Waiting in the Mire

The work that belongs to God alone

“I waited, I waited for the Lord and he stooped down to me.”

Psalm 40

There comes a moment in the spiritual life when the machinery of effort begins to fail.

For years a man labors to become something.

He gathers virtues.

He forms disciplines.

He constructs an image of holiness that he can recognize and inhabit.

Even repentance itself can become part of this construction.

The fathers knew this stage well.

They did not despise the effort.

But they also knew that sooner or later God must dismantle what the soul has built.

In the Lenten talks we have spoken about the dismantling of the religious ego.

Not the destruction of the soul, but the exposure of the illusion the soul has built about itself.

The man who believed himself strong discovers weakness.

The man who believed himself clear finds confusion.

The man who believed himself faithful finds his heart divided.

What once felt solid begins to dissolve.

The fathers say that when this moment comes a man must learn something very difficult.

He must wait.

Not the waiting of impatience.

Not the waiting that secretly tries to repair the structure.

But the waiting of poverty.

The psalmist speaks with a strange emphasis.

I waited, I waited for the Lord.

The repetition is not poetic decoration.

It is experience.

The first waiting is the waiting of effort.

The second waiting is the waiting that begins when effort fails.

In that second waiting the soul discovers the miry clay.

The fathers use many images for this place.

Darkness.

The desert.

The abyss of the heart.

It is the place where the self can no longer maintain its story about itself.

A man realizes that he cannot produce holiness.

He cannot manufacture humility.

He cannot control the purification of the heart.

Everything he once relied upon feels unstable.

This is the deadly pit of which the psalm speaks.

Not because God has abandoned the soul.

But because the illusions that once supported the soul are collapsing.

The religious ego hates this moment.

It wants to rebuild.

It wants clarity.

It wants resolution.

It wants to become holy again in a way that it can recognize.

But the fathers give another counsel.

Remain.

Wait.

Do not rush to escape the poverty that has been revealed.

Abba Isaac the Syrian says that when God begins to show a man his weakness, the greatest gift he can receive is the grace not to flee from the sight of himself.

For it is precisely there that God begins His work.

The psalm tells us something astonishing.

He stooped down to me.

The movement is not upward.

The soul does not climb out of the pit.

God stoops.

This is the mystery the fathers never tire of repeating.

Salvation is not achieved.

It is received.

When the soul finally ceases trying to control its purification, something changes.

The cry becomes real.

Not the cry of the religious man trying to be devout.

But the cry of the poor.

He heard my cry.

Then comes the work that no discipline can accomplish.

He drew me from the deadly pit,

from the miry clay.

Notice that the psalm does not say the man climbed out.

He was drawn.

Grace does what effort cannot.

The fathers say that the deepest transformations of the heart happen precisely when a man has come to the end of his own strategies.

Then God places the feet upon the rock.

Not the rock of a new spiritual identity.

Not the rock of a refined religious persona.

But the rock of Christ Himself.

And the footsteps become firm because the soul has finally learned something that the religious ego could never accept.

Everything belongs to God.

Even the healing of the soul.

Especially the healing of the soul.

So the fathers say again and again to the one who finds himself in confusion, weakness, and interior poverty:

Do not be afraid of the pit.

Wait.

The One who stoops is already near.