whole of creation.”

— St. Isaac the Syrian

There is a way of leaving the world that is really an attempt to escape it.

And there is another way of leaving the world that finally allows us to see it.

The Fathers went into the desert not because they despised creation. They went because they understood how difficult it is to see anything clearly while we are trying to possess it.

The passions do not merely make us desire wrongly. They alter our vision.

We cease to see things as they are.

We see them according to what they can give us.

A person becomes consolation or threat.

Work becomes achievement or failure.

Time becomes something to fill.

Silence becomes something to escape.

Possessions become security.

Reputation becomes identity.

Even prayer can become another means of establishing ourselves.

We do not encounter the world.

We encounter our hunger reflected back to us.

This is why the ascetical life can seem so severe.

It begins to take things away.

Not necessarily the things themselves, but our claim upon them.

The desert Fathers understood that the heart must become poor before it can become free. Fasting loosens our claim upon food. Vigil loosens our claim upon comfort. Silence loosens our claim upon speech. Obedience loosens our claim upon our own will. Solitude exposes the terrible dependence we have upon being noticed, affirmed, remembered.

And prayer eventually touches the deepest possession of all:

the self we have constructed and spend our lives defending.

This is the dying.

But the Fathers did not die in order to become dead.

They died in order to live.

And somewhere beyond that dying, something unexpected happens.

The world returns.

Bread becomes bread again.

Water becomes astonishing.

A tree standing silently beneath the sky no longer needs to mean anything.

The face of another human being ceases to be an interruption.

Work done with the hands becomes enough.

The passing of an afternoon no longer produces anxiety.

Silence is no longer empty.

The ordinary becomes luminous.

Nothing has changed.

And everything has changed.

Perhaps this is one of the deepest meanings of phronema.

It is not simply learning to think correctly about God.

It is learning to see creation from within the mind of Christ.

And Christ possesses nothing.

He receives everything from the Father.

This is the great poverty at the heart of the Gospel.

“The Son can do nothing of himself.”

We hear such words and imagine weakness.

The Fathers heard freedom.

Christ does not grasp.

He receives.

He does not possess.

He offers.

He does not construct an identity that must be defended.

He receives himself eternally from the Father and gives himself eternally in love.

And therefore, when the mind of Christ begins to take root within us, our relationship with the world changes.

We stop asking everything to tell us who we are.

We stop demanding that life conform itself to the shape of our desires.

We stop requiring people to carry the unbearable burden of completing us.

We begin to receive.

And receiving is very different from possessing.

Possession closes the hand.

Wonder opens it.

Perhaps this is why the purified heart of St. Isaac becomes a heart burning with love for the whole creation—for human beings, animals, birds, even the smallest creatures.

This tenderness is not sentimentality.

It is what remains when the violence of possession has begun to disappear.

The heart no longer stands over creation demanding something from it.

It stands before creation astonished that anything exists at all.

The world does not become less beautiful when we die to it.

It becomes beautiful for the first time because we no longer need it to be ours.

This is not naïveté.

The saints saw suffering more clearly than most of us ever will.

They knew betrayal.

Illness.

Exile.

Injustice.

Loneliness.

The deterioration of the body.

The instability of human affection.

Death.

They did not recover wonder because they had somehow forgotten these things.

They recovered wonder because suffering had stripped away the illusion that life could be possessed.

And what remained could finally be received.

There is a strange tenderness that sometimes comes after great loss.

One notices small things.

Light entering a room.

The sound of someone breathing nearby.

The warmth of a cup held between the hands.

A familiar chair.

A bird outside the window.

The quiet repetition of the Name.

Things that once seemed insignificant begin to bear an almost unbearable weight of presence.

Not because suffering has made us romantic.

Because suffering has made us poor.

And poverty sees differently.

The rich heart passes through the world asking:

What can this give me?

The poor heart asks nothing.

And therefore it can behold.

This is why wonder belongs to asceticism.

Wonder is not the beginning of the spiritual life alone.

It may also be one of its final fruits.

The child wonders because he has not yet learned to possess the world.

The saint wonders because he has finally stopped trying.

Between them lies the long tragedy of grasping.

We accumulate.

We accomplish.

We establish identities.

We defend them.

We become frightened of losing what we have built.

And eventually God, in his mercy, begins to loosen our fingers.

Sometimes gently.

Sometimes painfully.

One thing after another slips from our grasp.

Certainty.

Strength.

Position.

Plans.

The future we imagined.

Even the image we carried of ourselves.

We call this loss.

And it is loss.

The Gospel never asks us to pretend otherwise.

But hidden within the loss may be another kind of seeing.

The hand that can no longer hold everything becomes capable of receiving anything.

Then even the smallest thing becomes gift.

This is the world after you have died to it.

It is the same world.

Still wounded.

Still passing away.

Still groaning beneath the weight of mortality.

But no longer merely material for our desires.

Creation becomes gift again.

And perhaps even more than gift.

It becomes doxology.

“The heavens declare the glory of God.”

Not because the heavens have suddenly begun speaking.

But because the heart has finally become quiet enough to hear them.

The Jesus Prayer belongs here.

At first we say the Prayer amid a thousand competing thoughts.

Then, slowly, the Name begins to descend beneath them.

The world grows quieter.

Not because the world has disappeared.

Because our commentary upon it has begun to cease.

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

Again.

Again.

Again.

And gradually the Prayer ceases to remove us from reality.

It returns us to it.

This person.

This room.

This suffering.

This meal.

This patch of earth.

This moment.

Nothing extraordinary.

Everything holy.

The Fathers fled the world only to discover the world as God had always intended it to be seen.

Not as possession.

As sacrament.

Not as something to consume.

As something to bless.

Not as something that must satisfy us.

As something through which we may give thanks.

Perhaps this is why the Eucharistic movement is the deepest movement of the Christian heart:

Take.

Bless.

Break.

Give.

It is also the shape of a human life surrendered to God.

We are taken.

We are blessed.

We are broken.

And we are given.

Only then do we discover that the breaking was not the destruction of life.

It was the opening of it.

Phronema is born there.

Not merely in learning another way of thinking.

But in becoming another kind of human being.

A human being who no longer stands before creation with clenched hands.

A human being who can finally say:

This is not mine.

This was never mine.

And because it is not mine,

I can finally love it.

The world after you have died to it is not empty.

It is unbearably full.

And perhaps this is what resurrectional sight means:

to behold what we once tried to possess,

to love what we know we cannot keep,

to receive what will eventually be taken from our hands,

and nevertheless to whisper,

with wonder rather than fear:

Glory to God for all things.