To Remain Before Him

When Even the Desire to Do Something for God Must Become Still

“And this is the definition of stillness, silence to all things.”

— St. Isaac the Syrian, Homily 21

There are desires that arise from restlessness, and there are desires that arise only after restlessness has begun to die.

For many years I thought of the spiritual life largely in terms of movement: what must be done, what must be offered, where one must go, what form one’s fidelity must take. Even the deepest desires of the heart seemed eventually to require embodiment in some work, some ministry, some visible form of service. Grace was given, and therefore grace must become something. A gift was received, and therefore the gift must be used.

But there is another movement of grace that seems to lead in the opposite direction.

Not toward indifference.

Not toward disengagement.

Not toward a rejection of the Church or of those whom God places before us.

But toward stillness.

Sometimes I experience a deep desire to become a hermit. Yet even that language can be misleading, because what I desire is not primarily a different place or a different canonical condition or even a different external form of life. I do not find myself dreaming of an enclosure somewhere far away, imagining that holiness waits for me there.

What I desire is simpler and more difficult to explain.

I desire to remain before Him.

I have encountered something in the silence of prayer that makes every other claim upon the heart seem secondary—not unreal, not unimportant, but secondary. There are moments when the heart becomes aware that beneath all its searching, all its discernment, all its efforts to understand what God desires from it, there has always been one deeper longing:

to remain.

To remain before the One who is Reality.

To remain where the Name descends beneath thought.

To remain where explanation ceases.

To remain where the heart no longer asks what it might accomplish for God because it has become overwhelmed by the wonder that God is there.

Perhaps this is why the words of St. Isaac the Syrian concerning Abba Arsenius have begun to sound so differently to me.

Isaac places before us two men.

One, for God’s sake, speaks throughout the day and receives every stranger who comes to him.

The other, Arsenius, also for God’s sake, speaks with almost no one.

Isaac does not condemn the first in order to praise the second. This is important. Both lives may be holy. Both may be obedience. Both may be expressions of love.

But they are not the same obedience.

Arsenius had been given another path.

And because he remained faithful to it, Isaac says that he crossed the sea of this present life “in the ship of stillness,” conversing with the Spirit of God in sublime tranquillity.

There is an immense freedom in this.

We do not have to diminish another person’s vocation in order to embrace our own.

One person may receive everyone.

Another may disappear.

One may preach.

Another may remain silent.

One may build.

Another may allow everything he once built his identity upon to fall away.

The question is not which life appears more useful.

The question is obedience.

And perhaps one of the hardest obediences is to cease imagining that what God has given us must necessarily become useful in the way that others expect.

This has become increasingly clear to me whenever conversations about the future quickly turn toward what might be done with me.

Perhaps a monastery could be started.

Perhaps some ministry could be undertaken.

Perhaps these years of formation, priesthood, study, writing, teaching, and pastoral experience could be placed at the service of some new ecclesial work.

None of these thoughts is unreasonable. They are often offered generously. They arise from people who see gifts and naturally wonder how those gifts might serve the Church.

Yet somewhere beneath all of this I hear something much quieter:

Flee.

Be silent.

Pray without ceasing.

Not because the world is evil.

Not because ministry is false.

Not because people are an intrusion.

But because there comes a time when even the desire to do many things for God must yield to the desire simply to remain with God.

Isaac says something almost unsettling in this regard. He warns against being filled with turbulence while claiming to seek stillness, disturbing the body with work and the soul with cares, becoming concerned over many things “in order to please God.”

There is something piercing about those final words.

In order to please God.

For the things that most easily draw us away from God are not always things opposed to Him.

Sometimes they are things undertaken for Him.

Religious work can become another form of distraction.

Ministry can become another way of avoiding nakedness before God.

Even generosity can conceal an inability to become still.

We can fill our lives with things done for God and slowly lose the capacity simply to be with God.

This does not make activity suspect. Isaac himself prevents such a conclusion by placing beside Arsenius the man who received strangers throughout the day for God’s sake.

The issue is subtler.

What has God asked of this heart?

There is a terrible temptation to take the holiness of another person and turn it into the measure of our own obedience. Because one saint received everyone, we imagine that everyone must. Because another founded monasteries, we assume that fruitfulness means building something. Because another preached, taught, governed, traveled, or wrote, we imagine that grace must eventually take the same visible form in us.

But obedience is more intimate than imitation.

There are things that are holy in themselves that nevertheless may not be ours to do.

And there are relinquishments that may appear useless to others while becoming the very place where God waits for us.

