To Belong to God Alone

St. Isaac the Syrian on the Undivided Heart and the Poverty of True Love

“He it is that possesses nothing upon the earth, who earns nothing for himself among material things, who in his mind clings to nothing visible.”

— St. Isaac the Syrian, Homily 21

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Synopsis of Tonight’s Group on The Ascetical Homilies of St. Isaac the Syrian Homily 21 paragraph 17b-19a

There is a poverty of the heart far more difficult to embrace than the renunciation of material possessions.

It is the poverty of belonging to God alone.

St. Isaac speaks of this with a severity that can be difficult for us to understand. He describes the monk who has withdrawn from the world, who has relinquished not only possessions and worldly occupations but even the desire to accomplish visible works of righteousness. Such a man has embraced another kind of labor, one that remains hidden from the eyes of others. His offering to God is the sacrifice of his thoughts, the patient endurance of his own poverty, and the unceasing struggle to remain before the Lord with an undivided heart.

To modern ears, this may sound like an abandonment of charity. How can one turn away from the needs of others in order to remain in solitude? How can the hidden labor of prayer be preferred to the visible works of mercy?

Yet Isaac is not setting love of God against love of neighbor. Nor is he dismissing the goodness of those who labor for the physical well-being of others. He acknowledges the dignity of such service. Rather, he is defending the integrity of a particular vocation and, through it, revealing a truth that belongs to the whole Christian life.

God does not ask merely for what we can do for Him. He asks for the whole of who we are.

And this is where Isaac’s words begin to penetrate the heart.

For we are often more willing to do great things for God than to surrender ourselves to Him without reservation.

We are willing to work, to sacrifice, to endure, to teach, to serve. We are willing to give our time and strength, sometimes even to the point of exhaustion. Yet beneath all this activity there may remain a part of the heart that we have never truly surrendered.

We may still need to be useful.

We may still need to be recognized.

We may still need to know that our lives have accomplished something.

We may cling to our responsibilities, our ministries, our relationships, and even our sacrifices because through them we have come to understand who we are.

And so the heart remains divided.

Not necessarily between good and evil, but between God and the good things through which we seek to possess some measure of certainty about ourselves.

The desert fathers understood this danger with extraordinary clarity.

They knew that the soul can become attached to virtue itself. A man may renounce wealth and still possess his poverty. He may withdraw from the world and remain inwardly consumed by its judgments. He may embrace silence while secretly longing to be known as a man of prayer.

Even the desire to become holy can become another form of self-possession.

This is why Isaac insists upon a renunciation that reaches beyond external things.

The monk must relinquish not only what he owns but what he seeks to acquire inwardly. He must cease constructing a life in which he can continually reassure himself of his own fidelity.

He must stand before God with nothing to defend.

Nothing to prove.

Nothing to claim as his own.

And in this nakedness of heart, he begins to discover what it means to belong to God.

Yet the deeper significance of Isaac’s teaching is not confined to the monastery.

The monk’s withdrawal from the world is a particular calling, and its radical character must not be diminished. His solitude is not merely a symbol for an interior disposition that can be practiced anywhere. It is a concrete renunciation, a form of life that bears witness to the absolute primacy of God.

But what that renunciation reveals is necessary for every Christian.

For every Christian, whatever his state of life, must eventually confront the question of whether God is truly the center of his existence or merely the highest good among the many things to which his heart remains attached.

A husband or wife may discover this in the daily surrender demanded by fidelity.

A parent may discover it in the exhaustion of caring for a child whose needs leave little room for personal freedom.

A son or daughter may discover it in the long obedience of caring for an aging parent, when the world gradually becomes smaller and the future can no longer be arranged according to one’s desires.

A priest may discover it when the forms of ministry that once gave shape to his life are taken away, and he is left to face the unsettling question of who he is before God when there is nothing left to accomplish.

In each case, the outward circumstances differ.

But the purification is the same.

The Lord is drawing the heart away from everything it has mistaken for its final security.

He is teaching it to love without possessing.

To serve without needing to be necessary.

To obey without demanding to understand the outcome.

To remain faithful without continually seeking evidence that its fidelity has been fruitful.

This is not passivity. Nor is it indifference to the suffering of others.

It is the freedom of a heart that no longer makes itself the measure of everything.

How difficult this freedom is for us.

We want to know what our lives mean. We want to see the fruit of our sacrifices. We want to believe that the years we have given to God have brought us somewhere, that the struggles we have endured have made us into something recognizable.

And perhaps most of all, we want to know that we have not wasted our lives.

Yet the fathers speak to us from a place beyond these anxieties.

They remind us that the Christian life is not the construction of a religious identity. It is not the gradual accumulation of spiritual achievements. It is not even the successful realization of the life we once believed God had called us to live.

It is communion with the living God.

And communion requires the surrender of the heart.

There are times when this surrender comes through the deliberate renunciation of possessions, ambitions, and worldly attachments.

But there are other times when God permits the very structure of our lives to be dismantled.

What once seemed certain becomes uncertain.

What once gave us a sense of purpose no longer does so.

The roles through which we understood ourselves begin to fall away.

Even the image we carried of our own vocation may no longer be able to sustain us.

Such experiences can be deeply frightening, particularly when the things being relinquished were not sinful or unworthy but genuinely good.

We may wonder whether we have lost our way.

We may fear that we have failed in the very life we sought to offer to God.

But perhaps the deepest purification begins precisely here.

For there is a difference between giving God the life we have chosen for Him and allowing Him to receive us into the life He is actually giving.

