When Conscience Becomes Quiet

On belonging, uncertainty, and learning to stand before God when no one can tell you what comes next

“In returning and rest you shall be saved;

in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.”

— Isaiah 30:15

There are seasons when conscience seems to ask for a decision.

And there are seasons when it asks for something more difficult.

To stand before God without one.

I have found myself in such a season.

Things that once seemed settled no longer seem so. A form of life that shaped me for years, gave me a name, a place, brothers, responsibilities, and a way of understanding my vocation has changed. Or perhaps I have changed within it. It is difficult to know where one ends and the other begins.

What I do know is that questions I once thought had been answered have returned in another form.

Where do I belong?

What does fidelity require now?

What must be preserved because it was truly given by God—and what must be relinquished because the season in which it was given has passed?

And perhaps the most frightening question:

What if I am wrong?

I have listened to people I respect.

Their counsel has not always agreed.

One voice says patience. Another sees fear where I have called prudence. One emphasizes obligation. Another tells me not to violate conscience. There are reasons to remain and reasons to leave. There are people whose lives are not abstractions to me, people toward whom I have real responsibilities. There is history. Affection. Gratitude. Grief.

There are also movements of the heart that I can no longer pretend are not there.

My prayer has changed.

The saints toward whom I find myself drawn have changed.

The books beside my chair have changed.

Even certain words—Church, obedience, repentance, salvation, communion—have slowly acquired another grammar within me.

None of this amounts to a verdict.

And perhaps that is what I have been slow to understand.

For a long time I thought that if I prayed enough, listened carefully enough, sought enough counsel, and examined my motives rigorously enough, everything would eventually converge upon a single unmistakable answer.

I wanted clarity.

But hidden inside that desire was something else.

I wanted protection.

I wanted to know that if I eventually took a step that others could not understand, I could defend it.

I wanted to be able to say:

I was told.

I was certain.

God made it unmistakable.

Then perhaps I would not have to bear the terrible vulnerability of simply saying:

This is where conscience has brought me, and I may still be mistaken.

The Fathers do not give us much shelter there.

They speak relentlessly of humility because they know that discernment can become another means of protecting the self. We can seek certainty not because we love truth, but because we cannot bear the possibility of being wrong.

We can seek counsel until we find the counsel we want.

We can call fear prudence.

We can call self-will conscience.

We can call attachment fidelity.

And we can also call fidelity attachment because we are afraid to remain.

The heart is capable of all of it.

That knowledge has made me less certain of myself.

Strangely, it has not made me less trusting of God.

There was a time when I could bring such questions to a spiritual father whose voice had become familiar enough that even correction carried a certain shelter. Death takes away many things. One of them is the illusion that someone will always be there to tell us what faithfulness requires.

There are conversations I would still like to have.

Questions I would still like to ask.

I know almost exactly how I would begin.

But there is no answer coming from that chair now.

And perhaps there comes a time in every spiritual life when the voices upon which we have rightly depended grow quiet—not because they were wrong, and not because we have outgrown obedience, but because no human being can finally stand before God for us.

There are places where one must become a person before God.

Alone, though not abandoned.

This is where my understanding of conscience has begun to change.

I used to think of conscience chiefly as something that eventually says:

Do this.

Now I wonder whether its deeper work is sometimes simply to strip away everything that prevents us from standing truthfully before God.

The explanations.

The imagined arguments.

The need to be vindicated.

The fear of disappointing people we love.

The desire to preserve an identity because we do not know who we will be without it.

Even the need to know what comes next.

Perhaps this is why my conscience has become quieter even though my situation has not become clearer.

That distinction matters to me now.

A quiet conscience is not the same as a resolved conscience.

There are still questions.

There are still obligations.

There are still people I do not wish to wound.

There are still ecclesial questions whose consequences reach far beyond preference or temperament.

There is still the possibility that what appears to me as faithfulness contains some measure of self-deception.

And there is still no map of what life would look like on the other side of certain choices.

But something has changed.

I no longer feel the same compulsion to solve all of it at once.

Perhaps conscience is saying something quieter:

Stop prosecuting the case.

Stop rehearsing your defense.

Stop trying to make tomorrow acquit you.

Stand before God.

That is harder than deciding.

A decision can sometimes relieve anxiety. Standing before God does not necessarily relieve anything.

It simply makes concealment more difficult.

There I have to admit that some of what I fear losing is not merely vocation or community, but identity.

A name.

A place.

A history others can recognize.

The sense of being useful.

The consolation of knowing where I belong.

And perhaps even the image I have carried of myself as someone who remained faithful to what had once been given.

But nothing God has given us is false simply because its form changes.

And nothing He has given us may be loved more than God Himself.

The desert begins there.

Not in dramatic renunciation, but in the terrible simplicity of having nothing left with which to negotiate.

Lord, I do not know.

I do not know where this ends.

I do not know what others will think.

I do not know whether what has begun within me will lead where I suspect it may.

I do not even know whether I will recognize myself when this season is over.

But You know.

For now, perhaps that is the prayer.

Meanwhile there is someone to care for.

There are ordinary duties.

There are prayers to say when prayer feels dry.

There are relationships that must not become casualties of discernment.

There is repentance.

There is the Jesus Prayer.

There is today’s small obedience.

The Fathers continually return us to these things because the imagination wants to live in the future while grace waits for us in the present.

Do not solve your life.

Stand before God.

If an hour comes when conscience requires a step, then that step must be taken with as little self-deception as possible.

But perhaps I am not being asked for that step today.

Perhaps today I am being asked for humility.

To remain teachable without surrendering conscience.

To listen to authority without asking authority to carry the burden that belongs to me.

To love those from whom I may eventually differ.

To refuse to turn another tradition, another community, another possible home into an escape from the painful work God is doing here.

To allow what is emerging to be tested by time, prayer, repentance, and love.

And above all, not to demand certainty as the price of trusting God.

Perhaps holiness is not reaching the place where we can finally say:

I know what God is doing.

Perhaps it is reaching the place where we no longer need to say it.

The courtroom empties.

The arguments cease.

The imagined accusers disappear.

There is no audience left to persuade.

There is only the soul standing before God.

I still do not know what comes next.

But increasingly I wonder whether this is the grace being given to me now:

not an answer,

not yet a departure,

not yet an arrival,

but a heart slowly becoming quiet enough to say,

You are God.

I am here.

I will not run ahead of You.

And I will not turn away from what You show me.

For now, that is enough.