Perhaps this is why I no longer think that becoming a hermit would necessarily mean doing something radically different from what I am doing now.

The ordinary circumstances of life have already taught me something about this.

There are long stretches in which nothing apparently significant happens. Days acquire a simple rhythm. Prayer becomes quieter. Plans become less important. One discovers that much of what once seemed necessary can fall away without anything essential being lost.

There is very little that appears extraordinary.

And perhaps this is precisely where the illusion of another life must die.

I do not need to escape the present in order to find stillness.

The present moment is not preventing me from reaching the desert.

The desert may already be here.

There are long hours of silence. Prayer. The Jesus Prayer whispered within the heart. The small obediences that belong to each day. The relinquishment of plans. The impossibility of controlling the future. The gradual stripping away of identities that once seemed indispensable.

The desert is not always where nothing interrupts us.

Sometimes the desert is where we finally cease demanding that life become something other than what God has permitted it to be.

And so when I think of whatever years may yet be given to me, I do not find myself dreaming principally of what I might accomplish with them.

If anything, the desire moves in the opposite direction.

More simplicity.

More hiddenness.

More prayer.

Fewer claims upon the heart.

A deeper surrender to whatever is actually present.

Perhaps a cell.

Perhaps not.

Perhaps a monastery.

Perhaps not.

Perhaps some form of service that I cannot yet see.

Perhaps nothing that anyone would consider significant.

Those things are not mine to decide beforehand.

I am not Providence.

The desire is not for a particular arrangement of circumstances.

It is for God.

And this distinction matters enormously, because even the desire for the eremitical life can become another possession. One can construct an identity around being a hermit just as easily as one can construct an identity around being a priest, a monk, a writer, a teacher, or the founder of something.

The heart can turn even renunciation into a project.

But true stillness cannot be possessed.

It is consent.

It is the gradual surrender of everything that keeps the heart divided.

This is why I hesitate when people ask what I will do next.

The question itself may no longer be the right one.

Perhaps the deeper question is:

What must fall silent so that I may remain before Him?

And perhaps this is what Arsenius understood.

His silence was not emptiness.

He was not withdrawing into nothing.

Isaac tells us that precisely there, in the ship of stillness, Arsenius “conversed with the Spirit of God.”

He became silent to many things because he had found the One with whom he desired to remain.

This is very different from escaping the world.

It is being seized by Reality.

The hermit does not flee because creation has become intolerable. He flees because God has become overwhelmingly real.

He does not despise human speech. He has heard another Word beneath it.

He does not hate human companionship. He has discovered a Presence that gathers every human love into itself.

He does not renounce usefulness because usefulness is evil. He simply no longer needs usefulness to justify his existence.

Perhaps this is the freedom I desire most.

To no longer need to become anything.

To no longer need to prove that the years have produced something.

To no longer measure fidelity by visibility or fruitfulness by accomplishment.

To allow whatever gifts God has given to remain His gifts, available if He asks for them and relinquished if He does not.

To write if writing is given.

To speak if speaking is required.

To love the person placed before me.

To be silent when silence is given.

To disappear if disappearance becomes obedience.

The freedom to receive either Arsenius’s silence or the stranger-filled cell of another elder without deciding beforehand which holiness God must ask of me.

An undivided heart does not mean possessing certainty about the future.

It means refusing to manufacture a future merely to quiet the anxiety of not knowing.

It means remaining pliable in the hands of God.

And perhaps, in the end, this is all the eremitical desire has ever meant in me.

Not that I must go somewhere.

Not that I must become something.

Not that I must exchange one identity for another.

Only that I have tasted enough of silence to know that there is Someone there.

And having encountered Him there, I desire increasingly to remain.

The sea of this life will continue.

There will be needs, interruptions, sorrows, responsibilities, decisions, losses, and perhaps paths that I cannot presently imagine. Stillness does not require that the sea disappear.

Isaac gives us a more beautiful image.

There is a ship upon it.

And perhaps the grace I ask for now is simply this:

that whatever waters remain to be crossed, I may cross them in the ship of stillness;

that I may not abandon silence merely because something useful could be done;

that I may never confuse another person’s obedience with my own;

that I may serve when love requires service and disappear when love requires disappearance;

that nothing—not even something undertaken for God—be allowed to draw the heart away from God.

For at the deepest place, the desire is no longer to become a hermit.

It is no longer even to become holy in some form I can recognize.

It is only this:

to remain before Him.

And if He should permit it,

to remain until there is nothing left in the heart

but Him.