The first may demand extraordinary effort.

The second demands surrender.

And surrender is often the more difficult offering.

Isaac’s words about the monk who possesses nothing bring us to the heart of this mystery.

He describes a man who does not seek to acquire anything, who receives only what is necessary, and who lives like a bird.

What an extraordinary image of the soul.

The bird does not seek to secure its entire future. It does not accumulate possessions to establish its importance. It receives what is necessary for the day.

Its life is marked by a simplicity that we have almost entirely forgotten.

We live as though everything depends upon us.

We try to anticipate every difficulty, prevent every loss, preserve every relationship, and secure every possible outcome. Even in our spiritual lives, we attempt to manage the future through our plans, our discernment, and our efforts to remain in control.

We call this responsibility.

And sometimes it is.

But often beneath it lies a fear that we have never brought honestly before God.

We are afraid to be poor.

Afraid to be unnecessary.

Afraid to be forgotten.

Afraid that if we cease doing the things through which we have established our identity, there will be nothing left of us.

The desert fathers would tell us that this is precisely the illusion that must die.

For what remains when everything else has been taken away is not nothing.

What remains is the soul before God.

And this is where the true life begins.

The monk seeks this through stillness. He withdraws so that the heart may cease scattering itself among countless concerns. He embraces the hidden struggle of prayer because he knows that the greatest work of the human person is not something that can be measured from the outside.

It is the offering of the heart to God.

But the person living in the world is not excluded from this mystery.

Indeed, there are circumstances in which the ordinary demands of love become a profound school of interior poverty.

A person caring for someone who is frail or suffering may discover that he can no longer arrange his days according to his own desires. Prayer is interrupted. Silence is broken. The body becomes weary. Plans are abandoned. The future remains uncertain.

And yet within this very life, the heart may be learning something that years of uninterrupted religious activity never taught it.

It may be learning to relinquish control.

To receive the present moment without resentment.

To love without seeking consolation.

To remain before God even when the only prayer possible is the quiet endurance of what has been given.

This does not make caregiving identical to monastic solitude. Nor does it mean that every burden is automatically sanctifying. The heart can resist God in solitude just as easily as it can resist Him amid the demands of others.

But grace is not confined to the circumstances we would have chosen.

The Lord can lead a soul into profound stillness even when its outward life is filled with interruptions.

For stillness, in its deepest sense, is not merely the absence of noise.

It is the gradual silencing of the will that insists upon possessing its own life.

And perhaps this is the most searching aspect of Isaac’s teaching.

We can relinquish almost everything and still cling to the idea of what our surrender should look like.

We may desire a hidden life and secretly resent the demands that prevent us from living it as we imagine.

We may long to give ourselves entirely to prayer while resisting the obedience that stands immediately before us.

We may believe that God will be found only when our circumstances finally become what we have been waiting for.

But God is not waiting for the life we have imagined.

He meets us in the life that is ours.

This does not abolish the need for discernment, nor does it make every circumstance an expression of His will. But it does mean that our surrender cannot remain forever postponed until some future moment when everything has become clear.

The heart must begin to belong to God now.

In uncertainty.

In weakness.

In the loss of what once sustained us.

In the quiet responsibilities that no one sees.

In the unfinished work.

In the unanswered questions.

In the painful recognition that we are not the masters of our own lives.

And perhaps most of all, in the willingness to remain small.

There is a great mercy in this smallness.

For the soul that no longer needs to become something extraordinary is finally free to receive what God desires to give.

It no longer needs to justify its existence through accomplishment.

It no longer needs to defend the story it has told about itself.

It no longer needs to turn every sacrifice into proof of its faithfulness.

It can simply stand before God.

Poor.

Dependent.

Unfinished.

Loved.

This is the freedom toward which Isaac directs our gaze.

Not the freedom of having escaped all responsibilities, but the freedom of no longer being possessed by them.

Not the freedom of indifference, but the freedom to love without making ourselves the center of that love.

Not the freedom of having secured our future, but the freedom of entrusting it to God.

And this is why his words belong to every Christian, even as they preserve the distinctive beauty and severity of the solitary vocation.

The monk bears witness through his very manner of life that God is enough.

The Christian living in the world is called to discover, amid all the legitimate loves and obligations of his life, that God must remain the One to whom everything else is offered.

Neither can substitute outward fidelity for inward surrender.

Neither can possess God as an accomplishment.

Both must become poor.

And perhaps after many years, after much striving and searching, after the collapse of things we once believed indispensable, we begin to understand something of the simplicity Isaac describes.

We do not need to become impressive.

We do not need to be indispensable.

We do not need to preserve every form through which we once served God.

We need to belong to Him.

Entirely.

Without bargaining.

Without withholding some hidden portion of the heart.

Without demanding that He preserve the life we have imagined for ourselves.

For the undivided heart is not a heart that has no responsibilities, no attachments of love, no sorrow, and no struggle.

It is a heart that no longer seeks its life apart from God.

And perhaps this is the final poverty to which Isaac calls us.

To relinquish even the need to know what we are becoming.

To cease measuring our lives by what remains visible.

To allow the Lord to strip away whatever prevents us from receiving Him.

And to discover that when everything else has fallen silent, when all the claims we have made upon life have been surrendered, there remains the one thing that was necessary from the beginning.

God Himself.

Not the work we have done for Him.

Not the life we hoped to build for Him.

Not the person we imagined we would become through serving Him.

Only God.

And the heart, at last, learning to be His.