Weakness Carried

A Colloquy on Remaining in Mercy When Strength Fails

Soul

God, what does it mean to remain standing in Your mercy.

How do I know that I am loving You or that I am being loved.

Not forgotten. Remembered.

This feels like uncharted territory, not in thought but in living.

I call Your Name in the Silence and nothing answers the way it once did.

You say Remain.

Yet I feel like a man dying. Strength draining.

My eyes are closed. I am breathing, but shallowly.

I feel my heart beating as the only proof of life.

I am aware of the world around me, yet it passes like a shadow without desire.

And the One I desire, the Life, the Love, feels distant,

as though my soul is feeble, straining toward what it cannot reach.

Tell me how to remain when everything in me is weakening.

Tell me how this is not abandonment.

God

You are not dying.

You are being kept alive without the supports you once mistook for life.

To remain in My mercy does not mean to feel held.

It means to stop resisting being held when you no longer feel it.

My mercy is not warmth in the chest or clarity in the mind.

It is the ground beneath you when every sensation of ground is gone.

You ask how you can know that you love Me.

Love is not proven by intensity.

It is proven by staying when nothing is being given back.

Did I not remain in Gethsemane when even the Father’s face was hidden.

Love remained though consolation withdrew.

Soul

But I do not feel strong enough for this.

My desire itself feels weak, as though it is barely alive.

If love is remaining, I fear I will not be able to remain much longer.

God

You confuse strength with fidelity.

The heart that beats faintly still beats.

The flame that barely burns is still fire.

Abba Isaac said that God allows the soul to taste weakness

so that it may learn where life truly comes from.

Not from fervor. Not from certainty.

But from dependence.

You are not being asked to endure heroically.

You are being asked to stay breathing.

Remain means do not add anything.

Do not flee.

Do not replace Me with explanations.

Just stay where you are.

Soul

Then what of this emptiness.

This absence of desire for anything created.

This thinning of the world.

Is this sickness.

Is this loss.

God

It is hunger purified of appetite.

The world grows thin because it can no longer satisfy what I am enlarging.

What you call emptiness is space I have cleared.

Remember Elijah at Horeb.

The wind was not Me.

The earthquake was not Me.

The fire was not Me.

I was the stillness that followed.

You are standing in that stillness now,

and it feels like death only because noise once told you who you were.

Soul

Then why does it feel as though I am barely reaching You.

As though my soul strains and cannot grasp.

God

Because grasping has ended.

You are not reaching for Me.

You are being drawn by Me.

Desire no longer runs ahead of you because it has entered its rest.

The Fathers said that when desire matures, it becomes still.

Do not measure love by movement.

Measure it by consent.

Soul

Consent to what.

God

To be loved without reassurance.

To be remembered without proof.

To be held without sensation.

To remain where you are

without turning back to look for yourself.

This is what it means to stand in My mercy.

Not to feel forgiven.

But to stop standing outside forgiveness.

Soul

Then I am not forgotten.

God

I am closer to you than your breath.

You are remembered not because you feel Me

but because I sustain you even when you cannot feel yourself.

Remain.

Not as one who understands.

Not as one who feels strong.

But as one who trusts that even this weakness is carried.

You are not standing at the edge of My mercy.

You are standing inside it.

Remain.